[1.12.5] Bluedog Design Bureau - Stockalike Saturn, Apollo, and more! (v1.13.0 "Забытый" 13/Aug/2023)

[alberro+]

[Pioneer_Steve]

Another shakedown of the Apollo Parts. This time I was testing the Lunar Module's new RCS quantity

Edited September 3, 2021 by Pioneer_Steve

[DeadJohn]

Urgent question about the "GMSS-IAM Inflatable Airlock Segment". Are they supposed to dock to each other, and if yes is there a trick to getting them to work?

I constructed 2 station halves but they won't attach in orbit. The docking magnets don't attract even if I adjust the force to 200%. I tried with the tubes uninflated as well as extended. I tried a variety of approach speeds just in case they worked more like the grabbing claw. The parts always bounce off each other.

(KSP 1.11.2, production BDB. 3 other BDB docking port styles work correctly.)

 

[CobaltWolf]

54 minutes ago, DeadJohn said:

 The docking magnets don't attract even if I adjust the force to 200%.

... how?

[Invaderchaos]

Trying to squeeze one (well two I guess) last probes in before the probe update is officially done. Mariner 3/4 and 5

 

[DeadJohn]

1 minute ago, CobaltWolf said:

... how?

Using the Advanced Tweakables config option. By default ports start at "100%" and I couldn't dock with that, so I experimented with 200% to see if the magnets would work then and still nothing. I haven't edited any BDB or stock config files.

I wonder if a KSP docking bug that's been around forever has corrupted my savefile. I see the symptom in gameplay (undocked GMSS-IAM status = "Locked") but my savefile doesn't show the symptom (status there says "Ready"). I'm still looking at my savefile and other forum threads to see if I can work some magic there.

In this thread I'm just trying to confirm that I'm using the parts correctly. I'm supposed to dock with the tubes deflated, and I should then expect them to work just like regular docking ports? Do the magnets work for others? If the ports aren't known to be bugged I'll start a new thread in the tech support forum to avoid cluttering this thread.

 

[CobaltWolf]

13 minutes ago, DeadJohn said:

Using the Advanced Tweakables config option. By default ports start at "100%" and I couldn't dock with that, so I experimented with 200% to see if the magnets would work then and still nothing. I haven't edited any BDB or stock config files.

I wonder if a KSP docking bug that's been around forever has corrupted my savefile. I see the symptom in gameplay (undocked GMSS-IAM status = "Locked") but my savefile doesn't show the symptom (status there says "Ready"). I'm still looking at my savefile and other forum threads to see if I can work some magic there.

In this thread I'm just trying to confirm that I'm using the parts correctly. I'm supposed to dock with the tubes deflated, and I should then expect them to work just like regular docking ports? Do the magnets work for others? If the ports aren't known to be bugged I'll start a new thread in the tech support forum to avoid cluttering this thread.

I mean, my confusion stems from, uh, it shouldn't have a docking module on it.

With that said, I just looked, and it in fact DOES. I wonder why. At any rate, it doesn't have a dockingNode transform so it wouldn't work no matter what you do.

[Bellabong]

So the Atlas leads to a shiny Agena, a shiny  GATV leads to a shiny GLV, which leads to a shiny Titan 3...

 

Still need a lot more work though

[Clamp-o-Tron]

29 minutes ago, Bellabong said:

So the Atlas leads to a shiny Agena, a shiny  GATV leads to a shiny GLV, which leads to a shiny Titan 3...

 

Still need a lot more work though

In the top left picture, if some of the minor detailing on the launch tower and the smoke cloud were gone, I’d have no problem accepting that that was a KSP screenshot!

[DeadJohn]

2 hours ago, CobaltWolf said:

I mean, my confusion stems from, uh, it shouldn't have a docking module on it.

With that said, I just looked, and it in fact DOES. I wonder why. At any rate, it doesn't have a dockingNode transform so it wouldn't work no matter what you do.

Thanks for confirming an issue with the inflatable airlock. I never used the part before, but thought it was your best looking part for radial attachment to expand stations.

Since I already had a big station 75% constructed in orbit before I noticed the issue, I did a savefile edit to retroactively replace the inflatable airlocks with APS docking ports:

name = bluedog.Gemini.InflatableAirlock bluedog.CXA.APAS.A.L04F

rTrf = bluedog.Gemini.InflatableAirlock bluedog.CXA.APAS.A.L04F

Edited September 3, 2021 by DeadJohn

[pTrevTrevs]

7 hours ago, AlphaMensae said:

The Agena/Centaur tower is a simple one because by the the time I got around to it, I was sick of making Atlas parts and did not want to spend even more time making all the various towers that Atlas used over the decades.   So I said "screw it" and made the basic mini-modular type for Atlas-Agena/Centaur.  

I was going to make the Agena arm usuable with the general towers as well, but it would have been even more work to add the switchable front wall those  tower sections, so I nixed that idea too.

I can’t fault you for that; the Atlas towers are frustratingly complex. It was hard enough to kitbash a convincing Agena tower, I wouldn’t dare suggest you try to make one from scratch.

6 hours ago, OrbitalManeuvers said:

I put a Not-a-Hubble into space:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

So that Hubble part is from SpaceDust, right? Does it actually have telescope capabilities akin to what you might find in CactEye or Tarsier, or does it have an entirely different purpose?

Edited September 3, 2021 by pTrevTrevs

[OrdinaryKerman]

37 minutes ago, pTrevTrevs said:

So that Hubble part is from SpaceDust, right? Does it actually have telescope capabilities akin to what you might find in CactEye or Tarsier, or does it have an entirely different purpose?

From what I gather in the SpaceDust thread, it finds orbital resource bands in the exospheres of planets

[septemberWaves]

On 9/1/2021 at 7:22 PM, DaveyJ576 said:

Okay, I need a little help. After two years of playing a Stock sized game, I finally moved up to KSRSS. So far the visuals have been blowing me away, but the learning curve on launching rockets is steep, and I knew that was going to be the case. BDB was waaay overpowered on the Stock system, but now I have having trouble getting to orbit, particularly with the Saturn IB. I just can't seem to get enough horizontal velocity. I use MechJeb on the Classic Ascent Profile. No matter what combination of parameters that I try, I can't get an Apoapsis of over 92 km and I really struggled with that. The S-IVB is still burning but it can't build up speed fast enough to get up to a usable orbit. Once I hit apoapsis the stack takes a dip and gets pulled back into the atmosphere.

After some fiddling with the MechJeb settings, I was successful with Mercury Atlas, Gemini Titan, and the ETS Saturn IC Apollo, but no joy with the Saturn IB Apollo. What am I doing wrong? First and second stages are full of fuel, all engines are upgraded, and I cut down the SM to mimimal prop and monoprop. I even tried to upgrade the first stage to four E-1 engines, but even that failed. I must be missing something very obvious. 

Classic ascent profile is not what you want. What you need is Primer Vector Guidance (PVG), it provides a better ascent profile by doing calculations on-the-fly to tailor the ascent profile to your launch vehicle's capabilities (for example, the thrust of the current stage, which changes with stage-and-a-half designs). There is one thing PVG doesn't handle, and that's half-stage separation; you'll have to jettison those manually at an appropriate part of the launch.

Additionally, rockets with solid orbital insertion stages don't tend to work overwhelmingly well with Mechjeb's ascent autopilot in general; for those, as well as any other rockets that PVG doesn't perform well with (or that you just want to fly manually),  I have a profile which typically works well and can be performed with Smart A.S.S (set to surface mode so your pitch and heading are relative to the surface):

Spoiler

1. Ascend to 1000m directly up, and ensure that your heading is correct for the target orbit. The default heading of 90 degrees is for zero inclination prograde.
2. Once past 1000m, begin reducing pitch by 1 degree every 200 meters, starting at 1200m.
3. Continue this until you reach either 50 degrees if your launch stage has low thrust, or 45 degrees if your launch stage has high thrust (i.e. at least about 3g by this point). Note that for stage-and-a-half designs like early Atlas rockets, it's better to use the higher pitch, because although the first stage will still be at full thrust by this point in most cases, it will soon lose the half-stage and have its thrust significantly reduced.
4. Once you reach an altitude of 20km, reduce pitch to 40 degrees. This is also usually approximately the point at which you should jettison any half-stage engines; I find with Atlas specifically it's often good to ditch the half-stage when current acceleration is about 3g to 3.2g.
5. Reduce pitch again by one degree per extra kilometer of altitude until you reach 20 degrees at 40km.

At this point, you should be able to hold prograde with most designs until you reach the desired apoapsis, though there are a few notable exceptions:

• Any vehicle with a solid orbital insertion stage must ensure that the apoapsis is in space before the penultimate stage burns out, since of course solids can only be started once. This can be problematic with certain rockets, notably Juno II, which will likely demand either a higher pitch earlier in flight, or throttling down after the 20km mark.
• Scout deserves special mention, being uniquely challenging to fly. While you can mostly follow this general launch profile with Scout, I would strongly recommend installing KRASH and doing some test flights to get a clear idea of its performance if you don't have reverts enabled. I often find it's actually necessary to reduce the fuel and thrust of several Scout stages (usually the first two, sometimes the third) to tailor it a bit better to the payload mass. Test flights for each payload are important to make sure you know how to do the trajectory. This is likely to be similar for other all-solid vehicles, though I have far less experience with others from BDB.
• If you have an especially low-thrust upper stage (nuclear upper stages come to mind), it can be beneficial to stop the pitch program at 30km instead of 40km, and hold 30 degrees until your first stage burns out. In this case, you'll be aiming for a higher parking orbit than one right above the atmosphere, to give your upper stage time to finalize the orbit. These kinds of rockets can be challenging to optimize a trajectory for, so I recommend some experimentation if you're planning on using something like this.
• Redstone-Atlas (and any other 1.5-stage design where the launch stage minus the half-stage reaches orbit) is another uniquely challenging rocket to fly like this, because you don't shut down the first stage engine until you reach orbit. Fortunately though, PVG can fly this kind of mission for you because the engine is liquid-fueled, and all you have to do manually is separate the half-stage.

For the actual orbital insertion, larger-than-stock systems can require deceptively long apoapsis burns if you're not used to it. PVG autopilot calculates when it needs to start burning (though this only works properly for liquid upper stages), but for manual launches you can approximate. If you can make a maneuver node quickly, that's obviously a good option and will be helpful for liquid upper stages in particular. With solids, keep in mind the burn time (the total burn time if you have multiple solid stages, such as with Juno), point prograde, spin-stabilize, and ignite the engines when your time to apoapsis is about a third of the burn time of the rockets; for multiple solid stages, just fire them one after another.

If you have a liquid upper stage and can't make a maneuver node quickly enough, you can approximate in a similar way if you know how much delta-v you're likely to consume from the stage for circularization. In this case, if you estimate what portion of the delta-v will be used, and apply that fraction to the remaining burn time, if you point prograde and start burning when time to apoapsis is roughly half of that number, you should be good.

One last point of note is that it's extremely helpful to give yourself plenty of room above the atmosphere in case your estimations aren't ideal. As an example, my standard parking orbits are usually 5 to 15km above the atmosphere for things that fly consistently with PVG, but I'll aim for at least 20 to 30km above the atmosphere if I'm flying manually with this launch profile.

One final note: while at least one of these methods (either PVG or the manual ascent profile, I can't remember which as it's been a while) definitely used to work fine with Saturn IB in JNSQ (which is about 2.7x stock scale), I can't confirm if it still does with the new Saturn revamp as I've not tested that at all yet.

Edited September 3, 2021 by septemberWaves

[Zorg]

16 minutes ago, septemberWaves said:

Classic ascent profile is not what you want. What you need is Primer Vector Guidance (PVG), it provides a better ascent profile by doing calculations on-the-fly to tailor the ascent profile to your launch vehicle's capabilities (for example, the thrust of the current stage, which changes with stage-and-a-half designs). There is one thing PVG doesn't handle, and that's half-stage separation; you'll have to jettison those manually at an appropriate part of the launch.

Additionally, rockets with solid orbital insertion stages don't tend to work overwhelmingly well with Mechjeb's ascent autopilot in general; for those, as well as any other rockets that PVG doesn't perform well with (or that you just want to fly manually),  I have a profile which typically works well and can be performed with Smart A.S.S (set to surface mode so your pitch and heading are relative to the surface):

  Hide contents

1. Ascend to 1000m directly up, and ensure that your heading is correct for the target orbit. The default heading of 90 degrees is for zero inclination prograde.
2. Once past 1000m, begin reducing pitch by 1 degree every 200 meters, starting at 1200m.
3. Continue this until you reach either 50 degrees if your launch stage has low thrust, or 45 degrees if your launch stage has high thrust (i.e. at least about 3g by this point). Note that for stage-and-a-half designs like early Atlas rockets, it's better to use the higher pitch, because although the first stage will still be at full thrust by this point in most cases, it will soon lose the half-stage and have its thrust significantly reduced.
4. Once you reach an altitude of 20km, reduce pitch to 40 degrees. This is also usually approximately the point at which you should jettison any half-stage engines; I find with Atlas specifically it's often good to ditch the half-stage when current acceleration is about 3g to 3.2g.
5. Reduce pitch again by one degree per extra kilometer of altitude until you reach 20 degrees at 40km.

At this point, you should be able to hold prograde with most designs until you reach the desired apoapsis, though there are a few notable exceptions:

• Any vehicle with a solid orbital insertion stage must ensure that the apoapsis is in space before the penultimate stage burns out, since of course solids can only be started once. This can be problematic with certain rockets, notably Juno II, which will likely demand either a higher pitch earlier in flight, or throttling down after the 20km mark.
• Scout deserves special mention, being uniquely challenging to fly. While you can mostly follow this general launch profile with Scout, I would strongly recommend installing KRASH and doing some test flights to get a clear idea of its performance if you don't have reverts enabled. I often find it's actually necessary to reduce the fuel and thrust of several Scout stages (usually the first two, sometimes the third) to tailor it a bit better to the payload mass. Test flights for each payload are important to make sure you know how to do the trajectory. This is likely to be similar for other all-solid vehicles, though I have far less experience with others from BDB.
• If you have an especially low-thrust upper stage (nuclear upper stages come to mind), it can be beneficial to stop the pitch program at 30km instead of 40km, and hold 30 degrees until your first stage burns out. In this case, you'll be aiming for a higher parking orbit than one right above the atmosphere, to give your upper stage time to finalize the orbit. These kinds of rockets can be challenging to optimize a trajectory for, so I recommend some experimentation if you're planning on using something like this.
• Redstone-Atlas (and any other 1.5-stage design where the launch stage minus the half-stage reaches orbit) is another uniquely challenging rocket to fly like this, because you don't shut down the first stage engine until you reach orbit. Fortunately though, PVG can fly this kind of mission for you because the engine is liquid-fueled, and all you have to do manually is separate the half-stage.

For the actual orbital insertion, larger-than-stock systems can require deceptively long apoapsis burns if you're not used to it. PVG autopilot calculates when it needs to start burning (though this only works properly for liquid upper stages), but for manual launches you can approximate. If you can make a maneuver node quickly, that's obviously a good option and will be helpful for liquid upper stages in particular. With solids, keep in mind the burn time (the total burn time if you have multiple solid stages, such as with Juno), point prograde, spin-stabilize, and ignite the engines when your time to apoapsis is about a third of the burn time of the rockets; for multiple solid stages, just fire them one after another.

If you have a liquid upper stage and can't make a maneuver node quickly enough, you can approximate in a similar way if you know how much delta-v you're likely to consume from the stage for circularization. In this case, if you estimate what portion of the delta-v will be used, and apply that fraction to the remaining burn time, if you point prograde and start burning when time to apoapsis is roughly half of that number, you should be good.

One last point of note is that it's extremely helpful to give yourself plenty of room above the atmosphere in case your estimations aren't ideal. As an example, my standard parking orbits are usually 5 to 15km above the atmosphere for things that fly consistently with PVG, but I'll aim for at least 20 to 30km above the atmosphere if I'm flying manually with this launch profile.

One final note: while at least one of these methods (either PVG or the manual ascent profile, I can't remember which as it's been a while) definitely used to work fine with Saturn IB in JNSQ (which is about 2.7x stock scale), I can't confirm if it still does with the new Saturn revamp as I've not tested that at all yet.

I've successfully flown the Saturn IB in JNSQ into orbit using the baseline H1 configs (without the 1973 era upgrades) using PVG. The settings I've used are in the BDB wiki,  essentially:

- 120-130km periapsis (we're lofting bit higher than the lowest orbital altitude),

- booster pitch start at 100m/s,

- booster pitch rate at 0.3 (which is lower than default) to ensure the first stage focuses on gaining altitude. This might be the most important setting here. The pitch rate determines the inital "dumb" trajectory of the rocket until closed loop guidance is initiated. Most rockets are fine with the default settings, Saturn IB is not.

- I even set Apoapsis to 300 so we can get into a nice 130x300km orbit comfortably.

Revamped Saturn IB is not in game yet but I believe JSO has been testing the planned balance and the end result is much the same.

Edited September 3, 2021 by Zorg

[Jacktical]

I've tried downloading the development branch but cannot find the new Apollo parts. Is there a different place I need to get them from?

[biohazard15]

10 minutes ago, Hatattack said:

I've tried downloading the development branch but cannot find the new Apollo parts. Is there a different place I need to get them from?

Check "apollo-saturn-revamp" branch.

4 hours ago, pTrevTrevs said:

So that Hubble part is from SpaceDust, right? Does it actually have telescope capabilities akin to what you might find in CactEye or Tarsier, or does it have an entirely different purpose?

Unfortunately no - its only purpose is to survey resources. SpaceDust also needs a config set for each planet pack, meaning that in most cases your Hubble is just a nice orbital trinket.

[Jacktical]

14 minutes ago, biohazard15 said:

Check "apollo-saturn-revamp" branch.

Unfortunately no - its only purpose is to survey resources. SpaceDust also needs a config set for each planet pack, meaning that in most cases your Hubble is just a nice orbital trinket.

Thanks alot  

 

 

[Entr8899]

10 hours ago, Invaderchaos said:

Trying to squeeze one (well two I guess) last probes in before the probe update is officially done. Mariner 3/4 and 5

 

Aren't these Mariners in Coatl Aerospace already? Perhaps you could sort something out with Akron?

[Pioneer_Steve]

Another day another launch in Kerbal Space Program, I wanted to give Titan a spin today, really loving the UA-1205 SRM's.

 

Edited September 3, 2021 by Pioneer_Steve

[Adam-Kerman]

[Zorg]

SIM bay in early alpha state is uploaded. Testing for basic functionality only, no balancing has been attempted yet. Also the underside of the CM decoupler is messed up (my bad lol) and needs to be re UV'd so its a known issue.

 

[Pioneer_Steve]

1 minute ago, Zorg said:

SIM bay in early alpha state is uploaded. Testing for basic functionality only, no balancing has been attempted yet. Also the underside of the CM decoupler is messed up (my bad lol) and needs to be re UV'd so its a known issue.

 

Legendary Talent  honestly.

[Sadaell]

On 8/31/2021 at 3:52 AM, DaveyJ576 said:

Does anyone have any idea of what may be causing these stick-like artifacts?

They are present throughout all phases of flight. They are semi-transparent and have a brownish tint. Game Data folder below.

This is a 1.11.2 install. Note that I had the same issues on a Stock 1.11.2 install. Only present on the Mercury. 

It happens when ConformalDecals parts cover RCS ports 

[Pioneer_Steve]

I love the SIM bay, I'm glad Al Worden got to see what he saw during 15

[alberro+]