Friday, May 9, 2014

The Delphinki Near-Kerbin Radio Observatory

Delphinki on the launchpad.
 So the most recent update to the game has added asteroids, which, sadly, can impact. Since I happen to be of the belief that planetary extinction effects are bad for the human condition, I've decided to begin work on my completely informally-educated response to the threat - Project Dragon.

The project comprises a series of launches to form a swarm of asteroid-killing satellites (the Dragon Formation) that are directed remotely from a specialized mission group on the ground. In order to target asteroids, however, I would logically need something capable of seeing them.
Coasting to orbit.

Enter the Delphinki NKRO. I genuinely have no idea if a space-based radio telescope is feasible (I worry that the same signals that allow it to communicate with the ground would inhibit detection) or precisely how it would function (asteroids don't natively broadcast radio, so presumably this functions more like Radar). Either way, though, this is the system I have chosen to use, and the actual working parts of the system will come in later launches.

Next time, I'll begin launching the Dragons.
Eyes front, Little Bean

Saturday, March 29, 2014

Landing on Duna and Project Going Forward

Caravan III touches down beside the Cargo Pod
With the Yondalla Mission's Caravan now safely parked in Duna's orbit, there was very little left to do but to land the cargo pod and the Caravan landers at George's site on the surface. Because manual landings aren't my specialty and I already had a few disasters manually landing the probes in the Donner Mission, I'd elected to put a Mech Jeb controller on each landing module.

Caravan IV Moved Wrongly!
Caravan II also moves wrongly.
 For convenience's sake and to keep my number of active flights down as low as possible for as long as possible, I separated each module from the Yondalla space craft individually and only more-or-less in time for their metaphorical bite at the apple. That meant that the fourth lander to launch from Kerbin, Caravan IV, was actually the first to make planetfall. Overall, the landing went very smoothly, but after realizing it was destined to land on top of the cargo pod, potentially destroying all of the vital scientific equipment and spare parts inside of it, vessel commander Huddrin Kermin took over control from his Mechanical Jeb, attempting to move over to the side a few meters using only his gimballed lander rockets. In spite of his best efforts, the system couldn't correct for the new vector in time, and the pod landed on its side - thankfully taking no damage and with no casualties aboard.

Caravan I Low Approach
The landings that follows proceeded smooth as glass, each landing relatively in turn, until Caravan II's MechJeb unit did something strange... burning for a landing, and then continuing to fire the rockets until it was in a very eccentric, very high orbit over Duna proper with bingo fuel.

Well... It's not on it's side anymore.
Since there's not much that can be done in space without fuel, and since Yondalla didn't bring the mostly-empty ORB tug along, there's actually very little that can be done with our Duna assets to rescue Caravan II. Fortunately, their life support systems were designed to function more or less indefinitely (barring some breakdown elements which I plan to model statistically), so it might still be possible to rescue them using Kerbin-Launched Assets.

And so, while Huddrin flips his spacecraft upright in the wrong orientation, and his crew prepares the tedious process of tearing out every fixture and installing it properly upright for the craft's "inventive" landed orientation, we have to make a few judgement calls about the mission, take what we learned and decide on a new plan going forward.

Now, I have been asked on the Kerbal forums and in a few other places why ZAXA has focused so heavily on Duna when Laythe seems the better candidate for colonization - after all, it has water and a thicker atmosphere that some speculate to be oxygenated. One is that a few have hinted that Laythe is going to have volcanic activity and high radiation problems in later versions of the game. The other is that I have a bias toward Mars (Duna's evident reality-based counterpart) as a potential "Earth II" planet. I think it's going to be the first planetary body humans go to beyond our own, and I would not be at all surprised if it were one day colonized.

So, going forward, I do want to grow the colony on Duna - I believe I once stated that 50 Kerbals would be enough to be genetically self-sustaining, so 4 more of these caravan-style landers should do it. Unfortunately we won't be able to bring them all at once on a big rocket train - that was too unwieldy. Pushing them to Duna orbit one at a time shouldn't be too difficult, provided we have a way to refuel whatever is pushing or pulling them at the Theseus station. That'll require getting the new Kethane Miner online in the near future.

So, moving forward, we'll need to move 4 pods and a buggy to Duna. I'd also like to land a Kethane miner at the colony, as well as sending a Hermes-Demeter-style Miner Mission to Ike.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Launching, Rendevous, and Docking of Caravan Missions 1-4

AH-001 Fuel Lighter
 So, even with the collapse of the Demeter-Hermes mission it was decided to go ahead with Yondalla - after all, there's only so many times per Kerbin year that you can transfer from Kerbin's orbit to the Duna-Ike system. While it's going to be a joke to launch Demeter II, we needed to fuel the Yondalla tug NOW and so I constructed and deployed an ad-hoc fuel lighter, designed simply to get into orbit, offload the vast majority of its remaining fuel into the tug, and then turn around retrograde and burn whatever was left, destroying itself with re-entry heating. Quick, simple, dirty, and a ten-minute mission.

Monday, March 10, 2014

Mundane Missions: Kethane Mining on Minmus, Fuel for Yondalla

So, after some debate about "whether or not to bother", it occurred to me that the whole point of setting up the Demeter-Hermes mission was that it was realistically more economical to take fuel from a moon, fly it into planetary orbit, and refuel there than do a half-dozen or so launches with surface-based craft to fuel up a similar-sized ship.

I was off doing some math on the efficiency of the process and I realized that I could fuel the Yondalla Duna Tug much more economically if I was bringing fuel in from Minmus rather than the Mun, which is pretty counter-intuitive given that Minmus is over twice as far away.

Twice as wide an orbit, however, is not the same thing as twice as much delta-v. In fact, round trip from LKO to Minmus is about half the delta-V (that is, half the fuel cost) as the same to the Mun, and so I decided to change my mining operations by moving them to Minmus - as soon as possible, since a design flaw in the Yondalla mission meant that it had to be fully fueled before we could load up the actual cargo.

Friday, March 7, 2014

Going to space without fuel.

Launches look like this. Totes Realism.
 So, at long last we make a little bit more progress with our Duna project.

I've decided to call the suite of missions to assemble the spacecraft that's going to Duna Project Yondalla. It's going to be a multiple-flight type of project - so far I've made four launches, and only just assembled the drive system.

Fuel Module and RC Depot in Place.
Many of these launches were made with empty fuel tanks on the "final" stages, just to keep the weight down and make it easier to make the orbits I needed. The construction orbit is just outside that used by Theseus, which will make it easy enough to fuel the ship later, once it is fully constructed.

The struts and Orbital Registration Bus (ORB) arrive on site.
The first launch was the main fuel canister and auxiliary power systems, along with a canister of extra RCS fuel, which will be useful later. This system has its own probe-core controller and short-range communications suite - partly because the former is necessary to keep the object spawned in game, and partly because realism is important and the probe core will help keep the fuel tank stable while we're docking other parts to it.

Maneuvering Alpha Strut into position.
The next launch was three parts launched all as one - a pair of full fuel tanks that double as separation struts for the engine modules, and a nifty little device called an ORB, which I'm using to correctly position the parts in orbit and then dock them to the craft. I've built orb-like designs before, but this is the first one I've built with an actual rocket attached to it, rather than just RCS.

Taking Risks to dock the Beta Strut
This part of assembly was simple, though Mech Jeb made me nervous by taking maneuvers I totally wouldn't. You simply need to dock on the first strut, disconnect the second one from it, dock that to the matching port on the far side, and then go back to Kerbin for the next launch.

It didn't really get complicated until we sent up the engine modules, which had to be docked the right way around. Once that was done, though, it's on to the next phase - designing and testing the first of three landers - A Cargo Hab.
Finished product after two launches.
ORB breaks away to go grab the first Engine Module.





Hauling the first Engine Module into place.

And we're locked.

Stealing some power from the nuclear engine.

Nuclear Engine, parking in orbit beside a station,
moving at about a mile per 5 seconds.

The completed Tug Module. Port side lost a shield.



Green Orbit is our station - this is the space near Kerbin.

















Saturday, February 15, 2014

Donner and Vasco De Gama: Project Duna, phase 1!

Donner I on the launchpad.
 So in the wee hours of the morning, ZAXA engineers rolled out the Donner Launch Vehicle to the platform. DLV was a purpose-build vehicle on the 3.5 metre platform provided by KW Rocketry, quad-boosted with basically just two stages to orbit - SRB burn and then liquid fuel burn. Donner, a trio of rovers intended to do site selection for a Kerbal colony on Duna, launched shortly afterward.

Donner Launch!

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Planning For the Future: Zaxton's Plans for Duna

Duna, the Fourth Planet from Kerbol, is the second-closest of all planets to Kerbin, our home, and far more hospitable to space travel than the closes, Eve. Naturally, this makes it a good prospect for colonization.

Of course, we can't just go off to another planet willy-nilly and set up a new society, any more than you could just go to another continent without a little planning, so we're going to take a conservative approach to colonizing Duna, and her moon, Ike.


Friday, February 7, 2014

Rocketeer's Lexicon: Delta-V

Simplified Rocket Equation
So for pretty much the entire narrative of this blog I've been talking about a quality of my spacecraft called Delta-V. I don't particularly like to type delta-v, but my alt-coding is not the best so I'm not actually sure how to type the actual Greek letter I am referring to. Oh well.

Anyway, delta-V, in simple physics terms, is the amount by which a velocity has been changed. There is one such formula for Delta-V based on a steady rate of acceleration over time that every high school student ostensibly knows and which most of you have forgotten, but that is okay because I'm not referring to it ever again. Delta-V in rocketry (whether real, sci-fi, or kerbal) refers to the amount by which a spacecraft can change its delta-V if you were to expend all of the propellant which it carried. Obviously, in staged rocketry this gets more complicated than single-stage rockets which is a part of the reason I occasionally miscalculate my delta-V budget and wind up doing stupid things like Barbara.

Delta-V is actually pretty easy to calculate manually, with a few known values and a good spreadsheet to keep track of the numbers you need. Alternatively you could use a few separate instances of the calculator app built into your computer, or a mod like Flight Engineer or MechJeb, which is my usual choice.

The formula above gives the formula for Delta-V given the velocity of the exhaust (v-sub-e), and the mass ratio (mass with fuel over mass without fuel) from which you take the natural log (ln). So the natural log of the mass ratio, multiplied by the exhaust velocity, gives you your total delta-v. Nominally.

Now, that only works for a single stage, so remember not to discount the fuel in any of the stages above it when you are calculating the dry mass (m-sub-i). This is part of the reason why it is in my view better to use a program like Flight Engineer or MechJeb for doing these calculations in Kerbal Space Program.

The delta-V calculation, or Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation, is one of the single most important equations in fundamental rocketry. If you play quite a bit of KSP or want to start making model rockets or are going to work for a major space agency (or space corporation) one day, you're going to need it. Advice from the interesting website Project Rho for aspiring hard-sci-fi writers is actually to have it on a poster or t-shirt. I simply memorized it as that was far easier.

Delta-V is so important because it is fundamentally the range of your spacecraft, which is to say a map of real distances in space is actually far less useful than a delta-v map showing the required delta-v to get from point-A to point-B. Making some exceptions for nifty things like the Oberth effect and aerobreaking, your fuel-based Delta-V is going to pretty well limit where you can go and what you can do once you've gotten there. Further, it's a useful measure of range because it already took into account the mass of a craft, so the delta-V of a TDRS satellite tells you exactly as much as the Delta-V of a Star Destroyer.

So, once you've got an idea of delta-v, it's helpful to have a map of delta-V values for the sorts of places you want to go in your world. If you are kerbonaut, there is an excellent one here. Happy Flying.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

The Hermes-Demeter Mission

Behold Hermes.
 I actually have no idea how mission numbering would work in a NASA-style nomenclature system for the following series of missions. I do consider the whole operation to be individual missions, but at the same time, the operation itself is basically a (functionally) infinite iteration of such missions.

After the catastrophe with Barbara, it became evident we needed a new system to get the Kethane we're mining from the Munar surface to a 100 km equatorial orbit around Kerbin. True to Kerbal engineering, anyone using ten parts where fifty would do the job just isn't trying hard enough, so I changed the entire mode of operation to a two-vessel system - remote tug Hermes and remote miner Demeter.

Monday, February 3, 2014

Theseus, Barbara Return, and a Lesson in Math

Theseus on Station, Pre-Deployment
So, you may recall our last project, in which we landed a kethane workhorse on the Mun. Now that it's got a nice belly full of Kethane and reconstituted Liquid Fuel and Oxidizer reserves, it's time to bring it home.

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Luna 2: The Quest for Kethane

Luna 2: Doin' it Right.
 So, way back during the first Heinlein mission, you might recall me vaguely mentioning having brought along a probe named Luna in the nosecone of the craft.

Now, Luna was constructed using parts from the fairly popular Kethane mod for Kerbal Space Program, an add-on that adds resource gathering gameplay to the game, allowing you to essentially create fuel in-situ in a properly designed craft.

The Luna probe, with its clumsily slow Ion drive and not enough power to really run it, wasn't all that helpful in finding the kethane from orbit, since its orbit wasn't very efficient. If you want to scan the whole surface of a body, orbit it pole-to-pole. As it rotates underneath you, your flight path moves across the surface, and after a number of revolutions you'll have pretty well mapped the whole thing.
Barbara on the Richeleau Heavy

Heinlein II: The Jeb-Squared Law

Rebels without a Clue
 When last we left our intrepid crew of Bertred, Dunmore, and Huddrin Kerman on the surface of the Mun, their Heinlein I landing vehicle had toppled over under the force of a gratuitously fast landing combined with an impractically top-heavy landing stage design. Stranded on the Mun with no help of repairing their broken, battered spacecraft, there can be no other help for these heroes than for the brave astronauts that follow them to be their saviours - even when they themselves failed the task!

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

The Heinlein Mission to the Mun

The 83-m Heinlein System
 Pretty much anyone who was born before me and who had an enjoyment of Science Fiction is going to recall an author by the name of Richard A. Heinlein, who in his heighday was one of the most revolutionary writers in the field, and from whom we derive the fantastic spacer adage "Once you're in orbit you're halfway to anywhere."

What Heinlein meant by this is that the single most onerous task in space travel in terms of the fuel required is breaking into orbit around a planet - such as what we do on almost every single flight, breaking orbit of Kerbin. The "burn" for this maneuver requires a delta-v of 4550 m/s, which can be quite a bit to squeeze out and is usually the largest burn on any mission.
Third boosting stage.

Heinlein favoured the moon in his writings, and I thought that today, instead of more fiddling with sattellites, it might be fun to launch a mission to the Mun. Credit being where it was do, Toddicus decided the name of the ship for me, and all this preamble about Heinlein has very little to do with anything related.

The rocket ascended rather well, powered by four titanic solid rocket boosters and two seprate liquid-fuelled rocket boost stages. In fact, thanks to having sat done to do the math beforehand, the initial maneuvering went very quickly.
 Getting a capture window I actually liked took a bit longer. I had the bare minimum amounts of delta-v required for the mission, mostly because the ship's double-payload was probably a bit over-ambitiously heavy, and I didn't want to resort to asperagus staging to get the damn thing into orbit if I could absolutely avoid it.

One you have a window though, it's as simple as pointing the rocket onto the maneuver prograde node and burning when it tells you to. Getting to the Mun is not really an achievement compared to some of the further-out missions.
Coasting in the void, farings deployed.

Sunrise and Farewell.
Why two payloads? The short answer was that I could. The longer answer is in parts - I'd never delivered a two-part payload to the Mun before and I wanted to see if it could be done at all - it can. I also have ambitions for the moon in keeping with Heinlein, namely the production of fuel from Kethane, because shipping that fuel from the moon to a low kerbin orbit would still be cheaper than flying it up from the surface of the planet itself. Physics hates space travel.

Luna spreads her wings ahead of Heinlein
So, the second part of the payload is actually a sattelite the astronauts are going to dump into Low Munar Orbit once they get there, ideally at about 14 KM. Now, this is a bit low for groundscan, but the sattelite itself has no propulsion system of any real utility, so I had to circularize the lander and the satellite in one shot. A future mission may be planned to push the process a bit further, if I can't make some adjustments with what little fuel the probe itself has.

So, with solar collectors unfurled and the burn complete, there was little to do other than to time accelerate and coast onward, but not without first taking some pretty pictures.

In orbit of Mun, post-separation
Very unfortunately, the taking of pretty pictures did not extend so far as watching the separation of Luna and Heinlein proper, since I wasn't expecting the sheer force that my decoupler was going to impart upon the satellite. I'm reasonably certain that the faring base has a decoupler pre-installed, which might save some effort on future flights.

I was actually pleasantly surprised that we made it to the moon with as much fuel as we did. I was always planning to kill the velocity on the landing stage with the same stage I used for the transfer and capture burns, but I wound up with something on the order of a third of a tank - the equivalent of a couple hundred extra meters per second of delta-v.

De-Orbit Burn, as scheduled.
What followed later was the usual space travel trope - a good ten minutes of boredom followed by a moment of sheer terror for the crew and a proper laugh for me, here related in the form of a proper story.

"Luna is away." Danburry, the Payload specialist, commented dryly for the benefit of the flight data recorder. "TLM is all good. Solar cells to full power, streaming kethane sensor data to KSC via Athos."
Inches from the surface

Flight Commander Hilbert Kerman nodded slightly, sucking a bit of overly-dry air through his helmet filters. "Roger. Rotate through one-eight-zero yaw... complete. De-orbit burn in three, two, one..."

Well, now what?
The de-orbit burn went smoothly - taken a bit longer than originally planned. Working purely on the fly, Hilbert had calculated that the remaining fuel on board was simply going to be too heavy, and would cause the landing legs to collapse under the force of the impact at the projected landing speed.

"Moving sideways a little faster than I would like," he muttered. There was only so much he could angle sideways while burning - the landing stage only had one thruster! Still, the overall surface speed was well within the calculated tolerances of the landing legs. 100m to go, then 50, then 25...

It suddenly hit home that Hilbert was to be the first kerbal to ever walk upon the Mun. He grip the steering mechanisms with a bit more anticipation than a moment ago, cutting out the fuel feed to the landing stage rocket motor.

There was a horrendous crash and a bang, a great roar of rent metal, and the whole ship was suddenly going ass over teakettle as the rocket nozzle dragged across the ground, tearing it from the ship which landed sideways with a vast impact.


Hilbert laughed a moment later, once a very agitated Samdred Kerman got done checking through his life systems. "They send up a ship with no damn ground clearance and we hit the one rock on the whole Mun!"

Now, there is some good news in this whole process. As near as I can tell the return stage and crew capsule weren't actually damaged, and I happen to be on a bit of an incline. I think there's enough torque in the system that I could potentially take off on an angle... with a perfect transfer orbit and generous aerobreaking on kerbin, there's no reason it wouldn't work.

We might try that next time, since they have no way of calling for a rescue mission.








Friday, January 24, 2014

Project ASARTES, Part 2: Conclusion, or, "Stationary".

Maneuver nodes take the guesswork out. Sorta.
 So, when we left off, we had an elliptical and highly eccentric orbit courtesy of my sloppy insertion burn. The first thing I did was say "Okay, Let's Circularize!".

Easiest way to make any change to orbit in the vanilla GUI is to use maneuver nodes. Since I haven't quite caved in to using MechJeb yet, I grabbed a node at apoapsis and plotted out the yellow orbit in the image on the left.

Then, I accidentally clicked space, giving us the present situation you see in the image, where my maneuver isn't actually on orbit. Whoops. I then time accellerated to get up there, whipped myself around so fast the probe batteries died, and had to reload the save. Hah.
Aramis under sail - Richeleu is "falling" away.

After about ten minutes of Ion Drive. Middle line is a debris.
Service Established!
 Oh well. Such things as these happened. What isn't shown is the three attempts of me playing with different orbit plans until I got the ship in a workable position, or the separation of Aramis from the carrier vehicle.

Once we got up there, though, I had the foresight to grab an image of Aramis burning under its nifty ionic engine - this thing takes some high voltage and uses it to accelerate Xenon ions at high speed. This I like, because the fuel lasts virtually forever, affording tons of Delta-V to the person willing to wait long enough for it to add up.

It was at around that point that I realized Richeleau wasn't going to de-orbit the way it is meant to. However, because I could EASILY have used more ion drive and less chemical rocket in the orbit, I reasoned it wasn't that unreasonable to imagine I had done so, and manually truncated it from the control center.
Space after we "correct" Richeleau
After another twenty minutes of play (comprising about a full day of Kerbin time), I more or-less circularized in KEO. I say more or less because it's not perfect... it is, however, close enough for our purposes, within about 10 km altitude on either side. As long as the ships themselves are properly in phase, it won't really matter anyway - one will always be in view of ground control.

So, for purely roleplaying purposes that have no point since SAS doesn't apply once you leave the perspective of the ship, I pointed Aramis at Kerbin and popped the antenna.

Then, off we went to the space centre to trim out the things that aren't meant to be in orbit.

The final orbit wouldn't naturally degrade. Woops.
Which brings me to the next problem I had. KEO isn't really exciting to shoot. I mean it was fun to do - way more fun than my usual attempts to just get to orbit with way too much kit. I won't be showing the other launches. It's just too tedious. To be honest, I'm going to cheat them into place using the in-game debug menu, and put them into place with the much faster chemical rockets. I know it's a little silly, but I don't want to spend another hour getting them all aligned correctly.

Next: What exactly did we need our own TDRS system for, anyway?

Project ASARTES: Kerbin Orbit Communications Network, Part 1

D'Artagnan, the ASARTES prototype. Differs from
Launch Version.
 So, yesterday some of you would have seen me doing commentary on the TDRS-L launch. TDRS is the NASA-administrated system of communications satellites that help ensure around-the-clock space-to-ground communications, which is pretty important if you find yourself in space, or if you're trying to do any sort of orbital research.

Kerbal Space Program has an equivalent to the orbits that TDRS occupies, called KEO, which is a Kerbin-stationary Equatorial Orbit, at a height of about 2.7 million metres. I've never really done any KEO projects for a number of reasons, so I thought, for giggles, a good first set of missions for the publicized version of the Zaxton Space Program would be establishing our own, much less populated, version of TDRS, which I am calling ASARTES.

We call this launch vehicle the Richeleau
 So, I designed a small satellite with lots of communications gear, and we're going to strap it onto a launch platform and put it in orbit. At present, there's no real point to this. My current modset doesn't bother calculating range or alignment for radio systems, so there's no "good" reason to do this, except that it's cool.

There were a few false starts with the same basic launch rocket design, owing to a few problems with aerodynamics and some other things I didn't fully understand. We eventually got around that by reducing the number of Solid Rocket Boosters attached to the Richeleau from 4 to 3. When there were four boosters, the vessel was prone to spinning.

If you haven't played KSP yet, or played around with KV Rocketry mod, I recommend it. There's a very satisfying khawump when you touch off the solid-state boosters.

Now, this design is actually well-balanced... it accelerates at just about the right speed, initially, that it is always just about at the terminal velocity for that altitude, under SSB power. I highly recommend giving thought to such designs as these. The lifting body of the rocket has its own probe core, in addition to that on the satellite, which is going to allow me to control it after the probe seperates, meaning I can de-orbit it and keep my space nice and clean.

 My only complaint about the boosters I used is that their lifespan seemed a bit limited, and I spent more time than I would have liked burning vertically against gravity on the main engines, before I got to the 10km altitude at which I like to do my gravity turns. In the future I might use larger SRBS.

Shown on the right is the moment of SRB-Sep, and you can see the main engine kick in. This engine is from KV rocketry. It's less powerful than I am comfortable with, but very fuel efficient, and actually does make a good main "boost" stage for a rocket of this size.

 This photo is a little less clear - I couldn't hit F1 fast enough to get a good screen capture of the moment of seperation between stages. The engine on the Orbital Stage pretty much tore me out of the first stage faster than the decoupler could push me.

I was pretty nervous at this point. I was hoping to make orbit, or at least a 70km apoapsis, on the first stage. I didn't show the map here, but I'd only done about half that by the time I flamed out from lack of fuel.

Aramis takes his first look at the stars.
I also screwed this up, too, and wasted a bit of fuel lugging around the mass of this faring. Basically, you want to blow the faring the instant you're out of atmosphere - once you don't have to worry about aerodynamics, it's just extra mass to waste thrust on.

I'm very happy with the way that KV Rocketry models farings and peels them away. This faring actually had four segments - a modification to the probe made it artificially taller than I thought it would be, which was another modification from previous designs. Not strictly a problem, but I broke a few spacecraft design rules with it, and we'll see if that was worth the effort.

Unfortunately, I actually have to pack house today, so I didn't go much further than this yet. I'd started the launch to see if the rocket even worked, and once I got it into a semistable orbit, I thought it would be a good time to take a break.

I quicksaved here and closed the application, concerned about that low periapsis, which would de-orbit me, but I didn't feel it prudent to wait the half-hour (or time accellerate) to get arouind the other side of the planet and boost it. This could work in my favour, though. I was thinking I would barely make low orbit (70km) on the launch vehicle, and I'm still on the second stage of it.

The plan moving forward will be to milk all the delta-V I can out of what's left of the chemical rocket, then proceed on the satellite's own thrust system. I have no doubt we will get to KEO in short order.