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What did you do in KSP1 today?


Xeldrak

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I docked a smallish truss unit with solar panels and radiators onto a station core that I'd put in orbit yesterday, and designed the next large module to be added which has another docking port, an antenna array, and a bunch of cupolas. Unfortunately I messed up the design as at nearly 10 tons it didn't have enough thruster force to maneuver properly, and smashed right into the station and tore it apart (at least it was unmanned!). I reverted rather than rebuilding the whole thing and redesigned the cupola module with 16 thruster blocks instead of 8, but didn't launch it yet. Then I got distracted and built a fun little UAV for no particular reason and flew it around the space center for a while.

Edited by Coyote27
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Managed to launch part two of my three-part Duna exploration mission complex (the Duna lander) and created a series of three 'minilanders' to test landing strategies on Duna and to widen the exploration zone... planning to send a cluster of them on ahead of the kerballed expedition and to include a few with the expedition itself.

I ran out of pilots! Will need to shuttle a few back down from the station to KSC...

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Spent my 45 minutes last night designing Wildcat 7, which is basically the bulk ore tank storage and delivery unit for my nascent Minmus mining operation. It'll hook up to the Mosquito 7 drilling unit with KAS parts, using data gathered from the Sojourner 7 orbital probe to find a good spot for drilling. Launched two white-suit engineers up with Wildcat and it's now on its way to Minmus; it should arrive in 15 days. The craft was originally going to include a converter, but I was dismayed to discover that things won't attach to a converter radially. I also figured that if I really needed a converter at all, it should be part of an orbital space station assembly - so plans are commencing to rebuild the Minmusport space station in this career save. Minmus will probably be completely tapped out of science by the time I get the thing up and running, so I'll probably would just replace the lab module with the converter module. Boom - floating Exxon station. That's kinda what I wanted to do with my other career save; just never got the necessary tech unlocked.

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Kraken summoning is most easily performed by clipping parts into the sides of cargo bays - the 1.25 and 2.5 flavours seem exceedingly effective and tearing your ship apart when the doors open. The mk2 bay on the other hand, isn't shielded in the corners, so you can get the 'mysterious heat' kraken for things that you thought should be safe.

I can't give out any rep yet! Sorry.

The bay doors are completely clear. I miiiiiight have some antennas stuck in the side of it... I deleted the craft since it was an iteration of a design that didn't explode every time.

The design that doesn't explode has a problem too. The front of the ship has a MK2 probe core attached to the cargo bay that explodes when I time warp in atmosphere. I'm assuming it's for similar reasons... It seems like anything near an MK2 short cargo bay simply becomes a time bomb. Is that correct?

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Had to rescue Jeb, Bill and Bob that (again) took the place of trainee astronauts in a Mk1-2 Command Pod. The mission was originally designed to test a new 3-seats ship designed for rendez-vous and dockings but after they took off and went into LEO just fine, they decided to go by the Moon, as Bill's dV estimation said they had enough for a free return trajectory. A second calculation showed they didn't (no, I did not revert from a missed intercept :P) so they decided to mess around in orbit.

They then realised that decouplers do not cross-feed hypergolic fuels, so no RCS; and when planning the reentry, they realised that an idiot had removed EC storage in the module (no, I did not revert from catastrophic reentry :P; and yes, I was new to Real Fuels at the time I made the module).

So I had to rescue them, with two ships, as they were already three in their module. First rescue mission successfully docked with their ship with no RCS (hypergolics cross-feed issue hadn't been solved at the time); the second rescue ship, which was finally fully operational with working RCS and electric charge, then joined the two ships in orbit and docked with the rescued one.

Finally, the rescue ships reentered, bringing the stranded vessel with them to erase any evidence; only to realise that after LEO reentry, we had only 15 units of ablator (out of >100 at the beginning) left on each rescue ship...

Anyway, I took a screenshot:

3B62fP8.png

Screenshot shows the stranded ship (top) and the 2nd rescue ship (bottom) docking, seen from the 1st rescue ship IVA view.

Did I forget to mention those were only my 2nd and 3rd rendez-vous in RSS ?

Edited by Gaarst
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Taking a break from my 1.0.2 career to play around in 1.0.4 sandbox, trying out mods for my next career.

One of the things I enjoy about sandbox is I get to do stuff I might not have tried in career, like an Apollo-style Mun mission. As far as I know there's no engineering reason to do this, in the scale-model system the mass ratios work out so a direct-ascent mission is smaller and cheaper than a lunar/munar orbit rendezvous. But in sandbox I figured it would be a fun way to test out some part mods, so I had a try.

pQ3nQER.jpg?1

Launch. It's not a true Saturn/Apollo replica, the lifter only has two stages and the lander only has one, but it used the same general mission profile.

vIpzuhO.jpg?1

Transposition and docking. Finally got to use that KW petal adapter. Also enjoying the VSR version of the Poodle which actually looks like a vacuum engine.

lC1nh8g.jpg?1

Separation and the landing craft starts descent.

8EVqv4h.jpg?1

On the surface. Although the lifter and CSM had plenty of fuel to spare the LM actually cut it pretty close, it only had about 100m/s left for rendezvous.

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TheDoctor;2163217']After months of gameplay and learning' date=' I finally landed a crew on the moon and successfully returned them to Kerbin!!! What a monumental success for Kerbalkind!!!!!!!:D:D:D:D:Dhttp://s11.postimg.org/lxdhhe4wj/on_the_moon.png

Congrats! The first time is always the best.

Also Hotaru, tjat looks sweet.

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Just completed an unofficial "grand survey" of the great flats of Minmus. Having arrived with a bit of a bang (hit a transition at ~10m/s, everything should survive 20m/s impacts, but one wheel gave up) I ended up with a three-wheeled rover. Having initially decided that the rover was dead, I came back to it and realised that if I reactivated the reaction wheels, it could stay perfectly level - but I could no longer use the wheel controls (because they also tip the girder that no longer has a wheel into the ground)

So, I've activated the reaction wheels to keep the vehicle level and I'm using RCS to move around. The vehicle seems to react well when travelling at about 8m/s. And I've just visited all four corners of the great flats. This has taken about four hours of play time (I didn't want to attempt to short-cut over any inclinations - I stayed at 0m altitude). And you cannot time warp when travelling on ground. Still, I loved accomplishing this tour.

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Get in orbit the 10 pieces of my interplanetary mothership "proton" wich will travel to eve, duna, jool, laythe, vall, eeloo, and go back. for all the fuel it requires, I will dock another piece of the ship that contains an ISRU converter, big ore tank and 4 mining arms. at all, the ship will contain a dozen people even if he can transport 12, because these idiots of jebediah and bob kerman needs a rescue mission an laythe (fuell tank exploded, only mk2 command pod and 3 parachutes were alive) :P

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I came back to it and realised that if I reactivated the reaction wheels, it could stay perfectly level - but I could no longer use the wheel controls (because they also tip the girder that no longer has a wheel into the ground).

Rebind your rover controlling keys (I like mine on IJKL, but then you wouldn't be able to use RCS with it) and drive with SAS on (in some case it's efficient to use the surface-prograde mode, but be careful with complex terrain).

I once had a rover-base driving on Minmus on 2 wheels (2 destroyed, 4 broken) for a while until I got an engineer to it. It got damaged on descending down a slope into the plains and has driven quite a distance across the plains and even a bit outside of these in such a state.

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Today I decided to start a new career with a bunch of procedural mods installed. All was going well and after a few suborbital tourist runs to gain a bit of cash to upgrade a few buildings, I decided it was time to try for the 2,500m/s target.

Now I have already unlocked the stayputnik, so I figured I would go for an unmanned run which lifted safety off the table. No Kerbals are dying on my watch!

So my basic set up was a stayputnik on top of a conical procedural solid fuel booster with the max allowable thruster. The first tests showed that there just wasn't enough fuel to hit the required speed. So I went two staged, basically the same set up with a decoupler and the same conical solid booster underneath. My intent was to give it some speed and altitude, ditch the stage and let that final stage do its things. It didn't all go to plan. Entering stage two, the rocket hit 1000m/s and promptly exploded due to drag/overheating.

Back in the VAB I decided on two things. First I would add a couple of fleas to the first stage, not so much for the speed but to help it get higher faster, hoping it would be high enough that drag wasn't an issue. I also added radiators to the SPN in an octagonal formation so that the top was completely covered and it spiralled back in a conical fashion. Help radiate the heat and be somewhat aerodynamic. My plan was somewhat successful, the rocket was able to survive a lot more drag/heat reaching a whopping 1900m/s before succumbing to inevitable destruction.

So I decided a redesign was in order. I kept the final stage as is, but chose a liquid fuel option for the first stage. My thinking being, a slower accent to reach a higher altitude before firing the final stage. Just to help get it off the ground I added some thumpers.

Well, this new idea certainly did the job. By the time I jettisoned the first stage I was already well past 20k, with less drag at high altitude the final stage managed to hit 2,500m/s without a problem and it kept goings. I was wondering how far the rocket would go before Kerbin's SOI would pull it back, so I put it on 4x warp and celebrated my victory with a fizzy drink and that's went the Mun flew past. It took me a moment to realise what I just saw. Switching to the orbital map to I was surprised to see that I had managed to push my rocket into a solar orbit.

I quickly left Mission Control before any one asked why the monitors smell like Iron Bru.

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... i did more orbital assembly on my interplanetary kerbal partybo... errm sience vessel...

f8zRX3I.png

and launched more even more equipment... if it starts to lag too much i will weld it to lesser parts with UBIOZURs welding Mod...

I have build a lander in two reusable stages which can land and get off again nearly everywhere, except Eve... and Jool :D

NYy8jMu.png

Edited by Mikki
Typo:)
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I quickly left Mission Control before any one asked why the monitors smell like Iron Bru.

Ha! Awesome story.

Not sure if the procedural SRBs you are using have this option, but the stock SRBs include a thrust limiter tweakable you can set in the VAB but not after deployment. You can use a SRB with the same total amount of fuel but a slower, longer burn to give you a slower acceleration and more gentle ascent. If you wanted to do a two-stage option, you could use a more limited thrust SRB to get out of the thickest of the atmosphere, then use a much more aggressive second stage to break the speed threshold you were going for once you reached thinner atmosphere.

Just do not tweak the thrust too low or a SRB will have trouble even lifting itself.

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Today I got bored of launching station parts while waiting for probes to arrive to their destinations and transfer window from Duna to Kerbin to open so I went on and took a contract to test ion engine from Mk2 Expansion mod in flight over Kerbin. It took me some 2-3 hours to get a plane which did not spin whenever I touch controls at high altitude and speed, but I managed it. This is that drone plane on its way back after successful test of ion engine

B7qRMNB.png

W9ZoXOq.png

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I was trying to setup a base on the Mun, and I just wasn't getting enough delta-v. Well I had the bright idea to use the nuclear engines on the decent phase as a method of getting more delta-v. Don't do this...it's stupid. Anyway. I ended up having to do a suicide landing where I had to start burning a exactly the right point, 8150m. Too soon and I would run out of fuel before I landed. Too late and I would slam into the surface. After much trial and error I arrived at that number, and managed to start burning at 8150, and then run out of fuel just before touching down at 5m/s.

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The El Cheapo Space Plane

msgcp2.jpg

Or rather what was left of it. It had two turbos and a nuke. Very basic design. It had a enough delta V to orbit, get to the moon, orbit, come back. Then on approach to Kerbin, the delta wing on the right hand side suddenly poofed for no reason. No thermal overload. I wasn't even near the atmosphere. I think maybe the Kraken just wanted to take a little nibble or something.

Realizing the ship wouldn't possibly last through rentry without turning into a spinning wreck, I turned the ship retrograde hoping that the rear of the ship could take the heat and the SAS would be enough to hold the ship in a constant direction. I lost the flaps and the nuke due to heat, but the turbos stayed intact and the ship managed to stay pointing retrograde. I then used the turbos to suicide burn and managed to slow just enough so when I hit the water it only took out the turbos. :P

Mission accomplished!

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It took a lot of tweaking and redesigning, and will probably need some adjustment (transferring fuel during landing to maintain trim probably exceeds safety guidelines somewhat), but I got the Sojourner to the Mun. I may add a small tank forward to balance out the big one in the back. I'm also considering giving up on landing horizontally, it seemed to use a lot of fuel. I might see about landing vertically, and adding a couple engines up front to soften the landing when it tips over.

Landing looks a little crazy at the start:

g58tXl2l.png

Looking a little less crazy, and almost down:

zHLm0wTl.png

Nice day for a drive:

pkDgDa8l.png

Obligatory "I was here" flag planting picture:

Rkeqvs5l.png

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Launched a fuel depot and then sent my orbital tug Resolute to rendez-vous and dock with it. Resolute had been in a high parking orbit around Kerbin after taking an experimental orbital ore refinery and lander/drill from LKO to Minimus. Although she has plenty of delta-V on hand she was running on monoprop fumes so I had to be very careful when docking and took things very slowly which resulted in by far my best and smoothest manual docking to date!

Here is the Resolute docked to the depot:

CP4v1Ki.png

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Been playing around with some stuff close to home, testing for extraplanetary use. The most recent and arguably most interesting, is my long haul heavy transport rover! Featuring 6 load bearing wheels, 6 fuel cells and 4 seats standard, with optional SAS and RCS for tough situations. Turns like a boat (trust me it's a feature) and carries enough fuel to run for... Well, I have no idea how long but I'm guessing a really long time. Unintended cool side effect of the design: It pops wheelies like a champ with a load! The guys and gals in the hitchhiker module don't look too impressed though.

KSP%202015-08-27%2022-48-55-32.jpg~original

KSP%202015-08-27%2022-52-02-42.jpg~original

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i built my minmus mining rig, a lander/fuel to orbit probe and a rocket to bring it all up there.. as usual it turned out pretty heavy.. 120t for the mining module alone. optional for a second launch is a big fuel tank to add extra capacity for the fuel to orbit probe. actually i might have to split up the lander and mining module and put them on seperate flights.. as it is now it's not very airodynamic and the smallest fairing i could get on it weighs 18 tonnes which kind of defeats it's purpose i guess..

also did a 'place sat in a specific orbit around minmus' contract and it turned out to be one of my lightest launches yet, made it there with only 1 big 1.25m tank, a swivel engine, 4 oscar b tanks and a spark engine

next up is some more contracts until i can afford to launch the big one

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Rebind your rover controlling keys (I like mine on IJKL, but then you wouldn't be able to use RCS with it) and drive with SAS on (in some case it's efficient to use the surface-prograde mode, but be careful with complex terrain).

I once had a rover-base driving on Minmus on 2 wheels (2 destroyed, 4 broken) for a while until I got an engineer to it. It got damaged on descending down a slope into the plains and has driven quite a distance across the plains and even a bit outside of these in such a state.

I felt too committed to it, didn't want to break out to find/remap keys (similarly, during an earlier part of the mission, I really wanted to leave the power at full forwards. I could remember the trim controls (Alt+ WSAD) to set it up but felt nervous doing so because I couldn't remember what I'd need to do to cancel trim if an emergency emerged).

It was actually fun to see what the rover was capable of when being mis-used.

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