What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Red Iron Crown]

Wait a sec... wouldn't a shorter day actually INCREASE the boost you get from launching east (shorter rotation period=faster speed at surface=moar boosters!)?

It would. Starman is suggesting increasing the day from 12h to 18h to reduce the boost.

[electronicfox]

I tried designing a single-launch Mun base from which to launch more rockets. Turned into several launches.

Just gotta figure out how to get all the base parts into one piece, then I can extend the base once mining has begun.

[AengorKerbow]

Jeb climbed a mountain...

With a jet airplane...

I...don't know why.

I did get some nice mountains biome science.

[Aragosnat]

Last night I found out that the tank like rover wheels need to be straight up and down for them to work otherwise this design would have been fun to drive around:

Got this ugly thing into orbit after a second try. First one had to do a powered landing into water as it lacked an escape system. Also remember to put any docking ports that have things attached like mine onto those 1-0 keys. Just in case you need to dump whats on them real fast:

Also going to need to find a spot on Mün to land it so my rovrs can be deployed safely I hope.

[Overfloater]

Performed a Lunar landing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rheCOIzsvuw

Well maybe not really today, more like during the past 2 weeks xD

now I just finished the flight.

[Lhathron the Elf]

I flew around in an Aeris 3A in cockpit mode with No Crash Damage on. It was weird. And epic.

[astropapi1]

Cruising at Mach 15 is fun.

Also decided to design some standarized rockets. This one, for example, is carrying 1 ton of pure water into orbit:

[MrOnak]

I pretty much finished what I had begun last night...

Congratulations to ESA on landing on 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko!

[SkyRender]

More of a "what I've been doing in KSP lately" update, I decided to get back to an old idea I had of a Career mode story of sorts. It's gotten pretty far, all things considered, with the culmination of the first LKO "space hotel":

Escape Velocity Headquarters (or EVHQ for short) is a pretty spacious place. Just need to get a few Kerbal tourists on board now...

[GloriousWater]

Made a working cargo SSTO, rendering my recently made shuttle useless.

Dunno why I put science on the command pod, this is in Sandbox.

[Aragosnat]

Made a working cargo SSTO, rendering my recently made shuttle useless.

http://i.imgur.com/xeDfys7.png

http://i.imgur.com/P2gwLEy.png

Dunno why I put science on the command pod, this is in Sandbox.

For when you want to play career mode. So you get in the habit of putting them on. =^.^=

[Norpo]

Well, the Class B asteroid finally entered Kerbin's SOI, so I sent a guy to go after it. Here is what followed...

Success!

(for those dying to know, the moving parts co. wanted me to get a class D to Gilly. Yeah, I mayyyy of just accepted it because of the generous forward reward, but also because I don't think this save will last 33 years for the deadline to end anyways. )

I also went sent my duna mothership, the K.S.V. (kerbal space vessel) Red Lumal.

The last glimpse of where they were for the past year..

(I also redirected the Flying Lemur to Dres, but that's boring so I have no screenshots of that.)

[cantab]

Watched Scott Manley's

where he discusses FAR, then installed it and made a working plane in it . Though I admit I wimped out and turned off aerodynamic failures.

Now to try some rockets.

[von Ziegendorf]

Performed final tests of my biggest rocket ever- 423 parts, 20kT and nearly 300MN of thrust on liftoff Aaaand my laptop overheats during launch :/

[Richy teh space man]

Moving a kethane miner over to my main Laythe base:

Time consuming..

[LABHOUSE]

Again failed to see what is blowing up on my shuttle due to the new explosion textures. I think it has to due with the engines. They must be bending the fuel tanks into the cargo bay.

Edited November 13, 2014 by LABHOUSE

[Slam_Jones]

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Made a TIE-Interceptor (sorta)

It flies (not very quickly) on two Ion engines

[Lunaran]

Again failed to see what is blowing up on my shuttle due to the new explosion textures. I think it has to due with the engines. They must be bending the fuel tanks into the cargo bay.

press f3

presssss efff threeeeee

[Jouni]

I tried to build a rocket that could launch the 6.4x Tylo lander and the upper transfer stage, but all my designs were a little short of reaching orbit. The payload is around 150 tonnes without fuel, while fairings add another 50 tonnes. My best attempt was over 3800 tonnes at launchpad:

The real problem is the upper stage. With a single KR-2L engine, its initial TWR is only around 0.5, and it needs around 6 minutes to circularize. To reach orbit, the ascent rate should be at least 900 m/s when the upper stage is ignited, but the lower stages have too low TWR to reach that.

My next attempt will add two Skippers to the upper stage. Maybe I'll also add a third set of SRBs to boost the TWR at launch.

[Aragosnat]

Well my rover made it to Mun. Need to remember to add the goo and science moduals to staging:

Did drive it around. Very stable with just a small problem. Not enough wheels and have to fish tail up the mountain side so far. Dispite the wheels look like they are all touching the ground. But, it looks like I can climb 20 degrees up. True it was at 3.7ish m/s. Might be faster if I had 6 wheels. Getting enough juice to run 18+ currently with no loss. Yeah over kill. But, well worth it.

Edit: I like dropping rovers in pairs.

[bitbucket]

So I have a 1700 ton class E asteroid sitting in Kerbin orbit. What to do with it?

I brought up a refinery equipped with Asteroid Recycling Technologies equipment. Here Bill is bolting it down.

And away it goes, with eight Jaw units slowly hollowing it out to make room for storage tanks.

...yeah, this is going to take a while to finish hollowing out. (about 180 hours)

[plaerzen]

Finally made my "2sto" spaceplane (it has 2 stages, one has SRBs to help it get into orbit) back into orbit. Desperately needed aerobrakes, took many tries to take off, make orbit, rescue a kerbal and land.

The final design uses 4 turbojets, 2 rocket engines (I forget which ones now, I think they might be from KW rocketry but unsure, They aren't the hybrid ones shown in one of the pics, that was an earlier design. Didn't quite make the cut, not goot enough TWR, or lsp, I forget which. Anyway, here it goes. Still haven't tested carrying load with it, but I Imagine it could pack it's cargo bay full no problem.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Oh and FAR is used.

Edited November 13, 2014 by plaerzen

[capi3101]

Spent most of the evening farting around with a challenge to fire one of the big SRBs on/into the VAB's helipads. Got close - I made the VAB roof, but not the helipad proper.

Started making adjustments to the Moneybroker 7 spaceplane. RAPIERs on the thing still switched over early, around 27k/1550 m/s. Not sure what's going on there; by the numbers that plane oughta be able to make orbit with a 12 tonne payload. Might be how I'm flying it, I guess. The game locked up on me before I could make a second series of adjustments to its design.

[Concentric]

Finally made my "ssto" (it has 2 stages, one has SRBs to help it get into orbit) back into orbit. Desperately needed aerobrakes, took many tries to take off, make orbit, rescue a kerbal and land.

The final design uses 4 turbojets, 2 rocket engines (I forget which ones now, I think they might be from KW rocketry but unsure, They aren't the hybrid ones shown in one of the pics, that was an earlier design. Didn't quite make the cut, not goot enough TWR, or lsp, I forget which. Anyway, here it goes. Still haven't tested carrying load with it, but I Imagine it could pack it's cargo bay full no problem.

<iframe class="imgur-album" width="100%" height="550" frameborder="0" src="//imgur.com/a/nwigL/embed"></iframe>

You can't just inject html into the post: the bbcode you want to embed that album is [noparse]

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[/noparse].

The reason it's not embedded in my post is the [noparse][noparse][/noparse][/noparse] I have around it.

Anyway, at what point in the flight do you activate your SRBs?

[NecroBones]

Busy getting the 5m / heavy-lifter parts pack ready. Since this will probably push the 3.75m parts toward being radial boosters, I added a 3.75m nose cone, which is fueled. Also reworked the R5 engine again (probably the third time I've tweaked it), since it still looked too small. It's a 10k thrust engine, with a SaturnV-ish look, so it needs to be beefy. I think I'm finally happy with it. Pictures below.

But first, I got the SRB line-up looking pretty good, and I thought I'd talk a little about the balancing-act that's going on here, to make them both useful and fair. This may be a 5m pack that's extending beyond what the stock parts have, but I want it to have a stock-like feel, but also not be anemic in capability either.

So I thought it might be cool to do some comparisons, and show a little of the thought process that's going into figuring out some stats.

[table]

[tr][td]#[/td][td]Name[/td][td]Diameter[/td][td]Full Mass[/td][td]Thrust[/td][td]Pad-TWR[/td][td]Burn Time[/td][td]Tech Node[/td][/tr]

[tr][td]A[/td][td]RT-10[/td] [td]1.25m[/td][td]3.7475[/td][td]250[/td][td]66.71[/td][td]30s[/td][td]start[/td][/tr]

[tr][td]B[/td][td]BACC[/td] [td]1.25m[/td][td]7.875[/td][td]315[/td][td]40.00[/td][td]47s[/td][td]generalRocketry[/td][/tr]

[tr][td]C[/td][td]KD25k[/td] [td]1.25m[/td][td]21.75[/td][td]650[/td][td]29.89[/td][td]68s[/td][td]heavyRocketry[/td][/tr]

[tr][td]D[/td][td]SY1875S[/td][td]1.875m[/td][td]29.3125[/td][td]2000[/td][td]68.23[/td][td]30s[/td][td]heavierRocketry[/td][/tr]

[tr][td]E[/td][td]SY1875L[/td][td]1.875m[/td][td]48.9375[/td][td]2500[/td][td]51.09[/td][td]40s[/td][td]veryHeavyRocketry[/td][/tr]

[tr][td]F[/td][td]SY25S[/td] [td]2.5m[/td][td]58.625[/td][td]2800[/td][td]47.76[/td][td]42s[/td][td]experimentalRocketry (1000)[/td][/tr]

[tr][td]G[/td][td]SY25L[/td] [td]2.5m[/td][td]97.875[/td][td]3800[/td][td]38.83[/td][td]52s[/td][td]experimentalRocketry (1000)[/td][/tr]

[/table]

In the above, the TWR is calculated as Thrust(kn) / Fueled Mass. Also, since KSP varies the fuel-flow rate of engines based on air pressure, instead of the thrust, it's hard to get a precise number for the burn time. The above times are estimates based on firing the SRB with a probe core, reaction wheel, and battery, straight up from the pad, and looking at the mission-clock to see when it burned out.

Something that I always suspected, and was confirmed when I started looking at the numbers for the three stock SRBs, is that the new NASA/ARM/KD25k SRB is really weak, thrust-wise. The other SRBs are pretty powerful compared to everything else you've unlocked in the tech-tree, at the time that you get them, and they also have better TWRs (and thus shorter burn times). But the KD25k feels almost useless in normal play, unless you stack a lot of them on your rocket. They're meant to accompany the 2.5m and 3.75m parts, and yet the thrust is only equivalent to the Skipper (and I noticed in all of this, that the Skipper was nerfed at some point, since it used to have 800 thrust, but that's another topic).

So what I did for my larger SRBs, is I copied the precise ratios from the ARM SRB, for empty/full mass and cost, and scaled up based on the change in volume. Then, I applied thrust numbers that would get the TWR and burn-time back within the ranges of the smaller stock SRBs. These are intended for use alongside 3.75m to 5m parts, after all. So while the thrust numbers look larger than we're used to, also remember that the larger engine cluster in the pack is going to have 10k thrust (and its more efficient smaller brother, the Falcon9-inspired one, is around 6800 thrust). Also, these have been pushed very late in the tech tree, so that they unlock in a meaningful order, and you don't get the 2.5m SRBs until you get the 5m rocketry parts.

My feeling is that SRBs should be a cheap source of thrust when you need it. You can always tweak the thrust down, to get longer burn times, but you can't go in the other direction. So they should have respectable TWRs right out of the gate.

Anyway, more screenshots of what I worked on last night:

The 5m R5 engine, tested on a rocket with one of each fuel tank in the pack so far, including both the size-adapter and the nose-cone, which are also fuel tanks. Also, a test-bed of all three of the 5m engines for the set.