[Scenario] Rendezvous With Roche

[NovaSilisko]

Prologue

It was a cool mid-Blaugust day at the Kerbal Space Center.

Administrator Joseph Kerman IX sat in his comfortable swivel chair, elbows on his desk and his small hands on his chin - quite obviously bored out of his mind. The chief engineer Billy-Bobthompdorp Kerman suddenly burst into the room! Joseph started, and his elbows slipped off the desk, sending him hurtling face-first into it - knocking him out cold. Billy stood there for a moment, unsure of what to do. He was about ready to simply sprint away and pretend he didn't see anything when Joseph came to. Billy spoke carefully,

"Ah... you're ali-- awake."

"Yes... now what did you come barging in here for, anyway?"

"The first expedition to... R-roche has failed They ran straight into it and are now stranded."

"Ruh-roche? What's that? Also, who are you, and where am I?"

Billy sighed and shook his head, his initial fear of having accidentally killed the administrator now overcome with annoyance. "Okay, I'll give you the short version. You're the administrator of the Kerbal Space Agency. You're in your office. Roche is a small moonlet orbiting Eve, which is a planet--"

"I know what Eve is, you condescending--"

"Okay, okay! Anyway, Roche is a small moonlet orbiting it, just discovered a few months ago. Around the same time, we sent a mission out to investigate it, and determine whether it's worth further exploration. The answer was a resounding yes, but they somehow managed to ram directly into it whilst doing their departure burn... and now they're stranded in Eve orbit"

Joseph seemed to snap back to reality at the mention of several technical terms. "Well? Draft up another mission, Bill! Hell, this time let's bring that boulder home so we can study it without spending so much."

"Uh, yes sir..."

-

After a bit of walking, Billy arrived at the engineering department. He entered the front door, climbed up atop the secretary's desk and addressed everyone present:

"Okay, listen up everybody! We've got a new plan, direct from Administrator Kerman. We're going to haul Roche back to Kerbin orbit for future studies."

Someone coughed. Somebody else dropped a coffee cup. This was gonna be huge.

Rendezvous with Roche!

As the prologue suggests, Roche is a tiny asteroid that's been discovered orbiting Eve! It's suspected to be a fragment of its surface, thrown off by an ancient asteroid collision. Now, you've been tasked with retrieving it, and returning it to Kerbin orbit. Weighing 600 tons, it's not going to be easy to move. We've developed a magnetic asteroid stabbing device, which will firmly attach to any metallic areas of the object. Luckily, Expedition 1 managed to paint a bright red X over an especially metallic area before they met their horrible fate. Now it's just a matter of stabbing it with the provided Asteroid Stabbing Utility and bringing it home! Also included is a cubic chunk of a Neutron star that happens to weigh exactly the same as Roche, useful for delta-v calculations using Kerbal Engineer or MechJeb without having to actually fly all the way to Eve.

Criteria for mission success:

1. Roche does get hauled from Eve orbit to a Kerbin orbit of under 300km.
   
2. Roche does not enter any planetary atmosphere (this would greatly damage its otherwise pristine surface) Note: A large heat shield stuck in front of it allows you to ignore this restriction, so long as you don't scorch any part of Roche.
   
3. Roche does not impact any planet, especially Kerbin (this would also damage it)
   

Optional objectives:

1. Recover the stranded crew of Expedition 1 and bring them home.
   
2. Place Roche in an equatorial, circular (no more than 5km difference between periapsis and apoapsis) orbit around Kerbin.
   
3. Orbit Roche around another body besides Eve before bringing it back to Kerbin. For science.
   
4. Do the entire mission in one launch, with stock parts. This will grant you a Kerbal X-Prize Scratch-n-Sniff Sticker.
   

There are few guidelines to this challenge - this is more a free-form exercise in performing the difficult task of relocating a 600 ton space boulder. Mods are allowed, but of course the most impressive relocations will be the ones done with only stock parts, or parts balanced to stock standards! I recommend using www.imgur.com to create an album of images to showcase your mission.

Now, good luck, Kerbonauts! I look forward to seeing your ridiculous methods of relocating this huge space boulder.

Download the scenario and parts

> RendezvousWithRoche-update1.zip <

IMPORTANT: Roche is classified as debris*, so you must activate debris in the map view/tracking station to see it!

Otherwise, all you'll see is Expedition 1. Remember, to enable debris, move your mouse to the top area of the screen,

and right-click on the debris button to add it to the currently visible items. Also, it would be a good idea to

check what limit you have set for debris on the option screen, so it isn't auto-deleted.

(If you want to put up with the possible bugs, an alternate version of the .sfs file is available at the bottom of this post)

To install:

First, open up your game data folder. (To access your game files on steam, right click

on KSP, and hit properties. Then go to the Local Files tab and click "browse local files")

Second, get the files from the zip to your game directory. For windows, you can just extract the zip

directly into the KSP directory, and tell it to overwrite any files it finds. For OSX/Linux, you'll have to manually

merge the new files, otherwise you'll delete your scenarios and normal gamedata!

(thank you rspeed on reddit for that note).

Please let me know if you find any bugs/problems and I'll try to remedy them.

_{*The reason for it being debris is, if it's classified as a ship, the game thinks "oh boy, this thing's massive and must be important", so it merges your ship into it, and subsequently renames the whole stack as "Roche", which gets annoying.If you're okay with these problems though, and don't like it being debris, here's an alternate version of the sfs file. Just put it into the saves/scenarios/ folder, overwriting the normal one.}

Edited June 3, 2013 by NovaSilisko

[Kenobi McCormick]

Ooooooooh. A 600 ton brute of a space rock, eh? And we're supposed to move it back to Kerbin? I might very well try this.

....on the topic of mods, do we get points for odd methods of getting it back, even if they're not balanced? Because I already have a plan in me head but it's not exactly 'balanced'. Or 'normal'. Or even 'safe'.

Edited June 2, 2013 by Kenobi McCormick

[Francesco]

"Billy sighed and shook his head, his initial fear of having accidentally killed the administrator now overcome with annoyance."

>>>

"When it was finally revealed to the company's chairman, he stared in shock, screamed WHY and subsequently dropped dead on spot."

Kerbals seem to have a history of random heart attacks

[NovaSilisko]

Added another optional objective, the Kerbal X-Prize Scratch-n-Sniff Sticker

[Richy teh space man]

This looks interesting, I'll have a go at it.

[Kerbal01]

Whaaa!!! How

Wait he's a Dev

[Richy teh space man]

Maybe I'm just being stupid, but I can't find the asteroid. I have 9 ship pieces and 1 command pod, with the original crew in, help..

[NovaSilisko]

Did you install the parts included in the zip file as well as the scenario? Check your GameData folder for a RendezvousWithRoche folder. In that there should be Parts/New/ and then all the parts in the pack.

If so, check in the VAB under the science tab for any of the parts. The asteroid's under structural, the stabber's under utility and the mass simulator is under science.

If they are, lastly you should check your debris limit. It might be culling Roche as it's a piece of debris. If you want to keep the debris limit low you can just grab the alternate scenario file at the bottom of the first post.

Edited June 2, 2013 by NovaSilisko

[Stelith61]

If we include a heat shield, can we then aerobrake the Asteroid in kerbins aatmosphere? The extra weight would lower the rockets size.

Edited June 2, 2013 by Stelith61

[Richy teh space man]

Yeah I see it now after deleting and reinstalling it, put it down to user error

[NovaSilisko]

If we include a heat shield, can we then aerobrake the Asteroid in kerbins aatmosphere? The extra weight would lower the rockets size.

Sure, as long as no part of the asteroid experiences fiery flames.

Edit: Added as a clause to the first post.

[Richy teh space man]

Once docked with the asteroid switching between max and one less then max time warp using the [ and ] keys makes Eve move forwards and backwards on the map screen. At least on my Pc..

[NovaSilisko]

Did you perhaps use hyperedit to get there? That sounds suspiciously like the weird frameshift issues that occur when you edit your orbit.

[Ascensiam]

Have you considered implementing this into the game itself?

[NovaSilisko]

Easier said than done, but when we do have asteroids you'll be able to push them around, so consider this mission practice for the inevitable

[Richy teh space man]

Did you perhaps use hyperedit to get there? That sounds suspiciously like the weird frameshift issues that occur when you edit your orbit.

Yeah guilty as charged, I was just doing some preliminary tests on it prior to doing the challenge itself.. I'll stop posting for now lol

[Kenobi McCormick]

...is there any reason that neither Roche nor Expedition 1 show up in the map? Because I'm in Eve orbit right now and they're suspiciously absent. The parts are present. The stabber is installed on my craft, I fiddled with the test block, and the boulder itself is in the parts folder. But neither it nor the ill-fated exploratory crew are visible on my map.

[NovaSilisko]

Did you load the scenario or just start a new game?

[Kenobi McCormick]

I did indeed load the scenario through the scenarios menu, and if I poke around inside the scenarios folder I can find a persistence.sfs, quicksave.sfs, and a ships/VAB/Asteroid Hunter 1.txt sitting there under a "Rendesvous with Roche" subfolder.

[NovaSilisko]

Try going to the scenario menu, selecting RWR and hitting Restart? Something might have goofed.

[Punk]

This seems like a cool way to distribute challenges and it uses the scenario functionality as well. I approve!

[Kenobi McCormick]

Try going to the scenario menu, selecting RWR and hitting Restart? Something might have goofed.

Maybe. Lemme back up my progress first...without letting anyone else know what I'm doing I'm just going to say my craft is 4/5ths as heavy as Roche so it takes a LONG time to turn the thing around.

[NovaSilisko]

Apparently there's a problem with the materials on linux, working to fix it now.

[Alikor]

My first post on these forums .

First of all: thank you for the sheer awesomeness of this scenario!

If this is only a glimpse on what's to come in future updates, you'll keep me hooked to this game for years (290+ hours already in)!

I copied the vessel code part of Roche in my persistent.sfs. The thing loads correctly and everything seems just fine. Can't wait to start building my first asteroid station! Just a question: both in my game save and in the scenario, the asteroid and the stabber appear white and textureless. Any hint about the problem (i'm running KSP under Mac OS X)?

Thank you!

[NovaSilisko]

All right, hopefully fixed it. New version uploaded with the material changes: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/575558/RendezvousWithRoche-update1.zip

Delete the RendezvousWithRoche folder from gamedata before you install this if you got the original version, it might screw things up otherwise.

Edit: Alikor, looks like your post was unapproved until just now. Your problem should hopefully be fixed by this latest update.

Edited June 3, 2013 by NovaSilisko