SMBC Comics Forum

Fun fact: That title is the maximum number of characters allowed.

But now all the posts are gonna be weirdly ordered when i import the posts from the other thread!

Worst friend ever.

Ah well, as long as I'm here I might as well post about the sweet-ass Mun landing I pulled off:



The transfer system I posted about earlier worked like a charm; I was able to do a Hohmann transfer and circularize at about thirty kilometers and (once detached from the lander portion) had just enough fuel left in the tanks to act as a depth sound for my chosen landing location:





The last number I saw was about three kilometers just before the crater, so I figured I would zero out my horizontal velocity around there and not sweat any fuel lost to gravity during the height difference between crater edge and near-ish to the center of the crater.







Just about a kilometer later, I have landed! First try and everything! I have well over half my fuel left, so I am confident that this mission is going to return to Kerbin when Jeb gets bored of rolling around in the dirt.



...it might be a while.

I snorted with laughter when I saw this.

This is going to sound nuts, but I might share some of the hopeless creations that I barely manage to get into space.

Liriodendron_fagotti wrote:I snorted with laughter when I saw this.

This is going to sound nuts, but I might share some of the hopeless creations that I barely manage to get into space.

Please do! I love seeing stuff people make with this game, and especially from newer players. Helps break me out of my stale design decisions, you know?

Also, this may help with your slideshow woes:
http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questio ... intel-card

I applied the fix. Let's try it out.

e: Good so far!

I managed to get into space, and I even remembered to put a parachute on, so they all landed safely.

e again: my vertical decoupler worked, but the radial ones didn't, so I had to drag my solid boosters up with me.

Third edit: It happened. The lag kicked in.

Fourth edit: Though, not as bad as previously.

Dang, I was pretty hopeful that would have fixed it :/

Yesterday the last thing I did before quitting KSP, I managed to unlock the second largest fuel tanks. Clearly this means I must start building stupid things again!

Like this (hopefully) interplanetary transfer module:


I had so many problems with launching the damned thing, and most of them were my own damned fault.


Forgot to check the staging, and decoupled the whole lifter assembly instead of the boosters


Messed up my fuel lines, so as the rocket burned the center of mass shifted further and further sideways


Decoupled a pair of boosters a moment too early, leading them to taking an adventure into two of the rockets and five droptanks on the Transfer. I was able to salvage this one by chucking all of the imbalanced droptanks, but since it was not at all going to space the best I could do was land it softly in the water.





That weird silver disc in the background is the remains of the ascent stage, which exploded in the upper atmosphere leaving only a single large tank attached to a decoupler. I had gotten tired of scrubbing launches so I just ignited the final set of engines and manually transferred fuel into the central greytank of the Transfer module.

As a result, the thing is half-fueled and on a rather inconvenient orbit. Thankfully the lander I built to attach to the Transfer still has a ton of fuel left in the ascent stage, so I can probably get the thing filled two-thirds at least.

It is done.

Orbit has been achieved. Elliptical and I don't know if I can make more than a couple passes, but I made it.

Alright! If your Periapse is above 70km, then you are in a stable orbit!

Now that you've done that, it's time you learned how to make a circular orbit. It's important to remember that the cheapest time to effect change on your periapse is at apoapse, and vice-versa.

I decided to try lifting the transfer stage one last time, and I managed to not have anything explode that was not expected to! As a result, it was much more full of fuel than the last attempt, and was able to keep the final ascent stage around to circularize. It still spent some fuel doing maneuvers, but I was confident that it would be able to refuel adequately from the leftovers in the Lander's ascent stage.

On final approach:




Docked!


When transferring the fuel from the Lander's ascent stage, Newemy was fairly certain it was all going to explode at any moment. Which I guess is fair, considering how often it exploded previously. And I was right! The remaining fuel was almost enough to fully fuel the assembled unit.


Fuel transfer complete, and ascent stage jettisoned. I am really surprised how nice the whole thing looks considering as how it's the largely the same lander that was designed for the Mun landing. I guess having the massive ASAS unit on top of the transfer stage gives it the right aesthetic balance.


god i hope this thing works

ED I ESCAPED WHAT DO I DO?

It looks like you haven't escaped yet. Point yourself at the retrograde marker on your navball and burn as hard as you can, and that *might* bring your apoapse down into a non-escape situation.

If you're already out of fuel, then comfort yourself with the knowledge that you will now have an interplanetary rendezvous target to practise on.

Edminster wrote:It looks like you haven't escaped yet. Point yourself at the retrograde marker on your navball and burn as hard as you can, and that *might* bring your apoapse down into a non-escape situation.

If you're already out of fuel, then comfort yourself with the knowledge that you will now have an interplanetary rendezvous target to practise on.

I didn't realize the yellow was the sun's orbit, not my escape trajectory, at first. I rotated the camera and saw that I am indeed on course to escape. I clicked the handy rocket info button to confirm.

And yes, I'm out of fuel.

No, you had the right of it the first time. The yellow is the orbit your ship will be taking around the sun after it has escaped. Did you put an antenna and batteries on your pod? If you had, you could use this as an opportunity to beam back some science. I think solar orbit crew data is fairly valuable.

YESSSSSSSS



And I only used half the fuel in the Transfer stage, so I might be able to make it home from Duna!



bonus super-tiny 3D effect gif:



I've never done an interplanetary transfer without using an autopilot addon, so I am pretty well stoked.

I now have a man in orbit of Kerbin.



No, I don't mean a man in a ship.



Godspeed, Bob Kerman.