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My wife "Why have you been reading about rocket science and the history of Nasa mission?" Me: https://imgur.com/a/V7SL3OO

Early crewed Moon landing Nasa proposal Gemini Lander I've just managed to do this early "low-cost" Nasa proposal to a cheap and fast moon landing, since our space program is often running out of money ( big hug to RP-1 team) . Of course, this little thing never flown in reality, was one of the possible applications of the Gemini spacecraft (one design even was planned to a Mars landing!). First, have to launch the landing module, attached to a Centaur stage (2 RL-10 with restart capacity), in LEO. Launch vehicle is the great Titan III-E: first stage 2 solid boosters and LR-87 (burning aerozine/NTO in AJ-9 configuration), second stage is LR-91 (same, AJ-9 too), and last stage is hypergolic Centaur stage , just to finish orbit. Of course we have to launch in the plane of the moon, so waiting, to have right relative inclination. Initial ascent Booters separation, aiming orbit at 250 km: Then LR-91 firing, and finally centaur stage just a bit to finish the work: The Lander is hidden in the fairings, and on top of that, agena probe core/docking port for gemini spacecraft. Now let's launch the crew! The gemini spacecraft have been upgrated with a better service module, providing enough deltav to hopefully come back from moon orbit, and enough life support stuff. Same Launch Vehicle. Crew: Neil Amstrong, Alan Shepard. And launching from Cap Canaveral (same as before) Standing by the launch: Neil and Alan photographs from the launch tower for their respective wives when they will (we hope) come back: Now get in, and launch! Waiting to have the same inclination as our target and an acceptable phase angle to minimize rendez-vous deltav cost. Hmm, all this thrust, glorious. After getting rid of boosters and first stage, centaur is as before finshing orbit: After rendez-vous maneuver, let's dock this! Docked! Now go for the moon: After about 2 days of travel in this tiny spacecraft, and after circularization burn, Neil Amstrong is getting in the Landing Module, leaving Alan Shepard a few hours alone in moon orbit: Undocking, and centaur stage firing its last precious amounts of deltav doing the decceleration burn, after that the lander will be released juuuust to the do final descent, at about 2000 m above the terrain, meaning Neil Amstrong will land with a Centaur stage going to crash.. just under him. What a brutal Nasa idea! Almost, almost, now let's do it smooth (the lander is propelled with 1 or 2 kn engines burning Aerozine/NTO (unthrottable) and have very few life support on it). I made the lander with descent and ascent stage, but not necessary at all, as you can see. And done! Now let's get out quickly of this flying scrap, plant a flag, take one or two pebbles for our scientists, eat a snack on moonar surface, and get back! Good bye moon: Rendez-vous with Gemini, and EVA crew transfer: Now let's go back to our dear old Earth, have to aim the return Pe at 71 km to capture first, and then land, for good ( since the Gemini heatshield will burn up under that, and we don't wan't that). Second and final reentry: Chuutes, chuutes: And gloriously, marvelously, splashed in the Indian Ocean:

RSS-RO-RP-1 Career I will post here some stuff about significant and important missions in my ongoing career (already started so quite a lot of posts coming. Right know I'm in Moonar landings era, deep space probe, etc). Enjoy! Difficulty settings: -general: Hard -have to purchase parts after researching them -no crew respawn/no revert flights (save and quickload yes) -remotetech and all other realism settings and mods: yes Other things: I choose to not focus on accurate historical launch dates and take my time (since it was stressful on others games I did). Sadly, I'm not using Principia because it causes my game crash/performance hungry. And I was not happy with Mechjeb integration, but maybe it's better today I don't know (Say me if yes! EDIT: Yes, now with Lamont's PEG branch) Summary Let's start! As always, starting with a bunch of sounding rockets launches, and all those lovely testflight engine failures First rocket, first contract: The Wac. Wac: max apoapsis: 96 km. Spinned fins to stabilize trajectory, little unstability at few seconds before engines cut off. Xaerobee: using the upgraded aerobee engine in XARS configuration. Same as before, but with max Ap around 225 km. I'm also using it for sounding rockets contracts: it can bring a 20 SR payload to space quite easely: Jus passing the Karman line: And finally, first recovered rocket, the Xaerobee-Kombak using a modified xaerobee. Scientific payload is 2 biological samples. Ap around 120 km: Ditch the fairings Separation of the return stage. Chute aaarmed. And back. Landing in Cap Canaveral city

Hello, I am playing KSP 1.6.1 with RO and a bunch of other mods, however I am struggling to replicate the Luna missions. I am using the pre-made "RN Stock Luna 2" craft (from the Soviet Probes and Soviet Rockets mods by Raidernick), the craft has plenty of Dv, but I am still unable to reach/impact the moon. Correct me if I am wrong, but here is my understanding of how the real mission went: 1. Launched from Baikonur 2. Reached an altitude of about 200-300km (could not find an accurate number), before the main engine of the second stage ran out of fuel 3. Removed the fairing 4. Decoupled the upper stage, and lit it's vernier engines 5. At the right time it lit the upper stage's main engine as well (the RD-0105) 6. When the impact orbit was reached (or in the case of Luna 1, slightly after) the engines shut down. 7. Decoupled the probe 8. Impacted/flew close by the Moon Here is what I am doing in KSP RO using the RN Stock Luna 2 craft: 1. Set the Moon as target 2. Wait until the inclination of the orbit is as close as possible to the one of the Moon (around 17.5 degrees, according to Mechjeb's Rendezvous Planner) and the moon is in a proper position (not too far behind or in front of what would become my transfer orbit trajectory) 3. Launch 4. Reach about 200-300 km, decouple, light verniers, etc. 5. Use Mechjeb's Maneuver Planner to create a node automatically 5.1. Select "bi-impulsive (Hohmann) transfer to target" 5.2. Select "intercept only, no capture burn (impact/flyby)" 5.3. Select "create node at next apoapsis", because otherwise it creates a node after one orbit has passed, and the craft is not in orbit 5.4. Click "create node" 6. Align the upper stage with the node, wait untill the required burn time is split 50/50 before and after the node. 7. light the main engine, burn until fuel runs out. The craft itself (according to Mechjeb's Dv stats has 13176 m/s of Dv. However no matter what I do I still fall short by at least 1000 m/s of Dv on the upper stage. I tried warping back and forward before launching to change the position of the Moon in it's orbit, tried playing with the inclination and initial altitude, but no luck. What am I doing wrong, why am I unable to reach the Moon? I tried looking for a tutorial/info about this mission and it's mission profile, but I was unable to find anything detailed.

To celebrate / showcase the newly released RP-1 (for KSP 1.3.1; hey, don't judge us!), I'm running a Race Into Space game with some folks from the RO IRC and Discord. An extra quirk is that we're all flying from different launch sites, with a random draw order (I came next-to-last, but fortunately no-one grabbed the one I wanted). Our players are, in alphabetical order (and with links to logos for those who have provided one): Eagle, flying from Brownsville, Texas. @Norcalplanner, flying for KABOOM out of Cape Canaveral, Florida. @pap1723, flying for the Marshall Space Agency from Omelek Island (Kwajalein Atoll) in the Marshall Islands. scanistar, launching from the Chinese spaceport of Wenchang, Hainan. @shadowofneptune, flying for the Agência Espacial Ibérica out of São Tomé, colony of Salazarian Portugal. @soundnfury, flying for the Snowbird Space Agency out of Kodiak, Alaska. @vallin, flying for ISRO from Satish Dhawan, India. @wrobz, launching W Industries rockets from Kourou in French Guiana. We will be posting updates in this thread, and some of us will also be running Encyclopædia Kerbonautica instances to provide full launch libraries. (Mine is at http://jttlov.no-ip.org:8084/.) I believe also some players are planning to stream / record video of their campaigns. You can also keep an eye on where everyone's game is at the RIS server.

Real Solar Sytem / Realism Overhaul / Realistic Progression 1 Kurgutovich Space Program, the Soviet way! Career mission reports Summary Early launches One of the first missions, a jealous copy of the V2 rocket, the K2. After WW2, well juust after the capitulation, a race occured between URSS and USA to found the V2 factory and learn about it, also, found its creator, Werner von Braun, but Americans were first! It was maybe the very beginning of the space race before actually doing it in space So the engine here is a early RD-100 (copy of the V2 engine) burning Lox/Alcohol: The goal is simply to learn about rocket guidance and rocketry in general (engines), by the way we also added some temperature and pressure sensors to studie the upper atmosphere, and the space border. Launch site: Baikonour cosmodrome max Altitude: 160 km (suborbital) Then, with this good knwoledge, we upgraded the engine to RD-101 for increased performances. This rocket was also fully recovered, to studie the reaction of a spacecraft after exposure to space environement. By the way, this was the first ever recovered object after reaching space. Morning launch: After reaching the space limit, deploying Kevlar drogue chute to start safely slowing down the rocket, until the main chutes deploy few hundred meters before the surface: And landed! From what we see, the rocket seems to have been exposed to very high radiation level, that confirms our scientists predictions (to celebrate that, they will simply take a vodka bath in the R&D center) Then, still upgrading the initial RD-100 engine, the K2-c rocket now allow a heavyier payload. So a mission was launched, to bring back the first earth photographs from space! Farings jetisoned, taking photos.. Released the return camera, it landed safely in the Kazak' desert. And finally, last upgrade of the K2 rocket, that broked an altitude record of 550 km!! Now, the polit bureau wan't to impress the world with its puissance, so they idea is to send some Kerbals up there.. This will be the Bayan program!

Hi all, Since a few months, I've finally joined the RSS/RO/RP-0 club. After years of playing "stock-ish" KSP this is a great change/challenge. I quickly learned about RP-1, but was scared it was unstable. Other players (on the RO discord) have shared a great GameData folder, for easier RP-1 (RP-0 Dev branch) configuration. I started a few days ago with it, including KCT and TestFlight. After a few months ingame, I feel I have problems with KCT's RP-1 build rates. Or that I just miss understand something. Even worse than in RP-0, I feel build rates are really low. Starting at about 0.05 in the VAB, and IIRC about 4.2 for the R&D. First sounding rockets take about 10/20 days to build, plus a few days to rollout. This seems ok to me. Lanched a few different versions, grinding some science allowing nodes unlocks, allowing a few more build points, allowing to raise VAB to about 0.2bp/s. But first rockets with an A4 engine push me to about 140 days of build time, this seems huge. And it only has about 4/5k DeltaV, so still far from reaching orbit. I only have about 200k $ in hand, so I cant even spend it all on buying build points (30k each). First sub-orbital capable manned rocket with X-1 cockpit was (IIRC) about 250days of build time. This is without even mentioning that each early tech-nodes take about 150 days to unlock. Seeing an old post from @Bornholio (bellow) I see he was able to get a total of about 65 points by September 1951 and still have about a half a million $ in hand. I started with moderate difficulty with 400% cash rewards, that seem to be the recommended settings in RP1. If I continue the way I am doing now, I feel I'll reach 70's tech in 2000 or so... This seems wrong. So my question is: what am I missing or doing wrong? How to unlock faster R&D research speed and faster VAB build rates to have reasonable progression? Best to all!

Russian rockets like the Soyuz are listed as using RG-1, while American one's, even if they use Russian engines, like Antares: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz-2_(rocket) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antares_(rocket) I also read that the oil reservoir used to make RG-1 was depleting, and that this was a concern for their rockets. What is the difference between RG-1 and RP-1, and could an engine be modified to use RG-1 just as easily as RP-1 (which seems to be more common)?