What did you do in KSP1 today?

[munseeker]

There was a slight problem with docking two Mun base module prototypes last night. Jeb says he didn't do it.

[Guz]

http://youtu.be/aVUzQXmp-QM

[Mr.Rocket]

Yeah, Eve is a cruel, cruel b***h. What happened? Not enough parachutes? It looked good in the descent.

No, enough parachutes. I was trying to land on top of a hill (easier ascent). I landed on the very angled side, and blew up. Luckily Jeb survived

[Concentric]

Gave Aldfred his fuel, and brought him home safely.

An all solid lifter, with a bit of a boost towards the end with the six 48-7S engines. The SRBs dropped in pairs due to differing thrust limiters: first the 80% pair, then the 60%, then the 40%, with the final 20% thrust SRB being the core. Launch doctrine with a pure-SRB rocket and similar is very different to normal launches, so I'm not sure I did it in the most efficient manner.

Considering that I'll be using the LV-909 to perform the rendezvous, and of course hindsight, I could probably have done with switching the X200-16 and the X200-8.

Oh, look, it's that maneuver again.

I rendezvoused and matched orbits, then separated the drive module from the spaceplane. After that, I docked with the drive module, performed some fuel transfers, decoupled the LV-909 and docked with the spaceplane.

The LV-909 can just go crash into the planet, I don't care.

I had the fuel, so I decided not to try precision aerobraking, and instead just burned into a 100km circular orbit with the LV-N.

Deorbited with the spaceplane. It took a few tries to get the right height to fly back. The first attempt ended at the runway, but burned fuel in the approach and ended up in a crash after losing control.

The fourth return flight was perfectly successful, though. The image of the plane coming in over the mountains is also from that flight. That cleared out my active missions, too.

Then, I made a quicksave titled "Prewarp", and timewarped to the Jool window. Time to try my Single-Stage-to-Laythe-and-back spaceplane, and see if it's really capable of that.

It's quite a busy undercarriage... Note the structural supports that keep the spaceplane from seriously tipping onto its side after landing.

Had to do the bounce again... I don't think I've quite gotten the hang of flying this into orbit yet.

The problem with this kind of ion-driven ultra-long-range spaceplane, is the burn times. A series of burns, the first two being ten minutes, and the last likely longer, all on the dark side of Kerbin... Needless to say, I may be putting this off and running the SSTLaB mission after my other missions, instead. It's only the first Jool window coming up before the Duna and Eve ones, after all - there'll be another some other time. Perhaps by then I'll have a contract for that location.

[TheOsmiumGamer]

Landed on eve today... And got stuck. You haven't played ksp if you haven't stranded bill, jeb or bob on a planet

[moogoob]

Tried making some minimal, efficient launchers. Recreated the Ares rocket (to some degree).

[Spooks]

trying to make su 30 ?

http://imgur.com/NVoQWK4

[MortalDanger]

Made this:

The Nova Corps Starblaster from Guardians of the Galaxy. Took forever because I couldn't find a design I liked with the right parts, etc. Finally got it down. The wings fold back like in the movie with infernal robotics and it is very controllable in space or atmosphere.

[Ruthgar]

Landed on eve today... And got stuck. You haven't played ksp if you haven't stranded bill, jeb or bob on a planet

For my strandings, it's been more like Bill, Jeb, AND Bob on a planet/moon

[kaboom1212]

Made a craft that pulls around 300 g's and then went to jool in 77 days landed on laythe and managed to come back without the kraken attacking me so it was a pretty good day!

[Mister Kerman]

For my strandings, it's been more like Bill, Jeb, AND Bob on a planet/moon

Yeah. I like to stick those guys together whenever I can. I love the MK1-2. I used to have them in supervisory roles but I don't have much on my plate right now. Just trying to pull off a successful Apollo mission.

[KingPhantom]

i visited the duna-face

[General Rarity]

Headed for Duna, or Eve?

[Ravenchant]

Experimented with Majorjim-inspired fairings

[soulsource]

I lost the first Kerbals in 0.24.2... First Jebediah died testing the first prototype of a plane (being also the first plane I built with FAR installed), when it veered off the runway. Since the reasons were unknown, and the aerodynamics engineers insisted that the plane was "perfectly stable, we've calculated that", Bob was trying his luck with a just slightly changed prototype. Well, it didn't turn out well. The third prototype, now changed even a little more, did indeed make it off the runway, but due to the oversensitive yaw controls crashed just a few meters after takeoff, taking Bills life.

Luckily the fourth prototype started perfectly and allowed to fulfill a part testing contract in flight. Sadly, while landing at the KSC runway it not stay on the runway, and the pilot didn't release the brakes fast enough,so that the plane started to spin after the front wheel lost ground contact, killing the pilot...

Here's the official statement of the aerodynamics engineers:

"We suffered the tragic loss of four high-risk pilots today, due to their inability to control our perfectly working planes. This is a sad day for Kerbalkind, but on the bright side, this allowed us to fine tweak our planes in such a way, that they now forgive most piloting errors, so our test flights 5 and 6 did not crash, the latter even successfully completed high altitude aerial surveys. You might ask, why we don't use remote controlled vessels for test flights, just like our colleagues at the rocket science department do. The reason is simple: We only have line of sight radio communications, and the only antenna that can reach our relays network and doesn't break off during aerial flight is a dish and therefore not aerodynamic at all."

Regarding space exploration, there is also a statement of Wernher von Kerman, on the progress with the automated landing software.

"Last time I was talking about sanity checks that were omitted due to lack of memory. Well, it was these sanity checks, that would have saved us 3 landers. But let me start from the beginning. The new probes that our colleagues at the rocket science department built have enough fuel to get to the Mun, land there, do some material science and get back to Kerbin, so we can analyze the samples. Nevertheless, in order to make the launcher cheap, some experimental solid rocket boosters were used. They worked, but some fine tuning was necessary to keep the rocket below the critical velocity at which it becomes unstable. Our first three attempts to launch the probe failed, because the best way to perform this fine tuning is by gathering real flight data. Probe 4 launched successfully, and the transfer to a low orbit around the Mun was standard procedure. Sadly one of the missing sanity checks in the lander program was, if the thrust calculated to cancel gravity really cancels gravity. Due to this, the probe did not descend the last few meters with a constant velocity, but instead slowly accelerated upwards, possibly due to a rounding issue, making it impossible to reach the ground. Of course we tried to manually take over control of the lander, but due to a bug in the k-OS computers we use, our "cancel program" command was not accepted, what made it impossible for us to control thrust (It's not really a kOS bug, but a Unity bug. On Linux Unity reports wrong keycodes to mods, and while for ENTER there's a hotfix for kOS, it seems that for CTRL+C the issue has not been worked around yet.)... The first quick and dirty attempts to fix this issue in the program failed, so sadly also Probe 5 was lost, and Probe 6 was damaged so it couldn't launch again. Probe 7 was destroyed during launch due to a piloting error that broke the rocket in half at 10 km above KSC. Probe 8 on the other hand worked flawlessly, since we realized that keeping the landing velocity constant is not strictly necessary, it only mustn't get too high, so by simply putting 10% less thrust than would be needed to theoretically cancel gravity, the program again does its job nicely.

Long story short: Yes, we lost some relatively cheap unmanned probes, but we also got our first automatically landed probe back from the munar surface, what is also the first probe we got back from the munar surface at all, and our contractors pay us much more for this than the lost probes cost."

The rocket science department of course also made a rather brief comment on this issue: "Now that we've shown that one out of eight landers actually manages to land safely, we'll hopefully get green light for the first manned Mun mission."

[Concentric]

Reloaded from my Prewarp named quicksave. I decided to either put the Single Stage to Laythe and back mission off until after my other missions, or do it in sandbox, so I then warped to the Duna window. After a first launch became a little problematic with flexing towards the end, I added some more struts.

Launch proceeded according to the notes I made for this lifter: Full throttle until 1km, throttle down for ~1 TWR, raise throttle to 1/2 and begin turn to 45^o immediately after dropping SRBs, throttle to full immediately after dropping LFBs, tilt toward horizon to keep time to apoapse at ~30 seconds, cut throttle when apopase is a bit above target orbit, then use short pulses when it drops below.

Had a periapse of 30 km when I cut throttle. I needed to pulse the engine a couple of times when the apoapse fell below 80 km, though.

80 km circular orbit achieved! Next, bringing and docking the nuclear drive modules.

The modules were tightly packed onto the lifter: decoupling smashed off a solar panel from each of the two modules I was transferring (I sent that up when I sent my Minmus mission, in the ManyMission launch). I renamed the two modules Nuclear Drive B and C, then began to make maneuvers to get them to the Duna ship.

Nuclear engines only, no RCS of any sort... Still, managed to dock into place. The side with the broken-off solar panel became the one closest to the core of the ship - it's almost as though I planned to break them off! (I didn't.) The maneuvering was a little poorly planned - sometimes one would have a node before the other had finished burning. I managed to get them both orbit-matched at under 1 km distance before I docked the first, though.

After docking the second, I transferred some of the spare fuel from the lifter into the drive modules' tanks. The lifter still has more than enough to deorbit itself, and I wanted the Duna mission to be full.

I decoupled, planned a burn, and began. Duna Ship used Burn! But nothing happened... The problem is probably clear to most of you, but just to clarify - for at least the vast majority of engines (LV-N included), if the exhaust is blocked, then there's no net thrust. So, the fact that I twisted the Duna lander portion 90^o for aesthetic reasons has made the ship almost entirely useless. I could fit an adaptor to the bottom, where the Duna lander is... or I could reload from Prewarp quicksave again and twist it back and out of the way.

I went for the latter option, though my frustration at my past self's lack of forethought meant that I didn't launch it again immediately.

[Mr.Rocket]

I decoupled, planned a burn, and began. Duna Ship used Burn! But nothing happened... The problem is probably clear to most of you, but just to clarify - for at least the vast majority of engines (LV-N included), if the exhaust is blocked, then there's no net thrust. So, the fact that I twisted the Duna lander portion 90^o for aesthetic reasons has made the ship almost entirely useless. I could fit an adaptor to the bottom, where the Duna lander is... or I could reload from Prewarp quicksave again and twist it back and out of the way.

I went for the latter option, though my frustration at my past self's lack of forethought meant that I didn't launch it again immediately.

Couldn't you just right click the docking port, decouple node, turn the lander around, rotate it 90 degrees, and re-dock?

[Concentric]

Couldn't you just right click the docking port, decouple node, turn the lander around, rotate it 90 degrees, and re-dock?

I could have done, yes. But I didn't think about that. I think I still have the quicksave from just after decoupling from the lifter, so I'll give it a shot. Thanks, you've probably saved me quite a bit of hassle. I'm also glad I put those extra probe cores about the place.

If you load a quicksave, then load a quicksave that's further in the future, is that a forward-load from quicksave?

[TrooperCooper]

If you load a quicksave, then load a quicksave that's further in the future, is that a forward-load from quicksave?

Thats time-travelling

The Pelican taking off to perform orbital tests in preparation of a new mission setup...

Ten minutes later, it is about to make the last hop into space...

After circularization into orbit, the crew opens the cargo-bays...

Jebediah going on EVA to inspect the cargo and make sure it didnt get damaged during the ascent. It consists of an exploration lander and a mobile processing lab to allow cleaning out the landers experiment-canisters. Thus, this setup should allow a super cheap multi-landing exploration mission to Duna and later on to other orbital bodies...

After boarding the lander, Jeb pulled it out of the bay...

...and performed a series of bay-internal docking tests.

Once that was done, he had to tie the craft back into the bay with struts again .

Final inspection of the re-mounted lander, making sure all struts are linked correctly. Mission control said that internal wobbling of heavy cargo would not improve the flight characteristics of the Pelican SSTO...

Then it was time to head for a rendezvous with the tanker IPT-1.

The Pelican handed over 25 tons of fuel to loose some weight before re-entry...

Jeb and Bill entering the atmosphere on their way back home, all air brakes open...

Descending into the beautiful sunrise...

Fried Pelican? I wonder how that tastes.

KSP runway in sight, still gliding...

Incoming to land...

After a nearly perfect landing (didnt have to fire the engines once since entering the atmosphere) the crew inspected the cargo for a last time. Yup... everything still there. Struts are able to hold it during the landing.

After this orbital test with a non-fueled lander, the next step will be a test-landing on the Mun to make sure everything works as planed before the real mission to Duna...

EDIT: note to self: cargo-bay needs some internal lights. EVA-strutting inside a dark bay is pure horror...

Edited August 8, 2014 by TrooperCooper

[Kowgan]

Cool. Yeah, I've always been a fan of timelapse. I put some elements of that in this cinematic too:

It's... Beautiful!

Nice job there, really great work.

[capi3101]

Checked in with y'all today for the hell of it; it seems I haven't even bothered to log in to the forums since April. Anybody want to give me the low-down on what all I've missed?

[astropapi1]

Checked in with y'all today for the hell of it; it seems I haven't even bothered to log in to the forums since April. Anybody want to give me the low-down on what all I've missed?

0.24.2, hype train, there's a KSP cubesat being discussed, ferram released NEAR, Tw1 made the first stock Eve SSTO...

Not much, really.

[capi3101]

Aw, dagnabbit...I was hoping to get to that Eve SSTO myself. I suppose it helps if you pick up the game every now and again...

[Jouni]

I completed the flight tests for the Laythe lander in my overengineered Jool-5 expedition. Adding more fuel and replacing two radial parachutes with a Mk16-XL parachute made the lander aerodynamically more stable (in FAR). This time it also had enough fuel to to complete the test flight (launch on a rocket, deorbit under its own power, land near KSC, and return back to orbit).

[Concentric]

Thanks to the keen eyes of two forumers in two different threads, a solution to my Duna ship's woes was implemented! I put their names on the Duna flag plaque, which also happened to be a contract-fulfilling flag-planting. The contracts: both the Duna and Ike exploration contracts, then a science from space near and a flag plant for each of them.

So, twisting and turning the Duna lander module, then docking it in place with the pods out of the way of the engines perfectly solved the problem without need for relaunch. I immediately burned the transfer, then suddenly realised that I hadn't attached the scientific instrumentation modules. Fortunately, they were on an ion tug that still had over 2750 xenon, so they could actually transfer separately.

It took several orbits to get the escape to work, but I managed it. The trajectory of the tug was such that it would actually arrive at Duna first, and even get into orbit before the Eve-Gilly probe stack had its escape burn (I won't elaborate on the Eve-Gilly probe stack here). If I ever want to do more complex simultaneous missions, I should probably get Kerbal Alarm Clock...

I deorbited the lifter core relatively close to KSC, recovering it at a 97% rate in the ocean. I'm not sure it would have survived hitting the ground instead.

The tug got a flyby of Ike on its way in, and took a gravity scan high above Duna. Then, I put it into a nice, equatorial 100 km circular orbit. It still has over 2000 xenon left... I guess it can still be useful.

I had another Ike flyby with Bob. He took the opportunity to take some reports, transmitting a crew report to complete a Science from Ike orbit contract. It took several attempts at burning over Ike to get the right periapse to aerobrake into Duna orbit - 11 km turned out about right, leaving me in almost a 700 km over 10 km orbit. I adjusted to rendezvous with the instruments.

And docked! Looks like I didn't need to attach them before leaving after all. Phew. I then undocked from the tug and started to manipulate the ship.

I took the Duna satellite, and attached the Atmospheric science module to it, then attached the Ike satellite to the nose and detached the Duna lander. Afterwards, I had Bob gather readings from Near Duna orbit, and it was time to transfer to Ike.

That looks unusually close to elliptical... Don't think I've seen that before.

A 30 km orbit should be a good place to leave the satellite and the ship. Time to land.

The lander is entirely monopropellant-powered: four O-10 engines and a big R1 tank. The capsule has an R10, too - it's intended to perform several docking procedures.

I landed very softly, took readings and transmitted a crew report from the surface to complete the Ike exploration contract. I then checked for a flag-planting mission, and planted the flag once I got one. A little timewarping until the ship was overhead before liftoff

I still had enough monopropellant to partially fill the R1, even after docking the satellite and transferring the instruments over. Bob kept the data in the capsule, and turned the ship to escape Ike.

Getting the periapse where I wanted it used up some monopropellant, so I decided to empty the Ike lander's R1 into the rest of the ship, then detach it on a Duna impact trajectory. It's a bit of a waste, but really, if you're going to bring enough fuel to fill it back up, you may as well bring another Ike lander.

Rendezvoused with the Duna lander, and transferred the capsule over. Then I brought the final science module to it with the Duna satellite. Here goes!

Landed just a bit past the point that Ike was visible in the sky. I tried to decelerate faster with the engine in the atmosphere - so no heating effects.

Took the readings (and more on the way down), made reports and got out. I planted the flag, writing the plaque to name the forumers who pointed out the solution to me: Mr. Rocket in this thread, and Kasuha in the Not Going to Space Today thread. Thanks, both of you.

Back up to the Duna satellite to leave the instruments behind. The Duna satellite also had the closest antenna to transmit my surface EVA report and complete the Duna exploration mission. I also repacked the lander's parachutes for the next time it's used.

And finally, rendezvous with the transfer ship and moving the capsule over. The Duna lander will remain in orbit, because it's actually cost-effective as infrastructure. The Duna return window won't be for a while - the Eve-Gilly mission will probably perform its landings before that happens.