Anime Weaboos conquer space and do SCIENCE! for the Emperor.

[Hellraiser]

You know what? Please disregard any of my predictions about the number of images in future updates. The next update will somehow have a few more than the last one. Well maybe a few less, I'll may end up purging a few more images if I deem them redundant.

Anyway totally devoid of content bump posts would be appreciated to put some space. DU really should have set posts per page in the playground to 10.

Oh and apply for the position of KAMIKAZE kerbonauts if you want to. Future missions are shaping up to be probable one way trips, into the afterlife.

 

[Kashmir Slippers]

Bump

 

[Hellraiser]

THE FIST OF THE FIRESTAR RETURNS

An endless red dust,
the cold wind howls mockingly,
the last laugh is mine.

Spoiler

New lander, tested it and it seems to be safe and have enough delta-v. One key new addition are the drogue parachutes, there will be very helpful. The other is the ladder, had to check first if it reaches the ground. On Duna you can get away with not adding a ladder but just barely. Still Duna is not to be underestimated, it can be deadly for landers.

The Firestar-3 is assembled. Everything is a new design, from the lander to the lifter to the probe. Yes, like the Jigoku this one will also launch a probe, although it will be used to (hopefully) land on the moon Ike rather than on the planet proper. That's what the lander is for after all.

The crew is assembled just as the dice gods dictated. Since the lander is a two-kerman one everyone but Agassi will land on Duna. Or only Agassi will survive the mission, either outcome is probable.

Engage launch music:


The only two notable things about that series are the ridiculous amounts of fan-service and the fact they had a damn good guitarist do the soundtrack.

I wait for the launch window and get this glorious piece of kipponese engineeringu into space.

Uhhh... it shouldn't do that.

It definitely shouldn't do that! There's some kind of problem with maintaining stability, probably asymmetrical thrust or weight.

The good news is neither of the boosters crashed into the pod.

It lands safely.

I launch again hoping it was just a random booster smashing into a launch clamp as the flight log indicated. It was not.

But at least it confirmed that the science core of the lander can land intact together with the return capsule.

Two or three flights and design revisions later the Firestar-3b still had the same problem, despite balancing all boosters, adding more control surfaces and winglets for stability and what not. Nobody died but the Emperor was furious, many engineers have committed seppuku.

The Firestar-3c swapped the SRBs for liquid fuel boosters with vector thrusting. This should work.

Oh for fucks sake!

However I noticed the problem. All tanks are supposed to be staged in pairs, so for every engine there should be another engine with the same amount of fuel, apart from the core which should have the most fuel. That was not the case here.

One of the engines emptied its tank before the other, this was visible due to the fact that it had time to cool down and thus stopped glowing unlike the engine it was paired. Which meant the fuel lines had to be connected wrongly. With the crew recovered safely, again, I focused on fixing the problem for good.

Turned out some of the fuel lines failed to connect when I attached them using symmetry placement. So one tank was connected properly while the other in its pair wasn't. I fixed it.

And it started working the way it should.

Only 600 m/s short of orbital velocity as the last of the side boosters get jettisoned. Smooth sailing on mainsails, those engines and double-jumbo tanks make lifting shit piss easy.

BTW they fixed a bug where these engines overheated if they were attached to the jumbo tank because its center of mass was beyond the heat transfer range of the engine. So they no longer explode if you set them to max throttle and forget to watch the heat, which is either decline or incline depending on the point of view.

Over half of the fuel left in the asparagus lifter core, Duna transfer burn is 1088 m/s, I think that burn is not going to drain the lifter. A double jumbo and a mainsail are a fucking ton of delta-v even if they are ridiculously heavy.

And the trajectory needs a 100 m/s correction. I still have fuel in the lifter core.

I ditch the core before the next set of correction burns for aerobraking. For one it has too much thrust for such precise burns, also since it's as heavy as an average sumo wrestler or otaku gobbling up moe-shit, so rotating the craft around was a chore. Should have added another large reaction wheel set but I have torque from the lander can, the 3-kerman capsule and two large reaction wheels sets so that still should have been enough to rotate it fairly fast. Unlikely another set of reaction wheels would change that, maybe four more would.

Spoiler

An about 13km aerobraking trajectory. More than the Firestar-2's but that's because I need a higher apoapsis to hopefully get pulled in by Ike for free to launch the probe ASAP.

Engage majestic aerobraking* music:



*technically it's an aerocapture. So far in spaceflight it has only been suggested for Mars Oddysey and never actually used for probes or anything. It turned out that reinforcing everything for pulling it off was more expensive than just launching the probe with more propellant for regular orbital insertion. You can blame that either on congress pushing to use the same legacy legacy tech of the obvious two military industrial complex aerospace manufacturers or on budgets cuts.

About to enter atmo, Tzaero looks like he took all the happy pills himself.

Aproaching periapsis, so far lost 126 m/s of velocity.

Ganing back altitude as the Firestar-3c flies over a large canyon, lost over 300 m/s of velocity. Should be enough to slow down below escape velocity and end up with an apoapsis around Ike's SoI.

Well it was a bit too much, but no worry as I have fuel to spare since most of the work was done by the mainsail aparagus core.

BTW the devs mentioned they'll be working on some long neglected thing that kept getting pushed back which is not resources (since they specifically said no endgame content until the career mode mechanics are fleshed out). So it is possible that's going to be re-entry heat and the aerodynamics rework, so the end to the shit I pull in here with aerocapture could be near (at least without heatshields). It's either that or they'll add a celestial body discovery mechanic and a new gas giant planet with moons which would make sense considering they want to finish the bulk of the science! system in 0.23, including polishing and re-balancing it.

My bet though is on them remaking spaceplane parts, aerodynamics and adding heatshields though as it's a basic level mechanic that the game lacks, and the addition of which will fuck up any sort of part cost economy they will want to add. Which is why they probably decided not to go with budgets and missions yet. Anyway they'll announce what it is possibly next week.

Agassi uses her knowledge of all stuffies and thingies occult to plot a series of maneuvers that will take the ship close to Ike with he minimum use of fuel. First she'll raise periapsis above Duna's atmosphere, then boost up to Ike and enter orbit around it before it slingshots the Firestar-3 out into solar orbit.

Playing around with gravity assists is pretty fun and useful but requires waiting for shit to get aligned, works best in a complex system of Moons and there is only one of those in the game at the moment.

Burning to Ike.

And it's done, Agassi got the ship into an initial orbit which will be circularized soon before the probe gets dispatched. So enjoy some Ike lore.

Ike is smaller than the Mun, a bit more assymetrical in shape and looks kind of like a large lump of coal. Possibly it is made in large parts of Kerbon.

No I'm not joking, Kerbon is one of the elements the devs want to put into the resource system.

Circularizing, also deployed the newly unlocked antenna. It's actually the old dish they added in 0.18, but it got a new model now in 0.22.

Probe dispatched, expected orbital experiment result for goo.

Didn't circularize the orbit as well as I should have so the descent will need 3 burns rather than two. I want to land in the large maria or patch of Kerbon, whatever that black area is.

Engage landing music ~desu:

First burn is 75 m/s, Duna rises above the horizon.

Performing second burn, this time it is 100 m/s.

Doing some science in low orbit before the final deceleration burn.

Spess is cold.

Descent going well, lots of fuel left and the ground is close.

Or not, I try to land and the slope makes the probe tip. I throttle to boost the probe up before it smacks into the black surface.

Spoiler

Which I repeat doing a few more times over the course of the next four minutes as can be seen by the mission time clock. The probe just keeps bouncing and tipping all the time.

NASA material I am not.

Success!

Also the science value shown is actually a bug, the real value is far less. AFAIK the gravioli sensor and the atmospheric analyzer whatever also have the same problem where the displayed values are much higher than the real ones you get. Oh and default message on sensor I just used for the first time.

I send back the first batch of data mostly got in orbit. Ran out of power as this antenna uses more power per packet sent, it just waits until it recharges for a moment and continues sending packets.

Strangely? Did it turn into the Zebra Queen or some kind of Kaiju?

Placeholder report text in both cases.

Sent back the surface set of experiment data. Time for the main course.

Agassi plots a trajectory that will take the Firestar-3 into a low periapsis of about 62km above Duna.

Tzaero and Vaarna EVA to the lander after Agassi establishes a circular low Duna orbit. Sadly you can't transfer crew between crew compartments connected via docking ports. Now that I think about it this could be another thing they may be working on for the next update, that feature has also been neglected and people have been complaining about no way to transfer experiment data on a ship in the case of soil samples.

The lander separates. Godspeed brave gaijin, may your parachutes not fail and may there be no mountains in the way of your descent trajectory.

The first burn lowered the periapsis by a not low enough amount. At 35km it was still too high to de-orbit the lander.

Another this time final de-orbiting burn was made, no going back now. Kippon is with you, glory to the rising sun engage music:

Forty kilometers, atmospheric pressure slowly rising.

Sixteen and a half, parachutes are set to deploy but they don't fire yet. This is the one thing you need to remember about Duna, the parachutes open when you are far lower than anywhere else. Hence you need to go in shallow or risk crashing into the ground.

Either way the trajectory is already suborbital, the parachutes still refuse to open.

At 9,5km the drogue parachutes deploy. You now know why I said these are useful for Duna.

At about seven kilometers the regular parachutes deploy. Still going above 400 m/s because the thin atmosphere generates little drag, so naturally the parachutes are overall less effective than on Kerbin and in other places.

At about 5,6km the drogue chutes fully deploy. Unlike regular parachutes these do that at about 2 or 2,5 kilometers above the surface. This makes them really good at slowing down large heavy objects as regular parachutes fully deploy at 500 meters above the ground. Needless to say those last 500 meters are sometimes not enough to slow the damn thing down. However drogue chutes generate less drag when fully deployed, it's just that they generate a lot more in their semi-deployed form than regular ones and they deploy at higher altitudes.

IVA view is a bit ass for the bigger lander can. They should redo the glass with frosting just on the edges like that 6 months newer 1-kerman lander can has. Can't see shit through it, but at least the radar altimeter works.

Spoiler

About 500 meters above the surface and at an altitude of above 3700 meters all parachutes are fully deployed. Despite this I still need to throttle the engines a bit to slow down to 13 m/s and lower if I want to land safely. It is totally impossible to land heavy things on Duna without some use of thrusters, the way drag works even in its current simplified form parachutes have diminishing returns.

A moment later the lander touches down at a safe velocity of something like 6 m/s. The two KAMIKAZE kebonauts report: mission accomplished, we have landed on Duna.

First some science.

What do you mean no unique goo report for Duna?

Baka!

Well shit, Hoggaido winters have nothing on Duna it seems.

This is actually a very nice report. Well apart from the fact that you probably notice the low effectiveness of parachutes before you get it since you need to land intact first.

Bugged displayed value, unique report but not enlightening much. An additional "Duna seems to be tectonically inactive
" added at the end of it would suffice IMO.

Tzaero exists the airlock and walks down the ladder. It seems the happy pills got to his brain. A chemically lobotomized gaijin is a loyal gaijin I guess.

Similar to Martian dust, which is mostly composed of iron oxide aka rust. It's possible that shit is electrically charged and could be rather deadly to electronics so cleaning space suits properly in the airlock may be vital if men ever step on that planet (if we don't we fail as a species period, not saying we should do it ASAP though).

Vaarna does a report before he also steps out of the lander.

Group shot by the flag for Jakan.

After spending nearly a Dunar day on the surface building sand castles while high as kites on happy pills doing SCIENCE! they board the lander back and prepare for return into orbit. Before they do that they pack up the parachutes, so that they can be used again, except for the drogue chutes which will be jettisoned since they will not be needed during a Kerbin return.

The Firestar-3 orbiter is directly above them. Easiest way to rendezvous and dock with something while launching from the surface, is to launch about at the time when it is above you. You need to try to insert the craft into a lower orbit as you end up behind the target, in order to catch up to it as both your orbital velocity will be higher and your orbit shorter.

The dumped parachutes are doing a poor job at falling off. Of course since I am pushing them that means their weight does slow me down a bit, as does their drag (luckily they're not deployed of course).

I landed fairly high up at 3,5km which was risky but quite frankly I had no way of knowing how high the landing site will be. The trade-off though was that launching from a higher altitude means there is less drag to slow me down as I need to fight less atmo. Although on duna drag is not much of an issue since it is about the same at 0 meters as at 10 kilometers on Kerbin.

I encountered some bug where my trajectory was not being displayed. The result of that was ending up at a far higher trajectory than I wanted to, the good new is though the lander had too much fuel.

Those damn parachutes kept following me into space, should have added seperatrons to them so that they would fly off the top. Anyway with about 40% of fuel left in the lander I needed less than 300 m/s to finish getting the lander into orbit.

Rendezvous was a bit tricky. I should have put the Firestar-3c orbiter into a higher orbit. The time warp limit below 60 km is x10 above 60km it is x50, so with the huge error in initial orbit that I made I had to wait for a long time to do basic maneuvers due to this limitation. Then again a lower orbit requires less delta-v to reach from the surface and less to de-orbit from.

Spoiler

After a few orbits and minor burns the lander gets into position to begin docking maneuvers.

The lander begins to decelerate to park about 60 meters away from the orbiter.

Agassi orients the orbiter in the direction of the lander to ease the final approach.

This time the RCS thrusters are placed correctly, final approach goes without a problem. Vaarna however does not seem to enjoy this round telakoituminen, perhaps he misses the steam and naked kermen of his native fimmland that enhance the experience?

The remaining fuel is drained although the Firestar-3c is far from empty anyway. Still the plan is to refuel it for the next mission if I manage to first aerocapture it into Kerbin orbit. Then a new lander will be docked with it, along with possibly an external fuel tank. On its own I think the Firestar-3c should get nearly anywhere although not necessarily back to Kerbin from there, it should have about 6k delta-v since it is based on a similar design I once did. Although that one had half of its fuel capacity and a heavier cockpit (which was a part from a mod) so overall it could have more.

Still pushing a lander in front and the fact that every other place apart from Duna and Eve is a lot harder to reach (more delta-v for the burn, no atmo to aerocapture with apart from one instance), means that the extra fuel may really be needed.

Jetissoned the now useless parts of the lander, that is the legs, the fuel tanks and engines and the solar panels. Only the compact return payload is left. BTW one of the panels actually broke before landing, not sure why but possibly from the first "tug" when the drogue parachutes deployed fully, that usually creates a few gees of acceleration.

Forgot to take a shot but basically the return burn was delayed indefinitely because Ike did what its lore mentioned, that is it put itself right in my path fucking up any planned maneuvers. If you get an encounter with a moon as part of a planned interplanetary trajectory it doesn't show you your trajectory when you exit the parent object's SoI. That's highly annoying.

Still a few minutes after the optimal transfer point Ike moves out of the way and I can begin the burn.

Burn was a little fucked up, NASA always plans at least two correction burns for each interplanetary trips so why should mine be different?

17 m/s? Oh please, pennies compared to what this thing still has left, not even a third of fuel gone yet. Also I think Agassi and Vaarna got a sudden case of major DERP judging by their faces. Is it the time to debate the right and left hand path again?

This time I'm trying 39 kilometers for aerocapture as I want to have the orbiter still in Kerbin orbit after slowing down below escape velocity.

Ah fuck, 30 m/s short of getting into orbit. I'll aerocapture from Duna at 37km next time, although I'm not going to do that as part of this LP since there's no point in sending a fourth ship there. I could land on Ike and return but that's easy, there are far more dangerous celestial bodies to land and return from in KSP's solar system. Like the one where I will be taking the KAMIKAZE crew next.

HA HA HAHAHAHAHAHA! [/maniacal laughter]

Still I need to detach the science pod first. The orbit both ships are on is still one passing through atmo, but the orbiter will raise it above it, since I cannot have two vessels flying through the atmosphere at the same time (one will either be destroyed automatically or pass through along its orbit as if there was no atmosphere at all).

Many fiefs in Fimmland await Vaarna on Kerbin, Tzaero will get his fair share of new titles as well, the Emperor is pleased, the people of the empire celebrate. First however the kerbonauts make their fiery entrance before they can claim their rewards.

At least they're landing on solid ground, not sure if the materials bay and instruments would survive splashdown.

Spoiler

And a safe landing among some trees.

The Ike probe got me over 350 science, the Duna lander got me over 1000.

Most notably seismic scan science yield is 160 and not 400 science.

Also it turns out I cannot into reading projected trajectories. I got a Mun encounter and though I would get to my new Apoapsis after it rather than first go to the new periapsis which was beneath Kerbin's surface. I warped until the planned maneuver that would raise it only to see Kerbin suddenly appearing in Agassi's face.

Despite a fucked up direct hit impact trajectory at a steep angle close to 90 degrees the parachutes manage to slow down the capsule rapidly.

Agassi safely splashes down.

Tech tree time, I get rover wheels. Not of much use yet with no biomes beyond the Mun but still, why not. The command seat will be of use however.

As well as Gigantor XL solar panels and inline batteries.

And Ramscoops and better jet engines, also the game could use really advanced ramjet engines or hybrid jet-rocket engines like SABRE engines. These probably won't be of much use, but they're needed to unlock one final rocket engine.

I also get meta-materials for the large docking port.

One newly revealed node unlocks the large inline probe core. Fits nicely inside standard large-diameter manned ships, useful for tugs, empty space stations or simply having a way to control your orbiter while the entire crew goes to the surface.

The largest inline battery and the RTG, because you do need to power those damn lights and probes beyond Duna where sunlight is very weak.

A second set of medium rover wheels, a bit more sturdy then the ones I have now, along with the large rover wheels. Large doesn't even begin to describe how big those things are. The large wheel has the same diameter as a large fuel tank, add to that the suspension mechanism making it look even bigger and it literary makes kerbals look like ants. Best used for ridiculously huge mobile surface bases, cranes (with the KAS mod) or heavy fuel tankers. Not much use for career mode yet but once they add biomes on other planets I can see certain very heavy landers use these. Oh and they have tank-style controls meaning they can rotate around while still in one place, where as other rover wheels behave like a typical four (or more) wheel drive car.

Well Duna and Eve are done. Those two are the easiest planets to reach, there are still four more out there although two are dwarf planets. Three of those remaining worlds are between difficult to very difficult to reach and return from, so of course one of them will be the target of the next mission, because Dres is not really that hard to reach and land on nor exciting. Nuclear Thermal Rocket engines and heavy lifters may make the game easy but what await beyond Eve and Duna requires them for good reason.

Enough for today. If you are a japanophilic Gaijin and want to volunteer you have a guaranteed spot on the likely one way trip that will be the next mission. So please do.

 

[Hellraiser]

Ran out of rolls in the last post the last non-repeating (or of a person who hasn't been in space too much) rolled numbers were 9 and 8. So I roll once again to draw more crew.

 

[Kashmir Slippers]

Bump

 

[Hellraiser]

FULL MOHO PANIC!

I see the source,
the origin of creation,
burning ever bright.

Spoiler

Amaterasu, the Goddess which created the universe, the one who's blood flows in the veins of the divine Emperor. The vessel bearing her name rides atop what I call the 9-pack, an asparagus staging monstrosity using 9 mainsail engines, 16 SRBs and 18 jumbo tanks. It used to be the absolute limit of what fit on the old launchpad when there was a launch tower, into which shit would often crash. You can build bigger now, but I already get at best 8 FPS when launching this so I rather not.

Well that and every new asparagus stage lasts only 50% of what the previous one does, diminishing returns on delta-v kick in due to the tyranny of the rocket equation as adding more fuel means I need more fuel to lift the rest of the fuel.

Anyway engage fitting music ~desu:

The other thing is that the more stages there are the more likely it is that something goes wrong.

Speaking of which I do not like the look of those fuel per engine bars...

Engage emergency separation!

The flight event log tells me that the connection between two fuel tanks broke. I'll guess I'll have to reinforce them.

Forgot to mention the crew is split across two different pods. They're not connected to each other so I have to deploy parachutes first while the lander is docked with with the Amaterasu. Then I undocked the lander and decoupled the cupola cockpit of the Amaterasu. As long as two vessels on a suborbital trajectory are within 2500 meters of the one you are controlling the game will simulate them fully and not delete them. Otherwise everything that is not in orbit or landed will get deleted.

Due to derp I forgot to make a shot of the crew screen. Haba pilots the orbiter, the other two gaijin stay in the lander.

Well so far it goes well, the improvements seem to work.

The jettisoned stage collided with the rocket proper causing the above catastrophe.

Still everyone makes it back alive.

Next attempt ends up with the top of one of the double-tanks breaking off again. So I reinforce it with struts, again.

CURSE YOU ROCKET SCIENCE!

I reinforced everything that seemed weak, again, and repositioned the seperatrons so that the spent stages definitely flew away from the rest of the rocket. It finally worked.

Spoiler

The Amaterasu is now in orbit, the asparagus core has about 60% fuel left. Good because this time I will need all the fuel I can get. As you can see the ship is going to Moho. Moho is hard to reach, mostly because it is the innermost planet of the system. I decided to go there because I never landed on it, only was there once and because I think it is easier to reach than Eeloo (spoiler: it is not, I'll explain why soon) and because I don't want to go to Jool yet and Dres would be Dres too easy, I think (I never went there).

However after I warped to the transfer window I reminded myself one of the reasons why Moho is hard to reach. It is not just close to the Sun, it is also on a fucked up inclined orbit and elliptical orbit. With no idea on how to get a mostly direct burn from Kerbin (with an orbital plane matching correction mid-course) I decide to do this shit like how I did it the last and only time I was there, using an Eve slingshot.

Engage slingshot music:

Had to do a correction burn first, the last piece of the mainsail lifter lasted until the middle of that burn.

91km should be enough to be above Eve's atmosphere. As you can see the Amaterasu will swing past it flying back in the direction it came from. This will change my solar orbit from one where the apoapsis was at kerbin's orbit and periapsis at eve's, to one where apoapsis is at eve's orbital altitude around the sun and periapsis is somewhere low and not far from Moho's orbit.

Turns out there is some atmo at 91km, the lore lies about it being 90km, I knew I wanted to fly at above 92km for some reason. Still the drag is negligible so I'll maybe lose a meter or two per second due to it. Also I do a crew report since the last time a KAMIKAZE ship was here I forgot to. I transmitted the data shortly afterwards.

You can see the lander here. The thing is huge, which is what worries me. The ship should have a lot of delta-v but hauling this thing around puts a dent in it. Basically the lander needs twice the delta-v of a Duna lander because Moho has no atmosphere so like on the Mun I need a descent and ascent stage. Oh and did I mention surface gravity on Moho is slightly higher than on Duna? Told you Moho is FUN.

Orbit after the slingshot, I think it saved about 1k of delta-v, possibly more. The problem is Moho most certainly won't be at an optimal position for transfer from that orbit, but I'll swing around the sun for a few months if I have to. In the outer solar system that would take too long, but so close to the sun orbits are just a few weeks long.

And here is the second reason why Moho is hard. Once you plan a trajectory that works it turns out you still need like 2200 m/s of delta-v to do. First 1413 m/s to lower the periapsis to Moho, then another 820 m/s to match its retarded inclination and put you on a path towards it.

Still the KAMIKAZE expendable gaijin lab rats brave volunteers will not stop at such an obstacle, they finally reach Moho with slightly over a half of their fuel left. That's definitely most of the delta-v budget. But there is bad news, well two pieces of bad news actually.

So here, have some dramatic animu music while I deliver the bad news:

Spoiler

First, in order to insert the ship into orbit, I need to decelerate by 3200 m/s.

FUCKING MOHO!

Let me explain where the 3200 m/s comes from. For one, Moho is fairly small and with about 25% of Kerbin's gravity so it has a lower orbital velocity. At the same time the ship is close to solar periapsis and periapsis is the lowest point of the orbit, where orbital velocity is also the highest. That bit is easily explained by basic physics, if you throw something up you convert kinetic energy to potential energy as gravity slows it down until it reaches the peak, when it starts falling down it converts its potential energy back into kinetic energy thus accelerating. The same applies to orbits only the ship never falls down entirely and merely loops from a low point to a high point as long as the orbit is stable changing velocity all the time (unless the orbit is a perfect circle).

So the ship is going really fucking fast, a lot faster relative to moho since it needs that excess velocity to climb back to its apoapsis around the sun when it will convert it into potential energy. The second piece of bad news is that the fuel displayed is total for both the lander and the orbiter, so considering the 2,2k burns that drained nearly half of the fuel a landing is out of the question. Bah, I doubt this thing will be able to return with the science.

BTW around Kerbin these panels generate only 18 power at 100% sun exposure. In hindsight I should have done an Ion Engine return stage, if I had that engine unlocked. Considering the power output I guess I could power 6 ion engines at full power per panel so burn times even for a manned mission would be decent, which usually is not the case with ion engines and spacecrafts bigger than small probes.

Also I could swear I needed just 1 km/s of delta-v the last time I got into an orbit around Moho.

Oh and I forgot to mention one problem this thing has, I fucked up the fuel line connections and engines from one side of the ship drain the fuel from the other. I need to keep pumping it around manually, luckily it doesn't veer off its heading much due to the center of mass shift as the thrust vectoring and reaction wheels torque counter it. Still it is highly annoying.

800 m/s short of entering orbit I drain the entirety of the orbiter's fuel tanks and have to pump it from the lander. Excess dry mass is jettisoned. This does not look good.

Eventually the ship enters orbit so here's some lore. Apart from Kerbal science being pushed forward by search for the AWESOME BUTTON, this one references old Moho. When it was first added in 0.17 Moho did not look like Mercury (apart from Duna and Kerbin it is the only Ersatz planet of one from our solar system), it was red, had volcanoes and even had an atmosphere which you think may have been useful to aerocapture with. It probably was, but it was also superheated and caused engines to overheat making Moho about as difficult to land and return from as Eve. Also it looked a bit ugly, so in 0.18 it got an art pass turning it into a Mercury clone.

More Moho lore.

The concept of a volcanic planet with a burning atmosphere, may return in the future as a closer to the Sun dwarf planet, as the developers have said once that they may do that in the future. If they ever do that I am not sending any Kerbals there unless they add some new endgame spacecraft engine like a VASIMR or fusion drive, delta-v requirements are too ridiculous to dive even closer to the sun than Moho and insert yourself into orbit around a possibly smaller planet with weaker gravity. Unless they make it into a moon of Moho, that would be pretty nice although not really realistic (why would Moho's moon have volcanism and Moho not?).

IVA view of Moho from the Cupola aka the Tie-Fighter pod, also the Navball texture in its IVA got bugged or something.

Moho's north pole has a dark spot for some reason, it will probably be a biome in the future. This is definitely a place that should be explored with probes only unfortunately. The delta-v cost in one direction is not bad, but hauling fuel for return is just too much. Well unless you don't mind 4 hour long ion engine transfer burns. Let's do science and salvage something out of this failure before I figure out how to get these guys back and fail trying to do so.

Bah, apparently this is still high Moho orbit.

Surprise surprise, a unique goo result while in orbit.

This one should have something about stuff melting IMO.

Absalom goes to get some suntan in EVA, I don't think that's very healthy considering what the sun here did to the goo.

On his way back inside he crashes into one of the solar panels. It's not an ion engine vessel so that isn't much of a problem. Time to figure out what to do about this mission.

Spoiler

I decided to give these guys one rescue attempt before I leave them permanently abandoned while basking in the intense solar radiation of the inner system. Also because getting stranded is lame compared to crashing into a planet because the lander had too little delta-v to land or return from the surface.

I'm too good at building landers though as witnessed in this LP with all of them being overkill so far, I guess I should try landing on Tylo* next.



*Imagine if the Mun was the almost the size of Kerbin with almost its gravity as well. That's Tylo basically, the ultimate powered descent challenge in the game and the second hardest place to do a return from the surface from. Well fourth if you count trying to get as close to the Sun's surface as possible (not doable without cheating) or doing the same on Jool.

This is the ARV by the way, the automated rescue vehicle or jidō resukyū-sha in machine translated japanese. The lifter just fucked itself but as the name suggests the thing is automated so nobody could get killed (disappointing I know). From now on, unless I somehow need more delta-v, this thing will be sent to rescue any gaijin kerbonauts KAMIKAZE leaves stranded when it gets too ambitious. As it should have the delta-v to reach anywhere and get back.

Next launch goes fine and look at this, I manage to plan a Moho encounter trajectory in a single burn from LKO, which btw costs me over 1000 fucking delta-v less than what I did with the Amaterasu. FFS, I may have tried to land on Moho if I had such a good transfer burn! Also the Eve slingshot was probably not worth it in hindsight.

Still when I got this to orbit the stage before the final lifter stage still had some fuel so it is looking good so far.

A 271 m/s correction burn puts the ARV on a close encounter with Moho.

Spoiler

The lifter stage survived all the way to Moho, now I need to finish the orbital insertion by burning the single LV-N for 52 minutes.

Although to be honest I expected something like that. Definitely the longest LV-N burn I ever did but not longer than a few of the ion engine burns I did. You can physics warp up to four time to speed the process up, but physics warp can be buggy and caused things to crash into each other and blow up. Luckily the game can run physics simulation while alt-tabbed so I just minimized it and did other shit checking up on it every ten or fifteen minutes or so.

Also a burn that needs 4,2 km/s delta-v, since the difference between apoapsis and periapsis is higher than it was when the Amaterasu got here. It seems the delta-v gained by a better transfer will go into an even worse orbital insertion burn. Goddamn inner solar system orbital velocities.

The good news is that the burn is not longer than the time the ARV will be in Moho's small SoI.



Although of course the time to exit the SoI would be lengthened over the duration of the burn as it is after all slowing the ship down relative to Moho.

Just in case the game would crash I stopped the burn about 2/3 in to save, hence the lower delta-v requirement. You know, so that I wouldn't have to spend over 30 minutes redoing it. Anyway the outer tanks are spent and thus jettisoned after decelerating by about 3300 m/s. That means half of the fuel is gone so I think there should be enough of it to get back, after I drain what is left on the Amaterasu when I dock with it.

At the very least the ARV came in from the right side to rendezvous with the Amaterasu. I forgot to check from what side it was coming in. Fucked up inclination all around but matching orbital planes will take just 40 m/s. Let's do this shit, rendezvous animu music for cool weaboo cats:



I think it's Moho

With orbital planes matched I lower periapsis to Amaterasu's orbital altitude. Docking from big altitude differences is easy.

Why is it easy? Because with matched inclinations and apoapsis (or periapsis) as the point of orbital intersection you can just lower apoasis (or raise periapsis) by enough to get a very close rendezvous with a single prograde or retrograde burn in just one orbit.

Moho is close now as the final orbit lowering burn is being conducted.

An orbit later the ARV is under 500 meters away from its target.

I park it closer to begin the necessary transfer of Science! and crew.

Absalom rushes to the ARV, he probably wants to take all the happy pills and snacks for himself.

I undocked the lander's Kerbin return core first and steered it a bit out of the way. After docking with the orbiter Absalom refuels the ARV to full and there is still fuel remaining inside the doomed orbiter. Could have brought a slightly bigger main tank, oh well this should be enough.

Undocked the ARV.

All three ships in Moho orbit. The lander core prepares to dock with the two remaining stranded kerbonauts.

Everybody is aboard, two weeks until the return transfer window.

After much fiddling with the maneuver node I plan a two burn return to Kerbin from Moho orbit. 4300 m/s to return to Kerbin total in a 3500 m/s burn first and a 800 m/s one later. The ARV should have just enough fuel even with the lander's dead weight pushed in front of it.

Spoiler

Over half of the delta-v expenditure took over half of the fuel. It is going to be close but they should make it back, barely.

I didn't want to risk ending up on an escape trajectory after dipping into atmo, the heroes of Kippon need to return home now.

Nearly 90% of the fuel is gone, Moho proved to be a hard opponent.

Solar panels break off from g-forces caused by strong atmospheric drag experienced upon descending deeper into the atmosphere. The crew experiences nearly 10 gees now. Luckily Kerbals are short and that increases g-force tolerance from what I heard.

As expected the maneuver was a success.

Separating from all the junk that doesn't need to land intact, like the nuclear engine. It's not like some radioactivity will create a giant lizard hell-bent on attacking jakanese urban areas.

Parachutes open.

Mission accomplished. I probably won't be returning to Moho anytime soon.

Mission science yield sucks as expected. Only reached high orbit, couldn't use any of the three surface/atmo sensors to get any science. Diminishing returns from returning two of the same experiments cases. Got 56 science for returning a ship from Moho orbit (the value not shown due to scrolling).

I want these parts (if only because the gravioli sensor works in vacuum) but I'm short by 12 science. I could launch a simple orbital probe I guess. However I have a better (read: lazier) idea, which will also show off some minor "easter eggs" hidden in the R&D system.

The launchpad is its own biome! Also this should be enough science but there are also some other reports to show.

In Kippon even materials bay samples look down upon laziness. Hard work until you die during overtime at your zaibatsu employer is how the Emperor wants you to die!

And lastly origins of the mysterious goo, it was found in one of the space center's garbage after all.

I unlock the last two science sensors. I was tempted to get ion engines, but since I am not going to Moho again in the next update they will be useless, as all remaining destination are in the outer system where solar panels perform very poorly. I also regret not having certain structural parts unlocked but I will explain that in the next update.

Who will live and who will die? Can the space kraken be defated or does tentacle rape await the weaboo kebonauts? Can I launch something without the lifter exploding on the first attempt? What probably insane, too ambitious and risky mission do I have planned for the next update? Find out in the next update.

Applications are still open, also bumps are much appreciated. I watch the photobucket bandwidth used bars with horror every time I upload a new update, having less updates per page would be good for it.

 

[Kashmir Slippers]

Bump

 

[Ashery]

All of these rocket failures and not a single death? I'm disappointed, Hellraiser.

 

[Hellraiser]

All of these rocket failures and not a single death? I'm disappointed, Hellraiser.

I am surprised and disappointed myself, but this is probably because the boosters are failing and all of those have two pairs of seperatrons attached to them, so they fly away from the rest of the rocket when separated. At the same time all capsules have parachutes, with all these precautions the only way to die during ascent is if the rocket tips over or fails just after liftoff, if I throttle too little to liftoff (unlikely) or if the structural connection between the payload and the lifter's core fails (unlikely because I space tape the shit out of it).

If deaths are going to happen it will be because I fuck up a landing, if a lander runs out of fuel during ascent or powered descent or if I fuck up an aerocapture (which nearly happened with the Firestar-1, I can't believe I managed to save that ship but then again it had good thrust and enough delta-v left). Most of the difficulty now comes from knowing how to design a craft and knowing how spaceflight works.

I would like to see more challenge outside of the VAB so to speak, shit where you can't plan out how to proceed before they happen and know if you succeed or not before you even click the launch icon, but where you need to improvise not to lose the ship. Which is why I game really needs more terrain hazards to make landings harder, things like lava, volcanism, cryovolcanism, geysers and dense fields of rocks. Weather like gusts of wind, fog limiting visibility (same goes to clouds higher up) and maybe lightning strikes. Radiation belts and rings (flying through saturn's would be quite lethal apparently) in orbit around planets. Most of those will probably get added eventually though as they're on the planned features list.

 

[Kattze]

Sign me up for the emperor's voyage! I'm just a loyal MAKAPILI conscript.

 

[Hellraiser]

Looks like what I wanted to be in the next update will have to be split up into parts as everything took longer than expected, hence the rather long silence relative to the frequency of updates from before the last one. Anyway at least the first part will be posted today, I'll upload the first batch of images and get on with the writing now.

 

[Hellraiser]

AREA 88 - KAMIKAZE SQUADRON
The divine wind,
it is what guides lives,
as we soar above.

Spoiler

And now for something completely different, planes. What the hell do planes have to do with the next mission? Well I'm not going to say much now, but for certain reasons which I will disclose when I KAMIKAZE gets there, planes are the better option for a lander and return, particularly in the context of an Ironman playthrough. But those of you familiar with the KSP solar system can probably guess what those reasons are.

Kattze is the first Kamikaze spaceplane pilot.

He prepares himself to take off in the Raikou, a SSTO (single stage to orbit) spaceplane prototype. Engage various anime instrumental themes:

Despite some initially instability the flight goes rather good, not bad for a first flight. Oh and yeah, re-entry effects kick in a bit too low in atmo which turns every high-altitude jet into a fireball. Hopefully that gets tweaked, although it is not all that unrealistic. The Blackbird for example had to be made out of titanium, it heated up so much during high altitude mach 3 flight that the air close to the cockpit glass inside of the plane was above 100 degrees celcius, and the fuselage actually stretched by a couple of centimeters in flight due to it.

At 25km the Raikou reaches 1700 m/s, that's just 500 m/s short of orbital velocity, however this is the operational height of its jet engines. A key difference between jet engines and regular rocket engines in KSP is that they require atmospheric oxygen. You get it "for free" using air intakes, however the amount of it you get per second depends on atmospheric pressure and your airspeed. The engines use a set rate of that "intake air" per second proportional to their throttle percentage, while the resource tab shows how much intake air you get in total.

If the level of intake air drops below what the engines need to operate they flame-out, basically shut down. This is bad if you have more than one engine, because they flame-out one at a time. So if the engine which is not right in the center shutsdown you have asymmetrical thrust and the whole plane spins out of control.

Typical SSTO configurations activate rocket engines when you are just about to run out of air for the jets. This speeds the plane up increase air flow rate during a final push on the jets. Then you shut the jets off, close all air intakes to reduce drag generated by them, and continue up using the rocket engines until you get a nice periapsis at a low orbital altitude. Here I burned off most of my rocket fuel as Kattze tries to get into space.

He does some science in upper atmo testing the new sensor, that data value is bugged, it should by 10 times smaller. Still it has a nice transmission rate of 90%. Data size is big though, 200 mits, better make sure to stack batteries or generators.

The good news is the Raikou is SSTO as it did achieve orbit. Kattze is now the best pilot in Kippon, the first to fly a plane into not just space but also into orbit.

The bad news is the orbit runs entirely within the atmosphere and with no fuel left Kattze will have to land the plane before testing its rendezvous potential, as the atmospheric drag even this high up will de-orbit him. The Raikou will need a few improvements.

More science, this time using the negative gravioli detector which measures gravity. This value is also bugged and should be lower.

Kattze enjoys the flight just a few kilometers below the ceiling of the atmosphere.

Re-entry, Kattze pitches the nose down to descend quicker.

Shit, there's water below and no fuel for the jet engines, splash down at nearly 40 m/s. He tries to do some manuvering to slow it down.

However that only results in the plane spinning out of control.

Miraculously he survives, as the rear section of the plane splashes down first. I decide to put an emergency ejection mechanism on the next iteration of the Raikou.

The Raikou-2 features more powerful engines, more fuel and even more instability.

Luckily it also featured the ejection system. I should set up a hotkey for that abort action.

However tragedy strikes with the Raikou-3. I placed the parachutes wrongly and it seems that Kattze's part of the two cockpits wasn't the one with them. It seperated and crashed into the water.

Kattze is dead. The first casualty of the KAMIKAZE program. Our best pilot gave his life for the Rising Sun so soon, too soon indeed.

Bah, and I wanted him to fly that shit and plant a flag. Still you can see the problem with spaceplanes here. There's a delicate equilibrium between enough lift, enough jet engines, enough stability and enough delta-v and thrust of the rocket engines. Until they add hybrid jet/rocket engines like SABRE engines this is going to be a problem. Well that and procedural wings, current wings are not versatile enough.

Ashery is up next for suicide test flights. Instability strikes again. Did I mention I don't have all the wing and structural parts researched so building good SSTO spaceplanes is even harder?

At least the ejection system has no design flaws this time.

Spoiler

I try to improve stability by using a double-tail configuration. This is actually a very good idea, as you want to have some lift and control surfaces behind your engine. One of the reasons why the game really needs radially-attached jet engines, also smaller jet engines.

Regardless this Raikou iteration was too heavy to fly far, Ashery ejected.

I tried trimming down the mass by changins the engines and added wider wings, still too little to fly far, Ashery ejected safely, again.

At this point two things changed, for one I remembered I could and indeed should use probes to test these lethal contraptions. Also I decided to ditch SSTO and simplify the spaceplane by making it a two stage configuration.

This actually flew.

But it had too little lift to land safely with the vast majority of its fuel.

I added more wings.

But it turned out I still had too little lift in front which caused the thing to pitch down.

The next version had the same problem.

I decide to pursue a different approach, a VTOL jet-rocket lander with wings. I just need the wings to guide it down to the desired landing site, then I might as well jettison them and land on parachutes.


Oh and jet engines have a wind-up time, so it takes a while for the thrust to go to maximum if you throttle all the way to 100%. Also I use the launch clamps to burn off some jet fuel. Jet fuel is just liquid fuel rockets can also use, however only one tank in the game contains just liquid fuel which is what also makes SSTO spaceplane design so difficult, you don't have smaller sized tanks and have to design it to either drag excess fuel into orbit (which is useless without oxidizer) or to burn it all off.

Needless to say space plane parts need a rework, one thing that may fix this is adding the ability to set tanks to be filled with just fuel or oxidizer which is probably coming in the next major update as part of "tweakables" in the VAB/SPH craft editor.

Also the thing loses control when I try to put it into vertical flight.

Back to planes, I simplify the old design again, this time going for a one Kerman plane and a smaller engine.

This one fucking flies like it should.

It lands!

It takes of from mostly but not entirely flat terrain!

However it had too little lift to fly above 10km. After I burn off nearly all jet fuel I'm flying at a measly 475 m/s.

Despite all those rocket engines it had too little thrust to fight drag and actually lost airspeed while they were running at 100%.



Too much fuel I guess, makes the thing to heavy. Also I should probably ditch the wings at this point. It needs to be lighter and go higher.

However I got frustrated again and decided to go for another jet-rocket lander, sans the wings. This is actually a copy of a design I used to land where I plan to land the last time I was there. I forgot to add launch clamps and the suspension unevenly distributed the weight causing it to tip when I tried to launch it.

I fix that and it flies as it should. This is SSTO, however while it uses jets it uses only reaction wheel torque to steer itself. No winglets, just pure balistics.

I ditched most of the parachutes as those are supposed to only aid in landing this and not getting it into orbit which I am trying to do here.

However at 22km flame-out happens, the whole thing spins violently and the rocket engines fall off due to the force.



Should have used struts.

The whole thing crashes into the sea, slowed down a bit by the four parachutes attached to the inside structure.

Back to planes then.

Yes, that would make it back into orbit after strutting it, but I decided it is too complicated and most importantly too risky, as I do need wings where I'm going. I simplified the former design further to unleash the Kuro Neko Jetoglidah project upon the skies.

It flew well so I first tried to land it at an island airfield to the east of the KSC.

Spoiler

I crashed.

Second attempt at landing at an empty field just south of the KSC was successful.

Easily made it back into the air.

And then it turned out I should use more struts.

KAMIKAZE engineers claim however that this was an ornithopter test.

This has been dubbed the Chibi-Ghiddorah. It is a very unusual design. For one it uses swept wings instead of tail sections. Also it has no regular ramjet intakes which are the best ones in the game. However it uses less efficient radial intakes (twelve of them) which at the very least are far easier to build a plane around.

It flies very well. In fact I forgot to test if it can land, but it's mass to lift area ratio is low and it easily took off the runway very quickly so it should be able to glide down majestically with ease.

Also one key detail I forgot to mention. There are two jet engines in the game. Why am I using this one all the time? Because they get maximum thrust at different altitudes. Both thrust and specific impulse (also known as ISP) change with altitude. Specific impulse tells you how long does it take an engine to burn a unit (a ton? Not sure) of fuel+oxidizer (or just fuel for jets), so it is basically an efficiency rating. In general rocket engines, with one exception, have 320 seconds or less of ISP at kerbin sea level and above 370 in vacuum. The LV-N atomic engine has a vacuum ISP of 800 seconds but its atmo ISP is 220 seconds IIRC.

Look at this thing go! At 25km it still has a decent, albeit not particularly big, margin of excess intake air. At the same time airspeed is above 1630 m/s. I think this will make it into orbit.

1850 m/s and 27km. Flow rate above 0.1, I think a single engine flames-out at 0,08 or 0,07 IIRC.

At 30km I throttle the engine down to 40%, this decreases airflow requirements by 60% but still generates enough thrust to accelerate the craft. At this altitude 100% thrust is just above 100 kN for it, so you can see that thrust falls off both below and above the optimal altitude. Also there is so little air here that lift is negligible and this basically becomes a ballistic flight. Also the Chibi-Ghiddorah is just 200 m/s short of orbital velocity! Truly worthy the name of a mighty Kaiju!

At 33 kilometers the airflow is far too low to accelerate more, the plane section is jettisoned and the orbital module fires it's single engine (this engine is fairly new and ridiculously good for the mass it has).

Achieves a circular orbit with about 25% fuel left. This pleases the emperor. Now to test how this docks.

The Sakura Docking Testing Vehicle will serve as a target.

First I just get it into orbit, simple rocket, simple launch, easy orbit. No need to overengineer this shit.

Forgot to open the shielded docking ports before I jetissoned the lifter where the probe core was. Regardless I easily manage to manuver the Chibi-Ghiddorah's orbital module into a position where it could dock.

There was just one problem left, how do I get this to space without staging it? And how do I get it to the next mission target?

The solution was the Chibi-Ghiddorah bundle. You see you can't attach anything below jet engines (which is silly). So how do you go around this limitation of launching a jet plane into space, without using two jet engines and spacing them apart? How do you ensure the CoM isn't shifted when spaceplanes are fairly asymmetrical? By using an idea I picked up earlier for rover.

That is by attaching two of them to a sides of one rocket to maintain symmetry. Although it was actually harder than it looks as there were some derpy radial attachment and subassembly issues in the editor. Most notably the cockpit cannot be attached radially for some inane arbitrary reason, and it was the root part. So I circumvented it by saving half of the plane as one subassembly and other other half as another.

This also solves another issue. I can land two kerbals now. Also there is a back up in case the first one fails so I won't have to launch a second plane if I crash during a landing attempt.

However guess what went wrong?

I staged incorrectly and had the stage that was still full jetisson before the empty one.

In the second launch attempt I begun the gravity turn too early, it pitched down on its own and crashed despite my attempts at pitching it back up.

Spoiler

Third one was a charm. Orbit a bit high but I can live with it.

Now time for the second and arguably most important launch. The new mothership Amaterasu-2. I take all but 4 KAMIKAZE kebonauts aboard. Haba is not listed because he's standing on the runway. Whyis he doing that? Because by default it assigns a crew member if you have a manned pod or cockpit, you have to change it manually every time if you launch from the editor. So I had him EVA and exit a tested plane where I forgot to set the plane to empty. He stood at the side watching as the planes went off.

First I checked if nothing broke when physics loaded. It seems I strutted everything correctly as the rocket is intact and ready for launch.

Standard 9pack lifter, I double checked it to make sure it had all the pipes and seperatrons in the right places. It actually has less parts than the first amaterasu, mostly because there is no lander on this. If something goes wrong there is an abort action group set up to save the gaijin, as the crew sections have like seven parachutes attached and strutted tightly.

Nothing goes wrong?

Blessed be the Emperor and Kippon! The maiden flight of a new design did not suffer from any problems whatsoever.

The ship is safely in orbit, time to explain what this is all about. KAMIKAZE is going to Laythe, a moon of Jool which is currently only gas giant in the game. Laythe is a moon with an atmosphere, the only such moon in the game for now. At the front is the Jool probe, it will probe the shit out of the gas giant as it is totally impossible to land there. You'll see why soon.

Another feature of the new Amaterasu is a large docking port in the back, currently the mainsail lifter's core is attached there, but if the lifter went dry I would attach another fuel tank to that back port to expand delta-v capacity. This won't be needed as the mainsail should last deep into the transfer burn again saving precious delta-v in the mothership itself. Also there is a hub of four docking ports. With luck two of them will be used to bring back the science from Laythe.

However there is also a third launch that needs to be done. Unfortunately the launch clamps attached retardedly in the editor and the whole thing exploded as it loaded.

I fix that and aim to launch just after the Chibi-Ghiddorah Bundle is overhead. You see I need to dock with it for two reasons. Best way toi launch into a rendezvous is to launch after the target passes you, insert yourself a lower orbit than it and catch up.

However I fucked up the staging, again.

Third time was a charm, again. This is the Deorbitu Roboto, actually it's more of an orbital service drone/tug/construction rig. It has two deorbiter sections which i need to attach to the planes. I realized they have no means to de-orbit itself apart from using the transfer vehicle they are attached to. However if I separate one from it, controlling the thing with the other plane still attached will be impossible, because the Center of Mass will not be aligned with the center of thrust. Hence they need to de-orbit themselves. In hindsight making the transfer stage capable of docking by adding RCS and a medium sized docking port would also work.

However the service drone has a second task, the one why I made it originally before realizing half-way in that I need to deo-rbit the planes somehow. It will attach an extra fuel tank to the transfer stage of the Bundle. Had to detach the lifter first as I forgot about that.

I rotated the Bundle to prepare its anus allows easier access to the rear docking port.

I have only a few meters of room on either side, which is why I want to dock the tank first. If I fuck up this I'll need a new Bundle. Also the tank is heavy so getting rid off it will make docking the two de-orbiters easier.

Still this is not the first time I did such precise docking, it's actually easier than it looks. The hard part about is learning how to dock first. Well that and designing something that keeps itself stable as you do lateral thrusts with RCS. But nowadays that just requires putting RCS thrusters around the center of mass and stacking enough reaction wheels to counter any errors with raw torque.

Easy, considering I once docked 4 jumbo tanks to one interplanetary cruiser with similar little room to wiggle around. That was the last time I went to Laythe, it was overkill by one or two tanks, but that ship had a lander attached.

I swing around, with the tank already gone this thing has ridiculous acceleration using RCS.

Both de-orbiters docked. We're going to Jool next baby!

TO BE CONTINUED...

 

[hostergaard]

Hey, I want to be a proud Kerbonaut of Jakan empire (Jakanaut?). Sign me up!

 

[Bloodshifter]

Gods how many Kerbins have been lost thus far on mislaunchs alone?

Signs up anyways.

BANZAI!!

 

[Kattze]

BANZAI!

 

[Hellraiser]

Added the new recruits, I already have some fun and possibly lethal activities in space planned for them. But first I need to finish all the Laythe business, next part coming soon(tm).

 

[Hellraiser]

AUTUMN ON LAYTHE

The king's royal court,
circling around forever,
craving his power.

Spoiler

A transfer burn to Jool from LKO is nearly worth 2 km/s of delta-v. Jool is fairly easy to get an encounter with, it is after all a massive gas giant far away from other planets (it probably ate the competition), so the SoI is ridiculously large. So big in fact that a simple flyby probe can spend over a month or two within it's SoI. But why do a flyby when you can aerocapture?

The Amaterasu-2 is more or less on the path I planned, it will still need a correction burn to match inclination with Jool's orbit and get a closer encounter but for now I focus on the other craft.

I realized I placed the fuel lines wrong, again. Time for more manual pumping.

I split the burn into two parts, I did one, swinged around the now enlarged orbit and finished it about 4 hours of game time later. The expansion pack tank went dry with 600 m/s of velocity left to finish the burn.

Overburned for some reason, nothing I can't correct mid-course though.

Amaterasu-2 left Kerbin behind it, Ashery does not seem to like this fact. I don't know why, he's only going to spend at least the next two years in space. Unless he dies crushed by pressure inside a giant space ball of probably toxic gas.

Kippon be praised! The correction burn will totally take the Amaterasu-2 to a Laythe encounter. Looks like I'll be aerocapturing directly around it. Death by gas giant pressure is not on the agenda today it seems.

I set up a correction burn for the Bundle as well. Here's how the solar system looks from the top or north to be exact. For the moment the only thing more distant than Jool is Eeloo, which is temporarily doing a Pluto thing with a weird orbit. Eeloo is in a 2:3 orbital resonance with Jool, basically synchronized so it will never crash into Jool or get thrown out of the system (it couldn't due to how planet orbital motion is handled in the game). In the future it will be moved and orbit the second ringed gas giant as a moon. But that's probably a few game updates away.

All correction burns go well, time for the main course some Jool lore. Jool is of course green. The Spaceplane Bundle enter its SoI first, I set up a very dangerously looking trajectory to attempt aerocapture. It's result will be a direct impact with the green giant, if Laythe's atmosphere will not slow it down enough. Luckily the whole thing is robotic.

More Jool lore. I keep forgetting how tall its atmosphere is exactly, 210km? Personally I think they should add at least hundred more to that. Also it's ASL gravity is listed as far weaker than it is I think. Also since in KSP planets are scaled down, Jool would be about the size of Earth if it existed.

The wiki said 25km is the safe aerocapture altitude for a direct laythe aerocapture. I have my doubts since I faintly remember diving deeper the last few times I sent crap to Laythe (I sent a lot of crap there). Still it seems safe enough so worst case scenario I'll have to burn to decelerate and finish the capture.

I set up aerobraking for the Amaterasu as well.

It seems Ashery found his pills. Also at this distance from the sun the panels work rather poorly, about half of what they provide around Kerbin. You can see Jool and its 3 biggest moons on this image, Laythe, Vall and Tylo. Those are the KSP equivalents of the Galilean Moons of Jupiter, although they differ in some ways, laythe in particular. For one they're all quite big, two of them are larger than Duna and nearly as large as Kerbin. The smallest one Vall is about the size of Moho.

The crew dispatches the Jool probe, it's still far from it so the probe will easily shift it's trajectory with the small engine and tank it has as the delta-v cost is negligible at this distance.

Only a quarter of its fuel was used. The timing of the descent seems a bit unlucky when you compare it to the SoI alarms, but I set those to trigger 2 hours before entering the SoI of laythe for final aerobraking correction. So there is plenty of the time to do science with the probe before the other ships enter Laythe's atmosphere.

Jool looks a bit dull from up-close without clouds, they need to add those.

Doing more orbital science before descent.

Bugged value on the negative gravioli sensor again, but at least it does have a unique report. Looks like the lore was right, the gravity is not that high. I guess that due to its diameter increasing it to >10 m/s^2 would make it too hard to escape it or something.

Default message, again.

Spoiler

Time to light up the night, engage dramatic music for descent:

At 97 kilometers the re-entry effects become outright spectacular. The probe is entering the gas giant at nearly 36000 kilometers per hour, with every second it falls one kilometer deeper into Jool. The experienced drag generates g-forces of around 9 gees, enough to possibly kill a man.

21 seconds later it dropped by 14 kilometers and slowed down by about 3 km/s. The g-forces are now off the scale, exceeding the 20 g limit of it. No man, not even the finest of those little and green from Jakan, could survive this.

At 72km the parachutes deploy because I derped and over-staged earlier. Good thing those are made out of asbestos and I strutted them well enough to keep the probe in one piece, despite all the extra deceleration force those thing generate. Also some re-entry trivia: nobody knows what re-entry effects look like from up close, however plasma color does not depend on atmospheric composition, so they'll look roughly the same regardless if you enter one made of oxygen or ammonia.

240 science (it's bugged remember) for analyzing the atmosphere. Really nice report text. Also 90% of this will get back to Kerbin.

Well actually they're not but Jool has only the "flying" experiment case apart from the orbital ones so this report applies to all altitudes in its atmosphere including the lowest ones.

Laythe in the sky as I transmit the so far collected data back. Almost forgot, the probe entered the night side so Jool's sky doesn't appear but the clear starry night does (clouds would fix this, it should be a perpetual fog there). In the day it looks much better.

Also the atmo data is a ton of Mits which really drained the probes power, and its on the night side. I knew I should have added two more inline batteries but no, two will be enough with solar panels to recharge them I thought, too bad they don't work at night. Derp.

I collect some more data but I know it can't be transmitted back.

The probe runs out of power. KAMIKAZE loses contact with it.

Also it seems the "surface" is bugged at night, like I said the green color of its atmosphere should fill that here if it was day.

At 250 meters below the "surface" (the altimeter shows distance from the surface regardless if it is above or below you) the probe crashes.

I'll LARP it as the immense pressure crushing the probe.

The Amaterasu prepares for a 27km aerobraking manuever.

Also Absalom sees Vall from his Cupola.

Tylo is also visible.

The ship approaches Laythe. Engage music for aerocapture:

But first a better look at Laythe and some lore. As you can see Laythe is an ocean moon, the tidal forces caused by being in a 1:2:4 orbital resonance with Vall and Tylo heat up it's interior causing immense volcanic activity, kind of like with Io. The difference is that the effect isn't strong enough to turn Laythe into a volcanic hell. Will the volcanism and lava flow are not in the game yet, they may be at one point. Storms and dense cloud cover should also be another feature of such an ocean moon.

The oceans look inviting but in reality Laythe is fairly cold, temperature barely rises above freezing point at some places. Some people speculate that the oceans are filled with some kind of antifreeze mixed with water, which is why they appear as darker than on Kerbin. Overall it's a refactored Kerbin, around 80% in size, mass and gravity. Also the air contains oxygen, possibly originating from water in the oceans.

Few islands dot the surface, this is why I needed a plane. Landing on top of one of those in just one attempt is hard, landing in the ocean is not an option (unless they do proper buoyancy parts for splashdown and floating). Being able to cruise using a jet engine for a couple of minutes here after descent, will greatly help in ensuring the mission ends with success. Still the islands can be quite mountainous and flat surfaces are scarce.

Spoiler

I think I underestimated the required altitude, the Amaterasu is going in at above 8 km/s, accelerated both by Jool's and later Laythe's gravity. Also I entered laythe from a retrograde trajectory around Jool, so both mine and it's orbital velocities got summed up.

The current aerodynamics model definitely makes no sense yet. All my mass is in the back, my control surfaces are in the back, the front starts spinning and get pushed to the back despite this. Luckily the craft is subject to just around 2 gees so nothing breaks off. Hooray for space tape.

Bad news, the aerobraking was not enough to get captured by Laythe as I lost only about 1 km/s of velocity and needed to lose at least 5500 m/s. Good news: it was enough to place the Amaterasu in a Jool orbit intersecting Laythe's (and away from Tylo's), so I'm guaranteed to get another chance at aerocapture. Also the orbit is still retrograde unlike the moons of Jool which travel east around it. Less risky than the usual aerocapture where you get launched into some weird solar orbit.

Leaving Laythe for now, but I will return soon, probably in an orbit or two. Speaking of moons Jool has 5 total, the two ones I didn't mention are Bop and Pol, moonlets smaller than Minmus but larger than Gilly. Also their orbits are rather distant and inclined as opposed to the big moons, which are firmly in an equatorial orbit around Jool.

After witnessing that it was not enough in the case of the Amaterasu-2, I lower the aerobraking altitude for the bundle.

Let's do this, engage animu music:

The bundle hold together during aerobraking.

And shit, should have gone in deeper. Also unless I slow this down by a few thousand meters per second this shit is gonna crash into Jool.

Slowing down by 3,5 km/s will take 17 minutes while I have only 11.



Here's hoping the burn extends that time.

Thirteen minutes with nine to spare, shit, shit, shit.

Seven while I have five. GODDAMN IT!

To add more excitement into my life the main fuel tank decided to go empty.

Of course I fail to insert the spaceplane bundle into Laythe orbit. I can only salvage this with a 700+ m/s burn.

It works, but there are literary vapors left in the fuel tanks, apart from those on the planes. The orbit is stable, above Jool's atmosphere and prograde, so it there is little risk of it getting flinged out of Jool by Laythe soon. But that still might happen.

Meanwhile the Amaterasu gets it's second Laythe encounter. The previous one flinged me into a somewhat inclined orbit, I did a slight burn to put me on a trajectory that will result in Laythe lowering the Amaterasu's orbital inclination saving at least 400 m/s of delta-v in the process.

The resulting orbit is "flatter" relative to the orbital plane on which the three main moons are. It also flinged me into a higher orbit, which allowed me to save even more fuel by lowering the cost to fully match inclination. Without matched inclination it is hard to insert yourself into an equatorial orbit via aerocapture, and I need such an orbit for the return from surface.

Over a day later I get another shot at aerocapture.

Spoiler

Laythe is in sight, the ship prepares for aerobraking. Prepare you anus ears for more animu music:

Surprisingly Ashery is not panicking. I orient the ships backwards so that it doesn't spin around again.

The sight of plasma enveloping the ship makes him fall back into pessimism.

This time I aerobraked at 18,8km, forgot to take a shot of the trajectory. The ship started gaining back altitude and has a velocity of above 3600 m/s.

A minute later it is at 22km and slower by nearly 800 m/s since the last shot. This should be enough to get into a stable orbit.

At nearly 30km velocity is down to 2600 m/s, that's a high orbital velocity on Laythe IIRC.

Actually it is not, but I think I'm only 400-600 m/s short of orbit. Absalom engages the kipponese nucular engines.

After burning just 80 units of fuels (I keep forgetting if those are liters or what) the ship is in stable nearly perfect equatorial orbit. The Rising Sun's space program is indeed mighty.

The plan now is to save fuel by doing high altitude aerobraking passes, which will lower the orbit's apoapsis by a few dozen kilometers with every orbit. It takes a while but patience is a virtue.

It was rather uneventful, each pass lowered apoapsis by about 200km so it did indeed take a while. So I'll just show you pretty pictures of spess done while the ship swung around Laythe.

Some islands below and Jool rising. Laythe is tidally locked, I think the other big moons of Jool are as well. Also nearly an entire hemisphere of the planet contains no island at all, apart from the ice at the poles. Just one giant ocean.

Eventually the apoapsis is lower to about 350km, I decide to do one last past which should at most lower it to about 100km, well above Laythe's gaseous layer.

Absalom enjoys the view. Did I mention the navball is displaying correctly here? Must have been some driver issue or random rendering bug.

Full view of Jool's moons. The gray trajectory is the decoupler that the probe was attached to, it got flinged out into solar orbit. Debris tends to do that in real life as well, for example one discovered asteroid that passed by Earth turned out to actually be a jettisoned Apollo spacecraft stage, that spent 30 years in solar orbit only to pass by Earth again.

The last pass lowered apoapsis to 200km. Enough and the next one could lower it to much. I raise periapsis to achieve stable orbit above the atmosphere.

Absalom writes down a report in his captain's log.

Tzaero takes a walk, he seems to be unconcerned with all the lethal radiation that Jool is probably emanating. Maybe he thinks they actually put lead or shielding into those EVA suits?

Back to the spaceplanes, this is how much fuel each engine has. One thing is for certain, it will need refueling. I will however try to get it into a better orbit, maybe drain the spaceplane fuel tanks and get around Laythe first.

Still I try to launch a tanker, but it explodes as I forgot to add launch clamps.

Next launch succeeds, the Tankeru gets into orbit. Looks like there will need to be a part three to this as this project keeps dragging on and on.

TO BE CONTINUED.

What the hell happens next? What new missions will KAMIKAZE send? Well I know but you'll have to wait for the next update.

 

[m4davis]

I would like to sign up for the suicide squad if thats no problem

 

[Hellraiser]

CHIBI-GHIDDORAH VS LAYTHE: FINARU DESU WORZU!
A sandy shore,
I make my steep dive,
into the unknown.

Spoiler

After much time-warping the stranded spaceplanes encounter Laythe again. I use this encounter to boost their orbit for free rather than attempt another aerocapture.

I do that again...

...and again...

...and again.

Until an opportunity for aerocapture in an equatorial prograde orbit appears. To complete this burn I pumped all the fuel from the spaceplanes into the engines, hopefully it will be enough.

That's not a prograde flyby, that's a fucking polar flyby! Goddamn 2D projection of 3D shapes! We need holograms for this shit.

Anyway engage kaiju music for aerocapture, and no, not that gay mothra song those earth spirits sing:

Velocity is dropping too fast.

Well fuck, it's just 2358 m/s an I'm not yet at the lowest point of the pass through atmo. This is bad.

I burn what is left of the fuel to try to get it out of atmo.

I manage to save the spaceplanes, again. The rest of the fuel will be used to raise the apoapsis above atmo. Refueling this thing in polar orbit will be a bitch.

Luckily it doesn't need much delta-v to get into a stable orbit.

Back at Kerbin I launch a tanker called the Tankeru. It encounters the rather frequent in KSP event of a Solar Eclipse (since the Mun orbits Kerbin on the same plane as Kerbin orbits the Sun), as you can see it does indeed block sunlight. I actually had to do an emergency landing on Duna with a solar powered ion plane because of such an event once.

Getting the Tankeru on a path to Jool was not problem. If I would choose not to change this trajectory the Tankeru would get flung by Jool's gravity into a very high solar orbit taking it as much as 40 years to orbit the Sun. Good thing I plan to aerocapture.

Two burns are planned to bring the ship into an aerocapture trajectory.

Preparing for aerocrapture, engage arrival music:

I decide to raise the altitude as the ship is coming it prograde relative to Laythe's orbit around Jool at only 2600 m/s so far. It doesn't need to slow down much.

20 minutes later it is faster by just 1000 m/s due to Laythe's gravity accelerating it.

Looks like I should have gone in deeper as it slowed down by less than 400 m/s when it reached the low point of 25km.

I use the engines to slow down further, the external tank has gone dry and was jettisoned.

The good news is that from such a high Laythe orbit inclination change by nearly 90 degrees takes just 581 m/s of velocity. If you want to drastically change inclination doing so from the higher ascend/descent node is the better choice.

Spoiler

After a few burns the Tankeru is close to its target. However orbits were still far from matched so it was moving faster by over 200 m/s compared to the spaceplanes.

I timed the burn correctly though so getting close to the planes was no problem.

Docking went pretty smoothly as well.

Refilled the two smaller tanks to full and the central one to about 45%. Hopefully this will be enough to change the orbit to an equatorial one.

So in low orbit I probably need like 2 or 3 km/s of delta-v to change my inclination by 90 degrees.

Tanks go dry when the planes are still off by 28,5 degrees. This is still a lot but acceptable, KAMIKAZE command orders the Amaterasu to rendezvous with the planes.

Which requires nearly 900 m/s of delta-v. A lot so I guess the Amaterasu will have to be refueled in orbit as well.

The Orbiter is parked near the planes. Less than half of total fuel left on the Amaterasu, definitely needs a refueling if it will want to get back to Kerbin safely.

First Ashery EVAs to his plane, the Chibi-Ghiddorah 1.

Tzaero will pilot the second Chibi-Ghiddorah.

Both pilots have boarded their planes.

Seperation, engage mission music:

This is the plan, Ashery will attempt to land on one of these fine island here near Laythe's equator. A 20km apoapsis should be enough to get him close to them.

First however I make final adjustments to compensate for Laythe's "slow" rotation. "Slow" because a Kerbin day last 6 hours while one on Laythe over 14.

The deorbiter has been jettisoned and the plane is beginning to enter the atmosphere.

27km and the western-most islands are approaching fast. Velocity is still around orbital with total drag less than half of a gee.

About 40 seconds later the predicted trajectory is right where KAMIKAZE and Ashery want it to be. Looks like he can start gliding down to the large eastern island.

Laythe has two kinds of terrain basically, well four counting the polar ice caps and the ocean. Low sandy shores filled with dunes and volcanic highlands made of whatever is the Kerbal equivalent of basalt, obsidian and other rock that gets spewed out by volcanoes. Ashery attempts to avoid the volcanic highlands for two reasons, for one they're probably pretty steep and not flat enough to land safely. The other reason is that lift is proportional to atmospheric density, which in kerbal space program is the same thing as pressure, which of course changes with altitude. So Ashery can try to glide down to landing at a far slower velocity if he does it in the low lands.

Spoiler

Science time in upper atmo, goo gives a default message. Due to an oversight on my part instead of having the full sensor package it is missing the negative gravioli sensor and thermometer. Instead it has two seismic sensors and barometers.

Again a default message.

Oh look, a unique report. Useful indeed.

Default again here.

Ashery starts to dive down or else he'll glide pass the land.

He steers the plane north so that he can land on the most flat terrain and not the hill visible here.

Ah crap, looks like a large dune ahead. Ashery levels the plane and prepares for landing. He's going below 100 m/s now so this should be a safe landing speed.

The ground gets closer as does the hill. Landing gear is deployed, velocity below 80 m/s.

What happened was that the two tails decided to explode when they hit the ground. Technically they shouldn't do that since the landing gear was supposed to take that hit, and it should easily survive coming down at this velocity. Withe both tails gone the plane's front section glided for a bit before it also hit the ground. Only the cockpit and orbiting module was left. At over 50 m/s it hits the ground.

No one could have survived that.

RIP Ashery, you nearly landed on Laythe.

Tzaero quickly gets over the fact his comrade died in the same kind of plane he will attempt to land. Engage more kaiju descent music:

Aiming for roughly the same area, although more to the west of that terrible hill.

I realized what went wrong with the other plane. I didn't level it enough as the landing gear is not at the very end of the tails. This gave me less margin for error, although I made the decision to place them like that in case the plane would taxi over some hill/mound/dune top.

Tzaero enters the atmosphere and begins his glide, the deorbiter is falling below him.

He's at 16km and land is nowhere in sight.

Derp, no wonder it is not around. Lowered the orbit way too much.

Luckily this is why I went with spaceplanes for a landing on Laythe in the first place. Tzaero engages the jet engines and throttles it all the way up to 100%.

Jet engines being as efficient as they are it doesn't take much fuel to get him to the islands at the equator. He soars majestically over some volcanic mountains.

Tzaero gently throttles the engines to help manuver his way down to the low, flat, sandy tip of what has now been called "Ashery Island" in memory of the KAMIKAZE kerbonaut pilot who died there.

First he will do a 90 degree turn left followed by a U-turn to perfectly align him with the tip of the island.

Spoiler

Over two kilometers above the sandy shore, the U-turn is nearly done, Tzaero dives to lower altitude at the same time.

About 750 meters above sea level, current velocity is above 70 m/s, Tzaero pitches the plane up to slow down descent and lose more velocity.

400 meters, the plane is now close to the ground.

Tzaero puts it down on the ground, it continues rolling along at 35 m/s down a hill while the pilot cautiously taps the brakes to put it to a stop.

It is done, the plane comes to a full stop. Tzaero has landed on Laythe.

Science time. Clearly Tzaero won't be attempting to do this:

Pressure is below 0,8 bars.

Tidal forces are warming up the moon, I wonder if the thermometer would mention that.

Looks like Tzaero has some sand in his materials bay.

Goo continues being predictable.

Woah, 420 science for the surface sample, nice. Also nice bit about the islands possibly being fairly new.

Tzaero fills out the paperwork.

Obligatory flag shot.

Ashery

The surrounding terrain is not mostly flat, take off should be fairly easy as there don't seem to be any steep dunes around.

FYI Ashery crashed 60 kilometers away from here.

Another shot of Tzaero and the plane.

He climbs back into the plane. It turned out I placed the ladder a bit too high and had trouble getting on the cockpits ladder. I had to try jumping from the top of the ladder but luckily I succeeded. Otherwise Tzaero would end up stranded here.

He makes it back in, the volcanic peak on the other side of the strait is visible.

He spends a few Kerbin days on the island. Probably not sunbathing like so:

I don't know who would try sunbathing there when there's far more mostly lethal radiation coming in from Jool than the sun and the temperature is at best just above 0 degrees Celsius.

Spoiler

The Amaterasu is roughly above Ashery Island, Tzaero prepares for the return flight. Engage music:

Breaks have been released and the engine has been engaged. There's some dune far in the front but I think the plane will be in the air before it hits it.

And Tzaero is back in the air.

He looks at the distant site of the crash saluting his comrade as he climbs up.

Jool rises above the horizon as Tzaero continues gaining altitude and traveling further east. Jool is unfortunately not visible from Ashery island as Laythe is tidally locked.

Engine flames-out putting Tzaero's Chibi-Ghiddorah 2 on a ballistic trajectory with a 33km peak. The angle of ascent was too high and the plane's jet engine ran out of oxygen fast, velocity is far below what it could have been.

He does some science with the spare instruments.

The plane is pretty far to the east now.

After dropping low enough Tzaero engages the engine again.

Oh man, it gets him into orbit with a 94km apoapsis! Of course that apoapsis will drop before the plane exits atmo due to drag. Still, any spaceplane that works on Kerbin will easily work on Laythe.

At a nearly 40km altitude the atmospheric flight stage is jettisoned. It won't be needed anymore.

Apoapsis dropped to 60 km, luckily laythe's atmo ends at 50-something so I only need to raise the periapsis.

However Tzaero has less fuel than he should. Turns out i forgot to disable fuel cross-feed on the docking port and the deorbiter sucked fuel from the plane's orbiter's tank rather than from its own.

Still that's enough to get into a stable orbit. The remaining fuel will be used to match inclination with the Amaterasu's orbit.

The orbital module is quite short on delta-v to finish matching orbital planes so the Amaterasu will finish the rest of the rendezvous.

Spoiler

It parks near Tzaero, looks like it will definitely need a refueling before retuning to Kerbin.

Tzaero gets close.

And he docks.

Back at Kerbin I launch a slightly different Tankeru.

It gets on a right trajectory for a Laythe aerocapture easily.

Well maybe not that easily.

Since it will be coming in retrograde I will attempt to aerocapture at nearly 17,5 km.

Here's hoping this won't be another fuck up.

Coming in at over 8,3 km/s.

Near the low point velocity is about 4,8 km/s

The tankeru experiences extreme g-forces as it loses 800 m/s of velocity in mere seconds.

Spoiler

2600 m/s as it starts gaining back altitude rising to nearly 22 km.

At nearly 26km atmospheric drag drops below one gee, velocity is still above 2400 m/s.

Still that was enough to put the Tankeru into a high orbit.

It matches inclination and aerobrakes through the upper atmosphere once lowering its orbit.

After a few burns it gets near the Amaterasu.

With both ships parked the docking attempt begins.

However I fucked up, the engines and lights here are blocking the ship from docking as they end up coliding with the Amaterasu's engines which are arranged in a 3-fold symmetry pattern.

I attempt to fix this by doicking with the other side of the Tankeru. These sections can detach themselves because I also need an adapter to dock the single spaceplane orbital module behind the Amaterasu and maintain a Center of Mass matching the Center of Thrust.

The next attempt also fails, next time I am putting the engines and the main tank more apart on the tankeru. Luckily since the collisions happen at less than 1 m/s nothing gets damaged.

Last attempt is rather risky. I try to dock the tankeru to a small docking port, the problem is the only small port it has is used by the probe tug and without it I can't control the fuel tank. So I align it as perfectly as I can and put it on a slow straight path to the port before detaching the port.

Spoiler

The fuel tank and engines drift slowly towards the amaterasu, I rotate the target docking port to align it as close as possible. NASA wouldn't ever try such risky shit, but then again NASA would never design a tanker that cannot dock the way it should and sent it to space.



Anyway the tank drifts at about 0,1 m/s so it's fairly slow.

It works as nearly everything was perfectly aligned, also at the last meter or so magnets in the docking ports start to pull the ships together.

Pumped all the fuel to the Amaterasu, the empty tank is undocked.

After it drifts far away enough I get the probe tug drone and dock with the adapter again. I need to attach it in the back.

It goes smoothly, Tzaero once again boards the orbital module and undocks to dock with the new small docking port at the back of the Amaterasu.

Everything is ready for a trip back home, still the crew needs to wait for a transfer window.

I hire new recruits in the KSC.

Over 1096 days after the mission began the ship is ready to perform a trans-kerbin injection burn to return home. From Laythe orbit I will need just 1350 for the initial burn.

I think all the radiation or time spent in space badly affected the brians of JoKa and Tzaero.

Less than half fuel remaining, turns out the Amaterasu will pass by the Mun.

Over four Earth years later the ship is back in Kerbin's SoI. A burn is planned to put it on a proper trajectory for aerocapture after passing by the Mun (green line), I would need slightly more delta-v without the Mun passing by as shown by the orange line that would be an impact trajectory.

Burn goes well.

The Mun greets the surviving KAMIKAZE Kerbonauts. They pass about 120 km away from it's surface.

As predicted the trajectory will pass through atmo at 25,7 km. Should be enough for this flyby velocity.

Kippon is close.

Plasma appears at 46 km.

Flames intensify, it seems both JoKa and Tzaero have gone completely mad from space.

Thirty kilometers, velocity is down to 5670 m/s.

Down to 4255 m/s at the low point. That's just 2000 m/s above minimal orbital velocity. Shit.

Spoiler

I dived by just one kilometer too deep it seems.

Absalom tries turning the ship around and burn, however atmospheric drag proves too much for the reaction wheels and RCS thrusters to handle. It is impossible to turn the ship around. Therefore he engages emergency powered descent procedures to bring the ship down, or at least most of it, on solid ground.

Parachutes deploy.

At 10 km above sea level the ship has already decelerated by enough to avoid a splashdown.

The plan is to attempt to land this using the 3 LV-N's augmented by the parachutes. They don't have a lot of thrust but hopefully it will be enough to salvage some of the remaining science.

In a worst case scenario the engine and empty Chibi-Ghoddorah 2 orbital module with the science will break off from the top of the Amaterasu where the parachutes are. If the descent velocity is too great I will simply press the abort button seperating the two crewed modules with the parachutes from the rest of the ship.

The parachutes fully deployed and the bottom fell off.

Well the science is lost but the crew us alive and well, falling down at a safe 7 m/s. Oh well, they can always return back to Laythe later and get the science back.

Or not as apparently the hitchhiker module where three of the remaining four crew were has exploded upon contact with the ground.

GODDAMN IT WHY DID THAT PART HAVE SUCH LOW IMPACT TOLERANCE, IT SHOULD HAVE FUCKING SURVIVED THAT.

This is KAMIKAZE's most tragic hour. The Laythe expedition of the Amaterasu-2 claimed 80% of the crew, one on Laythe and three at the very final moment of the mission so close to home.

As the only survivor Absalom marks the spot of this great tragedy.

Nearly all science has been lost as well. Most of it comes from the probe which ran out of power too soon.

Lessons for the future, add landing legs to the Amaterasu crew module, fix the Chibi-Ghiddorah design, land at flatter and lower terrain on Laythe, aerocapture at 31 km when coming back from Jool, remember the altitudes for prograde and retrograde aerocapture around Laythe.

Well the update featuring the next mission shouldn't be this long. Not sure if I can research anything with the science I have. I'll give Jool a rest for now, the KAMIKAZE will go elsewhere for the next mission. I have such fabulous sights to show you anyway. I'll return to Laythe after that probably, this time trying to land on the side where Jool is visible.

Well that took longer than expected, here's hoping there's less derping and refueling involved in future missions. Want to sign up for some of the fun you just witnessed? Sure you can, Jakan needs suicidal gaijin!

 

[Ashery]

At the rate you're losing kerbals now, I'm pretty sure I'll remain the most successful for a while yet. And I died, if not honorably, at least not shamefully.

 

[Absalom]

Huzzah! BTW plz rescue me from Laythe

 

[Hellraiser]

Huzzah! BTW plz rescue me from Laythe

Bro, you already are back on Kerbin remember, you were the guy piloting the whole Amaterasu-2 from the Cupola.

 

[Absalom]

Huzzah! BTW plz rescue me from Laythe

Bro, you already are back on Kerbin remember, you were the guy piloting the whole Amaterasu-2 from the Cupola.

lol oops

 

[Shadenuat]

This game is absolutely fascinating, but damn it's MATH. I've been playing for two or three days, only recently found a way for it to crash less (got screen of death like every second launch). Even after all the wiki's and youtube still destroyed about 12 rockets before I managed to make a nice orbit and then de orbit back. Almost couldn't sleep first few days, and even in sleep was thinking how to make a proper rocket.
Then again after 11 rockets I suddenly realized I was making rockets in plane hangar all the time. As Codex LP's showed designs I couldn't make myself so I became suspicious I was doing something wrong. But I got enough Science for solar panels and launched my first satellite, now I am planning on launching moar probes on different planets.
I liked Poland and Viking LP's a lot but this I like even more. "Glowing hair kawai desu"
Will there be Macross songs? I know it's banal, but space is not complete without Minmei songs.

Bumpity bump

 

[TheEntitledOne]

Add me to the cannon fodder please.

I discovered this game like two weeks ago. Stuck trying to send guys to mün (achieved) and getting them back later (not achieved).