Kerbal Space Program: Let's Light This Candle

I hope some better engines are in the pipe. Tired of having to make giant fuel pyramids covered in SRB's to lift anything.

Desram wrote:

I hope some better engines are in the pipe. Tired of having to make giant fuel pyramids covered in SRB's to lift anything.

Those Mainsail engines are already crazy-powerful! There's some challenge in building a vehicle big enough to use several of them in the first stage, but if you can crack that, you can launch a *lot* in to orbit. SRBs are a bit of a mug's game, IMO -- they're a handy crutch on occasion, but you're usually better off adding more liquid tanks and engines instead.

That rocket looks seriously overpowered there Yonder. Especially if you're just going to Kerbin orbit. I can usually get to the mun with one mainsail and one large tank, eight small tanks in "asparagus" configuration around it and eight solid rocket boosters to get it out of the early atmosphere.

I have a feeling you're spending most of the fuel to lift the fuel up.

I took this to the moon tonight

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/gGr3R.jpg)

I would have gotten it back too but Jeb got stuck in the struts on the moon and couldn't get back in the capsule.

And this is the rocket I used to practice docking with my space station at about 200 meters up.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/WPtFP.jpg)

Norfair wrote:

That rocket looks seriously overpowered there Yonder. Especially if you're just going to Kerbin orbit. I can usually get to the mun with one mainsail and one large tank, eight small tanks in "asparagus" configuration around it and eight solid rocket boosters to get it out of the early atmosphere.

That one is overpowered, that's just a test launch of my "Heavy Lifter" launch vehicle. Now that it has survived as a proof of concept I will be lifting much heavier payloads with it, not just that tiny comm sat. Hmm... now a grouping of four or five Comm Sats at once... that has promise.

Kave Johnson: I have called this press conference to announce that—for the moment—Bill, Jebediah, and Bob Kerman have been stranded in low Kermin orbit. As you know, efforts to launch the new Crew Shuttle have proved much more difficult than anticipated, leading to the failure of many missions and the loss of many spacecraft. The important thing to remember, however, is that the new Crew Abort tower has succeeded admirably, each time pulling our brave Kerbanoughts to safety! This time will be no different, Bill, Jeb, and Bob are currently safe and sound, and are apparently equipped to live in orbit indefinitely. That is plenty of time to send up a rescue mission!

I will take questions at this time.

Reporter: How exactly did this happen?

Kave Johnson: Well, we were trying once again to get the Crew Shuttle in orbit to dock with the Heavy Lifter, and we were feeling really good about this try. We got up into, just barely, a stable orbit, disconnected from the Launch Vehicle, fired off the Abort Tower for an extra boost of speed, jettisoning it right before it ran out of propellant… and realized that the Shuttle fuel tank was empty! Somehow, and at this point we have no idea how, because it was pretty late and we needed to get to bed for an early meeting, the Shuttle fuel tank seems to have been connected to the Launch Vehicle engines.

Reporter: Doesn’t the Shuttle have RCS thrusters? Do those have enough fuel for a reentry course?

Kave Johnson: Yeah, we totally think they do. We haven’t done the math or anything, because the Kerbal way is really just to try things out and see what happens, but we’ve got quite a bit of RCS fuel and are in a pretty low orbit, so that could probably work. Lacks a bit of glamour doesn’t it though? I mean, what would you rather have “Newsflash! Stranded Kerbanoughts saved in daring rescue mission!” or “Newsflash! Kerbanoughts putter back home on backup engines.”?

Reporter: Have you had a successful docking mission yet? How confident are you of being able to pull this off?

Kave Johnson: Well it seems like it should work, right? And we’re ready for this, the stranded mission was on the way to a docking attempt!

Reporter: But wasn’t that docking attempt going to be with an unmanned vessel precisely to limit loss of life in case something went terribly wrong?

Kave Johnson: Well sure, but this string of complete and total failures in trying to get the Crew Shuttle into orbit has really filled us with confidence. After all, we think that at this point we have pretty much made all the mistakes, so this whole “Space” thing should be smooth sailing from here.

Reporter: You mentioned those earlier difficulties, what exactly has gone wrong in the earlier missions?

Kave Johnson: What’s gone wrong? The better question is what hasn’t gone wrong, you know what I mean? Hah! And I guess the answer to that is the Abort Tower, that’s what! Good thing too, if that hadn’t worked our Kerbanoughts would have been burned to a crisp! Or pulverized. Or impaled. Yep, Jeb Jam, all over the tarmac.

Anyways, first of all we didn’t have quite enough punch, so we made everything a bit taller and threw some SRBs on that sucker. Then the taller engines were hitting the primary stage on separation, so we tossed some Seperatrons up there. After that we had a bit of trouble with all the shaking from our terribly programmed ASAS units making the whole vehicle a bit too Wibbly Wobbly, so we slapped some struts on there. After that we learned that Jeb’s earlier separation problems stemmed from separating two stages when the ASAS is on, which the unit doesn’t really like because it sucks.

After that we were pretty close, except when the engine didn’t fire we didn’t realize that it was because the upper stage was out of fuel. We instead thought that we just hadn’t pressed the space bar hard enough, and pressed it again—whoops—reentry pod deployed! Luckily we weren’t quite in a stable orbit yet and came back down after an orbit.

Reporter: And that makes you confident?

Kave Johnson: Well of course! Everything that can break already has! Except for the Abort Tower.

God help them if it does.

I spent a little time last night refining my Apollo-style Mün rocket, with separate orbiter and lander modules -- here's what it looks like now:

IMAGE(http://wootangent.net/~lsd/blah/kerpollo_pad.jpg)

The three Mainsail engines are more than enough to get all of that off the ground without the need for SRBs. The two outer stages cross-feed fuel in to the core stage, leaving it fully fueled after they separate; that core stage is enough to get quite close to Kerbin orbit. The middle stage, with the two side-mounted engines, is like the Saturn IV stage -- it burns a little to complete the trip to Kerbin orbit, and then provides all the thrust for the transfer to the Mün. After separating that stage and docking the orbiter and lander nose-to-nose, the orbiter provides the thrust for entering Münar orbit.

I wasn't sure if that smallest Rockomax fuel tank on the orbiter would be enough, but it turned out to be plenty -- even after performing the Münar orbit insertion, and then the trans-Kerbin burn after ditching the lander, it had more than half its fuel left. The lander didn't have much at all left after getting back in to Münar orbit, though (but I did transfer what little it had back to the orbiter before heading home, just in case).

Jeb Jam's "All Over the Tarmac" was an amazing album, I don't think I would have survived college without it.

Is there any merchandise available with a KSP theme? I'd love to get a t-shirt or a model rocket or something of the sort for one of my kids. (KSP model rockets really need to happen.)

I just flew the Apollo-style rocket above on a mission to the Mün and took screenshots along the way -- this time I'm trying out posting such things to Tumblr. I took a bunch of shots, so the full mission is in six posts, the first of which is here:

http://pneumanspaceprogram.tumblr.co...

Here's the money shot, though -- one of my Kerbalnauts posing next to the Kurveyor 3 lander, which I sent up earlier.
IMAGE(http://25.media.tumblr.com/eea1eb025ad005c9f014f5429e7d9057/tumblr_mep4yq79xh1rmm5rbo4_1280.png)

It's not quite as cool as this photo of Pete Conrad next to Surveyor 3 on the Apollo 12 mission, but you get the idea

IMAGE(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4e/Surveyor_3-Apollo_12.jpg/685px-Surveyor_3-Apollo_12.jpg)

Sexy!

Awesome Moondragon! You've inspired me a bit. After dabbling with the free version way back when, I parted ways with it feeling like I never quite got to where I wanted to be with it. I paid for the full version a few weeks ago, and am eager to sit down and give it some time.

Druidpeak wrote:

Awesome Moondragon! You've inspired me a bit.

Glad I could give back.

I'll have to post some pictures tonight of my super low orbit Minmus station. It's hovering over the surface around 10000 meters up but I plan on lowering it to 5000. It was only two lifts but I couldn't get the second stage to orbit clockwise to match the first part. Now it has a lander, some spare rcs and fuel tanks and room to sleep five.

I'm going to have to take the lander down to the surface some time to see how it works. Next I want to put some stations around Ike and Duna.

And here they are.

IMAGE(http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/1101393627302490319/B03A15D6EA25F38F52619BE4248559633E308103/)

IMAGE(http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/1101393627302489226/F424B02790D3ED6A7B23BD74A9AB99CAE00A7060/)

So just a though, would there be any interest in a Kerbal space race? Pick a goal and a time frame and people attempt to complete the goal (we wouldn't necessarily have to race I suppose)

Having tried this game many müns ago, and thoroughly sucking at it, I wanted to come back to it. All this recent talk got me stoked for it and I finally splurged the whole $20 clams for it.

Putting a satellite into AN orbit wasn't too difficult at this point. The whole business about planning your burns with the new tools they added is brilliant. And it explains orbital mechanics in such a simple way. After playing with the game for just a few hours, I started to feel confident of my ability to perform simple burns without even setting up computer guidance.

My intermediate goal was to start building a space station. With that in mind, my first core segment was a control module with segment hub and basic comm/power facilities:
IMAGE(https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-q6gOmkBhIpM/UNK6hUMFRRI/AAAAAAAACME/wUGhXNkxDG4/s764/screenshot0.jpg)

I was struggling with my heavy lifting capability and this sucker took a while to get right. Ended up in a fairly low orbit of 120k. My second module was supposed to be housing. So 5 command modules and storage compartments were supposed to go up next. Of course, instead of doing them individually and slowly building the whole thing, I shot up the whole thing at once. This really tested the limits of my rocketry technology. After many attempts I finally put one in orbit. But it ran out of fuel before I could even attempt a rendezvous with the command module.

So the next mission had to be a refuelling mission. A simple non-crewed rocket was sent up to dock with the Hab module and dump its remaining fuel into it. This was also a first docking attempt I ever made:
IMAGE(https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-WPou_yaD9l0/UNK64OJmttI/AAAAAAAACMQ/ujOK0jHLOqs/s764/screenshot3.jpg)

The first time I came as close as 100m, I found a horrible bug. Having switched to "docking" mode and finding it unusable, I switched back to "staging" mode only to find out that doing so puts your thrust at about 40%, automatically. Needless to say my rocket shot out and by the time I managed to stop it I had 100m/s deltaV to the Hab module and distance/orbit completely messed up. A few days later when I cooled off, I replayed the whole scenario (my save was like half an hour prior to docking) and the result is seen in the above screenshot.

I separated the refuelling rocket and de-orbited it. With about a third tank of gas, my Hab module could finally make its way to the Command module. Having already performed a successful dock, the actual mechanics of it were much simpler. BUT! There is a big difference shoving around a tank of fuel with some command electronics on top, and docking it on a longitudinal axis, than shoving around a massive station module with bunch of crap hanging on all sides, and trying to dock it laterally on an object that is free floating in space.

Quite a few sweaty palms later, the result is:
IMAGE(https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-C74LyhWicW8/UNK6788G9TI/AAAAAAAACMY/pN7EVrsU4iE/s764/screenshot4.jpg)

I'd love to. But unfortunately I do not have the time over the next few weeks. Would LOVE to see what you guys get up to though.

After a lot of dicking around, I finally managed to build a spacecraft capable of delivering an astronaut to the surface of Eve and then getting them back up. Eve has nearly twice the gravity and about 5 times the atmosphere of Kerbin, so to get from the surface back to orbit, you need a fairly big rocket -- several times bigger than you'd need to get up from the surface of Kerbin. Then, of course, you have to actually get that thing to Eve and successfully land it

I couldn't launch the lander in to Kerbin orbit fully-fuelled, so I had to fly two tanker missions up to it to refuel it before the trip. I then docked two more tanker missions to it, to provide the fuel for the flight to Eve. The entire spacecraft, as assembled in Kerbin orbit, is here:

IMAGE(http://24.media.tumblr.com/8c504b5d02b8779f639abedd1f2f9bb6/tumblr_mgi4su5tpb1rmm5rbo1_1280.png)

Once at Eve the tankers refuel the lander and detach, and then the lander enters Eve's atmosphere, aiming to land on one of the high plateaus (at around 5000-6000m height) to reduce the amount of atmosphere it needs to launch through on the way back up. A combination of drogue and regular 'chutes provides most of the deceleration for landing, but the final descent does require an engine burn.

IMAGE(http://24.media.tumblr.com/f949dba8a2c3c9750213c60b8aa235d0/tumblr_mgi4su5tpb1rmm5rbo7_1280.png)

All that makes it back to orbit is this:

IMAGE(http://24.media.tumblr.com/ab90b1e1c419ad19bb533b76fbb6df20/tumblr_mgi4su5tpb1rmm5rbo10_1280.png)

For this test mission I flew the lander unmanned -- if there was an astronaut on board, they'd have to meet up with a return craft waiting in Eve orbit to get back home.

Seems there's a demo for this now

Norfair wrote:

So just a though, would there be any interest in a Kerbal space race? Pick a goal and a time frame and people attempt to complete the goal (we wouldn't necessarily have to race I suppose)

I think it would be great to get some community involvement in this game. But since people will be coming to it with different levels of experience, and this isn't the most ACTIVE thread on the forums, maybe we should make a road-map to follow with some sort of achievements, rather than a time-limited competition. That way more people could participate on their own time.

As a kicking off point, I'm thinking of these general 'achievements':

1) Manual orbit with eccentricity of less than 5%
2) Polar Kerbin orbit
3) Get 36 tons of fuel to orbit (then 72, then 108)
4) Achieve orbit only using SRBs
5) Escape velocity from Kerbin
6) Polar lunar orbit lower than 10km
7) Manual landings: Mun, Minmus
8) Jool encounter
9) Mun/Mimus return mission
10) Using a single launch, put three probes into circular orbits with more than 100 km difference in average height
11) Achieve kerbin orbit and land on any island without parachutes
12) SSTO and full craft return
13) Geostationary constellation with 100% Kerbin coverage (at 30 degrees), multiple missions
14) Dock 3 ships in Kerbin orbit (then Mun)
15) Conduct Apollo-style Munar landing and dock with orbiting command module
16) Land within 1km of Neil Armstrong memorial
17) Land on top of Munar arch
18) Land on Mun and Minmus and return in a single mission

etc

Maybe you could help me formalize the achievements by difficulty? I'd be willing to design some mission badges for the Kerbalnauts for use in this thread as people meet the challenges.

This idea may be enough to get me to buy the game. Now I just need a team of Kerbal engineers to work on it and claim all the success myself!

Actually, some kind of multi-station multi-player mode like Artemis could be pretty cool.

Schmutzli wrote:
Norfair wrote:

So just a though, would there be any interest in a Kerbal space race? Pick a goal and a time frame and people attempt to complete the goal (we wouldn't necessarily have to race I suppose)

I think it would be great to get some community involvement in this game. But since people will be coming to it with different levels of experience, and this isn't the most ACTIVE thread on the forums, maybe we should make a road-map to follow with some sort of achievements, rather than a time-limited competition. That way more people could participate on their own time.

As a kicking off point, I'm thinking of these general 'achievements':

1) Manual orbit with eccentricity of less than 5%
2) Polar Kerbin orbit
3) Get 36 tons of fuel to orbit (then 72, then 108)
4) Achieve orbit only using SRBs
5) Escape velocity from Kerbin
6) Polar lunar orbit lower than 10km
7) Manual landings: Mun, Minmus
8) Jool encounter
9) Mun/Mimus return mission
10) Using a single launch, put three probes into circular orbits with more than 100 km difference in average height
11) Achieve kerbin orbit and land on any island without parachutes
12) SSTO and full craft return
13) Geostationary constellation with 100% Kerbin coverage (at 30 degrees), multiple missions
14) Dock 3 ships in Kerbin orbit (then Mun)
15) Conduct Apollo-style Munar landing and dock with orbiting command module
16) Land within 1km of Neil Armstrong memorial
17) Land on top of Munar arch
18) Land on Mun and Minmus and return in a single mission

etc

Maybe you could help me formalize the achievements by difficulty? I'd be willing to design some mission badges for the Kerbalnauts for use in this thread as people meet the challenges. :-)

I'd be up for trying one of these.

I did watch a video on the new demo and it looks pretty nice. Somebody might be able to participate using only the demo. It has a lot less parts and no space planes but it looks like you could accomplish most of the stuff on the list.

The latest version crashes regularly for me.

Schmutzli wrote:

1) Manual orbit with eccentricity of less than 5%
2) Polar Kerbin orbit
3) Get 36 tons of fuel to orbit (then 72, then 108)
4) Achieve orbit only using SRBs
5) Escape velocity from Kerbin
6) Polar lunar orbit lower than 10km
7) Manual landings: Mun, Minmus
8) Jool encounter
9) Mun/Mimus return mission
10) Using a single launch, put three probes into circular orbits with more than 100 km difference in average height
11) Achieve kerbin orbit and land on any island without parachutes
12) SSTO and full craft return
13) Geostationary constellation with 100% Kerbin coverage (at 30 degrees), multiple missions
14) Dock 3 ships in Kerbin orbit (then Mun)
15) Conduct Apollo-style Munar landing and dock with orbiting command module
16) Land within 1km of Neil Armstrong memorial
17) Land on top of Munar arch
18) Land on Mun and Minmus and return in a single mission

So I've started unofficially trying out these milestones. Some of them are pretty fun.

One and two were pretty easy for me but to switch it up I tried to do it with as small a rocket as possible. Once you get a rocket that can do step one, step two is just a matter of tilting a different direction once you lift off.

Three I skipped. I think that's a pretty difficult task and have never actually managed it.

Four however was a boat load of fun. I did get into orbit, just not a good orbit. I have to work on timing the last booster to get a circular orbit and not a very oblong one.

I'll try them again later and post some screenshots or something.

Is there a way to get a "manifest" for a given ship? It'd be nice to know total weight, cost, components, etc to show some progress on making more efficient ships etc.

I think there's a mod for doing that... Kerbal Engineer or something?

Well I took the Brutus IV up for another orbit attempt with only solid rocket boosters.

Behold!

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/vPVhYDD.png)

And on the launch pad in the early morning

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/XRmSAVq.png)

Lift off!

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/v3kNpjc.png)

It's not a great orbit but it is an orbit.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/XXKj4Pq.png)

I put the one main aircraft cockpit on it for the views. Here we are on the sunny side of the globe.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/jRSDdmt.jpg)

For the record, I did have one liquid rocket on it but I just used that for deorbiting.

Actually, that is a Hohmann transfer orbit... You can put something there, attach stuff to it in the lower orbit, then detach it in a higher orbit. At least that's what it's used for in real life.

Norfair wrote:

I think there's a mod for doing that... Kerbal Engineer or something?

Well I took the Brutus IV up for another orbit attempt with only solid rocket boosters.

Behold!

And on the launch pad in the early morning

Lift off!

It's not a great orbit but it is an orbit.

I put the one main aircraft cockpit on it for the views. Here we are on the sunny side of the globe.

For the record, I did have one liquid rocket on it but I just used that for deorbiting.

That's fantastic! I'll have to try my hand at these also, and think of new ones! If you come up with any ideas let me know!

I'll start working on those badges too. Ultimately I'd like to work on a roadmap of challenges for new players, to help folks new to KSP get a handle on the basics before graduating to higher challenges. The SRB to orbit challenge is great for planning staging, for example.

Set a new personal best for heavy lifter. This takes 78.21 tons to LKO, with 4519 fuel (and equivalent oxidizer) with an estimated dv of 4337.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/NUpYHXl.jpg)
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/86lHAoS.jpg)
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/L01zhGPh.png)

There are docking ports for chaining up to four of these ships together, which should be more than enough for landing on one of Jools moons and returning. I've successfully docked them in orbit, but the side engines were NERVA at the time giving awesome efficiency but annoying TWR.

Here's a Reddit thread collating a bunch of stuff that the devs just revealed about upcoming features in a livestream:

http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceP...