Get With The Program! (RSS/RO/RP-1/P&LC)

[jimmymcgoochie]

So when I said "new" LV design... See, I already have a 700-ton class launch rocket that works perfectly well in It's Only Rocket Science, Blue String, so I just copied the design and made some small changes, chief among them replacing the second stage RL-200 with two J-2s since the RL-200 is part of CH-4 which I'm not using in this playthrough.

The design works, unsurprisingly, but tooling the new parts will be a bit more of a problem. (Sneak preview of the livery too!)

The new LC is under construction, however paying for the new tooling will be a much bigger challenge as it has to be done all at once, up front, rather than being able to spread the cost over time as with facility construction/upgrades. Something to suggest for future P&LC development maybe?

The Mars transfer window is open, cue the interplanetary launches!

Salmanzar Mars Orbiter 1 is sent earlier in the window while the second will follow in what MechJeb insists is a more optimal time but which TWP isn't so sure about. This is one of several reasons why I built two of them.

Meanwhile, back on Earth:

Following some construction reprioritisation, what was meant to be Voskhod 3 is now launched as Voskhod 2 since the new astronauts aren't even close to being able to fly yet ad I want them to all get an EVA. This mission does without the airlock and docking target and has two goals: longer term crew experiments lasting up to six days, and staying in orbit for a whole week.

Seven days later, re-entry was targeted at Florida...

And to my surprise, that's exactly where it ended up!

That's Miami in the distance, so splashdown will be somewhere near the Florida Keys? Much better than my usual "targeted" re-entries, that's for sure.

Between the science recovered and already transmitted, that's enough to keep R&D going for another year at least.

Over to the Moon now with an upgraded Salmanzar Moonlander Mk5 featuring new bipropellant RCS and thrusters. Not that it needed those, strictly speaking, but the extra margin is always a good thing.

The landing site ended up being at the edge of a fairly substantial crater, but the lander found a less steep area that wasn't too lumpy and set itself down. In the dark, obviously.

The landing was on the far side of the Moon in the highlands, a biome unvisited until now. Science should be sent back via the lunar relay network just as soon as the sun comes up.

I've been playing around with the idea of a low-tech Mercury orbiter but without a whole lot of success, it really needs the extremely high ISP of hydrolox to stand a chance of getting there unless I figure out how to use a slingshot planner of some kind.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/0GU34lK

Next time: Second Mars launch? I'm not entirely sure if the second Mars-bound probe has been launched already or is still waiting, everything before the Moon lander was done a couple of weeks ago and I've only recently come back to this save.

[jimmymcgoochie]

I've come back to this save after a while away from it because I've heard P&LC's "release" is imminent- it will become RP-1 in the next major update. With that in mind, I want to finish this one off with a Moon landing and then start afresh with all the updates that have gone in since I started this save and using what I've learnt here.

To get to the Moon I'll need something a bit better than the R-7 knockoffs I've been using so far. I spent some time designing new rockets, but then I cheated and just copy-pasted the Blue String from It's Only Rocket Science and changed a few details (RL-200s swapped to J-2s, tech levels adjusted on avionics etc.) to make it work with what I have in this save.

Payload to orbit is 32.5 tons, a huge step up from the Salmanzar and enough to throw a capsule or lander out to the Moon; I'll probably reuse my stolen-from-Terminal-Velocity lander again and the D-2 capsule just to try something different again.

Meanwhile, the LCs are finishing their assigned construction jobs- two more Voskhod missions in CLC-200 and two Venus orbiters in LC-400- and are now sitting idle, wasting time and money. A couple of Salmanzar Moonlanders will keep LC-400 going for a while and a rather odd science satellite went into CLC-200's queue to pick off some space high science.

Really? Engine failure with <0.05% failure rate- wait, why does that engine have a >2% failure chance?

Turns out the engine configs were wrong, I must have used the wrong booster craft. A quick refit later and it launched just fine.

This launch is more like the R-7 than usual as there's no second stage; instead the tank that used to be part of the second stage is joined to the first stage to give it a longer burn time, with a strange upper stage using five RD-0110 verniers to put the satellite into a very high (40Mm) polar orbit. Three of those engines powered the final part of the launch and boosted the apoapsis up to 40Mm, while the other two circularised the orbit using the same tank of fuel. They're all single ignition, but this pattern meant that none of them were overburnt and they're pretty reliable.

Between the infrared radiometer and the orbital perturbation experiment, this should be providing a steady trickle of science for years to come.

And to finish, a quick visit to the two Mars orbiter missions to perform course corrections.

One is heading to a polar orbit, the other isn't because I forgot to set the course correction up that way until after I'd done it.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/fq0GcoI

Next time: A holiday hiatus and then back to launch the Venus orbiters, park the Mars orbiters, do some Voskhod stuff and hopefully move towards lunar landings.

[jimmymcgoochie]

The official release of RP-1 v2.0 (RP-2?) with P&LC has already happened, so there goes my goal of trying to finish this career with a Moon landing before that happened. I'll wrap this up as quickly as possible to try out the "proper" P&LC experience instead of my current WIP build.

Starting with the Venus launches:

Both were dispatched within about a week of each other and are on course for good Venus encounters, their little dinnerplate atmosphere probes ready to be deployed- and possibly land intact, who knows.

Then I found a Moon lander sitting in lunar orbit that I'd forgotten about for a while and landed it.

More science is always welcome, though by this point the research queue is over a decade long so it's not that urgent.

Staying with Moon landings, I redesigned my trusty crewed Moon lander with parts tooled in this save and made sure it worked, which it did.

I may trim some of that excess fuel to make it light enough to be sent out to the Moon in the first place.

On a related note, I also designed a lunar D-2 and tested that out on the OR-5 Balthazar, now sporting a suitably hideous paint scheme.

Aside from the crew all suffocating due to only having the shoddy 2-day scrubber unlocked so far, everything went according to plan.

The next launch was Voskhod 4, which due to an error in the experiment selection had an experiment that couldn't be run- it needed an engineer, but the crew were a pilot and a scientist. It's also launching out of sequence because Voskhod 3 has an airlock and I'm giving that flight to the newbies to get some more experience once their training is done.

A few days in orbit later and they made a surprisingly accurate re-entry, dropping down on top of Miami just down the road from Cape Canaveral.

Uh... so apparently X-planes contracts can be completed by orbital launches? I took that Program because I had a spare slot and it lasts so long that I'll be done before it expires which means free money!

Much plane, so wow.

After much training time, the newbies Valerie and Nicole were finally ready to fly. Voskhod 3, on the other hand, wasn't: a strange miscalculation meant that the rocket was too heavy on the pad until I detached one of the interstage fairings.

It had more staging issues in flight with the fairings surrounding the capsule not separating properly and the capsule itself ending up in a spin, just short of orbit, after the upper stage shut down. Some well-timed engine burns bumped the periapsis sufficiently and the crew got on with their science tasks while attention shifted to Mars.

Despite reliability issues in the past, the Juno 6k worked as advertised for the braking burn and this probe parked itself in a 200x4500km orbit to gather all the science it could. It's not inclined enough to do orbital perturbation, but with only a dribble of HTP left and no ignitions on the main engine there's no way to fix that.

Program complete! I'll probably replace it with the one for flybys of Mercury, Ceres and Vesta since there's a Mercury window coming up (and I've already done a Mercury flyby anyway).

Back to Voskhod 3 where Nicole and Valerie were faffing around with the docking probe, only included because it balanced the weight of the airlock, and waiting for the airlock to inflate so they could do some EVAs.

With all their tasks done, another surprisingly accurate re-entry ensued- this time they got the latitude right but overshot a bit on the longitude, whereas last time the longitude was about right but the latitude was a bit off.

Another rocketplane contract completed by a Voskhod...

With LC-400 getting an upgrade to be human-rated so that it can launch a D-2 to LEO for testing and science, there are a lot of engineers sitting around doing nothing. Might as well try doing some rocketplane contracts legitimately...

Despite zero sim testing, the Q-1 performed pretty well overall. The only real problem was that it didn't get fast enough to complete the contract, so the engineers just sawed a metre from each wing and it worked perfectly.

Staying with crewed stuff, I hired two more astronauts to go straight into D-2 training. Now I have two sets of pilot, scientist and engineer so there are two crews for lunar missions.

All I need now is the Block 2 mission module with the space for a docking port on the end, or I could caveman it and not bother docking...

Back to Mars as the second orbiter approaches.

Once again the Juno 6k works properly...

...and the probe settles into a low polar orbit for biome mapping. Some experiments can't run as the orbit isn't eccentric enough, but that's why I sent two probes.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/PrwkZ4I

Next time: Gearing up for a Moon landing!

[jimmymcgoochie]

No new LV this report because I botched the LC construction and now I have to wait another 450 days because it was a) too short and b) not crew-rated. On the plus side, all this waiting around means I have more than enough free cash to save up for all the tooling costs for the Moon landing stuff.

The Venus missions are arriving, so now I need to choose whether to drop the little atmo probes/landers off in a higher orbit, saving fuel but giving them a hotter re-entry, or in a low orbit which costs more fuel but will be more survivable. I have two probes, so one of each will do.

The first mission to arrive dropped its probe from an apoapsis of 2500km, which turned out to be too high as the heatshield exploded. The second waited until it was in a nearly circular low orbit and the atmosphere probe survived re-entry and the fall to the ground in one piece.

A tweak to the orbiter's orbit to let it communicate with the "lander" and Earth at the same time to relay the signal and the surface science flowed.

You can tell this install is struggling by the newspaper for these missions. The game is freezing up my entire PC on a fairly regular basis when loading saves or switching scenes after it starts, requiring a PC reboot to fix.

With LC-400 finally upgraded, those two Moonlander Mk5s sitting in storage can finally fly.

The second one landed at the north pole just to do something different. No more of these now, it's full steam ahead for the Moon landing- which means a lot of time warp.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/k2EH0G9

Next time: The D-2 seems to have a very long build time and with the LC delays I won't be beating Apollo 11, or possibly even 12, to the Moon.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Lunar D-2 stuff takes a very long time to build, so in the meantime I turned a D-2 into a station and launched that instead.

The crew were launched up soon after.

Next, a proper test of the lunar D-2 in LEO launched on an OR-4 Salmanzar, delayed considerably as I had to upgrade the LC to crew-rate it and let it cope with a slightly taller rocket.

This test ended up being rather pointless since a) I immediately unlocked the block 2 mission module that has space for a docking port, and b) this happened straight after reaching orbit:

The crew stayed in orbit for a week or so, then returned.

A lot more waiting around for stuff to finish building later, it's finally time for the Moon Landing. In 1971 due to repeatedly bungling the LC settings. The OR-5 Balthazar's TWR is higher than expected due to the Earth itself trying to run away from that hideous paint job.

First to launch is the lander:

Upper stage engine failure while doing a correction burn en route to the Moon, but that's why I was only using them in pairs and there are two perfectly good engines remaining. It was 0.04% over the failure threshold too...

A day after their lander, the crew of the first D-2 Lunar are launched on their own Balthazar and follow it Moonwards.

With those two on their way, I went to the Tracking Station to keep an eye on them; then I decided to change the lander into a base to avoid cluttering up the UI with all the little probe landers on the Moon, then I noticed there were "bases" in polar Earth orbits...

Remember that cluster of imaging satellites I launched six years ago?

Yeah, me neither- hence the six year wait for what should have been a 40 day experiment per satellite. Strangely enough, two of them had used up all their film but the other three hadn't come close to using theirs. All five return capsules were brought down and by some odd coincidence four of them ended up on or near Antarctica while the fifth landed in Siberia.

125 out of 200 science gathered, two of them got 40 each and the other three got only a fraction of what they should have. I blame Kerbalism automation.

Back to the Moon Landing as the lander brakes into orbit.

The hydrolox stage didn't have quite enough juice left to get a circular orbit, but I can't afford to waste the lander's main engine ignitions so it'll have to do.

One day and one small course correction later, the crew arrived at the Moon too.

A quick rendezvous later...

And Rhonda transfers over to the lander to head to the surface. The D-2 craft's own engine also has limited ignitions and has used three out of five just getting to this point, but it should only need one more to get home.

Rhonda chose a landing site that was a) in daylight and b) had a line of sight to the Earth, mostly for the pictures. She ended up coming down over a large crater which was mostly flat, except for those lumps that seemed to leap up at her.

She dodged the hills and set the lander down on a shallow slope, perfect for the photographs.

It's 15 February 1971- not only did I not beat Apollo 11 and 12, but Apollo 14 was splashing down just before I launched the lander. It's my slowest Moon landing yet, which is largely because P&LC (in this build at least) is significantly slower than "normal" RP-1 is/was.

But still, MOON LANDING!

All too soon it was time to go home. First Rhonda launched up from the surface to intercept the orbiter, timing it nicely for an orbital-insertion-and-rendezvous burn:

And then an easy docking:

The lander's remaining supplies and propellants were transferred over and then it was deorbited using the last of its fuel.

There was time left for the other two crew members to have orbital EVAs and get some science for it:

And for the obligatory Earthrise shot:

Rhonda did a brief EVA in space high over Earth to get that EVA report too, then it was just a case of getting back home in one piece.

And then I realised something...

So this is embarrassing- I never completed the prerequisite contracts so the contract for First Crewed Moon Landing wasn't offered until after I'd already done a crewed Moon landing. I could do another one just to finish that contract, but I just can't be bothered doing all that again and at this point the install is quite buggy and crashy and P&LC has been released now so I want to try the new version instead.

See? Rhonda got zero retirement delay FOR A MOON LANDING!

Final final scores:

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/6KB6CM4

Coming soon^TM: A new report using the release version of RP-1 P&LC (aka RP-1 2.0 aka RP-2(?)), but before that I have a European themed run in "legacy" RP-1 to finish first:

And at some point I really need to go back to It's Only Rocket Science and do that Mars mission to cap it off too.

[Fizwalker]

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Edited April 21, 2024 by Fizwalker