What did you do in KSP1 today?

[GreenLight]

I went to Duna.

I also crashed into duna...oops....

Edited October 25, 2017 by GreenLight
to put another thing i did down

[Delay]

I have a question: When should I start leaving Eve's SOI for going back to Kerbin? I have ~1800m/s dV left. Oh, I forgot: I entered Eve orbit, the very first orbit around another planet for me (Duna was just a flyby).

I know that I need to launch to Eve when Eve is 45° behind Kerbin, so maybe when Kerbin is 45° ahead?

[Whisky Tango Foxtrot]

24 minutes ago, Delay said:

I have a question: When should I start leaving Eve's SOI for going back to Kerbin? I have ~1800m/s dV left. Oh, I forgot: I entered Eve orbit, the very first orbit around another planet for me (Duna was just a flyby).

I know that I need to launch to Eve when Eve is 45° behind Kerbin, so maybe when Kerbin is 45° ahead?

https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/

[The Flying Kerbal]

7 hours ago, Tyko said:

Congrats! Sorry to hear of your frustrations. setting those up can be a real pain. The trick I've learned is to determine the period for one full orbit, then set your launcher on an elliptical orbit exactly 1/3 that period with your launcher's AP at the target altitude. On the first pass you drop off you first sat and circularize it. On the next pass you drop off the second, then repeat for the third. You can also do 2/3 if that's easier. 2/3 puts your launcher on a more circular orbit meaning it takes less DV for the sat to circularize.  

Kerbal Engineer Redux has an orbital period readout - hope this helps!

Yes that was the plan, I read about the wider elliptical orbit elsewhere on this forum - maybe it was one of your posts?  I can only assume that somewhere in the calculations, I screwed up and got that all wrong, or maybe my Ap wasn't precise enough, but whatever caused it, it sure didn't work for me the first time (though it did the second).  If the error had been off the mark by a large margin, it wouldn't have been so maddening, but it was just a tad out and looked like a few simple adjustments would iron out the problems.  But nope, I just couldn't get the satellites to behave themselves, finally running out of monopropellant  (engines... we don't need no stinking engines!) for their manoeuvring thrusters.

One guy who I've mentioned before on this forum, and I don't know if he subscribes to it or not, who once again came to the rescue was Marcus House and his Youtube channel.  I was totally unaware of the Orbital Period Readout on KER, it doesn't appear on the orbit window by default, and I've been too lazy to look at all the options, but it was his video about setting up these orbits that drew my attention to it.  It was an enormous help, indeed without it I suspect one of two things would have happened: either I'd still be battling with this mission or - more likely - a sledgehammer would have been buried in my computer keyboard by this time! 

'ere... 'ave another photo:

 

[JadeOfMaar]

I made some iterations on what I just realized was the evolution of my "Palladium" spaceplane airplane, primarily involving the highly experimental Mk2 scifi parts. I can't recall the last craft I made that needed to be as heavy on control surface as this. The "fangs" rear-most wing pieces are envisioned to be whole elevons by themselves, justifying the clipped elevons in them.

I also did a lot of troubleshooting on some certain Kopernicus configs of mine.   Oh this is all in a stock-scale test install, not the main game.

 

The Gaelean Space Center has aliens in its basement!

This insectoid craft is aerodynamically sound. While the F12 overlay will tell you the arms want to tear themselves off at high speed, there's no need at all to wage war with SAS and gimbal to maintain a heading.

Lastly, I finished a pair of exclusive sunflares. I can only show this one, Karkua, the black hole in Kerbal Star Systems.

[capi3101]

(1.3.0) Yesterday began with the arrival of Laggin' Dragon at Mun. The ferry ship docked with the Munport space station, refueled and swapped crews with Necessary Evil already docked at the station. Upon the craft's departure, the conditions were finally satisfied for a "new space station" contract in orbit of the Mun. Pilot Agamore Kerman and tourist Hanby Kerman departed the station shortly after Laggin' Dragon's departure:

Spamcan 7b lander departing Munport, with Laggin' Dragon in the background. Visible craft docked at the station are the Old Bessie 7 (upper left, back), Spamcan 7 (upper left, fore), Necessary Evil (upper right) and Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout 7 (lower right).

The Spamcan 7b lander reached the surface of Mun safely and after Agamore planted a flag the lander returned successfully to the station. The two kerbals boarded Necessary Evil at that point and were joined by tourist Herhat Kerman and pilot Catfrey Kerman. The ship was refueled and departed the station bound for Minmus, where it will arrive in twelve days. Meanwhile, Laggin' Dragon set a course back to Kerbin, where it will arrive in about five hours.

 

Meanwhile in my litterbox save, an Auk III tanker plane was launched to rendezvous with an Auk Ia 2-passenger plane in a 500km orbit over Kerbin with Jeb and Val aboard; the plane had ran out of gas after a botched rendezvous attempt with the heighliner Little Boy in a 600 km failsafe orbit. I wasn't sure sending the tanker was a great idea - first, none of the Auk series are really designed to go much past 150km LKO, and second I wasn't sure I'd be able to get their respective docking ports to connect due to their respective designs. The rendezvous went off without a hitch and I was able to get the ports to mate up, though, and Jeb and Val were able to complete their trip out to Little Boy. Meanwhile, the Auk III successfully returned to KSC 27 - the plane was on vapors, but it did make it (and I've been able to make KSC before with completely dry tanks with that design, so that's not a personal record). Little Boy will be hauling the Auk Ia along on its planned exploration journey to the moons of Jool, which will take place once I can get some more Jool-bound infrastructure up and docked. I've never flown a plane over Laythe before...looking forward to trying it out.

[Boganaut]

On 23/10/2017 at 2:00 AM, Geonovast said:

How about "The Boganaut Maneuver"

I would be proud!

 

On 23/10/2017 at 6:14 AM, Zeiss Ikon said:

Going way up high is the only practical way to change from prograde to retrograde (or vice versa).  Adding the aerobraking is a nice way to get from "long skinny orbit you can change cheaply" to "an orbit like ordinary people would use for ordinary purposes."  I've done it in Kerbin's SOI when I was trying to intercept an asteroid, though I didn't aerobrake because I was trying to match with the asteroid well before periapsis (it was on a collision course, I was trying to divert and capture at the same time -- I failed, BTW).

Of course, if it's an orbit around the Sun, it takes years to get that high and years more to fall back, leading folks trying to rescue a retrograde Kerbal to do it the hard way.

Yep, it makes sense. I'd dong a bit of reading a while ago and it dawned on me I should give it a go due to my rather non-Kerbal under-engineering. Got a bit of an assist from Ike which kept the fuel spend nice and low considering the weight of the craft. The ore shipment enabled the Duna Invasion Fleet to propel itself out to Ike to get dragged over to an eastward orbital direction around Duna. I'm glad that despite my propensity for setting up infrastructure to make fuel plentiful in the long run, that I encounter these scenarios.

Oh man, if I saw a Kerbal in retrograde solar orbit, I think I'd just organise a lovely memorial for him/her!

On a game mechanic note: this evening, after a cup of tea, I moved a relay satellite into a nice wide polar orbit around Duna. I had thought that the 2 pilots on the nearby space station might be able to bounce their remote control signal off the satellite to one of the ore barges making another run up to Ike, but it seems that probe control signals don't relay - there has to be direct line of sight. Fortunately, I had full probe control at all the right times anyway. I'm thinking a small auxilliary outpost in same orbit, 180 degrees apart will be necessary to reduce blackouts.

The Duna landing rocket DAVE II has just completed a series of aerograzes (ultra-cautious aerobraking?!) to lower its orbit for a minimal fuel landing.... again, I think I have another under-engineered machine here. All orbital adjustments were being done using monoprop as far as possible. Just needed to keep enough mono left over for 1 docking manouvre in the coming days. A bit of orbital plane adjustment was required to land near the stranded Seanwell's pod and Bill & Jeb were able to touch down 5.9km. They estimate the can break orbit using about 75% of available fuel reserves. Bill & Jeb are currently arguing about whether they will risk rescuing a non-equatorial Kerbal again and also about who has to go for a few kms walk to make contact with Seanwell.

And me? I'm going to have another cup of tea! Goodnight!

[Red Shirt]

In the last couple days I updated to KSP 1.3.1 from 1.2.1. and started modding the snot out of it.

All went well except docking strut 1,0 will no longer work. In fact it crashed the game   I'll miss it but with KJR it probably is no longer necessary. (yeah I know about KIS/KAS but I personally find it too cumbersome to use) 

Also MechJeb isn't working well at all for me in 131. Discovered manual Mun landings are a lot easier than I remembered. So that's a plus.

[Atkara]

Didn't really do anything in KSP itself, but I did sit down to arrange some old screenshots, dating back to 1.2.2 and onward. Not much in the area of looks, given the state of my backup machine and the 4:3 aspect ratio -but anyway, here they are.

Edited October 24, 2017 by Atkara

[Angelo Kerman]

Started working on DSEV's Estonian command pod. It's a Size 3 kerbalized Orion:

Here you can see its lineage:

The beginnings of the IVA:

Concept art:

[CatastrophicFailure]

31 minutes ago, Angel-125 said:

The beginnings of the IVA:

At first glance I thought this was Darth Vader on tiny feet. 

[Halfdan]

i finally built something big

like really big 

after suceeding with the little space wheel, i designed this one as a HUGE orbital harbor in mun orbit

The fuel depot was the first module

Spoiler

the second was the ore storage facility

Spoiler

the processing facility

Spoiler

the habitation module

Spoiler

the final piece was the reactor section containing the RTGs

Spoiler

 

 

Edited October 24, 2017 by Halfdan

[Jeb, The Lonely Kerbonaut]

19 hours ago, Jeb, The Lonely Kerbonaut said:

I tried to launch my first manned Duna mission. The mission was going ok. I placed my ship in orbit, made a Homman transfer to Duna, made a aerobrake to get me into the orbit of Duna, and  after all this i landed on Duna.

I started my trip to back to Kerbin, orbited Duna, and i made a Homman transfer to Kerbin. I entered in the Kerbin SOI, and i tried to make a aerobrake. But my fuel ended during the burn.

Now i have to get out and push, but i will try this tomorrow. Wish me luck!

Today i finished the mission with sucess, thanks to Bill, who pushed the craft until the periapsis is 34 kilometers. Made the aerobrake, almost exploded, and i landed sucessfully in Kerbin. I have 2 pics of the mission, but sadly i don't have a Imgur account (I wanted so much that the forum let me post images directly from the screenshoot paste), and I will not waste my time creating an account just to post these 2 images.

 

[dvp]

20 minutes ago, Jeb, The Lonely Kerbonaut said:

Today i finished the mission with sucess, thanks to Bill, who pushed the craft until the periapsis is 34 kilometers. Made the aerobrake, almost exploded, and i landed sucessfully in Kerbin. I have 2 pics of the mission, but sadly i don't have a Imgur account (I wanted so much that the forum let me post images directly from the screenshoot paste), and I will not waste my time creating an account just to post these 2 images.

 

You don't need an imgur account to post pictures. But there's also tinypic.

[Zeiss Ikon]

Last night, I killed Adeny Kerman (in my career game).

I have a few photos from the mission, but they aren't up on imgur yet; I may come back and offer them up when I have more time.

The contract was to take four (4) tourists variously to orbit and fly by the Mun.  Adeny, the newest pilot in the Program, had been out to Mun orbit as a passenger/student on Jeb's previous flight, and was now able to fly prograde and retrograde hold -- same as both Jeb and Val, though he had fewer flights.  He was picked for the four tourist excursion; Val was going to fly two VIPs to Munar orbit following, then there were a pair of two tourist orbital flights on tap.

In a possible bad decision, Adeny was handed the newest tourist bus -- Taxicab IV, with two passenger cabins and tandem wings plus a canard, and 50% greater fuel capacity than Taxicab III.  Like Taxicab III, the dorsal surface was festooned with parachutes (Mission Control is still waiting on R&D to provide landing gear that can stand up to supersonic/hypersonic flight).  The new secondary wing also had RCS quads at the tips, but the vessel had the same monopropellant capacity as Taxicab III.

Launch was a little difficult; even with the booster fins upgraded to the same swept wings used on the orbiter, the vessel is less stable at launch than Taxicab III (COM is further aft, due to the required upgrade from four to six strap-on boosters).  With proper nose management, however, Adeny was able to pilot the stack into orbit, and once there, set up his trans-Munar burn.  Despite the much heavier booster, the orbiter's engine and fuel had to be used to circularize.  Adeny calculated there was enough fuel to complete the mission, and there would be an opportunity for abort back to Kerbin instead of capture if his calculations turned out to be incorrect.

Munar orbit capture was nominal, however, using just less than half the remaining fuel -- return from Munar orbit takes the same delta-V as Munar orbit capture from transfer orbit, so that was fine.  After completing the contract orbit and giving the tourists the best view of the Mun ever achieved without magnification (orbit was 90x91 km), Adeny set up his return burn -- which completed with a 59 km Kerbin periapsis for a first aerobraking pass, leaving about 4 units of Lf/O and monopropellant tanks nearly full (a small correction burn had been done using RCS while outbound).  Well, that's okay, it's all downhill from here, right?

First aerobrake pass demonstrated that apoapsis was too high; very little braking occurred, and Adeny used almost half the monopropellant slowing with the RCS.  At apoapsis (still above 2000 km) he adjusted his periapsis down to 54 km (a tiny RCS burn, just a few m/s).

The next aerobrake pass confirmed that Taxicab IV shares one of Taxicab III's problems -- it can't hold its nose up high enough for reentry with aerodynamics alone; in fact, even with additional elevons added on the trailing wing, pitch authority is less than Taxicab III.  Still, with a little RCS assistance, Adeny was able to keep the nose pointed vertically upward through this pass -- but now RCS was nearly empty, and the batteries (last fully charged by the Swivel's alternator during the Kerbin transfer burn) were down to about half capacity.

Next aerobrake pass, with similar periapsis, saw enough energy bled away to ensure the ship would land.  It also, however, used the last of the monopropellant, and batteries were down to 5% by the time the ship was down to 40 km.  Adeny killed the reaction wheel, and continued flying on aerodynamics alone -- still able to keep the nose up at about 45 degrees AoA, lower than preferred, but all the vessel could do without RCS or reaction wheel assistance.

At 29 km, with velocity down to 1900 m/s, the Mk. 1 cockpit failed due to excessive heat, killing Adeny instantly.  He must have suspected this might happen, because he had pre-armed the parachutes (doctrine for the Taxicab III is to hold the parachutes, as the vessel lands slowly enough to make ditching in the ocean a viable alternative to parachute landing).  The remainder of the vessel (lacking any control inputs and the canard, and with COM well back from where it ought to be relative to the flying surfaces) immediately started to spin and rapidly shed the bulk of its remaining speed, the four tourists still conscious and uninjured.  The headless vessel slowed enough in its unstable configuration that, when the air pressure rose into the "safe" range for the parachutes, they deployed -- eight furled canopies that lowered the vessel, still spinning, at a mere 200 m/s until their full opening altitude of 1000 m.

From there down, the vessel dropped stably, a little tail down (unbalanced by the missing mass of the cockpit), and touched down at a mere 4.8 m/s.

All four tourists were fine, and most of the orbiter was recovered intact, but Adeny has gone to the Kraken, a victim of the cardboard and foil construction of the Mk. 1 cockpit.  Taxicab IV has been grounded pending design review.  Space Center authorities have announced that open tourist contracts will be serviced with the Taxicab III, which has an excellent safety record.  Future tourist flights will also be instrumented, so that excursions can also gather science data to advance the Program.

[JadeOfMaar]

I had a serious need for speed today and built some random large spaceplanes. The earlier ones were rocketplanes primarily using LFO engines. The Mk3 one came close to being an SSTO but failed. The later ones were OPT spaceplanes and didn't need to be SSTOs. Surprisingly, they weren't draggy as heck as usual in KSP, and this discovery (in addition to the engineering) led to the birth of revision 5 of my NOX Crown SSTO. Less engines, much less drag, same satisfying range of dV overall, awesome airbrake potential (military split elevon style) and now it's even a proper VTOL with about 2 TWR on Mun's surface.

The design is overall largely unchanged but it just...seems fresh and promising for some reason. I'll see if it's worth a darn when I take it to the 2.5x playground.

I'm on the fence about the Mk2 engines and radial shock cones. They're not needed at stock scale, and were for when I felt like accelerating to Ludicrous Speed.

Spoiler

It managed Mach 11 before the ablative Water supply (another modlet of mine) ran out and the adapter behind the cockpit melted. "Off with his head!"

Edited October 25, 2017 by JadeOfMaar

[kraden]

@JadeOfMaar I would love to know how that thing performs in 2.5x 

[XB-70A]

It is my first day in months I was able to play a bit, so I finally decided to complete a mini satellites constellation :

125 parts yeah... but only 5.3 tooooonnnnns...

 

Toucan 18 is climbing with the Dwarf units on-board. Inclination aimed: 45 degrees.

 

Time to separate after 1 min 30 s of flight only.

 

The payload fairing was separated once 50 km has been reached. It definitively lacked force, and was ugly to look at.

 

Ap placed at 350 km for now. The second stage past over the southern mountains at approx 80 km.

 

Circularization and...

 

Release of the first comsat successful.

 

The rest is way too long to be show directly, so the best was to place them in a spoiler.

 

Spoiler

 

Dwarf IB is released.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And finally the last member was ejected following nearly 2 hours of flight.

 

 

Then followed...

The end for the 2nd stage which was deorbitted with its fuel residue.

 

End of the mission.

 

 

Eight small relay in orbit for the modest amount of around 7300 funds.

 

 

[capi3101]

(1.3.0) Yesterday was a designing day. One of the things about the Alcubierre Drive mod is that it does burn through Xenon. It's at a relatively slow rate, but it happens nonetheless, and eventually a warp-driven ship will need its Xenon supply restocked. Gave me an excuse to design the Auk X HKO Xenon tanker plane:

Auk X initial prototype.

The shakedown flight of the initial prototype shown in the screenie above revealed several crucial flaws in the design, namely crappy area ruling and the use Mk-2 LF tanks instead of Mk-2 Rocket fuel tanks. The inital prototype did rendezvous, dock and "deliver" its load to the heighliner Little Boy in a 600km Kerbin orbit, but it did not have sufficient fuel to return to Kerbin. After reverting the flight, several changes were made; The Mk-2 tanks were replaced with the correct model, some FL-T400 tanks were added to the inboard set of air intakes, pushing those forward, a pair of Mk-1 fuselages were added to the outboard set of engines, pushing those back and the horizontal stabilizers were moved onto them (putting them further back). The flaps were also set to deflect in the opposite direction; they were moving the wrong way during the initial shakedown. I completed the second rehearsal flight this morning, orbiting Kerbin, rendezvousing with Little Boy, TAC dumping xenon, returning to LKO and deorbiting for a successful landing at KSC 09. The bird is now operational, and available for when I need it in both my career and litterbox saves.

Speaking of the litterbox, plans are continuing for my mock Jool-5 run. Tylo's got me concerned; estimates put the flight in the neighborhood of 10,000 m/s of delta-V to travel from warp fail-safe altitude to low orbit, land, return to low orbit, and then return to fail-safe. If I can build a craft that can do all that, it might be time to consider a run at Eve too. I'm investigating ways to reduce the delta-V requirement.

 

In my career save, the Old Bessie 7 tanker lander at the Munport space station landed near the Piper Alpha refinery to gas up. Lander was out of direct winching range of the refinery so the rover Indecision has moved over to bridge the gap...or at least, that was the plan. I can't seem to find the rover's winch...

[Azimech]

On 10/23/2017 at 11:17 PM, CatastrophicFailure said:

. . .

Take it off any sweet jumps?

You could say the whole of Gilly is one large jump-fest. But without the adrenaline.

[Tyko]

On 10/23/2017 at 10:44 PM, The Flying Kerbal said:

Yes that was the plan, I read about the wider elliptical orbit elsewhere on this forum - maybe it was one of your posts?  I can only assume that somewhere in the calculations, I screwed up and got that all wrong, or maybe my Ap wasn't precise enough, but whatever caused it, it sure didn't work for me the first time (though it did the second).  If the error had been off the mark by a large margin, it wouldn't have been so maddening, but it was just a tad out and looked like a few simple adjustments would iron out the problems.  But nope, I just couldn't get the satellites to behave themselves, finally running out of monopropellant  (engines... we don't need no stinking engines!) for their manoeuvring thrusters.

One guy who I've mentioned before on this forum, and I don't know if he subscribes to it or not, who once again came to the rescue was Marcus House and his Youtube channel.  I was totally unaware of the Orbital Period Readout on KER, it doesn't appear on the orbit window by default, and I've been too lazy to look at all the options, but it was his video about setting up these orbits that drew my attention to it.  It was an enormous help, indeed without it I suspect one of two things would have happened: either I'd still be battling with this mission or - more likely - a sledgehammer would have been buried in my computer keyboard by this time! 

'ere... 'ave another photo:

 

Looks a lot like the ones I've launched..go figure      I've got a great KER screen layout for 1440 screens if you're interested. Includes custom windows for just about everything. you can seen it in my screen shots. There are three smaller windows I've configured in addition to the ones across the top. There's a rendezvous, a landing and an orbit period window you can pull up as needed. The 4 across the top are always up.

 

[Agustin]

Anybody Knows a mod that locks the internal crewed cockpit while flying? You know that transparent-zone on the walls of the part that makes it possible to see the kerbals inside, and that it is activated by clicking the little button next to the kerbal's portraits? Because whenever I swith to the map view and back to the flight view, it switches itself back off, and I sometimes want it to be locked on.

https://i.imgur.com/3nELzSV.png

Edited October 25, 2017 by Agustin

[Delay]

After 3 years, 244 days and 2¹/₄ hours, Jebediah finally landed back on Kerbin after a Duna fly by. I didn't bring enough fuel for orbit, so two years were spent adjusting the orbit to get a Kerbin encounter.

Next: Orbit around Duna.

[Slam_Jones]

Finally got RSS working (realized I had always forgotten to install the textures... ) and performed a few missions. After barely getting Jeb to Earth orbit and back, I downloaded a few rocketry mods and set about building a few variations of a heavy launcher. So far I've done a Lunar flyby (on probably the largest rocket I've ever built) as well as put together a 3-module station in low earth orbit. 

Feels like a whole new game when you need about 9.4km/s of dv just to get to a low orbit!! I love it though, since my launch vehicles look a bit more realistic than typical Kerbal contraptions. My lunar flyby had something like 11.5km/s of dv, in which Jeb only got home because of a very lucky free return trajectory. 

Next up: lunar station, lunar landing, and eventually on to Mars!  May slowly add more mods till I have an RO-like install.

Edited October 25, 2017 by Slam_Jones

[Agustin]

Better Missions, and more interesting surface places...