What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Firemetal]

Landed on all 5 Jool moons within 12 hours.

(Jeb still had enough fuel to reach orbit!  )

I brought the KSS Jool 5 Big Ship Thing to Jool last night however.

The log is here.  

Edited September 12, 2016 by Firemetal

[eddiew]

Pondering a new interplanetary cruiser...

16.3km/s in the tanks, thank you KR&D! If I can make a lander less than 15 tons, should make Moho and back  

How do you get monsters like this to orbit? With massive fins on the boosters and a TWR of 1.3 until 30km, that's how.

[Francois424]

25 minutes ago, eddiew said:

Pondering a new interplanetary cruiser...

16.3km/s in the tanks, thank you KR&D! If I can make a lander less than 15 tons, should make Moho and back  

How do you get monsters like this to orbit? With massive fins on the boosters and a TWR of 1.3 until 30km, that's how.

That looks a lot more like Ulysses31's Odysseus than mine did.  Very good work !

 

EDIT: here's what mine looked like (The cupola would look the the middle section of his if looked from the front).

The old 1.0.5 version of the "Odysseus" mothership with 11.5k delta-V, carrying a low clearance undercarriage rover and an ill-fated, oversized ISRU lander.

 

The mothership was highly successful if prone to buggy disassembly and containing too many parts, making for bad 1/5sec FPS.  That was 1.0.5 for you.
I like your iteration better as far as looks go, but still proud of mine, given it was 99% stock (8x FTmN280 for engines).

 

Edited September 12, 2016 by Francois424

[CatastrophicFailure]

6 minutes ago, eddiew said:

Pondering a new interplanetary cruiser...

 

 

MOAR pix plz....

2 minutes ago, Francois424 said:

That looks a lot more like Ulysses31's Odysseus than mine did.  Very good work !

 

 

THAT's what it reminded me of! Brilliant!

Edited September 12, 2016 by CatastrophicFailure

[Francois424]

4 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

 

MOAR pix plz....

THAT's what it reminded me of! Brilliant!

I kinda want the ship file now...  but then it wouldn't be my ship...

I love it tho.

[EpicSpaceTroll139]

Did some more messing with giant unclamped structures in KSP.

Spoiler

 

Badly designed one. It not only had too high of a part/height ratio to hope compete with anything I'd made before, It also toppled off the pad with... interesting results.

Spoiler

 

[Aegrim]

On 11/09/2016 at 7:16 AM, Mikki said:

Bill, Bob and Jeb made a serious Duna touchdown, most successfull stockcraft ever with a rover and the gearundercarriage detachable for lighter ascend.

That's a great looking Mars return craft. Looks similar to those in the concept art zubrin uses in his mars direct presentations.

 

It just needs a built in drill and refining suite to refuel itself before the crew arrives.

[Guest]

Refined the Archangel design, and pushed it to see how far it goes. Built "Long" variants of it: LP with three Mk3 crew compartments, and LC with the biggest Mk3 cargo bay. Then I cranked up the take-off weight.

It goes to somewhere between 121 and 137 tons take-off weight. The LC with a (simulated) space station module as cargo weighed in at 121 tons and I was able to deliver the cargo to LKO. I attempted an LT (long tanker) with three Mk3 fuel sections instead of two; that weighed in at 137 tons take-off weight, and I didn't have enough thrust to get it even to 10k -- I would eventually get there of course once I've burned enough fuel, but it's too much. 

That 121 ton launch was not much fun. It's pretty sweet just a few tons lighter than that; at around 100 tons it virtually springs into orbit.

[moogoob]

Well, yesterday I tried to build an air-breathing SSTO, you know, the space plane kind. I just can't seem to make them work. Is it my piloting? My Engineering? Don't know.

Today, I think I hit a realization - I'm just not a spaceplane person. I'm a shuttle person. This is what I just banged out in the last hour and a half:

That's building in the SPH, aero testing (to see if it can actually fly ), moving to the VAB and performing a (successful) test flight with typical interplanetary probe payload.

So maybe that's it. Shuttles and rockets are my thing, trying to take an SR71 to orbit just isn't.

Edited September 13, 2016 by moogoob

[MinerEdgar]

Sent little probe to Eve, First time to Eve. Kerbal Engineer and Olex's transfer calculator really helped. 

[Aegrim]

Upgraded the station a bit today, as well as a food supply visit from an unmanned craft. I'm referring to it as dragon because of its purpose, and I'm going to try landing it. I'm not sure how those engines and such will fair on a hot re-entry to the KSC, so I gave it an expandable heat shield just in case.

The more long term habitat section has been added, along with food storage to extend their sustainability to over a year without resupply on the food front, I honestly don't know about oxygen and water since it's recycled.

On that note: (I'm still loving these camera filters, they're great during docking too.)

The oxygen and water treatment module got an upgrade, doubling its capacity.

 

Viking reached mars

Already discovered some interesting geography

No shots of the trench yet, or Olympus Mons.

and it took some shots of the two moons

Phobos

and Deimos 

Jupiter soon, also going to build some surface probes for the nearby planets.

Once Voyager gets to Jupiter I'm going to try seeing how much it'll take to swing it on to Saturn and get moon pictures while passing Jupiter, if I cant it'll travel the Jovian system. My JIMO craft will leave soon, hoping to pay special attention to my favourite moon Europa. This is my first time playing with the IRL planets and I'm feeling like my actually getting to explore.

[XB-70A]

The Comet proved satisfactory at docking.

The crew of four will remain here for some days, as the laboratory is working again (?!).

Meanwhile the launch window to Eve opened :

Eve Explorer I slowly leaves the ground under the thrust of the six Mainsails.

The Neutron launcher was a bit underpowered for the job but keep on accelerating smoothly.

There was a problem with the ducts and fuel transfert was not correct, everything has to be made manually.

Most of the work is done.

The second stage thanksfully did not made the first explode.

The four "Twitch" engines reveal to be good Vernier thruster.

Last kick to circularize at 350 km.

The rover will wait here for some days until a good transfert window opens.

[Justicier]

Did a couple things today... First tested my Mk.II Multi-Purpose SSTO, got to orbit with nearly half its fuel still on board. I also sent a small probe to the Joolian System, to make a flyby of Jool, then Laythe, then Tylo, then back to a highly elliptical orbit of Jool to end its mission and be put into hibernation. As a result of these missions... I give you eyecandy. Sometimes it still makes me pause just to appreciate how beautiful KSP can be.

[Guest]

3 hours ago, moogoob said:

Well, yesterday I tried to build an air-breathing SSTO, you know, the space plane kind. I just can't seem to make them work. Is it my piloting? My Engineering? Don't know.

Space planes are hard. I was feeling pretty good about KSP and thought "hey, let's make one."

It took me days to get one that makes orbit and back. Easily the hardest thing I'd attempted since... well, since my first Kerbaled Mun landing I suppose.

The good news is, once I had the first one, I was able to scale the design up and down in different directions, and now I have SSTO launch capability that scales to payloads of 20 tons or so -- enough to loft a biggish space station module. It was very rewarding. It's just too bad the atmospheric flight controls are rather awful ATM.

[JadeOfMaar]

I finished developing this. with plenty info, 2 editions and 14 screenshots.

 

Edited September 13, 2016 by JadeOfMaar

[Guest]

I may be getting a bit too obsessed here. 

I stayed up 'til 3 am last night refining Archangel. I'm working on three variants in parallel: cargo, passengers, and tanker. I think I've got the general design pretty near its limits. I now have 7 Whiplashes and one Vector for power after I swapped the tri-coupler for a quad-coupler and stuck on one more Whiplash. Then I swapped out bits and pieces and adjusted things until I got it passively stable but not overly nose-heavy both full and empty, tweaked wing and control surface pitch and camber until I got it behaving in a somewhat civilised way, and spent way more time on landing gear than I ever thought I would.

The last test flight I did was with a 15-ton payload and ca 115 ton take-off mass, and it handled it with grace and poise and a very pleasant launch profile. Only real inconvenience is that I have to pump fuel around while in flight -- there's no way to get rocket fuel flowing from the forward to the aft tanks since the cargo bay is in the way and too big to run fuel lines, which means I have to start pumping mid-acceleration-burn or the Vector cuts out. And of course I have to pump it around when deorbiting to get into a stable configuration, but that's actually kind of nice.

Once I've got the cargo variant tuned as close to optimal as I can get it, I'll polish up the tanker and passenger models. The passenger model would scale up to 64 seats but I have no need that kind of spaceliner (cool as it is), and replacing the big cargo bay with fuel would get way too heavy, which means I need to either make it stubbier or fill out the extra space with something light, smaller cargo bays for example, or combine the tanker/spaceliner into a single design.

[eddiew]

10 hours ago, Francois424 said:

EDIT: here's what mine looked like (The cupola would look the the middle section of his if looked from the front)....

"Inspired by" can be a pretty loose term   I like your ambition, that thing is gigantic! But indeed I would fear to fly it in 1.0.5. Tbh I don't fancy my chances in 1.1, I welded the curved sections together to reduce part count  

[lodger]

I was learning how to KIS today. In the image below we see veteran kerbonaut Bill Kerman during his ASES KIS-1 mission after having successfully mounted a cubic octagonal strut to the KIS Orbital Test Platform (KOTP) to which, in turn, a gravioli detector was mounted. During a second EVA Bill mounted a Mystery Goo(tm) containment unit to the lower end of the KOTP and added a second Z-100 battery pack to his capsule to demonstrate the advantages of in-orbit / in-space construction. ASES management considers the KIS-1 mission a huge success.

 

Further KIS-1 mission images:

ASES A2-A launcher on its way to spaaaace!

ASES A2-A with KIS Orbital Test Platform just before Bill went on his first EVA

Bill returns in the early morning hours after he successfully completed the KIS-1 mission.

Edited September 13, 2016 by lodger

[NecroBones]

On 9/11/2016 at 6:54 PM, Francois424 said:

if fact, the landing wrapped up with ZERO dV. The Engine was at 100% throttle, flamed-out because out-of-fuel around 100 meters off the surface and the lander then violently hit the ground on the landing legs at 10,6 m/s. Nothing broke, and everyone was okay.  But man. *whew*.  KSC really needs to send @NecroBones's manufacturing plant of those landing gear a case of Champaign.  Everybody there earned it.

 

Yeah, we built those legs to be tough.

 

[capi3101]

12 hours ago, moogoob said:

Well, yesterday I tried to build an air-breathing SSTO, you know, the space plane kind. I just can't seem to make them work. Is it my piloting? My Engineering? Don't know.

A fast way to diagnose whether it's your piloting vs. your engineering would be for you to post a screenie or two of your ersatz spaceplane, preferably one screenie in the SPH with the engineering tab open showing the craft's mass and the CoM, CoT and CoL markers and a second screenie on the Runway with the resources tab open.

 

Myself, I haven't touched KSP for a few days. Hoping to get back into it some time in the very near future.

[moogoob]

2 hours ago, capi3101 said:

A fast way to diagnose whether it's your piloting vs. your engineering would be for you to post a screenie or two of your ersatz spaceplane, preferably one screenie in the SPH with the engineering tab open showing the craft's mass and the CoM, CoT and CoL markers and a second screenie on the Runway with the resources tab open.

 

Myself, I haven't touched KSP for a few days. Hoping to get back into it some time in the very near future.

Maybe I will. However, I think I'll continue development of my new shuttle, the Pelican. The maiden flight was just too fun!

("Cannot deploy while stowed" error on the nose gear notwithstanding.)

[Guest]

Bought a joystick. Installed Atmosphere Autopilot. Made the first flight where piloting the monster I've made felt... not awful. Proceeded to pull a few barrel rolls and an Immelmann turn out of sheer exuberance.

But man are the stock atmospheric flight controls in this game broken or what.

[hellblazer]

Launched, delivered, and installed the Destiny laboratory module to my ISS.

 

[XB-70A]

9 hours ago, JadeOfMaar said:

 

Wow, just W-O-W!

Impressive appearance. The kind of craft which gives you the feeling that every star systems now is too small.

[Planetace]

Due to a "certain" SSTO. I was motivated enough to tackle a "certain" ice cream moon... And i succeeded...

The Icey succeeded its mission. And `safety` landing back on kerbin without parachutes (really, I just landed it in the ocean, and ditched Jeb and bill before it crashed.)