Efil Space Program: A GPTT and 2.56x scale Kcalbeloh long campaign

[loki130]

This is a campaign I’ll be playing in the lovely Kcalbeloh planet pack at 2.56x scale and home-switched to Efil, a moon of the planet Anehta, orbiting the Aralc binary star system, which in turn has a high orbit of the Kcalbeloh black hole. This is perhaps a somewhat less interesting planet and a bit less central a location to explore the system than Suluco, but I though the Anehta system might make for a more interesting early game, and it’s actually easier to launch early interstellar flyby probes from Aralc’s high perch in the system. I also made a quick patch to bring the science value multipliers for the neighboring bodies in the Aralc system down to be more in line with the stock system (and nerf Kcalbeloh a bit). In terms of graphics mods, I’m using Parallax 2.0, EVE and scatterer with volumetric clouds using the experimental Kcalbeloh patch (which helpfully covers most of the bodies I’ll be encountering most from Efil), TUFX with blaackrack’s config, and Deferred.

One of the main goals of this campaign is to test out a custom tech tree I’m working on, the Gradual Progression Tech Tree built to give a more gradual RP-1-like early game progression while still working well with more stock gameplay and taking advantage of a number of popular modpacks. The full list of parts packs, at least to start with, includes:

• Airplane Plus
• Bluedog Design Bureau
• Coatl Aerospace Probes Plus
• CryoEngines
• DeepFreeze
• DMagic Orbital Science
• Far Future Technologies
• Heat Control
• JX2 Antennas
• Kerbal Atomics
• Kerbal Foundries
• Kerbal Planetary Base Systems
• Kerbal Reusabiity Expansion
• Mk2 Expansion
• Near Future Technologies collection
• Planetside MMSEV
• Restock and Restock Plus
• Station Parts Expansion Redux
• Sterling Systems Thermals
• Supplementary Electric Engines
• USI Malemute and Karibou
• USI Sounding Rockets

In terms of other career/difficulty mods, I’ll be playing with Bureaucracy, but with no kerbonaut retirement, no budget cap, and with a bit of reputation decay, amounting to about 8% per year (also the length of months in Bureaucracy seems to be tied to the home planet rotation, so they're about 4 times longer here than in the stock system); Kerbal Construction Time with the very slower settings, and as a personal rule I won’t get any upgrades to produce science; USI Life Support, but not the whole MKS collection; Mandatory RCS; and doubled DSN and antenna range (on top of the modifier given by sigma dimensions) to make interstellar probes a little more viable earlier on. I will be using Mechjeb, because I don’t particularly feel the need to do a hundred manual launches to prove I can, and I won’t be using any reliability or parts failure mods because I couldn’t find any that really worked well with the range of parts mods I’m using.

My general intention here is to have a complete but not intensive record of the whole campaign, including at least one shot from every mission, excepting perhaps repeated identical launches of relays or orbital refueling/resupply runs (and I may very well get a mod like KSTS to handle those at some point). But it’ll be a while before we get to anything like those; for the first few years of the game, I'll be limited largely to suborbital sounding rockets.

Part 1: Climbing the Sounding Rocket Ladder

We start off small with Pioneer 1, reaching a precocious 4,000 meters altitude above the launchpad.

Pioneer 2 rises no higher, essentially just serving as a test of the larger, faster-burning lower stage sounding rocket engine.

Pioneer 3, with 2 stages, manages to make it to 7,000 meters.

Pioneer 4 is essentially a repeat of 3 but launches our first scientific instruments, studying the rocket’s performance and the atmospheric conditions above the launch center.

Despite a rainy launch day, Pioneer 5’s 3 stages loft it to over 14 km, reaching the upper atmosphere for the first time.

Pioneer 6 launches at an angle for atmospheric studies of the nearby coast, landing a couple kilometers away.

The program’s second year is kicked off with the serene dawn launch of Pioneer 7, a low-altitude test of a heavier science package.

Meanwhile, our first candidate kerbonauts pass the time until we have any work for them exploring the nearby islands on the P-1 “Dancing Dan” trainer aircraft.

Pioneer 8 performs further upper atmosphere science, as well as testing a new upper stage solid rocket.

Pioneer 9 suffers some guidance issues on its final stage, but still manages to reach 40 km altitude.

Pioneer 10 features our first liquid-fuel rocket, massing over 8 tons, almost twice as much as any previous design.

This allows it to make the program's first suborbital spaceflight, reaching over 140 km, a good milestone to cap off 2 years of rocket tests.

Pioneer 11 is another test craft, performing some atmospheric photography.

Pioneer 12 is the second craft to reach space, ascending to over 500 km.

Pioneer 13 is another upper atmospheric test craft, taking aerial photography of the nearby sea.

With science advancing on liquid-fuel rocketry, avionics, and communications, the Efil space program is finally ready to launch its first satellite, Unity 1, on a 2-stage liquid-fuel design.

The launch is fairly uneventful, and the vehicle is actually somewhat overpowered for the mission, guidance concerns being the main reason we haven’t made any previous attempts at reaching orbit.

The design is perhaps not super original, but it’ll do. In under 3 years from the program’s start, the moon Efil has its own little submoon. That’ll do for the first part of this campaign; future portions should be a little more varied, but we all have to start somewhere, and part of my main goal with this tech tree is to make that start fill a little more important and less abrupt. Bye for now.

Edited 5 hours ago by loki130