Duke23

I was getting a little burned out with my routine before, so I was playing around with an idea I saw somewhere else (Modular Mun Base Kit I think it was called) but I am building it myself instead of downloading the pieces, and it's on the northern ice caps of Kerbin instead of at the Mun. It's harder than it looks to land everything "near" each other and make sure it all fits. I've only got two modules up there so far, a "command center" which is just a hitchhiker container with some antennas and solar arrays, and a fuel tank for the tractor since it uses a small amount of rocket fuel to dock sometimes. It is technically working, but I had a rocket malfunction when I dropped the command center up there so I had to send the rover 32km to go get it and bring it back to where I wanted the base to be. Thankfully I had the foresight to add MechJeb to it for the rover autopilot. The more I play the game and get better at things, the more certain things are just tedious and should probably be done by a robot, lol. There aren't any Kerbals there yet because the whole thing was so untested but I am flying a couple in shortly as I expand.

I was thinking it would be nice to have something more than just a launchpad on Kerbin, like cities maybe some bridges.. It would make atmospheric planes a little more useful and interesting imo. Right now I suck at planes so when I do get one that flies right I'm like Yay I could have done this faster by launching a rocket at 45-60 degrees in this general direction (which I actually did for a while to hop biomes) If there was some other sign of life it would give me a reason to stay low and cruise by to check everything out, or opportunities for Kerbin based missions. Like taking passengers from one airport to another, or taking a group of civilians into lko and back etc, all to gain funding and/or public support and reputation for your rocket program of course. I agree too about having targets to aim away from when staging or landing (crashing). I can see it now - since everything goes on rails when not focused there will be an equation based on number of objects left in a decaying orbit and you might get a message that says a city was destroyed by your oversized lifter core and you have to pay to rebuild it

I'm kind of having a burnout myself. Bad part is I've only been to two other planets and haven't even come back from them. I'm almost done with my interplanetary ship that should be capable of return (and rescue) but when I start up the game I feel like I'm stuck. I think if I try a new and different design or unlock a new tech tree node I'll feel better. I'd really like to build an ssto or even a working plane that looks better than the ones I have. Other than that I've been alternating between KSP and Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

This thread makes my brain hurt.

I definitely like the idea of Kerbal acheivements / medals. Things I'm thinking would be like longest EVA distance on land or in zero-grav, count of times he has been to ______ planet or moon, distance traveled, highest speed, etc. Maybe even an achievement for coming back in a damaged ship or cutting it close on fuel. Just brainstorming. Also it would be cool (and I assume coming at some point) to have either customizable faces or even randomly generated faces so they don't all look the same. I for one have no idea what's planned for the future and I need to do research on that. Maybe a lot of what I'd like to see is already in the works... But I will say I could probably just do without multiplayer. I'm not sure how they plan to implement that but it sounds like a big server killing trainwreck to me.

About to start working on this myself. I pretty much have to just pick a general area "over there a little before the blue line ends". I think if you play around with it enough it'll become easier just like everything else we used to botch every time in this game. lol

I have landed on the dark side of the Mun a few times, it's not the end of the world but it's certainly more challenging. Remember to pack lights and extra batteries, I usually aim for a big crater and try to keep my speed low by keeping my engines slightly throttled up once I start to get nervous. Usually I bring enough fuel that it doesn't matter, or have a larger ship in orbit to take me home.

When the SRS light comes on in your car and for a split second you think "that means I can let go of the wheel now right?"

I am pretty new here so my opinion may or may not matter but I don't really see the need for an alternative forum. I wouldn't be opposed to one that would only be used in the case that this one goes down but not a permanent parallel community. I agree with others it would only cause division. The subreddit is probably the closest thing needed and could get out any information or links that would need to spread (see next statement)... It'd be nice to have a centralized backup of all the maintained / up to date mods out there but I feel like if something did happen that caused Spaceport to be unusable, a new server run by users would spring up pretty quickly. In other words I think if there's a problem it will take care of itself when it becomes necessary and I haven't personally seen problems here with unreasonable censorship and such that would make people feel the need to go anywhere else. It's nice having everything right here.

All my old lifters (max 25ish tons) used SRBs on the outsides but I've found it's much more effective for me to use all liquid. It's more controlled in general and it just feels a little less white knuckle to know that if something goes wrong I can power down, drop them, and decide whether to keep going or land safely rather than risk turning my whole ship into a spray of debris. That and I've noticed a couple of my payloads aren't very structurally secure and when I try to send them up with my current lifter, just the negative gees from my outer stage burning out is enough to rip certain things apart. Until I find a better way I've been going to half throttle right before they run out of fuel and then powering back up to full after it's dropped. I TRIED a lifter that used jets for the first 13km or so... It was powerful for its size but very unstable and I scrapped it pretty quick. I also found out the hard way that asymmetrical flameout was a thing, thanks to that design. I might revisit that once I unlock the turbojets.

I've almost got the KSS Storm as I've decided to call it ready for its shakedown cruise around the Mun and back. Honestly I'm scared to take it out for fear of what might happen... But I guess no gain without risk. I'm deciding whether to go ahead and dock the lander and possibly a rover to it before the shakedown just so it's at its full working weight. This is it in its current state docked to my tanker station (in this pic it still has probe core + MonoPropellant tanks attached to one side). I know it has a ton of docking ports but I thought why redesign the entire ship if it turns out to be a success and I want to add to it. I'm really not that confident that it's going to work the way I intend though... It's meant for a Duna trip (with return this time) and it will tug a lander; I'm still debating the rover. They usually cause me more trouble than they're worth and usually end in long hikes after I wreck them. I also made a "Docking Assist Drone" to help out at the station. I WAS making everything permanently maneuverable under its own power with probe cores and RCS + propellant, but the probe cores especially aren't jiving with my build ideas right now. So this little guy is there to either capture things from nearby after separation from its rendezvous stage or re-dock them for a better position. It carries only a battery and 80 units of Mono Propellant but ideally whatever it docks to already has its own RCS thrusters since the center of gravity would be out of whack otherwise. Its first use was when I put the first set of nukes on the Storm the wrong way (I want to be able to fire off 2 at a time if the desire / need arises) so I did a quick rotate and reattach. I think I'm actually gonna take it with me and use it as an adapter -- the Clampotron on the rear of the Storm can connect to the drone which has a Clampotron Jr on the opposite side which will keep my lander looking a little better, by not having to put a standard size docking port on the nose. There is a standard one on the rear of the lander, but that's really a relic from another design meant to be decoupled to reveal a "last chance" engine when needed. Funny story (well to me anyway), notice in the top picture how the right tank with the probe core assembly still attached has the cubic struts on it, well on the left side I made a slight oversight and had them pointed in the way of the docking ports and there was no way I was doing a relaunch when I was just meters away. So I got everything lined up pretty close to the Storm traveling about .1 m/s and decoupled the probe core to perform kind of a controlled crash. It actually worked perfectly and the probe core assembly bounced harmlessly off the central tanks, then Kurt got a bug up his butt about it blocking his view from the hitchhiker container and pushed it away from the station with his jetpack.

That is a pretty cool plane but I can see why it would be impossible to fly. I don't have anything too whacky, at least not saved on my new computer. This isn't a plane but it was one of my dumber ideas... As you can imagine didn't work very well. This one isn't very wacky but it was lets say "outside the box" for me at the time and it works quite well except when I land it on a hill and break a wing off. Probably the heaviest functional plane I have, and I've had pretty bad luck with planes so I haven't done anything too crazy.

I think I used the Poodle once, before I actually looked at its stats and then just decided to go with smaller engines to save weight. I use Skippers for everything right now, my workhorse lifter uses a total of 19 Skippers and can lift 50+ tons (I haven't maxed it out yet as it's a new design to replace my old ~25T lifter) into a stable 150km orbit without breaking a sweat. It was a big accomplishment for me being pretty new too all this still. It's usually got a full tank or almost full tank on the central stage after circularizing and it's not even a proper asparagus setup but it does crossfeed toward center. The payload in this pic weighs a little over 49T and is what I'm constructing a supposedly interplanetary ship around in orbit. Edit: After going back and looking at some of the monstrosities in the last couple pages, I almost don't want to post this. Whackjob you especially, never cease to amaze me and also make me ask "Whyyyyyyy?!" lol

Today was a productive day (sort of). I put a communications satellite up in ~650km orbit just because. It's the only thing I've ever used MechJeb on other than seeing how it works, and it's just to rotate it towards Kerbin whenever it's focused. Put an overkill lander on the Mun. The inner stages never even got used and it had some fuel to spare in the outer set which is what I was expecting, and it had a nuke cruiser waiting in 60km-ish Munar orbit to take it home -- it's really meant for Duna once I add more parachutes to it but this was the best test I could think of without actually going there. There was a tiny probe attached to the top but it came in too fast and that probe was really better suited for Minmus anyway, and it crashed in quite a pathetic way. The probe did find something I thought was interesting before it crashed though. Is that a tunnel to the other side of the Mun? lol. Minor catastrophe averted while building a new prototype interplanetary ship. This one is supposed to actually come back, if all goes according to plan. This shot was taken after all the bad stuff happened, but the ship I'm talking about is the farthest to the left. First of all it had an escape pod docked to the copula just like the station itself, but that decided to fly apart for some reason when I staged the second set of boosters so I dropped what was left of it and brought a replacement up with the hitchhiker containers for the station. It basically is the main section of the station but without the hitchhiker and it's got a docking port on the rear to tug a lander, and ports on the sides for engines I haven't brought up yet. But before this shot I had docked it to the science lab which was apparently a really bad idea. The entire station started to buck and sway when it connected and I thought it was going to rip itself apart, SAS couldn't do anything about it and I couldn't even stop it myself. Finally I had to undock and switch to the station to help SAS sort the problem out, then pick a better place to dock after everything settled down. Physics got me again... But I knew the risks when I tried it. Bob, Jeb, and Kurt are currently hanging out in the main hitchhiker container arguing over who gets to fly the new ship to rescue Bill from Duna, assuming it gets that far.

I haven't actually "done" anything yet today, but I just found out that I had a slight misconception of what Asparagus staging was and my rocket wasn't quite asparagus. All outside engines ran fuel to the next stage closer to the center, not to each other. So I suppose I could squeeze a little more efficiency out of my design if I can deal with the spinning.

It's coming together now.. Just need a science lab and some random unfinished ships attached all over it. My next one (when I unlock more of the tech tree) isn't going to have humongous engines still attached to it when it's done as I've found ways around that.

I was saying I was going to deorbit that one tanker station that was going the wrong direction after I pick up Bob, well I just did that and it wasn't pretty but it was effective. I made the rendezvous with the new asparagus staged nuke cruiser and tested to see if my new docking port alignment method is compatible (it's not), transferred Bob over, topped off the tanks and separated, that's where things got hairy. I went to turn the tanker station around to retrograde and bumped the cruiser with one of the engines, almost knocking off a monoprop tank (no big loss there) then decided I'd throttle up the outside engines just to see what happened with my docking setup. Everything instantly flexed but held together, so I decided to give it a little more and it fell apart, the outside engines & tanks slamming into the front of the main stack and causing a massive explosion. At first I thought I lost the cruiser too but thankfully I had thrusted far enough away by that point that none of the spray of debris hit it. The good news is all of the debris is pretty much on a 40km periapsis to Kerbin so it will come down eventually if not this orbit (the apo was only 90ish). I should take all my stations down in massive sprays of debris into the atmosphere.

I built my first functional asparagus staged rocket. Why did I not try this before? The thing is unexpectedly powerful compared to anything else I currently have and gets to stable 100km orbit using only a sip of the fuel in the central tanks after dropping all boosters. Originally I had put more stuff on it but I was feeling unsure due to my weight increases (the design this is based off of which was good for lifting 15 tons to 150km orbital rendezvous using about 1/2 fuel in the central tanks, used SRBs in place of the outer ring and one fewer tank height-wise on the inner ring) so I dropped the science lab and decreased the nuke engines from 3 to 1 and did this as a test expecting to have to decouple everything behind the nuke once I was ready to leave Kerbin orbit. It's a little wobbly due to not enough torque wheels, but it's flyable and was only a prototype. You can see the radial decouplers hanging off the outer tanks where I was going to add more but decided to see what this would do.

Ah, I see. I tried MechJeb once and it's pretty cool but I prefer to control everything myself for something "serious". The only mod I'm using right now is a docking alignment indicator.

I haven't seen much info on this (apologies if I just haven't looked hard enough) but I know you guys are doing it, so here goes. I've been messing with these tanker stations in ~125-150km Kerbin orbit for my outgoing gas guzzlers and to experiment with docking configurations for orbital ship building other than in a straight line. I want to have my pieces arranged rotationally correct basically so that if I build something large I can fire the engines off in pairs and not have the ship cutting cartwheels through space like my Minmus mission (single docking ports) where the outside engines were .1 degree off from each other. My first dual port design worked pretty well, which was to just pick lines on the tanks and reuse the same core with docking ports already placed. Problem is what if I want to put something different onto the same ports? I am scared to just guess how far apart to put them and hope it works. So I tried this method: It's just a bi-stack adapter with a battery as a spacer to prevent clipping of the docking ports out the backside of the adapter. It's gotta look nice too right? The battery packs aren't heavy and I certainly don't need that much electricity but the problem is it doesn't seem to be very stable. It already flexes just when I rotate the station, I'd hate to throttle up the outside engines. And I can't exactly hang that huge assembly off just any payload coming into orbit, it'd be silly. That and it leaves my connected modules miles apart, which in this one case is perfectly fine. Basically I'm asking is there a reliable way to place dual or more docking ports that I can make it standardized for use with all my building needs and won't fall apart or add too much extra crap to my ship? How do YOU make sure your orbitally constructed vessels aren't going to shake apart or thrust different directions? Maybe I'm missing something here.

I've only been there manned once so far, my next trip has been shelved while I work on a new refueling station. Anyway, from the short time I spent there: -It's pretty easy to land as long as you don't have any sideways momentum, it's very easy to knock your lander over if you're not coming straight down. If you aren't freaking out like I was the first try, you can use RCS/SAS to keep from falling over as long as it's not too bad. -Be VERY CAREFUL with rovers. I managed to get one up to around 18m/s surface speed and then I came up on a small ridge I didn't see and went airborne, coming down on one wheel. The stupid thing tumbled forever (but didn't break!) before landing upside down and tossing Jeb out on his face. Poor guy hasn't gotten in a rover since. -If you forget a ladder on your module like I tend to do, no worries. You can just jump or jetpack up to it very easily. Edit: What he said ^ lol, I must have been sitting on the reply screen when that post came up.

Pulled my tanker station out of the sky because I wanted to send up a new design. Problem: Jeb was up there in a ship I was constructing in orbit (which was out of date by this point because of it sitting there during science missions) attached to the tanker, and he had no parachute for whatever reason so I had to send Kurt up to get him. Hilarity ensued. I built a jet lifter to get me up to ~15km and then dropped it and fired off a Skipper, everything was going fine. I drop that stage and I've got a nuke engine and I run up and dock with the station with plenty of fuel to spare, not that it mattered, and EVA Jeb over to his taxi ride. I go to deorbit and, well I was trying out the larger parachute on my 3-Kerbal command module and turns out that thing snaps right off if it's the only chute attached (or maybe it's because I put a battery between that and the module). So I had to let them sit there in orbit while I built another ship to go get them both! Well that all turned out okay but when I went to put my new design up I got it into a steady 150km orbit give or take a few hundred meters and attached a couple more tank modules to expand it, then realized while I was playing with my planes that if I ever get a proper spaceplane up and running the orbit of that tanker is completely wrong. So I brought that down to a ~90km orbit while I wait for someone to come get Bob because I didn't actually plan ahead for when that one would have to come down. So the newest of the new is still very much a work in progress but it has it's own escape pod for just this type of situation which I thought was a nice touch. In this screenshot the antenna is attached to the escape pod which is docked to the Copula (you can't really see it, but it's there). You can see the escape pod better in this one, not that there's much to see. BTW I found a setting in Photobucket just now and changed it to a higher resolution so my uploads after these should look better.

Last night after my successes the day before with my Eve probe and almost success with my Duna probe, I decided it was high time to mount a manned mission. I dubbed them ISM-1 and ISM-2 respectively (Interplanetary Suicide Mission, because the Eve mission was most certainly one-way and I wasn't feeling too sure about the Duna one). Gregmund Kerman bravely volunteered to go to Eve knowing full well that he wouldn't make it back and the chances of rescue were minimal. This was my first manned ship to use my newly acquired nuclear engines and ion propulsion. This mission actually went TOO well at one point, I fiddled around with maneuver nodes until it was pretty darn close and I had PLANNED to orbit a few times and take a look at what was down there then pick a general area to land. What actually happened is I accidentally set my trajectory for a high speed Eve intercept and by the time I realized it my engine wasn't powerful enough to correct it in time. Not to be deterred, I burned off as much speed as I could and separated my command module with science equipment while entering the atmosphere. The landing went mostly smooth except that on impact 2 of my 4 solar arrays were knocked off because I landed on a small hill and they were too close to the bottom of the craft which didn't have landing legs. (insert extremely zoomed out screenshot here) My Duna mission however was more thought out and for the most part it went exactly according to plan. I had a young and dumb recruit lined up to pilot this mission who thought he could make it there and back successfully even though we told him it'd be a real stretch. Plot twist happens when Bill decides to sneak into the lander when no one was looking and kick the newbie out, and no one noticed until the ship was halfway to Duna. The bad part came when I was passing too close and fast (I think?) to Duna and instead of doing a smooth transition to orbit I was forced to burn up the remaining fuel just to keep from going on an escape path. Then I was in an extremely elliptical orbit and I switched on the ion drive until it was reasonable to aerobrake. I had planned for the thin atmosphere by packing 3 Rockomax 24-77s to thrust just before touchdown, but I wasn't sure exactly what I was dealing with so the fuel and engine size was an educated guess. It was quite a nailbiting experience watching the planet flying towards me and praying the altimeter was wrong while waiting on my chute to deploy. When it did I burned retro until I was coming straight down at about 13-15m/s and then was able to set the lander down gently at about 3m/s with the help of the engines (on my third try, mind you. There were a couple minor disasters that were avoided with a quickload). There is a slight possibility that this ship could return home on ion power after (hopefully) getting into a low orbit with the engines I included, but I'm not brave enough to try it yet. A rescue mission is certainly feasible though with the tech I have now. Between those two missions' transmitted data I was able to get new tech I needed. Now I must go back to work on my current project -- a jet powered booster stage. Tested the prototype last night and it did surprisingly well until the engines flamed out asymmetrically around 14km and I went for a spin. If that starts to seem hopeless I also have an SSTO design in my head I'd like to prototype.

Last night I had my first (successful?) interplanetary missions, unmanned of course. I built several probes but only two made it anywhere near their destinations. Two of them were utter failures, one didn't make it out of the atmosphere of Kerbin and the other got stuck in Kerbol orbit with no batteries because I forgot to extend the solar panels before I warped. One of the successful ones was pretty standard and did a very far away flyby of Duna, it didn't have enough fuel to even attempt orbit due to my horrible calculations and I was probably on the outer edge of Duna's SOI. The other probe managed to meet up with Eve. I goofed and separated the "main probe" from the ant probe without transmitting the data from outside Kerbin SOI that it had, but the ant probe somehow made it into orbit and subsequently onto the surface of Eve. It didn't survive, but I was trying to squeeze the last bit of data I could out of it (atmo pressure and temp). I tried to suicide burn but the little engine just couldn't. I finally got my new computer built and running by the way, the game is running infinitely better. These screenshots except for the pic of my Eve probe before launch were taken on the old computer though. And apparently Photobucket resizes everything. Humph. The utter failure: And the somewhat success:

I just had my very first successful atmospheric jet flight. Woohoo! All my other attempts crashed on the runway or VERY shortly after takeoff and I had sworn off jets for a while. This one however, flew and landed over at the island strip just fine with SAS on (although the controls are weird to me): BUT, then I saw something sticking out of the hangar (I don't know if it's debris from one of my many rocket failures or if it's always been there, I've never actually touched land over there) and I wanted to steer the plane on the ground to go check it out. I was having throttle issues because I don't know what I'm doing with planes, the engine wouldn't turn on at low throttle so I kicked it up to a little less than 1/2 while turning and this happened: