What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Agustin]

I was out of fuel, so I pushed my ship with my Kerbal:

Then my mission was completed successfully...

Then this is a random picture that I like

Edited November 18, 2017 by Agustin

[Kosmonaut]

2 hours ago, eloquentJane said:

I launched a couple of interesting space probes in the New Horizons system. Details can be found here.

 

Reminds me of Alouette 1, the first Canadian Satellite. It made us the third space-faring nation in the world after the CCCP/USSR and America

[L0ck0n]

Another russian plane: PAK FA aka Su-57:

https://kerbalx.com/Lock0n/PAK-FA

Plane is maneuverable, not wobbly even in physics x4 and equipped with missiles carried inside weapons bay.

[PT]

Took pics of dots among stars with second batch of All Seeing Eyes:

Found three stellar bodies utterly by accident while taking pics of sun. What I though to be graphic bug turned into two planets and one moon on low, warm, orbit. Cash and science from ASE probes was dumped into pair of fission powered Ion Survey Drones. In afterthought, solar panels could be useful on low solar orbit mission...

[silentvelcro]

[CatastrophicFailure]

5 hours ago, Agustin said:

was out of fuel, so I pushed my ship with my Kerbal:

This is technically known as the Leia Maneuver. 

[Cupcake...]

Did a spot of underground exploring.

 

Cupcake...

[CatastrophicFailure]

14 minutes ago, Cupcake... said:

Cupcake.

*framerate envy intensifies* 

also, random craving for baked goods...

[eddiew]

With the advanced autopilot proving its worth, Doohan and Nimoy decide on a brief hibernate as the rover trundles slowly from the frigid martian pole to the not-much-less-frigid crater of Olympus Mons.

The science team in orbit is more than happy to have something to sink their teeth into. Possibly literally.

Not for the first time, KSC discover that somewhere on Kerbin there are competing space agencies, and none of them are as good as we are. Remember folks, if you don't see the our label on the box, you're buying a substandard product that could put your life at risk!

[ARS]

I'm towing an asteroid to make my first asteroid base (Finally my first docking! )

Kinda hard to maneuver this thing, especially with high-powered engine. The orbital tug often makes this thing spin out of control

After the stable kerbin orbit has been established, it's time to send a self-sustaining fuel station spire for refueling/ mining purpose

And an observatory module for initial habitation

Might not be pretty, but at least it works. More modules will be added later

That's all for today

Edited November 19, 2017 by ARS

[PT]

18 minutes ago, ARS said:

I'm towing an asteroid to make my first asteroid base (FInally my first docking! )

Kinda hard to maneuver this thing, especially with high-powered engine. The orbital tug oftem makes this thing spin out of control

*snip*

Withe center of mass that high, now wonder it topples over, try towing instead of pushing (think of cargo trains).

Once you got your cargo, check Thrust Offset (on neutral steering) in KER/MJ, then play with engines thrust limit to minimize it. Thud high thrust vectoring (8 degrees! In stock, only Vector have more) can cover up for small imbalance.

With your current design I would try locking gimbal on Mamooth, setting low gimbal on Vector, and then try some thrust offset balance.

[ARS]

9 minutes ago, PT said:

Withe center of mass that high, now wonder it topples over, try towing instead of pushing (think of cargo trains).

 

I was considering that option, but I am not used with asteroid docking (It's my first asteroid anyway). I would probably try your advice for another asteroid, it sounds plausible. With my current design, I had to turn off gimbal from all engines, relying only in reaction wheel and RCS thrusters for SAS and maneuvering, and even then, the thrust used must be less than 15%, or there's a risk of the asteroid goes spinning out of control

9 minutes ago, PT said:

Once you got your cargo, check Thrust Offset (on neutral steering) in KER/MJ, then play with engines thrust limit to minimize it. Thud high thrust vectoring (8 degrees! In stock, only Vector have more) can cover up for small imbalance.

With your current design I would try locking gimbal on Mamooth, setting low gimbal on Vector, and then try some thrust offset balance.

Is there any other engines that's good for hauling asteroid? Sorry if I'm asking this, since this is my first asteroid, so what I thought is [huge mass asteroid=> need big engine to haul]. I could use some advice

[PT]

Just now, ARS said:

I was considering that option, but I am not used with asteroid docking (It's my first asteroid anyway). I would probably try your advice for another asteroid, it sounds plausible. With my current design, I had to turn off gimbal from all engines, relying only in reaction wheel and RCS thrusters for SAS and maneuvering, and even then, the thrust used must be less than 15%, or there's a risk of the asteroid goes spinning out of control

Is there any other engines that's good for hauling asteroid? Sorry if I'm asking this, since this is my first asteroid, so what I thought is [huge mass asteroid=> need big engine to haul]. I could use some advice

Huge mass => need high delta V. Thrust will mostly affect time. With one huge engine cluster you are prone to toppling, and if you are going on low thrust big engine is just waste of mass. Consider something like this:

Grab, decouple, grab decouple... And you have four engines on four side of that rock. Then you dock fifth piece to serve as "control from here". The wider the design, the easier it is to balance thrust. You can easily scale it to bigger tanks with Vector engines.

I got bunch of contracts for class C rocks, so stay tuned for my contraptions

[Atkara]

7 minutes ago, ARS said:

Is there any other engines that's good for hauling asteroid? Sorry if I'm asking this, since this is my first asteroid, so what I thought is [huge mass asteroid=> need big engine to haul]. I could use some advice

Well, my asteroid miner uses 4 Poodles. Relatively low total TWR compared to the mass of a Class E asteroid, but more efficient than others. You should be able to get pretty much the same results from a single Rhino.

[Just Jim]

Just keep roving, roving, roving.... 

[Rune]

2 hours ago, ARS said:

I'm towing an asteroid to make my first asteroid base (Finally my first docking! )

 

Kinda hard to maneuver this thing, especially with high-powered engine. The orbital tug often makes this thing spin out of control

 

After the stable kerbin orbit has been established, it's time to send a self-sustaining fuel station spire for refueling/ mining purpose

 

And an observatory module for initial habitation

 

Might not be pretty, but at least it works. More modules will be added later

That's all for today

Cool stuff! Asteroid bases are a ton of fun. Two things I found that help make it funnier:

-KER's thrust angle and thrust torque indicator. Priceless. You can counteract thrust imbalance in several ways (elastic tractor designs, high engine gimbal, low engine thrust and high counter-torque, differential throttling...) but the crucial thing is that you have to know how much you need to counter it, and when you have fiddled enough. I myself only use nukes to move rocks around (high efficiency), and those don't have gimbal, so I use the Klaw's lock/unlock as a crude gimbal, until I manage to bring the induced torque into the realm of something my reaction wheels/RCS can handle, then autostrut to keep things like that. Anything below 10kNm can be handled with a few reaction wheels, see the upper-right window of this pic to see that in this instance, I was handling 7.94kNm moving this 1,740mT rock. Yes, I was doing 20min burns to get 150m/s... you don't need much to nudge something into the right orbit, if you do it at the right time.

 

-KIS/KAS to build the actual asteroid base. You may not use it for anything else, but directly slapping docking ports on the surface leads to awesome things. And if you take it further and you use attachment points for other non-surface attachable stuff, the sky is the limit:

 

Rune. It is nice if the rock is big enough to make the rest of the stuff aesthetically insignificant.

 

Edited November 19, 2017 by Rune

[ARS]

5 minutes ago, Rune said:

Rune. It is nice if the rock is big enough to make the rest of the stuff aesthetically insignificant.

 

Very nice design! The KIS/KAS asteroid base looks very good. The only thing that I am still feels lacking now in KSP is the other grabber size, forcing me to use adapter for larger/smaller parts. The KIS/KAS looks very nice, having an ability to attach large docking port directly on the asteroid could make an aesthetically good asteroid base

[Rune]

24 minutes ago, ARS said:

Very nice design! The KIS/KAS asteroid base looks very good. The only thing that I am still feels lacking now in KSP is the other grabber size, forcing me to use adapter for larger/smaller parts. The KIS/KAS looks very nice, having an ability to attach large docking port directly on the asteroid could make an aesthetically good asteroid base

Actually you need some short of adaptor, since you can only surface-attach things you could normally surface-attach in the VAB. But put a Cubic Octagonal Strut , or a BZ-52 Radial Attachment Point, and you are set. Docking ports of other sizes can be directly attached to the rock.

 

Rune. Beware the 1.3.1 bug with asteroids changing seed, tough!

[KerikBalm]

Came back after a break, updated the KPBS mod, and saw that it now has nuclear reactors... which seem like overkill for the stock system, but could be very good for operations past Jool... so I added OPM to my game (with my own mod modifying the inner solar system), and thought about making a nuclear powered Tekto base.

Still playing with a 3x rescale, 1.25x atmosphere rescale, and 1.5x heightmap rescale. Before getting this next save going (my last one I felt I had more or less finished after constructing multiple colonies on bodies of interest to me), I decided to update and optimise my heavy spaceplane design.

I set a new personal SSTO payload fraction record  for this resized kerbin of 13.757% (all stock parts), not including the payload fairing mass as part of the payload, but including unused fuel as part of the payload. The payload mass was 9.2 tons dry mass, and I had 21279 units of LF and Ox combined... 108.64 tons of fuel, 117.84 tons of payload... my highest yet for these 3x settings. I'm a bit tempted to use the design in a stock system and see what a ridiculous payload mass to orbit this thing could get. It was 856 tons on the runway, even a modest 35% payload fraction in stock would get over 300 tons to orbit

[JadeOfMaar]

Now that The Spice is no longer top secret I can show pics and give commentary.

I decided to integrate the "codename Mk2 Scifi" parts (an engine, intake, 2 cockpits) and added/changed modules between them and prior parts. Any red plume is Spice mode. Any plume without red is codename MetaLOX (Hybrid Plasma LFO).

Thanks to @SuicidalInsanity for making these screenshots possible.

There's supposed to be more yellow and less Vector/SSME engine plume in the circular engines. I fixed that since I took this screenshot.

Over here I flew a SPICEplane spaceplane on some moons of Cyran. The cockpit and intake from "Mk2 Scifi" clearly visible. 

 

[CatastrophicFailure]

6 hours ago, Just Jim said:

Just keep roving, roving, roving.... 

I know the feeling.  Yet also, I can’t right now cuz it’s winding like mad outside. Gee, that sounds familiar, too... 

[Julien Kerman]

The Callisto Lander entered Jupiters SOI and performed a capture burn (I am afraid that it wont be able to land there  --> RIP 7.5 million)

Also, after its 12 years trip to Uranus, the Voyager 3 probe finally arrived:

[Slam_Jones]

Finally got around to sending my first Mars crew, consisting of Jeb, BIll, Bob, and Val back home.

 

Sent up another Constellation Sat, intended for Venus.  The previous one, which had been intended for Mercury, ended up only performing a fly-by.  It was able to collect and transmit some science from Mercurys SOI, so this mission wasn't a total loss.  I then renamed it to 'Inner Relay' and left it in a elliptical orbit around the Sun to help incoming transmissions reach Earth.  I had also attempted to send a rover to Mercury, but it, too, was unable to achieve a stable orbit and was flung into a parabolic orbit around the Sun.  I terminated the mission after collecting what science I could.

 

I also sent up a Farm to Space Station: Earth to test the systems and see how valid it would be to send one on an interplanetary mission.

 

I also have a probe en route to Saturn, but it has a 6 year transit time or so, so it'll be a while til I check back in on it.

Edited November 19, 2017 by Slam_Jones

[PT]

Zapped laser at asteroid.. FOR SCIENCE!

...found air augmented rocket engine (?!?) while building second generation of pseudo shuttle which apparently needs to be kickstarted to few machs first, had to convince MJ that burning on ascent is exactly what I wanted this time...

 and then removed 160 parts from my space station, sending tug drone with each module makes docking easier but takes tool on FPS :]

[L0ck0n]

Chengdu J-20

Plane is maneuverable, stable and equipped with a lot of missiles carried inside weapons bay.