A newb's adventures.

[Mister Spock]

This will be a log of my newbish efforts to learn KSP. I've been playing KSP for only a few weeks. I did start a career mode in 23.5, but I got only as far as Minmus, and I didn't come close to finishing the tech tree. Last week I started a new career game in 24.2, and I've been loving it.

My first missions were probably standard stuff. Launches, orbits, parts-testing, Kerbil-rescuing, etc. From a newb's perspective, the contracts are pretty nice. The "rescue Kerbil" contracts forced me to learn how to do an orbital rendez-vous. With some help from the nice folks in the Gameplay Questions thread, I was able to figure it out, and I now can do them reasonably well. The "test parts" contracts introduce me to new parts, or even to existing parts that I've been ignoring, and they give me a look at them. These contracts have also induced me to make a plane, because I thought it would be fun to splash down with a jet to run those splashed-down-test contracts. I also test some stuff on a rover I made, just because. My first couple docking efforts went surprisingly smoothly, partly thanks to the practice rescuing Kerbils.

Anyway, I soon had a couple million roots, because I'm afraid I've been rather liberal about using the "revert" button. (It's that, not the reload-quicksave button, that I abuse too much.) So off I went to the Mun and Minmus. I stranded a Kerbil on the moon because I didn't have enough fuel, but that turned out okay, because he did a few plant-flag missions until I decided that was a bit cheesy. I had an easier time hopping around Minmus for science, as its lower gravity requires less fuel expenditure.

For the past day or two, I've been using Minmus as a practice proving-ground for my upcoming launch window to Duna. (I'm using Kerbal Alarm Clock to help plan launch window; what an amazing mod. I had resisted installing it for a while, but I got it yesterday, and I'm glad I did. My other mods are Kerbal Engineer Redux and Final Frontier. Mod-light so far, but I look forward to playing things like Remote Tech 2 and Deadly Reentry later.) So I put a space station and a refueling station in orbit around Minmus, then just sent another manned mission there. The intention was to have a lander sample a bit more science, then return to orbit to dock and refuel just to make sure I could do that. But before I could rendez-vous with my tanker, my Duna window started to open.

It's now 2-3 hours before the optimal launch window, and I'd like to start sending stuff toward Duna. My first effort was a miserable failure. I figured I'd try sending a simple orange tank, equipped with a nuclear engine, to Duna, just to get an idea of what the maneuver nodes would be like. But I didn't make my lifter big enough, and I had to try to fire the nuclear engine to make the final push into orbit, and the engine gave out or something. (I know the LV-N doesn't like atmospheres.)

I need to think more systematically about how to build infrastructure at a place like Duna. I was thinking tanker, then space station, then lander. I'm still not quite sure how to make or use a tug. (Do tugs operate only in orbit, or do people use them for transfers?) I'm still reading posts on the forums for guidance, but it's kinda fun to engage in my own disastrous trial-and-error too. More to come tomorrow.

[Mister Spock]

Here's a look at one of four ships I now have en route to Duna. I've been experimenting with pretty lights.

[Mister Spock]

And yes, I've been busy flinging ships out my Duna launch window. First I mailed off a tank of fuel, Duna Refueler, pushed by an LV-N. Next I made a big science station, Duna Station, and I was pleased I got it into orbit and was then able to send it toward Duna with an LV-N, too.

But although I assigned a couple Kerbils to the science lab, they escaped when I made a last-minute strut addition, and the science lab is empty -- gah! I didn't revert or reload; I am trying to live with the consequences of my actions. One lesson I've learned is to put docking ports on *everything*, so my next vessel was a capsule, the Duna Orbiter, manned by three Kerbils. They'll dock with the station, theoretically. Er, once docked, I may not be able to move them to the lab without a mod like Ship Manifest, I imagine? Or maybe I will be able to EVA them to it? I've got a couple hundred days to think about it.

Finally, I've been testing Duna Lander. It's weighing in at more than 5 tons, and it still doesn't have enough fuel, I suspect. I want to load it up with science gear too, but first priority is enough fuel to let it shuttle between Duna and my orbiter/refueling stations. I need to get better at finding ways to get heavy payloads into LKO, and then to move those same payloads to distant planets. Right now I'm using brute force -- moar rockets -- but spaceplanes or SSTO thingies sound more elegant.

Up until now, I hadn't seen a need for Kerbil Alarm Clock. Wow, now I need it in spades. With all these ships crossing the solar system, it's hard to keep track of all the upcoming nodes and changes of SOI and whatnot. Plus I have ongoing missions around Minmus, with nodes and such awaiting my attention in a day or so. What a lifesaver that mod is. Oh, I also should've mentioned two other mods I'm using: PreciseNode, and AviationLights, for fun.

I'll try to post more pictures tomorrow. Up too danged late playing this addictive game.

[Mister Spock]

Here's my first docking effort -- a surprising success. The rescue-Kerbal missions helped prep me for this.

[Mister Spock]

I think this was my rocket to send a lander to Minmus, but I don't remember for sure. Gives you an idea of what I've been using inside the Kerbin SOI.

[Mister Spock]

My flag on Minmus. As I said in another thread, the flag design was Kirk's idea, not mine.

[Mister Spock]

Jumping on Minmus.

[Mister Spock]

Mun Base Alpha. And Beta, Gamma, Delta.... I stranded this Kerbal there, and the unintended side benefit was that he completed easy flag-plant contracts for a while. I've stopped accepting those contracts for a bit because they feel a bit gamey, but if funds get tight, I might revisit that decision.

[Mister Spock]

My Kerbin space is getting cluttered. Does everyone's map look like this? It's getting crowded around Kerbin in particular. Sometimes I have trouble picking out my current orbit and maneuver nodes. Is there a way to temporarily turn off all the other ships in map view?

[Mister Spock]

Now I'm fussing with my Duna lander. As I said earlier, I think it needs more fuel, and it's probably too heavy. What to leave behind? And how and where to add fuel? Those are questions I take up today.

[Mister Spock]

I lightened the lander and shipped it off toward Duna. Then I had a busy afternoon of multitasking, as my ships at Minmus and the Mun competed with the Duna fleet for attention. Gotta love Kerbal Alarm Clock.

After that, I spent a fair bit of time making my own space planes. I got a couple into space, and one could have made LKO if I'd felt like it. Then I tried strapping a huge 10t payload on one, and that was a comedy of errors. I did eventually get it to the edge of space, but then my engines starting blowing up. Here's a look.

[Zylark]

Now I'm fussing with my Duna lander. As I said earlier, I think it needs more fuel, and it's probably too heavy. What to leave behind? And how and where to add fuel? Those are questions I take up today.

For a roundtrip from Duna orbit -> Duna surface -> Duna orbit, you'll need roughly 2100dV. Assuming no inclination change and a landing spot at the lowest point you can find - which is good for braking with chutes rather than use engines too much.

Here is a lander I made in my previous career that did the job just fine:

As you can see it is 4 LV909, one center and three radial. And as little fuel as I thought I could get away with, so a Rockomax 16, four of those 1.25m tanks that hold 90 units of fuel and on top of the three radial of these a few thoroidal tanks with a spherical RCS hidden inside the thoroids. Didn't need much RCS anyway - only for docking back with the mothership. Structural elements are basically dead weight, so only three cubic trusses used to connect the radial tanks to the center. To save further weight I could have probably gotten rid of the central engine. The TWR was plentiful.

[Halban]

Enjoyed reading this, good work

[Pyromartian]

I am glad that you have taken so well to the game! I hope to read more.

[SlowThought]

It's getting crowded around Kerbin in particular.

I manually harvested a bunch of debris with periapsii < 70km, once the traffic got annoying. I think the game automatically kills stuff hitting 23km. I'm considering a FLYCATCHER series of missions, just to neaten things up.

[Mister Spock]

Thanks for the comments! My four-ship Duna fleet has now left Kerbin's sphere of influence, so for the first time in my KSP career, I'm in orbit around the sun. Phoned in some nice sun-science from my science lab. But Duna itself is still a couple months away. In the meantime, tonight I'm re-visiting the Mun to harvest more biomes for science. Then I may take another stab at designing space planes. More pictures and news to follow.

[Mister Spock]

Well, I had a bit of an Apollo 13 situation en route to the moon. I had an Apollo-style mission set up, with an orbital probe linked to a manned lander. But when it came time to decouple the probe from the lander, the decoupler wouldn't work! I'm not sure what has gone wrong. I don't have "Dang it" or any such failure mod installed. No doubt it's my faulty engineering. So the lander can't land with this big ol' nuclear engine sticking out its behind. Nor can it do a safe re-entry and landing on Kerbin. So I'm thinking I'll dock it with Mun Station (my science outpost there) and EVA the pilot into an empty capsule for a trip home. A side benefit is that this will let me refuel Mun Station.

While I was pondering that, I went ahead and sent out a new manned mission to the Mun, and landed successfully there. But I landed in Midlands, rather than my intended target, Highlands or a crater, so the science haul was just okay (as I've visited the Midlands before). I may refuel this lander and try again. Or I may just send it home, because I'm anxious to get its science so I can buy a "stack separator" -- a two-sided decoupler, rather than the one-sided decoupler that is causing me trouble.

[Mister Spock]

Here's my Kerbal on the Mun. We landed near a big crater, so I took 10 minutes to hike up to it, with help from RCS, to see if it had a different biome.

No luck. But I peered over the edge, hoping I might see a 2001 black monolith or something. No dice there, either. Still pretty.

[Mister Spock]

After some debate, I sent this Kerbal into orbit to rescue my disabled ship. I'm still new to docking, but I'm getting the hang of it. In this shot, you can see that the ship on the right has a decoupler that is "stuck" over the engine, blocking it from firing properly. So the engine on the left will push the whole shebang home.

And here's splashdown. I'm not using Deadly Reentry, and I doubt I would've gotten away with this caper in that mod. But I'm using mostly stock, so I made it through the atmosphere unscathed.

[Mister Spock]

Yesterday I made my first successful SSTO vehicle, a single-engine spaceplane. (There are pictures at the end of my thread on spaceplane questions in the questions forum, so I won't repost them here.) It achieved a circular orbit around Kerbin, did a couple orbits for fun, and returned to Kerbin with no fuss, landing on an empty field. After that experience, I sent a rover out near the KSC to plant a flag so that I can more easily find KSC on the map for spaceplane landings.

After that, I did course corrections for my fleet heading to Duna. I used PreciseNode's ability to change to conic option 0, which let me fine-tune each course while focused on Duna itself. I guess one can change to 0 by editing a config file in the stock game, but even if I'd thought to do that, I can't imagine dragging the stock maneuver nodes around accurately enough to make these 0.6 m/s course corrections I needed to get close to Duna. There's no way to make small increments to node values in stock, is there? I wonder about this because I'd like to try Better Than Starting Manned soon, but he says he supports no mods other than Deadly Reentry. Hmm.

Anyway, Duna pics to come, today or tomorrow. Kinda busy in RL today, but we'll see.

[Mister Spock]

Duna Base Alpha has been established! It was surprisingly easy. My first ship to arrive in orbit was a refueler; it did a little aerobraking but had to burn some to get captured by Duna. The second ship was an orbiter, holding 3 Kerbals, two of whom will staff my science station, which I cleverly forgot to staff with Kerbals when it left home. This ship did a more aggressive aerobrake and established orbit using only a little fuel. The third ship to arrive was my science station, but I made a course correction, then forgot to adjust my Kerbal Alarm Clock, so the station warped through the SOI change -- which messed up the course correction. So this ship had to do a major burn to make it into Duna orbit. Successful, though.

Finally, my lander arrived, and it did an aggressive aerobrake -- too aggressive! To my chagrin, I started going down. So I went into landing mode, stopped my horizontal velocity, slowed vertical velocity, deployed two radial chutes, and ... landed smoothly. It was almost anticlimactic, it was so easy. I'm sure it's not always so easy there, but the descent was straightforward (though I'm not sure how much the chutes really helped). The only complication was that I didn't have time to plan *where* I would land, and I ended up on the dark side of the planet, so I couldn't see where I was landing until I was a few meters off the ground. I guess I got a bit lucky.

[Mister Spock]

I sent probes and landers off to Eve, and two probes to Moho. It was relatively easy to plot a course to Eve; not so easy to get to Moho, but we'll see.

I also spent some time putting together a joint lander/rover, linked by a decoupler, for a Mun visit. I added RCS to the rover to help it land softly when the time comes. I've tested the rover extensively on Kerbin, but a low-gravity environment will be another kettle of fish. Assuming I can get it *onto* that low-gravity environment. The whole kaboodle is on its way to the Mun now. I used the gigantic Kerbodyne tanks and engines to lift it to orbit, with fuel left over to help make the transfer to the Mun. Now the rocket is in its second stage (the LV-N). I hope the LV-909 will be enough to land the thing. Kerbal Engineer suggests yes, but we'll see.

[Mister Spock]

Well, here's one way to solve the problem of how to get a rover off a lander:

Heh, I cleverly forgot to extend my landing gear, for starters. And I didn't pick the best landing spot: right smack in the middle of a crater sloping downward. Still, I got everything unpacked.

I had a fun joyride, but the walls of the crater were almost impassible. I have electric propulsion plus RCS; wish I'd brought ion engines or something. I can probably get over them by firing the rover's RCS fuel, but I have limited fuel, and the rover does not handle airborne travel very well. Still pondering what to do. In the meantime, it's fun to ride around; the car is pretty stable, I'm happy to say.

In other news, one of my refuelers established orbit around Eve. The rest of the Eve fleet to follow shortly.

In other other news, I started a game of "Better Than Starting Manned," and I had fun with it. (I made a second installation of KSP to accommodate this mod. I wonder if making a second install takes one out of "newb" status.) But I'm really chomping at the bit to try a big ol' heavily-modded game, centered on OKS/MKS/Karbonite/Interstellar, with many bells and whistles. I'm planning to create a third install, tentatively planning the mods listed below. Will this be too many for 32-bit KSP? See anything here that will clash?

Orbital Konstruction System/Modular Konstruction System

KSP Interstellar

Karbonite

TAC Life Support

Open Resource System

TweakScale

FAR

Deadly Reentry

RemoteTech2

KAS

SCANsat

Cargo Transportation Solutions

Infernal Robotics

Procedural Fairings

Ship Manifest

RealChute Parachute Systems

Extraplanetary Launchpads

Connected Living Space

Kerbal Engineer Redux

Kerbal Alarm Clock

PreciseNode

Final Frontier (not essential, but I love it)

AviationLights (expendable if I need to cut something)

[Mister Spock]

Oh, and maybe "Dang It!" But I'm probably pushing my luck with that long list as mods as it is.