What did you do in KSP1 today?

[DerekL1963]

1 hour ago, Angel-125 said:

I finished up the adapter part that goes from my classic hex truss system to the new D2 truss system:

Where is your classic hex truss to be found?

[Angelo Kerman]

1 hour ago, DerekL1963 said:

Where is your classic hex truss to be found?

It's in the DSEV mod. It's "classic" in that it is about two years old now. I designed it to fit in the Mk3 cargo bay, and it was originally based on the truss design for NASA's Discovery II. But they looked like escher drawings from a distance, so I changed them, and eventually redesigned them to somewhat resemble the chassis from the Buffalo mod. 

The newer D2 trusses are just upscaled versions that are sized for 3.75m parts. In fact, I originally wanted them to be 3.75m, but also wanted them to fit in the Mk3 cargo bay, so the 2.5m form factor won out. After making the new 3.75m crew parts for DSEV, the 2.5m trusses just didn't look right. I did consider making them 2.5m. But 2.5m crew parts have been done many times, and I haven't seen many 3.75m ones done in pork-alike style...

My hex trusses are so named because that's what NASA calls them in their paper. But The first mod to use the name hex truss was created by @SpeedyB and you can see the elegance that my trusses lack here:

 

Edited February 23, 2017 by Angel-125

[DerekL1963]

1 minute ago, Angel-125 said:

It's in the DSEV mod. It's "classic" in that it is about two years old now.

Ah, I presumed "classic" meant "had been out for a while".       I remember Speedy's...  used to use them sometimes (though I prefer 4-way symmetry to 3-way) before Nert's NF Construction.   I'm always on the lookout for truss systems, I'm a bit of a sucker for them.

[JadeOfMaar]

I did a bunch of test flights again, mainly playing with the buffed Whiplash engine again. I replaced the vector engines with two more Whips so no more engine clipping, and am now able to effectively use both modes of the Rapiers. Landing this plane was a little trouble since it's a lawndart.

Afterwards I tried to make a Gratian SSTO and failed. Not wanting to trash this design I figured it would work on Niven. It works very well going up but landing is as always, another chapter and another time.

 

[MaverickSawyer]

Hunting for any missed scraps of science in Minmus' equatorial belt.

[winged]

3 hours ago, Rock3tman_ said:

@winged this is awesome! I find the Orion Mars mission is awesome and I'm looking forward to another one of your epic videos.

Ares, not Orion.

[NISSKEPCSIM]

Today I landed on Minmus for the first time. Val became the first Kerbal to set foot on the mint green ice cream. 

More here:

The third one from the bottom is my Minmus landing.

Edited February 23, 2017 by NISSKEPCSIM

[joacobanfield]

I planned a course for the Mun. Then I realised it went through Kerbin.

It took several tries to get a Mun encounter. I didn´t have enough fuel to land, so I just made a quick flyby. Today, however, I´ll see how that Munsplorer thing I unlocked fares.

 

EDIT:

Now to get back...

Edited February 23, 2017 by joacobanfield
Added Mun pic!

[Red Shirt]

I killed Bill. If I had been listening to the 5.6.7.8's at the time it would have been kind of poetic.

Of all the choices to transport crew back and forth to the KSS, I had to use 2 stacked Hitchhikers. Bill was in the bottom one during reentry. When the Wiki says crash tolerance of 6 m/s they aren't kidding. The parachutes brought it down at 7 m/s. Guess I should probably add some landing legs to absorb the impact. What a rookie mistake. Not the first, won't be the last. I'm sure Bill 2.0 will be up to the next run.

[dboi88]

Finished another new part, Space Aquarium for all your tourists to visit. 

[astroheiko]

I put my Gratian SSTO in the orbit of Gael. Just a few rapiers attached and already I could start.

 

I just had to take care that the MK1 cockpit was not getting too hot. So could not accelerate quite as fast as usual.

 

I chosed an orbit of 400km to wait for the start window to Gratian. 1587 m/s I need and then still a little to brake when I arrive in the Gratian system. I'll try an aerobrake maneuver with a high AP. Could be a bit tricky with the MK1 cockpit. But I have a total of 3500 m/s dV available, so enough reserves to brake. And I can make ISRU if I am on the surface.

In addition, I need a vehicle to get back home, because the SSTO will not have enough fuel left when I'm back from Gratian. In addition, I want to leave it in the orbit around Gratian, if I want to come back again. It can be used again and again.

 

And since eddiew has such a beautiful round space ship, I have built mine a little bit like his. A small hommage to eddiew.
When it is grown up, it also wants to be so beautiful.

Greetings

Edited February 23, 2017 by astroheiko

[HalcyonSon]

On 2/19/2017 at 10:11 PM, Spacetraindriver said:

Today I held shift and pressed a directional key and... TA DAH!

I knew this was a feature, but I never knew how to do it!

What feature?  Is that Kerbal... tilted?

 

On 2/20/2017 at 10:09 AM, McFarnsworth said:

and since I had some room left in the spaceplane's cargo hold I stuffed one of these in there because of ... reasons.

Is that a Kerbal Speeder Bike?!

 

On 2/22/2017 at 2:31 AM, Dafni said:

Undock multiple ports simultaneously by action groups.

Furthermore, if you undock a port, it wont immediately redock AFAIK. You have to move away a few meters and wait a few seconds before they remagnetize, at least it was like that last time I checked. And if they changed that, the action group thing should still work.

Right-click to undock one, and it undocks all of the ports between two ships.  No action group necessary.  

[McFarnsworth]

10 minutes ago, HalcyonSon said:

Is that a Kerbal Speeder Bike?!

Yes and no. It's where I got my inspiration, but I had no clue anymore what they looked like and I didn't bother googling so this is what fell out of my brain.

 

 

In the meantime I minimized my Vall, Bop and Pol lander to combat the feature bloat of my Jool mission.

"Good Farns, good, you're learning"

 

... but then I decided I needed to bring a spare 50+ ton Tylo lander.

"No, no, bad Farns, bad"

[Tyko]

Just (accidentally) set up a really fun corkscrew flyby:

 

[Fearless Son]

1 hour ago, McFarnsworth said:

... but then I decided I needed to bring a spare 50+ ton Tylo lander.

"No, no, bad Farns, bad"

Is the resemblance to a hermit crab intentional?  

[McFarnsworth]

29 minutes ago, Fearless Son said:

Is the resemblance to a hermit crab intentional?  

I spent days trying to make a spider, but it either looked like crap, lacked dV or carried too much dead weight.

Then I tried to make something out of a fairing truss system, but I couldn't get it balanced properly.

Finally I just made something functional that was vaguely in the right shape that it needed to be (flat and wide, mostly). Which I then spent some time on trying to make it look organic and alien by segmenting the fuel tanks and angling them. While experimenting with that I noticed that it did kind of look like a crab, so I tweaked it a bit to make it resemble one a bit more without sacrificing functionality or usability. ... and then I randomly slapped some more fuel on it.

 

tl;dr No, but kinda yes

[eddiew]

After the cramped darkness of the ancient city near Rald's equator, the crew decided to make a break for open space - literally. There isn't a lot of spare capacity on Squeakbat, but about 500 units of LF are transferred to the HyperRing, and it's never going to hurt to have a little more than the mission planners intended.

Having come to a screeching halt teetering perilously over the edge of a volcanic crater, Leo and Thystle insist that Lyssa fly somewhere a little more sedate. And what's more sedate than a lush, green valley?

Due to a peculiarity of rotation vs orbital speed, Tellumo rises as the sun sets. Seems like a nice place to spend the night...

The southward jaunt to Kargyre is likely to be the last science gathering trip, and the crew decide to spend a few days lounging around on the lush green plains and pretending that the radio isn't working. The transfer window home is some time away, and what mission control doesn't know won't hurt them, right?

(If anyone wants to educate me on how to not have scatterer put that sort of glow/line effect at the horizon when it should be hidden behind the high terrain, I'd love to know!)

3 hours ago, astroheiko said:

And since eddiew has such a beautiful round space ship, I have built mine a little bit like his. A small hommage to eddiew.
When it is grown up, it also wants to be so beautiful.

Heh, I wouldn't say it's particularly ugly

If you want a building tip, try surface-attaching nosecones to the end of your ring tanks. That way when you node-attach them and rotate, the cones make a nice overlap and you get a much smoother seam. Hardly adds to the weight ^^  If part count becomes an issue, consider the welding mod. I think my HyperRing is only about 20 parts all told, because each the ring is only 2 weldments.

[Curveball Anders]

I got a chance to show KSP to some real (astro-)tech nerds and managed to bodge up an Apollo style lunar mission from scratch (sandbox, new install (and MJ), hosts' computer).

And despite the beers before and during the demo it actually worked

Good becuse I probably hooked some new addicts, but bad because I might have caused a delay to proper research ...

[HalcyonSon]

4 hours ago, McFarnsworth said:

Yes and no. It's where I got my inspiration, but I had no clue anymore what they looked like and I didn't bother googling so this is what fell out of my brain.

 

In the meantime I minimized my Vall, Bop and Pol lander to combat the feature bloat of my Jool mission.

"Good Farns, good, you're learning"

The Speeder looks great all the same.  I may try to recreate that for fun around the KSC and for my Minmus tourists to have something to do up there.

I was going to comment on your "minimized" science drone... until I realized there's a command chair in each of the side pods.  That is very minimal for an atmosphere world.

[cantab]

I did it! The Queen lander put a Kerbal on the Moon.

 

Getting back to orbit was a close thing, I had to use most of my 15 units of monoprop to make it safe, then send the orbiter to do the rendevous.

Now to get them home. Although ... I'm tempted to try for a second landing! I have enough fuel in the orbiter to fill the lander and leave just enough to get back to Earth, although the Kerbal would need to jetpack to finish getting back to the orbiter after landing. It'll be a close run thing, but fun to go for.

[Rex2.0]

I went to Sarnus today! It was cool! And pretty!

[septemberWaves]

I launched the four satellites and two uncrewed payloads for my Constellation-style mission to Duna. Full mission report can be found here.

[SleepyMan]

Just started playing KSP this week, so far I have learned to:

• Successfully fly rockets into orbit.
• Place satellites into orbit around Kerbal and Mun and Minmus (once I realised Kerbal had two moons but only one Mun )
• Crash Land probes on Minmas and Mun
• On Minmas Kerbals can easily tip their lander over when trying to crash fly back to the hatch.
• Service module doors make excellent impromptu launch devices (at least on Minmus)
• 10 units of Mono prop has enough dV to place a capsule in LKO on a return trajectory in extremis.

Too much dV can be a bad thing, you might get cocky and think that after orbiting Mun you still have enough dV to fly to Minmus and crash  land. Unfortunately getting back was not so easy. Ended up not sure what would happen if I re-entered on my Lander with over 3k orbital speed. My previous highest re entry speed had been with a simple capsule coming in @ 2.5k. Now I had a much bigger lander coming in @ 3.3k iirc

I did panic when using the service doors didn't simply tilt the lander up but actually threw it up 15m. A panicked full throttle burn for far too long straight up wasted dV and placed me on an even higher orbit to eventually return to Kerbal from.

So playing safe I decided to aerobrake. First braking was successful but left me with a 25,000km apoapsis. However my orbital velocity was still over 3k, so I repeated the aerobrake  for a new apoapsis of 15,000km. Over a day of in game time later and more aerobraking manoeuvres than I care to remember I finally felt brave enough to go for it ... sucess and a ticker tape parade for Jeb.

Now I've got to learn how to successfully rendezvous in orbit with another craft, my first attempt got me within 700m and with a target velocity of 140m/s empty fuel tanks and a valuable lesson in the uses of monoprop.

[JadeOfMaar]

An identical Iota lander was launched and and set into an 18km polar orbit. With a fraction of the same grace and timing of eddiew's pilots, this one launched up and secured an encounter without needing to wait an orbit, but not before a quick check of the science loot was done. Since this first one had no probe core, Eiyuu had to personally deorbit it and use his EVA pack to catch up again with the rescue vessel. Powered aerobraking was the method of choice for the return to Gael's surface, namely because the heat tolerance of the adapter part for the lander's stubby feet are unmeasured, and the CoM isn't as far down as desired, making it easy topple when the engine stops, but best of all, with that rogue crossfeed switch disabled the missing nearly 1500m/s dV from before was available.

With 40% science return and just 2 science parts, Eiyuu and Samael brought home 300 science points, adding up to about 400 and just over enough to open 2 precious tech tree nodes.

  

[eddiew]

1 hour ago, JadeOfMaar said:

An identical Iota lander was launched and and set into an 18km polar orbit. With a fraction of the same grace and timing of eddiew's pilots, this one launched up and secured an encounter without needing to wait an orbit

Satisfying isn't it   Fairly easy around small bodies where you have time to think, since as soon as you get *any* close encounter marker you can burn more horizontal or more vertical to adjust where the intercept happens. Wouldn't really want to try it from Gael with a spaceplane though, that would be really hard to eyeball xD

I can't help but wonder if a mod could be written to calculate a good launch window for orbital rendezvous, say giving you +/-30 seconds around the optimal, based on the TWR of your vessel...