[1.12.5] Bluedog Design Bureau - Stockalike Saturn, Apollo, and more! (v1.14.0 "металл" 30/Sep/2024)

[Galileo chiu]

6 minutes ago, Starhelperdude said:

IMO tanks and avionics shouldn't be put into 1 part, for example if you want (for some reason) to have multiple centaurs stacked on another, it wouldn't really make sense for every centaur to have avionics, having avionics on the centaur at the top would make more sense

also, if the avionics get merged with the tank, there would be no space for the fairing 

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you heard of F.R.I.E.N.D.S., but have you heard of A.B.W.C.C.D.?

  Reveal hidden contents

(C(2) and wetlab -B are fictional)

 

Oh, I mean on the Techtree

[biohazard15]

27 minutes ago, Galileo chiu said:

Oh, I mean on the Techtree

Centaur-D avionics is also used by Vega - that's why it's unlocked earlier than other Centaur stuff.

[alberro+]

[Beccab]

4 minutes ago, alberro+ said:

What planet/visual pack are you using in those screenshots? I'm on JNSQ and the quality of the clouds is a bit too low for my taste since ad Astra doesn't work

[SpaceFace545]

2 minutes ago, Beccab said:

What planet/visual pack are you using in those screenshots? I'm on JNSQ and the quality of the clouds is a bit too low for my taste since ad Astra doesn't work

I do believe he uses JNSQ with the Ad Astra visual pack. 

[Toasty Dyna-Soar]

Just wanted to say, thank you for this awesome mod!

[Beccab]

5 minutes ago, SpaceFace545 said:

I do believe he uses JNSQ with the Ad Astra visual pack. 

Damn, I really need to make it work then

[alberro+]

10 minutes ago, Beccab said:

What planet/visual pack are you using in those screenshots? I'm on JNSQ and the quality of the clouds is a bit too low for my taste since ad Astra doesn't work

Using JNSQ with 43k Ad Astra, with some heavy tweaking to the scatterer configs. 

(fyi ad astra is a pain to install)

[SpaceFace545]

2 hours ago, Beccab said:

Damn, I really need to make it work then

Astra is pretty outdated (1.7.3) so the installation process entails tearing apart the files and installing stuff manually.

[Galileo chiu]

10 hours ago, biohazard15 said:

Centaur-D avionics is also used by Vega - that's why it's unlocked earlier than other Centaur stuff.

The RL 10 is also unlocked on that node

[Invaderchaos]

Apollo 7, White, and Skylab variants for Apollo Block 2 SM are now on github under the apollo branch! ASTP and Toasted Skylab variants coming in near future.

Spoiler

 

[biohazard15]

1 hour ago, Galileo chiu said:

The RL 10 is also unlocked on that node

That's for building Gamma stage (an early cryo stage concept based on Vega), and for legoing.

[pTrevTrevs]

Apollo 16 Part 2: Personally, You Know, This is My Favorite Apollo Mission of them All:

 

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As EVA 1 comes to an end at Descartes, the lone occupant of Casper continues his orbital observations. In addition to mapping and photography of the surface, he also conducts observation of the Sun's corona, making use of the Moon to occlude the natural brightness of the star and study the dimmer light that becomes visible shortly before lunar sunrise. Apollo 16 has an almost completely different orbital track to Apollo 15 because of the distance between the two missions' landing sites, and thanks to Descartes's southerly latitude Casper has the opportunity to fly over more parts of the Moon's southern hemisphere than any other mission.

The following day, the landing crew descend to the surface a second time for the first geologically-focused moonwalk of the mission. Today's plan involves an extended trek to the summit of Stone Mountain, where they expect to find ancient highland material kicked up from the South Ray impact.

Thanks to the new television broadcasting techniques being pioneered on Apollo 16, the LRV's camera provides an unprecedentedly clear video of the drive up the slopes.

Although the rising terrain is hard for the astronauts to detect, the instruments on the rover show an incline exceeding twenty degrees, incredibly steep for this region.

At their first station atop Stone Mountain, the astronauts disembark near a small plateau overlooking South Ray Crater. This location is the highest elevation yet reached by Apollo astronauts, some 150 meters above their landing side.

After about half an hour at the summit station, they start the drive back downhill. There are several more stations to stop at on the way back to the LM, and hopefully the sought-after volcanic rocks will be found somewhere along the way.

On one of the stations at the base of Stone Mountain, the crew request an EVA extension to allow them more time to search for volcanic samples. Unfortuately, here just as at every other place they've stopped, the ground is littered with nothing but breccias.

On the way back to Orion, they return to the ALSEP site to continue its calibration. The seismometers have proven very problematic on previous missions, and the ALSEP team in Houston wants the crew to make certain that theirs is operating normally.

Once done with the ALSEP, the crew return to Orion and head inside for the night. EVA 2 clocks in at just over three hours duration.

 

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The following day is the crew's third and final day on the surface. The delayed landing has forced mission planners to cut the third moonwalk slightly short, but it is still hoped that the crew will have enough time to properly excavate North Ray Crater and the surrounding formations. Upon stepping onto the surface, the astronauts notice that the landscape is much brighter than it was two days prior. While on landing day Orion's shadow stretched several feet from the base of the ladder, it now extends barely a meter. The rising surface temperatures have proven to be the biggest restraint to surface stay time, as the LM and the crew's spacesuits were not built to handle the blistering heat of lunar midday. Surface Day 3 will be extremely packed, as after the EVA they must prepare immediately for the liftoff so as to be off the surface before the environment becomes too hostile. In orbit, Casper has already performed the necessary plane-change maneuver to keep itself above the landing site in preparation for liftoff.

Wasting no time, the rover sets off to the north. Yesterday's excursion sampled the southerly Descartes formation; today the primary area of interest are the Cayley Plains. If Descartes was not formed volcanically, it is still possible that Cayley was. However, as the crew drive through the areas which they will sample on the return drive, their expectations plummet as they glance at the angular boulders in the area.

[Historical Note]: On EVA 3, the crew of Apollo 16 visited the rim of North Ray Crater, the largest impact crater explored by any Apollo mission (sorry Shepard/Mitchell, Cone Crater doesn't count). North Ray is nearly a kilometer in diameter and some seven hundred feet deep, large enough to fit the Saturn V that launched the mission three times over. On the crater rim they discovered a massive breccia boulder which has come to be known as House Rock. This four-story behemoth served the death blow to the Descartes volcanism hypothesis, and conclusively proved that the region was never formed through igneous processes. As much as I would love to imitate the breathtaking images of John Young and Charlie Duke staring down into North Ray Crater or being dwarfed in the shadow of House Rock, KSP/KSRSS just can't simulate features this minute while rending entire celestial bodies at only a fourth the size of their real counterparts. As such, the mighty North Ray is reduced to the small white patch the rover is passing over in the above photo, and House Rock is simply not here because I have terrain scatter turned off. The following pictures are the best I could do under the circumstances. May John Young forgive me.

Seriously, just pretend that there's a huge freaking boulder some ten times the height of these Kerbals just beyond them in the background...

While  the station at North Ray Crater was able to be fully investigated and the volcanic highlands theory completely dispelled, the shortened EVA required other stations on the traverse to be cut from the schedule. Because of this, the crew only made two stops on the drive back to Orion, one at a particularly dark rock near North Ray, and the second at a small overlook just before the LM.

Upon returning to Orion, the commander drops off the LMP and drives the Rover to its final parking spot before configuring it to film the liftoff in a few hours.

Because Apollo 16 flew a few months before the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Young and Duke had planned to do a series of events on the Moon as their final "gimmick" to go alongside Alan Shepard's golf drive and Dave Scott's hammer and feather experiment. Young was to set the lunar long-jump record and Duke was to perform the high-jump, but the condensed schedule forced them to abandon most of their ideas. Instead, according to Charlie Duke, while explaining the idea to Houston, John Young started bouncing in the air repeatedly to show what a spacesuit-clad man could do on the surface. Charlie followed suit, and for several seconds the two astronauts bounced again and again. On one bounce, however, Charlie Duke jumped a little too high and fell as he hit the ground. For a moment he was afraid he had punctured his suit, but no such disaster had occured. It did, however, put a premature end to the 1972 Lunar Olympics at Descartes.

After loading supplies and samples back into the LM, the crew ascend the ladders themselves and immediately set to work preparing for the return to lunar orbit. EVA 3 lasted a total of two hours and thirty minutes.

 

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Liftoff goes through as normal, with LRV-2 filming the ascent stage as it climbs skyward.

The rover will stand vigil over the landing site for a day or two more, sending film back to the surface until its batteries run out.

Orion follows the now-standard one orbit rendezvous profile, arriving at Casper around an hour after liftoff. The occupants of the two ships photograph each other and then line up for docking.

Shortly thereafter Orion is jettisoned, but a guidance system error prevents mission controllers from deorbiting it. Instead, the derelict LM will orbit the moon for months to come, until the irregular lunar gravity field causes it to crash onto the surface sometime in 1973.

Casper, meanwhile, will spend an additional three days in lunar orbit, continuing its SIM observations as well as deploying its Particle Fields Subsatellite. PFS-2 will cover much of the lunar surface that PFS-1 could not reach, allowing for a more comprehensive image of the lunar gravity field and the distribution of mascons on the surface.

At the end of this time, the SPS is fired to return the ship to Earth. 

The following day, the highlight of the mission for the CMP arrives, as he ventures outside the spacecraft to retrieve the film canisters from the SIM bay's mapping cameras.

On Apollo 16, the CMP also performs additional experiments in the deep space environment, affording him a little extra time outside the spacecraft and helping further understanding of an object's physical behavior in an environment unaffected by nearby celestial bodies.

As usual the missions comes to a close in a pillar of flame over the central Pacific, as Casper reenter's the atmosphere at a face-melting 8Gs of acceleration.

I have always been amazed at how, after travelling across the vast gulf of deep space and becoming one of only a few men to lay eyes on the far side of the Moon, Ken Mattingly still said afterward that the parachutes were the most beautiful part of the mission. I guess I can't blame him, but wow...

 

Next Time: I make yet another Apollo astronaut cry by doing something they dreamed of but never realized...

[Entr8899]

1 hour ago, Invaderchaos said:

Apollo 7, White, and Skylab variants for Apollo Block 2 SM are now on github under the apollo branch! ASTP and Toasted Skylab variants coming in near future.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Once you're done making the current WIP variants, is there any possibility you could do some similar variants for the ETS Block 3/4 SMs?

[OrbitalManeuvers]

hey did you guys watch The Slider? The First and Last? The uhhh ... oddity that is the 511?

Spoiler

 

[Invaderchaos]

2 hours ago, Entr8899 said:

Once you're done making the current WIP variants, is there any possibility you could do some similar variants for the ETS Block 3/4 SMs?

Maybe? I’m not rly sure yet.

[Beccab]

On 1/20/2022 at 5:55 PM, CobaltWolf said:

Regarding Alternate Apollo, I'm not particularly interested in adopting anything. Maybe some day if I get REALLY bored we can try some non-North American CSM stuff.

I'm very late but if you get ever that bored at some point, the original 1961 North American CSM is kinda interesting and detailed too. Solid fueled SPS with 38 motors plus verniers, forward mounted RCS, "beveled" connection between CM and SM and something called "radar doors". Of course they had to add a paraglider option as well . Edit: oh, and Mercury style impact bags over the heat shield as well

Here's the full 1961 NAA publication, at that point the architecture was still for direct ascent but maybe the design wouldn't have changed too much:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/sdasmarchives/albums/72157628843527459

 

Edited January 24, 2022 by Beccab

[TruthfulGnome]

6 hours ago, Invaderchaos said:

Apollo 7, White, and Skylab variants for Apollo Block 2 SM are now on github under the apollo branch! ASTP and Toasted Skylab variants coming in near future.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

The VFB version of the mount has white texture clipping and the SM doesn't have texture switches

[TaintedLion]

7 hours ago, pTrevTrevs said:

Next Time: I make yet another Apollo astronaut cry by doing something they dreamed of but never realized...

Engle? IIRC he wasn't actually all that bothered by getting bumped from Apollo 17 cuz he understood the importance of letting an actual geologist go to the Moon, and was offered the chance to fly on Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, or the Shuttle, and we all know which one he picked.

Edited January 24, 2022 by TaintedLion

[TaintedLion]

Here's another cool repaint for Apollo. The Block I CSM.

[Adam-Kerman]

3 hours ago, TruthfulGnome said:

The VFB version of the mount has white texture clipping and the SM doesn't have texture switches

Ye Also

[JustDark]

11 hours ago, Invaderchaos said:

Apollo 7, White, and Skylab variants for Apollo Block 2 SM are now on github under the apollo branch! ASTP and Toasted Skylab variants coming in near future.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Could it be possible to add a variant for Apollo 13 that adds a detachable shroud on the other side? (Probs won’t be added but it’d be useful for role playing/recreations/educational videos, the current service bay panel in the mod is on the opposite side of the explosion.)
 

Spoiler

Screenshot tax of a weird idea I had, a stripped down Apollo to save weight. Has this ever been officially studied? Could it be added in that future Alternate Apollo update?

 

[pTrevTrevs]

4 hours ago, TaintedLion said:

Engle? IIRC he wasn't actually all that bothered by getting bumped from Apollo 17 cuz he understood the importance of letting an actual geologist go to the Moon, and was offered the chance to fly on Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, or the Shuttle, and we all know which one he picked.

Harrison Schmitt. He aggressively lobbied for a landing at Tsiolkovsky, and from a technical standpoint it was possible. There were proposals to modify existing weather satellite hardware (probably TIROS/ITOS) into a communications relay and send it to the lunar L2 point with a Titan III, but with NASA’s budget being practically confiscated in the early 1970s there just wasn’t enough money to pay for that, and Taurus-Littrow won out.

Anyway since I already visited Taurus-Littrow on my Apollo 14 flight I’m sending ‘17 to Tsiolkovsky. Planning on doing at least two further landings, but I’m still debating where they should land. Current candidates are Aristarchus/Schroter’s Valley, Copernicus, Shackleton, Tycho, and Hyginus Rille.

Edited January 24, 2022 by pTrevTrevs

[TaintedLion]

9 minutes ago, pTrevTrevs said:

Current candidates are Aristarchus/Schroter’s Valley, Copernicus, Shackleton, Tycho, and Hyginus Rille.

A Tycho landing was considered fairly risky at the time. It's a very rocky area, too rocky for a rover, it'd have to be walking only. Copernicus would be cool.

[Kass__XAP]

Falling to Earth.

Edited January 24, 2022 by Pioneer_Steve