Bay 12 Games Forum

A new day, a new Minmushot.


_{”Okay. Just gotta wait until it crashes, right?”}

(P.S. More struts were added before we hit space.)
The strutted version launches nice and straight, and fast. Nine solid fuel boosters mean we’re hitting the hundred-meter-per-second mark less than ten seconds in. By the second kilometer, not quite twenty seconds in, we’re moving over 150 m/s. We hit 200 m/s, Scott’s “You’re flying too fast for efficient low-atmo flight, slow down!” mark, at 3600 meters and 27 seconds, with perhaps a third of the solid fuel left. We hit the nine-klick mark right before jettisoning the empty solid fuel boosters, moving nearly 400 m/s, letting momentum carry us up until we’re out of the lower atmosphere and firing up the liquid engine. A gravity turn is attempted, but our lower stages are too heavy it seems. We get a steady speed of a bit over 173 m/s at a hair over two-thirds throttle, then head to max as we break fourteen kilometers. With more thrust, thrust vectoring is more effective and we turn easily.
We burn through the second stage’s fuel, leaving us with a stage that needs to take us to Minmus. I burn a bit at a time, keeping the apoapsis 40-50 seconds away. Eventually, I find that two ticks’ thrust keeps it at 46 seconds away. The fuel slowly goes down, the apoapsis slowly goes up. The latter starts going up faster and getting farther away, so I level out the craft so it’s facing horizontally. Fiddling with thrust and such eventually keeps it 48 seconds away. I spend the last of my non-lander fuel getting an elliptical orbit, apoapsis 81 klicks…periapsis 38. Yeah, this launch may be aborted.

So…yeah. Fail. Let’s try orbiting this the way I used to: Burn at max, 45-degree gravity turn at 10 kilometers, burn until apoapsis is 70-80 kilometers, burn prograde at apoapsis. Except that I won’t be firing my liquid engines whilst in the lower atmosphere above 200 m/s—that seems like pretty undeniable advice.
The gravity turn is a bit tardy and clumsy, but eh. The rocket takes a bit of coaxing to stay turned, but nothing new. Fuel of the second stage half gone, apoapsis 24 klicks. Second stage dry, apoapsis 37 klicks. Third stage fuel is about two-thirds when we hit an apoapsis of 71 klicks. I set up a maneuver node to bring me into a nice, roughly circular orbit, periapsis a bit over 70 kilometers, apoapsis about 74k. I fiddle with thrust, starting a bit early and burning slower to account for it. It’s too slow, we re-enter the atmosphere half-done with maybe 10-15% fuel. Bill is glad to be heading home. I snag some research data from the upper atmosphere. I want to practice landing a bit, so I—


_{Um. Not quite my intention…}

Ah well. Live and screw up. As thinks Bill, who can’t get back into his pod after the wet EVA. And we lost all the science.

I intend to modify the Minmushot IIX slightly, adding a couple fuel tanks. Sadly, the darn thing won’t let me. Whenever I try to pop off the solid fuel boosters, they don’t go back on the same. So, I make a new Minmushot…with a lot more fuel.


_{The upcoming budget update may mess up my space program some…}

The solid boosters can’t lift the rocket off the ground. Solution: Fix staging so more than a quarter fire at once. That gives us a solid launch that swiftly starts leaning west. “45 degrees at 3000 meters” fast. When they run out, I’m a bit over 6200 meters, a bit under 300 m/s, rising in altitude but falling in velocity, and incidentally almost horizontally west. The immediate problem has a simple solution:


_{Solved! Well, except for the crowd about to get hit will rockets full of mildly explosive fuel.}

So. That was…interesting.

I add (sigh) empty command pods to the Ms8. Three of them. So inelegant, but hopefully effective. This prevents the tipping from being a serious issue. Mind, we still tip a lot, but only to that top circle at 4200 meters. It also turns 45 or 90 degrees in the horizontal plane. Once we drop the boosters, it’s easy enough to correct, although we start losing tons of velocity. Too much fuel, perhaps? At about 50% of the tank, still going up 90-100 m/s, our luck reverses, weaker gravity and lower fuel level (mostly the latter, likely) conspiring to give us more thrust than weight. We drop the second stage around 17800 meters and continue to climb. The burn stops at 72 kilometers apoapsis and about one-quarter fuel left. Maneuver node set up for a slightly elliptical orbit; the burn begins but we run out of fuel before we can get more than halfway through, and the lander’s meager supplies won’t cut it, so…we never reach space.

Damn. We may need more powerful engines or something before we get to Minmus.