(Complete, Part 14) Project Odyssey: Ultimate Steve's First Grand Tour

[Ultimate Steve]

So!

I've never done a grand tour.

I've done a lot of other things, but, I've just never had the time and motivation to put together and fly an actual grand tour ship.

Until now.

I present to you:

The Ultimate Space Ship Voyager!

Powered by 8 NERV engines, capable of carrying six separate landers, and with a crew capacity of - 

...Oh.

Let's try that again, shall we...

(temporary logo probably)

 

Mod list:

Spoiler

B9 Part Switch - It was a dependancy of something, IDK what it does

Blast Awesomeness Modifier

Distant Object Enhancement

Environmental Visual Enhancements and default configs

Kerbal Engineer Redux

Module Manager

Pood's Milky Way Skybox (not currently working by the looks of things, I'll probably replace it)

TextureReplacer

Trajectories

Waterfall for the gorgeous plumes

Both DLCs

 

Part 1 - Mothership Assembly

 

Spoiler

Anyway, as I was saying, this is the U.S.S. Voyager, or rather, the U.S.S. Voyager II now, because the first one exploded. The only change was the addition of absolutely massive fins to keep it stable on the way up.

You're probably thinking that its too small of a launch vehicle to get it into orbit, and you would be correct - if it was fully fueled. Its not completely empty, but its missing roughly 3 Mk3 fuselages worth of liquid fuel, which will be delivered via refueler later (or we will just get the fuel from Minmus when we stop by there).

Successful booster separation!

This mission will rely heavily on refueling - There will be a large lander attached to the back of the mothership capable of harvesting a full Mk3 fuel tank's worth of fuel from light moons such as Bop, Pol, Gilly, and Minmus, decreasing to about half a Mk3 tank's worth on Moho and Vall, the largest bodies I expect to refuel from.

Back to the mission, the Voyager II successfully reached Kerbin Orbit. There is a small probe core slapped to the booster stage so it can be de-orbited.

Short firing of the engines to separate the stage.

And, entry! I kinda wanted to try to glide it until landing, but sadly it burned up a few seconds after this picture was taken.

Now for the second launch: The Eve Lander!

By far the heaviest lander, the Eve lander takes up over half of the payload mass - including the refueler and the fuel it needs to land places! That is why we will be going to Eve first, to ditch that massive 90 ton lander as soon as possible.

Good booster separation again.

The Eve lander is powered by two Vectors on the first stage, and a Terrier on the second stage. In testing, it is barely able to make it back from sea level assuming good piloting, but it is not equipped for a water landing, so we need to land on, well, land, for it to work.

On orbit propulsion is provided by four terriers on jettisonable pods that also include RCS. These detach before Eve Entry, and provide both rendezvous capability and de orbit capability.

The probe core on it isn't super advanced, though, so I couldn't do target SAS... I'm running without MJ in this save, so I also couldn't do target antiparalell.

But, we did indeed get it docked - and what a beautiful ship its shaping up to be!

There will be five more launches excluding refuelers:

1. Massive ISRU ship as explained earlier - 62t dry-ish (with enough fuel on board to land on Moho/Vall). Attaches to back docking port, is "hung" in tension to increase stability. Will land on Moho and anything smaller. Crew capacity of 5.
2. Duna Lander - small, 3 man lander. May also be used to land on lighter worlds if I don't need to refuel, to save me the hassle of flying the refueler. 7 tons dry, 15 tons wet.
3. Tylo Lander - 1 man, 5 Terrier, single use lander. 6 tons dry, 15 tons wet.
4. Laythe SSTO - single RAPIER, 1 man Laythe SSTO plane. 6 tons dry, 10 tons wet.
5. Crew Return Vehicle - Not designed yet, but will take the crew up to the mothership, and will serve as the Kerbin return vehicle.

That's all for now, though. Here goes nothing!

 

 

 

Edited April 3, 2022 by Ultimate Steve

[Ultimate Steve]

Part 2 - Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Spoiler

This is the Laythe SSTO. It took several attempts to launch, and I'm not going to bother posting them all. It is fairly straightforward, using one RAPIER for main propulsion.

However, in orbit, we ran out of fuel, and had to use RCS to complete the rendezvous... When we got a close approach, it turned out that we actually had about 10m/s too little!

So, we did part of the burn with the mothership instead, and used the SSTO's RCS for the last 10m/s of relative velocity and fine maneuvering.

Slight problem, however. The fin blocks one of the docking ports! That's a problem for later, however...

Next up is the Duna lander, which was thrown up on an SRB, and will arrive with about half fuel load. It is piloted by Valentina Kerman.

Rendezvous and docking went exceedingly smoothly.

Next up, a fairly unconventional Tylo lander, in that the ascent stage is actually mounted upside down.

The RCS stage there is used for rendezvous.

I docked it, and then used the new docking port rotation functionality to adjust it to be square, and to get the SSTO's fin out of the way.

And then, like a complete and total doofus, I reverted to VAB instead of exiting to the space center!

I didn't notice this until later, though.

Next, Bob Kerman launched on the large refueler, designed to haul a full mk3 fuel tank from a light moon to the mothership, and a half tank from a medium planet or moon like Moho or Vall.

Separation of the boosters went beautifully.

And then I separated the launch vehicle... Can you see the problem?

Yup. I got all the way here, and I put the docking port on backwards! It stayed with the launch vehicle when it was used to decouple. Silly me...

Bob fired the engines to de orbit the now worthless refueler and bailed out, EVA-ing over to the Voyager II.

And then I realized that I reverted after I launched the Tylo lander...

So this session, I launched four things and only got two successful dockings... Unfortunate, but well, could be worse. I just have to keep moving forward.

 

 

[Maria Sirona]

Yay! New mission report! Awesome! But u could've just slapped a docking port the right way up with the 1.11 (i think) orbital construction or whatever tool

[Ultimate Steve]

8 hours ago, Maria Sirona said:

Yay! New mission report! Awesome! But u could've just slapped a docking port the right way up with the 1.11 (i think) orbital construction or whatever tool

I considered that, but I was under the assumption that the large docking port would be too big for that. Oh well, too late now...

Part 3 - The Odyssey Begins

Spoiler

So!

Apparently there's already a mission report called Project Voyager right now... Granted it doesn't have any replies or pictures at the moment, but I'm not gonna be one to steal anyone's name, so the project has been renamed to Odyssey.

Interesting. Before I was gonna make it into a story, the ship in Voyage: The Final Warning was called the Odyssey, and then I renamed it to the Voyager. Now I had a ship called Voyager II, and I've renamed it to Odyssey II... I guess things really do come full circle sometimes!

Refueler number 2, this time with Bob Kerman on board. We double checked to make sure the docking port was on the right way this time!

And, docked! We used most of the oxidizer on board, though, so we will have to borrow some from the Eve lander in order to land when we refuel next.

Tylo lander... Again.

And, docked!

One last thing - the crew return vehicle. I have decided on a crew of 6.

As four are already on board the Odyssey II, two are going up on this ship - Margaret Kerman and Munby Kerman.

The launch vehicle is just a large SRB and a poodle stage. The actual return vehicle is powered by RCS only, and is only intended to be used for final return to Kerbin.

Fortunately, the docking port rotation range was enough to move the Laythe SSTO's tail out of the way, freeing up enough room for the return vehicle to dock.

Looking at the numbers, as we launched the refueler full of liquid fuel (I was too lazy to design a properly sized LV, so I filled it up all the way and put it on the large one), we just barely have enough Delta-V to make it to Low Minmus orbit. Remember, we did launch the ship nearly empty to save on launch mass.

So, there she is - the U.S.S. Odyssey II. Beautiful!

And off we go to Minmus!

We were able to do the escape burn in one go, because the ship is so close to empty.

After a mid course plane change, the Odyssey II approaches Minmus.

And I was right - we just barely made it to low Minmus orbit! Only 26m/s remaining in the main tanks. We did accidentally steal from some of the other tanks as I forgot to turn off crossfeed on some of the docking ports, though. We probably had something like another kilometer per second's worth scattered across the whole ship, but then I would have to deal with refueling all the smaller landers, and that isn't something I wanted to do.

Before we leave Minmus, we need to take on enough fuel to:

1. Make it to the Mun

2.  Make it to Low Eve Orbit

3. Make it to Gilly

Technically, I could also refuel the ship at the Mun, and I could go to Gilly before landing on Eve, but Minmus is so convenient to refuel from due to its high ore concentration, low gravity, and flat landing sites, I'd prefer to take on a lot of fuel here.

The refueler detaches.

And, landed on Minmus!

From left to right, Bob, Bill, and Jebediah, on the first of many landings on this mission. I hope they brought snacks, its gonna be a while before the next supermarket!

 

 

 

[Maria Sirona]

The Cupola in the rear is sooooo cool

[Ultimate Steve]

Part 4 - Fly Me To The Mun

Spoiler

In order to keep the length and image count of these updates reasonable, I'm gonna skip over most repeated refuelings. The Minmus refuelings took about 3 days to fill the tanks, and I ended up conducting three landings. All 6 crew got to go down to the surface at least once.

After that, I looked at my fuel load, and I concluded that in order to be safe, I'd need one more, but if I took fuel from the landers to stretch my range, my current load would probably be sufficient, but risky. I decided to risk it, and if needed, I'd refuel at the Mun.

After I arrived at the Mun, I kicked the can further down the road and decided against refueling. I took the 3 man Duna lander down to the surface instead.

I have decided to make this mission Ultimate Challenge Compatible, so one Kerbal must go everywhere. I've decided that this is going to be Bob Kerman, as he usually gets less attention than the others. That, and with the current textures, he kinda has my hairstyle.

After that, and several months of time warping, I plotted a course for Eve. A burn from Mun orbit would put my periapsis low around Kerbin.

Then I did an Eve transfer burn at Kerbin Periapsis.

Not gonna see that view for quite a long time, take it in while you can!

I didn't take a picture of this, but there was a large plane change and correction burn of about 380m/s which was the largest of the 3 burns so far.

Much Purple, very wow.

Due to the low TWR and high velocity, it took the Odyssey II four separate periapsis burns to capture into a Low Eve Orbit.

After the first burn, a plane change burn was conducted high above Eve to mostly correct our inclination with respect to Gilly, so we could more easily get there later.

But after those burns, plus two more to reduce total altitude to 100 kilometers, the Odyssey II was in Low Eve Orbit.

Tune in next time to see how the landing goes!

 

 

[Ultimate Steve]

Part 5 - Into The Purple

Spoiler

This is Bob.

Bob is about to land on the hardest planet to return from in KSP.

Bob is about to do this using a lander that was never tested in its final configuration because I got so fed up with it.

Sounds fun, right?

Partially to stall, partially because I was curious, I measured the length of the ship, which turned out to be roughly 78 meters - quite the beast! It was about to get a whole lot shorter, however.

Bob got into the ship, undocked, and then instantly realized that he'd forgotten to fill up the de orbit tanks, which were still partially empty from the Kerbin orbit rendezvous. Bob docked again, took the fuel from the ship (which was already running pretty low on fuel), and undocked again.

The docking port was jettisoned, meaning it was now or never.

Moments after the Jettison, Bob remembered that he should have transferred the remaining RCS fuel to the mothership, as the mothership cannot easily refill its small monopropellant stores, but with the docking port gone, it was too late now.

Due to the thick clouds in this particular set of visual mods, I had to rely on orbital biome measurements taken with the KER biome readout to plot a landing site. I aimed for a wide area that had a lot of land, but other than that, I had little to no control over where I landed.

The next problem, however, is that the fins blocked the engine thrust, which never happened in the simulations. This was fixed by repeatedly rolling back and forth during the de-orbit burn to make the exhaust go to the side of the fins.

It is at this point that I would like to point out how elegant the original lander design was - super slim, without the bulky de orbit motors, or the four outer heat shields... But unfortunately it didn't work, so I went the "slap more things onto it until it stops exploding" route.

The de orbit motors were jettisoned and the top inflatable heat shield was inflated.

And the fiery descent began!

After the flames and gs calmed down, I tried some physics warp to speed up the descent.

This was a mistake, and I quickloaded.

The lander descended through the Evian atmosphere. I love how mysterious the clouds make Eve feel, but I also do not like how dark it gets on the surface.

Now, as we are falling through the clouds and approaching the surface, we start the parachute deployment sequence. There are two drogues, which will deploy first. Then the heat shield is jettisoned, then the mains deploy.

Heat shield jettison.

And main depllyment! Coming up on full deployment...

*@#@$(^

That didn't happen in the sims either. Quickloading again...

Let's try deploying just one main chute at a time to reduce the shock, and let's deploy them early, even though it will look goofy. Let's even keep the heat shield for a while for the extra drag.

Come on, KSP! In the simulations it worked every single time without ripping the top half of the rocket off!

I continued quickloading and testing various different configurations. Eventually I found out that with a lot of autostruts and a one at a time chute deployment sequence, the thing would not rip apart.

Bob's view of one successful main chute deployment.

And, finally, all chutes are out and the vehicle is still in one piece!

Ditching the heat shields and firing up the main engines for landing.

And, touchdown!

I was too fed up with the lander during testing to add a proper ladder system, so I did that cheesey thing where you transfer to a command pod thats right next to a surface despite there being no reasonable path to get there.

But there we are, successfully landed on Eve, although after many quickloads. Either the hardest or second hardest landing of the mission (Tylo might end up being more difficult), and its done! Now, Bob just has to get back...

 

 

[Ultimate Steve]

Part 6 - A Facelift For The Mothership

Spoiler

The parachutes are mounted on decouplers, and were detached. I had vernor RCS on the top stage as some form of tipping protection but come to think of it, in the thick atmospohere, it wouldn't have done much. I didn't end up needing them, and they probably produced a lot of drag due to the way KSP works... But, anyway...

And here is the liftoff from Eve! The entire landing assembly is mounted on a decoupler, which is attached to a fairing node on the bottom boattail fairing. 

I'm unsure what an optimal ascent would look like, and I was too busy panicking, so I mostly just had the throttle pegged at full throughout the ascent.

In a simulation, an earlier, but largely similar version of the ascent vehicle had made orbit from sea level, and we had landed at about 1 kilometer above sea level, so I shouldn't have been worried. However, at one point, SAS jumped to target prograde instead of orbit prograde, shoving me sideways, so I lost a bunch of Delta-V. Also my steering was not efficient at all.

Bob breaks through the clouds and begins the gravity turn!

I'm so glad to be playing with visual mods again, that moment when you break from the dark impenatrable cloud layer and see space again, and the curved, purple horizon, is just so cool!

After burnout I elected to coast for a while, as this stage is aerodynamically stable. When I did decouple, however, the upper stage could only barely counteract the drag and gravity, so I probably should have waited a bit longer.

Just four parts, the pod, two tanks, and an LV-909.

Due to the afforementioned bad steering, and the fact that I was going into an inclined orbit, I did not have very much fuel left, but I did make it to orbit!

First ever Eve 2 stage to orbit vehicle for me. Maybe one day I'll do an Eve SSTO just for the sake of doing one. I find it awesome how for the longest time, an Eve SSTO was thought to be an impossibility, but then someone went out and barely did it... Then someone did it a bit better, and now we have smaller Eve SSTOs, ones that use propellors, and even ones with enough margins to carry a full ISRU kit!

Anyway, I'm off topic.

Kinda hard to see, but I had to use the EVA pack for the last bit of rendezvous as I did end up running out of fuel, but the thing didn't have a docking port anyway, so not that big of a deal.

Now, if you will look at the front of the ship for a bit, you will notice that it looks a lot less epic after the Eve lander is gone. I can't really stand that. Luckily, I foresaw this and planned for it.

Surprise!

This Cupola can detach and fly around!

And just like that, the mothership looks about 42% cooler than it did previously!

 

 

Edited March 29, 2022 by Ultimate Steve

[Ultimate Steve]

Part 7 - A Blunder At Moho

Spoiler

Anyway, from there, I went to Gilly, as planned previously. There were a few periapsis kicks coming up from Eve, a rendezvous burn at apoapsis, and I think a minor plane correction burn (was already at 0.0 degrees but sometimes that's not close enough).

Anyway, I got there eventually.

With a whole 124m/s to spare!

Although if I stole all the fuel from everything I'd probably have significantly more.

The refueler was taken down to the surface. At this site, it took like 4-5ish days to fill the tanks, a bit more than on Minmus.

The goal here was to completely fill up the tanks of the mothership and as much of the refueler as possible. We can get to Moho at a partial fuel load, but we are also going to want to have full tanks for good measure coming back from Moho. Since we can only refuel half of a load at a time from Moho, it is going to be super annoying to refuel. If we can get a full tank here, that will reduce the amount of time refueling at Moho significantly.

After four refuelings, we left Gilly on a transfer to Moho. The ship departed at the Eve-Moho ascending or descending node, I forget which, the one thats at Moho's apoapsis, for efficiency. The inclination is mostly cancelled out during the transfer burn, and it proceeds like a normal multi orbit rendezvous from there.

That's no moon! Well, its a planet...

After a long capture burn and then a shorter circularization burn, the Odyssey II entered a low-ish Moho orbit.

Now, how this is supposed to work, is that the side tanks and the short LFO fuselage tank are going to be filled fully and locked, to be used for the next landing. The two Mk3-2.5m adapters are the ascent fuel. The middle tank will also be locked, after it is filled halfway, and that fuel goes into the main ship's tanks.

However, well, that's not what happened. I realized that I had gotten into a routine and accidentally filled the fuel tank up all the way. I didn't have any way to burn just liquid fuel. I could burn off the liquid fuel and oxidizer together, but I would always have a 10,000 unit excess of liquid fuel. I had enough dleta-V to get to orbit, but I didn't have enough oxidizer to land back on Moho after delivering the fuel load.

Without any other option, I went back to the mothership with full tanks.

At this point, I realized that I could probably steal enough oxidizer from the Tylo, Duna, and Laythe landers to make it down to Moho. Plus, I had offloaded some excess onto the mothership just in case at Gilly, but not much. However, I wasn't comfortable with that, as if I messed up again, it could mean not being able to refuel at all when I got to Ike later on, and I wasn't in the mood for another landing. I plotted some nodes, and it turned out that I could get to Ike, just barely, with all the liquid fuel on board, including all of the stuff in the landers, minus a little bit for the Ike landing.

So, I did that instead of chancing a second Moho landing, and that ended up being the worst decision I've made on this mission so far.

But that's a story for when I'm less tired!

 

 

[Maria Sirona]

AWESOME! Now there's cupolas at both ends! Also, can Val be first on Vall and Bob first on Bop

6 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

that ended up being the worst decision 

:0

[Stamp20]

17 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

so one Kerbal must go everywhere.

The rules only say there has to be a Kerbal present, not that it has to be the same one every time.

[Ultimate Steve]

3 hours ago, Stamp20 said:

The rules only say there has to be a Kerbal present, not that it has to be the same one every time.

Oh, okay, looks like I misread it. I'm still gonna send Bob everywhere, though, he doesn't get out much.

[Ultimate Steve]

Part 8: The Mothership Gets A Facelift... Again

Spoiler

So it turns out that either I miscalculated, or there were major losses because of the long escape burn, but, basically, we do not have enough fuel to get to Ike orbit.

After a small ~100m/s plane change burn, we have a very near optimal Duna encounter, just barely grazing Duna's orbit, at the ascending or descending node, so its not getting much better than this.

Due to the lack of fuel, we really only have 2 options. Option 1 is interplanetary gravity assists, the one main KSP skill I don't have mastered yet. Option 2 is aerocapture.

The ship was never designed for aerocapture, or aero anything except for Kerbin ascent, but its our last option besides quickloading back to Moho.

A large amount of fuel was burned to slow the ship down, but I really should have started earlier.

It started out alright, but then as the atmosphere became too thick, control was lost.

And then the explosions started. Solar panels, mostly, which was expected. The biggest loss was the ones on the Tylo and Laythe landers, which is a bit of a problem, but as for the ones on the ship, they were purely aesthetic (I think the single RTG on the Duna lander is literally enough for our needs) and we still have half of them left.

Eventually the ship settled into a steady state like this, but with the front pointed foewards like that, there was one more casualty.

RIP Epic Front Cupola, Eve-Duna. Fortunately, nobody was inside (okay, one person was inside but then I quickloaded and moved them out and retried the aerocapture), and the ship can function just fine without it.

Based on the F3 menu, one RCS block somewhere also exploded but I've been unable to find where, so hopefully it wasn't important.

After all that, we still needed to burn some fuel to capture.

After a second aerobraking pass and a plane change, a near ideal Ike encounter was achieved.

And, in orbit!

In hindsight, knowing I had 120m/s left, I would have burned more before the aerocapture so I could have gone more aggressively for less or similar damage, but the past is in the past, and we are in Ike orbit with a functional, but somewhat damaged mothership.

The plan is to take on nearly a full fuel load here, like with Gilly, then go to the surface of Duna, then Dres, and then to one of the outer Joolian moons, but that could change depending on how much fuel I have left when I reach Jool.

 

 

[Ultimate Steve]

Part 9 - I Like Ike

Spoiler

Ike time!

The first landing went pretty standard-ly, if that is a word. Nominally? Normally? Something like that, you get the gist.

Its been a day or so since I've played this, so I don't remember if I did two or three refuelings. If I knew what was good for me I would have done 3, but I only have photo evidence of 2 of them. Its not super critical, howver, as our next target is Dres, and we can refuel there.

After that, the ship headed down to Low Duna Orbit.

The Duna lander was detached with 3 crew inside, and aimed for a spot that looked vaguely low altitude to give the chutes a better chance of working.

Somehow, this thing was stable on re entry.

The chutes were armed, but didn't deploy for an alarmingly long time, so the engines were started earlier, but then the chutes popped out and the engines were shut off.

The landing didn't go quite as planned the first time around, but luckily, the RCS, landing legs, and reaction wheels were just enough to right it!

The lander, was, however, sliding downhill slowly (I really hope they finally fix this in KSP 2), so the Kerbals had to run to the lander shortly after this picture was taken.

Launching up through clouds will never not be cool.

And, back to the mothership! Next stop, Dres!

 

 

 

[Maria Sirona]

Maybe you should move two of the solar panels to the other side so the Odyssey II does not look so beat up?

Edited March 31, 2022 by Maria Sirona

[Ultimate Steve]

9 hours ago, Maria Sirona said:

Maybe you should move two of the solar panels to the other side so the Odyssey II does not look so beat up?

That's a good idea, I'll try it when I get back to the game next.

Part 10 - The Grand Canyon

Spoiler

The trip to Dres went very normally, except for me starting the burn late and having to do 2 burns to get to low orbit, but that's okay.

What better place to land on Dres than next to the canyon?

There are four or five Kerbals in the lander, but with this many landings, I was too lazy to get them all out for a picture this time around.

This is actually very close to the same place I landed for a part of Project Intrepid a while ago, when the crew of the ITV-016 discovered the true source of the "Teddy Monster" and Tomfurt went back in time. The postmortem for Project Intrepid is in progress, its just taking a while btw. Its on the list, but university takes first priority, recreation so I don't go insane takes a very close second priority, and the two tend me to not leave a lot of time for writing. This grand tour is about the most I can do right now with my current workload, just a mission report with no plot.

Although, I am working on 3 more things slowly in the backgroud. One series of fictional KSP battles, one cool blend of kerbal tech and magic, and the next Voyage chapter are in progress, but no ETAs on any of those.

Anyway, with that detour over, back to the mission.

The trip back to orbit was uneventful. However, it should be noted that we are too far away from the sun to be able to run even one drill and the ISRU at the same time, so refueling will be a lot more tedious from now on.

The only other thing of note to happen during the trip is that, during a quickload, I decided to fly in first person through the canyon, and it was pretty fun!

Then, we went to Jool. Slight problem, however. Its gonna take several years due to bad planet positioning.

A few years in, there was a course correction, which put us on a nice course for the Jool system. The original plan was to tylo assist into orbit, then go to Pol to refuel, but I was so close to Bop so I tweaked the encounter. With the insane angle, it would have been cheaper to do it the other way, but I need gravity assist practice... Granted this isn't a great gravity assist, but I used it to encounter Bop at a certain point, that's currently good enough for me - I used a gravity assist to get into a wonky orbit and a Bop encounter. It's not a great Bop encounter, but baby steps.

After well over a decade in space, the crew flies by Tylo.

And enters orbit around Bop!

 

The current plan is to refuel everything to full here, try to do Tylo, Laythe, and Vall without refueling, and then going to Pol to take on fuel for the trip to Eeloo, where I may or may not need to refuel, we'll see.

 

 

 

[Ultimate Steve]

Part 11 - MOAR POWAH!!!

Spoiler

Short update before I go to bed.

@Maria Sirona's comment about moving the solar panels around to make the mothership look symmetrical got me thinking. Since I'm far enough from the sun to have power problems, and the mothership barely needs any power, why not bring the four remaining solar panels over to the refueler?

And, landed on Bop! Unfortunately the new layout still is too little power, but its closer, and its far better than nothing. Again, 5 people were on the lander, too lazy to get them all out.

I didn't fill the ship all the way to full, but the main portion of the ship was completely full, the landers were full, and the lander was slightly full, which I thought would be good enough for the next leg of the journey, especially as the next three landings will see us get rid of 3 heavy landers.

Next up was Tylo, and I accidentally warped past Periapsis, but we were so close to an orbit that I was able to burn a bit retrograde here and get into an elliptical orbit. It took many, many periapsis kicks due to Tylo's sheer size, but eventually the U.S.S. Odyssey reached low orbit.

Bob Kerman gets ready for one of the most risky moments remaining in the mission - the landing on Tylo.

After transferring monopropellant from the Tylo Lander's large stores into the rest of the ship, Bob undocks.

The idea was to use the RCS rendezvous stage to lower the orbit, but I was controlling from the wrong point and I ended up raising it instead. Even after I saw and tried to correct, the RCS stage ended up being a net negative.

Fortunately, the lander had margins. Landing on Tylo is a very harrowing experience. I'm not sure its fair to compare Eve and Tylo, they are both terrifying in their own ways, and they are so different.

On Eve you at least have time to see how badly things are going for you, but on Tylo you will be a line of goo 12 kilometers long before you have a chance to stop and say "Wait, I forgot to look at my vertical speed!"

And landing happens so fast too!

But, we made it! It only took me two tries to land this time!

The gear was retracted because we were sliding down a hill.

That's the third to last really stressful moment complete, the other two being laythe operations and the return to Kerbin.

I'm not anticipating any major problems, but its worth noting that the Laythe plane has never been tested on Laythe, only Kerbin, and I don't think I ever even tested it through re-entry... Wish me luck!

You may have noticed the... Odd layout of this lander.

The side boosters quickly run out of fuel on ascent, revealing the core, which spins around.

Sorry, Bob! That can't be comfortable, but it was a simple way to eliminate the need for a ladder without crowding the bottom of the lander with engines!

The trip back to the mothership was mostly uneventful, except for the fact that my mouse decided to disconnect right as I was burning to slow down relative to the Odyssey II. In the confusion, I kept burning for longer than planned, and I ended up docking with less than 100m/s left, not that I needed to dock.

I transferred as much oxidizer to the lander as possible (and kept some liquid fuel in it) both to reduce the refueling burden for it if I ever decide to use that part of it again, and to lighten the mothership, as due to the way the refueler operates, it has been running with an excess of oxidizer this entire time.

And with that over, the ship voyaged onwards to Laythe!

 

 

 

[Ultimate Steve]

Part 12 - Oh Hey, Geysers!

Spoiler

So, I did not intend to aerobrake at Laythe, but my periapsis was 45 kilometers and I was too lazy to correct it. I didn't think much would happen, but I forgot how feisty Laythe's atmosphere was, as I haven't been there in a good long while. It didn't melt anything off, but it looked *really* cool.

Like the wings of a Phoenix...

Apart from Kerbin, I'd say Laythe is the prettiest world, especially with visual mods, so I took a lot of pictures. In general what I post here is less than a third of the pictures I take, and with Laythe that's probably an even smaller fraction because of how many there are.

Bob took the plane down to Laythe, but due to the lack of decent equatorial sites nearby, elected to make a turn and try to land on a southern landmass.

Entry went surprisingly well considering it had neverbeen tested in this craft before.

I saw someting interesting on the surface and attempted to drive towards it.

Turns out, a cool rock!

And one of the solid ones, too!

I was just about to leave when I noticed another interesting looking thing off in the distance.

Naturally, I had to investigate, especially as the aircraft was known to have a 200 liquid fuel surprlus during Kerbin operations. Not only did I have fuel to spare, I *had* to burn some off in order to have a decent shot at making orbit.

Getting closer, I began to suspect what it was.

And I was right - a Geyser! I really haven't been to Laythe in a while, wow. I don't know when they were added, but 1.12 has been out for nearly a year, and that's the latest they could have possibly come. College will do that to you...

Like any good scientist would, I decided to see what happens when you jump in.

And it threw Bob up into the air! To whatever dev out there put this in, hats off to you. I love this sort of thing, utterly pointless but cool and interesting.

I wonder if its possible to harness this energy in any way. I don't think you can convert rotation into power in KSP, though, so the use cases would be marginal at best... But that's for another time.

Bob made camp for the night near the Geyser.

Unfortunately, the pretty pictures can't continue forever, and it was time for Bob to depart.

Bob had to fly a significant distnace north, you can see the flag in there, south and slightly west of the spaceplane's current location.

Once Bob was lined up with the orbital plane of the Odyssey II, he opened the throttle up and began his proper ascent.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, it had worked flawlessly despite its lack of testing. With all three difficult bodies landed on and ascended from, it was smooth sailing from here on out - or rather, it was supposed to be.

However, then something weird happened. I'm not gonna post many pics of it because it was long and laborious to do, but basically something happened and the plane and the docking port were ripped from the mothership.

I think it happened after I moved something on EVA, and it was probably a weird reaction with the rotating part of the docking ports and the EVA construction mode, but that's just speculation. Anyway, after a long battle, I got everything attached again, filled up the plane with excess Oxidizer, and left for Vall.

Only three moons/planets left to go - Vall, Bop, and Eeloo!

 

 

[Ultimate Steve]

Part 13 - Totally Enough Fuel

Spoiler

The Odyssey II entered orbit around Vall after departing from Laythe.

I was like "Yeah, I've probably got enough fuel, I'll just take on a full load at Pol where I can get fuel more easily" so I decided to use the Duna lander here to save time.

I went to land, but then I saw something off in the distance, and I flew over to see it, so I wasted a lot of fuel, but I also had a lot of fuel in the first place.

It was another Geyser, or rather, a cryovolcano!

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to provide force like the Laythe ones, or maybe bigger ones do, I don't know. Either that, or the Vall volvanoes like Val enough to not want to push her away.

The Vall ascent was uneventful.

The Duna lander, now not needed, was cast away, after being filled with oxidizer to reduce the "dry" mass of the ship.

And off to Pol it went!

I originally intended to do just one Pol landing because laziness.

Landing after landing, it does get to be a bit much - I'm not even taking the full crew out of the ship for a picture any more.

However, I looked at the planets, and unless I wanted to wait decades for an ideal transfer, one load of fuel wasn't enough, so I ended up doing at least 3 total.

My trajectory involved going inwards, nearl to Eve, doing a prograde burn, and then a plane change high up.

Here's me accidentally almost burning the solar panels off. That's the one downside of switching the solar panels like I did, I can't fire the engines and generate power at the same time, now that the RTG on the Duna lander is gone. If I had been thinking, I might have grabbed it, because there's a 95%+ chance I'm never going to reuse it.

The plane change and trajectory refinement burn.

And the Eeloo capture! I actually started the burn way too late, and overshot quite a bit - Eeloo is small, this ship doesn't have the best TWR, and we were going *fast.*

After coming around the next periapsis pass, low orbit was established, and 5 of the 6 crew boarded the refueler to land on the furthest planet.

And, landed! Bob Kerman has now walked on every single body in the Kerbol system!

It was determined that only one refueling was needed to make it back to Kerbin, but I really should have done two. Anyway, we burned to escape Eeloo, we burned to correct Kerbin inclination, and a few years later...

Home.

 

 

 

[Ultimate Steve]

Part 14 - The Home Stretch

Spoiler

The Odyssey II flew past the Mun.

And seeing Kerbin's city lights more, entered orbit.

This burn was actually started very late, due to a time warp error, and finished about here I think.

While the Kerbin descent vehicle could probably survive such a steep descent, and we could have aerobraked, in case I decide to use this vehicle again, I decided that I should leave it with enough fuel to reach Minmus and be able to refuel itself. This necessitated a trip to Minmus with the little fuel we had left.

This is how close it was - I transferred all unneeded oxidizer over to the mothership, and all of the liquid fuel into the refueler's tanks. I ended up with aroudn twice the delta-V needed to land on Minmus.

And after that quick detour, the Odyssey II returned to Low Kerbin Orbit.

This took surprisingly many periapsis kicks, at least four if I remember correctly.

The crew were overjoyed to finally be nearly back. They all packed into the descent module and prepared to undock.

The monopropellant tanks (the only propulsion) on the descent vehicle were topped up, and then the undock button was pressed.

Unfortunately, after I pressed undock, nothing happened and the option went away - nothing on the other port as well! It persisted through quickloading, scene changes, you name it, although I didn't try a full restart. I did, however, try the EVA construction tool, but that doesnt' work on parts that have something else attached to them, at least in this case (I am not very familiar with the tool).

This left only one option.

Melt the docking port off.

The "slicer" ship approached the Odyssey II slowly and carefully.

The two engines were fired, heating up the docking port.

And, boom! Gone!

The crew of six de-orbited the return vehicle using RCS power.

And approached the KSC runway.

After so long, so many planets and Moons... The crew were finally just home.

D'Oh! I touched down hard, somehow broke off the bottom RCS block (might have raised gear by accident? Dont' remember), and skidded off the runway!

But the return vehicle came to a stop - and that landing was much better than the other 5-10 attempts it took to land this thing - so I'd call it a success!

After nearly 27 years in space - not a bad pace for a grand tour, about nearly 8 real life years - the crew of the Odyssey II had returned home!

Jebediah Kerman, Bill Kerman, Bob Kerman, Valentina Kerman, Munby Kerman, and Margaret Kerman, heroes of Kerbin.

Moho, Eve, Gilly, Kerbin, the Mun, Minmus, Duna, Ike, Dres, Laythe, Vall, Tylo, Bop, Pol, and Eeloo, in one mission, after 9 years to the month of playing this game, I have finally completed the Ultimate Challenge.

 

However, Ideas have been bouncing around in my head - and assuming I don't get bored of it soon, and assuming this next round of exams doesn't kill my interest, this is probably not the last time you will be seeing this save.

 

Preview of Project Starman:

 

 

I did it!

[Maria Sirona]

AWESOME!