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What did you do in KSP1 today?


Xeldrak

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@Leafbaron You're right, the cargo bay is from MRS - although on that shuttle it's not actually for cargo, it's for the docking system and instrumentation. It's a low-tech shuttle that will be used as an early-to-mid -game crew transport. The 1.875m tanks from M.O.L.E are also great for making small vehicles like this. It took me a while to get the fuel flow right though, and the same goes for finding a low-tech engine with enough gimbal range (I settled for the 5 degree range of the Moa from SpaceY).

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I learned that not only will x2tXkjS.png + x2tXkjS.pngkxHdPID.png 

throw this  F7LhLoEm.png  around these 7PtxIJom.png  per my Mars 2024 flyby

it also has the deltaV and consumables to visit this C1Jopn6.png an Aten class Near Earth Asteroid 2000 SG344 

If you use one more x2tXkjS.png to stack another Briz-M core as a booster then there are about a dozen NEAs it could visit. Some are smaller than the craft, crazy to think of finding a 3m rock in the middle of so much nothing.

Edited by DBowman
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Well, decided to make another Mun rocket, because in my other Mun rocket, it actually turned out being more expensive and had too much weight, so I'm going to change it. Yep, I'm a big fan of the real life 1960s-1970s moon landings. The rocket shown is fully stock (NO mods).

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The Mun rocket in more detail. I call it the "Kerbo V Spacebullet". Why is it called the "Spacebullet"? You will see why in a minute. Okay, I'll admit, it kinda looks nothing like the real life Saturn V rocket. But oh well, I don't care. This is Kerbal Space Program. I did make two different fairing variants, however; one "bullet" looking and one not so very bullet-looking (see bottom image below).

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LIFTOFF! We have a liftoff!

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First stage separation. Second stage is fired. That escape tower is also later jettisoned afterwards.

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There is the space centre that we just launched from.

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Second stage is now depleted. The retrorockets fire for second stage separation. Second stage must keep a faraway distance first before third stage ignition. I think you should now be beginning to see why I call it the "Spacebullet".

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Third stage now fires and prepares for parking orbit.

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Parking orbit is achieved and we now have MECO (Main Engine Cutoff). Okay, so about the question "why is it named the Spacebullet?" Well, as you can see, it is kinda shaped like a bullet... With an engine nozzle at the end. And it is going to shoot the Mun!

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But what about the other rocket with the different fairing variant? Let’s try launching it, shall we… Reverting flight and changing the fairings. At least this one looks ALMOST Apollo-like. Yes, it is still FULLY STOCK (I’m not a fan of mods).

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Same as the previous "bullet" rocket - first stage is depleted and separates. Second stage fires and escape tower will later jettison.

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Second stage is now depleted, firing retrorockets.

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Compared to the other previous rocket, this one is not very "bullet" looking. Not really sure what shape it looks like, so you can use your imagination. I think this is actually the better design since the RCS thrusters are out in case I need them. I then turn the engine off once I got into parking orbit.

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Skip a few scenes, because a rocket on a parking orbit does not really make good pictures. A few circular orbits later, I fired the third stage again to get out of parking orbit. After that’s done, the fairings are then separated. Now preparing to dock with lander.

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Docking still in progress...

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And... We have a successful docking! :)

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That third stage is no longer needed, so we jettison it. After docking, I rotated the entire craft and jettisoned the third stage facing pro-grade. This is so that the third stage WILL crash on the Mun and not fly around in deep space. We don't want any space junk, after all.

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Goodbye Kerbin, sending three brave Kerbal souls into the unknown… Will see you soon...

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Now let’s deploy those solar panels so that we can get some electricity. Yea, I know, the real Apollo missions didn't use solar panels. But I couldn't help it; it just didn’t look nice without it (will probably lose points for this, haha!).

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Okay, a recap. Let’s see what we have in our spacecraft. These here are the parts:

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Fast forward to Mun orbit (because I don’t want to be putting too many screenshots). I'm actually flying very low (around 6,000-7,000m) but not low enough for me to crash on the surface. At this point, I’m now looking for a good landing spot.

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Chose a landing spot and about to land on Mun's surface. Just gently now...

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We have a successful landing! What a historic achievement for Kerbalkind! Saying some more historic words... blah, blah… :sticktongue:

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The Kerbonaut in this spacecraft is all alone and didn't get a chance to land on the Mun with the other two… :(

Oh well, there is only room for two in the lander anyway.

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That is all for now! I'm not going to bother sending more snapshots of the Kerbals returning back to Kerbin and the re-entry, because I will be sending way too many screenshots. Hope you enjoy :D

- - -

EDIT: Actually, you know what, I'm just gonna show a few more, love this craft so much! Now that they achieved their mission, the Kerbals need to return home.

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The ascent stage gets back up using monopropellants.

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A lot of orbits and a game of chase later, I end up trying to re-dock on the dark side...

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Firing engine, now returning to Kerbin!

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Goodbye Mun, it was a great visit. :)

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And goodbye Service Module... you served us well on the trip.

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Re-entry heating. Not as impressive without the special effects mods...

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Deploying parachutes.

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Well done Kerbals, and welcome home! :D

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Once again, hope you enjoy :)

Edited by MR.Mac
Saw some spelling mistakes. Also added more pics.
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3 hours ago, Martian Emigrant said:

Personally I use ladders only when I have to.

When I want to get off I retract the gears. Depending on the design I have retracted all or just the nose gear.

Sometime after landing you will find the ship is drifting, sliding down a hill. Retracting the gear usually stops all motion.

 

ME

Brilliant, why didn't I think of that, it's like the Russians using pencils in space in stead of ballpoint pens ^_^

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Did some testing with the Colossus to see if it could make it to orbit, and so far it seems promising. Only issue is the nuke's pathetic TWR. It's going to take me 6 minutes to get to orbital velocity after the ascent. I'm pretty sure by then my plane will already be scattered across Titanus.

After that I built a new SSTO:

Luna.png

It has LFO VTOL engines, so it can land on bodies without atmospheres. KER's delta-v reading is broken for some reason, so I don't know the exact amount, but the nuke seems have about 1500 m/s delta-v, and the landing engines have 200-400 m/s, depending on how much oxidizer I use during the ascent.

I also built the most minimalist escape "pod" ever:

Pod.png

More of an escape glider, really.

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It may not survive impact, but the Kerbal does. So technically it's a success.

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And finally, I built a jet. That's it. What an anticlimax.

Stingray.png

 

Edited by Brownhair2
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My crowning acheivement for the day. My thanks to the developers of ScanSat and MechJeb, without which it would've been much more difficult getting a good, close landing.

And no, I didn't use MechJeb's landing guidance; it doesn't play well with RealFuel's ullage simulation. I mostly just used the distance-to-landing-target function, combined with a very quick-and-dirty calculation of how much distance I'd travel while landing (about 240 km). And yes, I tried to fly through the arch on the way home. The less said about that attempt, the better.

Spoiler

 

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Started playing about with spaceplanes for the first time in forever; it is hard at 6.4x scale. This one didn't quite make it to orbit; my current line of thought is a two-stage aerospike-powered vehicle which dumps a fuel tank midway through ascent. I totally did not expect to land this one safely, but somehow I managed. And yes, the boulders can be collided with.

Spoiler

 

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Two flotillas of probes, about half headed to Jool, the other half to Moho. Probably the most interesting one of the bunch is a a Galileo-like "fly past the everything" probe, which has a ludicrous excess of delta-V courtesy of using an ion engine. My first-generation Jool communication relays (powered by a mildly absurd 6 tonnes of batteries and 6 tonnes of solar panels) have a much tighter dV budget, with about 3.5 km/sec remaining in a liquid methane LV-N; getting these to their destination orbits will almost certainly require playing gravitational ping-pong with the Jovian moons.

Spoiler

 

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The transfer stage for my new Minmus biome hopper may have had a bit more delta-V than strictly necessary.

Spoiler

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I also ran a polar Minmus mission, sending along both of the landers just in case dV got tight. In the final accounting, I had about 300 m/sec left at return-to-station; I probably saved a little bit by carrying only just enough propellant to land in the first lander while leaving the rest of the propellant back in orbit.

Spoiler

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DMagic wasn't kidding about the oversized radio telescopes being, well, oversized.

Spoiler

 

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They also made this burn extraordinarily tedious; I needed to complete 700 m/sec of my Moho transfer burn on ion (with a grand 0.07 TWR), and for the first part of the burn, the solar panels were blocked by that giant array, so I had to keep a tight eye on my electricity and discharge capacitors as I began to run out of charge. Even when the solar panels weren't occluded I was still running a net loss of about 80 EC/sec, meaning I had to throttle down to ~50% at the end of the 20-minute ion burn (estimated roughly a quarter-million electric charge used).

Spoiler

mtTwY25.png

 

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20 minutes ago, The Raging Sandwich said:

Huh, that's weird. That looks exactly like my Mun rocket!

(Well not exactly, mine's a bit different.) Great minds think alike.

Thank NASA for that. They were the ones who built the real deal. I just copied their rocket as inspiration for my craft. :D

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(1.1.3, FAR to go) Compared to my activities on Tuesday, yesterday was a good deal quieter. I began with Valcy and Corbas's ongoing roving mission in the vicinity of the Wildcat 7 drilling outpost on Mün, which saw them go about thirty kilometers from the outpost, with some areas having grade up to 43 degrees. Makes me glad I sent a Hellhound 7 rover for them to complete the mission - they would never have been able to venture quite that far on jet-packs alone, certainly not on Mün anyway. I did lose the light as they were heading back; roving on Mün is dangerous enough during the daylight, but doing it at night is just plain suicidal. Let's just say the Hound caught a lot more air yesterday than the day before, and damn near flipped completely over at least once (fortunately there was sufficient air on that one for me to bring it back around the right way before it slammed into the ground). I'm proud of the Hound for not blowing any tires on the entire trip or for ejecting Kerbals; damage to the rover was limited to a busted strut and the BZ-52 that was used to connect it to the booster, neither of which were crucial for the vehicle's continued operations.

The rover also came across a considerably flatter region of Mün (in the 3-5 degree grade range) about twenty kilometers north and northeast of the current Piper Alpha 7 refinery site, so I was understandably curious to see how that area compared to Piper Alpha in terms of mineralogical density (a comparable or greater density would warrant a relocation of the site). So, I embarked on a project to do a KAS refit of the Hellhound, with the goal of putting a surface scanner on it (the Hound's design dates back to 0.21 and surface scanners didn't exist until 1.0, which is why the Hound didn't have one already installed - though why I didn't add one during the refit is beyond me). To that end, I had Val board an Auk II passenger spaceplane to the Kerbinport space station, where Bill had already been stationed. Before departure I loaded her up with some tools and parts - she got a screwdriver, two strut connectors, a connector port and a surface scanner - using KIS. Plane docked successfully, the tools were handed off and Val returned to KSC along with VIP Alemma. Came in on a three degree glide-slope to KSC 27 in what turned out to be one of the smoothest landings I've affected in a while. With both Strange Cargo and Next Objective dispatched to Minmus and unavailable, I decided the time had come to add a third Superfortress 7 craft to my passenger ferry fleet and launched Big Stink, with Val at the helm. The craft arrived safely at Kerbinport on the final booster stage and docked after the booster was discarded. Val will now head to Mün with Bill and two tourists bound for the Münar surface; the plan is to send all four Kerbals down in the Spamcan lander docked at the Munport space station. I'll probably be handling the pre-planning for all of that (translation: put the Hound out in a safe landing zone and make sure the Spamcan is fueled and ready to go) later today. 

Also launched Hojo Charlie - a Bates Motel 7 outpost - to Mün for contract. Nothing much to say about that; pretty routine launch and transfer burn so far. Will probably land it today if I have time.

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Finally managed to complete a tricky contract to retrieve a Mk1 cockpit from low Mun orbit.  They weren't joking when they said "low"!  At just a shade over 10,000m, I'm guessing the rest of the craft is splattered over a mountain side somewhere.  It made for some tricky rendezvous maneuveres as, when dropping back down to intercept it's orbit my trajectory became distinctly sub-orbital.  A quick burn to match velocity and the Klaw simply needed a little RCS to close in on its target.  

Grabbing the cockpit from the rear and returning to Kerbin, there were brief concerns over the parachute arrangement.  But dropping the heat shield reduced the sink rate to a non-leathal level.  The funds received have already been earmarked for the Minmus Biome Hopper mission...

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Further testing on the Mun Scrap Return... and that's it really.

Turns out that throwing some landing legs on a basic Klaw Retriever works pretty well in simulated Mun grav.  Replaced the 0.625 m reaction wheel and 2 x 200 EC batteries with 2 x 1.25 m reaction wheels and 4 x 100 EC batteries and removed the RCS tanks and nozzles.  Now the vehicle will stand up pretty while attached to a 1.25 ton dummy load.  Haven't figured out how to hack atmo for vac sim, but KER shows that the vehicle plus load should have plenty of delta V to make Munar orbit, and Kerbin rendezvous.

The Mun Scrap Return vehicle (previously Klaw Retriever 2) now consists of the Klaw, 2 x 1.25 m reaction wheels, 4 x 100 EC batteries, 4 x base flat solar panels, Okto Probe Core, 2 x base extending combineable antenna, FLT-400 LFO tank, Terrier engine, 4x base landing legs, 2 x drogue chutes, and 2 x Mk 16 chutes.  This setup gives well over 2,000 delta V.  The plan is to burn for Mun, land upright, gently lay 'er down, skid in for the grab, stand up on reaction wheels alone, and burn for Kerbin.  My only fear is that the scrap recovered will add enough extra weight that my Kerbin rendevous burn will fall short.

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Man, I see several people working on spaceplanes and SSTOs and I'm just over here like, "I put boom-boom on the bottom for to make the thing go in the sky". Seriously though I'm awful at any kind of spaceplane.

Sent an Apollo style Mission to Iota (GPP). It was fun but I think I'll stick with my standard setup.

(Also, using pencils in space would leave graphite debris floating around for you to breathe in or get in your eyes)

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12 minutes ago, eloquentJane said:

@kraden SSTO spaceplanes are the second most difficult thing to make in KSP. It takes a lot of practice (or a lot of maths) to get good at them, you shouldn't feel bad about struggling to make them work.

What do you think is the hardest?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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4 minutes ago, Majorjim! said:

What do you think is the hardest?

If I were to guess, I'd go with a craft that can make orbit from the surface of Eve that also survives the landing intact...certainly true in the days before 1.0. Could be "putting anything around/on/through Moho", I guess.

@kraden; there are plenty of folks here who can give you pointers. What specific problem are you having?

Edited by capi3101
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12 minutes ago, Majorjim! said:

What do you think is the hardest?

Space shuttles. Unless you make a dual shuttle (2 shuttles on the same launch vehicle, which is a system with rather limited usability), space shuttles are a pain because you have all the difficulty of making something fly like a plane, added to the challenge of balancing an asymmetrical launch vehicle.

I suppose both have their ups and downs, but SSTO spaceplanes seem to require far less tinkering and small adjustments, and if all else fails you can at least rely on a brute force approach to get them into orbit. There's no real brute force approach to a shuttle though, it has to be precisely engineered.

Edited by eloquentJane
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