Shuttle Challenge v5 - The STS thread [Stock and Mod Friendly] - MAJOR CHALLENGE ANNOUNCEMENT! - 30.3.2020

[4x4cheesecake]

15 minutes ago, Kerbolitto said:

I should post my STS Mun 2/3/4 even if michal did not review my STS 1, that might give you some ideas .

 

Well, I always like to see how other poeple solves problems for a mission  
(In this case, I've created the biggest problem on my own since I want to build a base with mutiple modules, which isn't actually required for the challenge, so depending on your design, so your solution may focus on a different problem^^)

[Mr. Peabody]

STS-4

Spoiler

    

Lift-off/ Gravity turn

  

Circularization/booster separation

  

Final Orbit altitude: 357,021 meters          Final Orbit inclination: 25.5 degrees

STS-4R

Spoiler

  

Lift-off/Gravity turn

  

Circularization/Inclination matching burn/Separation of secondary tanks

  

Intercept/Rendevous achieved!

  

Crew is transferred from the stranded orbiter

  

End of rendezvous/Separation of primary booster tanks. We are headed home.

  

Zeroing inclination/decreasing altitude for re-entry

  

Re-entry/KSC Approach

  

Gliding towards runway/Touchdown. (Touchdown was very slow about 40 m/s. I was worried about a stall.)

Down and safe!

 

Also here is proof of crew pics:

Spoiler

Cockpit: Rodous, Valentina, Kirble

Crew module: Ragan, Dilton, Sherald, and Edemy     Total crew rescued: 6

 

 

[Alchemist]

Last time mod question was seriously discussed, the general consensus was like this - if it doesn't affect mission performance (aside from dead weight), it can be allowed under stock category.

Which basically boils down to:

• Modded shuttle/launcher propulsion and/or airframe components (including structural properties alteration like KJR part welding) =  modded category
  * since the introduction of auto-struts, Kerbal Joint Reinforcement is considered well enough balanced with current stock
• Visual, information mods, autopilots (within what allowed by the rules), as well as extra weight like life support = allowed in stock category
• Any stuff in the payload added on top of fulfilling mission specifications = allowed for stock category. For example on STS-3 it's completely OK to bring a modded telescope, you just still have to design the mission the way so that it still requires the orbital assembly.
• Payload components that are required by mission specifications or crucial for mission execution - that might be negotiable for stock-alike parts, but anything that allows better packing (or notably less mass) of the necessary stuff in the payload bay or easier deployment from there (like the various rover and base parts do, especially for surface deployment) is more of the modded category material.
• Relying on modded functionality for completing mission parameters (like for surface base assembly) = modded category
• Using modded functionality to bypass mission requirements (like using KAS for assembly on STS-3) = not allowed at all

Edited September 4, 2018 by Alchemist

[Artienia]

1 hour ago, Alchemist said:

Last time mod question was seriously discussed, the general consensus was like this - if it doesn't affect mission performance (aside from dead weight), it can be allowed under stock category.

Which basically boils down to:

• Modded shuttle/launcher propulsion and/or airframe components (including structural properties alteration like KJR) =  modded category
• Visual, information mods, autopilots (within what allowed by the rules), as well as extra weight like life support = allowed in stock category
• Any stuff in the payload added on top of fulfilling mission specifications = allowed for stock category. For example on STS-3 it's completely OK to bring a modded telescope, you just still have to design the mission the way so that it still requires the orbital assembly.
• Payload components that are required by mission specifications or crucial for mission execution - that might be negotiable for stock-alike parts, but anything that allows better packing (or notably less mass) of the necessary stuff in the payload bay (like the various rover and base parts do) is more of the modded category material.
• Relying on modded functionality for completing mission parameters (like for surface base assembly) = modded category
• Using modded functionality to bypass mission requirements (like using KAS for assembly on STS-3) = not allowed at all

i use USI-LS. Does that mean i can put a life module on a statoin or a lunar base and still it be stock category? It doesn't make my job easier, doesnt remove any stock featueres, same execution as everything else. because if  not i will just do the mission without it, send it and than later add it off-mission so mmy kerbals don't starve

Edited August 29, 2018 by Artienia

[Alchemist]

2 minutes ago, Artienia said:

i use USI-LS. Does that mean i can put a life module on a statoin or a lunar base and still it be modded category? It doesn't make my job easier, doesnt remove any stock featueres, same execution as everything else. because if  not i will just do the mission without it, send it and than later add it off-mission so mmy kerbals don't starve

Since life support is basically adding a few more things on top of what would work for stock, you can use it and still qualify for stock categogy

[Artienia]

21 minutes ago, Alchemist said:

Since life support is basically adding a few more things on top of what would work for stock, you can use it and still qualify for stock categogy

You sir has saved my life.

[Artienia]

Thoth Station Concept
Opinion?

[hoioh]

31 minutes ago, Artienia said:

Thoth Station Concept
Opinion?

It's long and hard and full of sea men?

Bit straight, don't you think? Maybe add some solar panels to the side, or make a cross out of it or something? All it would need is a 6-way coupler somewhere to make it a little more exciting

[Artienia]

Just now, hoioh said:

It's long and hard and full of sea men?

Bit straight, don't you think? Maybe add some solar panels to the side, or make a cross out of it or something? All it would need is a 6-way coupler somewhere to make it a little more exciting

Look on the side of CCcommand deck and Engineering. It is there

Also i wanted to put a 6 way but there is only one part in stock and it is 1.25 (or something like that). SSRX has a correct part but i fear if i incclude it i will go overboard on the mod : stock ratio and get a modded badge

[hoioh]

25 minutes ago, Artienia said:

Look on the side of CCcommand deck and Engineering. It is there

Also i wanted to put a 6 way but there is only one part in stock and it is 1.25 (or something like that). SSRX has a correct part but i fear if i incclude it i will go overboard on the mod : stock ratio and get a modded badge

I see it now. I was thinking more like a protruding truss on a docking port with 4 panels on it some such, one that requires an MMU to attach.

I've used that 6-way port more than once and placed adapters to 3.75m on each end and then a big docking port. With autostrutting it works just fine that way

[Artienia]

12 minutes ago, hoioh said:

I see it now. I was thinking more like a protruding truss on a docking port with 4 panels on it some such, one that requires an MMU to attach.

I've used that 6-way port more than once and placed adapters to 3.75m on each end and then a big docking port. With autostrutting it works just fine that way

i think i can do that

[michal.don]

Guess who's back  I see you've been busy, quite a bit of reviewing time for me, I'll probably be able to have a closer look tomorrow, so hang on a little bit longer

Michal.don

[Artienia]

52 minutes ago, michal.don said:

Guess who's back  I see you've been busy, quite a bit of reviewing time for me, I'll probably be able to have a closer look tomorrow, so hang on a little bit longer

Michal.don

HE IS BACK

Also have you considered hiring someone to help you review?

(EDIT: just wanna clarify i am not virtue-signaling for me to get hired, but for other people instead

Edited August 30, 2018 by Artienia

[michal.don]

34 minutes ago, Artienia said:

Also have you considered hiring someone to help you review?

I'd consider doing that if I was going to be away for a longer period of time. I think even you shuttle-nerds can survive a week without new badges

Michal.don

[Artienia]

6 minutes ago, michal.don said:

I'd consider doing that if I was going to be away for a longer period of time. I think even you shuttle-nerds can survive a week without new badges

Michal.don

Also what do you think about gettingg new badges? Any hope we see new (or expanded) badges? Any ideas? if you have would you care to share it?

 

Edited August 30, 2018 by Artienia

[4x4cheesecake]

2 hours ago, michal.don said:

Guess who's back  I see you've been busy, quite a bit of reviewing time for me, I'll probably be able to have a closer look tomorrow, so hang on a little bit longer

Michal.don

\o/ welcome back Michal.don How was your holiday?

We tried our best to prepare a 'few' missions for you to review but no rush to do so

[Artienia]

1 hour ago, 4x4cheesecake said:

\o/ welcome back Michal.don How was your holiday?

We tried our best to prepare a 'few' missions for you to review but no rush to do so

by that he means i had mission diarrea so sorry about that

[michal.don]

Alright, time to get to work.

I probably won't be able to do all the reviews at once, you guys managed to fill five pages of the forum, that's quite a lot, so I'll take a page-by-page approach. I hope I'll catch up quickly, so you get the badges soon, but no promises, sorry

Also, I'll probably be a bit briefer in my comments than usually, I only have so much time, and it's possible I'll miss something important, or a question or two along the way. If that happens - please let me know.

On 8/20/2018 at 8:00 PM, Kerbolitto said:

I went with a light station, not too shiny but actually effective and flyable. It has a cheetah engine, approx 8t. of fuel, RCS, science modules, com, lots of room etc etc..

A little unconventional design, intersting placement of the radial modules, but I like it  What are the delta-V stats of the station? Good enough for a Munar trip? or even further? 

Your report was a bit brief, but being familiar with your shuttle, I'll award you the badge. But the next time, please, include at least the liftoff/sep/orbit/reentry/landing pictures, too

On 8/21/2018 at 12:00 AM, 4x4cheesecake said:

Finally, some progress in my shuttle pilot career

Good to see you managed to tackle the difficult one, the one even NASA feared  About the Karman line crossing, you were right, not only it's allowed, but pretty much required

And about he poker chip stacks of badges - go for it, I'm quite curious how will that turn out to look!

 

Michal.don

Edited August 31, 2018 by michal.don

[michal.don]

On 8/22/2018 at 2:13 PM, Artienia said:

I know this sounds crazy but is Realfuels allowed? No Fuels other than LFO etc, so no fancy Liquid Hydrogen etc. Just having realfuels , no new fuels.

I guess it was probably answere a page or two down the topic, but to be sure - yes, it's allowed, but will place you in a "modded" category.

 

On 8/24/2018 at 3:12 PM, Artienia said:

Artemis I Shuttle Launch and Landing for STS-1

Well, that's a mighty fine looking machine you have there  And seeing that most of the entries are probably yours, I'd like to clear a few things with you before I get into it:

1) I see a lot of badges in your sig, and i can recall you flying some missions around here, and now you are starting over from STS-1a. Could you please remind me which missions you completed, and on which tier (pilot/commander)? If you would be so kind, could you send a link to the missions? If I went digging through the whole thread, I wouldn't be able to review anything else today  Thanks!

2) I can see a few mod tabs in your screenshots, but I don't recognize some of those. Would you please provide a modlist of your install, so I can decide if it's "stock enough"?

I'll review your missions as soon as I have an answer for those, I promise

Thanks!

On 8/25/2018 at 3:57 AM, 4x4cheesecake said:

I managed to visit every Jool moon and still had plenty of fuel left in the probe.

Impressive show of gravity assists, and the visual mods make it almost a piece of art  Also, great compact "pancake" design of the lander  

One thing I'm not certain of from the screenshots - the d-V readout of the transfer stage shows about 2500 m/s, and the maneuver is about 2000. Is the readout somehow borked, or did you really burn 500 m/s more, and dealt with the consequences later?

Here's your badge, this one very well deserved:

 

[Artienia]

3 hours ago, michal.don said:

I guess it was probably answere a page or two down the topic, but to be sure - yes, it's allowed, but will place you in a "modded" category.

 

Well, that's a mighty fine looking machine you have there  And seeing that most of the entries are probably yours, I'd like to clear a few things with you before I get into it:

1) I see a lot of badges in your sig, and i can recall you flying some missions around here, and now you are starting over from STS-1a. Could you please remind me which missions you completed, and on which tier (pilot/commander)? If you would be so kind, could you send a link to the missions? If I went digging through the whole thread, I wouldn't be able to review anything else today  Thanks!

2) I can see a few mod tabs in your screenshots, but I don't recognize some of those. Would you please provide a modlist of your install, so I can decide if it's "stock enough"?

I'll review your missions as soon as I have an answer for those, I promise

Thanks!

Impressive show of gravity assists, and the visual mods make it almost a piece of art  Also, great compact "pancake" design of the lander  

One thing I'm not certain of from the screenshots - the d-V readout of the transfer stage shows about 2500 m/s, and the maneuver is about 2000. Is the readout somehow borked, or did you really burn 500 m/s more, and dealt with the consequences later?

Here's your badge, this one very well deserved:

 

1) Badges are placeholders, no Stars are there. I just put them so i dont have to redo every timem i get a new badge. The Center ribbion is just to look cool. it shows how far i went in the world, it was mainly used to show my "'badge" without you judging it (cause you were away) but now u are here so it's only pourpuse is to look cool

2) - I just took a picture of STS 4 from my save and this is what it's things are. The icon i left blank is Janitor's toolbar.

)

Hope this anwsers some questions

 

 

Edited August 31, 2018 by Artienia

[4x4cheesecake]

10 hours ago, michal.don said:

And about he poker chip stacks of badges - go for it, I'm quite curious how will that turn out to look!

Me too

10 hours ago, michal.don said:

One thing I'm not certain of from the screenshots - the d-V readout of the transfer stage shows about 2500 m/s, and the maneuver is about 2000. Is the readout somehow borked, or did you really burn 500 m/s more, and dealt with the consequences later?

The readout is absolute borked for this one, it doesn't even show me the different stages, just a single one. I had some issues with the stages as well and had to rebuild the whole stagebar in space because when I hit the spacebar, the transferstage decoupled instead of fire up the engines xD. In the editor it shows me a dV of ~2750m/s but in reality is exactly 1955 (I guess the whole issue is caused by a strange root part which is required to get the correct attachment node when merging the probe with the orbiter).
In a separate savegame, I set up a maneuvernode to get the dV requirements and build the transfer stage to provide pretty much exactly this amount of dV. That's actually the reason why there are a few separatrons...the 4 SRBs sum up to ~1940m/s and the separatrons just pushed the numbers up to 1955^^

Well, I'm glad you believe me and already handed out the badge, but just for fun, we can do the math 'old school' style^^
(look at the screens for wet and dry mass...the mass in KER and the engineer report is different so KER calculates different dV numbers)

Wet mass: 19.293t
Dry Mass: 6.843t
Sum of ISP: (20 * separatrons + 4 * SRB 'Hammer') = 192.3s
dV = 1955.35m/s

I get even the same results in KER by rerooting the probe to the probecore:

IMGUR IS DOWN RIGHT NOW, TAKE THE VIDEO SHOWING THE MANEUVER UNTIL I CAN UPLOAD THE SCREENSHOTS:
(You can pause the video whenever you want, the dV readout of KER will always show slightly more than the maneuvernode readout)

Btw.: I'm planning to release the video of the whole flight, just for fun and I want to improve my editing skills^^

Edited August 31, 2018 by 4x4cheesecake

[Kerbolitto]

4 hours ago, michal.don said:

A little unconventional design, intersting placement of the radial modules, but I like it  What are the delta-V stats of the station? Good enough for a Munar trip? or even further? 

Your report was a bit brief, but being familiar with your shuttle, I'll award you the badge. But the next time, please, include at least the liftoff/sep/orbit/reentry/landing pictures, too

Thank you

In regard of lift off / staging of the shuttle, nothing changed about the lifter since the first STS missions. I finalized the orbit using the 2nd stage of the booster which has a ton of dV before activating the shuttle's engines. I included a screenshot of the re-entry maneuver I used at 18k meters (very hot xD), and here is are some more pics in the spoiler below abour final re-entry / landing procedure .

The whole assembly is now very efficient and the shuttle has a lot of dV even without using it's maximum Lf-storage configuration !

Spoiler

Final approach, this more developped version of the shuttle version with tilted wings has a lot of lift and allows for very VERY slow landings !

STS 5 6 7 on the ground :

 

Also the whole space station has almost 1300 dV, so it's enough to circularize on low-mun orbit

Spoiler

 

Should I take more pics for my next attempts ? I'm flying STS Mun 2 right now so tell me what you wanna see

Edited August 31, 2018 by Kerbolitto

[michal.don]

39 minutes ago, Artienia said:

1) Badges are placeholders, no Stars are there. I just put them so i dont have to redo every timem i get a new badge. The Center ribbion is just to look cool. it shows how far i went in the world, it was mainly used to show my "'badge" without you judging it (cause you were away) but now u are here so it's only pourpuse is to look cool

2) - I just took a picture of STS 4 from my save and this is what it's things are. The icon i left blank is Janitor's toolbar.

Thanks for clearing that up for me, now I know everything I need to

About the badges... I asked just to be certain - I thought you completed only a few of the "Kerbin" missions, but I wanted to be sure. Since I was right, I have to ask you to remove the badges from your signature - the badge symbolises missions completed, and I consider them to be kind of bragging rights - "look what I have done with my shuttle" of sorts. Don't worry, when you get there, I'll be really happy to award you every single one of them, but this will have to wait after the mission is succesfully flown. I'll get to your entries in about day or two, but in the meantime, here's one for the first one - that one I already saw, and this one you deserve

And about the mods - the only one I have slight issue with is Hyperedit, but this challenge works pretty much on honor system, so I won't make you uninstall it, as long as you don't use it.

 

10 minutes ago, 4x4cheesecake said:

The readout is absolute borked for this one, it doesn't even show me the different stages, just a single one. I had some issues with the stages as well and had to rebuild the whole stagebar in space because when I hit the spacebar, the transferstage decoupled instead of fire up the engines xD. In the editor it shows me a dV of ~2750m/s but in reality is exactly 1955 (I guess the whole issue is caused by a strange root part which is required to get the correct attachment node when merging the probe with the orbiter).

Yeah, the same thing happened to me too, I was just curious whether it's the same issue, or a creative transfer to Jool

10 minutes ago, Kerbolitto said:

In regard of lift off / staging of the shuttle, nothing changed about the lifter since the first STS missions. I finalized the orbit using the 2nd stage of the booster which has a ton of dV before activating the shuttle's engines.

Alright, I get that, noone wants to upload the same set of screenshots every mission he flies, but I need at least something to be able to tell what was going on  So, please, just a pic or two of the usual procedures next time  

 

Michal.don

[Artienia]

1 minute ago, michal.don said:

Thanks for clearing that up for me, now I know everything I need to

About the badges... I asked just to be certain - I thought you completed only a few of the "Kerbin" missions, but I wanted to be sure. Since I was right, I have to ask you to remove the badges from your signature - the badge symbolises missions completed, and I consider them to be kind of bragging rights - "look what I have done with my shuttle" of sorts. Don't worry, when you get there, I'll be really happy to award you every single one of them, but this will have to wait after the mission is succesfully flown. I'll get to your entries in about day or two, but in the meantime, here's one for the first one - that one I already saw, and this one you deserve

And about the mods - the only one I have slight issue with is Hyperedit, but this challenge works pretty much on honor system, so I won't make you uninstall it, as long as you don't use it.

 

Yeah, the same thing happened to me too, I was just curious whether it's the same issue, or a creative transfer to Jool

Alright, I get that, noone wants to upload the same set of screenshots every mission he flies, but I need at least something to be able to tell what was going on  So, please, just a pic or two of the usual procedures next time  

 

Michal.don

1) Will remove the badges, as requested
2) I only have hyperedit so i ccan test the shuttles. Like STS 4 i wasnt sure if it could dock, so i used hyperedit. Than when they ould, i launched the real mmission

[michal.don]

Just now, Artienia said:

1) Will remove the badges, as requested
2) I only have hyperedit so i ccan test the shuttles. Like STS 4 i wasnt sure if it could dock, so i used hyperedit. Than when they ould, i launched the real mmission

1) Thanks, I hope you understand the reason why I asked you to do this

2) I used HE for testing too, but since the "Set orbit" option was included in the "Cheat menu", I do not need it anymore - have you tried that? HE caused me a fair share of problems, so I was glad I could get rid of it....