Flora 3

[lajoswinkler]

I've finally put the modified rescue vessel into orbit around Kerbin, battling 2.5 fps at lowest possible settings and initially almost 370 parts of CPU choking material.

Orbit is 73x75 km and the ship has around 13.5 km/s of delta-v. That's barely enough, so this mission will probably end with a failure.

If I manage to land this without it becoming a mangled pile of e-waste, I'll try to use MechJeb and manual for ascent. If I need to, I'll try to use Kerbal jetpacks (450 m/s delta-v) to rescue all of them after the last litre of bipropellant is spent.

That means 3 rendezvous operations when I send the rescue ship.

The Kerbals are at 4 km tall plateau,

.

Stay tuned for more news.

[lajoswinkler]

Thanks, MechJeb.

I'll try again tommorow, combining MechJeb's autopilot and manual approach at the very last moments.

This was barely 5 fps with almost 190 parts... Provided parachutes decrease the landing speed to 8.2 m/s. If MechJeb had only deployed the landing gear...

[JayKay]

If MechJeb had only deployed the landing gear...

Looks like you switched MechJeb off at the end. MechJeb deploys the gear in the last few seconds before touchdown. It always makes me nervous, wondering if it will deploy in time, so I usually do it manually a lot earlier.

JK

[lajoswinkler]

No, it was turned on. I was just watching the screen. It seems to be turned off because it stopped working after it touched the ground. I guess it thought "mission complete" while the craft was starting to impact the ground with its engines.

Next time I'll turn it off, deploy the landing gear and give some thrust to reduce the speed below 5 m/s.

Maybe I shouldn't have lowered the terrain detail. The ground actually swallowed the stranded team (they're 210 m away yet invisible) and maybe MechJeb used the wrong ground elevation reference. I just had to do it to increase the framerate as much as possible.

KAS and a surface fuel supply mission would be great now.

[JayKay]

It was probably the lag that got you then. I've noticed MechJeb really struggles with lag at times. The automatic docking at my space station was useless, it just spun around and around, probably because it kept overshooting its mark with each frame and tried thrusting the other way, overshot again, etc. In your case it probably was impacting the ground before it knew it was that close.

JK