SCREENIE TIME:
First Mun landing...one way trip actually, the second rocket was a modified version of the one below with a CPU to bring him back... Fun times.
Dubbing it the "Hex" Since it had 6 separate booster tanks that fueled the center, this was the first "workhorse" that sent my Kerbals to the Mun/Minmus and back.
First landing on Minmus, yes, using the 5th iteration of the Hex Rocket design.
Should have taken pics of the rocket that sent these up, but since then deleted them for the next versions, first bases on Minmus were sent off with some relative ease.
Millennium Station is complete after three rendezvous. Nodes and RCS are your friends. This was before I binded translations to my keyboard so docking was
extremely tricky. Many attempts to catchup to my parts were a total pain.
As time went on and basically made my trips around Low Kerban Orbit/the local Moons almost a how-to demonstration to friends and family, my ambition and rockets grew synonymously. Next up Duna!....Sadly this design was completely insane and only made it to orbit...once. You can kinda make out the later stages are the predecessor to my interplanetary ship designs. Lucky for me when I launched this, a week later the next KSP update was out, and after a few prototypes I came up with:
The new Hex 'Spectrum' Rockets. Named a different color depending on their destination. My targets: Duna/Red, Eve/Violet, Laythe/Blue, respectively. This design is essentially a jumbo sized version of my Hex rockets, but carry a payload of a large fuel tank, 4 smaller tanks (relatively) with Nuclear engines to make the burns. They worked perfectly but due to the sheer size/weight the burns were quite extensive. Your burns will vary depending on size, but mine on this workhorse run about 5-10 minutes, but barely take any fuel.
Prepare for 20+ minute burns!
Red Hex on route to Duna.
Almost there, and a bit fast too..
Atmosphere Braking is fun, especially when you are moving about 5km+/s, better hug that atmosphere to slow me as much as possible. Since Duna's atmosphere is freaking thin, you had to play 'how low can you go', If i had gone any higher (around 7km) I simply slow down a bit and keep on going! 5km was the magic number. This maneuver basically became my 'go-to' method of getting to a place fast...normally you want to orbit around it but, why not just have the atmosphere do the work for me?
All my first flights to newer bodies are unmanned, thus had more room for fuel/less weight making my landers extremely easy to land. Even so because of the low altitude atmosphere breaking, this took several tries to land properly.
Touchdown on Duna!
Right away I sent Violet Hex off to Eve, same principle for landing was utilized but since the atmosphere was thicker, it was much easier to land. Took me two tries...mainly because the first one crashed since the gravity is much higher here. These were not equipped with parachutes and quite frankly I wanted to see if I could land with just engines; I had plenty of practice to fly these in failed rocket design attempts and landed them on Kerbin
- so I knew they would work on Duna (where it's lighter) and possibly Eve.
Entering Eve's atmosphere.
So much purple, it hurts!
Took a break from designing and launching rockets to Laythe to test out making Transport vehicles. Behold the Terrainorizer!
After some crazy thinking, I began to alter my Spectrum Rockets to hold transport slots.
And it
worked.
Meanwhile on Minmus.
Sadly since the Gravity is so low on Minmus, my Terrainorizer (I still love that name by the way), doesn't cope well, you essentially have to throw on RCS simply to keep it on the ground. Oh and yes it is equiped with SAS systems in case it flips over....or starts spinning midair - whichever comes first.
Blue Hex headed towards Jool.
Burns are strikingly the same as my previous runs on Duna and Eve, it only gets longer to get there for obvious reasons but it servers to have little challenge for now..
Having to double check how low
I can go on Jool, I do 2 burns to adjust my trajectory towards Laythe.
It actually takes me several tries to get to Laythe, simply because I'm going too fast and the target is actually a moon. Realistically we would want to orbit Jool first but in this run too much fuel was being burnt
simply to aim at Laythe. Screw it, we're doing it the usual way.
Since Laythe is mostly composed of water (?) and only has a few islands to land on, I choose the North Pole since it was not only easier to get to from where I was coming from, but because aiming at any of the other islands were posing to be a huge challenge. First 'landing' was actually headfirst into the ocean at about 1.5km/s. So using atmosphere breaking near the north pole was the way to go.
Once inside the atmosphere and relatively close to the exact north pole, landing was a breeze compared to Eve and Duna.
I fucking love this game.
It's getting late, going to post the next wave of pics later. Next up: New
Mun bases using the
Spectrum rockets as the bases, the Fatman-52, Manned Duna mission and back and the beginning of my Kerbin/Duna Interplanetary Shuttle, the 'Arc'.