To the Mun! A Kerbal thread

[Josh]

KP-3 is busy merrily mapping the mun for kethane.

(KP-1 got Havened, KP-2 had a wonky Mechjeb screwup that left it hilariously spinning about fifty meters off the ground while the fuel burned up.)

I can see lovely fields of green, just waiting to be ripped from the mun's crust to fuel the expansion of the empire. And to those who say 'But what about the pristine mun?' I quote my fellow imperialist, Nwabudike Morgan:

"Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill."

[Josh]

Nukular rockets upside: fifteen minutes of burn off a single rocket doesn't even drink half a Rockomax X200 tank.

Nukular rockets downside: it takes fifteen minutes of realtime burn to shape an orbit for Duna.

[White Haven]

The Thingdragger 4, now that you gave the tech to appreciate this, mounts sixteen of those to mitigate that issue.

[Josh]

Yeah, one of these days I'll be building monstrosities like that.

In the meantime, my second Dunar landing went off largely without a hitch. The autolander hiccuped because I wanted to land at the base of Olympus Muns (or whatever the mountain is called in-game), so I took over and brought her in manually.

(First Dunar landing fell afoul of the autolander planting the vehicle on a steep slope while I was distracted, resulting in Jeb waking up in a cold sweat and saying 'It was just a bad dream...')

Contact has been made with the Kult Mechanicus, who will soon help us develop our antimatter propulsion technologies. I'm envisioning a movement, a grand return of Kerbalkind to the stars, to retake what is ours. One may even call it... a crusade.

[Josh]

One cool thing is that I overbuilt my Munar lander a bit, by adding four lower ejectable fuel tanks around the skirt of the main tank for my lander. Now that was partly to provide extra fuel margin, but mostly to create a nice broad platform for landing the craft.

Well I never needed the margin for Munar landings, that baby could slick up and down anywhere from four to six times on a single tank, probably.

But it paid off in spades on the Dunar lander, which was just a slightly beefed up model with better legs and an added barometric sensor. On my return burn for Kerbal, CHUNK, off go the auxiliary tanks and now I'm down to a nice streamlined rocket+science module+capsule. Made it home with half a tank to spare.

[General Havoc]

Keep striving, comrades! Comrade Kerbalmao demands sacrifices for the glory of the Party!

[B4UTRUST]

So far I have managed to fail magnificently in attempting Munar orbit. I need to watch/read more tutorials I think about correctly orbiting these things because somehow I always seem to miss and end up orbiting the sun and never really getting home. All those thousands of science points lost forever.

[Josh]

Easiest trick for Munar orbit is to rotate the map view around until you line Kerbal and the Mun up with the point where the Mun would cross the horizon on Kerbal's right side (right side from your POV.)

Make a maneuver node, then drag it prograde. Your orbit will increase on the opposite side of Kerbal and if you've got the right spot, you'll get to a point where you'll see the Mun encounter icon come up. You can pause there and play around with manipulating prograde/retrograde on the node to achieve the minimum periapsis, the lower the better because it'll make your eventual orbital burn more fuel efficient.

Once you've got it tweaked to where you like it, set the node and then wait/accelerate time until you approach the node, do the indicated burn as best you can (because of the way nodes slide around a bit you won't get your exact plotted course, but you can adjust afterward.)

Now, you'll be on a course in a Mun-ish direction. If your final bearing shows a Mun encounter, congratulations! You can play with tweaking it to lower your periapsis if you want, otherwise just wait until you have your Mun encounter, then burn retrograde at your periapsis to create something resembling a circular orbit. If you're just doing an experimental flyby your orbit doesn't have to be pretty or anything, but if you have the fuel to spare you'll want to drop your periapsis down to around forty so you can take in that beautiful Munar landscape.

If your bearing doesn't take you to an encounter, now's the time to play with it. Set a maneuver node about an eight of the way along your path, then play with your options- retrograde, prograde, side to side. Tweak and adjust until you get a good solid encounter, then see above.

In order to return from the Mun, just set a node in the middle of your orbit on the side of the Mun facing away from Kerbal. Pull it prograde until you get Munar escape and it'll drop you in a bitch-long orbit around Kerbal. Once you've achieved Munar escape, retrograde burn until you're aimed at Kerbal and experience the joy of dropping your Kerbal in at a screamingly fast pace that in real life would jelly him in the cabin.

(And probably will do so in-game once they get around to implementing gee-forces and take away our ability to hotshot our landings.)

[youtube][/youtube]

This is a reasonably good walkthrough, though he's playing sandbox and he overengineers the motherfuck out of that rocket and his Munar landing approach is a bit too direct and violent for my taste, I prefer to coast in laterally and then bring it down in an arc.

Pay attention to how he sets up the fuel lines on the rocket in construction- that asparagus fueling method is going to be something you'll use a lot and grow out into grotesque proportions.

Also SpaceX is doing that IRL and if it's good enough for Elon then it's good enough for us.

Also he uses the target nodes, which is good for other planets but the Mun is very easy to eyeball, so you don't have to really bother.

[Josh]

With all my breakthroughs in science instrumentation, running my new-model Dunar lander in an orbit over Ike (Duna's moon) to grab some quick data kind of feels like this:

[youtube][/youtube]

Let me add "Dual Technique Magnetometer", "Gramax Negative Gravioli Detector", and a "Double C Seismic Accelerometer" to that list.

However, I seem to have misplaced the sonic electronic ballbreaker.

Just doing a quick data pass over Ike and transmitting the results let me buy two new techs. Once I hit low Dunar orbit/landing the fun really begins.

By the way, the Kerb-Emperor does not recognize the authority of Comrade Kerbalmao.

[Hotfoot]

Huh, up until now, I've just been flying purely on manual and eyeball. I'll have to play around with this waypoint system.

[White Haven]

By the way, the Kerb-Emperor does not recognize the authority of Comrade Kerbalmao.

Choose your next words with exceptional care.




The Warthing-class orbital frigate is now in active production, after a successful prototype launch and test-firing.

It sails under the clenched-fist banner of Comrade Kerbalmao and under the direct command of Jebediah Kerman.

[Josh]

Huh, up until now, I've just been flying purely on manual and eyeball. I'll have to play around with this waypoint system.

You will be amazed at how much easier it makes life.

By the way, the Kerb-Emperor does not recognize the authority of Comrade Kerbalmao.

Choose your next words with exceptional care.




The Warthing-class orbital frigate is now in active production, after a successful prototype launch and test-firing.

It sails under the clenched-fist banner of Comrade Kerbalmao and under the direct command of Jebediah Kerman.

While the pic is very beautiful, the Kerb-Emperor has faced the threat of Xenotech before, but the pure essence of Kerbalkind will prevail against the dark night.

[Josh]

Okay, conclusion: Jeb just fucking hates solar panels and smashes them every chance he gets. Or 'forgets' to retract them during reentry.

Fortunately one panel somehow survived.

[White Haven]

Excuse me, did you just try to imply that Warthing 1, under the direct personal command of Jebediah Kerman, contains xenos technology?

[Josh]

[youtube][/youtube]

[Josh]

I mean it's called the 'Warthing' and it's firing unguided solid fuel rockets. It would only be more Orky if you painted WAAAAAAAGH all over the side.

However, it is held back by the lack of red.

[White Haven]

Warthing 2 is going to have a mix of heavy, short-range missiles and long-range strategic missiles. I plan to test this function by shooting the Mun from Kerbin orbit.

[Josh]

I was considering building a similar machine to use for seismic impact testing, but the current system only recognizes impacts if they come from differently-named rockets sooooooo.

[Josh]

My next focus now that I have beefed up my heavy-lift capacity is building an all-in-one unit to do a thorough land and survey on Moho. I'm taking a lab and all the trimmings along and I'm going to aim to suck as much science out of the planet in a single pass as I possibly can.

Time to strap the nukes together.

[Josh]

So I'm working on my new heavy lifter when best friend comes over for dinner. I'm nearly done, just running the asparagus fuel lines for the first stage.

Now, I'm pretty sure at this point that it'll make orbit, just not sure what the fuel state will be, but I decide to go ahead and give him a show. I load up with crew- this is the test model for my eventual Moho lander, so I'm going to send it to the mun as a test. It's a five-kerbal ship, three in the command module, two in the science section.

I go ahead and queue up the ascent assist, set for an orbit of 105k, hit the space bar and sit back.

Long about... fifteen hundred feet it takes a sharp left turn. I'm all "Wha? It's making the turn for orbit already?"

I mean, the rockets are hefty but it's not ready to turn at fifteen hundred. And then it keeps... turning... and turning...

Yup, this is what happens when we show off. So I stage it out, ditch all the other rockets until I'm just down to my landing section.

Whereupon I learn a very valuable lesson. Even with the chutes and landing rockets, my top-end is heavy enough that the impact is prettttttty dramatic. Rocket section smashs and I'm thinking that the science module and command module will at least survive. Then the attached side tanks blow and vaporize the science module. The command module survived, amazingly enough. But somehow when I got one of my guys out for an EVA it killed another one in the module. So one launch, rockets and toxic fuel splattered all over the launch center (again), and three dead kerbalnauts.

Oopsie.

[Josh]

Coming soon...

Operation Angel's Fury



As soon as I get all 98 rockets into position.

[Josh]

Okay, Moho landers are going to need a full redesign. More tanks and more rockets.

It's all good, baby.

[Josh]

And Angel's Fury is on hold until I can cobble together a lander that can make Moho and return safely.

[Josh]

In the meantime, I'm going to science it up with my new heavy duty rocket, the Goliath.

It's no Thingdragger, but it is the biggest manned unit I've built yet, and it's a beaut.

It's also the first thing I've built that's definitively beyond what NASA's done.

[Hotfoot]

Fucking hell man, what is wrong with you?

Take a shot with light shining ON the thing we're supposed to be focusing on! Photography 101 here, geez!