Diary of a hard career

[Falkenherz]

MarkusF, this is a fantastic report, tutorial and inspiration! Well written at that, too! And congrats to the nearly flawless piloting, I wouldn´t be able to pull this off. It is also interesting to see how artistic design choices start to creep into each player´s gameplay, the more the career does advance. I especially like your outpost and orbital facility designs!

I am still doing my second "moderate" career and write about it since March (see signature) and logged about 450 hours in Kerbal Space Programme, but I haven´t advanced as much as you yet. I can snatch up some nice ideas from here, e.g. the idea to attach large docking ports to the multi-point connector is an obvious one but had escaped me so far. Same with the idea to turn some parts around in space before landing them combined.

Maybe some ideas from my experience:

- You can have smaller payloads if you work with a refueling routine in LKO via spaceplane tankers.

- I am trying to build jack-of-all trade vessels, which can be sent around into galaxies unknown like the USS Enterprise... uh, well... anyways, in combination with said LKO refueling and/or on-board mining equipment, you can re-use them quite a lot.

From your reports, it is not very clear for me how you do the interplanetary burns; is it one long burn or do you also do the more "Mangalyaan"-way (i.e. multiple small burns)?

Keep it coming!

Addendum: In your early entries, you had a question about Mobile Labs, but I am sure you don´t really need them now anymore, after all the science from your expeditions. Two or three of them fed with a full load of 500 science data could have already maxed out your tech tree during a simple voyage to Duna.

Edited August 27, 2015 by Falkenherz

[MarkusF]

So as all my vessels for Jool are on their long journey, I accepted a contract, asking me to catch a class A asteroid and bring it into Kerbin's SOI.

Even though the asteroid was going to fly through Kerbin's SOI on its own, I couldn't figure out anything about its path through the Kerbin system while inside the tracking station. Therefore I've just built a vessel which hopefully has enough delta-V to bring the asteroid into an orbit.

Turns out, the vessel had way more fuel than required...

As soon as the vessel was on the launchpad, I've been able to select the asteroid as target and could see its path through the Kerbin system, so I tried to launch into the correct orbit for a later rendezvouz.

And finally I've put it into a nice orbit, 100km above Kerbin.

[MarkusF]

Okay, all my vessels have arrived at Jool, and reach their target bodies. I will tell about all of them later, except for the unmanned Tylo lander. I'm gonna tell about this one right now.

I won't tell about getting into Tylo orbit, as it has been the same as always.

For the descent, I've lowered periapsis to about 1km. At periapsis I've started burning horizontal, in order to decrease the horizontal surface speed. With dropping horizontal speed I increased pitch, in order to to keep the vertical speed at about 0.

When the horizontal speed reached zero, I waited for the right time for the suicide burn.

[MarkusF]

Before I'm going on telling about the other vessels arrived at Jool, there's a different mission I've just started, as a launch window came up.

No Kerbal has ever set foot onto Eeloo, so there's time for a manned (or kerbaled?) mission to go there.

The preparations for this flight have been pretty simple, as we can just reuse the old design of the Moho mission, which should fit for Eeloo according to the delta-v chart. The only updates are: RTGs instead of solar panels and a docking port at the bottom of the lander module. I've missed that one on the Moho and Dres missions. It's not required for the mission itself, but without it we can't refuel the lander and reuse it at a later time.

So here's the rocket:

Stage 1:

Stage 2:

Stage 3:

Stage 4:

- - - Updated - - -

Okay, so what's the overall progress?

Right now, I've landed something on all bodies of the Kerbol system, except for Vall.

And Kerbals have set foot on nearly all bodies, except for Eve, Eeloo, Vall, Tylo, Bop and Pol.

A manned Eeloo operation is on its way and a lander for Bop and Pol as well as one for Vall are waiting in their target orbit. The lander for Pol is waiting in Pol orbit, already manned, ready to land. After visiting Pol it has to refuel in Pol orbit for the trip to Bop. The lander for vall is waiting empty and unmanned for the Laythe spaceplane to meet with it, refuel it, and bring two Kerbals for the landing.

Taking into account the missions which are on the way, the only bodies waiting for a visit by a Kerbal are Eve and Tylo, which might be the two most difficult ones, especially if you don't want the Kerbals to get stranded on the surface.

[MarkusF]

Let me tell you now about my fuel deliver for Laythe orbit. I wanted to save as much fuel as possible, in order to have the maximum amount available for the Laythe spaceplane. In order to do this, I was going for a flyby at one of the inner planets before making the final encounter with Laythe. As it turned out, the refueller didn't even have a chance to get into a Jool orbit without a flyby at Tylo, as Tylo had been right in the path the refueller was going anyway. Altogether it took only 1600m/s from entering Jool's SOI to a 100km orbit around laythe.

What you can't see in this screenshot, because it's already executed, is a small manouver I did upon entering the system, in order to get into the same plane as the inner moons. I first set-up the retrograde node at periapsis to get an encounter with Laythe after the Tylo fly-by and then adjusted the planechange.

The Tylo fly-by has been setup in a way, that it gives me a new periapsis at Laythe's orbit, with an as low as possible apoapsis. After that it took only two small manouver nodes (blue and yellow) in order to get the final encounter with Laythe.

When planning the trip, I thought that I would have to take some liquid fuel out of the main S3-14400 fuel tank to get to Laythe, however I didn't even touch that fuel and still had 2/3 of my last cruise stage's fuel left (~1000m/s).

Tylo flyby:

Encounter with Laythe and separation of the second to last stage:

And finally meeting with the spaceplane:

[MarkusF]

Let me now tell you about the Vall landing:

First, the still unmanned new Laythe Spaceplane had to meet with the old one for the crew transfer. Afterwards the old spaceplane met with the refueller, as it still had a lot of fuel, mainly oxidizer, left in it, which it transferred to the refueller for later use.

Then the spaceplane made its transfer to Vall, in order to meet with the Vall lander. The crew transferred to the lander, and it was refuelled from the spaceplane.

Let's go down to Vall:

Woohoo!

And lets get back into orbit:

To meet with the spaceplane and get back to Laythe:

Next task was to take care about our fuel production on Pol. Turns out, the amount of ore is just based on the biome and not on the specific location (or the surface scanner just doesn't show the difference...), so there was not much use for the scanner, and no need to relocate the outpost.

So the next goal is to land the power upgrade. Landing on a planet is easy, landing on a docking port not so much. And I forgot to add any RCS thruster... Such a precise landing, with the need of tilting the vessel in order to change horizontal speed makes it extremely difficult. Luckily at somepoint I managed to "land" on the orange fuel tank and get closer and closer to the docking port with several small hops until the docking ports started to pull towards each other.

- - - Updated - - -

Okay, there's a problem with the Pol Mining operation... The fuel transporter, planned to pick up fuel on Pol and transport it to Laythe, has been destroyed by a kraken during descent. The vessel's fuel tank exploded, the flight log stated "crashed into Pol", even though I'Ve been well above the surface during the final descent right next to the outpost. Unfortunately the lander is also destroyed when loading my last quicksave made during the descent.

Luckily I've send some fuel to Laythe directly from Kerbin.