Bay 12 Games Forum

To start, Bob is tired and wants to examine the probe more. A couple of engineers came up with a plan to solve this issue: Build a space car to take him to the spacecraft!
After explaining what a "car" is, they got to work designing one.


_{It's an omni-directional space car! Perfect for when you don't know what direction you'll be going in next!}

That little thing has 3,880 m/s of Δv. On its own, it could (theoretically) get from LKO to Minmus and still have most of its fuel left! Hopefully, that won't be needed. We have a to-Minmus stage, a little rocket with 1,650 m/s (under ideal conditions, 1,240 is needed to reach Minmus from LKO), and four liquid boosters for 2,811 m/s, and finally eight triple boosters (Rockomax BACC boosters with two Globe I SRBs attached) for 1,899 m/s. We'll need to dip into the Minmus stage for orbital insertion, and into the car itself to land, but eh.

After kicking Jeb out of the car, we're ready to rock and roll. Wait, didn't Jeb die in a plane crash?
...
Well, he apparently survived. Huh.

Ahem. Space car launch.


_{Just feel the power of an absurd number of rockets.}

The solid boosters run out around 10,000 meters, which is pretty good timing in my opinion. We're going 340 m/s at that point, so we wait and reorient ourself (once we're free of the booster ring).


_{Quick pic.}

We begin boosting to orbit.


_{It's smaller, but it still works.}

I push the apoapsis to 75 kilometers and coast into space. Once there, I burn off the rest of my booster fuel and prepare for orbital insertion.


_{Stop floating away so fast, I JUST WANNA TAKE YOUR PICTURE!}

I get in a roughly circular (112/121 km) orbit. Now to do a plane correction...


<sub>I wonder how much like real NASA this is.

And this.</sub>

...then a burn to get closer to Minmus...


<sub>Maneuver nodes are a pain. I've seen Scott Manley use some sort of maneuver node editor that lets you adjust the raw numbers; I wonder where I could get that...

Well. Better get settled.

Not as magestic as the boosters, but it gets the job done.</sub>

It takes me a moment to notice that the SASS didn't have me pointing in the right direction. D'oh. Thankfully, the gimbal helps the turn.
Well, we have something to fix up here.


_{Wow. I'm...um...wow.}

Next, fiddling with a maneuver node.


_{That was pleasantly fast.}

Excellent.


<sub>Ah, space car, flying through space.

We're almost to Minmus. I can see it.

Almost can't see the Mun. Kerbin's still there, though.</sub>

We've entered Minmal influence. Now we need to get into orbit.


_{Pretty circular, too.}

This maneuver requires 294 m/s of Δv, but the rocket's only got 247 left. We'll be dipping into the car's fuel to get into orbit, then land. Still, it has almost four km/s in it--Δv won't be the problem, my skill with landing will be.
I empty the rocket and...


_...Huh.

It seems that rocket had more juice in it than MechJeb predicted.
Of course, I screw up when I eject the rocket and realize I forgot to turn off the throttle. Now I'm on an escape trajectory. I spin the ship around, and...


_{Well, I was landing anyways.}

Either Minmus is really easy to screw around in your orbit with, or I have a very powerful little rocket-car.
It'll take about a day to reach the surface-ish, so...quicksave time, then time-accelerate time.

19 kilometers above the surface, I attempt to stop my horizontal speed. This fails, but I do reduce it from over a hundred meters per second to only 11.8. A while later, I begin working on killing my vertical velocity. About 4,500 meters from the surface, I slant a bit to reduce both velocities. I manage to get my horizontal (briefly) under half a meter per second before bringing it up to almost two, and I start going up. After going up hundreds of meters, I begin falling again.
3,000 meters above the surface, I manage to bring my lateral velocity down to under 40 cm/s! Then it started going up. Weird. I also killed a lot of falling. I do the same a kilometer later. Then, a kilometer later, same thing. I don't kill all my vertical velocity, just a lot of it--enough that I don't fall too fast and need to bleed off my speed at just the right time or explode.
800 meters and falling. I see my shadow!


_{Well, there's no one in the car to see it, but...eh.}

Killed vertical velocity at 500 meters. Same at 300 meters, then 150, then 70. Boy, was that hair-raising. I planned to do it at 50, but panicked a bit. I waited until 30, but lifted off a bit. I kept doing little slow-down burns the whole way down, and hit the ground at a few meters per second. And the music hit a crescendo! Perfect!


_{The Space-Car has landed.}

That reminds me.


_{Is this important? Not at all, and yet it is vital.}

Now to drive it. I tip it over, and of course it starts rolling. So I activate the brakes, and it slides before stopping. Good. Now, let's look for that Bob...


_{Oh, I am just the master of precision landing aren't I?}

Glad I put a probe on this thing.
Anyways, using the dinky reaction wheels up front and the big one in the middle, we turn this thing towards Bob and prepare to go.
Once we pass 50 m/s, I decide that even on minimal throttle, we don't need to keep it up the whole way. Minmus's icy surface is low-friction, the wheels lower that more, and really a rocket car on a low-gravity moon is just asking for trouble.
We bounce a lot as we coast. We turn some, too. Glad I put wheels on all four sides.
Once we cross the crest of the hill, we're flying more than rolling.


_{I bet I could take off into orbit with this thing.}

The bounce I took a picture of took it 43 meters into the air. 43 meters! The longer this goes on, the longer I worry that I'm going to end up running off a cliff or something and crashing. The more I think about it, the more attractive a suborbital flight sounds. So, once I land from that, I turn off the brakes and prepare to fly once more.
We keep bouncing for a while, though. This might not be such a problem, but we're going increasingly off-course. Eventually, I decide to just go for it...and I do. I take off, get an apoapsis above 5,000 meters, and try to quicksave. It seems I'm about to crash.
After trying to set up a maneuver node that gets me close without crashing, I give up and set it up on an orbital trajectory...


_{Better get to maneuvering.}

...then an alteration as we start to fly nearby.


_{Not bad. Not bad at all.}

I seem to have hit / and done something, but guess what? There's a lot of /'s on the Key Bindings page of the wiki. And after scrolling through twice, I'm still not sure what I've done. I couldn't non-physical time warp for a bit, but now I can. Why must everything be so confusing when I stress about it? Why can't I stress over anything simple?
That was a rhetorical question.

As I approach the burn place, I spy Bob Kerman popping up on the UI, 30 kilometers out.
Now, to land. Without screwing up my landing site too much.
At night.


_{Stupid Sun. Why are you not on the right side of the thing?}

There are some weird pausey moments as we get closer to Bob and the alien probe.
As we start getting close, I turn off the SASS, turn on the SAS, and start slowing down for a landing. Dammit, why do I always forget to save until I'm "about to crash"?
Funny thing: I land while still trying to figure out if I should be reducing my velocity more. Damn, I make a good rocket-car.


_{Did something break, or is this durable enough to hold up?}

We point towards Bob, spend some fuel, and go. A bit slower this time, starting just under 40 m/s. Bob's just under four kilometers out, so it'll probably take a couple minutes to get there. Especially given how much we fly.
The game really freezes up once we get within 2.3 or 2.2 kilometers. Stupid loading stuff. Well, that should be the last of it, right?
A kilometer out, and we're still going 36 m/s. A hundred meters out, I try to apply the brakes. Seventy meters out, I succeed. 94.5 meters out, the game freezes, and again at 188.1. A few hundred meters later, I take advantage of a flight to turn around. I use a little rocket fuel to try and turn this car around, and succeed. Great, now we're going roughly towards Bob at 50 m/s. I literally fly past him. I spin around again, and end up going up to 80 meters above the ground. Okay, I suck at parking this thing. Coasting along at only several meters per second, I point towards Bob. I remember to turn off the brakes just before we go below 2 m/s. Speed slowly drops, I think because I'm going uphill. When we get to 300 meters away, we're going 0.35 m/s, so I turn on the brakes and switch to Bob. We begin heading back.


_{Night is pretty here.}

Bob walks over there, and having spent days here on Minmus, mostly napping by the alien probe, waiting for the car, and discovers...


_{"We did not plan for this eventuality!"
"Why did you not plan for me needing to enter the vehicle?"}

We could try tilting it, except...the battery died. It was solar-powered. The car needs a driver now.
Time to jump in. With no EVA assistance.


_{"I cannot adjust my vertical trajectory mid-flight!"}

I try getting a walking start.


<sub>"Theory number two..."

"...disproved..."</sub>

I'll figure something out tomorrow. Right now, I need to take care of miscellaneous biological functions. Four hours of flying and such is long enough.