I’ve had a question about strategies. It was a bit of a roundabout question of “Can you not just turn science into funds or vice versa?”.
The answer to this is “YES”, but there are some catches to this. While I don’t claim to fully understand the mechanics that are based around Reputation (mainly because I’m lazy about my reddit), I think they work a bit like this:
1). Every contract you take on and complete has up to three rewards. One is funds, one science and one reputation. Not all contracts carry all three rewards.
2). Failing a contract, either by time-out or cancellation, cost you some funds and reputation.
3). Killing Kerbals reduces reputation (This is something I’ve heard/read but not confirmed – I love Jeb too much).
The Administration Building at the KSC is where you assign strategies, and without any strategy mods it looks a bit like this on the inside:
Could be a lot more useful!
You have a choice of the following:
Fundraising Campaign – Reputation gain to Funds
Patents Licensing – Science to Funds
Unpaid research Program – Reputation gains to Science
Outsourcing R&D – Funds to Science
Appreciation Campaign – Funds to Reputation
Open Source Tech Program – Science to Reputation
Aggressive Negotiations – Reduction in launch cost and R&D spending for Reputation
Please note these only apply to the contracts (afaik), so if you have Patents Licensing active you don’t get extra funds form the science you recover with experiments!
Each of these has a set up cost that is related to the resource you’re giving up, so for Patents Licensing the set up cost is an amount of Science, for example. You can use the slider on the right to adjust the amount of commitment to the strategy, this increases the rewards as well as the cost. The amount you can use the slider and the number of active strategies is decided by the level of your Administration Building.
Now, for the double edge here, as with everything. I think that some balancing or a mod might be needed as, according to some of the things I’ve read, the higher your reputation the better the missions you have available from Mission Control. In my experience so far, I’ve found that better missions return more science, funds and reputation than you would get from sacrificing reputation early on for a strategy. So rather than trading 5% of my reputation gains for 1 science per 1.65 reputation (Unpaid Research at 5% commitment), I’d rather hang on to my reputation and get some awesome contracts sooner which I feel more than makes up for the slight pinch it puts on the early game. Up to this point, and likely beyond, I won’t be using any strategies – maybe I’m missing a trick though.
If anyone knows different then please let me know and I’ll update this with fact rather than opinion.
After several hours of banging my head against the desk trying to figure a way to get a Mun lander that would actually work, I gave up. I just can’t get enough delta-v into it with the current technology. The only way around this is to get some more science and unlock some new tech. While it’s possible to just send off a probe to the Mun again, that’s a little dull and won’t make any funds without an associated contract mission.
Fortunately, Kerbin has a second natural satellite, Minmus. There is a convenient mission to position a satellite around Minmus available to be started and that can be combined with the contract to explore Minmus, so we can do both of these with the new Occulus II. This satellite is a slight improvement in that it has an extra photovoltaic truss set-up as well as science in the form of a Mystery Goo Canister and a Materials Bay, but the most useful thing is a ScanSat Altimeter. This will begin to build up a map as the Occulus II orbits Minmus.
We can use this information to figure out the slopes of Minmus and it is the first step on our mission to colonise the solar system. We’ll be using further scanners to expose the underlying Kethane on other orbital bodies to mine and refuel ships before they press on to the outer solar system. More on this later though, one bridge at a time.
Mission to Minmus:
The launch is a simple thing by now. The launch stage doesn’t really have the grunt to get everything into orbit but the satellite can carry itself the final 200m/s into a reasonably circular orbit.
Since Minumus is not on the equatorial plane of Kerbin there has to be an inclination change to 6 degrees. This is done by targeting Minmus and planning a burn at either the ascending or descending node to burn either normal or anti-normal (depending on which node you use). Since our current orbit is circular, either will do, if it’s not circular you will get greater efficiency by burning at the node that is furthest from the body you are orbiting.
Once the inclination change is complete it’s time for a Hoffman Transfer to Minmus, coming around the back of the moon to set us up for the required inclination. Once circularised it’s not too hard of a job to use the manoeuvre nodes to set up a burn to match the inclination, another burn pulls the periapsis down to roughly where it is required.
For the final burn, Occulus II orbits to the periapsis we just set and then a burn both retrograde and anti-radial is used to pull down the apoapsis and also effectively “rotate” the orbit so that it matches what is required to complete the contract. After ten seconds of holding position with SAS on the contract is completed.
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Now it’s time to open up the science kit and take some readings. Mystery Goo and Materials Bays don’t return great science when transmitted, but the main reason for this mission is the science associated with the contract as well as the ScanSat altimeter radar. When sitting in orbit with the ScanSat active it will gradually produce a map of the surface, showing different things depending on the scanner. In this case we’ll only get the altitude of the terrain, but it’s a start, and the higher the inclination the more map will be revealed.
The first data returned about the surface of Minmus. This will fill itself in as we do other things.
Debriefing:
Another contract down and we’re up to 566k funds and 140 science. This new science is just what we need to get a sensible lander onto the Mun. The important thing is that we can buy “Fuel Systems” which unlock fuel lines. These will pump fuel around the spacecraft automatically while in flight, meaning we can come up with some much more efficient designs, and we’re all about efficiency!
Bonus:
So we also have a contract to test an XL parachute in flight over Kerbin. I’m pretty sure that you’re supposed to test these while re-entering the atmosphere but flying a probe with a parachute upwards seems to work just fine.
All that’s needed is to pop the chute between 5300m and 14200m while going 250-450 m/s. That’s trivial and the probe floats down on the chute to land next to the launchpad. The easiest 48 science so far and this gives enough to buy “Advanced Construction” which will make the satellites we build a lot easier to look at, among other things.
The next two missions on the docket are pretty much for making more funds, with a total return of nearly 200k funds, this should be well worth it. Two satellites need placing in orbit, one around Kerbin and the other around the Mun. For this we will be starting the Occulus Program to seed orbital satellites into the solar system. To begin with these will be simple satellites but as technology progresses they will take on several functions for missions, science gathering and terrain and resource scanning.
To get the program started I have designed one satellite – Occulus I. This is going to complete both missions. Firstly one satellite will be positioned about 2Mkm from Kerbin on an inclination of 1 degree. The second will be positioned around the Mun in an equatorial orbit at about 220km from the surface. Both should be attainable by Occulus I.
So here is it. A simple satellite with a couple of solar panels and Goo Canisters loaded onto an engine and some batteries.
The thing is so light we can strap it to the simplest of launch vehicles. A primary stage will do most of the lift to orbit before the secondary stage pushes the satellite into a parking orbit. After that the satellite should have enough fuel onboard to make any necessary orbital corrections around Kerbin but alos have enough delta-v to insert the second satellite to Munar orbit. If I was being super efficient I could build the first satelite to be a lot lighter with less fuel, but the temptation of clicking build twice was much more tempting and to be honest, it won’t save that much in funds.
Launch 1:
The first launch was very straight forward. The small launch vehicle has a good TWR and it’s east to get above the atmosphere before separating the first stage. The orbital manoeuvring stage is actually a little low on delta-v and doesn’t manage to get the payload fully into a stable orbit. The Occulus I satellite does have about 2500 delta-v of it’s own to make any necessary course corrections and a little bit of this was used to achieve final orbit.
After that it was a simple task of changing the orbit to match the request of the contract. First push the apoapsis out to match and then, at that new apoapsis, bring the periapsis to the desired point. Then leave the satellite alone for 10 seconds and the contract is completed.
While we’re up here, for a cheeky bonus there is a contract to collect science from Kerbin space. Since the satellite is already here this si free money and by running a mystery goo experiment and broadcasting it back we get an extra 30k funds. We also get one science – we could almost retire on that! Still, it’s better than nothing (see last mission to the Mun).
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Launch 2:
The thing to remember for this mission is that the final inclination of the orbit around the Mun must be 0 degrees. This means that we have to make sure that we got around the correct side of the Mun or we’ll end up with an orbit going the wrong way around. A correction burn for that will require more delta-v that we actually have. To sort this out we need to fly in front of the Mun as we approach.
Once that’s done it’s a very easy manoeuvre to slow the satellite down to orbital velocity. We came in at a very slight angle so after the circularisation of the orbit we’re at about 2 degrees inclination. This seems to be acceptable though as the mission is completed 10 seconds after stabilising the satellite. There’s no science to be had from the goo canisters as this data has already been collected from previous missions and while returning more data will give some science, transmitting the data will give no science. Completing the contract gives us 90k funds and a nice 50 science.
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Debriefing:
After two satellite launches there is 450k funds available in the bank and a total of 96.5 science.
The science gets spent on Heavy Rocketry, this means bigger rockets and more importantly something we can mount a 2.5m payload on. This is going to be needed to launch equipment for space stations and also off-world bases.
We’ve almost got enough money now that we can start doing missions that aren’t contract driven. Sadly the funds will get eaten up by prototyping the parts from the new technologies.
Building a space probe is a lot easier than building a ship that has to carry Kerbals. The main bonus is that you don’t have to bring a space probe home, you can leave it floating around in space and as long as it has power and it’s not on a sub orbital trajectory you can go back to it at any time. The other advantage is that probes tend not to have a great deal of mass, this is turn makes them cheaper to launch.
The Vanguard I Munar Probe has ended up with a mass of 2.5 tons. This isn’t ideal, but with technology limited I’m having to build whatever I can get away with to get more science and funding.
It does sit rather nicely in the expanded 1.25m faring and looks quite good on top of the launch vehicle, which is just a scaled down version of Valkyrie I. The total cost is 18k funds and it takes 6 days to clean the seawater out of the rocket parts from last time and strap them back on. Reconditioned, I’m assured, is totally safe.
Mun Landing
On day 23 Vanguard I was completed and by a quarter to lunchtime it was on the launchpad.
The Vanguard I turned out to be a very easy rocket to get to orbit, after separation of the solid rocket boosters it easily makes apoapsis and now that maneuver planning is available from Mechjeb I no longer have to guess when positioning my maneuver node so we get an almost circular orbit.
From there I eject the fairings and expose the probe as we push off towards the Mun. The orbital stage of the rocket doesn’t have enough delta-v to get us all the way there but the lander itself has more than enough to complete the transfer burn. At this point I leave the lander in space and stick my head into mission control to see if there are any juicy contracts. I find two for new satellites that will be simple to complete and return good money.
After this I return to control of Vanguard I and time accelerate to the Mun. As I get close to the Mun, I check my craft and realise I’m very low on electric charge. I’d forgotten to put the batteries into sleep mode (by turning off the flow of electric charge) and so they we all nearly drained. With no way to recharge them, I put the remaining batteries to sleep and frantically tried to figure a way to land.
By flipping on the batteries only when making a maneuver and performing a near suicide burn to the surface I managed to land on the Mun. That’s all well and good because it completes part of the contract, but I believe that hitting the ground at 600m/s has the same effect. The bad news is that the raminigng battery that has any charge contains only 3 electric charge. With nothing else to do the lander attempts to return a material science report but is immediately out of charge.
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This means a second launch and being more careful. It’s just cost 18k funds to soft land something on the Mun, great for PR, no use for furthering our cause with new scientific data.
The second launch of Vanguard I went without issue after I remembered to shut down the batteries. The probe arrived in orbit with 600 electric charge remaining and was able to make a smooth landing and collect the scientific data. Most importantly it was able to transmit the data to Kerbin and give us 32 science, completing the Mun exploration contract and netting another 30 science and over 125k funds. Now, their work done, we can leave the two Vanguard I probes on the Mun with a clear conscience, maybe one day we will see them again.
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Debriefing
So we I didn’t kill anyone and the job got done. With 203k funds in the bank and an extra 62 science from the Mun landing I can now unlock Electrics and get those pesky solar panels that will allow much more effective use of space and weight.
This was also a good test of the un-manned technology we need to use to complete the missions that I collected instead of concentrating on the Munar lander.
I’m not going to bore you with a detailed review of how I got back into orbit. Suffice to say it involved being quite careful with a lot of launches form a rocket consisting of a command pod and a solid rocket booster. No, I know that’s not safe, but it is cheap! Initially the best thing to do is to achieve each altitude record individually rather than strapping on all the boosters and going straight to space. The altitude records I completed we 5km, 11km, 22km, 33km and 56km before completing “Escape the Atmosphere” and “Orbit Kerbin!”. We’ve upgraded the launch pad, tracking station, astronaut complex and mission control to level 2 to make getting to the Mun a lot easier with maneuver nodes and patched conics so we’ll know when we have an intercept. Also being able to use a more then 18 ton rocket will make getting further out a lot easier, getting to the Mun in a model rocket isn’t easy!
Science collected and spent so far has yielded the improvements shown on the tech tree below:
The next node will be Electrics so that we can have some basic solar panels. Without those we won’t be going very far since covering the ship in AAA batteries really isn’t a sustainable option. Batteries are a perfectly reasonable option when going for a sightseeing trip to the Mun, however, so that’s exactly what we’re going to do. There’s more science to be had by experimentation as well as the contract for exploring the Mun which gives science as well as funds in decent amounts.
Off to the Mun (again):
This time I’m planning a mission with a little more reward. We’ll launch and do the usual gravity turn as we approach 10km, best to get out of the thicker atmosphere as soon as possible. A parking orbit of somewhere between 80km and 150km, depending on my flying, will then lead to the transfer burn the the Mun. We’re still messing about with maneuver nodes so there will be a degree of guesswork, but a lot less than before maneuver nodes and patched conics were available at all!
Piecing together the newly researched D-Magic Orbital Science wedges onto the top of a rather long and wobbly rocket almost had enough delta-V to get to the Mun and perform a free return flyby, but by the virtue of attaching MOAR BOOSTERS to the sides of the main rocket core I’ve managed to get the delta-V up to 5100-5800. Once again there are parachutes to get funds back from the expensive liquid fueled engine and also to protect the science and Jeb when they return to Kerbin. So the Valkyrie I is ready for launch and will take just over 12 days (and 25,000 funds!) for the Kerbal engineers to flatten out enough Quality Street wrappers to build it.
Before Launch I head to mission control and pick up the “Science data from space around Kerbin” mission that will add a nice 30k funds to the pot for doing something that I’ll have to do anyway. Finally, some free money.
The rocket is a bit of a fight to get into orbit, the solid boosters are throttle limited to a meagre 5% to give Jeb some chance of holding things on course. After first stage separation things get a lot more sensible and an apoapsis of roughly 90km is achieved. Then, mainly thanks to my flying the circularised orbit comes up very un-circular but at least we have orbit and plenty of fuel left in the orbiter.
Munar insertion is a fairly simple thing, involving setting a maneuver node u to change my apoapsis on to the Mun’s path and then sliding it around my current orbit until I get an encounter. Once that is trimmed out a bit the transfer to the Mun will take us with 85km of the surface, not a bad shot. Once at the Mun, it’s a simple job to circularise the orbit and do the scientific experiments on board. Jeb aslo gets a crew report and goes out for an EVA, stupidly forgetting that since he’s the only pilot there will be no SAS. As he releases the ladder the ship starts to spin and Jeb spends the next 5 minutes bouncing off the hatch door as he tries to get back in. Memo to self – add probe cores.
The return to Kerbin is simple an uneventful, with Jeb collecting a further crew report and magnetometer readings to please the boys at mission control and net that extra 30k funds for the next rocket. Re-entry is done by just allowing the ship to drop far enough into the atmosphere that it won’t be able to get back out and then firing the parachutes. A small hitch related to a mountainside was handled by burning some of the remaining fuel just before touchdown. It didn’t save the Mechjeb module when the orbiter fell over, but nothing else broke so I’m calling that a win.
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Debriefing:
After vehicle recovery there are now 75K funds available and 192.5 science. The science is used to buy General Construction so now we can use struts to hold radial boosters in place and Advanced Flight Control so that we can send an unmanned probe to the Mun to finish off this mission. The great thing about unmanned probes is that they are cheap, light and we can leave them places you wouldn’t want to leave a Kerbal for fear of upsetting the HR department!
So it seems that the main gripe in the community is the balancing of the costs of the buildings and/or the contracts. Some people think that the contracts are worth too little, others that the buildings cost is too high. It turns out that the cost of the buildings is linked to the slider for “Funds penalties” that is generally associated with failing a contract, so by changing this to 50% we can reduce the building costs to something a bit more sensible. To balance this out for “Normal” difficulty I’ve enabled the entry purchase costs to burn up a few of the saved funds. I’m also disabling crew re-spawning, dead is dead.
That gives us a game settings window that looks like this:
Mods:
The 64-bit KSP is still unstable so I’m not able to fill up 20GB of RAM with mods, I’m stuck to 3.4GB or less, any more causes an overflow and a crash. I’ve had to be a bit careful with the mods so as to preserve enough headroom in memory. The following list is what is installed (Sadly KSP Interstellar still seems to have problems).
Name
Version
Notes
Kerbal Space Program
0.90
The main KSP game files created by Squad.
B9 Aerospace Pack
5.2.8
A multitude of larger and better thought out parts. Exceptionally useful for building spaceplanes.
D-Magic Orbital Science
0.9.1
Extra Science! This will be needed to generate the huge amounts of science needed for the higher technologies.
Docking Port Alignment
5.1
If you don’t have this, you can’t dock without the using the Black Arts. This makes docking possible.
Enhanced NavBall
1.3.2
Small but very useful changes to the NavBall.
Ferram Aerospace Research
0.14.6
This is the most important mod you can download. The stock drag model is wrong and so planes and rockets behave oddly. Now that farings are available a more correct model of drag can be used. This makes planes fly – true fact!
Infernal Robotics
0.19.3
Moving parts for ships. This is used in conjunction with Kerbal Attachment System so that you can strengthen the parts you fold out. This is the best way to get a huge lander into a tiny faring.
Kerbal Attachment System
0.4.10
Got an unexpected wobble? This mod allows you to fix it in space! It’s basically duct-tape for space.
Kronal Vessel Viewer
0.0.4
This is used to make all the pretty pictures you’ll see around the place detailing the parts I use and their configuration.
KW Rocketry
2.6d
A lot of great rocket parts. Provides for rockets up to 5m, not that it really helps as much as you’d think.
MechJeb
2.3.1.0
I’m sure I’ll get flak for installing Mechjeb. It’s main uses are for the tedious stuff like getting your maneuver node spot on your periapsis.
Near Future Solar
0.3.0
More solar panels. Some of these are very large and wobbly!
RealChute
1.2.6.3
Better parachutes with a more realistic deployment. Stops things being jerked off the ship when the parachutes open.
Space Y Heavy Lifter Parts Pack
0.9
Space-X inspired parts pack.
Stage Recovery
1.5.3
Decoupled stages that fall back to Kerbin with parachutes can be recovered.
Tweakscale
1.50
Lets you rescale almost anything. Small fuel tanks to large ones and back again.
Universal Storage (CORE)
1.0.90.0
Much more sensible storage solutions for scientific equipment. Will save on bolting everything to the side of spacecraft.
Kerbal Alarm Clock
3.2.2.0
Set alarms. This is incredibly helpful as it stops you missing maneuvers.
Now with lot out of the way we can get back to explosions!
Okay, so the changes to KSP 0.90 “Beta than ever” are a lot more than I first thought!
Now that it’s pretty much feature complete KSP has officially entered the beta phase of development and Squad seem to have decided that the start of the game was far too easy. Now you have to upgrade your space centre from humble beginnings to something NASA would stand in awe of. Up until now all the buildings have been fully usable and all features are enabled, even at the start of career mode. No more is that the case, without upgrading your starting buildings you’re severely limited in several ways from the number of astronauts you can hire and the number of contracts you can accept to the launch mass of your rocket and not being able to EVA (these are really painful).
There are some bits of good news though!
One – We can get money back from recovered stages. This has been made easier as the community has made some very useful recovery mods as a matter of urgency, now by attaching enough parachutes to jettisoned stages we can get a decent return on them. Before when a stage got more than 2.5km or so from the active ship it was removed from the game to save on processing, now it is removed, but remembered by the mod that it would have landed safely if it hadn’t been removed and compensates us appropriately.
Two – Kerbals now get experience. We’ll have to see how this plays out but I’m led to believe that you can use the pilots to orient your ship at higher levels as well as other features from other crew. It means we’ll be cycling the crew around more so that they can all get some experience from the early launches and maybe be more than extra (green) weight when we get into space.
Three – Squad have revamped the assembly system so now new rockets are possible and it’ll be easier to make things that work and look good. Looking good is far more important than things actually working, we can fix it in space, but we can’t make it look any better once we leave the assembly building.
That means we’re really going to have to limit our ambitions. Upgrading buildings costs money, money comes from completed contracts, contracts need rockets and me *NOT* to make a bollocks of it without most of the assistance systems, rockets cost money. So we need money to get money and we don’t start with a lot of money.
With this in mind the first few launches are going to be about completing as many contracts as possible and saving money wherever we can. Cash is going to be the real killer and it’s not easy to get a ship of only 18 tons into orbit. Well, it’s not easy for me anyway.
Once some money has been made and we can actually get into orbit I plan on a few trips to the Mun and Minmus. The ship designs for both moons of Kerbin are pretty similar, Minmus may be further away, but it’s also a lot smaller so it’s easier to get off and into orbit as well as lower orbit and landing speeds. From there I’ll see what we can do about setting up a base on Duna, I’ve been a bit inspired by a book I’m reading so we’re off to the red planet.
Assuming we can get off the green and blue one again…
Now we’ve made orbit it’s time to set our sights on the Science held captive on the Mun. First though, it’s time to let you know that the upgrade to 0.25 has happened with all the mods I wanted to use. 0.25 seems to be a lot more stable for some reason (possibly some stability fixes went in), so I’ve also added a few more mods. One of my new favourites is “Fine Print” which adds a bucket load of contracts to the game that will make the whole game a lot more easily driven by the contracts without getting stale.
The main changes for 0.25 are:
1). Strategies:- These are global strategies that effectively allow you to swap some of the Funds/Science/Reputation you get from mission rewards into Funds/Science/Reputation so you can drive the space program in a way you want. It also gives us something to spend the reputation we’ve earned in 0.24 on.
2). Everything has a price:- Now, not only do you need to research the technology you want using Science, but you also have to buy the prototype parts at a much higher price than the part itself. Buying everything at the start of the space program will soon leave you with no Funds at all, so I’ve found the best way is to buy the prototype parts if you find you need the part. If you have a lot of mods installed, especially rocket part mods, you won’t want to buy everything anyway.
3). New Explosions:- New explosion graphics are now in game for when things go wrong, or you get crazy with an asteroid. Leading on to…
4). Destructible Buildings:- If you crash enough stuff, or an asteroid, into the space centre you’ll destroy the buildings. These are, by all accounts, very expensive to repair so it’s not something I’ll be trying to do any time soon. Apart from maybe a test or two.
There’s a whole host of other features and little tweaks and fixes that should make things more enjoyable. This is also going to be the last Alpha release, so next we wait for KSP 0.90. The save has also worked across the update (albeit with a bit of tweaking to the difficulty in the save file), so now we have the full functionality of v0.25. It seems that KSP 0.25 is a bit more stable than 0.24.2 and so I’m able to run some more mods without everything breaking, a full list is now on the page “Mods List”.
Veg in Space
So back to the mission to the Mun. Using the science from the previous mission I’ve decided to develop Advanced Rocketry and General Construction. This will give us some larger fuel tanks for our 1.25m rockets as well as struts to hold everything together and even a fancy tri-coupler that we’ll probably never use!
Before we head off to the Mun, some rather simple contracts have popped up which will enable us to grab enough extra science to invest in a further technology before we head out. This could mean the difference between orbiting the Mun or landing on the first attempt. We’re going to test 2 different liquid engines, one solid booster and the launch clamps, all at the same time. Clipboards at the ready!
At the end of the rocket test, we’re left with 112 Science which is plenty to give us the next technology. This is a bit of a head-scratcher as to the choice as both larger parts and fuel lines are tempting. In the end I went for fuel lines so that we can make our existing rockets a lot more fuel efficient by using Asparagus and Onion staging.
These two types of staging setups feed fuel towards the final stage of a rocket while it’s in flight. This means that you can drop extra weight as soon as possible while maintaining a high TWR. This means you get a better Delta-V for the same rocket. While the idea of using fuel transfer during launch has been around for a while, it’s taken until Space-X to really make a go of it with the Falcon Heavy (There is a KSP mod for it that I might use again at some point).
Explore the Mun
It’ll be fun, they said. You’ll meet new people, they said. The Explore the Mun contract is in two distinct parts. The first part is to achieve orbit and collect some data from near the Mun (you can do this without achieving Munar orbit), the second is to land on the Mun and collect scientific data. Since I don’t want to make a ship right now that can land on the Mun and return I’m going to try and be clever. The payload of this mission will have a small probe on the top of the orbiter which we will detach in Munar orbit and then land that on the surface without having to worry about bringing it back.
The chances are though, that something will go wrong. Remote Tech alone will ruin my day if I’m not very careful as I’ll need a connection to the main crew ship as well as bouncing that signal off to the probe that will land on the surface. With no communication satellites in orbit around Kerbin, I will have to wait for the space centre to be facing the Mun. We then have the time it takes the KSC to go over the horizon to make the landing maneuver, if we run out of time we run out of control.
Abandoning that idea as far too dangerous I constructed a rocket that will send a crew to orbit the Mun and then make a prompt return trip. So we have the “Mun Explorer”, equipped with the latest space engineering technology. The Primary stage consists of a central core and four radial boosters that are set up for asparagus staging. Once the fuel in the first two radial tanks is exhausted, these will be dropped and the craft will continue, fully fuelled, with the best TWR possible. We then drop the second set of radial boosters before continuing with the main booster core. The command module is equipped with a full range of scientific experiments to perform in Munar orbit as well as collecting a couple of crew reports on the way.
Return to Kerbin will be performed primarily by the four radial parachutes on the side of the command module’s fuel tank. This should reduce our descent velocity to a manageable number so that the whole thing doesn’t fall apart when we land, even though there are no landing legs attached.
Fortunately the most expensive part of this new rocket is the sceince package and the crew module with batteries and the other bits that are needed for successful flight control, so this will be returned in part when/if we safely return the ship to Kerbin.
So after a very perfunctory trip to the Mun and back we’ve generated some more funds (140K in the bank) and we generated 135 science from our jaunt, taking us to 188. That’s enough for two new technologies, specifically Advanced Flight Control and Electrics (some solar panels will be needed to make this all realistic).
While we were up we completed the contract requesting Kerbin orbital science data and we also completed half of the mission to explore the Mun. Since we’re going directly back to the Mun for a landing and further scientific work I’ve taken two complimentary contracts as well, planting a flag on the Mun and collecting science form orbit and the surface.
So next time we will return with a slightly larger rocket that will send a crew to land on the Mun and return the first samples of our closest celestial neighbour.
Even though we didn’t make it to orbit with the last launch we managed to retrieve enough valuable Science to unlock new technologies which will take us there.
Flight control is one of the most important technologies to unlock in my opinion as it unlocks the first part of MechJeb2. I’m not going to sit about using MechJeb to do all my landings, launches and other maneuvers because, let’s be honest, it’s KSP easy mode. MechJeb doesn’t currently work well with Ferram (although I have discovered there is a patch somewhere that means you can use the two together) so we won’t use it for launching anything. While it reduces the risk associated with terribly planned landings, and so reduces the fun of the ever-present chance than you will smash into the surface, MechJeb does do two things very nicely:
1). It can find an exact Apoapsis (or any other useful point you might want to pick out but can’t with the current maneuver node system). This means no more sliding the maneuver node about to try and circularise an orbit properly.
2). It calculates Delta-V and displays a load of useful information such as surface or orbital information so you don’t have to flick between the map and normal viewing.
Galaxy Rocket:
A more optimistic name to go with a much better rocket. Now we have a MechJeb output we cna be sure that, serious mishaps allowing, we will make orbit and have enough fuel to return and land back on Kerbin. We may even have enough time to pick a landing site that will give some reasonable practice for landing on the Mun and other celestial bodies.
The rocket is a bit more complex than last time, in keeping with incremental improvements, now being equipped 4 radially mounted rockets for the primary stage and one central booster to complete the flight. With the unlocking of further Science Tech, the rocket is equpped with the very latest in scientific experiments. The science payload contains a Magnetometer, 2 Material Science Bays and a Mystery Goo Canister, which combined with crew reports and EVA reports should give enough science to advance us to some very cool stuff. As photovoltaic cells (solar panels) aren’t available yet we hace strapped two huge batteries to the front of the ship to keep everything running on our trip around Kerbin. A word of warning, if you run out of electrical charge then you lose all control authority, including deploying solar panels – on a manned mission you can get out and do it manually. If you have TAC Life Support Mod running then you will simply suffocate if you don’t get it fixed!
The mission plan is to take off, begin the gravity turn and head upwards. The four primary boosters should run out of fuel just after getting the apoapsis to about 100km or more. After decoupling these the central rocket booster will have enough Delta-V to bring our rocket to orbital velocity. The orbit doesn’t have to have zero inclination, or be circlular, but just have a periapsis of at least 80km to give a stable orbit. That will complete the mission of achieving orbit, after which the fun can really begin as we head off to explore the Mun.
So here’s the video of our attempt to finally get to orbit and get this space program moving:
A huge success! We’ve finally made it out of the atmosphere without an immediate return. With the contract mission completed we have more money and we collected a full complement of Science totaling 69 for this mission. Not bad for just stepping out of the atmosphere. So in the upcoming missions we’ll be heading further afield, to the Mun and Minmus – Kerbin’s two moons. Scientific progress will be much faster on distant worlds, but the rockets will be more expensive and with the changes that have been made in 0.25 this is going to be very important.
I was hoping we’d have more time before 0.25 update for KSP was pushed out. However, 0.25 has now been out for a couple of days with some rather sweet improvements. It’s called “Economic Boom” and it’s made some changes that will make getting things running smoothly on a space program a bit more sensible.
Firstly, the main new feature, is the Administration Building. This is where you can select the new strategies. These do things like reduce your Funding bonus for completed contracts but gives you more science or reputation in return. So if you’re cash rich but really need to make some scientific progress then you can effectively swap money for knowledge. It should make it a bit easier to achieve the huge amounts of science needed to get up to the Interstellar tech.
Some of the old spaceplane parts have been removed in 0.25 and they are replaced and expanded upon by integration of the SpacePlace Plus mod into the stock game. There’s also some changes to the navball and a button to bring thrust immediately to 100%. There is also talk of savegames surviving the update, but I’m not holding my breath on that with all the mods.
The downside to an upgrade is that it usually breaks all the mods. This time is no exception and so I’m currently collecting the mods back up with version 0.25 support. Once this is done I’ll try to port over directly to the save file that we’re using or I’ll modify one up to be the same but working.
Flinty Goes To Space 