Next Small Step: RP-1 Career Series

[jimmymcgoochie]

That Moon base contract didn’t work for me either, I had to force complete it when the crew came back to Earth.

MechJeb isn’t cheating- real space agencies don’t fly stuff by hand so why should we? 

[Wiseman]

On 6/19/2021 at 1:02 AM, jimmymcgoochie said:

MechJeb isn’t cheating- real space agencies don’t fly stuff by hand so why should we? 

100% agree. The planning and design is always the hard part - executing the maneuvers and pointing the spacecraft are the least of my worries!

The crew of Apollo 9 are headed down to the surface, in one of the final Apollo LEM missions! We run into a contractual snag, however, which will require some careful mission planning...

 

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

@Wiseman so, funny story...

I updated RO to the latest master (as of about 3 days ago) and the KTDU-425 now has TestFlight/TestLite configs. Including a maximum rated burn time which is just 560 seconds; or to put it another way, so far the engine has failed or exploded due to overburning every time I've tried to land on the Moon, long before I've reached the surface. 

Don't update RO any time soon, or if you do, delete the rated burn time from the part config to prevent this issue.

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

I’ve been thinking about that reusable Moon lander and it might just work if you use RCS thrusters instead of the KTDU-425; get the biggest single port RCS thrusters you can and stick them on the bottom, then set their actuation toggles to only fire fore/aft and fore by throttle so they work like engines- including throttling down to 50%. I’d guess four 2kN generic thrusters and 3 of those 1.2kN RCS blocks with the three nozzles would be enough, but I haven’t tried it yet so that’s just a guess.

TWR won’t be all that great so long burn times all around, but it’ll use one single fuel mix (which KTDU-425/generic thrusters do not, they have different fuel ratios) and zero reliability concerns.

[jimmymcgoochie]

@Wiseman it’s been a while since the last episode, is this series still going? Obviously real life comes first but would be nice to know if/when you’ll be back. (Or maybe I’ll end up getting to Mars first and you can steal my ideas for once )