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What did you do in KSP1 today?


Xeldrak

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1 minute ago, eloquentJane said:

I'm a huge fan of that big plane. It looks like a very interesting solution to transporting cargoes that are too inconveniently-shaped for a cargo bay.

Me too and I made it :D

Seriously, it's a blast to fly -- one of the easiest planes to take-off and land that I've flown -- and has been impressively versatile -- delivering modules, doing crew rotations, delivering fuel... Only major downside is that it's very draggy, which means that you have to get pretty good at re-entry if you want to find your way home as it won't fly long distances with what fuel you have left. 

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37 minutes ago, Geonovast said:

KER says more than 2 hours of fuel left, Cruise control is on, I'm going grocery shopping!

Let's see how reliable this autopilot is when I'm not looking.

*glances at that altitude*

Suddenly, a mountain! :o

8 hours ago, Laie said:

 

I almost landed on Tylo

 

You’ve got MechJeb, I see. Have you tried the landing AP? Might be just the tick in efficiency that’s needed. 

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40 minutes ago, Geonovast said:

Let's see how reliable this autopilot is when I'm not looking.

I for one would like to know...

3 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

You’ve got MechJeb, I see. Have you tried the landing AP? Might be just the tick in efficiency that’s needed. 

Didn't even try. MJ's first order of business is not to trash the vessel, playing it safe. That approach needs a lot of fuel during the final descent.

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2 hours ago, Corscaria said:

Yeah... I might have gone overboard on the solar panels....

Oh god... the clipping...

48 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

*glances at that altitude*

Suddenly, a mountain! :o

I wasn't worried, heading straight east from the KSC.  I knew I'd be back or it'd run out of fuel before a "sudden" mountain would be a problem and cause a @CatastrophicFailure.

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33 minutes ago, Laie said:

I for one would like to know...

So far so good!

Edited by Geonovast
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Speaking of cruising, I botched a re-entry with my heavy lifter coming down from a higher orbit than usual. Overshot. Like, way overshot. Then I discovered supercruising, and flew around all of Kerbin on jet power -- Mach 4 or so at 20k altitude, barely sipping any fuel. Was kind of fun. Wouldn't want to do it every time.

Also am ready to send Massive-Kerguson up. Gonna be a bit of a nail-biter because the intercept isn't perfect, I need to do a mid-course burn, and I'm only packing a relatively small antenna so I might not be able to do it at the ideal moment. I have 100G relays up around Jool but even so there will be a blackout somewhere halfway. I have about 700 m/s more than I think I'll need so I'm gonna risk it. Worst case, whoever inhabits the next star system over will get a nice tractor entirely for free.

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9 minutes ago, Geonovast said:

I wasn't worried, heading straight east from the KSC.  I knew I'd be back or it'd run out of fuel before a "sudden" mountain would be a problem and cause a @CatastrophicFailure.

Heh, I'm a little too used to 6.4x GPP, I guess. My launch site has 10,000+ meter cliffs on two sides. :D

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On ‎1‎/‎27‎/‎2018 at 6:29 AM, WolfCoAerospace said:

oday I screwed up my staging in a non-revertable save game. Oy vey!

You know, you can change the settings from the escape menu to make it revertable. And then you turn off the escape menu and return to the f3 menu. Turn that off and on until the option to revert flight pops up. :wink:

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Today the Kraken ate my interplanetary ship and my Mun refinery base so I had to make replacements. I shaved nearly 100 parts off of the refinery, which was sorely needed. And, I am quite pleased with the interplanetary ship. It has over 18km/s dV and a TWR of 1.21. The 5 reactors can actually keep up with the 4 vista engines but, surprisingly enough, they can't keep up with the arcjet RCS system. I can only burn RCS of 5 out of every 8 seconds before the power runs dry but, learning to coast turn a 1400 ton ship is edifying.

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The base uses ore, regolith, and hydrates to produce oxidiser, liquid fuel, methane, oxygen, and hydrogen.

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This behemoth is sitting high in minmus orbit waiting on Val to arrive with a landing craft and 66 days to pass for the Duna transfer window. But, with 18km/s dV, I really don't have to wait for the window.

 

 

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Hi, my name is Tyko and I have a problem...I like the early low-tech portion of the game...the new GPP 1.6.0.1 was so tantalizing that I decided to pause my SSRSS 2.5x game and restart in GPP. I was planning on waiting until 1.4 / Making History was released, but I expect it'll be months before all the necessary mods are updated so I took the plunge.

So far I have to say that @Galileo and his intrepid team have done amazing work. As an added bonus CKAN has finally gotten it right for installs. I was able to do the entire GPP + Sigma 2.5x install by selecting GPP in CKAN and following its recommendations.

I'm still in 2.5x mode - love the bigger rockets - and I've dialed science down to 25%, half that of my previous game.  So far I'm getting a few satellites up and have successfully orbited a Kerbal. Next stop...Iota!!  :D 

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1 minute ago, Martian Emigrant said:

Can it make it to LKO and come back?

I know it can make it to LKO. Havent tested the "and back" part. Im going to say probably...

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But its still untested.

 

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Today was a bit busy. Following the recent flight to Gilly, I decided to launch a new multi-tasks mission, but dedicated to the exploration of Ike:

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To ensure the best efficiency a small, but powerful relay satellite was loaded with the probe. The last one consists of an "energy" section, providing thrust and electricity, and an experiments section equipped with multiple instrument, and supposed to land back at Kerbin smoothly.

 

 

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This flight was a great occasion to replay with Ariadne 44L which was moldering for some time in her hangar.

Alas, I discovered that it would had been way better to select the 42P version; the first one was literally kicking the payload out of the atmosphere.

 

 

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Separation of the P.A.L. at an altitude of about 29 km, and a speed of 1300 m/s. 

However, because of its size and its very fine upper stages, the launcher began to wave at the same time. Luckily, some gentle controls were able to solve the problem quickly.

 

 

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More than a ton of useless fairing won!

 

 

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Once again, I did not look at the planet position smartly... and Ike Explorer III will have to wait more than a year before leaving Kerbin.

 

 

So I had to kill time... a good opportunity to fill a few contracts and to test a remodel version of the good old X-35A.

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Everything was going well at this time, it was nothing else than an umpteenth flight to the Mun...

 

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When, suddenly, I saw some kind of an arch at the right of Sergei Pavlovitch! Can't believe it, this is the first egg I found on the Mun!

 

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Let's go back home! I just took a screenshot of our geographic position at the time of the sight, and I will come back here for sure. Also, about 10 tourists are desperately waiting for their trip to the Mun and Minmus, so they will easily cover the cost of flight to the Arch.

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First, the Ministry of Truth would like to remind citizens that previous news reports of some "Jebediah Kerman" and "Valentina Kerman" are in error. Our astronaut corps is led by Natalya Tsydlerina and Laura Lawrence, whose daring suborbital flights definitely did not land them in the hospital.

Also, if you're playing RP-0, and are wondering why the Original 4 are hanging around: visit the astronaut complex. That gets them renamed.

Anyways: Launch of the R7-Castor-Able-242 proceeded semi-nominally, by which I mean "I grossly overestimated its payload capacity and barely got the test payload of 1.19 tons to orbit". I don't think I've ever had a launch with that slim of margins. If you look closely, you'll notice that only one pair of Castor SRBs is lit: in the 242, 262, and 282 versions, not all SRBs are ignited on the ground.

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The R6B-Able test proceeded more nominally, however, with good margins left.

 

Natalya piloted the X3, a Mach 2-capable, high-altitude research jet. I don't often fly jets, but this was kind of nice... at least once I decided that the only way I could get it into the air was via the debug menu. I'm having severe runway issues if I try to take off normally.

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There have also been three missions to launch commsats into orbit.

The first one, described in my last post here, was... well... I forgot the attitude thrusters on the probes. Technically it put a couple into orbit, but hardly what was intended.

The second one switched over from the R6B-Able to the R7-Castor-Able-242 launcher, and... well, I suppose it went better than the first. I seriously goofed, underestimating the necessary perigee for the contracts and not using the booster as well as I should've, and outright forgetting to fuel up the last of the three relays. This has meant three relays in very... different orbits.

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It was only the third commsat launch that I really hit my groove: I used the Able upper stage to get all three to 900x900 km orbit, and dispensed one at a time separated by roughly 120 degrees, after which they hit about 900x5000 km orbits. It's hardly an ideal constellation: highly inclined, weakish omni antennae, orbital periods not synchronized, but at least the eccentric orbits mean they'll spend a lot of time near apogee.

 

An important pair of launches on my heaviest-to-date booster, the R7-Castor-Able-282.

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The mystery payload was a 200 kg probe with just 4 kg of instruments (Geiger counter, thermometer, orbital perturbation, micrometeorite detector)... and three Altair SRBs to push that 200 kg probe to a lunar injection. I didn't have any really good, low-mass liquid engines in the "really small" category, and there were no real mid-range probe cores, so I decided to use the Able upper stage to line up with the Moon transfer burn, then light up the Altairs for a spin-stabilized SRB burn, with mild correction on the 1 kN hydrazine thruster.

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The Altair SRM stages provided almost exactly enough dV for a Moon transfer. The first of these two launches was just an impactor, but the second mission is still technically in progress. It's fulfilled the flyby contract I have, and is now swinging around after about 120 days in Earth-centric orbit for an impact.

Funny thing about all this: I think one of the things I like the most about that design was the use of solid kicker stages. You don't really see a lot of them in stock or RF-Stockalike games, because you usually quickly get access to small, high-performance liquid engines, but at this point in RP-0, my best choice actually did wind up being a spin-stabilized SRM kicker.

 

I also got Vandenburg up and running, with the first launch being a sun-synchronous satellite (that also hit a weather observation satellite contract... and a medium sounding rocket contract*). It was initially giving me fits, because it said "eccentricity 0.020-0.040", and I mentally though "oh geez this is going to be a very tight window". I mucked around trying to get my eccentricity down with the clumsy tool of a 1 kN thruster... only to realize a couple minutes later "oh hey, the problem is that my eccentricity is too low".

*Seriously, completing sounding rocket contracts when I'm doing orbital launches is actually subsidizing a fair chunk of the costs.

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The final big thing was testing the R8-Atlas-Able 202 booster, which has an estimated payload to LEO of a whopping 2.75 tons. The first stage has two RD-107 engines (higher-performance but shorter-burning versions of my previous RD-108s), the second stage has an LR105 sustainer engine from the Atlas E/F, and while the engines on the Able upper remain the same (a pair of AJ-10s), the avionics have been updated to the new, merely 100 kg Titan II ICBM guidance package!

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Whose built-in antenna only reaches 3 km.

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Rumors that 6.5 tons of toxic UDMH and nitric acid have been dumped over the Atlantic Ocean are utter fabrications.

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Well, I made some progress on the base building front. I launched a test module to the Mun and landed it, proving that the design can in fact survive landing on a heavier moon than Minmus. I also launched another module to start building the base on Minmus, and plonked it down on a nice, ore-rich flat. I also fiddled with the design of the fuel truck meant to move the fuel from the base to the lifter shuttle that takes it to the orbital station, and managed to finagle the docking port into a position that neither caused the base to flail wildly nor popped a tire or four (a problem I saw in some of the earlier designs - I guess docking pushed the wheels into the ground because the port was a bit too high).

That's about as far as I got, because while I was waiting for... something (I don't remember; I just needed some time to pass to test something)... I decided to do a few contracts. One of these was to rescue a kerbal stranded on the surface of the Mun. I sent Jeb in a tried-and-true two-seat rover to collect some science and pick up this other kerbal. Unfortunately, the kerbal was up near the north pole (and I didn't even get any polar biome data because he was just too far south for the drive to the pole biome to be worth it) and that meant burning extra fuel to get to him. Jeb managed to get just barely into stable polar orbit (which I figured was better than some weird 60 degree angle orbit) and then promptly ran out of fuel.

To top it all off, this is the second time he's gotten stranded in orbit and needed Val to go and save him. Although I think it's a testimony to how much I've improved at this game how differently these events played out. The first time he got stuck was when I was just starting and had no idea what I was doing, on my first attempt at orbiting Kerbin - being new I overestimated how big my orbit needed to be and also learned the hard way that you burn retrograde rather than toward Kerbin to go home. It took me two real life weeks (not playing every day, granted, but most days) and a couple dozen ship designs to successfully bring him back to Kerbin. This time it took me a couple hours at most, with two or three minor modifications to a single ship, to bring him back from a much more difficult position. The cherry on top was that Val's rescue craft landed about 50km from the space center.

So Jeb managed to get stranded and needed to be rescued for a second time... while on a rescue mission himself. I don't think Val is ever going to let him live it down.

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1 hour ago, Starman4308 said:

First, the Ministry of Truth would like to remind citizens that previous news reports of some "Jebediah Kerman" and "Valentina Kerman" are in error. Our astronaut corps is led by Natalya Tsydlerina and Laura Lawrence, whose daring suborbital flights definitely did not land them in the hospital.

T—This... this, we do not speak of?

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On 1/27/2018 at 10:06 PM, Geonovast said:

I can't decide if this thing is ugly or awesome.

Let me help you... it's ugly... and scary looking! lol :wink:

 

Up on Duna, everything is starting to come together. The fleet of ships are all entering Duna's SOI, and maneuvering into orbit... fun stuff. I've a landing site all picked out, with two ships already set down there. Trama has begun her long trek back from Impossible Rock, bringing science with her.

Up on Dres, my two lander crews, waiting so patiently, now have a science lab to work with and a rover. Currently one of the crew is driving South to Dres's anomaly... only one I know of... to do some science and plant a flag. Driving on Dres is NOT like driving on Mun or Duna, it's not what I was expecting. It is going to take a lot longer to get to the anomaly. Still fun though.

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44 minutes ago, Hotel26 said:

Good luck with the best case, then!

Eh, I chickened out and sent up a high-power relay to go with it. Jool needs another one in any case, there are only two and they don't cover the system as well as I'd like. With this one in a wide polar orbit there shouldn't be many comms blackouts now (and certainly none for the trip).

That tractor though. It's a thing of grace and beauty. I have no doubt production quotas will go up by 300% AT LEAST

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7 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

T—This... this, we do not speak of?

I will fully admit: your writing style has influenced some of my writing style. I suspect it's because overblown totalitarianism, when not taken seriously, can be quite funny, and Americans have a hard time coming up with an amusing American stereotype for a space program.... so we use the Russians.

I hope they one day forgive us.

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