Kerbal Glory

Adventures with Kerbal Space Program.

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Well this is a fun second stage. Using interstage fairing. A little more punch than a skipper. Taking the reactor and mission support truss to the Minmus station.

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Start of Orbital base. Planning to use logistics module to ship stuff from the surface, try to setup an orbital construction yard, and see how it works.

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Got a basic base set up. Seems to be able to support 3 kerbals for a long time with food, water and O2. Using TAC life support. Planning to land an ore/water drilling platform here and then shipping raw materials to orbit.

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Sending a crew and a rover to Minmus to nail down a surveyed location that had high resources levels right next to a different biome with high Karbonite. Setting up base within 2km of the border to use logistics to get the Karbonite.

Oops on the rover deploy. Jeb had to flip it by hand. But then he could check out the drilling rig.

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Getting into MKS/OKS and Karbonite in 0.90 a few weeks ago. I had fun making this survey satellite.

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The new boosters let you launch pretty big stuff without it looking absurd on the pad. 

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The fun thing about KSP is that it lets you build some really unrealistic rockets.

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Bah. This setup can't generate fuel and oxidizer without a tank feeding the converter. I'm going to have to launch a replacement converter unit with a tank on the next window. Having the spare parts came in handy, I forgot to mount power generation on the utility rovers, but could bolt an RTG on there.

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Final Drop. Managed to pull it off without the extra fuel shipment that's half-way out from Kerbin.  All landings and navigation done manually. Now we'll see if this thing can generate some fuel.  (I had 77 fuel left).

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This is when I realized the base mover rover that was supposed to be under the utility pallet got left behind. Oh well, the skycrane can land so it's not a big deal.

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I forgot, I'm also using KAS for fun. Actually, that's the whole reason this base makes sense. At least, I hope it makes sense. I didn't actually test it on Kerbin. Anyway, nice shot of the skycrane flying past the site on the way to rendezvous with the rest of the stuff.

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First Drop. Could have probably brought all 4 modules in one go, but it seemed unwieldy, unphotogenic, and wrong.

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Rendezvoused the drill and reactor with the out-of-fuel skycrane, and left the transtage behind. Skycrane is back in business with all the base components.

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Landed at the planned mining site to provide an easy target for the bast components.

Answer to question: It's a 2 kerbal capsule from Near Future Propulsion. I'm using that, and the Habitats, and Kethane. I also have MechJeb but I've only used it for plane changes and half the dockings.

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Managed to rendezvous the lander and return vehicle with the Discovery which had been mapping Bop for 6 months or so.

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I made two mistakes with this piece. 

I put it on a higher energy trajectory by accident, and ended up getting to Jool like 80 days ahead of the other two ships, which wasted fuel.

As you can see, I didn't aerobrake enough. I should have come around for another pass to lower the periapsis more.

Consequently, there was barely enough fuel to get into Bop orbit, I burned it all plus most of the RCS. I had to through the empty fuel cannister overboard, although I'd been planning to save it to convert the skycrane into a tanker.

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And the two base components are en-route, with the skycrane.