I’ve been plugging away at my Probes Before Crew game, and I continue to really like how it progresses. I just completed my Strategia Mun Probes contract (land a probe on 3 munar biomes) and am getting read to send my first Kerbal (Valentina, of course) to the Mun, along with some of the Breaking Ground modules that I’m interested to try out. I also added Snacks! to my mod-list because I wanted something lightweight that prevents me from leaving Kerbals in space forever.
Once I get something interplanetary going, I’m thinking about starting up a game with Galileo’s new JNSQ planet pack, which looks pretty interesting. It’s a 2.5x scale pack, so more realistic than normal scale, but still doable with stock engines.
Got Valentina to the Mun and back, which netted me almost 1,000 science for just that one mission.
Here she is with her science controller (which will never do anything because this is on the far side of the Mun and can’t transmit back to Kerbin without relay. Oh well.)
Wow that is so cool! So you’re recovering those outer engines I gather from all the parachutes? I’m surprised you’d be close enough to get credit for them? Or are you using a mod like further physics?
Also, which engines are you using for inside and the center line? and for your little satellites?
Stage Recovery for, well, stage recovery—it calculates terminal velocity based on how many parachutes you have and refunds you a percentage of the value based on impact speed and distance from the launch site.
I only get about ~50% value on these ones even before the distance factor—four parachutes is only enough to slow the stage to ~10m/s. Each booster runs about 20,000 kerbucks, and I get ~8,000 back each. (It’s asparagus-staged, so a little more for the first two off, which land closer, and a little less for the last two.) After the last two side boosters separate, it dips down to about 0.7 TWR for a little while, but it’s high/fast enough by that point that it doesn’t matter.
The side boosters are Mainsails, the center booster is a Skipper, the Clipper’s transfer stage has three Nervs on an engine plate, and the satellites use the wee little Spark. I don’t recall offhand what the satellites mass, but they’re pretty simple—1-2 batteries, 1-2 solar panels, a small reaction wheel, some science instruments, and a QBE probe core. The single 1.25m tank with the Spark engine yields about 2km/s of delta-v, which is far and away more than I’ll need, and the Spark also has decent specific impulse in atmosphere, so it’s a fine choice for a Duna landing.
How do you know if you’re going to need radiator panels?
Also, any of you using memgraph? The hitches every 6 seconds are starting to drive me nuts and apparently memgraph can push those hitches out to every 2 minutes instead?
OK I have a major problem. When I go to look at my sentinel satellite, it is fine for 1 second and then spins itself apart after that. Thankfully I have a savegame I can reload, but I can’t get it to not do that. How can I fix this?
You appear to have two docking ports stuck together? Try right clicking on it and pressing undock?
Also you really should test these things on the Launch pad :) (e.g. I don’t think you’ll need that many ladders on the far end. Infact, unless you plan to land it, ladders aren’t all that helpful in space!)
Honestly, trying to use ladders in space is going to almost certainly result in you using EVA propulsion to return to the ship after the ladder janks you off anyway.
You can clamp a Claw onto another vessel and it joins onto it. It’s usually used for retrieving asteroids, but you can use it for rescues and as an ad-hoc docking port as well. So you can add a docking port that way. If I remember right, the Claw has a setting that makes it rigid too, so it’s a pretty solid connection.
