I redid the planned thing, taking a lot less time. Maybe it was how I did it, maybe it was the experience. Regardless, it wasn't as much of a pain. I went towards Minmus, got an encounter, burned towards Minmus until I was in orbit, noted that I was already on a landing/crashing trajectory, waited until I was close, and then let the game run in the background a few minutes before impact, trusting the landing autopilot to alert me to when we were about to land. I quicksaved a good bit. The landing was good, the thing was moved to the proper save...and then it didn't work.
So, the neat little plot stuff might not be starting just yet...
I spend some time fiddling with fairings around my satellite before getting down to business. The last stage, carrying just the satellite, is capable of 2475 m/s of Δv according to Mechjeb, and it's just a hundred units of liquid fuel, sufficient oxidizer, a Vesta rocket, and of course the payload. The next, with a larger rocket and more fuel, manages 2,325. Between then, we have 4,800 m/s of Δv. This is enough to get into LKO with some fuel to spare. Getting to GKO will be a bit tougher, so we add some slender solid rocket boosters. We should have enough to get into (or at least near) GKO.
So, we're launching.
So elegant. So simple. So beautiful. So...un-Kerbal.There is a slight problem during launch; the solid boosters evidently didn't end up properly attached to the decouplers (or, rather, unattached to not-decouplers). I fiddle with throttle to keep from wasting fuel on drag. Soon enough, the time comes for the gravity turn. Pointing 45 degrees from vertical and throttling back up to max, I eye the Apoapsis and Time to Apoapsis. A bit after 24 kilometers, that stage runs dry and we're on to our last stage already...still, before 34 kilometers, the apoapsis reaches 80, and we coast and prepare a maneuver node, impeded by the fact that the orbiting former home of Jebediah is in the way. We'll be coming within a few hundred kilometers after orbital insertion, which will require less than 520 m/s of Δv.
We overburn a little, but not much.
Not quite as circular as intended, but I hardly think that's important. I got something into orbit, easily. And that matters.I get the remainder of the spacecraft spinning, then decouple half of the fairing. This makes the spin rather less nice, so it's a bit of a chore to eject the other half. Still, they're gone, and MechJeb can fix the rotation. This buys us over a hundred m/s of Δv, so it's worth it. (Also, it exposes the solar panels.) According to MechJeb, we have 861 m/s of Δv left; it takes ~800 to ascend from an 80-kilometer orbit to a KSO. I plot a maneuver to bring us into an elliptical orbit with a high enough apoapsis and an essentially unchanged periapsis; this will take 645 m/s of our Δv. Hm, not quite reassurring...I eventually get a second node close enough for jazz, hoping I'll have enough Δv. This mode was a lot more touchy, maybe that means it takes less fuel?
We're falling behind on our Pretty Picture Quota (PPQ).
Oh, look, the Mun! Quick, take a picture!I adjust the Chatterer settings while waiting for the node to come up. Then, moving at 2.3 km/s, we accelerate to nearly 3 km/s. I fiddle with the maneuver node some before realizing that there's no way the ~430 m/s burn could be done with the 216 m/s of Δv we have left. After much fiddling, I make a burn that will produce an orbit nothing like circular, but hey it's our first satellite so cut us some slack.
Let's see how this goes.
But first...we wait.
And wait.
And wait.
And wait.
And pretend we're going to the Mun. Mostly, we wait.
These are nice pictures, though.We finally burn into orbit. Between the burn and the ejection of the stage, we manage to get into the following orbit:
Only 3.3 m/s short, too. Damn good ejection system.
Thank you, rapidly-vanishing chunk of space junk!The tranceiver is picking up signals we send to it. Doubtless, this will be useful once we get more up. Well, maybe. One issue is that it's picking up interference from the Mun--not much, but some.
We need two things, now that the communication satellite is in orbit:
1. A name for it!
2. A new goal! Do we still want to try shooting for Minmus, or do we want to do a Kerbal science plane, or do we want a space station, or what?
No, I didn't. ...Phooey.
