Jeb: Ok, I'm bringing our old Survey sat back in to refuel.
Bob: All docked, Sangan and I can at least handle the fuel transfer.
Gene: What are refueling it for?
Bill: We've already got two survey sats orbing Mun. This one doesn't have a ton of delta-v, but it's easy to refuel. I was thinking Duna.
Gene: And this?
Tefurt: A couple probe bodies for those sentinel telescopes we've had stuck to Munholme for the last month.
Jeb: There's one in its parking orbit.
Val: And two. Give this one a few seconds to get clear and then go ahead and light the engines on the lifter to burn off any extra fuel. I set it to retrograde before detatching.
Gene: Huh, looks like we almost had a water landing for this after all.
Tefurt: It's good to be back in microgravity! And to have fresh greens!
Gene: Looks like you have a day to get prepped for the probes to arrive, go ahead and get a good meal, but you might want to hold off on the nap.
(Editor's note: I know I've been doing a couple posts a week for a while, but I'm probably going to slow that pace down a bit. Nothing bad, I'm just spending more time on one of my other hobbies and working on a fantasy novel.)
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Gene: I'm seeing a decent sized rocket. Doing another interplanetary launch?
Mort: This one was my idea.
Gene: ...
Gene: Why is our finance officer designing rockets?
Mort: Think of it as an infrastructure investment.
Gene: Flooyd didn't read their own contract again, did they?
Mort: Nope!
Bill: But speaking of infrastructure, we do have an interplanetary mission starting.
Bill: We're going to try covering both Duna and Ike with a four sat tetrahedral array. Midcourse correction is going to be at the ascending node in just under 55 days. Until then, we're coasting.
Bill: Well, that and cashing in on ore contracts.
Mort: Wait for it...
Mort: And this is my favorite part!
Gene: Well, between the two that's almost a million extra funds. Are we really going to keep getting away with this trick though?
Mort: I formally propose renaming the new tanker "Cash Cow"
(Editor's note: I'm actually getting pretty close to running out of things to do in Kerbin's SOI, well things other than making new weird space stations. I might actually start timewarping away more than a couple days at once in a few posts. The horror.)
Jeb: Back in the cockpit! We'll try to hit all three equatorial anomalies. I think we'll only have to go up to orbit once to refuel, but I'm not worried.
Jowig: Let's hope we get some good readings.
Jeb: Hey, I heard you like flags...
Jowig: Wait... that's a pretty weird looking rock arch.
Gene: Flag it, get the readings you can, and if we need to set up a research base at least we know where to go.
Jeb: I think I see the last anomaly right below us. Another monolith?
Jowig: Take a look at these diagrams carved into the base! It's like an instruction manual!
Wernher: Yes! At last! We've broken the size limit for ore tanks! Now we can make them even bigger! And wait until you see our brand new Narrow Band Scanner!
Bill: Like the one I picked up off that scrapped rover and welded to our hopper here on Minmus?
Tefurt: Or the one we grabbed from that one satellite and welded on a survey probe?
Irgan: Or the one you all told me to not even bother bringing back from the satellite I repaired the other day?
Wernher: None of you is worthy of my genius!
Tefurt: Welcome back! Hey can I ride along for the south pole hop?
Jeb: I don't see why not. I'll have to pilot you two remotely, but we've got plenty of miles on this lander by now.
(Editor's note: All three of these were actually really easy to spot on the approach. I wasn't surprised with the rock arch, but sometimes monoliths have given me trouble.)
Building Out Kerbol 44: Why do I do this to myself?
Verming: Got a big batch of Kerbals for Minmus.
Tebart: Make room!
Bill: And that's our asteroid, drained of ore and parked in LKO.
Irgan: I'm back from that repair mission!
Irgan: Let me just check things out here, see how the rig took the trip.
Irgan: Got our sample!
Gene: What's this one?
Bill: Ready to fire up the second stage is what it is!
Gene: ...you know that's not what I meant.
Bill: All our stations except the Clubhaus are gone from LKO. It's time to build a proper tourist destination!
Bill: And there's our upper stage coming down nice and gentle.
Gene: Nice, but what about that station?
Irgan: It's here!
Bill: Well part of it anyway.
Irgan: Back home at last!
Gene: More station parts?
Bill: More station parts!
Verming: I'm going to try docking this segment under its own power. If that's too hard, we've still got that assembly probe Bill put together on the core piece.
Verming: Looks like we're good. Just dial in the approach and then turn to align the ports and coast into place.
Bill: Looks like the tug survived reentry.
Bill: Looking good...
Bill: Almost...
Bill: And done! Just need to recover the minitugs, but our tourist station is in place and ready to spin up!
(Editor's note: I probably should have eased my way back into the series instead of going straight for my most ambitious station yet.
Otoh, that doesn't sound very much like me.
In my head, asteroids in KSP are basically just giant sponges wrapped in an airtight skin. Ore pretty much has to be water, and I don't know how else you get something that light holding its shape after more than 80% of its mass has been mined out.)
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Now with more windows, as silly as windows are in space.
Hopefully I'll be back to the series with my next post. The work silliness, which was our semiannual store inventory check at the grocery store I retired to, is all over but the crying.
People who care more about visuals do really intricate spacecraft and stations in KSP. I view the whole thing as a rough sketch in the first place, and don't see much purpose in dropping my framerate down into the seconds or minutes per frame range. Still, it would be nice if the KSA team fits in some sort of workaround for large or complex ship hulls that allows for reasonable physics modelling without choking on 1000+ part count builds. Assuming, of course, that they eventually produce a working game.
More filler. I thought I'd slap together a KSP station with something like my idea of the ideal basic shape for a rotating space station.
The basic idea is a relatively short cylinder with inverted hemispheres for endcaps.
What I like about this shape is that it gives you a large, open, internal volume with the floor with the most area located at your target gravity. It's rotationally stable, and if you round off the rims where the caps meet the cylinder wall it has a strong shape for resisting its internal pressure.
The reason I like this shape better than a ring mostly comes down to walking distances. Up until the height of your cylinder is the same as half its circumference you get more area for the same walk by making the station taller than by making it wider. It's also cheaper in terms of structural support, since rotating stations are essentially suspension bridges and widening them is like making the bridge's span longer which makes the "support cables" longer adding more of their weight to what needs to be supported.
The reason I like it better than a taller cylinder will be obvious if you make a taller cylinder and try to spin it up in KSP. Tall cylinders are unstable and want to wobble or even tumble end over end (although you need to spin them fast enough for the game engine to model the flex in the joints to actually see the effect). I can make a stable hollow cylinder that's as tall as it is wide. But putting on endcaps messes with that. Inverted endcaps let me strike a balance, and give the residents a mix of high and low ceilings and almost as much area on the outer walls as a hollow cylinder could have.
I'll probably do another filler later this week before getting back to the series. Depends on how I'm feeling, but my work headache isn't going away for a few more days.
Had someone ask a little while ago how I keep motivated. Well this week I haven't been, so here's another part of the answer. When I'm not feeling the main series, I just do something silly for the fun of it.
Just because it's silly doesn't mean that it won't possibly make it into the series, of course. I do try to to keep all my designs workable even if they're a little whimsical. This one would probably take eight launches, and be really annoying to dock and assemble, but the curve is all made of hinged joints, which makes it easy to get into shape once everything's in place so that it can dock with itself and close those loops.
Slight heads up, my day job is going to be a little stupid next week. Well, even more stupid than usual I should say. I might do more filler or less posts than normal.
Jeb: You might think for a 10km round trip, we could have just drove. And you'd be wrong. Flying back now.
Sudon: Guests! Welcome Minmusians!
Lindo: Urggh... I'm still a little woozy from that hop into orbit we took. Did we really need to do that before deploying this stuff?
Bill: ...well not need exactly. But reviewing the tech library did help me get these panels working better. Down the road we are going to have to start putting more fuel cells on our mining rigs though. Now that I can crank up the converter even more they're having a hard time keeping up.
Lindo: That's weird, you'd think you could just crank up the fuel cells too.
Bill: Can't do it. Our fuel cells might as well be a black box.
(Editor's note: Meant for this one to be longer. But I have to visit the mechanic. Oh well.
Watched Passengers earlier. Then ran into a conversation about how a company could profit on running an interstellar colonization business.
Since I've already spent a fair amount of time thinking about generation ships, I have thoughts. Not timely thoughts, considering the age of the movie, but thoughts nonetheless.
In space, money is weird. Considering the 120 year trip time, Earth money isn't much use on Homestead II and money there isn't much use on Earth. But for the company that runs the ships that doesn't actually matter. Their Earth-side operations get to run entirely on Earth money. Their Homestead II operations are almost certainly the local government.
So the ship-operating company sells tickets in dollars, convincing working and middle-class people to liquidate all of their Earth money to buy those tickets and to also sign papers agreeing to what's essentially an extra income-tax. You might think: what good are those loan papers to the company on Earth? It's 120 years before they start any sort of payback. Why discount the trip for that? Why encourage or even let people run up big debts indulging in luxuries on the ship?
Because they can sell the loan papers on Earth for Earth money immediately. Imagine you're rich, and you want to leave Earth for Homestead II. But honestly, you still want to be rich when you get there. Because of course you do. By buying those loan papers, which are essentially shares in other people's lives and livelihoods, you get to trade your Earth fortune for a functionally equivalent Homestead II fortune. And the company at the heart of it gets a monopoly on what is essentially a massive, legal, human trafficking industry.
The plan doesn't actually have to work out at all for any of the colonists, rich or poor, for the company to profit. They've made their money, outside of whatever bonus they plan to make on their monopoly of the extremely limited interstellar data and material goods trade. And I guess the tourist trade for horribly damaged but still insanely wealthy people like Aurora. They do have a motive to try to make the colony work though. A media monopoly on Homestead II content is worth something on Earth, and the local value of their monopoly on Homestead II of the results of 60 years of technological advancement on Earth shouldn't be underestimated and helps with the sales pitch that their real clients will be able to enforce their contractual fiefdoms.
It's not the only way to fund this sort of project, or a good or ethical one, but in my opinion the movie makes it clear enough that it's probably pretty close to what's actually happening.)
Sig: It's absolutely crucial that we have the gear extended for this landing by the way...
Gene: And that's another great contract! We needed a good Munar lander in place, and thankfully our existing design counts as a station.
Bill: Hey, I revised that design. It has more lights now!
Gene: Money money money!
Gene: Win after win after win!
Jeb: I have it dialed in to dock with the refueling tanker. It is actually a pretty marginal lander for Mun compared to what we've been using.
Tefurt: Call it well engineered for the task.
Val: And we'll have our third moon captured in three... two... one... now!
Jeb: Hard pass on this one, Gene. Maybe, maybe if we'd gotten it a little earlier or the duration was ten years longer so we could have met it at the ascending node or periapsis. But that's over 20k m/s just to get there.
Gene: Wait, we're launching a relay to Eve? Aren't more than a year out from the transfer window?
Bob: Technically it's going to Gilly. We just launched a set of Moho relays. If we use the same design for Eve it's less transfer windows and more barn doors...
Val: This way we can go straight to a crewed mission when the first window opens.
Gene:...so should I be expecting a Duna relay soon?
Bill: Give us a few days. We're a lot closer to an efficient timing for Duna so we've got a ton of delta-v to play with. I think we can get full coverage for both Duna and Ike with one launch.
(Editor's note: I know I just said I liked transfer windows. And here I am not waiting for them. That's the nice thing about having real constraints. You can push against them. But doing that has tradeoffs.
I still have like a dozen things I need to be doing on Minmus in this save. Oh well. It isn't going anywhere. And I'd kind of like to find the green monolith on Mun before I max out the tech tree.)
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Building Out Kerbol 41 : The Land of Mint and Honey
Lupont: WOOHOO!!! Welcome to Minmus everykerbal!
Lupont: And we are detatched. Sig, remember to wait until we're clear before you spin up the farm. Teeny, your course is already plotted. When the button glows, press it!
Sizer: Bye!!!! I'll miss you all!!
Teeny: It's a three second burn Sizer, we aren't going far.
Merfield: You're all welcome back to the farm to visit any time!
Lupont: Wave to Bill, Lindo. I think I see him in the crew cabin.
Bill: A part of me is going to miss having this moon all to myself. But welcome to land of Mint and Honey you two.
Elsewhere:
Tefurt: Munholme is about to pass overhead. You ready to send the tanker up to meet it, Jeb?
Jeb: Too easy.
Richbert: Our asteroid rig is on its way!
Irgan: I think this thing has bigger problems than a missing AA, but who am I to argue with 105k?
Bob: Would you look at that? The survey probe just entered our sphere and it's already spotted two new anomalies just east of our mining camp.
Richbert: About to make contact.
Gene: We have our first asteroid. Looks like the rig is holding up well. Good job on the design everykerbal!
Bill: Yes... good... this is only the beginning...
(Editor's note: Huh, I could have sworn when I teleported out to scout the thing it was a magic asteroid with orange-red streaks. Maybe the game doesn't make that decision when the rock is generated but only when it renders it the first time for the save. I wonder if that means there's a chance that the comet I detected will become a magic comet whenever I finally get around to visiting it.
Either way, yay! I have a rock!
I kind of wish the whole anomaly/kerbnet thing worked a little differently. First off, I'd rather there were many more randomly generated anomalies. Second, it would be nice if the best probe for detecting them from orbit wasn't intended to be used as a rover body.
To me, contracts and anomalies are the best part of the game for getting me to actually explore. The actual assembling and flying rockets part is fun, but honestly getting around Kerbin, Mun, and Minmus lets you do almost every trick you'd want to go to other planets for.
Even an Eve return can be simulated pretty well by orbiting a rocket, landing it on Kerbin, and then launching it again. Actually, I might have to do that sometime to give Jeb 'practice' before doing an Eve return.
But contracts,and procedurally generated anomalies can get you to visit places you might not otherwise. And they give the game a little more spice for replay. It's sort of a game designers and modders have no sense of scale thing I guess.
There's plenty of mods to create entire new solar systems. But if each planet in those systems only has two things to look at then an entire new system is ultimately less interesting than a single comet ought to be. Think of how many genuinely interesting sights you might see during a single hour of hiking in real life. And visual mods don't really capture that, for me at least.)
Building Out Kerbol 40: Burning Burning Burning...
Sudon: Wow Minmus at last! And I beat everyone here!
Gene: Bad news Sudon, the client says a hyperbolic trajectory isn't suborbital even if it intersects the planet. You'll need to correct course, get into orbit, and try again.
Sudon: More piloting is never bad news!
Val: Taking over the helping hand to set up its intersect with that stray part. Looks like we'll have a pretty easy encounter.
Sudon: Yep, tell the client the engine still works! I'll just park in an equatorial orbit and wait for the farm crew to get here to complete the contract.
Jeb: Starting our Moho relay burn now.
Gene: Good work Jeb, looks like we'll just have a minor inclination change before we use our periapsis burn to set up an encounter.
Val: ...that is a heck of an engine to be floating in Minmus orbit.
Val: Got it, bringing it home.
Jedlin: Wow! It's an honor to be following Jeb's footsteps and remote piloting our second ever interplanetary probe!
Ten Minutes Later:
Jedlin: Electric charge is still holding steady at 100%. I guess putting the Rovemate in hibernation mode did the trick.
Gene: That's one concern down anyway.
Gene: Not bad Jed. You overdid the burn a hair, but it should be an easy fix when we get the last couple tenths of a degree of inclination.
(Editor's note: Storywise, I have to say the way I do things probably makes maintaining a narrative a little awkward.
Who knows what sort of dramatic daring-do my kerbals will be up to on Mun or Minmus or an asteroid 44 days 2 hours and 50 minutes from now when I have to interrupt them for a minute long burn in interplanetary space that isn't exactly time critical.
On the other hand, I just improv the commentary in a rush right before posting, so it isn't like I'm actually trying to maintain a coherent narrative in the first place.)
Gene: There's no reason to have two survey probes at Minmus, right? It'll be a while before the other one arrives, you're sure you don't want to keep this one around?
Bill: There's no need. The lab is going to be busy enough with the other data from here until the ion probe makes it here.
Irgan: I just set off for that Satellite upgrade. It feels a little weird leaving the Clubhaus after all this time...
Irgan: Huh, look at that. We must be right at our ascending node with Moho...
Gene: EVERYONE SCRAMBLE! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!!!
Irgan: What's the big deal? It's not like it's a transfer window.
Bob: Moho doesn't have transfer windows, not really. Between the inclination and the eccentricity there's only one good place in its orbit to meet it, right where a ship would hit its orbit if we launched right now. We either launch in the next day or so, or hold off for a year.
A few minutes later:
Gene: Bill I hope your design was final because it is now!
Bill: I mean... It should theoretically be able to get there. And have a strong signal. I hope...
Soon after:
Gene: Next up!
Bill: I did have time to revise the survey sat a bit. So long as that solar array can get it through the big burn here, we should be good.
Gene: The relays are locked in for a burn tomorrow.
Gene: And the surveyor. Sure hope your probe can handle an 18 minute burn, Bill.
Irgan: So that's a relay network and a science probe for Moho, right? What are we looking at for the other planets?
Bill: Just link your console back to the Clubhaus and pop open the maneuver tool. It should be able to spit out some basic launch window estimates.
Irgan: Huh, how did I never know it could do that?
Gene: It isn't exactly perfect, but for everywhere but Moho it should be close enough for figuring out our schedule. This year is all about Moho and Duna. Next year is Eve, Jool, and Eeloo.
Irgan: And then Dres after that?
Gene: Where?
(Editor's note: Yeah, I'm going to have to double check those transfer windows. And I don't know why the trip duration to Dres is 0, but it's funny. Considering that Dres isn't real. And it better not be, because a trip of 0hrs implies it's coming to us.
Transfer windows are one of the things I really like about how space travel works, and one I wish more science fiction leaned into. Because it really is a different world if our cities and countries and towns are minutes away from each other by phone, weeks or months away by ship, and in places where the path to reach them only opens once every three years.
Imagine being a dock worker on Phobos and having to deal with 780 days worth of traffic from Earth over the course of maybe two weeks... Imagine the party afterwards!)
Building out Kerbol 38: The difference between a station and a ship
Bob: We're sticking to 15% throttle to keep the unbalanced load from spinning us, but we're off to the edge of the SOI.
Sangan: We survived the big burn, looks like it'll be much easier switching planes.
Bill: We have some time to kill, so let's work on clearing out some contracts.
Gene: We're about to lose those fins.
Bill: Doesn't matter, we're above the soup and we weren't recovering the booster anyway.
Gene: So what is it?
Bill: Our first ion probe.
Bill: These engines take a ton of charge to run, so we're playing around to see how long of a burn we can manage between our panels and batteries. Looks like 2 minutes drained about a quarter of our charge even in the dark.
Bill: Here's our biggest burn so far. And one contract down.
Bill: And now to move on to the next contract.
Bob: And we are now polar and ready to properly service the surface exploration.
(Editor's note: The difference between a ship and a station is all in your mind. A ship is about the trip, a station is for the destination.
Munholme's new orbit lets it pass over essentially everywhere on the Mun's surface twice a munar day. The hope is that with my current rover's fuel reserves it should be doable to hop to anywhere on the surface from the mining rig and recover at the station if needed without doing any major plane changes, which is what made the last surface mission so iffy.
I just eyeballed it but the station should spend about half its orbit in a high orbit and half in low orbit with the transition over the poles. So, in theory, I can grab readings from both high and low orbit over every bit of Mun's surface from that orbit.
I've basically come to feel that there are two kinds of stations: Up stations and Down stations.
Up Stations are for missions going up and out of the gravity well. You want those to be equatorial so they'll have plenty of launch windows for travelling to distant destinations, which should mostly be on or near the equatorial plane. Staging a bunch of modules for an interplanetary ship? Until you light the engines that's an Up station.
Down stations are for exploring the world beneath them. Those should be polar so that they can be accessed relatively cheaply from any latitude and so that they pass over every part of the surface below. Sending Jeb up to park in orbit until he gets crew readings over every biome? Until his recovery burn he's in a Down station.
And if you have both Up and Down stations in equatorial and polar orbits, it makes sense to have your mining operations be on the equator. That way both kinds of station can easily reach or be reached by your mining and refueling systems.)
genuinely loving the series it's gotten me back into ksp and has me thinking differently about the game in a big way
question - how do you keep motivated with your many-plate-spinning playstyle? especially for interstellar travel when transfer window and travel times outweigh your elapsed time by an order of magnitude? during my last ksp phase i was playing in a similar style, and i always struggled staying motivated with the close-to-home stuff while waiting for transfer windows or travel time
A few different ways.
Assuming you mean interplanetary instead of interstellar, since I don't use mods. Although the answer there would probably be about the same.
First, it's still a game. If I look at a contract being offered and it just doesn't look like fun I just don't do it. If I was playing on harder difficulty I might feel more forced to do everything.
Second, just because I have a contract accepted doesn't mean I have to do it right now. At the moment, I think I have a satellite upgrade contract, a rover repair, and three new satellite launch contracts that I'm just sitting on. I don't like sitting around waiting or only having my Kerbals doing one thing, but I play it by ear how much I want to squeeze into the time I have between big maneuvers.
Third, if there's something I actually want to do and have time for I don't wait for a contract. None of that flying around for the last post got me any rewards other than the little discovery and world's first rewards. I just wanted to clear all the anomaly markers off the map and get access to some new launch sites. Similarly I'm probably going to send a mission to Mun sooner or later with a satellite that can find anomalies at a 100% rate because it's going to just get more annoying to me thinking that I haven't found everything there yet. And I really enjoy coming up with space station and base concepts, so if I have time and an idea...
Fourth, I probably will start doing more time warping once I feel like I'm done or done for the moment locally around Kerbin. But by the time that happens, transfer windows to the other planets should be showing up. I basically want to be doing at least three missions to everywhere: survey, explore, and tourism. Even if I'm only doing interplanetary stuff, just with the way transfer times and the calendar work I'm going to essentially always have several missions in the works at any given time.
Fifth, finalth, and maybe most importanth: I am doing the series. It's always easy for me to lose motivation if what I'm doing doesn't have any feedback or schedule or constraints. And then once I stop, it's hard to get back into the habit or the rhythm. For a game like Kerbal it's very easy for me to feel the pressure to start over from the beginning the second I think of a better way I could have done something. The series keeps me honest and motivated. This blog's only picked up something like four new followers and even my most popular posts mostly get a handful of reactions, but I'm doing this in public, sort of.
If I stopped I'd be letting you down Anon. And we can't have that.
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Verming: Huh, looks like that anomaly to the southwest was an entire, fully staffed launch site. Why didn't we just have it on the map? This thing was a pain to find in the dark!
Gene: But you made it down safe, right? The new jet's flying well?
Verming: ...sure.
Richbert: Sun's coming up over the horizon, I'm actually glad it's still dark though, the runway lights are making this spot much easier to find.
Verming: Wait, so you got a map marker and runway lights? No fair!
Richbert: Ooooh, looks like that extra anomaly we detected wasn't a glitch after all!
Tebart: Maybe another launch site? I see something shining anyway.
Tebart: Aww, this one's mothballed. I can't even refuel. Another monolith though, these things are everywhere! I have plenty of fuel though, so I'll keep heading north.
Tebart: Shouldn't our ground relays have map markers? At least I was able to just follow the signal to pinpoint it.
Tebart: It's getting kind of toasty in the cockpit. Jet's probably a little too fast for our atmosphere. Wonder if that's what got the aliens? Maybe they had to drop the monoliths to save weight.
Tebart: Oh thank Kerb! Bathrooms!
Tebart: Wake up! Where's the toilet!
Jedlin: Aww, I only get a short hop? Tebart gets all the fun.
Jedlin: Fill er up!
Verming: Behold! The wisdom of the ancients revealed! Fuel tanks can be bigger!
Verming: I hope there's a place to land coming up, otherwise I'm going to need to start watching the throttle so I don't blow up!
Verming: Yay! Two beaches in one relay!
Verming: Glad I packed my bikini!
Tebart: Made it across the ocean. Our first anomaly is a ground station. That's fine. There's several other anomalies we picked up, and it isn't like they'd have all the launch sites and airfields in one hemisphere, right?
Tebart: I'm going to be 100% honest. The core says there's something here, but I don't see shit. So much for my mountain resort.
Tebart: Another ground station...
Tebart: yay. a monolith.
Tebart: An entire continent with no launch sites?!?! What the hell Gene?
Gene: I don't know what to tell you, I just stamp the papers.
Tebart: I'm about to outrun the sun. Still got a bit to fly before I reach Mahi Mahi. I throttled down to cool off, but now things are getting kind of shaky. How well did you look at the balance in this thing with empty tanks?
Gus: We didn't...
Tebart: FFFFFFFFuuuuuuuuuu....
Tebart: I just had to take over for Verming at the cove. What was I thinking? I should have let Richbert fly this leg of the mission. That water looks so cold...
(Editor's note: The crash at the end wasn't staged. I really did just suddenly lose all control and fall into an unrecoverable tailspin. Dropped all the way from 10k to 1k meters fighting for control the whole way down before I decided to have her bail out.
There's a single anomaly I have mapped that I couldn't find. I don't know if there's anything actually there though, I was putting up those markers even if the anomaly was right on the horizon from the probe. So it's possible that I was way off on location and I marked that for the last monolith or the second to last ground station.
The jet was really great for this tour. Plenty of fuel, a top speed over 500 m/s, reasonable enough to land, and stable enough to point the thing, crank up to 4x warp, and walk away to get a drink or use the restroom while it flew and worst case come back to the thing being a couple thousand meters higher than I wanted. But I did check after the fact, and with empty tanks the center of mass was definitely behind the center of lift. Oops.
For the record, I was only listening to Daft Punk's Around the World for at most a quarter of the time I was flying this.)
Jeb: Looks like that new Mining shack is here. And its floodlights work...
Jeb: Coming in hot, see you on the ground in a few.
Tefurt: Welcome! Let's get all linked up so I can get this thing running at full capacity!
Jowig: Let's wait for sunrise before Jeb and I head out on our next hop.
Tefurt: Sounds good. I think I've got everything dialed in here if you two want to call it a night.
Gene: You know the timing on this is a little mean, right?
Bob: Why would you say that?
Gene: And we're sure it won't hit them?
Val: Relax, we can make adjustments if we need to.
Val: Beginning terminal burn...
Val: And that's flameout. Project Alarm Clock is due to hit in 5... 4...
Jeb: WHAT WAS THAT!?!?!
Jowig: Really Gene? Couldn't wait for morning?
(Editor's note: No cheating this time. Although I should admit that I did cheat the Mineshack into orbit a few posts ago. But it's the second Mineshack and the new hose connections have less mass than the spare batteries I took off, so I can't imagine it would have been difficult to launch. That was still probably a mistake, because just loading onto the launchpad fully fueled shredded three of its four tires and I had to blow through three repair kits once it landed to let it drive over.
I did have Tefurt drop the airlock on the Mineshack a bit so the science rover could dock with it. but the actual docking was easy. Drive over to line up the docks, and then switch to the landing legs to lift the rover and trust the magnets to keep everything lined up while the vehicle shifts around and make the connection.
I probably should have used the subassembly feature to make sure the things lined up back at the VAB, but where's the fun in that?
There's about a week of game time left before I get three ships arriving at Minmus and it's time for my asteroid rig to set off for its encounter. Knowing me I'm going to squeeze three or four other things in before then, because God forbid I time warp more than a couple hours...)
