Flieger, grüß' mir die Sonne, grüß' mir die Sterne und grüß' mir den Mond. Dein Leben, das ist ein Schweben, durch die Ferne, die keiner bewohnt! - Hans Albers, F.P.1 antwortet nicht (Adaptation in the 80s: Extrabreit)

Sunday 27 March 2016

Sagitta crash exercises

My tourist cruiser, the Sagitta, has finally finished its observation exercise and gets ready to land on Mün. Simple routine...

Here we go. BTW, must those craters be everywhere?

Just made it to the ridge of a crater, for a flat enough landing surface. But what is this? The vessel tumbles and falls, even though I am sure I had horizontal velocity in the 0.x area!

Reload, next try! Killing horizontal velocity.

WTF. The four spaced engines do not seem to provide for a stable basis as I had assumed!

Next try!

... uh, well. This time I had a touchdown at about 9m/s. The nuclear engines supposedly are rated for 12 m/s, and that for normal gravity, not the weak Münar gravity. Bt I finally realize the culprit for my failures: The engine nacelles are victim to the wet-noodle effect. Apparently, the game treats them only as fixed at the top, which makes them swagger and topple the whole vessel even at the slightest impact down at the other end, where the engines are. Damn, I should have used some struts!

Like this, the construction is basically a failure concerning landings, making those a high risk effort. But I am glad having verified that it is not entirely the fault of my crappy piloting.
I finally manage. Heff.

Next waypoint: Minmus. DeltaV is not as plenty as I had hoped, so here I try for a direct transfer to Minmus from Mün. This saves me about 500 deltaV, compared to a transfer from low Kerbin orbit, with an only slightly longer travel time.

Sometimes, game sessions pass very quickly when confronted with a bottleneck-like failure like today.

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