Kerbal Space Program has had an upgrade and the new version introduces electrical systems, docking, a manoeuvre planning system, and more. To celebrate, I want to, broadly speaking, pick up from my previous KSP Let's Play. In terms of mods and whatnot installed, I pretty much install everything except the "Sci Fi" stuff from Kerbal Spaceport - if you have specific questions on stuff I'm using, let me know. Where we're at So, like the last time we met, we again have four geostationary satellites, and a polar-orbiting mapping satellite. The four geostationary sats I have carefully placed in orbit so they're spread quite evenly around the planet. You can easily do the same yourself by following these instructions I wrote. I have also placed two comsats in a Molniya orbit high above the poles. They have extremely long range dishes on them so that any future inter-planetary mission has a good chance of interuptionless communications back to Kerbin (no chance of the Mun getting between the voyaging craft and the comsats. So how am I getting junk up into orbit? Here's the launcher for the comsats. Solid rocket boosters around a big liquid fuel tank and fairings covering the unit that pushes the satellites into their orbits before returning to Kerbin. Oh, we've also been to the Mun! We delivered a robotic suite there, first of all getting 8t into orbit using this... And while the bog-standard orbiting bit manoeuvred to a polar orbit to engage in a little mapping we decoupled the skycrane and rover and took them to the surface. GREAT SUCCESS! So what are our plans? Deliver a rover to Minmus using the same technique as the Mun and then look at some grand schemes.....
Right, well, here's the story of great Minmus success! So, as with the Mun landing we launched our standard 8t launcher and looked at lining up a nice move to Minmus. I decided to try for an slingshot manoeuvre around the Mun and managed to pull something of a slingshot off quite well! Only issue was I didn't think about how long it would take to head out to where Minmus would be and so a mid-course course correction was required to actually get me close to Minmus. Had I plotted this better (just practice,really) I could have had quite a "cheap" flight in terms of fuel use, I reckon! As we swung past Minmus a burn put us into orbit and another burn put us into a polar orbit for mapping purposes. A quick separation and some thruster use and the skycrane unit is on a path to land on Minmus. The dark blue line shows the comms path back to Kerbin. With Kerbin in the distance, we come in nice and slow. Gravity is low on this very small moon so it is a relatively easy landing. I didn't even bother 'dumping' the rover - risking toppling over - as the landing was so clean and perfect! I went for a bit of a drive, moved the skycrane to a nearby peak to have a look around and watched Kerbin rise once more before calling this a mission success! Time to move on with another great plan.
So Calistas where is your remote tech part on that rover? I use the "small" disk but you don't seem to have one...what's your secrut!?
I am using the remote tech aerial part, the one with a spiky bit on the end. It is horizontal at the back (which makes the nav ball wonky, btw). At the front, horizontally mounted, is the RemoteTech dipole antenna.
So those external fuel tanks you use one the satellite section in the first image set -- I can't seem to get them to work! Any ideas? And by the way, PLZ SHOW EVERY METICULOUS STEP OF THE SPACE SHURIKEN'S LAUNCH AND OPERATION! I have no idea how you do it so I want to see how it's done desperately.
Doing the Other Things When John F Kermin wanted us to go to the Mun and do those other things, little did he know the other things would include going to Kerbol, the sun! The sun looks quite hot and bright and a long way-away. So clearly we must visit! Building a ship to do this took quite a long time. First, we had to trawl the wrecks of crashed airplanes so we could take their wings and turn them into a heat shield. Then we had to run numerous simulations to determine how much fuel we needed to pack on for the flight, then we had to strap it all down enough to stop the whole thing wobbling off during ascent. Here is the boost stage: Here's inside the heat shield. Fuel tanks, batteries, solar panels, empty living quarters should we need to station any researchers here, lights, RemoteTech parts, antennas, and so on! Going up! In orbit, showing the insides: Leaving Kerbin; The 30+ minute (REAL TIME, even with 4 times physics warp) burn to reduce the ship's orbital velocity, dropping the periapsis to 5,000km above the surface of the sun (closer than 1,000km and ships tend to get shredded, I've heard). Lights are on to show off some structure. Approaching Kerbol The heat shield is holding up well!* 5,000km from Kerbol! This was a tough mission. The ship was so big the game slowed everything down so the physics wouldn't break. In the end it took FOREVER to burn to Kerbol, but it was worth it, FOR SCIENCE! * No in-game need for any kind of shield. It was just for lulz.
I like how the solar panels are on the "wrong" side of the ship, being protected from nasty solar emissions by the shield. :P
That's because you fail at orbital mechanics, Therlun! There are plenty of times when the ship is pointing away from the sun, especially when orbiting Kerbin and needing to burn for a while, and in those times you need power or the boat is dead in the water! Even the 30+ minute prograde burn saw lots of shadow across the ship, panels on both sides are handy. And.. er.. I just thought they looked cool =)
God damnit Calistas! You're like a crackhead showing me how to score crack. All I want is more Kerbals in space and you are showing me anything is possible.
So... this Duna landing didn't go so well. Should have bled off speed in the atmosphere first. Oops! My route and everything was looking good.. I calculated the rough burn locations from the link at the bottom of the 'angles' menu in MechJeb. Had quite a tidy launcher built too - think I'm going to need to rebuild it a little lighter. For one, it doesn't need anywhere near the fuel I brought - good to know!
Hey, look at it this way - chance to launch a rescue mission! I mean, how cool would that be, Calistas? It would also make for riveting reading for a Let's Play!
I will give it a go. Just as likely to be a crater-enlargement mission as a rescue mission. But why not!
I have somewhat overcome some problems I've been having with my computer recently. Not that it has helped much... "What's the plan, Jeb?" "Request another rescue mission, of course!" ...More details tomorrow night. And with luck, a rescue mission!
So I decided to affect a rescue of my poor, stranded, kerbalnaughts. I used essentially the same ship as I launched the first time - replacing a fuel tank with an empty crew section (to fit the stranded crew). I noticed last time that I had more than enough fuel for the trip so I was certain there wouldn't be any problems reducing the craft's weight by eight tons and losing the fuel. Consulting this fantastic DeltaV map and MechJeb's ship info readouts in the hanger I was determined I had a good margin of error. Transfer to Duna calculated, the voyage itself was uneventful. On arrival near Duna I burned for an atmospheric braking move that happily burned off a lot of speed... I even had a little help from Duna's moon, Ike, which threw me into an inclined orbit. Post-burn - a stable Duna orbit with plenty of fuel for a landing burn. Using MechJeb's landing autopilot I punched in the coordinates of the stranded crew so that as I de-orbited I had a precise measure of how far off target I would be. At this point I tried several full manual landing burns, usually getting within 2,000m of the stranded crew - each descent using manoeuvre nodes to correct the landing error (quickly smashing between "node" and "retrograde" in the SmartASS - dicey stuff!). As you can probably guess these landings all ended badly and I save-scummed back to orbit. The reason for the "not returning to space today" endings was that while I could get down ok (well, it took three attempts to learn precisely how much velocity to drop - Answer: absolute shitloads - the atmosphere is too thin for parachutes to do much of anything) I could not manage the last 500m. This is a problem I face often. I can drop my velocity to 30, 20, 10m/s and then.. then the yo-yoing begins - The craft suddenly goes up again (not throttling back enough) and then one repeats the up and down until, usually, a landing is attempted with too much lateral velocity (causing legs to break off and the lander to topple over) or some value is misjudged and I slam the vehicle into the ground. What is lacking, IMHO, is a clearer indication of change of velocity. The dial at the top of the UI is far too hard to read at the 0-20m/s values needs to land. So, in the end, I hit 'LAND at Target' on MechJeb when I was a couple of hundred meters up and left the final seconds of throttle management to the computer. Looking good! We can't wait to go home! Er, guys, that landing is going to maybe be a little close to existing wreckage! Very shortly after this the lander landed ON TOP of the crashed command module and then proceeded to tip over and break up, resulting in the screenshot from the previous post. I guess I'm going to have to take a little more care punching in the coordinates - maybe offsetting them a couple of seconds. I guess it's time to build ANOTHER rescue vehicle!
All. I've basically moved all my KSP noodling to the KSP thread. In LP threads I tend to worry about carefully writing stuff up and I don't bother showing my experiments. I figure that would actually be interesting to many people, so.. you all might as well read the thread if you want to keep up! Go look at my recent mission to send an airship to Mars! ...Starts at the top of this page.
