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Vapourware Let's play KSP (for the 4th time): KSP is a RPG edition
- Thread starter Hellraiser
- Start date
Hellraiser
Arcane
Chapter VI
The Moons of Jool are harsh mistresses.
All the Bop-hopping by Ulminati II paid off. I now have enough cash to buy the last upgrade for the R&D facility. TBH, at this point, I think people are honestly overestimating how grindy hard mode is. You just need to grab the mission control upgrades fairly soon and start planning multi-contract missions. Once they add in-situ refuelling, assuming it won't be at tier 3 R&D, survey contracts will become much easier. Either that or if we'll get those damn electric propellers. Duna/Eve planes would be a great source of cash.
Although I will admit, R&D outsourcing needs a nerf.
Vall is up next for a manned landing.
Added fresh meat for the space grinder.
Ulminati is doing more bop-hopping.
Though not for long, outer tanks on the Konjad expansion pack are empty. He'll need to get back to the Jaesun soon.
Unfortunately I had the bright idea of trying to get some of the objectives on the night side of Bop, when this bloody thing has no lights.
Luckily IVA view has a radar-based altimeter.
While objectives are completed one by one without any lethal disasters, Ulminati manages to knock-off one of the solar panels while descending down to the surface.
And the other fucking one later! Bloody hell! Down to the two small panels, again!
The Konjad leaves Bop and tries to do Jool survey contracts. Before I decide those are a fucking waste of time and delta-v. Honestly, it is better to just send a dedicated polar orbiter from Kerbin for these than try to get into high inclination survery orbit from a general equatorial orbital plane.
Preparing to aerocapture around Laythe.
Well, I went a bit too deep.
Ulminati II enjoys the view before plunging deep.
Very deep. I need an aerobraking reference table to stop this from happening in the future.
RIP Ulminati II
Meanwhile on Kerbin, shit explodes while I try to figure out how to make it work.
And then it works. This is the Golden Baby, STTO spaceplane built with newly unlocked tech, here seen landing at the KSC after returning from orbit. This thing is great. But more on that after it gets to Laythe.
In other news I install the Kerbonite mod (in-situ fuel production) and the Kerbonite plus expansion to it (adds one more hard to get resource for OP fusion drives), mostly for the epilogue to this LP.
Note that this mod uses one of the usually hidden tech tree nodes, experimental rocketry. These were added for high-tech shit from mods (or possibly for future high tech endgame parts), but few mods use them as they either use custom tech trees or earlier nodes.
I launch the Golden Baby on top of a carrier rocket and with a transfer tug stage, unmanned of course.
And as usual the lift from the wings and spaceplane body makes it unstable as fuck. It crashes into the VAB!
Well fuck, I'll have to repair that.
Not as expensive as expected, luckily.
Improved carrier design, this is probably the best way to launch planes unless the upcoming aerodynamics rework changes how lift works a lot.
Another disaster strikes soon after that, during a test of the Stereotypical Villain Vall Lander. Basically do not drop test landers, using launchclamps, onto the launchpad to check their impact tolerance. The destructible launchpad hates it.
At least this was not manned....
...oh wait. RIP Kashmir Slippers. He was onboard because I wanted to test the ladders.
Not sure if repair costs are capped at 128k or something.
Either way a final design is ready for launch. Hopefully nobody will become forever frozen on the surface of Vall, an eternal Prisoner of Ice.
Meanwhile Infinitron, uh, 11? Fuck I forgot. There was more of these than drog/chefe/knotalt alts. It makes it to Dres.
The joke about frequenting the bad parts of space is more funny to potatoes, as "dres" (tracksuit) is slang for the low life troglodyte thugs native to poor parts of potatoland. Actually the name Dres in KSP is a pun on Ceres (C-res, D-res? Get it?).
Dres is knows for two things, it has rather silly low gravity for a body that orbits the sun directly. Oh and it has this fuck huge canyon, the Dres Trench, biggest in the Kerbal solar system.
Of course, the probe is going to land in it.
And it does. FYI, those canyon walls are about 5 kilometers tall, or taller. Either way this thing is pretty fucking deep. There are some deep trenches in KSP, most notably there's one on Duna (a wide one) and on the Mun, but none are this long and deep.
Contract complete.
Installing the mod also added the related to it part manufacturer to the list of contract providing agents.
Ugh, Moho. I hate that place, then again I have a very good idea on how to do a manned mission there and back, after the last bit of derping around Moho in the Jakan LP. But first Joolian moons, and just a probe to Moho.
Jool transfer window, SV burns to greatness. It will rendezvous at Vall with the Jaesun, grab a volunteer and go to Vall from there.
We really need another moon-rich gas giant. Moon system are great to explore and you can try saving delta-v with gravity slingshot maneuvers Cassini and Galileo style.
Infinitron-12 (I think) arrives at Moho. As usual it takes way fucking more delta-v than the delta-v map says it should. Why? Small SoI (close to the sun while having gravity similar to Duna), fucked up inclined and eccentric orbit and when you finally get an encounter it is far from optimal and your relative velocity is just so fucking high. So orbital insertion through retrograde burning takes long.
Once you reach it though landing is not that hard. Duna with no atmo basically.
This is interesting. While they may not add again the superheated engine-killing atmosphere Moho had back in 0.17 when it was first added to the game, volcanism would make it more interesting than just brown Duna with no atmo from a gameplay perspective.
Good, Laythe survey contracts for a manned excursion. Perfect for the Golden Baby.
Speaking of Laythe, the Lyric Suite Laythe Lounge is about to aerocapture.
It's only 5 gees worth of deceleration, though the plasma envelope looks a bit scary.
Of course I went in too deep, again.
So instead of landing in this, as planned, this will land unmanned. I sent it to the North Pole where those surface visual survey objectives are. It was actually pretty cool to make these force me to explore the poles.
Oh great, since the assumption was this thing will land manned, the probe core was jettisoned to early and it landed like this, out of my control. Since it's tipped awkwardly like that with no means of control, it does not fulfil the "surface base on Laythe" objectives.
Meanwhile the SV aerocaptures safely around Laythe and rendezvous with the Jeaseun in orbit.
Azira volunteers to plant a flag on Vall. Also new crew transfer interface, so EVA to get from one part of the ship to the next is no longer needed.
Reaching Vall was fairly easy. I actually got lucky and the Jool periapsis after escaping Laythe's SoI was in such a point, that raising my apoapsis gave me a Vall encounter just like that.
Also the SV was carrying a survey sattelite with karbonite detectors, though I am using a somewhat bugged resource overlay to see deposits anyway. Unlike Kethane, Karbonite has deposits that have varying degrees of accessibility (to use the Aurora term), it is everywhere, but some places make you mine it faster, and it does take a while to mine it.
Unfortunately I fuck up and need to go suborbital to get one of the objectives. While Vall has huge ass jagged ice mountains.
Which are in front of me. Yeah, panic burn up to raise altitude and not kill Azira!
That wasted a lot of fuel and I need to go back to orbit to get to the other survey sites. Which are luckily clustered on the surface near each other. Still, this thing is low on fuel.
Good news, the Stereotypical Villain lands. Bad news, I nearly killed Azir because his EVA pack ran out of fuel just before getting back to the lander to refuel after surveying one site.
BTW navigating in EVA is borderline impossible due to how close these waypoints are, so I installed some mod that shows these in "flight" and just in map view. That was after I flew Azira in the totally fucking wrong direction twice.
Flag planting and getting other surveys.
Lucky those space suits don't tear apart.
I burn off monoprop to reduce mass, wondering if the SV has enough fuel to get back into orbit. I did the math...
Nope, at least 400 m/s short, considering I cannot into optimal ascent.
To be continued in next post, soon.
The Moons of Jool are harsh mistresses.
All the Bop-hopping by Ulminati II paid off. I now have enough cash to buy the last upgrade for the R&D facility. TBH, at this point, I think people are honestly overestimating how grindy hard mode is. You just need to grab the mission control upgrades fairly soon and start planning multi-contract missions. Once they add in-situ refuelling, assuming it won't be at tier 3 R&D, survey contracts will become much easier. Either that or if we'll get those damn electric propellers. Duna/Eve planes would be a great source of cash.
Although I will admit, R&D outsourcing needs a nerf.
Vall is up next for a manned landing.
Added fresh meat for the space grinder.
Ulminati is doing more bop-hopping.
Though not for long, outer tanks on the Konjad expansion pack are empty. He'll need to get back to the Jaesun soon.
Unfortunately I had the bright idea of trying to get some of the objectives on the night side of Bop, when this bloody thing has no lights.
Luckily IVA view has a radar-based altimeter.
While objectives are completed one by one without any lethal disasters, Ulminati manages to knock-off one of the solar panels while descending down to the surface.
And the other fucking one later! Bloody hell! Down to the two small panels, again!
The Konjad leaves Bop and tries to do Jool survey contracts. Before I decide those are a fucking waste of time and delta-v. Honestly, it is better to just send a dedicated polar orbiter from Kerbin for these than try to get into high inclination survery orbit from a general equatorial orbital plane.
Preparing to aerocapture around Laythe.
Well, I went a bit too deep.
Ulminati II enjoys the view before plunging deep.
Very deep. I need an aerobraking reference table to stop this from happening in the future.
RIP Ulminati II
Meanwhile on Kerbin, shit explodes while I try to figure out how to make it work.
And then it works. This is the Golden Baby, STTO spaceplane built with newly unlocked tech, here seen landing at the KSC after returning from orbit. This thing is great. But more on that after it gets to Laythe.
In other news I install the Kerbonite mod (in-situ fuel production) and the Kerbonite plus expansion to it (adds one more hard to get resource for OP fusion drives), mostly for the epilogue to this LP.
Note that this mod uses one of the usually hidden tech tree nodes, experimental rocketry. These were added for high-tech shit from mods (or possibly for future high tech endgame parts), but few mods use them as they either use custom tech trees or earlier nodes.
I launch the Golden Baby on top of a carrier rocket and with a transfer tug stage, unmanned of course.
And as usual the lift from the wings and spaceplane body makes it unstable as fuck. It crashes into the VAB!
Well fuck, I'll have to repair that.
Not as expensive as expected, luckily.
Improved carrier design, this is probably the best way to launch planes unless the upcoming aerodynamics rework changes how lift works a lot.
Another disaster strikes soon after that, during a test of the Stereotypical Villain Vall Lander. Basically do not drop test landers, using launchclamps, onto the launchpad to check their impact tolerance. The destructible launchpad hates it.
At least this was not manned....
...oh wait. RIP Kashmir Slippers. He was onboard because I wanted to test the ladders.
Not sure if repair costs are capped at 128k or something.
Either way a final design is ready for launch. Hopefully nobody will become forever frozen on the surface of Vall, an eternal Prisoner of Ice.
Meanwhile Infinitron, uh, 11? Fuck I forgot. There was more of these than drog/chefe/knotalt alts. It makes it to Dres.
The joke about frequenting the bad parts of space is more funny to potatoes, as "dres" (tracksuit) is slang for the low life troglodyte thugs native to poor parts of potatoland. Actually the name Dres in KSP is a pun on Ceres (C-res, D-res? Get it?).
Dres is knows for two things, it has rather silly low gravity for a body that orbits the sun directly. Oh and it has this fuck huge canyon, the Dres Trench, biggest in the Kerbal solar system.
Of course, the probe is going to land in it.
And it does. FYI, those canyon walls are about 5 kilometers tall, or taller. Either way this thing is pretty fucking deep. There are some deep trenches in KSP, most notably there's one on Duna (a wide one) and on the Mun, but none are this long and deep.
Contract complete.
Installing the mod also added the related to it part manufacturer to the list of contract providing agents.
Ugh, Moho. I hate that place, then again I have a very good idea on how to do a manned mission there and back, after the last bit of derping around Moho in the Jakan LP. But first Joolian moons, and just a probe to Moho.
Jool transfer window, SV burns to greatness. It will rendezvous at Vall with the Jaesun, grab a volunteer and go to Vall from there.
We really need another moon-rich gas giant. Moon system are great to explore and you can try saving delta-v with gravity slingshot maneuvers Cassini and Galileo style.
Infinitron-12 (I think) arrives at Moho. As usual it takes way fucking more delta-v than the delta-v map says it should. Why? Small SoI (close to the sun while having gravity similar to Duna), fucked up inclined and eccentric orbit and when you finally get an encounter it is far from optimal and your relative velocity is just so fucking high. So orbital insertion through retrograde burning takes long.
Once you reach it though landing is not that hard. Duna with no atmo basically.
This is interesting. While they may not add again the superheated engine-killing atmosphere Moho had back in 0.17 when it was first added to the game, volcanism would make it more interesting than just brown Duna with no atmo from a gameplay perspective.
Good, Laythe survey contracts for a manned excursion. Perfect for the Golden Baby.
Speaking of Laythe, the Lyric Suite Laythe Lounge is about to aerocapture.
It's only 5 gees worth of deceleration, though the plasma envelope looks a bit scary.
Of course I went in too deep, again.
So instead of landing in this, as planned, this will land unmanned. I sent it to the North Pole where those surface visual survey objectives are. It was actually pretty cool to make these force me to explore the poles.
Oh great, since the assumption was this thing will land manned, the probe core was jettisoned to early and it landed like this, out of my control. Since it's tipped awkwardly like that with no means of control, it does not fulfil the "surface base on Laythe" objectives.
Meanwhile the SV aerocaptures safely around Laythe and rendezvous with the Jeaseun in orbit.
Azira volunteers to plant a flag on Vall. Also new crew transfer interface, so EVA to get from one part of the ship to the next is no longer needed.
Reaching Vall was fairly easy. I actually got lucky and the Jool periapsis after escaping Laythe's SoI was in such a point, that raising my apoapsis gave me a Vall encounter just like that.
Also the SV was carrying a survey sattelite with karbonite detectors, though I am using a somewhat bugged resource overlay to see deposits anyway. Unlike Kethane, Karbonite has deposits that have varying degrees of accessibility (to use the Aurora term), it is everywhere, but some places make you mine it faster, and it does take a while to mine it.
Unfortunately I fuck up and need to go suborbital to get one of the objectives. While Vall has huge ass jagged ice mountains.
Which are in front of me. Yeah, panic burn up to raise altitude and not kill Azira!
That wasted a lot of fuel and I need to go back to orbit to get to the other survey sites. Which are luckily clustered on the surface near each other. Still, this thing is low on fuel.
Good news, the Stereotypical Villain lands. Bad news, I nearly killed Azir because his EVA pack ran out of fuel just before getting back to the lander to refuel after surveying one site.
BTW navigating in EVA is borderline impossible due to how close these waypoints are, so I installed some mod that shows these in "flight" and just in map view. That was after I flew Azira in the totally fucking wrong direction twice.
Flag planting and getting other surveys.
Lucky those space suits don't tear apart.
I burn off monoprop to reduce mass, wondering if the SV has enough fuel to get back into orbit. I did the math...
Nope, at least 400 m/s short, considering I cannot into optimal ascent.
To be continued in next post, soon.
Hellraiser
Arcane
Part 2 of Chapter VI
I test the rescue plan, since Azira is now a Prisoner of Ice. The Vall Dew Mobile Still. Also comes with some Kerbitos. A small, mining and refining rig. This thing will probably take months(!) to refuel to SV. Which actually makes it quite close to the estimation of in-situ fuel production for Mars with some proposed rigs. Luckily I can just time warp during production and mining.
The bottlenecks are the resource processing rate and the mining rate (tied to resource deposits at the SV landing site), and sunlight availability as Vall gets less sunlight than Kerbin.
Now, I could have just landed a land tanker, but since I have Kerbonite (or Karbonite? I keep forgetting) installed might as well use that and show you how in-situ fuel production can be used. Since it will be possible to mine and refine fuel in stock in deep space soon anyway and the general rules will be similar.
Also why not build and send a bigger rig to Minmus, as that place is quite possibly the best place for a refueling operation?
Cloned the dead some more.
Oh yeah, this thing is huge. The Minmus Dew Industrial Still. It also costs more than the contract will net me
The top orange tanks are actually mostly empty (tweakables are great) otherwise this would never take off the ground, but I need their capacity. This thing should be able to fill itself to full, get into minmus orbit and land back there when nearly drained.
The plan is to land on that juicy 6,3% Karbonite content minmus soil.
It is also fucking dark! I have lights, but they only start doing their magic below 1km. And if I have no idea how far off that 1km from the ground is I do not know when the point of no return for starting deceleration is. Good thing I can zoom out the camera and guess base on that.
Turns out the rich deposit is at one of the fronzen lakes at "sea" level.
The rig lands safely, with just barely enough fuel to get there. Unfortunately I fucked up the design I didn't connect a fuel tank directly to a Karbonite converter, but by using fuel lines, and that is not enough. So no fuel ends up in my tanks.
Proper order is drills to karbonite tank to converter/processor to fuel tank.
Meanwhile, you will believe a Golden Baby can fly on Laythe. But first it must aerobrake.
That worked, however I nearly drained both it's transfer stage and the Jaesun's of fuel. Why? It ended up on a polar orbit. Well, the orbit would be inclined anyway but for some retarded reason I figured it's better to drop this from Polar orbit to get to the survey site.
Guess I'll need to send a Taluntain-3 to refuel the Jaesun if it is ever to come back. Or just build a 3-man return to kerbin capsule and ditch Jaesun around Laythe (sorry bro).
There is nothing more fun then flying using EVA packs through the cold void of space with no safety lines for 1km.
ERYFKRAD and Storyfag III are chosen to participate in this expedition. This leaves the Jaesun uncrewed, however it has a probe core so it's 'k.
Not much of a view from the inside, while enveloped by re-entry (or rather entry) plasma.
Jet engines are brought to life. Course set for the North Pole of Laythe.
Right, so about this thing. It's actually rather heavy for a SSTO and a bit unorthodox. You see, while I have RAPIERs unlocked, it doesn't use them. Two turbojets (better jet thrust than RAPIERs) and one standard LV-RT30 (the first liquid fuel engine you start with). It is quite heavy, lot of rocket fuel and jet fuel and doesn't get as high up on Kerbin as typical SSTOs do, relying a lot on its single rocket engine to get into orbit.
Oh and it has a lot of jet fuel, enough to fly around Kerbin or Laythe as much as I please. And it can get to orbit despite having most of that fuel in the tanks. That's on Kerbin, here on Laythe it should have no issues at all as Laythe has less dense atmo, smaller orbital velocity due to a smaller radius and smaller gravity than kerbin's by 20% in both.
Also it has RTGs for power and all the science stuff in the cargo bay.
After about 7 minutes since re-entry it's doing supersonic cruising and arrives in the far northern polar regions. Since all planets and moons in KSP have no axial tilt, the poles are always in twilight.
Landing attempt near the inoperational surface base, time to fix it.
This is one of those "rare" new experiment reports texts, like the water on Duna and Kraken egg on Bop ones. Guess this does confirm that while Laythe's atmo has oxygen, there's some other stuff in it you do not want to breathe.
Also bad news, a decoupler to which the wings are attached prevent ERYFKRAD from climbing up the ladder into the Lyric Suite Laythe Lounge. Those were supposed to decouple simultanously when I decoupled the probe, but the game stopped decoupling as soon as it detected that the craft had nothing to control it with. At least it fired the parachutes first, since those were also supposed to deploy with the wing and probe decoupling.
I have an idea however. The Golden Baby after all has rover wheels, just like all my other survey planes...
I gently push it with the nose of the plane. It works and it is no longer tipped. Also...
The nose is in nearly perfectly aligned with the height of the wings, so I can use it to have a codexnaut climb on the wing, then on the nacelle, which makes him end up on the ladder above the decoupler blocking his path from surface level.
Entering the base makes it controllable, which also makes it complete the surface base contract.
Jettisoned the wings, finally. Now it looks the way it was supposed to and codexnauts can access it through the ladder.
Also I forgot to add an antenna to the Golden Baby, so I have my kerbonauts carry experiments from the plane to the base and send the data to Kerbin from there since it has an antenna (one of the contract requirements for the base).
Uh, looks like a bug, probably a typo in the red number somewhere as this contract is not procedural. I have not been anywhere near Pol
Been there, done that.
I fly about 20 km to the first survey point. Landing was rough, this thing is mostly filled with fuel and it can't glide being as heavy with it as it is. Luckily I use jets to level flight a bit during final approach.
Yeah, this is what the the "rare" EVA report text was referring to. Not sure why the "rare" one always appears first.
One surface survey contract down, two more to go for Laythe.
Back on Kerbin, spacejew gold is used to upgrade the tracking station.
This means I can detect and thus capture randomly generated asteroids now. They should make the game also spawn those in the rings of a gas giant. Would be cool for resource mining.
Back on Laythe, the Golden Baby leaves the poles, for some reason the poles on Laythe have a rather pixelated shape. That will probably get fixed when Laythe gets an art rework. Since pretty much every body apart from the Pol, Dres, Eeloo, Duna, Eve, Kebin, Minmus, Moho and the Mun hasn't gotten one yet. Actually, that just leaves Ike, Bop, Vall, Tylo, Laythe and Gilly. Well maybe Jool as well but it just needs clouds basically, not terrain repainting.
Somewhere in the sky, Vall can be seen, and somewhere on it, Azira is imprisoned... in ice.
Second survey contract bring me to an island somewhere around 40-ish degrees of latitude.
Actually more like 30-sih judging by how Jool is titled here.
After driving around a bit I get all 3 points. The isle was somewhat hilly but not much, however the last point was on the top of some slope. I took of from it after waiting for the right time of day.
Quite a bit of fuel got used but the plane is going supersonic and I have just one point to visit now and it's back to orbit. Should be enough and I hardly need that much oxidizer as that's enough for Kerbin and the rocket engine will be used less to get into laythe's orbit.
As mentioned I waited for the right time so that I would land during the day on the equatorial island. This is the one with the single surface sample waypoint I showed in the previous update or so.
That looks like a sharp slope, gently going in reverse (hard to turn around on this).
The slope turned out to be a sharp
! The force of braking necessary to start slowing down caused the plane to spin out of control! Distaster!
The cockpit survived, but not much else. Also the fucking survey point is right next to the fucking see, on what is close to a fucking cliff. You'd need a fucking helicopter or boat to survey this.
Actually I could have walked a Kerbonaut downhill but it would take too long (2km I think)
Yeah, now I need to figure out how to save these two from this clifside hell of. Rovers are out of the question and this island was already very hard to land on due to all the slopes. Probably going to have to walk up hill to a VTOL jet hopper or jet plane, taking them back to a proper spaceplane.
I test the rescue plan, since Azira is now a Prisoner of Ice. The Vall Dew Mobile Still. Also comes with some Kerbitos. A small, mining and refining rig. This thing will probably take months(!) to refuel to SV. Which actually makes it quite close to the estimation of in-situ fuel production for Mars with some proposed rigs. Luckily I can just time warp during production and mining.
The bottlenecks are the resource processing rate and the mining rate (tied to resource deposits at the SV landing site), and sunlight availability as Vall gets less sunlight than Kerbin.
Now, I could have just landed a land tanker, but since I have Kerbonite (or Karbonite? I keep forgetting) installed might as well use that and show you how in-situ fuel production can be used. Since it will be possible to mine and refine fuel in stock in deep space soon anyway and the general rules will be similar.
Also why not build and send a bigger rig to Minmus, as that place is quite possibly the best place for a refueling operation?
Cloned the dead some more.
Oh yeah, this thing is huge. The Minmus Dew Industrial Still. It also costs more than the contract will net me
The top orange tanks are actually mostly empty (tweakables are great) otherwise this would never take off the ground, but I need their capacity. This thing should be able to fill itself to full, get into minmus orbit and land back there when nearly drained.
The plan is to land on that juicy 6,3% Karbonite content minmus soil.
It is also fucking dark! I have lights, but they only start doing their magic below 1km. And if I have no idea how far off that 1km from the ground is I do not know when the point of no return for starting deceleration is. Good thing I can zoom out the camera and guess base on that.
Turns out the rich deposit is at one of the fronzen lakes at "sea" level.
The rig lands safely, with just barely enough fuel to get there. Unfortunately I fucked up the design I didn't connect a fuel tank directly to a Karbonite converter, but by using fuel lines, and that is not enough. So no fuel ends up in my tanks.
Proper order is drills to karbonite tank to converter/processor to fuel tank.
Meanwhile, you will believe a Golden Baby can fly on Laythe. But first it must aerobrake.
That worked, however I nearly drained both it's transfer stage and the Jaesun's of fuel. Why? It ended up on a polar orbit. Well, the orbit would be inclined anyway but for some retarded reason I figured it's better to drop this from Polar orbit to get to the survey site.
Guess I'll need to send a Taluntain-3 to refuel the Jaesun if it is ever to come back. Or just build a 3-man return to kerbin capsule and ditch Jaesun around Laythe (sorry bro).
There is nothing more fun then flying using EVA packs through the cold void of space with no safety lines for 1km.
ERYFKRAD and Storyfag III are chosen to participate in this expedition. This leaves the Jaesun uncrewed, however it has a probe core so it's 'k.
Not much of a view from the inside, while enveloped by re-entry (or rather entry) plasma.
Jet engines are brought to life. Course set for the North Pole of Laythe.
Right, so about this thing. It's actually rather heavy for a SSTO and a bit unorthodox. You see, while I have RAPIERs unlocked, it doesn't use them. Two turbojets (better jet thrust than RAPIERs) and one standard LV-RT30 (the first liquid fuel engine you start with). It is quite heavy, lot of rocket fuel and jet fuel and doesn't get as high up on Kerbin as typical SSTOs do, relying a lot on its single rocket engine to get into orbit.
Oh and it has a lot of jet fuel, enough to fly around Kerbin or Laythe as much as I please. And it can get to orbit despite having most of that fuel in the tanks. That's on Kerbin, here on Laythe it should have no issues at all as Laythe has less dense atmo, smaller orbital velocity due to a smaller radius and smaller gravity than kerbin's by 20% in both.
Also it has RTGs for power and all the science stuff in the cargo bay.
After about 7 minutes since re-entry it's doing supersonic cruising and arrives in the far northern polar regions. Since all planets and moons in KSP have no axial tilt, the poles are always in twilight.
Landing attempt near the inoperational surface base, time to fix it.
This is one of those "rare" new experiment reports texts, like the water on Duna and Kraken egg on Bop ones. Guess this does confirm that while Laythe's atmo has oxygen, there's some other stuff in it you do not want to breathe.
Also bad news, a decoupler to which the wings are attached prevent ERYFKRAD from climbing up the ladder into the Lyric Suite Laythe Lounge. Those were supposed to decouple simultanously when I decoupled the probe, but the game stopped decoupling as soon as it detected that the craft had nothing to control it with. At least it fired the parachutes first, since those were also supposed to deploy with the wing and probe decoupling.
I have an idea however. The Golden Baby after all has rover wheels, just like all my other survey planes...
I gently push it with the nose of the plane. It works and it is no longer tipped. Also...
The nose is in nearly perfectly aligned with the height of the wings, so I can use it to have a codexnaut climb on the wing, then on the nacelle, which makes him end up on the ladder above the decoupler blocking his path from surface level.
Entering the base makes it controllable, which also makes it complete the surface base contract.
Jettisoned the wings, finally. Now it looks the way it was supposed to and codexnauts can access it through the ladder.
Also I forgot to add an antenna to the Golden Baby, so I have my kerbonauts carry experiments from the plane to the base and send the data to Kerbin from there since it has an antenna (one of the contract requirements for the base).
Uh, looks like a bug, probably a typo in the red number somewhere as this contract is not procedural. I have not been anywhere near Pol
Been there, done that.
I fly about 20 km to the first survey point. Landing was rough, this thing is mostly filled with fuel and it can't glide being as heavy with it as it is. Luckily I use jets to level flight a bit during final approach.
Yeah, this is what the the "rare" EVA report text was referring to. Not sure why the "rare" one always appears first.
One surface survey contract down, two more to go for Laythe.
Back on Kerbin, spacejew gold is used to upgrade the tracking station.
This means I can detect and thus capture randomly generated asteroids now. They should make the game also spawn those in the rings of a gas giant. Would be cool for resource mining.
Back on Laythe, the Golden Baby leaves the poles, for some reason the poles on Laythe have a rather pixelated shape. That will probably get fixed when Laythe gets an art rework. Since pretty much every body apart from the Pol, Dres, Eeloo, Duna, Eve, Kebin, Minmus, Moho and the Mun hasn't gotten one yet. Actually, that just leaves Ike, Bop, Vall, Tylo, Laythe and Gilly. Well maybe Jool as well but it just needs clouds basically, not terrain repainting.
Somewhere in the sky, Vall can be seen, and somewhere on it, Azira is imprisoned... in ice.
Second survey contract bring me to an island somewhere around 40-ish degrees of latitude.
Actually more like 30-sih judging by how Jool is titled here.
After driving around a bit I get all 3 points. The isle was somewhat hilly but not much, however the last point was on the top of some slope. I took of from it after waiting for the right time of day.
Quite a bit of fuel got used but the plane is going supersonic and I have just one point to visit now and it's back to orbit. Should be enough and I hardly need that much oxidizer as that's enough for Kerbin and the rocket engine will be used less to get into laythe's orbit.
As mentioned I waited for the right time so that I would land during the day on the equatorial island. This is the one with the single surface sample waypoint I showed in the previous update or so.
That looks like a sharp slope, gently going in reverse (hard to turn around on this).
The slope turned out to be a sharp
! The force of braking necessary to start slowing down caused the plane to spin out of control! Distaster!
The cockpit survived, but not much else. Also the fucking survey point is right next to the fucking see, on what is close to a fucking cliff. You'd need a fucking helicopter or boat to survey this.
Actually I could have walked a Kerbonaut downhill but it would take too long (2km I think)
Yeah, now I need to figure out how to save these two from this clifside hell of
. Rovers are out of the question and this island was already very hard to land on due to all the slopes. Probably going to have to walk up hill to a VTOL jet hopper or jet plane, taking them back to a proper spaceplane.
What am I doing on Vall you ask?
...
Just chillin'.
...
Just chillin'.
Hellraiser
Arcane
Chapter VII
I wanna (space) rock!
With the dolts stuck on Laythe, and a steep cliff side between them and any sane landing site for a spaceplane, I opt to have them transported differently. I opt for the Hopper.
It has a range of about 20-30km, depending how you fly it. More than that on Laythe due to both less drag and atmo.
Two of these will be paradropped next to the wreck of the Golden Baby.
Testing a new SSTO, one which will only work as a shuttle to orbit and back.
But before anything will even get to Jool it will be another two Kerbin years. Or three even. A fucking lot. So I design the Jaesun-2 Asteroid Recovery Vessel.
With the upgraded tracking center these space rocks randomly spawn in varying sizes on different trajectoirs, all of which eventually encounter Kerbin. You pretty much have only one shot to capture them. The encounter with Kerbin may put them into crazy orbits around the Sun. Or have them impact Kerbin, or have them flung out of the system. Either way solar rendezvous is something I rather not do again.
The contract wants me to grab a B Class rock. Now B is the second smallest asteroid class. The biggest rocks are E class, and they have mass in the area of only about 1500 to 2000-ish tons. I think the heaviest rockets I built had, at launch, about 1000 tons.
While waiting for the rock to enter Kerbin's SoI I test the Winged Exemplar II prototype. It is smaller than the Golden Baby, has no rover wheels and uses a single RAPIER engine.
The Jimbob Deep Space Capsule will supply fresh codexer meat to the Joolian expedition and return all three surviving kerbonauts to Kerbin.
First however I need to level up these fresh recruits so they actually do shit. I fire up the good old starting dungeon.
Flight went well and all level 1 recruits are launched into spess aboard the Jimbob. They reach orbit safely and wait for the transfer burn.
However all is not well when launching the Vall Dew Mobile Distillery.
Quite a lot of spacejew gold ends up sinking into the ocean.
The launch of the Winged Exemplar-2 goes smoothly.
The Hopper Dropper launches as well, this will drop two Hoppers (duh!) near the crashed dolts.
The Konjad-2, since I still have to explore Pol and because I need to grab cash.
This was a testing station for the Orbital Karbonite Particle Collector. It either doesn't work around Kerbin or works only in atmo. Not sure.
The Jimbob DSC begins its trans-Joolian injection burn. It uses drop-tanks, these are jettisoned in pairs as they go dry to reduce drymass and increase delta-v.
This one has to pay a lot considering the nearly 500k advance. Alas I am not going to bother with it. Overall asteroid contracts, like base contracts, feel a bit pointless at this point.
Luckily the next update, which is actually going to be version 1.0, is supposed to feature resource mining. So these space rocks will be mineable for fuel. Capturing one and even putting it around a distant planet may actually make sense then.
I need to repair my budget a bit since I lost quite a few rockets and launched quite a lot of stuff. Luckily Laythe survey contracts show up and the Crooked Bee-2 is reactivated.
Well, looks like it is in the middle of Laythe's great Sagen Sea a.k.a. nowhere.
Did I mention that this survey contract required me to take the pressure reading on the surface? Bees may tend to fly vertically but this one wasn't made to float.
Luckily I have also a second contract with waypoints on laythe's northern isles. The waypoint is amidst some dunes.
Yeah, landing on those did not go as planned. But the Crooked Bee-2 now kind of looks like a B-Wing, or something.
The probe core survives the crash, but with no power source it eventually goes dead. Not like it could transmit or anything.
Somehow I missed the last B-Class asteroid, or it was on a shitty trajectory. Either way I found and started tracking a new one, DVC-659.
98k for this launch, 300k for the contracts, if this works.
36 days until it is closest to Kerbin, inclination is out of whack, periapsis 2,6 times further away from Kerbin than the Mun.
I launch north-east when more or less below the part of Kerbin's near-space through which it will fly.
I totally launched in the wrong fucking direction, should have gone south-west. The Jaesun-2 was orbiting retrograde relative to the asteroid. Luckily reversing your orbit is easy from a high altitude as kinetic energy is low while potential energy is high.
The asteroid entered Kerbin's SoI. I do some clever maneuvering to put my apoapsis as close to the asteroid as possible.
Nearly half of the fuel is gone. Target is moving away at 200 m/s.
Orbits are mostly matched, time now for the easy part, claw rape.
Jaedar and Whitewolf, space rock rapist pioneers, see their victim.
The claw is armed, exposed, ready to penetrate into the inside of the asteroid.
The deed is done. In space nobody can hear you cry rape
Well, getting it forcefully into orbit was still ahead of me, wasn't too hard.
Actually with the advance this whole mission was worth about 200-ish thousand.
Not much bigger than the ship.
You can science! it. Not sure why bother, 36 science by the time you buy the final tracking station upgrade is nothing. Luckily the next update is supposed to rebalance everything.
I bring it into a low periapsis, do some aerobraking passes.
A Winged Exemplar-2 (or II? How the fuck did I named it again...) was sent to get these heroes of Kerbalkind back to Kerbin. Despite having to launch into the north-west it managed to achieve orbit.
Landed quite far away from the KSC but in once piece. The Winged Exemplar II is most certainly space-worthy.
Deja vu. In that case, time to dust off an old design.
This time it should work.
That speck that looks like an insect on your monitor? That's the old and failed Minmus Dew Industrial Still as seeon from about 1500 meters away. It serves as a glorified navigation beacon.
Actually made a profit.
Minmus sublimation from the EVE mod, so majestic.
The mining rig works this time around, producing fuel, although slowly.
Join me later as I aerocapture shit around Laythe, after I waste a ton of funds on prototyping something as
as it is dangerous. And hopefully which will end in me repairing my damn budget. Getting really shitty contracts lately and I will get hit with a lot of penalties for failing some of them, like the Jool survey ones.
I wanna (space) rock!
With the dolts stuck on Laythe, and a steep cliff side between them and any sane landing site for a spaceplane, I opt to have them transported differently. I opt for the Hopper.
It has a range of about 20-30km, depending how you fly it. More than that on Laythe due to both less drag and atmo.
Two of these will be paradropped next to the wreck of the Golden Baby.
Testing a new SSTO, one which will only work as a shuttle to orbit and back.
But before anything will even get to Jool it will be another two Kerbin years. Or three even. A fucking lot. So I design the Jaesun-2 Asteroid Recovery Vessel.
With the upgraded tracking center these space rocks randomly spawn in varying sizes on different trajectoirs, all of which eventually encounter Kerbin. You pretty much have only one shot to capture them. The encounter with Kerbin may put them into crazy orbits around the Sun. Or have them impact Kerbin, or have them flung out of the system. Either way solar rendezvous is something I rather not do again.
The contract wants me to grab a B Class rock. Now B is the second smallest asteroid class. The biggest rocks are E class, and they have mass in the area of only about 1500 to 2000-ish tons. I think the heaviest rockets I built had, at launch, about 1000 tons.
While waiting for the rock to enter Kerbin's SoI I test the Winged Exemplar II prototype. It is smaller than the Golden Baby, has no rover wheels and uses a single RAPIER engine.
The Jimbob Deep Space Capsule will supply fresh codexer meat to the Joolian expedition and return all three surviving kerbonauts to Kerbin.
First however I need to level up these fresh recruits so they actually do shit. I fire up the good old starting dungeon.
Flight went well and all level 1 recruits are launched into spess aboard the Jimbob. They reach orbit safely and wait for the transfer burn.
However all is not well when launching the Vall Dew Mobile Distillery.
Quite a lot of spacejew gold ends up sinking into the ocean.
The launch of the Winged Exemplar-2 goes smoothly.
The Hopper Dropper launches as well, this will drop two Hoppers (duh!) near the crashed dolts.
The Konjad-2, since I still have to explore Pol and because I need to grab cash.
This was a testing station for the Orbital Karbonite Particle Collector. It either doesn't work around Kerbin or works only in atmo. Not sure.
The Jimbob DSC begins its trans-Joolian injection burn. It uses drop-tanks, these are jettisoned in pairs as they go dry to reduce drymass and increase delta-v.
This one has to pay a lot considering the nearly 500k advance. Alas I am not going to bother with it. Overall asteroid contracts, like base contracts, feel a bit pointless at this point.
Luckily the next update, which is actually going to be version 1.0, is supposed to feature resource mining. So these space rocks will be mineable for fuel. Capturing one and even putting it around a distant planet may actually make sense then.
I need to repair my budget a bit since I lost quite a few rockets and launched quite a lot of stuff. Luckily Laythe survey contracts show up and the Crooked Bee-2 is reactivated.
Well, looks like it is in the middle of Laythe's great Sagen Sea a.k.a. nowhere.
Did I mention that this survey contract required me to take the pressure reading on the surface? Bees may tend to fly vertically but this one wasn't made to float.
Luckily I have also a second contract with waypoints on laythe's northern isles. The waypoint is amidst some dunes.
Yeah, landing on those did not go as planned. But the Crooked Bee-2 now kind of looks like a B-Wing, or something.
The probe core survives the crash, but with no power source it eventually goes dead. Not like it could transmit or anything.
Somehow I missed the last B-Class asteroid, or it was on a shitty trajectory. Either way I found and started tracking a new one, DVC-659.
98k for this launch, 300k for the contracts, if this works.
36 days until it is closest to Kerbin, inclination is out of whack, periapsis 2,6 times further away from Kerbin than the Mun.
I launch north-east when more or less below the part of Kerbin's near-space through which it will fly.
I totally launched in the wrong fucking direction, should have gone south-west. The Jaesun-2 was orbiting retrograde relative to the asteroid. Luckily reversing your orbit is easy from a high altitude as kinetic energy is low while potential energy is high.
The asteroid entered Kerbin's SoI. I do some clever maneuvering to put my apoapsis as close to the asteroid as possible.
Nearly half of the fuel is gone. Target is moving away at 200 m/s.
Orbits are mostly matched, time now for the easy part, claw rape.
Jaedar and Whitewolf, space rock rapist pioneers, see their victim.
The claw is armed, exposed, ready to penetrate into the inside of the asteroid.
The deed is done. In space nobody can hear you cry rape
Well, getting it forcefully into orbit was still ahead of me, wasn't too hard.
Actually with the advance this whole mission was worth about 200-ish thousand.
Not much bigger than the ship.
You can science! it. Not sure why bother, 36 science by the time you buy the final tracking station upgrade is nothing. Luckily the next update is supposed to rebalance everything.
I bring it into a low periapsis, do some aerobraking passes.
A Winged Exemplar-2 (or II? How the fuck did I named it again...) was sent to get these heroes of Kerbalkind back to Kerbin. Despite having to launch into the north-west it managed to achieve orbit.
Landed quite far away from the KSC but in once piece. The Winged Exemplar II is most certainly space-worthy.
Deja vu. In that case, time to dust off an old design.
This time it should work.
That speck that looks like an insect on your monitor? That's the old and failed Minmus Dew Industrial Still as seeon from about 1500 meters away. It serves as a glorified navigation beacon.
Actually made a profit.
Minmus sublimation from the EVE mod, so majestic.
The mining rig works this time around, producing fuel, although slowly.
Join me later as I aerocapture shit around Laythe, after I waste a ton of funds on prototyping something as
as it is dangerous. And hopefully which will end in me repairing my damn budget. Getting really shitty contracts lately and I will get hit with a lot of penalties for failing some of them, like the Jool survey ones.
Makabb
Arcane
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2014
- Messages
- 11,753
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