This weeks highlights at KSC

[Claes]

Hi everyone. I recently stumbled upon KSP, after "playing" Martin Schweiger's "Orbiter" for quite a while. The images below highlights some of this weeks (my first) activities at KSC. Please enjoy, I did.

The first Munar landing, a pretty hair-raising affair of hand-sticking and wild eyeballing. But, hey, we made it! Small step for a Kerbal, one giant leap for me!

This forum was quite helpful with hints on how to time the transfer burn to Mun, without any add-on tools.

After some more hand-sticking and pure luck, our heroic Kerbal made it back not only to Kerbin, but literally to the front porch of KSC. The time had come for the program to move on. Hand-flying was considered obsolete. And dangerous. And we can't have dangerous, nossiree. So, MechJeb was installed, and a most ambitious goal was set: a double landing on Mun! Inside a crater of great geological significance! With MechJeb automation!

The first of the two-ship flight landed ok. A few minuter later, ship 2 landed hard on a sloping surface and the command pod broke off from the return stage! Oh noes! Fortunately, the brave engineers behind their desks and computers, came up with a rescue ship on very short notice. The still-functional Lander 1 was left on the Mun. Perhaps it can be used as a lifeboat for further expeditions. All kerbals made it back and are accounted for.

New goals were set! Ambitions were even higher! We'll land on a mountaintop on Minimus! *insert party-tweeter here*

A few days and several thousand kilometers later, on a mountaintop, on Minimus;

Oh MAN, not again!

The lander touched down at default vertical speed, 0,5 m/s, slid sideways, bounced, and the rest is still a bit blurry... Some say an engineer somewhere was embarrassed.

Embarrassed maybe, but not without answer to nature's challenges. There will be a rescue landing on the same mountain! No Kerbals gets left behind. Or on a frozen rock in outer space.

DamnedRobotics was consulted, and NovaPunch parts were added. A 1-2-command pod was edited to function as a crewable strut and the whole shebang was remote-controlled to a bouncy, wide-stanced mountaintop landing.

Now THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is a bona-fide mountain-top-rescue lander, made possible by community support! (And a nice pic as well, with Mun and Kerbin rising over the Minimus horizon.) The rescue craft even made it back with the rescued Kerbals to KSC (-ish) through aerobraking and shoddy timing of parachutes. (Does anybody have a boat-part, plz, they've been floating around out there for days now.)

A great many thanks to the KSP dev team and all you people who makes such great addons. And thanks to Dr. Schweiger who got me started prograde on the quest for space.

Now, is there a tool or tip to remotely determine the slope angle at a specific coordinate?

/Claes

[Capt'n Skunky]

Happy Launching!

Arrr!

Capt'n Skunky

KSP Community Manager

[sal_vager]

Hi Claes, that is a very impressive post and a great way to introduce yourself to the community

I'm glad you are enjoying the game so much, and it'll only get better as time goes on, now go launch some rockets

[KevinTMC]

Fantastic post, Claes. Your Kerbals are lucky to have you running their program.

I'd be interested to read more about how you manged to (manually!) return your first Mun mission to KSC. I've been playing for a couple of months now and the closest I've come is 45km away (in the foothills west-south-west of KSC, where the returned capsule of course rolled over on its hatch, trapping the brave Kerbonaut).

I'm also fascinated by your rescue lander. More details and screenshots of that intriguing beaut would be welcome.

[simplemunrockets]

I haven't gotten around to a plateau-landing on Minmus yet. It's one of my goals.

[Claes]

Thanks Kev. Well, thay let me stay as I do the work for free. The manual return involved both a little planning and a lot of luck. I got into a very good equatorial orbit on return from Mun, that was pure luck. I made just a small plane-change to align to Kerbin equator. I then retro-braked late to a very steep reentry. I figured that the steeper the reentry, the less lateral offset would be added from atmospheric drag later on, thus making it less impossible to judge where the trajectory would go. This is not really an option in real life because of the enormous G-forces such a steep reentry would induce. The poor Kerbal suffered from at least 10-15 G. The reentry path would still overshoot the KSC, but not by much, so to land *at* KSC required me to manually pop the chutes when I was just-short-of on top of it. I believe I was at or just below 20 000 meters altitude. That it got so good was also sheer luck. I tried to do it again tonight, but did not manage to get it so perfect again. I landed with KSC in view, but not on top of it.

[Claes]

Here it is, on top of its launch vehicle in the VAB. Thanks to the enormously wide stance, even wider with the pistons extended, it can land on a sloping surface.

And here it is, landed on the Minimus mountain.