What did you do in KSP1 today?

[CatastrophicFailure]

This actually makes sense in context:

This horrid little thing is my overly complicated solution to returning half a dozen Kerbals and a couple of big parts from the surface of Duna. The catch is, the cockpit & Skipper are what's waiting on the surface. I'll need to bring them together with the rest of it, assemble it with KAS/KIS, then get the whole mess back to Kerbin in one piece. Well, at least the important pieces. Who needs heat shields? I'll just use those big ol' wings to aerobrake down from interplanetary speeds. Nothing could possibly go wrong, right? 

Actually, initial testing from near-Münar apokee is surprisingly encouraging. Freed of all fuel, the thing actually flies quite nicely, got a little warm on re-entry but not quite toasty.

It, erm, actually lands very gently too, around 35m/s. As long as I'm not trying to make a 90 degree bank at the exact same moment.

 

[ROXunreal]

Finally made a plane with the limited parts I have that can fly more than a full hemisphere away on Kerbin. I made it for completing survey contracts, however its level flight ceiling is about 13,000m so I had to pick up speed and zoom climb to near 17,000m in order to complete the contracts.

Because my SPH is still level 1 and I can't afford an upgrade, I had to launch from the VAB/LP. The boosters were supposed to propel it towards the contract area and get it to high altitude fast, the small Hammer booster on the top of the fuselage was for balancing the thrust, in addition to thrust limiter ratio settings.

I decoupled the Hammer and continued with the S1's

Due to speed and lack of control, instead of propelling me towards the contract area through the high atmosphere as planned, I ended up at 92,000m, in space. As the plane fell down towards Kerbin uncontrolably, eventually it righted itself when the atmosphere became dense enough. From there on I glided to about 12,000m and then flew all the way to the north polar cap, where the survey contract was to be completed. The sights were beautiful

After completing the contract, I tested how this thing lands, luckily the therain is super flat. Stall speed is at around 40-50m/s

After landing I decided not to be lazy and took off again to land at the KSC and complete the mission properly, which I did without much issue and with some fuel to spare.

As can be seen, I had an emergency cockpit eject and chute ready. Glad I didn't have to use it.

The fuselage is one part full fuel tank, one part structural fuselage. The engines also each have fuel tanks.

[RoboRay]

9 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Wait, how do you attach the big heat shield by it's nose and still inflate it?

The inflatable heat shield is actually attached by its bottom node to one of the upper nodes of an inverted fairing base above it.  I've been abusing the heck out of fairing bases to put connection nodes where I need them. 

9 hours ago, ThatHomelessGuy said:

I want to see this folding plane.

It's a further refinement of this design:

It uses Firespitter's folding electric propellers powered by big fuel cells, with the rotating wings from Contares.  Folded up, it tucks perfectly inside a 3.75m cylinder.

Edited October 27, 2016 by RoboRay

[capi3101]

(1.1.3, 2 to go) Yesterday I found myself with a little extra time at work, and I had an idea to make a little O-10 powered "escape capsule" for my desktop career save (if I ever get back around to it) to get all those damn freeloaders off my orbital space station. Spent my afternoon break building and testing the design with a quick orbital hop. Worked better than I expected. Next up for the design is to make a little disposable "christmas tree" with the things, dock it up to the station and get those freeloaders packing. Only trouble I've got is that the number of parts involved is over the Level 2 VAB limit, and that's just the payload. Calls for a bit of a change in plans, I suppose...

Last night I went back to my laptop career save after having installed the penultimate version of B9 Procedural Wings; I have yet to give it a bench test to see if it's working with my build or not, something I've got planned for later in the day today. I went ahead and took the time to get my contracts written down where I could see them and begin making more definite plans. With that done, I performed a tech upgrade of the Gurney 7, which I called (unimaginatively) the Gurney 7a, with better long-range capability. Took the redesigned craft to pick up Pratzor from Münar orbit; the craft will arrive in about eight hours. After that, I went ahead and performed the launch of the Beep Beep 7b on a mission to put a probe over Mün. 7b is actually the seventh flight of a Beep Beep craft, but I had mislabeled the things pretty badly and this way I can get back on track with the launch of Beep Beep 7g (considering I've got contracts put probes over Kerbin and Minmus at the moment, that'll probably happen sooner rather than later). At the moment I've got three aircraft surveying contracts that I'll do as soon as I can get a plane together capable of doing the job, I have a flag planting mission to Mün, another LKO rescue mission, and a contract to put 4 tourists in Münar orbit. Nothing spectacular or tricky just yet...

[Jabbman]

Stock KSP was becoming a bit of a grind recently, so I decided to have a proper go at a RO/RSS install. I flirted with RSS back in 1.05, but never carried it through.

I managed to get it up and running, with a shed load of mods and my fragile old laptop seems to be coping well enough for medium graphics settings! To begin with, I cracked open a sandbox game just to get my bearings. Set launch site to Tyuratam and proceeded to play with my favourite thing in KSP: Soviet booster replicas.

Needless to say I soon hit the learning curve and all of a sudden KSP is as fun, challenging and exciting as it was when I first started playing stock back in 0.18! Here are some of my Soviet-era replicas...

 

R-7 with Vostok unmanned test capsule:

 

Early Soyuz capsule test:

 

Stage II Soyuz capsule test:

 

R-7 Satellite launch:

 

Proton/TKS test launch:

 

In all seriousness though, I did finally get some things working. And when you do, it's all the more satisfying...

 

Finally orbited the TKS

 

This 'Soyuz 5' inspired machine actually left the ground without detonating:

 

And some Tantares R-7 Glamour shots:

 

I'm having so much fun!!

[Theysen]

@Jabbman

 

good good, let the realism flow!  

[GusTurbo]

I reported a bug that causes the game to hang while loading on scene change to the flight scene. The more fairings that are part of a craft, the longer the game will freeze on the load screen (before loading normally).

http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/13120

The more you know!

[Curveball Anders]

I finally learned how to adjust orbits to match the exact stipulations in contracts.

And learned quite a bit more of orbital mechanics

[TooManyIdeas]

Today, I launched a satellite into a polar orbit around Kerbin that was only kinda eccentric. The rocket did do a bit of flipping on the way out of the atmosphere, but I assure everyone that wild flipping is a perfectly routine maneuver and that my shouts of "No! Bad rocket! Stop it!" were purely meant to add suspense for the Kerbals watching on TV at home.

I assure you.

[Martian Emigrant]

The last few days were spent building and playing with SSTOs.

http://imgur.com/a/uUTBK

Built a nice one and on pure just do it sent it to the Mun.

On the way down I recognized where I was.

So I taxied to the "Big Arch" in the next crater over. Took 10-15 mins.

Jeb was very disapointed.

Quote

Jeb: It's not a Pretzel!

After refuelling

Went to the obvious next step. Minmus.

I love Minmus. Easy to land on. The colour, lighting, the eat-ability of it.

Refuelled and went to Duna. Thinking "Hey I got the Delta-V to go anywhere".

And that's where my fun ended.............

It can't LAND.

I tried many ways the last few days. And it just won't handle AIR.

Won't glide. Forward or backward. Neither Duna nor Kerbin. Added airbrakes, fins and what-not. Power-landing, moving the COG.

A leaf on the wind. Won't behave in a predictable way.

Tried a clean-slate redesign, rebuild. No dice. No work.

Quite disappointed. I wanted a single-man-go-anywhere-ship. Not a huge SSTO-factory-thing-a-ma-bob.

Could do moons only but getting back ON Kerbin would be nicer. Never mind at the KSC.

Will work some more on it.

Like huge-wings-with-gobs-of-parachutes-or-something.

There is something that I am not learning here.

 

ME

Edited October 27, 2016 by Martian Emigrant

[DerekL1963]

Touchdown on Tylo!  One moon down, four to go.

 

[eddiew]

1 hour ago, Martian Emigrant said:

There is something that I am not learning here.

The wing placement worries me. You have no tanks forward of them so your CoM will run behind your CoL as fuel drains. Maybe move the wings to the rear  Also I feel like you have excess rapiers... they're deadweight once pass 25km on Kerbin... less may be more.

[Magzimum]

I played "Catchup", but failed.

You think docking in space is hard? Try docking at 2000 m.

The game is simple. Launch this.

The on the runway, have Jeb climb into the seat (leaving the bottom plane unmanned - it also has no drone core - but it will still launch and fly as long as the top one is docked). At altitude, undock. Engage Juno engines. The bottom one will just go straight from there on (if you were flying in a stable course).

Then try to catch up.

As you get closer, it gets harder.

This is as close as I got. Revert back to SPH, and back to the studio. 

I am sure that with a lot of trying, and a better design, I could get closer. But I just slapped this together quickly, and never improved the design or even stability of the small plane. It was just some fun. Was surprised the big plane even went straight for more than 1 min.  

 

[TheEpicSquared]

Well it's not in KSP, but me and my friend started work on a wind tunnel (for some reason I can't embed the picture but here's the link: http://imgur.com/gallery/E2UJG)

The fan to the right os what is going to be powering the tunnel."We modified it to run twice as fast, so air would actually come out the other end. It's far from finished - we still have to make it longer, permanently attach the fan, think of a way of generating smoke and replace a part of the shoebox with clear plastic. We expect to be done in 2 weeks.  

 

[SkyRender]

Today I made the final expansion to my example colony for my PBS Colonization Challenge thread.

Think you can do better?  Head on over and prove it!

Edited October 27, 2016 by SkyRender

[ThatHomelessGuy]

9 minutes ago, TheEpicSquared said:

 think of a way of generating smoke and replace a part of the shoebox with clear plastic. We expect to be done in 2 weeks.  

 

I did something like this before I found using the air pressure to draw the smoke from a straw downwind from the fan that was connected to a smoke box with a little hole in it and a piece of paper to control the draw pressure at the air input worked really well. I used chips of lightable smoke pellets from a joke shop on a plate inside the box but I'm sure there are other ways too. The cool thing about the smoke pellets is they come in different colours to make it easier to see if you use red or blue smoke.

Edited October 27, 2016 by ThatHomelessGuy

[TheEpicSquared]

1 minute ago, ThatHomelessGuy said:

I did something like this before I found using the air pressure to draw the smoke from a straw downwind from the fan that was connected to a smoke box with a little hole in it and a piece of paper to control the draw pressure at the air input worked really well I used chips of lightable smoke pellets from a joke shop on a plate inside the box but I'm sure there are other ways too. The cool thing about the smoke pellets is they come in different colours to make it easier to see if you use red or blue smoke.

We're currently thinking of using incense sticks, but I'm not sure if the smoke will be thick enough to see properly. :/

[ThatHomelessGuy]

8 minutes ago, TheEpicSquared said:

We're currently thinking of using incense sticks, but I'm not sure if the smoke will be thick enough to see properly. :/

You could make homemade SRB fuel out of potassium nitrate (can be found in garden centers) and sugar (50/50 ish) that makes allot of smoke. Adding something like coloured candles or crayons should make a dye but I'd test the mixture amounts and the whole thing outside first. The wax would also act as a binding agent for the mixture too meaning you could pour it into a tray and cut up pellets for easy use. Just don't knock the SRB mix over and into an open flame. It usually needs a match head or something to ignite but you know how these things can go. Best of luck.

Edit : Like this

 

Edited October 27, 2016 by ThatHomelessGuy

[TheEpicSquared]

2 minutes ago, ThatHomelessGuy said:

You could make homemade SRB fuel out of potassium nitrate (can be found in garden centers) and sugar (50/50 ish) that makes allot of smoke. Adding something like coloured candles or crayons should make a dye but I'd test the mixture amounts and the whole thing outside first. The wax would also act as a binding agent for the mixture too meaning you could pour it into a tray and cut up pellets for easy use. Just don't knock the SRB mix over and into an open flame. It usually needs a match head or something to ignite but you know how these things can go. Best of luck.

It's a good idea, but the only problem is that I really have no idea where you can get potassium nitrate in Sweden.  

[ThatHomelessGuy]

5 minutes ago, TheEpicSquared said:

It's a good idea, but the only problem is that I really have no idea where you can get potassium nitrate in Sweden.  

From a garden center. It's used in fertilizers. Go into a garden center and tell them you need potassium nitrate or a fertilizer with High Potassium nitrate content. They will take care of you.

Garden center = anywhere that sells gardening / farming supplies.

Edited October 27, 2016 by ThatHomelessGuy

[septemberWaves]

29 minutes ago, SkyRender said:

Today I made the final expansion to my example colony for my PBS Colonization Challenge thread.

Think you can do better?  Head on over and prove it!

Whilst I'm not sure the theme of your challenge is really my style, I am very impressed by your base. It looks very good. Also, this is reminding me now that I need to figure out how to use the garage parts; I have yet to play around with them.

[Shania_L]

11 minutes ago, ThatHomelessGuy said:

From a garden center. It's used in fertilizers. Go into a garden center and tell them you need potassium nitrate or a fertilizer with High Potassium nitrate content. They will take care of you.

Garden center = anywhere that sells gardening / farming supplies.

Try to ask this in your least 'terroristy' voice

[CatastrophicFailure]

3 minutes ago, Shania_L said:

Try to ask this in your least 'terroristy' voice

This.  Mind your P's & Q's and give a look to any local laws regarding the production of minute quantities of MOAR BOOSTERS! Probably perfectly legal unless you're in a big city, but best you find out ahead of time lest we see you in a not-so-flattering evening news report. 

[ThatHomelessGuy]

10 minutes ago, Shania_L said:

Try to ask this in your least 'terroristy' voice

Agreed Potasium Nitrate is technically the main ingredient in gunpowder. And Home made SRB fuel In some countries is considered bomb making equipment.
Probably should have mentioned that before.

Fun fact : A 1ft long 1&1/2 Inch pvc pipe correctly filled with the stuff with just the right mix can get upto and beyond 1km altitude all by itself. And that's with an altimeter watch strapped to the top.

Edited October 27, 2016 by ThatHomelessGuy
Dreadful grammar on my part

[septemberWaves]

Something tells me that it's probably vaguely illegal to make DIY SRBs without some sort of license.