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What did you do in KSP1 today?


Xeldrak

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I was about 90% done writing this post when my computer bluescreened. :mad: Thankfully KSP Forums apparently autosaves posts in progress!

Today I bolstered the ranks of the space program by taking a few rescue contracts. Funny how a task (rendezvous and retrieve stranded kerbal from orbit) that took a couple weeks when I first started playing is now so routine I do it casually. Anyway, I mention this because one of the kerbals I rescued had a very... interesting... name. He was called "Doing." I'm not sure whether to pronounce that "doo-ing" or "doyng," but either way it's hilarious.

I also made a couple more attempts at shuttles/spaceplanes because I can't leave well enough alone. These, too, failed, and I gave up and went back to working on Jade Base. Speaking of which, I finally completed it, save for the lifter craft meant to carry fuel produced at the base up to Jade Station (which has been sorely in need of fuel for a while now). I intend to send the lifter tomorrow, but due to its nature it was the one component I couldn't test on Kerbin, so it may take longer than expected if it needs a redesign.

Here's the haulerbot I've mentioned and praised so highly, carrying one of the modules during construction.

haulerbot_by_littlefiredragon-dc23mxw.pn

I actually managed to tip the haulerbot over for the first time today; necessarily narrow wheel base + low minmus gravity + impatient Ace trying to turn too tightly = flipped haulerbot. Thankfully, gravity on minmus is so low that nothing broke from the impact and I was able to flip it back right side up using the power of the module's reaction wheel alone. Really glad I put that on there. Construction proceeded as normal after this, although I was a bit more careful turning after that.

 

Here's the finished Jade Mining Base, with the haulerbot parked out front, and Elbree, the resident engineer, standing by.

jademiningbase_by_littlefiredragon-dc23m

Elbree, incidentally, was already aboard Jade Station waiting for the completion of the base. When it was ready, he simply jumped off the station as it passed over the base and RCS'd down. Minmus's low gravity is a wonderful, wonderful thing, and I love it.

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After the tragic but instructive demise of the Morningstar, work has begun on a new craft to address the deficiencies revealed in our first attempt at Eve. Thanks to the hard work of the Laythe Kosmodrome Krew, we have been able to commission some new parts which ought to make it easier to design a vessel that survives the rigours of entry into the Evian atmosphere. There have also been improvements to the payload and ISRU designs.

The new yet to be named vessel, codenamed MS2, has entered preliminary trials. The main focus of development is thermal and physical resistance: all surfaces are thermally hardened and the return module is shielded with a fairing for atmospheric entry. It will be shed on the surface for a kerbaled mission, to allow the pilot to perform an EVA: the return module ought to survive atmospheric ascent without the fairing, as the energies involved are much lower.

The MS2 has proven its ability to glide, land, and extract resources, and take off again after refueling. In-space tests have not yet started. The major test will be a simulated Eve entry: we intend to send it on a high trajectory over Kerbin to enter the atmosphere from an orbit that takes it to the edges of its sphere of influence, at an unusually steep angle. 

The KSC has released some images of the demise of the Morningstar, as well as a few shots of the MS2's first flights.

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I had a bit of fun blowing things up with missiles and bombs

Air to air missile 

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Unpowered guided bomb

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Long range do-anything missile

https://i.imgur.com/aifhAEA.png

 

Tried to weld a massive carrier, took several minutes to load and promptly crashed my game when I tried to move it

https://i.imgur.com/cSfmafY.png

 

Edited by Yukon0009
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9 hours ago, Castille7 said:

Submarine

Submarines!?  It blows my mind...  Who would have thought?  Inner Space.

I have no idea how to get started.  Drive them down the beach from KSC?  Fly them over in an amphibious  transport plane?  Launch them and de-orbit them?

Well, I am on a kick to get to Jool (Vall, actually) at the moment, but I guess the key is to start small and learn by doing...  :)  I'm trying to come up with a use case.  Why?  To sneak up on small rogue nations and come to periscope depth and fire a few nukes back at them???  :wink:

That'll work...

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21 minutes ago, Hotel26 said:

Submarines!?  It blows my mind...  Who would have thought?  Inner Space.

I have no idea how to get started.  Drive them down the beach from KSC?  Fly them over in an amphibious  transport plane?  Launch them and de-orbit them?

Yup, I've got one, too... lol.

P9oULHr.png

The easiest way to get it to the water is load them onto the runway, then use something like HyperEdit to land it over the water. And if you want to do it the hard way, there are also a few mods available out there with ejectable wheels, so you can drive it to the water, then lose the wheels.

But personally, since we don't have a dock at the KSC, I just use HyperEdit.

 

Edited by Just Jim
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planning Jool-5 mission and trying to avoid docking for reasons, turns out, delta-v of the craft is inadequate by around 3500 m/s (it took 32000 m/s delta-v), my jool-5 rocket is my largest existing vehicle with currently 984 parts and 28500 m/s delta-v, finished eve docklessly without ion or Nerva with 735 parts rocket (now modified into 766 or more parts), longest mission was Eeloo-Dres mission in a single launch, that took 34-36 kerbal years but with more than 500 m/s of margin safety (no Nerva, dockeing and ion), landed on every land-able body, after that, making my own planet and land on them myself

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The yet-unnamed vessel codenamed MS2 has passed all initial trials, including an exit test which sent the payload module on an escape trajectory out of Kerbol, and a reorbit torture test where we took her past the orbit of Minmus and hit the atmosphere with a Pe of 25 km... while partially fueled. 

In this test, it demonstrated its passive safety features: since the operation was highly risky, we used the un-kerbaled variant, and following plasma blackout it failed to re-establish contact with KSP for several minutes. During this time it re-entered, slowed down, and settled into coordinated flight without control input. It glided for several hundred kilometres before contact was re-established and it was brought to a landing on a pleasant island we haven't bothered looking at too closely.

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The engineers at KSC have worked overtime to cut down weight, and have devised this cosy cockpit for our kerbonaut. They take their work seriously -- to save a few grams, they even removed the padding from the command chair!

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For the un-kerbaled trial mission, the command chair will be replaced by a probe core, naturally.

--

As an aside, the MS2 is scary fun to fly. I've been doing gliding trials of it with the tanks near empty, and it must be what a Koenigsegg is like. The amount of power on tap is eye-watering, and it's incredibly responsive. It will flip out if carelessly handled but that just adds an edge to the excitement. 

Touchdown speed is a bit higher than I'd like -- about 70 m/s -- but Eve's soupy atmosphere ought to cut that down a bit. Glideslope is quite decent. Take-off is going to be a bit unusual -- it squats down on a pair of secondary landing gear; to take off, I switch on SAS, set it to Surface/Radial, and punch it. It will haul itself upright and point itself toward the sky. With a bit of tuning I've gotten it to work reliably. Nice as there's no control input needed. 

This one is about ready to go. Computed take-off from Eve dV (vacuum) is around 9400, which ought to be enough.

 

Edited by Guest
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3 hours ago, Martian Emigrant said:

Shuttles are hard.

Why the air intake? Does it have air breathing engines? Or are they providing lift for reentry?

 

ME

The wings are full of LF, it's got two airbreathers for atmospheric flight after re-entry in case I come in over mountains or water, so I can get to flat land.

This is definitely the best shuttle I've ever done.  I've got a valve on the back to drain the tank for the vectors if there's anything left in it, which means I'll know just how it'll fly after coming back down.  It's also able to tip the nose up on re-entry without tumbling, which all my previous shuttles have done.  The intakes probably help with that, their drag holding the nose from flipping up.

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Today I had a ship in orbit with a spare seat available, so I thought I'd take a rescue contract and pick someone up before coming back down to Kerbin. Turned out this guy wasn't on an orbit close to mine though, and in fact he was on a trajectory that would have him bouncing destructively off the surface of the Mun! So my Kerbals scrambled to launch an emergency rescue mission to save Tanbas Kerman from his doomed Mun encounter. But what really has me curious is, how in the world did this guy get himself into such a mess in the first place?

fFQemGl.jpg

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3 hours ago, Hotel26 said:

Submarines!?  It blows my mind...  Who would have thought?  Inner Space.

I was inspired by @pTrevTrevs 's incredible Das Boot and decided to go mini with my Mini Sub Squirt Don't be surprised if it doesn't work in the latest version of KSP, I build craft for the versions they were built in and don't update them, if I do it's rare. My second Sub was Scuba-Do. This newest Sub started out long and skiny and I prefer short and stocky so it's name might be Chubby, I haven't set that in stone yet. 

Thanks for the nice comment and the rep!

 

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3 hours ago, Just Jim said:

It's part of The Maritime Pack:

I am not a Mod guy (using mods on KSP) much, I seldom do. My picks lately for Mods would definitely be the latest version of Stockalike Station Parts Redux AMAZING LOOKING KSP PARTS! Also I would love to start using this Maritime Pack, what X-Boat Captain wouldn't? :D Just haven't gotten around to those yet.

Edited by Castille7
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I'll start with an acknowledgement for assistance offered by @Foxster today.  Thank you, sir.

My new project is Gizmo:

u9yRwHr.png

Spoiler

 

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It's got more Goddard than NASA, I know!

It's a:

  • heavy lifter [LKO]
  • it's a super tanker
  • it's an orbital fuel dump/habitat
  • it's an interplanetary transit vehicle
  • and it's an expeditionary force

and my mother (83) could fly it, it's so simple & sweet.

Loaded with *all* of the Operation Beach Head payload, this doohickey arrives in 90km orbit with LF:18073, OX:20505 in hand.

  • 2 Gimlet drill rigs
  • 2 Hawk tug/landers
  • 1 Hawk M700 surveyor
  • 2 fuel pods
  • 6 Hitchhikers (I may add a Mk3 crew cabin as well)

I'll be adding nukes for interplanetary transit as well as maybe 4 of my motorized solar sails (16x Gigantor on each sail; stowable for lift-off and aero-braking and deployed for ion drive) and a couple of my Omega xenon drives.  (24x Dawn each.)

And, when I'm done, they will be gangable.  I'll have to do some dV calculations!

Edited by Hotel26
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2 hours ago, Tekaoh said:

Today I had a ship in orbit with a spare seat available, so I thought I'd take a rescue contract and pick someone up before coming back down to Kerbin. Turned out this guy wasn't on an orbit close to mine though, and in fact he was on a trajectory that would have him bouncing destructively off the surface of the Mun! So my Kerbals scrambled to launch an emergency rescue mission to save Tanbas Kerman from his doomed Mun encounter. But what really has me curious is, how in the world did this guy get himself into such a mess in the first place?

fFQemGl.jpg

They are Kerbals. They don't do things quite like like us. A different outlook on risk taking.

The aerospace industry is totally unregulated and they have a lot of failed start up Cies.

Space is hard and cost money.

They go bankrupt after a single launch. How do you think that Jeb keeps is scrapyard so full?

But there is always another Kerbal that dreams to be the one to make it big.

They launch from backyards, schools playgrounds, churches and malls parking lots.

 

Don't worry about the rescue you didn't do. Another start up got them back....And went bankrupt.

 

Of course nobody wants to rescue your own cause you are in favor with the Government.

 

ME

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16 minutes ago, Puggonaut said:

Sent a message to Elon Kermin

Last time I saw Elon's car, it was right next to Russel's teapot.

Anyways, more later, but with a successful pad-abort and launch-abort test of the redesigned Mercury capsule, it was time to select the booster used for it. The old R8-Atlas-Able had initially been slated for use, but with continuing reliability issues of the Able upper stage, our engineers decided to make a mathematical comparison to the new Agena-E launch vehicle using standard Test Flight reliability metrics.

LV failure of the Agena-E estimated at 5.3%. Not the greatest, but the is a fully functioning abort system onboard. In the future, we may be able to switch to a more reliable first-stage engine, since the E1, not the Agena upper stage engine, is limiting reliability.

LV failure of the R8-Atlas-Able was estimated at 24.4%.

I decided to go with the Agena-E: while it has slightly less delta-V to support high-orbit operations, and the first-stage engine has not yet been extensively tested, the known devil of the R8-Atlas-Able just has too high a failure chance. Three tests are planned before the first crewed mission in any event: a mass-demonstrator of the Agena-E, a fully uncrewed Mercury-Agena launch, and one mission crewed by a space monkey*.

*No, I don't have a mod for that. It'll be an uncrewed launch, and I'll just pretend I have Cheese the Space Chimp onboard.

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3 hours ago, Castille7 said:

I was inspired by @pTrevTrevs 's incredible Das Boot and decided to go mini with my Mini Sub Squirt Don't be surprised if it doesn't work in the latest version of KSP, I build craft for the versions they were built in and don't update them, if I do it's rare. My second Sub was Scuba-Do. This newest Sub started out long and skiny and I prefer short and stocky so it's name might be Chubby, I haven't set that in stone yet. 

Thanks for the nice comment and the rep!

3
3

At least yours can dive...

Edited by pTrevTrevs
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Eve claims yet another victim. So close though! And the probe core made it to the surface alive, with a solar panel no less, so it's there beeping away.

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This time the problem was with aerodynamics. I'm not sure exactly what's the deal at the hypersonic speeds we're dealing with here -- centre of pressure probably? -- but it turns out the craft is aerodynamically unstable at the energies we're dealing with here. It wants to flip backwards. This meant I wasn't able to control attitude well enough to bleed off enough speed higher in the atmosphere, so when it flipped, went backwards, and hit thick air, rather a lot of pieces came off. An added complication was that my relays were really badly positioned so I couldn't talk to it after setting up the descent (not that it would have made much difference if I had). I did manage to get what's left of it sort of kind of under control so the subsequent splash didn't destroy anything else, just spread what was left around a bit. 

I think the flat Mk 2 nose is producing too much lift at those speeds; it's acting like a canard minus the controllability. Problem is I'm not quite sure what to do about it as I really want temperature-resistant stuff near the nose, as on the Morningstar the neck was one of the first bits to seriously heat up. Maybe go back to my previous design with the nose encased in a protective fairing? Or add an actual canard I can deploy to counteract it? Clearly going to have to do some hypersonic testing of whatever I come up with.

This is kinda fun actually. Frustrating, but fun.

Edited by Guest
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