Mission 3: Mapping the Mun!

Now that we've successfully proven that the Kirby Space Program is capable of both lifting a man into orbit and successfully recovering him once he lands on Kerbin again, it's time to set out sights a little higher! The obvious first choice for a more advanced mission is the Mun. It's close, it's in a tidy orbit around Kerbin, and we don't have to do anything too too crazy to get there, like leaving the local orbit of Kerbin and getting into the big leagues and establishing our own orbit around the Sun.

However, nothing is ever easy! Even with just going to the Mun, we have a lot of prep work to do. First and foremost, we have no idea about the topography of the Mun, besides what we can see by staring at it from the surface of Kerbin. Already, from there we can see it's littered with craters and valleys, which end up posing a big problem, because all the planning in the world won't help us out if we nail the delta/V and get everything right and then realize that our landing spot is on the side of a crater and at a 45 degree angle. If we try to land there, odds are we'll just tip the craft and strand anyone in the capsule on the Mun. So, it's very important that first things first, we need to send an unmanned probe to the Mun to map it for us, so we can pick a nice landing spot and look for any interesting anomalies.

Mission 2: Journey to Easter Egg Island

I know that the Kerbal solar system is loaded with little easter eggs, and I want to make a big point of never passing up an opportunity to find one if I spot it. In that nature, tonight we're going to launch a hopefully short mission to get about 50km away and check out what appears to be the first easter egg! It's sounds like a simple task, but remember, this is Kerbal, laced with bad decisions, ineptitude, and anything can happen!

Mission 1: Operation Orbit

For our first mission, we're going to tackle the simplest of tasks: sending a manned craft into orbit around Kerbin, the home planet of the Kerbals and our analogy of Earth. Along the way, we'll develop and enact a solid system to recover Kerbals landing after re-entry and dive deep into the wonderful world of calculus and trigonometry as we learn how to calculate a rocket's potential delta/V and how to calculate the delta/V of a trip, or, in layman's terms, see if you got enough gas!

Introduction and rules

Welcome, to the anointed halls of the Kerbal Space Program's infamous South Base!

This blog will follow the misadventures of me, Kirby, and my adventures into playing the game Kerbal Space Program. For the uninitiated, Kerbal is a very unique game- the game puts you in charge of a fledgling space program in a universe slightly akin to our own. There are no missions or goals in Kerbal, you have the solar system at your disposal, and you can build your own rockets and explore said solar system to your heart's content. The catch? The game is extremely realistic and follows most of the real laws of physics, and actually launching a mission successfully becomes a daunting task, often requiring several hours worth of trial and error and pen on paper arithmetic, and the slightest miscalculation or error in foresight can, and will, lead to grave troubles in the most important moments of the mission. Despite the hefty amounts of math and science involved with playing the game well, the game is cheeky and fun, with the Kerbals portrayed to be relatively dumb and incompetent, despite the fact that they're conducting deep space missions with ultra-high level technology.

So, I've been playing Kerbal for around six months now, and I've come to grips with it and become a semi-decent player. This blog will follow my pursuits and be a creative outlet for me to dramatize the missions. For continuity, I'll lay down some ground rules.

1. No ending flights premature. Every launch is a launch and will be treated as such.

2. No unnecessary killing of KSP personnel. Every vehicle must have built in crew safety redundancies which much be deployed in the event of an emergency.

3. No stranding of KSP personnel. Anyone who leaves Kerbin must have a ticket home as well. Anyone inadvertently left behind must be rescued before the next mission may proceed.

Other than that, that's about it! Let the fun begin!