Real Challenge - Off-world operations in real solar system

[Creature]

Oops - Off-world operations

This confidence-inspiring name belongs to a brand new branch of our space agency. Our mission is to explore the solar system and establish Oops as an operational unit that can be trusted with some actual missions in the future.

While waiting for contracts to be implemented, I'm exploring the career mode with the Realism Overhaul mod collection. I'm using all of the listed required mods plus Medieval Nerd's Realistic Tech Progression Lite tech tree, procedural fairings, ECLSS life support mod and the amazing KW rocketry which I just love. For the engine pack I chose NathanKell's Reaching for the stars-pack. Also I'm using the Environmental Visual Enhancements by rbray89.

I'm by far not a great player so feel free to laugh at any silly mistakes I might do

Onwards!

We need to start from somewhere of course.

Bill was kind enough to order us a Space-goer Starter Kit with some basic parts to get our program started. Our first big goal is obviously to get some kind of a rocket-like thingy into a stable orbit. First step on that road is to get some kind of thingy to lift off the ground and go in the general direction of space. There's not much choice in probe cores, so we'll just start with this thing.

It has integrated experiments in it, obviously the science folks want to gather some air and do some reading while in the upper atmosphere. Easy-peasy. I can gather air and read while lounging around in a hammock, how hard can it be when we have an entire rocket dedicated just for that?

Uh-oh. OK well. We have a rocket here, but all these options are a bit too baffling. I just pick kerosene, because it sounds manly and rocket~y. You can't go wrong with kerosene. Lots and lots of kerosene. We need to go high so the biggest and strongest engine is obviously selected. Let's add some more kerosene on it, just to be sure.

This beauty is called "Honeybee I" and it will go high and fast, I'm sure of it. They say that according to the laws of physics bees aren't supposed to be able to fly, but still they do, so the name is appropriate.

Liftoff! It's a great day for Oops.

Mission completed, I'd say! We're now flying high and doing some sweet science.

Umm... was it supposed to go this high?

OK this can't right. Mission control? Bob? Were we supposed to land this thing somehow? Yeah of course! I have the parachutes right here, I'm not stupid! What? Oh..."

Ahem, we had a bit too much kerosene it seems, so we'll need to change the rocket size a bit. And "adjust the placement of parachutes."

[Creature]

Faster, higher

Honeybee II

Next attempt to reach the upper atmosphere and come back. Honeybee II is smaller as I'm aiming for 100 km apoapsis, not 1000 km as happened with first rocket. This makes it faster and it has a silly TWR, but we'll just throttle down a bit. Jebediah was snickering at this idea, I have no idea why. This time we're also using parachutes to help with the landing.

Airborne!

We're going fast, throttle down guys.

Erm, guys... Throttle? Any day now if you will.

OK so while we're coasting to apoapsis and redoing our previous science experiments, it dawned on me that there's really no way to throttle down these engines. There's only on/off switch even with liquid boosters. Also, you get only one ignition so essentially liquid engines are much like solids, except they can be turned off at will. There's a part with extra ignitors though, I'll have to study how it works at some point.

Miraculously Honeybee II survived the ascent, but falling back down presented another problem.

Those parachutes. They burned off on re-entry. Yeah.

Again, a fine landing.

Honeybee III

You know what's amazing about the Stayputnik probe core? It seems very durable. I'm pretty sure it's just a metal ball that goes beep. So we're making Honeybee III even smaller and faster and I'm counting on the core to survive it. There would be smaller engines available, sure, but I don't really see downscaling as a proactive, problem solving approach you know. If life hands you big boosters, make fast rockets.

The core seems to be doing just fine.

All fuel is used up before heat gets too intense for our little 'putnik and we get a nice apoapsis.

Science! Again!

Parachutes didn't even burn off. We're coasting peacefully among the clouds.

To a pretty landing.

Science is finally collected. Yay!

I'm faced with hard decisions. This is what the tech tree looks like now. I'm picking the early staging node first because it's cheap and I need staging if I'm gonna go anywhere.

Also you gotta have engines.

I'm also picking early probes at this point. The description says there's two versions of stayputnik, but those were already on the first node and these cores are the QBE ones. I'm picking the node mostly for the battery so I can transmit stuff.

Next goal will be to actually get a real orbit. Having staging should help with this and maybe the rockets will start to look like rockets soon.

[NobodyIP]

I'm enjoying this so far.

[Creature]

I'm enjoying this so far.

I'm glad you like it

I've made some progress, but it takes surprisingly long to sort out all the screenshots.

[Creature]

Cutting the rocket into pieces

Honeybee IV

So maybe it's time to use some scientification in designing the next rocket. By that I mean adding explosive charges all over the thing and blow up any parts we're not using anymore. Hmm, well the engineers made it sound a bit more convincing.

For the upper stage, I'm actually thinking about the engine choise this time. WAC Corporal Sustainer sounds very convincing and organized so I'll pick that one. Also I'm swapping the kerosene for some Amines / Nitric Acid -combo for the engine. I'm still trying to figure out what's the difference between all the fuels, apart from ISP and thrust of course. The tank is a stretchy tank, although there's some confusion with the tech tree entries saying stretchable tank but the parts are called conic tanks. They work fine nevertheless, so I'll see how it goes. There's many variations of the tanks, like balloon tanks and some kind of cryogenic tank which I'm guessing could be used to store ice cream or other similar snacks.

The lower stage is made of "cylindical service module" which is another variation of the strecthy tank. UDMH/Acid combo is the way to go for many reasons I'm sure are there. I most definitely didn't just pick it at random.

Our engineers insisted that we need more boosters, so I'm adding more boosters, this time SRBs. It now has quite a lot of dV, but to be honest I have no idea how much I need to reach orbit. I know orbital speed is around 7~ish km/s so I probably don't have enough just yet. Also I have no idea what SLT means next to the TWR. Sea Level Thrust?

Enough with the numbers, let's launch!

Bob was charged with taking a photograph of lift-off, but we later found him eating some mint ice cream our scientists had stuffed inside one of the cryogenic tanks so we missed the launch itself. But here's a pretty picture a few moments after liftoff!

Separation of SRBs went perfectly!

Upper stage separation proceeding as planned, things are looking good!

We should be almost in orbit, right guys? Let's see that flight dat-

OK that was a massive disappointment. Turns out the rocket had way too little thrust and spent most of it's time just waddling upwards in a slow manner. Luckily we can add more boosters for the next rocket!

[Creature]

Honeybee V

We had a little discussion about our previous failure and came to a very solid conclusion. What I need is more power and more explosives. And kerosene. A few words about this new design. First off, the first stage runs on kerosene, because I could get the most thrust from it and it seemed pretty much superior in every way. I'm also pretty sure that the SLT means TWR on sea level. I tried to find some documentation but either there wasn't any or I just couldn't find it.

Something I forgot to mention on Honeybee IV was the poor maneuverability after the winglets had separated. The corporal sustainer engine doesn't have any gimballing and the probe core has very very low torque on it's reaction wheels so essentially the stage is uncontrollable. The small orange radials have gimbals so using those will help with steering. We had a morning meeting about this today and decided that steering is something we should have.

On that note, the upper stage is split into two and the probe itself is given a new engine. This one is actually throttleable and restartable! It's using hypergolic fuels which allow this so I'm expecting great things from the aptly named LR11R engine.

The probe core itself has two blocks of explosives, one to separate the re-entry phase that has a heat shield and second one to drop the heat shield off. This one we don't really need, but it's integrated into the shield.

Thrust is still a bit low and I know this won't make orbit just yet but I'm more interested in seeing how the engines perform.

Here's the rocket after SRB separation. Something I have no idea about as well is when to start gravity turn. Normally with FAR I just start it right away after clearing the tower, but now I decided to wait all the way until about 20 km to even begin.

Overall the launch went really well. The orange engines gimbal like crazy though, SAS went absolutely nuts if you tried to turn with anything but a quick, gentle tap on the controls. After the probe had spent all it's fuel I managed to get a good apoapsis at 251 km, which is a bit above the atmosphere. I'm not entirely sure where the limit is, but it's somewhere between 150 and 200 km I think. The tiny torque on the core is barely enough to turn it, but to do this properly SAS needs to be off.

At the end of the day I'm calling this our first entirely successful suborbital flight!

Now onwards to tease out that periapsis!

I'm liking the mod collection a lot so far, but I do have one gripe with it. The documentation is a bit off or misleading. For example the Stayputnik Mk 2 says it has experiments for suborbital flights. I was able to use the data recorder to gather the data, which acts as a resource that's needed to run the experiment. It worked nicely once my situation was low in space but the experiment itself couldn't be done. The experiment says KE/LEO in it, so I'm assuming you need a stable orbit for it. There's also no way to tell in VAB what the experiments are, so you need to first launch the probe before you can even see them. Not a big issue, but it is a bit confusing. There's also a technical issue where adding parts with symmetry messes up the fuel settings. Sometimes one or all of the tanks lose their ability to contain fuel at all and the only way to fix it so far has been to repeatedly just redo the parts. This can be very frustrating at times, but I don't know if my install is botched or if this happens to others as well. However with mods some technical issues are to be expected so as long as I can get it to work after a while, it's just an inconvenience.

[Creature]

Honeybee VI

That's it! We're making everything bigger this time and packing more kerosene, aka kerbal juice, than ever before!

The rocket starts to look a bit thin and tall, I honestly don't think it's possible to stretch it any more. The four liquid boosters weren't strong enough to get it off the ground, so we added some SRBs. But it was just too silly to have only one small SRB on each liquid booster so we added three. These would get it neatly off the ground and accelerate to a good pace fast (also yay for thrust limiter on SRBs!) and with stretchy tanks it was easy to adjust the liquid booster size so that once they run out of fuel, the core still has enough TWR to keep going. I'm not mathy enough to know if it would've been smarter to have more than 1.0 TWR after separation but I figured that once going at decent speed, it doesn't matter so much if there's some blind spots in acceleration. The whole thing weighs 31.7 tons, taking a payload of 200 kilograms hopefully to orbit. OK so the payload fraction is less than one percent but let's not worry about that before orbit.

Spirits are high on KSC as Honeybee VI is prepped for launch. Roar of engines fills the air as the rocket lifts off and shiny, twirling chocolate bar wrappers fill the air as one of the SRBs coughs them up on the unsuspecting crowd, then falling silent and dark.

Wait, what?

So that's where Bill had stashed his snacks. As it turns out, one of the SRBs didn't have any fuel in it, I have no idea why as they should be symmetrical. It doesn't matter though, we still have enough thrust to get going and the gimballing keeps the rocket steady. Also from the photo you can't even see the mistake so all is well as we feast on the ad hoc chocolate fondue which doesn't taste too much like kerosene.

The SRB triplets are dropped off. I was afraid they wouldn't separate neatly or would overheat, but all in all they behaved nicely.

I did similar gravity turn as before, starting around 20 km and I was already going pretty horizontally when the liquid boosters were separated.

The rocket is well above atmosphere when the upper stage is ignited. Now is time to gather some speed.

Insertion stage separates. It has low TWR but we're already in a good position so it doesn't matter.

And we have a periapsis! Honeybee VI is officially on a stable orbit! Time to celebrate and bully Bill into sharing his second snackstash!

There's plenty of dV left, so this might in theory even get to a high orbit, but we're sticking to mission plan. The show isn't over yet, this thing needs to come back alive.

But there's always time for a little pose, so strut those antennas and show us some elegance!

Time to get serious and do some science. As I suspected, the experiments work as intended now that the probe is in stable orbit. It exposes the mysterious sample to a vacuum to see if it survives the harsh conditions and does some reading. It's all very sciency. I transmit back what I can in case the probe doesn't survive re-entry.

Time to head back. I lower the periapsis to 20 km and hope that the heatshield can take the deceleration. When hitting the atmosphere, the clouds get bugged somehow. I think they're clipping with the planet's surface because they get a bit better after I raise their height to 10 km from the mod's GUI. However when approaching the atmosphere they look pretty ugly and pixelated, I don't know what's happening or if they're supposed to look like this:

Because after the re-entry (heat shield withstood it fine!) I'm sailing through them and they're absolutely gorgeus. The picture doesn't even do them justice, the mists look very good, the only bad side is that I think I have a very short draw distance or something, because some parts of the cloud keep appearing and disappearing randomly. When I have more patience, I might try to play around with the settings more.

After hitting water and surviving the known water-bouncing-bug I finally gather the spoils! A smashing success!

I decide to go for lots of cheap nodes. The next tier in rocketry costs 500 science and right now I have no idea how to get those kinds of numbers, but maybe I'll get bigger amounts when making manned flights or going to the moon. We'll see about that then. I'm going to take the thermometer and gravioli detector out for a spin next and see what their science output is like.

P.S. Sorry for the badly clipped tech tree pictures.

[Creature]

Honeybee VII

The purpose of this mission was simply to gather all data I could with the newly unlocked thermometer and gravioli detector. I was otherwise similar to the famous Honeybee VI but some fairings and nosecones were added. The rocket looks cooler, but the mission was actually quite boring. I had an extra objective though. Since I didn't need to land it (everything was transmittable), I was thinking of leaving it on orbit as a planning device, to see some dV requirements for maneuvers and such.

The launch was smoother than before, this time all the SRBs were filled with rocket fuel instead of chocolate.

I managed to gather most of the biomes. With RSS they are all over the place since it uses Kerbins biome map so I got highlands, grasslands and such while flying over the ocean. I know there's some maps with custom biomes mod to fix this, but honestly I'll be doing so little science on Earth that I probably won't bother at this point.

The mission was only a partial success though. I had only 2 solar panels on it, but it turns out that they're massively weaker than in stock and couldn't keep the probe running. I tested this on the ground and I'd need at least 0.70 exposure to get enough juice, but of course I didn't orient the probe properly so it's floating dead in space now. Luckily I was able to transmit pretty much all of the data back home (which was worth some science, but I obviously need to advance in the program if I want to get to the more expensive nodes). With this, we decided to declare the Honeybee line of rockets officially a successful series of missions, but as such they can carry too small payloads so the next step will be designing a new lifter that could potentially get a kerbal on the orbit.