Games Worth Playing: To Munis... or bust!

Progress report on Kerbal Space Program. Clature mk4 took me to Mun (closer moon) twice successfully... after about ten failed attempts heh. Stream lined design over the mk3 for two reasons. One, I've been learning alot from Scott Manley's video tutorials. He's an expert at this so makes very few mistakes, I make lots of mistakes heh. Using a design closer to his left lesser margin for error, forced me to learn and improve my technique. Parachute, Capsule, two goo containers, two research labs, two fuel tanks matted to the stage three engine. Stage two engine had four containers feeding it and outside that three large thrusters started the fun. Batteries were installed to keep things powered for the long trip since there was quite abit of repositioning and course correcting.

For the initial launch I ran the stage one thrusters at 70% of norm to conserve fuel, I also fuel feed them to the main stage two engine. What this did was allow me to run all four engines at one time while using none of the stage two engines actual fuel, the thrusters fed it nicely. Thrusters got me to almost 10k on their own, I decoupled them and continued at 2/3rd on main engine at a 45 degree angle until my peek orbit on the map screen was just over 100k. From that peek point I added a parameter pushing the thrusters until I had a near perfect orbit. Once in that orbit I made another parameter addition, this time pushing the orbit until it intersected Mun's gravity well. The main engine lasted about 1/3rd in to this course correction, stage three engine carried it the rest of the way.

I could go on but really, just watch Scott Manley's Mun orbit video linked below my photo of the mk4. It does a far better job explaining how to accomplish this feat than I could ever hope to with mere text :)

Now, using what I learned from that video I built the mk5 to be abit more forgiving and pretty much did exactly what I did for reaching the Mun to instead reach Munis. There is some equipment on the mk5 that didn't need to be there because I originally had other plans for how I was going to go about collecting experimental data, but in the end I just did it the same way I did with the Mun, same as how Scott did it in the above video.