Kerbal Space Program

[capi3101]

Tonight I tried out my first Minmus mission. Used my Apocalypse rocket; it figure if it gets to the Mun, it oughta get out to Minmus easy enough. And I was right.

What everybody says about Minmus was true; it's a much easier target to land on if you can get your trajectory right and get there in the first place. May not be apparent from the picture, but my capsule was on the side of a crater with at least a ten degree incline, and I still had no problems with the final landing.

Unfortunately, I had another chute/capsule linkage failure on return to Kerbin; Jeb the VI died in a fiery ball that was visible from space. Still trying to figure out what happened there...

 

[capi3101]

Made my first try at Duna tonight. The idea was to send a lander and bring it back to Kerbin. Things didn't go according to plan...

Had some bad staging going on, which didn't help of course. I'm also not sure I read the delta-v map of the system correctly; Duna's only supposed to take 8,740 m/s of delta-v, right?

 

[Sylvester]

Made my first try at Duna tonight. The idea was to send a lander and bring it back to Kerbin. Things didn't go according to plan...



Had some bad staging going on, which didn't help of course. I'm also not sure I read the delta-v map of the system correctly; Duna's only supposed to take 8,740 m/s of delta-v, right?

That's 8740 assuming you aerobrake to get into Duna's orbit. You should aim for a periapsis of between 11 and 14 km (depending on the mass of your craft) so it will slow you into a elliptical orbit without having to do a breaking burn.

 

[capi3101]

That explains a lot, thanks.

Aside from the staging issues, I think I need to go over all the numbers again; the ship was designed to have 9,054 m/s of delta-V and yet it barely made it there. Makes me wonder if I've jacked up my spreadsheet again.

I'm also pretty sure it took a lot more than 1,060 m/s of delta-V to get to Duna; more than twice that, IIRC. Actually, I think I timed the whole mission poorly - Duna was about 45 degrees ahead of Kerbin's orbit when I got started and it took about 90 days to get out there; I don't think they were "in phase" (if that's the correct term) for a Duna mission.

Looks like it's time to hit the KSP forums for advice.

 

[Ijuin]

Yes, a minimum-energy launch window would be when the spacecraft would cross the destination planet's orbit 180 degrees away from the starting planet's position at launch. A minimum-energy flight to Duna would take closer to 180 days than 90 days, and should launch when Duna is a bit more than 90 degrees ahead of Kerbin.

 

[capi3101]

Had some fun these last couple of days a bit closer to Kerbin. I decided I would try out one of the game's stock rockets, the Kerbal X, just for the hell of it. Got Jeb, Bill and Bob landed on the Mun and noticed the ship only had 13 units of liquid fuel left. Rescue mission time...

So I built a ship to go out there and pick them up - the mighty Flying Dutchman 7. Now, you know I meticulously design my rockets so I know they'll do the job I want them to do; I started with making sure the spamcan would survive landing. That killed two Kerbals - fortunately I did that stuff in the "Construction Basics" tutorial, so their deaths didn't count. Finally had enough chutes on the damn thing after the third try, so then it was time to design the lander; that went pretty quick, so I sat down and designed the booster. And then I built it. And then I realized as Seeley Kerbin was coming down for Mun landing and the engine flamed out that I hadn't kept to my design; neither the lander nor the boosters had been given enough fuel. He bounced once; KIA.

Redesign, great. Sent Neewig (or whatever the hell his name was) on the redesigned rocket, and made it. Too far away. Tried to move closer and wound up with a fourth stranded Kerbal...

Now, at that point I could've tried again; the spamcan was designed to pick up four guys, after all. But instead I'll admit to having done some savescumming - to right before Seeley would've started his fatal landing burn. Like a bad sequel to Final Destination, I had him divert back and land on Kerbin, going back up again in the "Block II" Dutchman. I also sought some advice at the KSP forums that turned out good - the second attempt got me 1.3 km from the Kerbal X, which was still a pretty good haul but manageable by jetpack. Picked the guys up and off they went. Mission complete.

I'll attach a few picks from the mission. Biggest design flaw with the Dutchman is that Seeley could never figure out how to maneuver the ladder all the way from the command module to the ground. I guess I should've put a ladder there or something...

 

[capi3101]

Been tinkering with a little satellite SSTO these last few days. I had the thought that I could use the basic design as a giant pop gun to knock out all those extra boosters and crap I've got floating around at this point; it ejects a Stayputnik (the payload) and can then de-orbit itself already, so it wouldn't take much tinkering.

Tonight, however, I made a second attempt at Duna. This one was slightly more successful, though I still obviously need to work on the "able to return to Kerbin" part of the mission before I send up any guys. I think I may have the phase angle slightly off still. At least I got a little further along...

The landing went about as well as I expected.

I had the RCS attached to the return probe, so yes I was able to go "jetpacking" with it, as you can see in the last screenshot. Still not sure what it counts as for purposes of updating my salad bar over on the KSP forums...

 

[capi3101]

Curious to see what y'all have been up to lately; the KSP forums have been down since this last weekend...

I finally got a lander onto Duna - the math says I'm about 400 m/s short of being able to get it home. So much for that design...

I've also been tinkering around with Aerospikes and Nuke Rockets. Built a Mun lander with the things and it worked really well. For some reason though the ship exploded when I made my burn back to Kerbin from Minmus. Game said I hit terrain; I know I was at least 2ok up at the time, so I think it was the Kraken...

With the problems I've been having I'm beginning to lean towards the notion of docking a lander to a two-way transfer stage in orbit. To that end I've been doing the Gemini 6A/7 tutorial on the KSP wiki. Tonight I successfully docked two ships together for the first time. It wasn't particularly difficult but it was time consuming. Keyboard locked up on me once; that didn't help matters. Also noted that the RCS fuel tank had a tendency to fall off the rest of the ship when the chutes opened. Don't know why that was happening; important thing is that the ships otherwise landed safely. Got 6A within 80 kilometers of KSC even.

A few pics. Why not.

 

[capi3101]

Sorry guys, the KSP forums threw up this last week and my account over there got wiped. I still can't post my own attachments over there; I'm posting over here so I can get these images up somewhere on the net, so I can get some help over there. Convoluted, I know.

 

[capi3101]

Been having fun with rovers lately.

 

[capi3101]

New version of KSP is up...and I've been having fun with flag modding/planting...

 

[capi3101]

Hey...there's a thought......

 

[Sylvester]

Sir, I think you may be on to something here. There's gotta be a way to get those images into the game. Then we can go around planting flags everywhere with plaques that say "Long Live the Confederation!"

 

[capi3101]

Adding flags in 0.20 is easy enough - just drop a 256x160 png in \GameData\Squad\Flags. That's how I got the Soviet flag in; for good measure I put in the American flag and the Oklahoma State flag too. These Confederation flags are already the correct size and format. I would do a Kilrathi one, but I'm at work at the moment so all I've got access to is MS Paint and the only Kilrathi logo I've got leaves artifacts.

MS Paint in Win 7 is, incidentally, a good way to resize images...

What I'm waiting for are those parts they're talking about that will put the image of the flag on your rocket. When that happens, it might be time to start fiddling with the Spaceplane Hangar a bit more...

Lemme post a better version of that Confed one...

 

[capi3101]

My 4-year old son is continuing to ask questions about worlds that are supposed to be in the Kerbin system. Tonight he was asking about Ckazee (KA-ZEE; what I wrote is how he spelled it). It's red and blue. To get there, you have to follow the Dralthis and kill them. Then you can see Ckazee. Dralthis live up in the sky. They can kill Ckazee.

Figured all y'all might like that one; he actually was talking about "Dralthis" as in "flying pancakes".

 

[capi3101]

Gilly.

 

[capi3101]

What's your status?

Lemme put it to you this way: the Chief Tech is gonna be pissed...

I suppose there is that saying about "any landing you can walk away from" that applies here. That was the first landing I walked away from; missed the runway but sat down right next to it; tore the wing off getting back onto the runway (the stabilizer hit the pavement and off it went.)

 

[Yuke]

Just played the demo and it was awesome, time to shell out for the full thing and fight for the Confederation!

 

[originlife]

Its so damn addictive, and i've only played the demo version. Looking forward to a heck of a lot of further dev!

 

[capi3101]

Apparently v. 0.21 is coming out in the very near future (mildly annoying since the release of 0.20 was only a few months ago); they're going to finally institute the campaign mode, among other things.

Lately my efforts with KSP have involved getting back from Eve. I'll admit it's cutting into the time I should be spending working on Vespus...