Forgotten Space Program

[Commander Zoom]

From experience:

You can't attach KAS struts to another craft until you make it part of/the same craft, with pipe (confirmed) or cable/tether (possible, should work?).  Or plain ol' docking, of course.

(On my old two-kerb Mun shuttles, which caught base components launched from Kerbin and carried them down to the surface skycrane style, the second seat was the designated "strut monkey" who went EVA to reinforce the connection for the trip down.)

Edited February 5, 2016 by Commander Zoom

[RocketSquid]

@Cydonian Monk :

Your telescope-station reminds me of my Mun Polar Observation Station: Part space station, part orbital survey satellite. Since I have pathfinder installed, it has an advanced geo-scanner, so I can get science from it continuously AND get a nice boost for any future Mun bases.

And speaking of bases, are there any bases left lying abandoned, waiting to be discovered?

[Cydonian Monk]

21 hours ago, Redhaze said:

Is it possible to strut to other crafts then!?

18 hours ago, RocketSquid said:

Not with the normal struts, but with the pipes, yes.

4 hours ago, Commander Zoom said:

From experience:

You can't attach KAS struts to another craft until you make it part of/the same craft, with pipe (confirmed) or cable/tether (possible, should work?).  Or plain ol' docking, of course.

Can confirm, at least on the non-struttage part. Crew is presently in orbit attempting to move pieces of their own ship around using wrenches and spacetape. When I tested the winch on the ground, the harpoon shot out at a good velocity. In orbit it kind of trickles out, so I'm trying to figure out what to do with that too. Attempting to shove it into the other satellite using a hammer is the next option.

Also: The front of the FCB doesn't have a collider, so this might instead be a ferry operation to a nearby space station. Of course I didn't bring any docking ports..... And there's a small fuel problem. 

 

11 hours ago, Choctofliatrio2.0 said:

I read the whole thing today, and I just want to say that it's AWESOME! Really well done! Can't wait to see what the kerbals discover next.\

Thank you!

 

12 minutes ago, RocketSquid said:

And speaking of bases, are there any bases left lying abandoned, waiting to be discovered?

There might be one or two, here or there.....

[Choctofliatrio2.0]

I wonder if any other survivors from the Before Times will be found... 

[Cydonian Monk]

1 minute ago, Choctofliatrio2.0 said:

I wonder if any other survivors from the Before Times will be found... 

I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any ongoing operations or activities without the approval of [REDACTED].

[RocketSquid]

2 hours ago, Cydonian Monk said:

 When I tested the winch on the ground, the harpoon shot out at a good velocity. In orbit it kind of trickles out, so I'm trying to figure out what to do with that too. Attempting to shove it into the other satellite using a hammer is the next option.

Did you use extend cable or eject hook?

[Cydonian Monk]

5 minutes ago, RocketSquid said:

Did you use extend cable or eject hook?

Eject. I'm going to try it once more tonight after I rearrange some things, along with a few other tests. (Though I've used KAS in the past for moving or removing parts, this is the first time I've tried to use the winches.) Afterwards I might send up another probe with spare parts and small docking ports (and some fuel) to try something else.

[Cydonian Monk]

More Housekeeping....

The communications satellites in low orbit discovered by Sieta made nice juicy targets for any attempted recovery operations. Especially those labelled "LKO-Comm-X" sitting in a nice, 220km orbit. Five satellites in a series ranging from Comm-1 to Comm-5. None of the five were responding, meaning none of them showed as a green light on the Baile Speir's control board, which helped alleviate a new jurisdictional issue.

Sieta, lone occupant of Baile Speir, had proclaimed herself "Queen of the Airwaves!" and was broadcasting somewhat peculiar commentary from her perch 100km above the surface. Trying to recovery one of "her" satellites might prove problematic, so these dead, low-orbit relays would do nicely. 

The crew for the recovery flight included Verly Kerman, one of the Carbon veterans, and Mardi (Girl Tuesday?) Kerman, of the Aluminium kids. Both Engineers, both equally qualified to use a wrench and other such tools, and both eager to get their mittens dirty with ancient technology. 

Officially labeled as a TB class, the Nitrogen 11 was the heaviest Nitrogen yet launched. (63.9 tonnes vs the 59.7 of the Nitrogen TC class.) Instead of using the more standard orbital module the TB class sported a set of Functional Cargo Blocks. Atop this "bay" module were enough parachutes to land it safely, a heat shield on the opposite end, and its own avionics and RCS.

The plan was to open the bay near the satellite, use a harpoon to spear it, a winch to reel it back in. Afterwards it would be strapped down, the more delicate electronics would be transferred to the capsule, and the whole mess would be returned to the surface for later study in the nice, safe lab at the space center.

Naturally that didn't work.

It quickly became obvious the satellite wouldn't fit in the bay without substantial modification.... or perhaps by forcing the antennas closed, which is what Mardi ventured out to do. In no time she had the little probe boxed up and ready to go. 

The satellite in question was KSO-Comm-1, with an estimated flight time of 75 years. (Exact numbers would only be available once the craft's chronometer could be reviewed in the lab.) The onboard batteries were dead when the Nitrogen TB-11 pulled up next to it, having lost efficiency over the generations of hot and cold in the nothingness of space. 

Those batteries started to heat back up slightly as the communications equipment was shut down, and reached a near full charge by the time Mardi had moved the satellite back to the Nitrogen. Within range of the Nitrogen's ship-to-ship communications link. 

Somewhere in the darkness a light blinked from red to a soft green. Eyes squinted.

Mardi was more than a bit nervous about letting the small commsat warm up too quickly.... Batteries that have been dead cold for how ever many decades might not take kindly to a sudden influx of energy, and many, many cases had been documented of just such a scenario causing a catastrophic explosion. (Or at the very least bursting the seams of a cell or two.)

Naturally this was when the trouble started.

Mardi pushed the satellite towards the bay, trying to position it directly over the harpoon. (The wisdom of this next move is debatable.) The initial test of the harpoon in orbit had shown that it didn't "eject" so much as "leak", so Mardi hadn't even considered that the harpoon might be capable of dealing a mortal wound. And so she asked Verly to "eject" it.

As before, it moved slowly out from the winch base. The mild force it imparted on the Nitrogen was enough to spin the craft off-axis, which in turn pulled the winch cable and resulted in it missing both the satellite and the questionably sane kerbal holding it. 

So Mardi tried to spear the satellite from considerably closer range. 

That time the harpoon "leaked" backwards through the wrong side of the cargo bay. Hmm. Moving the winch to a location outside of the bay saw similar results, just with the cable spinning wildly (yet slowly) around the craft.

Attempting to run a strut between the anchor points in the bay and an anchor point she had attached to the satellite didn't work for reasons yet unexplained.

Strapping the probe in by running struts in front of it and closing the bay doors didn't work. The satellite merely cheated at physics and phased through the door, escaping back into the void. (Phasing is a peculiarity of physics the super-genius interns in the lab have yet to adequately explain.)

Firing the winch head without a harpoon attached worked as expected, but with nothing to attach with, the cable head bounced off the satellite, sending it spinning away from the Nitrogen.

Grabbing the winch cable to flying out to the satellite didn't work, as Mardi then had nothing to attach it to the satellite with. (And no space blowtorch to weld it in place.)

Somewhere along the way one of the Nitrogen's solar arrays were destroyed. Mardi glanced up only to watch their flimsy yet critical debris drift off into the void.

Nothing was going according to plan.

And that's when the idea hit her. They could dump everything they had in the return capsule, glue that junk to the cargo bay, disassemble the satellite, and then squeeze it into the various nooks and crannies of their tiny ride home. It might work. It had to work. 

It was the only way.

And so she set to work. First order of business was to drag the satellite back to the craft. Not much daylight to work in, so she needed to hurry. She decided it was best to start with the large pieces, and so disconnected one of the craft's two monopropellent tanks to attach it inside the bay.

That's when things went _really_ wrong.

At first Mardi wasn't sure what hit her. One moment she was working in the Nitrogen TB-11's bay, the next she was spinning wildly in the blackness. It took more than a few seconds to get the tumble under control, and several near-panicked moments before she found her bearings towards the Nitrogen again. Verly was nearly screaming in her ear about the explosion, but all Mardi could remember was a cloud of expanding gas passing in front of her suit lights. And darkness. 

It would seem 75 year-old tanks of cold gas don't take very kindly to being moved, punctured, or punctured and moved.

Mardi got back to work once the two were sure everybody was alright. The blast had oddly fused the satellite to the cargo bay, meaning they wouldn't need to secure it externally or really even pack it in the capsule. After some discussion, Mardi and Verly decided it was best to pack the important bits in the capsule anyway.

The inside of the cargo bay was badly beaten and dinged, with numerous puncture marks left by the explosion's shrapnel. Not only had a wild tank of monoprop been playing billiards in it, but the harpoon had torn holes in it, the front seemed to be made of swiss cheese (mmm.... cheese). There was little chance it could survive reentry.

So Mardi worked on through the darkness, salvaging what she could.

Some short time later and she had secured all of the important pieces on the side of the bay or in her inventory. Afterwards she moved as much as possible into the capsule. Remarkably the probe core and its battery fit inside the tiny Tantares return module, leading many to speculate as to whether or not the capsule violated any dimensional laws.

Once everything was aboard they ran the numbers, and discovered their primary propellent had been exhausted by lugging the huge cargo bay to their 220km operating orbit. The fuel remaining only produced a whopping 39m/s of ∆v, leaving them to perform an extended RCS burn to lower their orbit. 

Slowly they pulled their periapsis down to 15km, more than enough to ensure a permanent aerocapture. They waited for atmospheric interface before blowing the three modules apart, hoping to keep the cargo bay close to the cpasule. The Nitrogen capsule righted itself into the airflow and Verly commanded the cargo bay to do the same. 

For a short time both cruised through the atmosphere side by side. Shortly the Nitrogen return capsule slipped well ahead of its cargo bay, as expected.

And then, at some unknown altitude above the surface, the cargo bay disintegrated. None of the kerbals in the tracking station witnessed this (given both craft were in the blackout period), and the two kerbals in the descent module were too distracted by their own rather violent reentry to notice. Only when the plasma had subsided did Verly mention the missing radio link.

No debris from the cargo bay was ever located, its existence cleared from the universe, its atoms returned to Kerbin.

The Nitrogen capsule touched down a bit heavy and a bit fast, burrowing into the sand at well over 12m/s. Shortly after landing, Verly leapt from the capsule, eager to collect the first ever surface samples from Kerbin's deserts. (Not sure why they need rockets when just exiting capsules can propel a kerbal tens of meters into the air.) Even with the sand getting into everything she was happy to have it.

And maybe, just maybe, she was glad to have that weird business with the winch and the exploding satellite behind her.

 

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Edited December 4, 2016 by Cydonian Monk

[Redhaze]

3 hours ago, Cydonian Monk said:

so Mardi hadn't even considered that the harpoon might be capable of dealing a mortal wound.

Eek! You had me at the edge of my seat for a moment there.

[Geschosskopf]

7 hours ago, Cydonian Monk said:

Grabbing the winch cable to flying out to the satellite didn't work, as Mardi then had nothing to attach it to the satellite with. (And no space blowtorch to weld it in place.)

I haven't used the KAS winches in a long time due to a variety of similar Kraken-related incidents.  However, last time I did, the cables could connect to pipe end pieces, and that was my preferred way of snagging other spacecraft in space, before the Klaw existed.

However, the winch cable isn't a rigid connection so any relative motion between the 2 ships present when you make the connection remains while the cable is connected, plus whatever more you create operating the winch.  It's thus quite possible for 1 ship to clip into the other.  As long as the cable remains connected and partially extended, this doesn't seem to cause any harm.  However, should the ships still be clipped when the cable comes off, or clipped when the cable locks up fully retracted, bad things can happen.

Like this.....

http://i.imgur.com/zabCkbu.gifv

Here, I had a floating fuel tank with winches.  I landed a seaplane next to it and during the refueling process, they drifted a little so that just as I disconnected the winch, the plane's wingtip was just barely clipping the fuel tank.   The plane and fuel tank immediately got into a fight to the death, wildly thrashing and shedding the occasional part, eventually disappearing over the horizon and leaving the pilot treading water mid-ocean.

 

[Hotaru]

7 hours ago, Cydonian Monk said:

And so she set to work. First order of business was to drag the satellite back to the craft. Not much daylight to work in, so she needed to hurry. She decided it was best to start with the large pieces, and so disconnected one of the craft's two monopropellent tanks to attach it inside the bay.

 

That's when things went _really_ wrong.

 

My experience is that disconnecting a thing with KAS and then immediately reconnecting it to something else can cause explosions. Not sure if it happens every time, but I think it's more reliable if you can disconnect the part, put it in a KIS inventory (the Kerbal's if the part is small enough, or a container), then take it back out of the inventory and attach it wherever you want it moved.

As far as the harpoons go, I seem to remember I had them working once in 1.0.2, but I haven't had any luck with them since. If I want to use KAS to connect two ships, I use pipes (or one pipe and struts).

Edited February 6, 2016 by Hotaru

[Cydonian Monk]

15 minutes ago, Geschosskopf said:

Like this....

Now _that's_ a kraken attack!

There'll be more tests on my part in the future, and I'll send up a wider variety of the KAS parts too, so I'm likely to see all sorts of voodoo and kraken mess. Perhaps if I put a docking port on the end of an infernal robotics arm and attach that to a claw which grabs a winched ship with the winch locked then I will finally and utterly destroy the universe.

2 minutes ago, Hotaru said:

My experience is that disconnecting a thing with KAS and then immediately reconnecting it to something else can cause explosions. Not sure if it happens every time....

Can confirm that it doesn't happen every time, just often. Funny thing is that "explosion" seemed to merge the two craft together, with the soon to be destroyed monoprop tank being the only piece of KSO-Comm-1 left. Couldn't switch to the other craft, only the Nitrogen and the EVA'd Mardi, couldn't force it out of the cargo bay, etc. Destructive welding?

Edited February 6, 2016 by Cydonian Monk

[Geschosskopf]

28 minutes ago, Cydonian Monk said:

Perhaps if I put a docking port on the end of an infernal robotics arm and attach that to a claw which grabs a winched ship with the winch locked then I will finally and utterly destroy the universe.

If that doesn't do it, nothing will

It used to be possible to capture space debris with a set of jaws make of lander legs.  Haven't tried this in a while and reentry heat now being a thing really complicates this method.  Still, it might be made to work.

I would really try to avoid using winches, regardless.  They've always been rather dangerous and unstable.  This is all good fun if you're not taking yourself too seriously and enjoy dealing with the resulting disasters.  But otherwise, I'd see if I could attach a 0.625m port to the probe and then dock to it conventionally, or use the Klaw.

 

[Choctofliatrio2.0]

So did the cargo bay actually burn up on reentry, or was it another victim of the game's refusing to cooperate?

[Cydonian Monk]

1 hour ago, Choctofliatrio2.0 said:

So did the cargo bay actually burn up on reentry, or was it another victim of the game's refusing to cooperate?

At some point Remote Tech caused its antenna to fall off. The game then decided the antenna was ok but the cargo bay wasn't, and unloaded the cargo bay. It was about 4km away at the time, and I had been trying to switch back and forth between it and the capsule, but it still unloaded. 

The antenna survived. 

Edited February 6, 2016 by Cydonian Monk

[Choctofliatrio2.0]

53 minutes ago, Cydonian Monk said:

At some point Remote Tech caused its antenna to fall off. The game then defided the antenna was ok but the cargo bay wasn't, and unloaded the cargo bay. It was about 4km away at the time, and I had been trying to switch back and forth between it and the capsule, but it still unloaded. 

The antenna survived. 

Huh :/ The game doesn't seem to like you

[RocketSquid]

And yet another entry to my list of reasons not to use RT.

[Cydonian Monk]

22 minutes ago, RocketSquid said:

And yet another entry to my list of reasons not to use RT.

It really wasn't remote tech that killed it though... just the stock game deciding the cargo bay was too far out of range. (The antenna, being low mass and extremely aerodynamic hot closer to the capsule.) Must admit I've never been a fan of the way RT antennas just fall off in the wind, even though it makes sense. 

Once (and whenever) the stock Antenna Range stuff hits, I'm planning to switch to that. If it doesn't have a signal delay then I'll probably write my own plugin for that. 

[RocketSquid]

All I can say is, 1.1 had better add some low-gain antennae, or add that function to probe cores, because it's gonna be a nightmare if we have to launch every rocket with random antennas sticking out during ascent.

[waterlubber]

1 hour ago, RocketSquid said:

All I can say is, 1.1 had better add some low-gain antennae, or add that function to probe cores, because it's gonna be a nightmare if we have to launch every rocket with random antennas sticking out during ascent.

IIRC all the antennas are "omnidirectional" (they automatically connect and orient to control the active craft) and by default have the range of in-kerbin. (kerbin is assumed to have a deep-space network).

[Geschosskopf]

1 hour ago, RocketSquid said:

All I can say is, 1.1 had better add some low-gain antennae, or add that function to probe cores, because it's gonna be a nightmare if we have to launch every rocket with random antennas sticking out during ascent.

As I understand things, the upcoming communications system has more in common with AntennaRange than RemoteTech, and thank the Almighty Kraken for that.

[Choctofliatrio2.0]

1 hour ago, RocketSquid said:

All I can say is, 1.1 had better add some low-gain antennae, or add that function to probe cores, because it's gonna be a nightmare if we have to launch every rocket with random antennas sticking out during ascent.

It would make sense to have antennae in probes. Generally launching antennae isn't a problem for me, though, depending on placement.

[RocketSquid]

I think I may have needed to be more specific: I hope that 1.1 adds static low gain antennae, so that I don't have to have deployed antennae on my ascent flight.

[Cydonian Monk]

1 hour ago, RocketSquid said:

I think I may have needed to be more specific: I hope that 1.1 adds static low gain antennae, so that I don't have to have deployed antennae on my ascent flight.

Well, the antenna range isn't coming until 1.2 now, and from what I understand you won't need anything on an ascent flight. There are a number of new antennas I think, not sure if a static low-gain will be one, since I'm not sure the game will ever require one. 

 

In other news - Busy weekend, haven't touched Kerbal. Big "new" project coming up once I'm back in the game.

[waterlubber]

 

Nice, enjoying the series so far, do you have a modlist?