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What did you do in KSP1 today?


Xeldrak

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Grand Tour Update (continued from page 847, 849 and 852)

Well... BIG TIME FAILURE... The grand tour II to Jool has to be aborted due to an insufficient lander... When attempting to land on Tylo, Jeb and Ed aborted the descent after using up nearly half of their fuel to slow down the horizontal speed... Mission command (me) totally underestimated the power of this massive moon. Well... its a ticket home for six, yet again disappointed kerbonauts. While they are on their way back home, its back to the drawing board for me. No new launch before .24 is out. I will start a complete new career then, with the goal to construct a new ship in orbit and go on a successful grand tour then.

The data i collected will help a lot, to get things right the next time. And maybe the new mission system will make me sending probes to the joolian system to get more data, before the next attempt will be undertaken.

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On the other hand if your Jool intercept is good it don't cost very much dV to enter an orbit close to Pol. Beating it pretty much require Tylo slingshots from Laythe or an Laythe aerobrake who put you in Jool orbit.

The real important part is to arive at Jool in the same plane as the moons.

I think I'll really go for that option, since I don't feel too confident when it comes to controlled aerobraking. I calculated an approximate flight plan and got a total dV requirement of about 12600 m/s, not counting landings and, for a first estimation, neglecting the eccentricity of the moons orbits. This sounds doable, but maybe I'll change my mind once I finished building the landers for the heavier moons...

In addition I sent my Moho mission home. They are now on a transfer orbit back to Kerbin. By chance they are passing by the Mun, and if I'm not mistaken, even get a small gravity assist from it.

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Spent the whole day assembling my Minmus station in Kerbin orbit, moving it to Minmus, and reassembling it in its final configuration...

And then stayed up all night doing it over again, having rolled back the save to rebuild it with the lessons learned from the first "simulation". Oy.

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The four-man crew of Gallivant Horizon, KSP's most advanced and capable interplanetary ship, began exploring Duna.

Gallivant Horizon executing a braking burn to enter Duna orbit. Note that the lander docked with the ship's bow has a large heat shield (constructed from a Rockomax adapter, and overlapping structural panels). The game doesn't really require this, but I find it hard to believe that the lander's engines could survive an unprotected tail-first meteoric reentry through Duna's atmosphere.

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The ship was accompanied by a rover and a habitat module with their own transfer stages. Like the manned lander, each is protected by a heat shield. They are delivered to the surface by parachute and expendable sky-crane.

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The lander standing on Duna's surface. Note the habitat module standing the crest of a hill in the background, 332 meters away. The rover made a much more precise landing, touching down about 25 meters from the manned lander.

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Alan and Bill Kerman conducting geological research, a few kilometers from the landing site.

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Aleksei Kerbolev standing beside the habitat module. All of the astronauts in my career game have "real" names, and about half of them have the surname "Kerbolev," rather than "Kerman" (I edit the persistent.sfs file, as necessary).

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Scott Kerman pulled "Collins Duty," remaining in Duna orbit aboard Gallivant Horizon.

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Bob took off with the travel ship from Kerbin to head for Duna...

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Just like Jebediah many years ago, he gets to watch a solar eclipse before leaving the planets orbit.

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Launch stage dropped and heading out...

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Unlike Jebs ship, Bob should have enough solar panels...

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About two month later, Bob arrived at the Duna service hub...

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After docking up with the Station, the travel-ship was refuelled and the lander prepared for the exploration journey...

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Bob undocked and went for his first Duna landing...

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Starting to farm science in every Duna biome...

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Edited by TrooperCooper
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Took a longish brake (for me at least) to play Payday 2. You know when we have to teach the Kerbals how to rob banks successfully when they are in need of a cash infusion or just something to do in their spare time while waiting for missions.

Anyways. Made this nice little SSTO plane with enough fuel in orbit to possibly make a bigger orbit:

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Have a refueler on stand-by already just in case I need it to be refueled.

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I set course for home for my 6 brave kerbals, returning from their failed Grand Tour to Jool. However they have a whole load of samples and stuff on board that needs to be attended to with SCIENCE when they get home. And regardless of the grave dangers they were in, they will return with no casualties. So, the ship performed well, the outcome was lossless and they will be rewarded with a whole load of new unlocked parts... so at least i call it a partial success :). I´ll post pictures of the returning craft and the landing. Maybe tomorrow.

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Got just about all of the fresh, gooey science I can from orbit around the Mun and Minmus, treated myself to some new and exciting tech (never got this far in career, I used to be a dedicated sandbox player until Mr Manley showed off his IQ series).I have tweaked and twerked my current sattelite designs with newly unlocked parts. Mostly exploring new probe cores, and solar panels, along with more weight economic batteries. I also have unlocked the multi-spectral SCAN device.I have also designed heavy lift rockets so I can get the fuel in orbit more eficiently for out-of-Kerbin SOI activities.More excitingly I have started the R+D phase for manned Munar and Minmus exploration! The biggest pain in the backside is keeping my aesthetic ideals and making it fly.

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Performed an unpowered landing on Laythe - that is, the only firing of engines was the deorbit, the landing itself was entirely by parachute. This is the first landing of the FourJade mission, and so my first manned landing on a Joolian moon.

It took two attempts to land intact, though in the first the pod and probe-core of the lander both survived undamaged and connected. I'll outline the first (which vanished into the mists of Quickload) here. Some of the images from the first descent appear in the FourJade mission thread update, specifically under "Additional footage from the first descent".

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The de-orbit burn was a little over five minutes, inclining the trajectory and rendering it suborbital such that it appeared to come down in the ocean a little way past one of the longer islands - atmospheric drag and drogue 'chutes would pull the lander over land. Once I was in the atmosphere, I had Jeb take a crew report and go EVA - as the trajectory was already suborbital, the High Atmosphere reports could be taken.

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Jool rises over the target island

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Shortly after atmospheric effects began to appear, I deployed the drogue 'chutes: I wasn't slowing down as fast as I'd hoped, and it seemed possible that I would overshoot the island. Once they had fully deployed, I activated the next stage: all the other parachutes on the lander, of which there were an additional seventeen.

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Once these had fully deployed, I got the flying at Laythe reports and twisted the lander so that it had one of its LT-2 landing legs pointing down the slope. The lander was still coming down a bit fast, onto an incline steeper than it had been designed to handle - its path had led it to the mountain close to the end of the island. (I took from this that I needed to come down a little steeper, and use a slightly bigger deorbit burn. The results... well, it did only take the two attempts to land safely.)

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You can guess what happened next.

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Impact. The legs broke, the lander tipped, the I-beams snapped, the 'spikes tore free, the fuel tanks went up, the LV-N disintegrated, the panels shattered... but the capsule and the probe core rolled away safely.

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So, yeah, I reloaded.

Edited by Concentric
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Went and found my first anomaly in my current career mode as a part of latest trip to Minimus

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Yeah, initial landing was a little off roughly 40 degrees east, and 20 degrees south of it, so I sent Bob (my goto Kerbal for planetary EVAs) to go scouting for it and as he would find unsampled biomes, would then wait for the landing to come near him so he could resupply.

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Accordingly he has now been renamed to "Super" Bob

Dark Force Engineering - Launching Kerbanauts into space since early 2014

Engineer to Mission Control - You know, maybe we should think about getting them down out of space at some point

​Mission Control to Engineers - Why, they seem happy up there?

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Damn nice haul on the science! I've never brought that much back.... >.> Well done!

Don't have a good picture of the lander, but from my post before Roastduck's, that mission actually brought back almost 2k in science (hit 6 different minimus biomes with the lander w 3 science juniors, 6 goo containers, and 8 each of seismic, thermal, and gravity detectors, plus made a mun stop on the way home as I lifted from minimus straight into a free return trajectory to kerbin that intercepted Mun) Did this without a rover, just a lot of jetpacking with Bob, then having Jeb and Bill fly to him when he found a new biome.

Then again, I'm kinda late game with my current career save, so even without a support ship to dock with it's easy to do something like that if I haven't really explored a place yet.

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So far today, I stranded a probe on the Mun....(It was the same design I sent to Minmus, and I thought that it would have enough dV, so silly of me... lol)

Don't have a good picture of the lander, but from my post before Roastduck's, that mission actually brought back almost 2k in science (hit 6 different minimus biomes with the lander w 3 science juniors, 6 goo containers, and 8 each of seismic, thermal, and gravity detectors, plus made a mun stop on the way home as I lifted from minimus straight into a free return trajectory to kerbin that intercepted Mun) Did this without a rover, just a lot of jetpacking with Bob, then having Jeb and Bill fly to him when he found a new biome.

Then again, I'm kinda late game with my current career save, so even without a support ship to dock with it's easy to do something like that if I haven't really explored a place yet.

I started a new career after creating a directory to keep KSP at 23.5 so I'm good if I get a few hundred science on a mission--(I've barely gotten through the bottom tiers of the Interstellar Tech Tree so far!) Still find myself a little envious of your achievements though! :D

Edited by Fizwalker
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And here as promised, the screenshots from the returning crew from Jool.

Leaving the Jool system – Tanks away – Arriving at the Kerbin system – Preparing for aerobraking

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Shield and Lander separation – Good bye to the Arthur C. Kerman – Heroes home safe* – What a beautiful place to land...

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* No plant life was harmed by landing capsules...

And now... Onward to new adventures.

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