What did you do in KSP1 today?

[NoPanShabuShabu]

With the Eve Science Rover nearing the completion of a circumnavigation of Eve, my thoughts turned to return vehicles. I can return these guys in my sleep, but I was thinking of how everybody hates to see the Kerbals sitting in seats on the ship during atmospheric flight. So, how about if I stick the guys in a fairing?

Here's a test in the Suicide Simulator. Some were critical of the fact that their heads were sticking out of the fairing, but separating the fairings proved successful, despite the protests of the Bob simulacrum.

[Biff Space]

After a couple of days of flying fuel up to a pair of ships in orbit around Kerbin, I was ready to send off my first manned mission out of Kerbin's SOI - to Jool. There's a ship with two kerbals in it, and an unmanned one with a bunch of fuel to donate to them to get them home - I hope. Both have a couple of landers and probes stuck on the front, too, so I hope to get a good look at Jool and its moons. Everyone's got their fingers crossed for brave Maclorf and Ribdos Kerman back home.

A few days later, a mission I launched ages ago got to Eve with some rovers. By pure luck I got into an aerobraking orbit with literally the last few drops of fuel, and got a couple of working rovers on the surface not in the sea. So I went for a drive:

[benzman]

Me being your actual Grumpy Old Man who rarely listens to music, I usually play KSP in silence, without the earphones. Today I D/Led the Chatterer mod and found that the music tended to drown out the speech. So I hunted through the file structure to try to find the default music files and suppress them. Couldn't find them anywhere. I was just about to make a public fool of myself by asking on this forum how to disable the music when it occurred to me to look in the 'settings' menu. Duh!

[SpaceGremlin]

After obtaining my first tier 7 techs in my current career, I assembled a small science station.

Eventually I'll haul it into a higher orbit and retrofit it for antimatter production.

[Pwnstarr]

Testing a prototype Monorail

http://imgur.com/a/PK053

I used docking ports to link track pieces but I'm not happy with that... I need something that keeps the individual pieces as separate crafts but still keeps them lined up enough to drive over.

I figure that way I could travel beyond the physrange, how awesome would that be?

haha awesome

[KerbMav]

The Explorer II - KER window shows values for Gilly - I expect this to be rather sobering in actual LKO, long burn times ahead, captain.

The cockpit and drive section detach to form a mining-expedition-lander. Several planets/moons can only be visited with less full tanks, some not at all regretfully - I will send automated ships to supply appropriate landers or launch individual missions for these.

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Launch and assembly at KSS is scheduled for tomorrow.

Flight plan is totally scaring me, as I have no idea yet in which order I should fly to all of the planets (with anomalies at least), but first the ship will have to proof itself at Mun and Minmus anyway.

[Robotengineer]

I accidentally killed 11 Kerbals whilst attempting to deorbit a station that ran out of food, probably should have just sent up food.

Edited May 22, 2014 by Robotengineer

[Amihan]

I actually did the opposite! I left Jeb on a space station orbiting the Mun for about five years. I wanted to get rid of the station, but couldn't bear to lose Jeb (even if I knew space magic would just put him right back in my roster), so I sent over a little rescue rocket and brought him home.

It's a tiny accomplishment, but I'm proud of it! I rewarded myself by deorbiting the space station afterwards because explosions Now I just have to, er, rescue the guy I left on Duna...

[joekidd1992]

I went and landed on the Mun again. My second one. Got some science and made it back. Then I had the great idea that I'll put lights on and land in the dark. Lights didn't work well and I bounced around several times. But, I did get the one in.

[corvustech]

I accidentally killed 11 kernels whilst attempting to deorbit a station that ran out of food, probably should have just sent up food.

11 kernels eh....there are simpler ways to make popcorn than via re-entry.

My evening has been full of fail, as well. I've been grinding career mode to sort of force myself to become better as a Kerbal Engineer. While I did successfully just land Jeb on the moon....

Jeb got out, planted a flag, got some science, ran some experiments.....and got comfortable. I dont' even have docking ports or 3 man crew pods unlocked yet. That's when he discovered his new home was moving, and two of the three landing legs were no longer functioning. A little rotation and I put an end to that...

My other project for the evening was in the aerospace division. I learned by encapsulating a cockpit it tends to survive terrible failures in design:

[RoboRay]

I put together a new tugboat design...

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It can retrieve derelict vessels, catch unpowered cargo tossed to its vicinity, as well as wrangle asteroids.

[Progressm]

A pretty design! Does it work okay being asymmetric?

[problemecium]

Today I gave Kerbatar 2 a break and did some maintenance on my LKO station, i.e. bringing up a fuel tanker only to find that I'd derpily forgotten that the station had no large docking ports.

So I launched a bunch of docking adapters, which gave me a chance to play with PFairings:

[TUFOM]

I asked once again myself what I have not done before? Little bit thinking and came up with front jet-engined SSTO and it works great:

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[DeepSpaceDutch]

I started my second take on the Jool-5 Mission, during my fist attempt a few brave Kerbals died of food and oxygen starvation on Tylo.

Launching the crew lander

Docking with the drive stage

Starting the long, loooonggg burn spread out over 4 orbit and a fews week

I spy with my huge Kerbal eye, something starting with the letter L

Dumping the drop tanks. Ditching that much mass got me almost 900m/s of Dv in return!

The Joolian system is so pretty

Edited May 22, 2014 by DeepSpaceDutch

[Giordano V]

I started on my third...playthrough? Game? Third time I started over in KSP, this time with mods!

As always I commemorate the birth of a new space program with a group photo (don't ask about the car thing):

Which I then attempted to blow it up:

...and it missed.

Tomorrow I'll get started on the Space Program proper.

[Vortex421]

Carrying on from here:

• Science Station "Minmus One" is now in a (relatively) stable orbit over Minmus. The station has some fuel on board to refuel ships and landers and the science lab is fully staffed and ready to go.
  
• Unfortunately, the lander/courier ship that I launched was based on an old combination design akin to the Apollo mission... except that the command module had no engine to begin with, which meant that it wasn't going to work.
  
• The lander module went down and back, but I realized I had not equipped it with all the necessary instruments, or lights for that matter. Landing on the dark side of Minmus was a very interesting challenge.
  
• The lander ran out of RCS while on final docking. Incredibly, I managed to use the main engine to dock up.
  
• Following all of the above points I went back and redesigned the lander/courier combination. The lander now has more RCS fuel and lights and a few other things and the courier now has an actual engine.
  
• Upon loading the game just now, the command module on the station went flying into space... o.O Structural failure somehow, yet I left it last night perfectly fine. Not sure what's happened but now I need to start designing a clean-up and rescue mission it seems...
  

[michaelhester07]

I lost my spacedock and orion cruiser to a rip in the space time continuum (caused by re-installing kerbal engineer after finding it doesn't work with the Near Future tech mod). I had to launch a new spacedock. Thankfully my engineers researched the new structural components. Here's Spacedock 2 in flight.

[ximrm]

On another mission to moho, i decoupled some empty tanks,before braking.

Sadly,they broke off all my struts that i placed around the tanks to keep the top of the ship rigged.

The result was a spaghetti like ship,everytime i accelerated.

"Ok, I'll decouple the satellite and lander " I thought.

pff..pff.. Oxidizer has gone bad...I forgot the exact definition, but my fuel was worthless.

Now which mod is accountable for that?

I didn't carry freshly picked bio raspberries as an oxidizer 8[

edit: I just saw the new spacedock. You're a mad man. A mad man in space.

[problemecium]

Learned a very important lesson today: never attempt to use a Klaw to join a flying ship to a landed one.

[SofusRud]

Learned a very important lesson today: never attempt to use a Klaw to join a flying ship to a landed one.

Why? What happens?

[going-to-the-MOON]

Finally got to Minmus after getting a replacement GPU. The RCS powered flying car didn't work, but I did get my guys back from my base, which I forgot to put chutes on. Also, I put Mitfen into orbit on an EVA, and somehow ran out of fuel for the landing. He impacted Minmus at ~40 m/s, and somehow lived, then proceeded to roll down a cliff, impact at 40 m/s and live again.

Kerbals are surprisingly tough.

[soulsource]

Yesterday I was at my girlfriends place and since she still had some work to do I installed KSP on her computer temporarily (she doesn't like the game for reasons beyond my horizon and eradicated the installation immediately after I stopped playing). Since I didn't bring my savegame with me, I started a new career mode game, this time with FAR and Isp Difficulty Scaler (what's the official acronym for that?), the latter set to the realistic preset. Well, I suck at rocket design, obviously, since all my attempts failed to go to orbit. Some rockets were promising, having an apoapsis at 80000m or so, yet they always ran out of fuel before the orbit could be stabilized. Nevertheless, I really liked the realism, and whenever I decide to start a new career on my PC, it will be with FAR, Isp Difficulty Scaler and DRE.

Another thing: Although my girlfriends computer has a (far) weaker GPU (R7 250x) than mine (R9 270x) the aerodynamic effects did not cause framerate drops on it, while my PC gets nearly unresponsive as soon as those are shoen. Both GPUs are using Radeon Southern Island chips and both were run with the radeonsi driver. Software difference: She is using Ubuntu (Mesa 10.1.0), I'm running Gentoo (Mesa 10.1.1 till today, now updating to Mesa 10.1.4) I'll try a fresh install of KSP on my PC today and see if the issue is caused by something in my settings files. Of course there might be an easier explanation: My CPU has a worse single core performance than hers, and that could be a bottleneck in case the aerodynamic effects depend on CPU power...

[jdsutton]

We are Korg.

Resistance is futile.

[joekidd1992]

Woohoo! 1st time to land on Minimus and land and return successfully!!! Not that hard after you figure out the Mun! I guess, when you're going to Minimus directly, it's better to turn on about 70 degrees instead of 90 degrees? That's what I tried and it worked. I had to drop my 2nd stage with fuel left in it, because I had so much extra fuel!