Ambitious Adventures in Realism Overhaul

[Julexus Quandem]

Despite having spent a great deal of time using the lovely Realism Overhaul mod I realised that I had never got much beyond manned orbital flights and probes to Mars and Venus. This was mainly due to getting distracted by other things to do in KSP, and always wanting to develop my space programme in a "realistic" progression, usually for this to end at a KSP update. So I felt it time that I skipped the faffing about with small rockets launching satellites and probes and tried more ambitious projects. I'm hoping for there to be a series of these "projects".

First up I present the Selene 1 mission.

This was a manned mission to and from the Moon, the first time I had tried such a thing in RO. I created the craft by "simulating" (read: using hyperedit) the various aspects and then building and running the mission from start to finish. Not a perfect mission, but I managed to get 3 little green men with large heads all the way to the moon and back, 2 of them even landed.

I tried to avoid making an Apollo replica, but form follows function so there are similarities. I also wasn't particularly worried about what combinations of hardware I used, as long as it did the job. I also used Chinese colours and the ESA flag just because I could. It had some (non-fatal) flaws as described in the pictures, but did the job.

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Next up is likely to be Selene 2, a more efficient moon mission...

[Sampa]

Great job, I gotta get used to RSS AND RO at the same time! So far, so good. Had a brief successful suborbital flight using Mercury/Redstone from Frizzank's FASA pack!

[Julexus Quandem]

Pictures below of Selene 2. I don't have shots of the actual landing as I managed to crash into the Moon due to not paying attention and then quick-saved instead of quick-loading... As it takes ages to launch the craft on shiny graphics settings (for the pix) I wasn't exactly enthusiastic to try again. At that point anyway there was enough DV to return from the moon in the (shorter than Selene 1) LOTV and the LMV was identical to before, so I feel I can safely assume it would have made it back. As you can see from the pictures I had better separation events, which for me was a major goal of this mission.

Selene 2 had a shorter LOTV section than Selene 1, therefore slightly shorter launch stages, and made it to LEO much more comfortably than Selene 1 did.

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I'm considering a mission to Mars...

[Julexus Quandem]

The Alator Project

Having thought long and hard about a manned mission to Mars, and having got some way towards creating the craft, I realized that I needed to work on some smaller Mars missions first, mainly due to my own lack of knowledge in terms of how to successfully get there (and back). So first up was the Alator 1 probe, which had the simple task of reaching orbit around Mars. It managed this, but not as well as I would have liked. Therefore the Alator 2 probe is already in the works.

Pictures:

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[mavlymax]

Well done, looks good so far.