SMBC Comics Forum

Here's a ship that can reach Minmus and return. It is ridiculously inefficient at it, and has many extraneous parts, but the second pair of lander legs definitely is not extraneous as three exploded materials bays have taught me. The upper-middle bit is the part that does the hohmann transfer, circularization, and landing. The three legs on the tanks get jettisoned upon leaving Minmus, and then the final engine jettisoned once you're in Kerbin atmosphere.





the .craft file goes in your ksp/saves/savename/ships/VAB folder

Minmus Toucher.craft

The Imperator, my jet.


Headin' Northwest.

GUTCHUCKER wrote:

That tail just cracks me up every time I see it. It looks like a weird evolutionary quirk, like the tail on a Bird of Paradise.

I found a thing that has markedly improved performance of KSP for me, it might help other people too!

http://kerbalspaceport.com/shrinkalater-0-21-1a-stock/

I will try this fix out at my soonest convenience!

Ages ago I had landed on Minmus with a tiny multistage lander, but in my excitement I neglected to plant a flag so I could remember the historic first.



A couple days ago I unlocked the Rover parts and the cubic octagonal struts, so I designed a new lander to replace the one I had upgraded to since my Minmus days, strapped a couple of tiny Grasshopper-shaped rovers to it, and chucked it out to Minmus.




Today I started to blast off back for Kerbin, but in the ascent I noticed a triplet of little debris icons with no flag in sight. I immediately started burning retrograde and was able to touch down almost exactly where I had originally landed a while ago, and put to rights the travesty that had occurred.

I like the flags dedication statement sort of thing.

I tried building a Single Stage To Orbit plane about a week ago but was only able to kiss space before running out of fuel. I knew that the design I had was almost enough to make it, but I just could not pull it off no matter how carefully I flew.




Disheartened, I turned my hand to building a nice, compact rovers and exploring the fuck out of the Mun to try and glean all the Science I could from it. I lost a good Kerbal (and a good memorial flag that fell through the ground while timewarping) but I've nearly completed the Techtree. In case you were wondering, the 763 is the height of the memorial in case I want to land near there again.



With that out of the way, I went back to my design convinced that it was fundamentally sound and needed only a bit of tweaking. A pair of tricouplers later, I have doubled the amount of air coming into my jets and broke through the wall I had been hitting before.




Unfortunately it doesn't have horizontal translation RCS control, as you can only place things in lateral bifold symmetry in the Spaceplane Hangar and moving it over to the VAB to fix would have required moving the .craft file over which I wasn't in the mood to do after an hour of design work and test launchings.




I'm probably going to tweak it a bit more by just sucking it up and doing the save file editing to get it into the VAB for the final RCS placements, as well as moving the inline clamp-o-tron to just in front of the cockpit as it currently has a nasty habit of physicsing into the jet engines. All in all though, I'm extremely happy I was finally able to accomplish making an SSTO.

Finished a fairly stressful test-run of the new configuration of my SSTO. I added the linear RCS underneath the 4-ways, and swapped the inline clamp-o-tron with the rocket fuel so the clamp is just in front of the cockpit.

At no point did I think to add any passive electricity generation, which led to the sudden loss of gyro stability a couple hundred meters out from the rendezvous ship I had made. Nearly out of fuel and with SAS pissing monopropellant to maintain orientation, I was just barely able to dock with the fuel tanker and recharge my cockpit's internal batteries, as well as refuel both my aerospike and my air-breathing engines.





After chilling out for a bit and enjoying the satisfaction of a nearly-disastrous mission rescued, I undocked and set course for re-entry. On final approach, I learned two very important facts. First, I really need to actually clean up all of the ships lying around at the Space Center. Second, when fully-fueled the Whoopsy-Daisy glides about as well as a brick does.






Raydrin survived, so now I have to strap a couple Radioisotope Thermal Generators to it and not de-orbit it full of fuel and it'll be pretty much ready for swapping out individual kerbals at the Station. God bless your inefficiency, SSTOs.

Reminder: Orbital Mechanics is absurdly anti-intuitive. Here's a different reference frame on how our solar system works:

That's pretty awesome. Naturally one doesn't really think of the solar system as in movement, so this is a little mindblowing.

Lethal Interjection wrote:That's pretty awesome. Naturally one doesn't really think of the solar system as in movement, so this is a little mindblowing.

Yeah, I meant to say something earlier. It's incredible to think about.

GUESS WHAT


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Is this a good thing?

WOOO! That's awesome. Can he get back?

Is this the first other planet you've gotten to?

Kimra wrote:Is this a good thing?

Yes, it is a very good thing. The red place is KSP's Mars analog, and since the update that came out last month I've been building up for a second go at it that wouldn't end in disaster.

Liriodendron_fagotti wrote:Is this the first other planet you've gotten to?

Yeah, but I 'cheated' and used a mod to do the ascent from Kerbin for the pusher vehicle (because the ship had so many parts I was running seconds per frame and therefore could not possibly stage it properly):

Liriodendron_fagotti wrote:WOOO! That's awesome. Can he get back?

Carefully examine the final two pictures in the series