Kilonova- Whirligig World Grand Tour

[MythicalHeFF]

Ever since I finished writing the mission report of my ludicrously overbuilt Tylo circumnavigation mission a while back, which*checks calendar*.. was  ten months ago now, I've wanted to write another mission report of similar style, but never really had an idea that stuck on what such a thread should be about. Then, a couple of months ago, I downloaded the Whirligig World planet pack just to try something new, and ended up absolutely loving it, doing an entire career save and whatnot. After I'd progressed through most, if not all, of the tech tree and visited numerous planets and moons within the mod, it came to me. I should do a grand tour of the Whirligig World planet pack, which, at least to my knowledge, is something that nobody has done before (or at least posted about on here before). So, after yet a few more months of procrastination and getting caught up in other things like a full-time job, here I am. 

Welcome to...

by Jack Joseph Kerman

PART 1: DESIGN AND PRE-MISSION TOMFOOLERY

Before I get into the design of the craft I'll be using (can you possibly guess what its name is?), let alone the actual mission, I'd first just like to give a brief overview of the Whirligig World mod and the system(s) I'll be attempting to conquer in one go. So, for those of you that aren't aware, Whirligig World is a Kopernicus planet pack created by @GregroxMun that radically changes the home system and how one goes about playing the game. Instead of starting out on Kerbin or any old habitable planet, you start the game on Mesbin, a massive, airless world that has an absurdly high rotation rate, which gives it its highly oblate shape, and gravity ranging from "feeling like you had a few too many snacks" at the equator (1.3 Gees) to "your spine will discombobulate into woodchips" at the poles (13 Gees). Luckily for our Kerbals, they are situated near the equator, and it is from here that your spacecraft are launched from. Getting into orbit around Mesbin is actually quite easy thanks to the fact that it rotates almost as fast as its orbital velocity, but because there's *almost* no atmosphere, landing again is pretty much like landing on Tylo in stock KSP.  I don't want to spoil too much about this mod right away, and the mod even has a little bit of lore to go with it, so be sure to check out the mod's forum page if you're interested. 

In general, the system's arrangement makes the game considerably harder, and that's why I think of a grand tour as a worthy challenge. Speaking of challenge, let's talk about the unique challenges imposed by some of the places I'll be visiting in this mission, and how I hopefully managed to work around them in designing the Kilonova. 

The Kilonova III

(Kilonova III prototype in orbit of Mesbin during a "simulation" test AKA cheat menu orbit setting).

I present to you the Kilonova III, my craft of choice for conducting this mission. As its name suggests, it is not the first iteration of such a vessel, with the first two having been scrapped for more or less the same reason: too many parts. While the current version has around 450 parts, raised to 650 or so with all three landers docked, the original two models had a partcount approaching 1,000 (in the Kilonova I's case, without any landers), which, while they could have been used for the mission, would have been like trying to run a marathon with sandbags tied to your legs. Sure, you could probably do it, given enough time, but does that seem worth it in any way? Not really. The strain they put on my crappy laptop was just too much to justify using them, because I'd rather not do an entire mission at 5-10 frames a second.

Kilonova I, more or less created just for fun and maybe a crazy Jool-5 mission:

Kilonova II:

The first major design element that I had to incorporate was simply giving the Kilonova a high amount of delta-V, around 7,000 meters per second at a minimum to be sufficient for some of the more outlandish transfers that I'll surely be having to make. That's kind of a no-brainer, however, as pretty much any interplanetary cruiser type-ship is to be decked out with loads of delta-V.

Now, you may have heard me say that this thing has three landers earlier. That's actually not true, there are seven landers in total, but two of them were counted in the ship's "unloaded" part count simply due to how small and light they are compared to the other three, and the two remaining landers are not going to be attached to the Kilonova itself, but rather shipped to the destination in advance.

Confused? Me too, let's walk through them one by one.

Lander 1: The Workhorse

Here is the lander that I will be using for the vast majority of the landings over the course of this mission (minus the docking ports, they were part of a configurable variant of the lander that I've since scrapped). It has over 3,600 meters per second of delta-V, which should be enough to land on and return from most of the planets and moons in this mod. The parachute at the top can also be removed or attached by an engineer Kerbal, depending on whether or not the Workhorse needs to land on a body with an atmosphere.

Lander 2: Tartarus Imterril Lander

This lander is the lander that I will be using to land on and return from Imterril. Instead of a fully powered ascent, it covers the first 70 kilometers or so of ascent using propellers, as Imterril's atmosphere is so thick at sea level (15 atmospheres) that most rocket engines simply wouldn't work at all. In addition, because Imterril is completely covered by water, it needs a flotation system in order to stay upright. You may recognize it from a forum post of mine from a few months ago in the thread "What did you do in KSP today?" in which I talked about my mission to Imterril. Its design is more or less unchanged from its previous use during that mission (the only notable difference being that there is no submersible this time), in which it proved highly reliable.

Lander 3: Kerbmun/Gannovar SSTO Lander

Quite a bit different from the other landers we've seen so far, this lander is a small SSTO spaceplane that will be used to land on Mesbin's habitable moon Kerbmun and the distant planet Gannovar, both of which have oxygenated atmospheres. It's pretty much identical to a basic Kerbin SSTO in a functional sense.

Landers 4 & 5: Brute 1 & Brute 2

(Brute 1 during a simulation test taking off from Valyr)

These two landers are the largest and most powerful of the bunch, both weighing in at over 100 tons. They are the landers that will be shipped to their respective destinations (Valyr and Derbin, which are both harder to escape from than Eve in stock KSP) in advance in order to save weight. Fully fueled, they have around 8,000 meters per second of delta-V, and performed exceptionally well in testing. Let's see if that holds up in practice.

Landers 6 & 7: DV-30000 "Hermes" 1 & 2

(Hermes 1 in side cargo bay)

Finally, we have the two small ion landers, which, as the name "DV-30000" would suggest, each have around 30,000 meters per second of delta-V to reach the most difficult/far-flung places in the whole mod (Ammenon, 2 Wolda, & Fophie). They may also be used to visit some of the smaller moons too, if I don't feel like bringing out the Workhorse.

OTHER NOTABLE FEATURES:

Another notable feature of the Kilonova III is its ability to latch onto asteroids and mine them for fuel, which will likely be necessary in situations where I don't have enough delta-V to reach a small moon somewhere for refueling. The asteroid capture arm consists of four Advanced Grabbing Units mounted on a large piston.

In addition to the asteroid mining, another notable (and somewhat questionable) choice I made was to use landing gear instead of landing legs for the ship to rest on when landed. This wasn't really a practical choice so much as it was a cosmetic one; the two fuel tank rings would make using landing legs impractical, so I just went for large landing gears instead.

Part 2 Launching Soon..

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

2. The Launch of Kilonova III

2.1 Do-Over

2.2 Statmun & Thresomin Exploration

3. Conuqering the Moons of Mesbin (except Kerbmun)

3.1 The Derminmus Debacle & Going Interplanetary

4. Visiting Valyr

4.1 GO HANG A SALAMI, I'M A LASAGNA HOG! (Moons of Valyr)

5. Turning up the Thermostat (Tyepolbynar)

6. Triple-Whammy (Wers, Egad, Rik)

7. Meandering Around Reander

8. The Scorch Trials (Shol & Wolda)

 

 

 

 

Edited November 16, 2022 by Jack Joseph Kerman

[Stamp20]

 Good luck on the grand tour!

6 hours ago, Jack Joseph Kerman said:

They are the landers that will be shipped to their respective destinations (Valyr and Derbin, which are both harder to escape from than Eve in stock KSP) in advance in order to save weight.

If you plan on submitting this to the Ultimate Challenge thread, you'd have to bring the landers with you out of Mesbin orbit. Once you escape, you can send them wherever on their own.

Quote

5. LKO assembly is allowed and encouraged, however once any part of the mission leaves LKO you can not launch any more vessels to assist your craft. Additionally, you can only have one active vessel when leaving LKO (your ship must be one giant ship, not a collection of small ships leaving at similar times).

 

[Leganeski]

Nice! I've been thinking about doing a Whirligig World grand tour, but it looks like you got to it well before me.

These landers look really well designed, and follow the same basic layout as what I would have done except that they have many improvements I wouldn't have thought of (such as the floatation pad for Imterril and the asteroid capture arm).

8 hours ago, Jack Joseph Kerman said:

Finally, we have the two small ion landers, which, as the name "DV-30000" would suggest, each have around 30,000 meters per second of delta-V to reach the most difficult/far-flung places in the whole mod (Ammenon, 2 Wolda, & Fophie)

How are two ion landers going to get to three places? Those bodies are nowhere near each other, and I don't see any extra xenon on Kilonova that could be used to refuel the landers.

Getting to Fophie is certainly really inconvenient, but using a Gememma assist to get into a polar Kaywell orbit and then meeting Fophie at its apoapsis seems like it would be well within the capabilities of Kilonova itself without the need for a dedicated lander.

 

8 hours ago, Jack Joseph Kerman said:

The parachute at the top can also be removed or attached by an engineer Kerbal, depending on whether or not the Workhorse needs to land on a body with an atmosphere.

Is that parachute going to be enough for Lowel's thin atmosphere? If Workhorse uses rocket braking to land there, the delta-v margins for ascent seem pretty tight.

[MythicalHeFF]

1 hour ago, Leganeski said:

 

How are two ion landers going to get to three places? Those bodies are nowhere near each other, and I don't see any extra xenon on Kilonova that could be used to refuel the landers.

 

The 30,000 delta-V I was talking about is really only necessary to reach Ammenon, which is located so deep in Genemma’s gravity well that reaching it with the Kilonova would be an exercise in futility. In testing, starting from about the orbit of Lowel, I needed at least 30-31k dV (the Hermes has around 34k). Given that Fophie (as you mentioned) and Wolda should take a lot less than that with the help of gravity assists (repeated Shol assists in the case of Wolda), the second lander should comfortably be able to reach them both.

1 hour ago, Leganeski said:

Is that parachute going to be enough for Lowel's thin atmosphere? If Workhorse uses rocket braking to land there, the delta-v margins for ascent seem pretty tight.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this, but inside the cargo containers that I mentioned are also two drogue chutes that will be used for Lowel and Lito’s thin atmospheres, so I don’t have to use rocket braking to reach a safe deployment speed for the main chute.

[jimmymcgoochie]

I’ve always wanted to try this planet pack out but never found the time to do so. I shall be following your progress with great interest.

[MythicalHeFF]

Alrighty, I think I've now got everything in perfect working order and the Kilonova is pretty much go for launch, all that is left is to assemble an adequate booster. As it turns out, there were a few problems with actually getting the Brute lander down to the surface of Derbin in one piece, that mainly being because the heat shields didn't behave exactly as I had been counting on. 

As I later found out, it turns out that the fuel tank directly behind the four 3.75m heat shields was somehow not being considered as protected from the airflow by the game, and as such it kept exploding, causing the whole craft to break apart. In order to fix this, I had to give it its own entire 2.5m heat shield.

Needy son of a gun.

Once that was done, however, the Brute made it down to the surface of Derbin okay, and was able to ascend back into orbit nominally.

The Brute landers are also now going to both be hauled up into Mesbin orbit with the Kilonova in accordance with the rules of the Ultimate Challenge, being mounted on two 2.5m docking ports at the rear end of the ship. Once Brute 1 is detached in its low Derbin parking orbit, Brute 2 will be moved over to a central docking port in order to keep the weight distribution balanced. Not looking forward to launching it, however, as the combined partcount of the ship, all the landers, and the booster is already over 1,100.

 

 

Edited September 20, 2022 by Jack Joseph Kerman

[MythicalHeFF]

PART 2: THE LAUNCH OF KILONOVA III

Spoiler

Today's the day, it seems. After careful selection of crewmembers (definitely not just picking any kerbal from the Astronaut Complex whose name I liked and creating a few kerbals through the console here and there), the Kilonova III is finally out on the pad ready to launch into low Mesbin orbit. A crew of fifteen kerbals has been assembled to crew the ship as it fulfills its momentous journey.

Their names are:

Jebediah Kerman, Bill Kerman, Bob Kerman, Valentina Kerman, Derwise Mesoman, Billy-Boblas Kerman, Agagan Kerman, Phil Mesoman, Eriney, Kerman Jack Mesoman, Stan Kerman, Gormund Mesoman, Kevin Mesoman, Joolina Kerman, and Bonnie Kerman.

Gene Mesoman: "Kilonova III, this is KSC. You are go for launch."

Jebediah Kerman: "Roger that, KSC. Engaging launch sequence."

"We are go for launch!" blares a speaker to the spectators looking on from inside multiple pressurized observation domes around the KSC.

"T-minus 60 seconds and counting.."

*Aboard the Kilonova III, there exists only an unbearably tense atmosphere and silence, occasionally interrupted by ominous creaking sounds and Jeb's lighthearted wisecracks*

"Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven.. Ignition!"

*The Kilonova III launcher's fourteen Mammoth engines silently roar to life in the near-vacuum of Mesbin's surface*

"Six, five, four, three, two, one.."

...

"We have liftoff!"

Once liftoff had been achieved, the Kilonova III was quite sluggish to ascend, thanks to its rather low thrust-to-weight ratio. Just a few seconds after launch, however, quite a significant error was made. Somehow, somewhere in mission control, someone had accidentally flipped a switch that remotely inflated all sixteen heat shields on both Brute landers. Who this mystery blunderer is remains to be seen, as do his motivations. (alright, it was me having a finger slip and accidentally pressing the action group key that activates the heat shields. We don't talk about this one.)

Regardless of this, however, the Kilonova III continued its ascent into orbit unaffected, as there was simply no way to abort the launch safely now. All that was left to be considered was, why in the name of the Kraken had the engineers made it so the heat shields could only be inflated remotely, and not from the actual Brute's command pod? 

After only about thirty seconds, the Kilonova III was already well on its way into Mesbin orbit, thanks to the fact that it rotates so quickly. In fact, you only need around 2,000 meters per second to reach orbit from the equator. Which I am more than thankful for, as I struggle to imagine how much more difficult a launch like this would have been from Kerbin, with all that atmosphere in the way and such. 

Finally at T+ 1 minute, 9 seconds, the fourteen Mammoth engines fizzled out as the last of their fuel was exhausted. Almost immediately afterwards, the two side decouplers were activated, jettisoning the first stage. 

Gene Mesoman: "This is KSC to Kilonova III. Thanks to whatever numpty prematurely inflated the heat shields, we're going to have to be completely clear of them before the second stage can be activated."

...

Gene Mesoman: "You are clear of the first stage boosters. Activate stage two."

Jebediah Kerman: "Roger. Second-stage ignition in 3..2..1.. Ignition!"

From that point on, it was smooth sailing all the way into orbit, with an altitude of about 1,025 km. (1025 km above datum level, really only about 55-60 km above the actual surface of Mesbin)

Now that the ship is in orbit, I'm presented with a bit of a dilemma. While the whole heat shield incident didn't initially seem like it would do any harm, after reaching orbit, I realized that some of the shields are clipping together, and can't be deflated once inflated, which means that decoupling one lander will almost surely just cause the whole thing to explode. Even if that doesn't happen, the heat shields will still block the central docking port for the orbital boosters. In other words, this means that I'm probably going to have to send up two replacement landers because of me accidentally pressing a key. Or, alternatively, I could just repeat the entire launch, because docking (twice) in the terrible frame rates that I will be experiencing sounds absolutely awful. To get an idea of how bad the frame rate was with the over 1,200 part launcher I was using, it took almost 10 minutes in real-time to get into orbit, while the in-game timer only read about 2 minutes.

Now back to that orbital booster I mentioned. While getting into Mesbin orbit is easy, escaping is a whole different game. From low Mesbin orbit, you need approximately 4,000 meters per second of delta-V to get onto an escape trajectory (or just reach Derbin in my case). While the Kilonova III can manage that with both landers attached, that will be about it. So, instead of burning practically all of my fuel just to reach Derbin, what I want to do instead is send up a few boosters that will dock with the Kilonova and give it a few hundered extra m/s of velocity repeatedly, so that I can reach Derbin almost fully-fueled and get down to a low Derbin orbit without having to do any refueling. As far as the other moons of Mesbin are concerned, I figure I can reach Statmun, Thresomin, and maybe Graymun just by sending the Workhorse or one of the Hermes landers out before doing the final burn to send the Kilonova to Derbin. After Derbin has been completed, the Kilonova will go to Dermun and Derminmus, and finally back towards Mesbin to Kerbmun, from orbit of which he Workhorse will reach Troymin.

Video:

 

Edited November 17, 2022 by Jack Joseph Kerman

[jimmymcgoochie]

May I suggest the Deflatable Heatshield mod which makes inflatable heatshields, well, deflatable again.

[Whirligig Girl]

impressive!

[MythicalHeFF]

PART 2.1: DO-OVER

Things are most definitely not going according to plan.

First off, I've had to redo the entire launch, because when I tried to decouple the heat shields, they ended up destroying the center docking port, making it so the booster is unable to dock with the Kilonova. Originally, I was considering just sending up new landers to replace the old ones, but, now that the docking port was gone, I was left with no choice but to bite the bullet and do the entire launch over again (this time without any unauthorized key pressing).

Oh, I'm sorry, did I say do the launch over again? What I meant to say was do the launch over again, twice. During the first stage separation, the booster collided with the Kilonova's radiator panel system and destroyed it, as well as damaging one of the landers. While I may have been able to just get away fine with this, I didn't want to risk it, and decided not to do so. 

Third time's the charm, complete with better booster separation

Once the Kilonova was finally back in orbit without inflated heatshields, I used the remainder of the second stage's fuel to get it up to an orbit that almost matches that of Mesbin's closest moon, Statmun, which is a tiny, metallic asteroid 6 kilometers across that orbits in an extremely close Mesbin-stationary orbit. This is only made possible by the fact that Mesbin rotates so quickly that the synchronous orbit altitude is actually quite close to the surface.

Passing near Statmun (never entered its SOI)

Everything seems to be going okay now, doesn't it? I thought so, too, until I attempted to attach the Kilonova's booster to it in orbit. Speaking of the booster, it's more or less a bunch of asparagus-staged Rhino engines attached to a central 3.75m core, that should give the Kilonova an extra 2,500 m/s or so of delta-V to use for escaping low Mesbin orbit.

Here you can see the earlier version, which used Mammoth engines instead but this was deemed unnecessary

Launch of the booster

Coming in to dock with the Kilonova. This is the point at which things really took a turn for the worse, as while I had anticipated that docking would be difficult due to the very low framerates and high part counts (the combined part counts of both ships was around 1300), what I did not expect was for it to be essentially impossible. 

In fact, the lag was so bad that just turning the booster or the Kilonova to get the correct orientation took several minutes, at which point they would already be moving too fast relative to one another to dock thanks to Mesbin's gravity pulling them apart.

Here's a GIF showing how low the framerates I was having to deal with were:

Yes. I'm not kidding. This is what I experienced in real time. I don't think there was a single time that I was pulling more than 3 frames a second.

And even if I did get the positions right, I'd still be rotating, which you'd think you'd be able to stop by just activating time warp. While I could do this, activating time warp also had the side effect of just straight up teleporting the other craft over 100 meters to the left or right, making the reorientation useless. 

In other words, there was just simply no way I was going to be able to dock the booster with the Kilonova, especially considering that, in order to do so, I'd have to slide the booster between the two landers, which, while certainly possible with good frame rates, was simply not going to happen. So I was forced to scrap the booster idea entirely, and instead rely on asteroid mining to get me to Derbin.

Another thing that ended up going wrong was that I somehow got my ion landers confused. Here you can see one of the Hermes landers emerging from the cargo bay to do a test run to Statmun, but there's a problem: It only has 11,500 m/s of delta-V, a far cry from the 32-34,000 I thought it had. I could have sword I'd seen it with 30 km/s in the VAB, but I must have gotten it confused with another ion lander I made.

The lander-in-question during a simulation test gauging how much delta-V I'd need to reach Ammenon and return, which turned out to be at least 30,000 m/s

Unlike the previous problem with the booster, however, this issue isn't that big of deal, seeing as I can just slap a docking port onto the lander and attach it to the docking port on the Kilonova's front command pod, which, while docking will probably still be difficult, shouldn't be so bad as it's a pretty small and lightweight craft.

Edited November 17, 2022 by Jack Joseph Kerman

[MythicalHeFF]

PART 2.2: STATMUN & THRESOMIN EXPLORATION

Spoiler

After a bit of hiatus, I've successfully managed to get the Kilonova to Statmun and Thresomin, and it is currently en route to Graymun. Before getting into any of that, however, I had to send up a new ion lander in order to fix a critical mistake I mentioned in the last post, that being that the two Hermes landers had less delta-V than I remembered them, and I got them mixed up with the new lander. Launch and docking were both fairly trivial, although once again the extremely low framerates made the docking take much longer than I would have liked.

DV-30000 "AmmeNot" lander approaching the Kilonova for docking

Once that was done, Kevin Kerman hopped onto one of the ion landers and set off for Statmun, which was just a stone's throw away in terms of delta-V.

Really, the only limiting factor in reaching Statmun was that it took a long time for it to be aligned correctly with the Kilonova's orbit, given that they were more or less on the same exact orbit at this point. Hence, I actually ended up doing a slight retrograde burn to help move things along, as I have a pretty ludicrous delta-V budget here. Orbit around Statmun was achieved with no difficulty.

An important thing I should mention about Statmun is that you can't actually land on its equator- it rotates too quickly and you'll just slowly float off into space again. Normally, a celestial body rotating faster than its own orbital velocity would mean that the centrifugal forces of its rotation would overcome the gravity holding it together and tear it apart, but because Statmun is so small and dense, it is held together by tensile strength rather than gravity, allowing it to exist. It's this same tensile strength that also allows it to exist despite being located well within Mesbin's Roche limit.

Due to the rotation, I'm having to land at the north pole, which went off pretty easy.

The views of Mesbin from here are quite something to behold. And dynamic, too, as Statmun rotates so quickly that you can easily see it in real time.

Leaving Statmun was another exercise in triviality, so I won't show it here. Once the lander had been safely docked back into the Kilonova's right cargo bay, it was time to begin raising our orbit to make our way to our next target, Thrembo Thresomin. The transfer to Thresomin was a very slow and arduous process, taking seven different periapsis kicks just to get our apoapsis up to match its orbit. Again, normally that wouldn't be too bad, but since the framerates were so low, this process took easily over an hour.

And once that was done, we still had to do three more periapsis kicks before we could get an encounter.

Once that had been completed, I still needed to plan out my orbital insertion burn around Thresomin. You see, Thresomin's sphere of influence is so small, and the Kilonova's TWR so low, that if I were to just make a maneuver node and burn when it tells me to, I would just go flying straight past Thresomin and back into Mesbin orbit. (assuming that the maneuver even gives me the correct burn time considering how many engines this thing has). Instead, I'll have to start my burn about 6 minutes before Thresomin periapsis, as the total burn, which is around 600 meters per second, should take us 8 or 9 minutes to complete.

Engine ignition. We're still a couple hundred kilometers away from entering Thresomin's sphere of influence.

Entering sphere of influence.

Orbit achieved

Now comes the "fun" part: attempting to land a 700 ton mothership on a tiny moonlet with two gigantic landers attached to the back end, meaning that the landing engines will be thrown off balance. The drill arm will not be able to reach the surface with the landers in the way, and, after the booster docking failure, docking the landers back to the ship in orbit is absolutely not something I was going to try and do. 

The first attempt to land, using the radial Thud engines, failed when the lander's heatshield hit the ground first and sent the nose of the ship onto the surface, causing the entire thing to explode.

Second landing attempt, this time using the atomic engines all the way until I'm hovering just over the surface, at which point I switched to the Thud engines and assumed a horizontal attitude

After about 15 minutes of finagling with RCS and repeatedly bouncing across the surface at a snail's pace, the Kilonova was "landed" on Thresomin. As I had predicted, the drills were not in any position to reach the ground, and as such Bill Kerman had to get out and move one to the front of the ship in order for it to be able to reach the surface.

Kerbal EVA construction is the best feature they ever added to this game, it's saved so many of my missions from utter failure

If the word "scuffed" was a picture, this would definitely be it

But alas, it did work, and, after spending about two weeks on the surface of Thresomin, the Kilonova's fuel reserves had been completely replenished. I must state that this was purely luck based, by the way- since Thresomin's sphere of influence is so small, the minimum altitude required to conduct an orbital survey is actually beyond its sphere of influence, meaning that conducting a survey is impossible. I found this out the hard way during a career playthrough of this mod, in which I got a contract to do exactly that. Wasn't exactly fun. If I had happened to land somewhere with no ore, I probably would have just quit the game right there, as getting the Kilonova down to the surface had already been an extremely frustrating process.

After the refueling was complete, it was time to leave this rock, which the Kilonova promptly did at about ten meters a second. Once I was a few kilometers away, however, I realized that I'd forgotten to plant a flag on Thresomin. No worries, however, as the Kerbal EVA pack has way more than enough delta-V to go back, land, and return to the mothership.

And who to do this job but Jebediah Kerman? I'm not really sure what's going on with the spacesuit textures right now, I'm using TextureReplacer and the textures were normal when I last played the game a few days ago. Might be some kind of Halloween update or something, I don't know.

After this last-minute flag-planting venture, the Kilonova promptly left Thresomin's sphere of influence and set off for our next target, Graymun.

 

Edited November 17, 2022 by Jack Joseph Kerman

[jimmymcgoochie]

I’ve seen similar suit texture issues, the helmets looked like they were painted backwards. I was also using Texture Replacer when that happened, but I think only the orange normal suit was affected (or at least that’s the only one I saw, I didn’t check every single suit option).

[Leganeski]

7 hours ago, Jack Joseph Kerman said:

this was purely luck based

 

From the Whirligig World forum post:

On 10/15/2017 at 7:01 AM, GregroxMun said:

Two of Mesbin's three minor moons, Thresomin and Troymin, are designed to exist as propellant mines for setting up infrastructure.

 

(spoilers for anyone who hasn't yet mined at Thresomin)

Spoiler

Thresomin and Troymin always have ore in every biome. From the OreAvailability.cfg file in the download:

Quote

//Thresomin and Troymin are chocked full of Ore, because you should basically always be able to mine these bodies.
PLANETARY_RESOURCE
{
	ResourceName = Ore
	ResourceType = 0
	PlanetName = Thresomin
	
	Distribution
	{
		PresenceChance = 100
		MinAbundance = 9
		MaxAbundance = 15
		Variance = 5
		Dispersal = 3
	}
}
PLANETARY_RESOURCE
{
	ResourceName = Ore
	ResourceType = 0
	PlanetName = Troymin
	
	Distribution
	{
		PresenceChance = 100
		MinAbundance = 9
		MaxAbundance = 15
		Variance = 5
		Dispersal = 3
	}
}

Notes the lines that say "PresenceChance = 100": each biome has a 100% chance of ore being present. 

 

[Whirligig Girl]

18 hours ago, Jack Joseph Kerman said:

But alas, it did work, and, after spending about two weeks on the surface of Thresomin, the Kilonova's fuel reserves had been completely replenished. I must state that this was purely luck based, by the way- since Thresomin's sphere of influence is so small, the minimum altitude required to conduct an orbital survey is actually beyond its sphere of influence, meaning that conducting a survey is impossible. I found this out the hard way during a career playthrough of this mod, in which I got a contract to do exactly that. Wasn't exactly fun. If I had happened to land somewhere with no ore, I probably would have just quit the game right there, as getting the Kilonova down to the surface had already been an extremely frustrating process.

Thresomin and Troymin have a minimum of like 80% ore--as another commenter said, I specifically designed them to be fueling outposts.

I do wonder if the scan altitude is exposed to mod developers and if it is per-body or not. i am aware of the scan altitude issue, i just don't know if there's anything i can do about it.

[Leganeski]

19 hours ago, Jack Joseph Kerman said:

since Thresomin's sphere of influence is so small, the minimum altitude required to conduct an orbital survey is actually beyond its sphere of influence, meaning that conducting a survey is impossible.

I had forgotten until I re-read this sentence, but it's not just the small sphere of influence that causes the problem: the maximum altitude for a scanning orbit is five times the body's radius, which for Thresomin is 11.55 km. This is already outside of the SOI, but it means that raising the SOI radius wouldn't fix the problem.

(And of course, it's not just Thresomin: Denna, Plaph, and Didd all have both of these problems. Jifgif does have a valid altitude range, 25-31 km, but its SOI ends at 23.8 km.)

[Whirligig Girl]

On 10/2/2022 at 11:36 PM, Leganeski said:

I had forgotten until I re-read this sentence, but it's not just the small sphere of influence that causes the problem: the maximum altitude for a scanning orbit is five times the body's radius, which for Thresomin is 11.55 km. This is already outside of the SOI, but it means that raising the SOI radius wouldn't fix the problem.

(And of course, it's not just Thresomin: Denna, Plaph, and Didd all have both of these problems. Jifgif does have a valid altitude range, 25-31 km, but its SOI ends at 23.8 km.)

so to clarify, there's a universal minimum altitude, but a variable maximum altitude? that's unfortunate.

[Leganeski]

36 minutes ago, GregroxMun said:

so to clarify, there's a universal minimum altitude, but a variable maximum altitude? that's unfortunate.

There are both universal and variable maximum and minimum altitudes; it's just that for small bodies, the universal minimum and the variable maximum are what end up mattering.

From the wiki page on the M700 Survey Scanner:

Quote

• The minimum altitude is one-tenth of the body radius or 25 km, whichever is higher.
• The maximum altitude is five times the body radius or 1.5 Mm, whichever is lower.

Bodies larger than 15 Mm radius aren't scannable either, but that isn't much of a problem at stock scale.

[MythicalHeFF]

Update: Graymun and Troymin landings completed, now in orbit of Derbin. Pics coming soon.

[MythicalHeFF]

PART 3: CONQUERING THE MOONS OF MESBIN

Spoiler

Alright, so I may or may not have just casually disappeared for almost a month because of a general lack of enthusiasm for this mission, the root cause of which is simply the kinds of framerates I'm having to deal with on a regular basis, but, alas, we are back. After lifting off from Thresomin and refueling its tanks to full capacity, the Kilonova set off for Graymun. Once again, however, this maneuver required several burns to complete, thanks to the abysmally low thrust-to-weight ratio of the craft.

After almost an hour of burning in real time, we finally had an encounter with Graymun. Something unique about Graymun that I hadn't really considered at first glance is that it's actually somewhat oblate in shape like Mesbin, albeit to a much lesser extent. At the equator, the terrain is easily over 10 kilometers high in most places, which, when you're someone like me that regularly sets the periapsis of a Mun encounter to less than 9, it is definitely something to consider. I guess the oblateness must be a result of Graymun being located so close to a body as massive as Mesbin; Mesbin is almost as massive as Jool in stock KSP, and yet Graymun orbits at a distance from Mesbin about the same as the radius of Jool. 

After the encounter had been set up, it was time to go back to waiting 11 years for the insertion burn to finish.

Once that was done, it was finally time to land and show the world what the Workhorse was made of! Gormund Kerman was selected to pilot the lander down to the Graymunar surface.

Which went off without a hitch, as landing on Graymun is more or less identical to landing on the Mun in terms of delta-V, albeit a little harder thanks to the higher gravity (which is probably the only thing keeping Graymun from just being shredded by Mesbin's tidal forces). Gormund could certainly feel the tidal stress in the form of regular earthquakes during his time on the surface. Being an amateur geologist on the side of being a professional kerbonaut pilot, Gormund couldn't help but wonder how Graymun manages to not have large-scale volcanism at its location. Who knows, maybe one day the surface would just erupt into volcanism and form more maria.

He didn't have time to think about it for too long, however, as it was time to lift off once the Kilonova had made another orbit and was above his location.

Achieving a rendezvous with the Kilonova was quite easy, and, surprisingly, docking was too, even without RCS. 

I do have a small RCS tug that can be used to retrieve the lander and guide it back into the cargo bay, but I didn't feel like having to do another docking just to make the process easier. I'm surprised I even managed to dock into the cargo bay without RCS in these framerates at all.

After Graymun had been conquered, it was off to our next target: the small moonlet of Troymin. It's a 7-kilometer-wide asteroid orbiting on the same orbit as Kerbmun, but 60 degrees ahead, leading it across the sky. (hence its name "troymin", as in trojan, or, according to the in-game description, "tiny leader".).

Approaching Troymin, commencing orbital insertion burn prior to entering SOI to avoid just flying straight past

The landing on Troymin was nothing too special, other than the fact that it was the first landing on body that I had not before visited in the Whirligig World planet pack, despite having been offered multiple contracts to go there during my career game; I just sort of ignored it, given that it was basically just another Thresomin, which I had already visited several times at that point.

Somehow managed to balance the entire 700-ton mothership on the rim of a crater. That's what microgravity'll do for ya.

After landing and drill deployment, Bob Kerman went on EVA to plant the MASA flag on Troymin.

After Troymin had been completed, it was time to move on to our most challenging and fearsome target yet: Derbin. Arguably a planet in its own right, Derbin is a super-Kerbin that is situated in a distant binary orbit with Mesbin. At ten times the mass of Kerbin and with over twice the surface gravity, landing on it and returning will be very challenging. But that's what the Brute is here for, after all. 

I've decied to skip over Kerbmun for now, as going there would necessitate me going down into another gravity well, and probably just require me to go back to Troymin again to refuel before going to Derbin, which I didn't want to do. Instead, I'll just come back for Kerbmun at the end of the mission.

After quite a long burn and a several-week-long transfer, the Kilonova arrived at Derbin and performed its orbital insertion. Before I can land, I'm going to have to get into a much lower orbit, as the inflatable heat shields actually can't handle an entry into Derbin's atmosphere at much more than the orbital velocity of about 5,000 m/s.

Several burns later, the desired orbit had been reached. From here on out, I decided to aerobrake the lander into a low orbit and final entry, as I was now confident that the heat shields could take the punishment.

Mesbin and Kerbmun in the distance

In order to get the lander onto a sub-orbital trajectory, I gave the Kilonova's engines a puff to put the periapsis to about 55 kilometers (Derbin's atmosphere starts at 58 km), and detached the lander before boosting the mothership back up to a safe orbit. The altitude of 55 kilometers later turned out to be too high, as aerobraking all the way to low orbit would have taken hours, and thus I redid the burn, this time to an altitude of 51 km. Here you can see the lander just before heat shield inflation.

Lander just before an aerobraking pass

The aerobraking went rather smoothly, with the lander being on a sub-orbital trajectory and ready to begin final entry after about ten passes. Billy-Boblas Kerman had not yet started to complain about the capsule getting too warm.

Final entry still ended up being a little tight on the heat margins, as the inflatable shields almost failed when the Brute 1 really started falling towards the surface at 4,000+ m/s. However, we managed to scrape by in the end.

During the later part of the entry, the gees began to build up very quickly, and it wasn't long before Billy-Boblas Kerman passed out from the gee forces. At its peak, the Brute 1 pulled about 14 gees, which surprisingly wasn't enough to break it apart.

After the dangerous part was over, and after Billy-Boblas Kerman had finally regained consciousness ,it was time to pop the chutes. I had to do this carefully, however, as deploying them all at once would certainly have torn the craft apart thanks to the high density of the atmosphere. Instead, I deployed the chutes in groups, one at 5000 meters, then another at 3000, 1000, and finally 500 meters from the surface.

Once all chutes had fully opened, the Brute 1 was slowed to about 11 m/s, which, while it would explode the heat shields, proved to be a safe impact speed in testing, as the shields provided sufficient damping to prevent destruction.

Once on the surface, and after the heat shields had been destroyed, as well as some sliding shenanigans, Billy-Boblas Kerman emerges from his command pod and climbs down the ladder. Climbing back up in 2 G's will not be an easy task, that's for sure.

Flag planting

After a few hours of mucking about on the surface, it was time to lift off from Derbin. In preparation for this, I jettisoned the final remaining ablative heat shields.

3..2..1.. Liftoff! Getting the liftoff right took a couple of attempts, as it often does when trying to get off of an Eve-like body.

Second stage

Third stage

Fourth stage. We ended up falling around 200 m/s of delta-V short of orbit, which meant that Billy-Boblas Kerman had to complete the ascent with his EVA jetpack, and was now stranded in low Derbin orbit.

Meanwhile, back up in high Derbin orbit, the Kilonova had to reposition the Brute 2 in order to rebalance the weight distribution. Docking wasn't exactly the easiest, but at least I managed to get some cool screenshots out of it.

Now, didn't I say that Billy-Boblas Kerman was stranded? Well, that's what I thought, as the Kilonova likely doesn't have the delta-V to get to a low Derbin orbit and back to Derminmus for refueling. Had it been only for this, he would have been stranded, but that's when I remembered the Hermes ion landers. While I wanted to use them for high-delta-V transfers with no other options available, it turns out that, due to a mistake I had made earlier, I actually had an extra one available, which I then used to retrieve the lost Kerbal.

After Billy-Boblas had been reunited with his fellow crewmembers, it was time to perform the necessary maneuvers to get to Derminmus for refueling.

Three prograde burns, a plane change, and another two prograde burns at apoapsis later, the Kilonova  was on course for Derminmus.

Which it then promptly landed on, after Bill Kerman had gone out and remove the decouplers that had held the Brute landers to the main ship.

 

 

 

Edited November 17, 2022 by Jack Joseph Kerman

[jimmymcgoochie]

The most challenging part of any Grand Tour isn’t designing the vessels or planning the route, it’s putting up with abysmal, slideshow quality frame rates as your thousand-plus-part monstrosity thrashes the single CPU core doing all the work. Docking or doing any kind of EVA work is so much slower and even more painful at 3FPS, plus I’ve found EVAs a lot harder to control properly as they always seem to overcorrect instead of just pointing the way I tell them to.

Edited October 22, 2022 by jimmymcgoochie

[Leganeski]

7 hours ago, Jack Joseph Kerman said:

Fourth stage. We ended up falling around 200 m/s of delta-V short of orbit, which meant that Billy-Boblas Kerman had to complete the ascent with his EVA jetpack, and was now stranded in low Derbin orbit.

Wow, that was really close! And that's after you avoided 43% of Derbin's atmosphere by landing at a moderate altitude; I can't imagine what would have happened if you had launched from lower down.

[MythicalHeFF]

10 hours ago, Leganeski said:

Wow, that was really close! And that's after you avoided 43% of Derbin's atmosphere by landing at a moderate altitude; I can't imagine what would have happened if you had launched from lower down.

Which is a bit weird, considering that in testing on Valyr, which has basically the same atmospheric pressure and gravity at sea level, the Brute was able to get into orbit from sea level just fine.

[WarriorSabe]

5 hours ago, Jack Joseph Kerman said:

Which is a bit weird, considering that in testing on Valyr, which has basically the same atmospheric pressure and gravity at sea level, the Brute was able to get into orbit from sea level just fine.

Well, if you consider that Valyr rotates at over 660 meters per second while Derbin barely does at all, that might make up some of the difference by giving you a boost. The pressure's about a third higher than from where you launched, but the planets have realistically calculated atmospheres, which means the colder temperature should make it fall off faster (all else being equal, which it approximately is), so perhaps that makes up for the higher pressure. Then finally there's the simple possibility that maybe you flew a better turn when you tested at Valyr.

[MythicalHeFF]

3 hours ago, WarriorSabe said:

Well, if you consider that Valyr rotates at over 660 meters per second while Derbin barely does at all, that might make up some of the difference by giving you a boost. The pressure's about a third higher than from where you launched, but the planets have realistically calculated atmospheres, which means the colder temperature should make it fall off faster (all else being equal, which it approximately is), so perhaps that makes up for the higher pressure. Then finally there's the simple possibility that maybe you flew a better turn when you tested at Valyr.

Indeed, I would say that these factors together would more than make up the difference, especially considering how quickly the Brute breaks through the lower parts of the atmosphere once it gets going (by the time the first stage runs out of juice it's accelerating at almost 10 G's, which admittedly means I probably should have throttled back considerably to reduce losses to drag, which I'm pretty sure I did during the Valyr test). That extra third of atmospheric pressure would already be gone after ascending just a couple of kilometers, or literally just a few seconds after liftoff. I don't think my gravity turn would have made much of a difference, as I wasn't able to perform one before the first stage separation anyways- the rocket would flip, and even if that didn't happen, I'd lose too much speed to drag after second stage activation.

[MythicalHeFF]

PART 3.1: THE DERMINMUS DEBACLE & GOING INTERPLANETARY

Spoiler

Well, this is awkward. It appears that the Kilonova is too fat to take off from Derminmus, as the moon's gravity is considerably higher than I anticipated, and thus the four radial Thud engines cannot provide enough thrust to lift off, with their measly collective 480 kN being insufficient to lift the 570-ton mothership in 0.09 g.

At first, I thought I was simply going to have to redo the entire landing and mining operation (without fully refueling this time), as I was simply unable to get off the ground. However, before too long, I began to get ideas on how to possibly get a start off of the metallic surface.

The first of these was to simply fire the atomic engines and hopefully get enough of a boost off of some terrain that I would have enough time to just turn around and ascend into orbit. However, the terrain for this was not favorable, and as such I simply ran headfirst into the ground after trying a jump at 15 m/s or so.

Next, I thought that, maybe if I could get down onto the flats, I could gather enough speed to take off once I hit other terrain again. I then disabled the brakes, and just let the Kilonova roll gently down the hillside towards the pistachio-colored flats below. I even activated the engines at one point to slow down and guarantee no damage, at least in theory.

It didn't work. The ion Ammenon lander up front still managed to run into the ground and explode. I then tried a second time, but the lander once again became a problem and began sliding along the ground, eventually bringing the whole ship to a stop, immobilizing it permanently.

After this failure, I then tried to turn the whole ship around before rolling down into the flats by only firing the right half of the engines. It barely turned, which I think may have had something to do with the fact that the extra-large landing gears don't have any steering for some reason. Eventually, I realized that I was simply going to have to just fire the engines until I'd burned enough fuel so that the ship was light enough to take off. Luckily, I didn't need to burn that much fuel, as I calculated that, with 480 kN of thrust, the ship would achieve a TWR of 1 once it had reached a mass of about 543 .6 tons, as

480,000 N/ 0.8829 m/s^2 = 543,662 kg for a TWR of 1.

Sure enough, once I'd burned enough fuel to get below this critical mass, and after I'd fired up the Thud engines, the Kilonova very slowly began to rise off the surface.... until it ran out of oxidizer. Sigh.... guess I'll just transfer some from the landers...

....and finally we're off!

After that debacle had been sorted out, I then had to go dock with Brute 2, our other heavy-duty lander for Valyr, which I did.

After all of these shenanigans were complete, we set a course for Dermun, Derbin's other satellite.

Orbital insertion was fairly easy, and once it had been completed, we found ourselves confronted with another gray, cratered world, similar in a lot of ways to Graymun, only smaller.

After circularizing our orbit, Agagan Kerman then boarded the Workhorse lander, and prepared to depart from the Kilonova.

The descent to the surface of Dermun wasn't really anything too spectacular, as it's basically identical to landing on the Mun in the stock game in terms of delta-V.

Landed on the surface of Dermun in one of the flats, this one called the Oceanus Australis, despite being located in the northern hemisphere.

Since we had plenty of fuel to work with, Agagan Kerman decided to do a secondary landing over in the highlands as well. You can just spot Derminmus in the background, just above the terrain, if you look hard enough.

After the surface exploration had been completed, the Workhorse made its way back into orbit, at which point it reunited with the Kilonova, and once again pulled a rather outlandish docking maneuver, as I refuse to use the RCS tug, even after I ran out of electricity.

Now that the whole Mesbin system had been completed (apart from Kerbmun, which I plan to get back to at the end), it was time to go interplanetary. More specifically, to Valyr, in order to get rid of the Brute 2 and reduce our part count and mass further. Only problem is, it's far from being in the right position.

So, I went to the tracking station and warped for a long time, almost two Kerbin years in fact, as Mesbin takes about that long to orbit the more luminous Kaywell. At least I managed to set up the transfer perfectly on the first attempt.

A transfer which we then promptly executed, and, after about a 10-minute burn, the Kilonova was on its way into deep space for the first time.

We still had to do a mid-course correction, however, as the inclination wasn't exactly right, and we needed to get a closer periapsis anyways. 

Originally, I had considered using Valyr's largest moon, Oshan, for a gravity assist, similarly to how I almost always use Laythe or Tylo for a gravity assist when arriving at Jool, but I decided this was more trouble than it was worth, especially given our inclination and relatively low encounter velocity.

After another year or so of drifting through deep space, the crew of the Kilonova finally caught a glimpse of the blue marble outside their windows, which surely reminded them of seeing Kerbmun in the sky from back home on Mesbin.

From there, it was only a short orbital insertion burn of about 60 m/s to achieve a highly eccentric orbit.

 

Edited November 17, 2022 by Jack Joseph Kerman