The Lacklustre Tour (slight spoilers)

[Silverchain]

I'll get there one day - I've been sizing up jump points on one side today, but it's a four kilometre jump, youch.

(There's a steep slope up from a crater on the south that should do, but I want to drop the pilot off first and try it uncrewed!)

I'm going to need a lot of planes and rovers for the Joolian moons, so I'm working on a combined transport approach where a spaceplane docks with a rover/lander/fuel tank in LKO.

Spaceplane Of Men and Monsters carrying a rover/lander over the canyon. I'm a rubbish navigator so they were nearly out of fuel, but both parts landed ok.

This arrangement turned out to be extremely wobbly - it wouldn't go over x2 time acceleration during engine burn - so I'm trying a new version with twin docking ports.

Fuel was low all round so I sent the Euryale Joy Candle to bring more out to Dres. Unfortunately there was a serious problem with the staging.

(I decoupled the decouplers under x2 time acceleration and the force became enough to break the docking ports off the side fuel tanks.)

The top docking ports on the tanks were unaffected but it meant I couldn't stack them.

Still, there was plenty of fuel to go round; Joy Candle provides a tank to the Merry Go Round; spaceplane Our Lady of the Shooting Stars is in the background.

Next steps: pick up the Science/Hab module again, return the Keg to orbit and collect it, try a canyon jump and then ship out for Jool. I haven't been to Jool and its moons for a long time.

[Silverchain]

Spaceplane Team Rocket arrives at Laythe carrying a rover lander. Rocket and the lander were fitted with double connectors in an attempt to reduce wobble. It didn't work.

I sent these on ahead to remind myself how to behave around Jool. The pair made a direct aerobrake at Laythe, with a 19km periapsis and it still wasn't enough to capture.

I've no idea what it'll be like for arriving from Dres, so that'll be fun.

The rover deployment was sub-optimal.

After the rover splashed down, Team Rocket came in for a nice beach landing. It was dark, and the beach turned out to be a cliff. I avoided the cliffs and tried to land on top of them where it was flatter.

Meowch! RIP Charlie Kerman. Again. Some Kerbals never learn.

(The sorry truth is that those planes aren't particularly good at landing, even on Kerbin; they come in very fast and while they're reasonably stable they're prone to losing wings and once part has gone they cartwheel and explode.

Charlie's cockpit bounced along the ground a bit and I hoped it would survive, but it didn't. Maybe a cockpit can be lined with ablative struts to help it survive?)

[Silverchain]

I realised I needed a spaceplane better-suited to Laythe - as I'm sending them there along with a dedicated rover anyway, I could switch to a lighter and more maneouverable design with only a single turbojet and no heavy nuclear engine and fuel.

Kiremone Kerman tests out a prototype back on Kerbin.

This time I at least managed to drop the rover onto an island. There was a problem during parachute deployment (I'd strutted the rover to the lander in this model, and when the chutes opened the top of the lander broke off, but the whole thing kinda coasted to the ground) and the lander was destroyed on impact but the rover survived intact.

Ceremonial-class spaceplane The Sensible Court landed next to the rover.

I love this game.

[Geschosskopf]

Good crashes. Keep 'em coming

[Silverchain]

Good news, everyone!

Spaceplane Wheely Good! made it to Laythe orbit safely.

Unfortunately this Science/Hab module didn't do so well, and after a long flight from Kerbin I messed up the aerobrake height and then failed to throw enough bits off the ship in time.

Left on its own the engine block would've gotten to safety. Fortunately there were no crew on board the lab. Just have to bring another one out.

This cute little rover might tag along.

After the Science/Hab module sank to its watery grave I scraped together some random bits of ship from LKO and sent them out.

The Regenbogen Oberth (originally designed to test the real-world benefits of the Oberth effect, and fitted with five detachable nuclear engines) picks up the damaged bottom section (Mainsail and all!) of some other ship (not a Euryale after all, think it was the bottom half of a crew transfer vehicle.)

The combined monstrosity (pictured leaving Kerbin) made it safely to Laythe orbit.

Merry Go Round and the Keg finally arrive at Laythe. I don't think the Keg has enough power to get off Laythe if I land it, but y'never know.

Joy Candle passes close to Jool before heading to Vall. "I know I've made some very poor decisions recently..."

Joy Candle landed on Vall; happy Kerbals celebrate. The smooth landing gives me confidence to bring the Merry Go Round down to the surface when it moves on to Vall.

These ships were always intended as landers for Duna and under, but the addition of Senior docking ports makes them much more practical as they can land Apollo style and not have to carry all their fuel down and back up.

[Silverchain]

I've been putting together a small flotilla of ships which are now on their way to Jool to join and resupply the tour.

Spaceplane Spherical Cow (Skurj-class) caught just after colliding with a discarded booster stage from the lander it had docked to.

The collision tore off one delta wing but the craft is otherwise (!) undamaged and should be fine for landing on Vall, Bop or Pol.

Spaceplane Fifty Thousand Tears (Ceremonial-class with extra Science gear) swings by the Mun on its way out.

Science Lander Michigan J. Frog (Orkney-class).

Spaceship The Powers That Push Me (Euryale-class) carrying the space station hub Gimbal Gold and attached fuel and engine blocks.

While it's not clear in the picture, I added a command seat to the outside of the engine block just in case, and the game consequently classified it as a rover.

I've mentioned I'm a rubbish navigator, though in my defence launching this way while wasteful does stagger the arrival times at Jool, which is useful.

The extra ship is the spaceplane Green Man Gaming (Skurj-class).

[Mistake Not…]

Can I just mention that I love all the ship names?

Keep going!

[Silverchain]

Thanks, I try. Though the names lack gravitas.

Nothing outstanding to report; the flotilla arrived at Jool without especial incident but the Frog ended up slingshotted into some ridiculous elliptical orbit thanks to an unplanned encounter with Tylo.

All the others ended up in a variety of peculiar Laythe orbits; after some work the new Laythe station is in roughly 100x100 equatorial prograde orbit and is ready for business.

Fifty Thousand Tears was in a highly elliptical, highly inclined retrograde orbit, so I decided on a very Kerbal move.

Yuck. Time to burn retrograde until the spaceplane will reenter sharply somewhere along the equator. Of course it can survive!

After smashing down until close to sea level, the plane rotates around to face 90 degrees and accelerates up through the atmosphere in a standard spaceplane ascent.

Only now going in a lovely prograde equatorial orbit.

Rendezvous - and the Kerbals got some good science on the way.

There's a fair amount of fuel on the station so we're good for plenty of operations here, but I'll be moving most of the ships on to Vall once I've recovered the Frog from its far-out wandering.

[Silverchain]

Spaceplane Stephanie! delivers a prototype rover to the Mun before returning to Kerbin. Gregtop Kerman poses.

I've been continuing to tidy things up with the tour fleet, and sending up fuel/rover pods to the dwindling flock of outdated spaceplanes in LKO.

Once they're all fueled up they'll head out to Jool so that I can drop a rover or two on each moon except Tylo. Have I mentioned I like rovers?

Merry Go Round took the Keg to Vall.

After returning to Kerbin in the Stephanie! Gregtop flew the Hermaphroditic, Transductive, Different to rendezvous with Kerbin Station Beta.

It'll join the old spaceplanes when they head to Jool.

Keg landed next to the Joy Candle, and I'll bring Merry Go Round down there next and bring a rover from Laythe. Then go look for the henge.

[Silverchain]

I "borrowed" a rover design and while testing it on the Mun, the lander Intergalactical Upset serendipitously discovered this Mun Arch.

As it happens it's only about 20km from the big Mun base / lander crash site / upside down rover dumping ground I've been steadily adding to since the tour ships stopped there.

Doodgan has set off driving to the base on the rover and has gotten about half way - no mean feat as the terrain relief is extremely sharp along the edge of a giant crater.

The rover has sustained some minor damage along the way but is proving stable and durable. The brakes work even when travelling down a steep slope provided the torque is on.

(There's a SAS gyro in the centre of the rover.)

(ETA) Arrived safe and sound. The lag is getting serious as the various craft here are all part-heavy.

Edited February 27, 2014 by Silverchain

[Geschosskopf]

Spaceplane Stephanie! delivers a prototype rover to the Mun before returning to Kerbin. Gregtop Kerman poses.

It's the Xenomorph queen! Run for your lives

[Silverchain]

It's a perfectly innocent little rover.

Nothing dramatic or very interesting today, I continued to mess about with the stolen rover design and launched a mixed bunch of rovers and another big ship.

Cane Sugar (Skurj, carrying large fuel tank), Cavalier Disrespect (Skurj, carrying a rover), Ring of Bright Flame (Skurj, carrying a rover), Conciliatrix (Skurj, carrying a rover) and Two Thousand Hamburg Four (Euryale) leaving Kerbin for Jool.

I haven't finished moving the last batch of ships around from Laythe, but I'll do that as this lot are travelling. This should be all the hardware I need for Jool's moons for the moment.

[Silverchain]

Onwards and upwards!

Some additional ships joined the Jool-bound flotilla at the last moment, a pair of very-likely-doomed Tylo landers (Grawlix and Red Rosy Bud), an extra rover (Foxblade Feet) and a small habitat (Loyals March.)

All are mated with nuclear transfer stages.

The near simultaneous arrival of nine ships at Jool will prove taxing. My plan is to aerobrake them all to very high elliptical orbits around Jool and then sort them out at leisure.

Fuel budget will be an issue for some of the ships, but the big Euryale is carrying about a couple of jumbo tanks worth spare fuel so provided I can get the ships to rendezvous it'll all work out.

At Jool, the Green Man Gaming collected a discarded rover (part of the transfer stage that brought a Ceremonial-class non-nuclear spaceplane out) from a difficult eccentric retrograde Laythe orbit and after looking at its remaining fuel and doing some hasty mental calculations it seemed a trip to Pol was possible...

...and on arriving there it looked like there'd be just enough for a landing if I used the monopropellant as well, and there was!

The plane touched down with 1.68 units of liquid fuel remaining (ETA ignore my earlier idiotic ramblings about liquid and oxidiser) and 4.66 units of monoprop.

I expect it would have survived a crash even from quite a height, but still it's got to be one of the closest run landings I've ever made!

Neildas Kerman goes for a drive on the Blue Toga. Unfortunately, Pol is not good rover country. I'd go so far as to say it's bloody awful rover country.

It skips and it bounces. With reaction wheels off it skids around. With reaction wheels on it can't keep its wheels on the ground.

It's actually quicker to spin the whole rover end over end than it is to drive, but poor Neildas might end up turned into debris.

Edited March 1, 2014 by Silverchain
I was being dim.

[Geschosskopf]

Neildas Kerman goes for a drive on the Blue Toga. Unfortunately, Pol is not good rover country. I'd go so far as to say it's bloody awful rover country.

It skips and it bounces. With reaction wheels off it skids around. With reaction wheels on it can't keep its wheels on the ground.

It's actually quicker to spin the whole rover end over end than it is to drive, but poor Neildas might end up turned into debris.

http://i.imgur.com/TyJ0Arf.png

I remember way back when I was very small, there was an old B&W "Gumby" episode where he went to the moon. The surface there was covered with little clay cones all over, which were alive and gave Gumby a lot of trouble. Pol has always reminded me of that old show.

[Silverchain]

I keep thinking of the Coneheads. It's a strange place.

It turns out the spaceplane is a bit better at driving over Pol - must be because of the longer and wider wheelbase - and I've been able to find a nice flat spot to drop a rescue ship to.

A lander descends towards Laythe carrying the rover Brainhammer.

Because I'm an utter idiot sometimes, I'd intended to transfer fuel out of the lander to a spaceplane, then control the descent approach using its small remaining RCS supply and hope I got lucky with an island along the orbital track.

However, I forgot to transfer the fuel and didn't realise it, so while I got a good descent close to an island, if I'd remembered the fuel I could've hit the island no trouble.

But I'd popped the 'chutes before I realised my mistake.

The shore is tantalisingly close (well, it looks a lot closer than it is from the perspective of sea level - it's actually several kilometres.)

By spinning the rover sideways it can splash along at about two metres per second. Or four knots in nautical speak!

I have installed an autopilot to help with this task.

[Geschosskopf]

Is that last pic the long-sought shaving cream atom?

[Werwolf]

Simply amazing read. Keep it up.... the toll has been heavy, but my god, the stories these Kerbals will have, man!

[Silverchain]

Is that last pic the long-sought shaving cream atom?

It's a Rover Rolling Massive Particle, or RRoMP. The first model autopilot was a Swiss army knife but it kept falling over onto the other keys...

Thanks Werwolf, I'm having fun in a bloody-minded way. Which is just as well, because things haven't gone well this morning.

After a long time rolling along (thank goodness for physics warp x4 or it would have taken hours) Brainhammer reached shore - it turned out to be over 8km from the splashdown point.

Unfortunately although the overall rover held together like the Top Gear Hilux, something has seriously broken (I think the trans-axle is blown) and it doesn't move smoothly but bumps and grinds along.

(Ok, the struts which the wheels are attached to are themselves connected to the ends of RTGs in a strange manner. I try not to abuse clipping but make an exception for the big strut boxes as there's clearly meant to be space inside them.

So I think the struts have come loose, but are still being held roughly in place by other bits, and they're wobbling around the RTGs as the rover drives so it bounces all over the place.)

It was painful driving it a small way up the cliff, which is itself two or three kilometres high. Bit of a failure.

I crashed the Lathe of Heaven on Laythe some time ago, and wanted to rescue the pilot. So I collected the Sensible Court, refueled it from a tug, transferred the pilot to the Laythe orbiting station and tried to land.

Sensible Court and Fifty Thousand Tears docked at the station.

Because the crash site was near the north pole and the station is in an equatorial orbit, I had to dip down into the atmosphere, realign and do a suborbital hop.

Visible in the background of the picture are the ships of the approaching flotilla, though they're still a long way out.

There's also an experimental ion-drive vessel out there (We Didn't Mean To Go To Space) which I must get round to recovering... I have phases where I think ion drives are a good idea for crewed ships. Never works well.

Yeah... so I crashed the Sensible Court right on top of the old crash site. Then I undocked the Fifty Thousand Tears, did exactly the same thing and crashed that plane as well. Rude words.

There is one spot of good news; Our Lady of the Shooting Stars successfully boosted from Laythe to Pol orbit and has plenty of fuel. It should be able to rendezvous with and refuel the plane that's stranded on the surface there.

[Silverchain]

I've been distracted by the current Better Stock Craft challenge, which is looking at replacements for the Aeris 4a spaceplane.

My entry for the challenge is a considerably altered version of the Ceremonial class, and I'm planning to bring several of them out to replace the ones I just crashed on Laythe.

Kerbin orbit is getting silly (I'm trying every design submitted), so I'm going to have an awful lot of housework to do clearing it, especially as a few of the planes inconveniently ran out of fuel.

Ironic that I'd just managed to get it clean again by sending the remaining spaceplanes I had there on the Jool flotilla which is still in transit!

Ceremonial Myriad Buxtehude sightseeing on Kerbin shortly before taking off to orbit.

Second Stage Guild Turbine ran out of fuel attempting to return from Munar orbit (nearly made it - not bad range for such a small plane, only one FLT-400, couple of Oscar-Bs and some additional jet fuel) and is seen refueling from the Foppish Man-Bird.

I'm pondering bringing all these planes out to Laythe, but it'd be a mammoth undertaking and I ought to get on touring. I'll maybe bring a couple of my favourites.

[RandomTask]

Seriously enjoying the write-up on your grand tour.

It's seems a very Kerbal thing to do: leave broken and ruined landers, planes and rovers on every orbiting body you can.

[Silverchain]

That's about the size of it, though it's not deliberate!

Because the BSC challenge flights I'm working on and testing are mostly happening in real time and fast orbits around Kerbin, the fleet is still crawling across space towards Jool.

In the meantime I've taken the opportunity to test some equipment on the Mun.

The Munar Escape Safety System, or MESS.

A small personal spacecraft which can take a single terrified passenger up to orbit, or alternatively be used to fly short hops around the surface.

This very light craft can be attached unfueled to the side of a lander, and if the main craft suffers damage, fuel can be transferred from it to the ROUND-8 tank and the MESS can be used to escape.

The whole thing is very light unfueled so for minimal extra mass you get a whole backup ascent stage.

I've always been a little sceptical about the external command seats being used on landers (as opposed to rovers) and hadn't realised there was a plan to do something similar on the Apollo missions.

I had constructed a small base on top of this canyon on the Mun. Dorie Kerman fell the whole way down it in slow motion, and somehow survived.

It's very steep-sided, but that's not going to stop Kerbals... this rover was able to drive down, pick up Dorie and drive straight back up the near vertical canyon wall.

(It's even steeper than it looks from the picture!) It's funny that in KSP rovers often perform better going up steep slopes, where the wheels bite securely, than they do on shallow slopes.

[Silverchain]

Still no great Tour progress while the BSC Spaceplane challenge continues, but I've had the opportunity to work on another light emergency and utility craft.

The Minimal Orbital Recovery Tool, Air-Launched, pictured during testing attached to the spaceplane First We Must Destroy:

Designed to be attached to other craft of any type (optionally with tanks empty, to be filled only in extremis) it provides half a klick or so of emergency velocity change and a parachute, which should be enough to bring someone home from most Kerbin orbits.

Additionally it can operate independently and refuel from a small docking port so can double as an orbital shuttle or even as a dropship for very light moons.

I do hope to return to the exploration of Jool's moons soon!

[Silverchain]

At last, progress! After the BSC challenge testing ended, all ships from the last flotilla have arrived at Jool, mostly going where they were intended to.

There were some slight problems with unexpected intercepts and intercept angles, and the hab Loyals March which was intended for Tylo orbit had to aerobrake around Laythe instead.

The spaceplane Ring of Bright Flame brought a rover/lander combo to Bop, and it made a good landing.

The rover set off exploring, heading for a large crater. The vertical relief on Bop is very very steep, and the horizon is close so it often feels like everywhere is downhill.

The orbital tug Foxblade Feet brought another rover down to the first landing site, and then the spaceplane followed.

The Feet was never intended to land directly; I tried to bring it down low, hover, undock the rover from the top and then move out of the way (which worked) but then I tried to land it on its engines and broke them.

I managed later to dock the spaceplane to the downed tug and suck it dry of precious, lifegiving rocket fuel.

When the Michigan J. Frog came to Jool, it accidentally ended up out of fuel and in a very high and slow orbit. I sent the newly arrived spaceplane Cane Sugar to refuel it.

Unfortunately, a peculiar bug means that I cannot undock the fuel tank which is attached to the Cane Sugar, so the only way I can refuel it will be to transfer fuel via the tug section.

I'd much rather have linked the two ships together, ditched the fuel tank and travelled as one unit!

So, all is well. Next up I'll land the Merry Go Round on Vall, then bring it to Tylo, where the tanker ship Two Thousand Hamburg Four is waiting with lots more fuel.

There's a couple of prototype Tylo landers in orbit there too, but I don't trust them, so I'll fuel them up and try them out uncrewed.

It's been a long time since I landed there and it's hard to practice.

[Silverchain]

Although the docking bug persists, I was able to transfer the Michigan J. Frog to Vall and land it safely.

Also in Vall orbit, the Conciliatrix had brought a rover / lander module. At the last minute Richfen Kerman decided to fly it down, hopefully to find Vallhenge.

Fuel was tight, so I flew a fast descent. I misjudged it. RIP Richfen Kerman, latest casualty of the tour.

[Silverchain]

Undeterred by the loss of Richfen and the Conciliatrix' lander (and with a much healthier fuel load) the Merry Go Round (background) landed safely at Vall base.

Tylo looks down mockingly from the heavens above. It knows who's boss.

The crew of Merry Go Round and the staff of Vall base mourn their many fallen colleagues in true Kerbal style, with a big grin.

Unfortunately Vall base is a) not much of a base, as there's no rover present and an awfully long way from the henge, so I don't think we'll be going there now.

I'm racing against the asteroids.