I had 30+ hours of footage for this video, so it took me way longer than usual to put together. Let me know if you all want to see more stuff like this in the future. I have an idea for a single engine video that I think should be fun!
For future reference, if you want to find out what just exploded at a glance, F3 brings up the "results screen", aka the pop-up window that shows up when you've crashed. bringing it up before you've crashed gives you a good itemised list of what's went wrong so far.
F3 to identify what exploded. Also, to save fuel don't take off in a retrograde orbit... So you created two small landers that you didn't use (Glly, Bop or Pol could have been the place to do so...)
Your vocabulary during these challenges is always hilarious. Like the way you make understatements or say un-added just making me laugh every time. Keep going rc!
not possible without any kind of engine you can get into a sub-orbital trajectory but then you need some sort of thrust to come once youre in this position and if you want to see how difficult that is without engines, check out stratzenblitz "Orbiting Kerbin using only Jet Engines", which is difficult enough with only jet engines, and since you cant use any engines at all, its really not possible, you could use sepratrons and decouplers but that will kill your computer
@@azzzertyy Im sure there'd be some kind of way to use motors and other things to create enough force to launch a craft, then give it enough sideways to start orbiting
Exciting mission! I think there's a problem though: that forest of solar panels must have been occluding each other. 2 columns would be good if you can always turn them to face the sun, otherwise i think it would be good to have 3 columns like the 3 individual ones on the big lander. Maybe 4 columns. The Tylo landing was awesome! :D Ooh, all the planets? For Eve, propellors help a lot; it looks like they can more than halve the size of an SSTO, if I estimate right, and they make it possible to launch from sea level where a rocket-powered SSTO has to launch from a very high mountain. Or you could take a multi-stage lander. :) If you go with propellors, put them in service bays to control the drag. Open the bays to use the propellors, close the bays for rocket flight because propellor blades make insane amounts of drag at supersonic speeds. You could probably get 200m/s out of propellors which is not a whole lot, but at least they can get you above the majority of the thick atmosphere before you try to go supersonic.
Even though there's no mechanics for it, I always thought it would be cool to see a big multi-phase mission like this planned with a semi-realistic time constraint like 1 year or something. Might involve like pre-launching spare stages to each destination with drones before the Kerbal finally gets to make his voyage or something so you can trade efficiency for speed. Just something I've always thought about when seeing these hilarious 150 year long missions lol.
I have been playing this game for years, watching guides and playing non stop on my old shitty laptop before getting a better pc and I cant even fathom getting a kerbal to the jool system yet here you are bringing one to every moon in one mission
I think the changes in orbit/encouters happen because of time warp. This happens more if you use the mod where you get higher time warp modes. You can prevent it if you only time warp from the tracking station. I've started to set an alarm clock for just before I need to do something and then time warping from the tracking station. It takes a little more effort but saves you a lot of time in the end bc you don't have to reload saves as much.
One thing you can do instead of using ion engines is using the nuclear engines because they have much more thrust compared to ion engines, and are almost as effecient
I am at 4:00 in video -- my approach would be to make a stable station around every object, just create a small lunar module and go through all the "ISSs," replenish fuel, land, take photos, get back to station, replenish fuel, dock to rocket, get to another body's orbital station, deploy module, land, photos, back, rocket, ... rinse & repeat 🙂
those cool features on planets and moons are from the making history dlc and you need the special mining arm to get samples from it bc you cant use a kerbal or regular mining stuff to get a sample
A tip for you Reid Captain and you guys: Don't. Spam. Solar. Panels. They will add dead weight because as they are soo many, these cover up sunlight for other panels, and only about a third of those solar panels ACTUALLY get the light, is better using RTGs, (if you are not going for a 150 year mission like this guy did) also those fins only work on laythe for obvious reasons
It would be nice to see same thing with precursor's planet pack. The mod looks cool though, maybe also to watch some series as well Great stuff, keep up great content
There's a trick for landing on bodies with no atmosphere: when you are on a suborbital trajectory, create a maneuver node at the point you intersect the surface. Then, increase the retrograde vector of the maneuver until your surface velocity will be 0. Start the burn the same as usual: when the time until the maneuver node is equal to half the time of the total burn, start your burn. This is a good rule of thumb for planning landing burns. I also solved the kinematics problem for what time/altitude to turn on your engines if you are falling vertically so that you do a suicide burn (I assumed the vessel is a particle with unchanging mass though). I found that solution to be a bit inaccurate though, but it gives a good estimation.
Great work! Its always a good feeling to pull off these giant missions. I will say though that your design has a lot of room for improvement and I honestly felt frustrated for you at certain points. Your lander design is massive, very tall/tippy, and ultimately made the mission harder than it needed to be. The mothership could also be optimized for higher thrust/better engines if it didnt have to push such a heavy payload. That turtle slow ion transfer stage was painful to watch, I would have tried to optimize weight and implement staging long before considering using ions on a huge design like this. Remember that with the rocket equation every kg of weight you remove from the dry mass gives you more delta v than adding one kg of fuel. Staging helps this greatly, and being minimalistic with the payload pays off big time. I can even imagine this mission being possible without mining equipment with planning and clever piloting. Another thing is you could have piloted the ship in a way more efficient manner, you burned hard into Laythes atmosphere but you could have done a small burn and let the atmosphere and parachutes do the work. You also hard braked around Tylo and did the "drop straight down from orbit" technique which wasted a ton of fuel. Launching into a retrograde orbit (270 degrees opposed to 90) means you are working against the rotation of the planet/moon and again wasting precious fuel. In addition plotting a crash course to directly land from outside a moons SOI is far less efficient than capturing into an orbit first. This is because when falling in a vacuum the gravitational acceleration does not stop unless there is a force like atmospheric drag acting to slow you down. Coming in from far away and falling straight down just has you picking up a ton of extra speed that you'll have to burn off to land, while coming down with a shallow angle from a low orbit gives you less time to accelerate towards the ground, granting very good fuel savings. Here is how I have designed similar missions in the past: I have a multibody lander design I use that is basically a mk1 lander can, 8 oscar B fuel tanks, 2 retractable solar panels (or 1 RTG) and 2 spark engines, a full science instrument set up and some small rcs ports. With this tiny lander I have over 2,200m/s DV fully fueled, with thrust high enough to land on all but 2 of the moons and return science. If the LF/OX runs out the 15 units of monopropellant provides something like 300m/s of delta V, more than enough to rendezvous and dock with the mothership. I do not add batteries, 50 units is more than enough as long as you are careful with dark side maneuvering and the solar panels are honestly enough even as far out as Jool. With such a low fuel mass requirement the refueling tanker can be even smaller as well, making the whole design easier to get into orbit and granting quicker burns with more conventional engines. Of course this can't land on Tylo, and would not have the thrust to get you back from Laythe even if you saved fuel with parachutes. To use this design for a Tylo landing you need to dock the lander to a larger descent stage with good thrust (I put my docking port on the bottom of the lander can so it can be used as a sort of reusable decoupler.) One aerospike is all you need, with a few drop tanks coupled radially around this stage with fuel lines feeding them into the core. If you stage this right you can use up the fuel in the drop tanks and land on Tylo, keeping the aerospike and enough fuel to get you back to an altitude where the tiny lander now has enough thrust to complete orbital insertion. For Laythe you dont even need a rocket powered lower stage. I have used the tiny lander docked to an ascent stage powered by a whiplash engine, with some landing legs and parachutes added for quality of life. From a low stating orbit you can undock from the mothership, use RCS to dip your periapsis into the atmosphere and use the drag and parachutes to land without using any liquid fuel. With a good ascent angle you can run the whiplash flat out, getting you just past the atmosphere on a suborbital arc. From that point you can drop the jet engine and the sparks can carry you the rest of the way to orbit. I still find spaceplanes more ideal for landing on Laythe. Of course all of that takes precious time to test and its often more fun to just make a wild design and yeet it into orbit using a bunch of boosters hoping for the best and overcoming the problems as they arise. These missions are always more memorable.
if you want max thrust from ions, you actually want the electrical system to be inadequate, ions operate in a lower ISP state, but with more thrust if the ion motor's flow exceeds the electrical demand. Also crossfeed, that's what's killing your fps.
Mr Reid Captain, could you check out the games or make a video on "Homebrew" and "Stormworks" or "Space Engineers" as all of thease games i would believe you would love, also massively looking forward to you're next video, i love you're videos.
i dont know if you would do this but, can you make a guide on how to make besiege engines? ive recently gotten the game and would love to learn how to make engines
