Jakalth finally works on a functional Jool mission...

[Jakalth]

To specify a few things, the transfer from Jool too Eeloo took about 1,800m/s delta-V, while the Eeloo too Dres transfer took me about 3,000m/s delta-V. Both transfers were well within the abilities of the lamp Post train since it had around 6,700m/s delta-V when it left Jool, and 6,400m/s delta-V when it left Eeloo. That is after the refueling missions at both stops.

Well, good bye Eeloo, thanks for the fuel and the snow cones, definitely the snow cones.

Leaving Eeloo orbit, first job is to simply get the ship into orbit of the Sun again. From there it was just a matter of burning some fuel to lower my orbit enough to intercect with the orbit of Dres, then get to the angle node and change the orbital plane to match that of dres. With that setup, finding a Dres encounter wasn't all that hard. I got lucky once again to have Dres in a fairly convenient position for the encounter.

it only took a bit of fiddling with the orbit to bring that close encounter into a clean orbital pass. Once I had that in place, it was only a matter of burning to slow down and bring the orbit into a circular low orbit of around 65,000m.

Hello Dres! We're here to visit the fuel station. I hear Dres fuel is best. Also, like my visits to Pol(the second time) and Eeloo, I am unable to get the orbit to stabilize so am unable to scan the surface. Ever since the glitch and the corrupted saves, I've been unable to get the Lamp Post to make a stable orbit. No matter what I do, the orbit shakes, and the proapsis/apoapsis keep changing rapidly back and forth causing the attempts to scan too fail. The two modules stabilize just fine once I undock them but they have no scanner onboard.

Once again, I seperate the two modules from the Lamp post and start my burn for the surface.

Touchdown! Time to do some science, take an EVA, plant the flag, and start mining.

After this, it's off too Duna, then Eve if I can get the encounter, before I head home.

[Rune]

You know, that is quite the mission report you are doing there! (BTW, there is a subforum for those, you might get more feedback there). Congrats on a rather exciting mission. How many years have those kerbals been out there by now?

Rune. Shame about the Laythe planes, apparently you need a steep ascent there until they fix the non-kerbin atmosphere boundaries.

[Jakalth]

You know, that is quite the mission report you are doing there! (BTW, there is a subforum for those, you might get more feedback there). Congrats on a rather exciting mission. How many years have those kerbals been out there by now?

Rune. Shame about the Laythe planes, apparently you need a steep ascent there until they fix the non-kerbin atmosphere boundaries.

So far, I think it's around 20 years in space... A long time gone from home.

Yeah... I had origionally tested the spaceplanes in kerbin atmosphere. They can just barely go orbital, but it requires pushing them to high speeds at high altitude before switching to the Nuke to coast to orbit. But Laythe's atmosphere doesn't allow this method of orbital achievement. Live and learn. Next time I'll just use drop landers with atmospheric descent assist(airbrakes and parachutes). The design I have fo those would allow a bit of vtol exploration before going orbital. somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes of free flight.

As for using the mission report sub forum, I didn't even know it exsisted. Would it be better to transfer this thread to that forum or make a link of some type?

Edited October 20, 2015 by Jakalth

[Jakalth]

Refueling at Dres went well. Now it's off too Duna.

And it's odd, but these are becoming very much routine maneuvers. Each transfer is becoming more and more like the last. the values change, but little else anymore. Not sure if this is a good or bad thing. Anyways, burned to get the perapsis down to Dunas orbit, then cleaned up the orbit so that it matches the plane of Dunas orbit. This way it is easier to get an encounter. Speaking of which, unlike the last few, this encounter was a bit harder to find... Took a bit of work to get it to line up and close the distance with Duna.

With the duna encounter found, I still had to clean up the encounter so a capture could be made. This was done with a few small burns to bring the encounter in closer and get it a bit straiter with the equator of Duna. This was quite strait forward. Once it was close enough, I waited for the Lamp post to get into the actual encounter before setting up the burn to circularize. While setting this up, I found an unusual thing happening. I was getting an Ike encounter without reaching full duna orbit, and the ike encounter was a strange one. It was causing my orbit to spiril around and under its self. Quite interesting, and useful. The fuel on the Lamp Post was going to be quite low again do to the cost of the Duna encounter and capture burns. So low infact, that a Duna landing was no longer possible. But Ike on the other hand, that is still doable. While making this burn, the Kerbins showed that they truly do LOVE Duna. Aaw...

With the fun of this silly, twisted encounter setup, I could finally plot the Ike capture burn. It turned out to be an easy one with low delta-V needed to complete it. Thankfully... So now the Lamp Post is parked in Ike orbit, prepairing for landing on this fair sized moon.

Next stop, landing on Ike for fuel. Then it's back and forth between Ike and the modules to refill them, before heading out for a visit with the purple world of Eve. Might even throw in a Moho flyby/landing before returning to kerbit, mission completed and then some.

Outtake: Duna Aerobraking...

Having made a quick save when I reach the duna encounter, I was given the chance to try something I thought might be risky, aerobraking in Duna's atmosphere. This method, if it worked, would allow me to have the fuel to land on Duna to refuel, perform science, and have a little fun. If nothing else, it was an excuse to see if the Lamp Post can even aerobrake.

First was to bring the Lamp Post into the atmosphere enough to slow down. The aerobrake calculator was saying I needed to drop too 29Km, but I felt off about doing that so I settled for plotting for 30Km.

While burning for this altitude, I ended up cutting it short and stopping at around 32Km instead, chancing it for a little less stress on the Lamp Post. I figured the modules would be vulnerable to the sheer of entering the atmosphere so I opted to enter nose first. Lets play a bit of Lawn Darts, huh Duna?

As the craft started to pierce the atmosphere, things started to go wrong quickly... First a few of the parts started to show overheat warnings, then things started to burn off... And then I got into the actual meat of the atmosphere around 40km up. That's not good... Poor Mica....

NOPE!

Test concluded:

1: The Lamp Post is far from optimized for aerobraking...

2: The Lamp Post was traveling WAY too fast for aerobraking...

Thankfully, this was just a "simulation" and was never performed with the "real" Lamp Post.

[CrashTestDanny]

wow - that ship is very cool looking... I may just have to steal it! Err... I mean trade you some rep for it!!

Danny!

[Jakalth]

At Ike again. Making my descent to the surface. Everything is going well. This is such a nice moon to land on! Fairly flat, with just enough slopes on it to make landing interesting. On my way down...

And nearly there, just a tiny bit of distance before the legs touch down...

The first landing on Ike went well. But the slight slope, combined with the 1.13m/s gravity field, and the fact that I still had a little horizontal momentum, meant the Lamp Post ended up sticking the landing, then tipping to nearly 60 deg off of vertical due to the landing legs on one side digging in. Was a bit sketchy, but the RCS was more then enough to pull it back to level with the ground(6 deg off vertical). Made for an interesting landing.

Mica decided to jump out of the Lamp Post, once mining operations commenced, to perform a little science and have a look around. She planted a flag for Kerbal kind and stared off into the sky, where Duna hung there, like a beautiful marble of red.

A quick check of the mining drills showed that they were still operating nicely despite their constant wear and tear. At least some things kerbals make seem to have the staying power of the Kerbals themselves.

Once the mining was complete, the Lamp Post made it's way to orbit again to catch up with the two orbiting modules. Once there, fuel was transferred, and the Lamp Post headed back down to Ike too top off it's own tanks again. In orbit, I have found it to be far easier to use the modules to intercept the Lamp Post, then to do it the other way. The Modules can maneuver much quicker then the Lamp Post its self with their substantial RCS, and they are a lot more precise. The Lamp Post is still used to burn the intercept orbit, but the modules do the rest once the craft are close.

With the second refueling run, I brought back a full tank of ore as well as fuel and monopropellant. This way I could get the Lamp Post and modules as full as possible before leaving orbit and heading out for Eve. With all the tanks full, save for just 1 on the Lamp Post, I was sitting at a good 6,800m/s delta-V. If I could of fueled that tank as well, who knows, I might of pushed it to 6,900 or even 7K..(not likely, the amount missing from that tank is just a drop compared to the total fuel capacity of the ship)

Next stop, Eve. I'm not sure I'll be doing Moho after all, it's getting harder and harder to fly the ship. The glitch that was making my maneuver nodes act up has been getting worse, and now I can't even get the Lamp Post to use the autopilot features associated with intercepts... It's also starting to show some bad visual glitches, like this orbital segment showing up with the Lamp Post. If it gets any worse, the Lamp Post, and my entire install, might become unplayable... The glitch(corruption?) is starting to effect the modules and the other craft I have in this save as well.

The line segments shown here are not even part of the crafts current flight plan, but still follow the craft no matter how I move it.

Here's hoping the game holds out at least until I can finish this mission...

[Jakalth]

Well, I logged in to fly the Lamp Post too Eve Only to find that the game is so badly corrupted now that it's barely playable. I need to finish this mission and reinstall the game with a clean install to clear this up. So instead of all the fun of going to eve and maybe Moho, it's back to Kerbin instead.

Starting from Ike orbit, I plotted an ike escape orbit, catching Duna in the process. With just a little extra delta-V, the Ike escape became a Duna escape thanks to a Duna gravity slingshot. This burn only needed 155m/s delta-V to get escape trajectory.

Part of the way through this slingshot, the game corruption took hold again and broke the burn. I basicly had to start the burn over again from this point, with the delta-V already spent, and burn it again. This lost me the clean gravity slingshot that would of gotten me a Duna escape, and ment I had to spend another 100m/s to break out of Duna's SOI. Still not very much, but it basicly set the pace for the return run to Kerbin....

Once I was out of Duna's SOI, I plotted another burn to bring me into a Kerbin encounter. This was going to be a single burn to reach the encounter.

But once again, part of the way through the burn, the game freaked out again and broke the orbit, placing me back in high orbit of Duna. So I had to burn back out of orbit and try the whole kerbin encounter burn once again. This time I was able to finish the burn. But while before I was able to get a nice 200Km encounter with kerbin, this time I was only able to get a 450km encounter... And it cost me an additional 800m/s due to the orbit breaking. But I rolled with it anyways, and let the craft get closer to kerbin. As this happened, the orbit broke again, and shifted an additional 400km out from Kerbin, making the encounter now at 850km...

So when I got into the encounter pass, I needed to bring the pass by in towards kerbin by close too 800km. This burn at least worked, the first one to actually work correctly today...

So I plotted the burn to circularize too a 90km orbit.

This was going to be my second longest burn to date, close too 11 minutes. And considering how badly things have been going, I didn't have much hope for this one to be any better then the last few... I was right it ends up... The maneuver node kept changing position during the burn, causing the circularizing orbit to turn into an atmospheric plunge that I had to manually correct to prevent the Lamp Post from burning up in kerbins atmosphere. It took the corrective burn, and then two additional burns to bring the orbit into a relatively circular orbit.

The total cost of going from Ike too Kerbin ended up costing me just shy of 4,000m/s delta-V. far more then it should of due to at least 1,200m/s being lost due to my game being badly corrupted... Kerbin, you've never looked so beautiful...

So that is mission complete. It was not 100% successful. The Laythe mission was a bust due to the failure of the Laytheplanes reaching orbit. But other then that, it all went well considering. I had the added bonus of an attempted Jool atmospheric entry using the remains of the single use, but highly successful, Tylo lander. I also had the bonus of visiting Eeloo, Dres, and Duna/Ike on my way home. It was only the corruption of the game it's self that finally put an end too the kerbin grand tour.

Next mission: Clean out my KSP install, delete it, and reinstall fresh to correct the game corruption that has made it nearly unplayable... See you all on the flip side.

[DMSP]

Great job!

Remember to post it on Jool 5 so everyone can appreciate what you did!

[Jakalth]

I wasn't sure if it qualified for the Jool 5 compitition due to the way I did this mission. I'm missing some of the crucial launch and coupling screenshots.

[Rune]

Good job! It was an awesome mission, and I'm sorry you caught a bad case of NaNovirus... although trajectory changes can happen just due to having one too many clipped parts... same principle as the K-drive, but highly irritating. Though that would present itself as a small constant acceleration, not an instant jump into another trajectory. In any case, always do the SoI transitions at x5-x10 timewarp: you are going slow enough so floating point errors will be minimal in the timestep, yet you are still on rails where the physics engine can't screw you over.

Rune. With great clipping comes great headache.

[Jakalth]

Yeah, instead of constant acceleration, I was getting uncontrollable, cyclic oscillation, with or without SAS engaged. Using anything other then stardard SAS hold(like retrograde, target, etc...) would result in SAS not responding and the craft acting like SAS had been turned off. RCS would do the same thing and become unresponsive with anything other then standard SAS hold. I had a rank 4 Pilot at the helm so that wouldn't account for it, I also had at least 1 other part I could switch control too that also had access to the other hold types(the large remote guidance part on the passenger module).

The game was just suffering from severe bloat and a corrupted save. I hadn't done a clean reinstall since Version 0.24 of the game so that was partly too blame. I backup ed everything that was important, craft file wise, and did a full uninstall/reinstall of the game. Everything works far smoother now. Controls are clean, nodes go where they are supposed to, and the game just seems to run faster now. Seems it really needed this to be done.