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What did you do in KSP1 today?


Xeldrak

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I am preparing my gravity asteroid lander probe(in RSS) . it will have a nice array of  d science mod experiments, it will be 100 kg , and i am thinking to a very low cost mission, so no RTG's , i will use solar panels. It would have a return capsule,. The capsule would be RTG powered indeed, but it would have a Polonium-210 short lived radio nucleai battery. It would be powered by a MMH NTO engine(370 isp). After the capsule leaving,  the orbiter would place a small commemorial plate on it, and would fire it's engine , pushing it into Deep Space. The lander part would remain here until it dies. I plan to use the Falcon 9. I will record some footage of the launch ,second stage and the rest.

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Started my 1.4.1 campaign rolling... after some sounding rockets went up, sent Jeb and Val on suborbital hops.   (Technically, they were supposed to be orbital attempts, but... at any rate, they lived to give their after-flight reports.)

A little closer to "iron man" this time... 70% science reward, no respawn, need to pay to unlock parts, Kerbal Construction Time, USI Life Support, no tracking stations beyond the one at KSC, only upgrade R&D capacity with KCT when the physical R&D gets upgraded.  I'm keeping the option to revert flight but will use it only when the problem is because of a system problem or other IRL issue, rather than an in-game situation.   Call it an "aluminum man" campaign.  :cool:

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6 hours ago, Haruspex said:

VuXhyo2.jpg

...That didn't end well. The landing speed was still way over 100  m/s, so the experimental Duna Express now rests in pieces.

Must add more boosters...

Well, on Duna a landing speed of over 100 m/s is pretty much standard, since the atmosphere is so thin, the best you can really get is 90 m/s in really low elevation areas and with a large amount of lift (Lotsa wings). Landing a spaceplane on Duna is no easy task!

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Went back through my logs today and realized it'd been a solid month since I last posted anything substantial for y'all. I probably oughta get around to doing that...meantime, here's a screenie:

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Stress testing the undocking/landing systems of a Piper Alpha 7 refinery for delivery to Eve. I didn't necessarily want it to be a live test, but Phoming insisted; just another day at the office, really.

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1 hour ago, Kronus_Aerospace said:

Well, on Duna a landing speed of over 100 m/s is pretty much standard, since the atmosphere is so thin, the best you can really get is 90 m/s in really low elevation areas and with a large amount of lift (Lotsa wings). Landing a spaceplane on Duna is no easy task!

Yes, it essentially needs to be a VTOL. But even an extra couple of forward-facing thrusters bound to an action group could have probably helped in this case. Or a dozen more parachutes. Let's see how the Duna Express II fares.

Edited by Haruspex
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22 minutes ago, Haruspex said:

Yes, it essentially needs to be a VTOL. But even an extra couple of forward-facing thrusters bound to an action group could have probably helped in this case. Or a dozen more parachutes. Let's see how the Duna Express II fares.

Most failed landings come from the craft bouncing around on Duna's rolling hills after touch down. So upwards facing thrusters wouldn't help much unless it was full VTOL. So the best option is to have a bunch of parachutes and to open them right before touch down, so that way you have enough airspeed to touch down safely, but by the time the wheels hit the ground the parachutes are already open and the thing slows down very quickly. But obviously full VTOL makes it very easy, if a lot more fuel consuming!

Edited by Kronus_Aerospace
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Got bored, built a space warship.

JJenm8s.png

Not a *big* one, granted. It's just 16.5m long and crews two Kerbals. But in KSP scale that's equivalent to 165m and 20 Kerbals, so it's like a frigate or something.

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Aft view. The big engine in the middle is the interplanetary drive, and the two on the sides are the combat engines. Excellent for zipping around the battlefield and dodging enemy fire.

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The cockpit, buried deep within the armored plating. Much of the ship's interior is just storage for the missiles, which are contained within the narrow tubes in the center and on the wings.

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View from the cockpit. Visibility is a bit limited, but it's easy to tell when an enemy ship is in your sights. There are also targeting "lasers" on the bow that light up targets when they're in range. If it's glowing red, you can hit it.

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The prow on the front isn't just for looks: if necessary, it's designed to ram enemy ships and emerge relatively unscathed. Still a risky move, so best not to do it unless you're out of missiles. You can also see two of the three missile launchers in this picture.

The ship has 32 missiles overall, as many as I could squeeze inside. They all fire in pairs for simplicity, and to keep the center of mass symmetrical.

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Firing a pair of missiles in Kerbin orbit.

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Docking port and RCS thrusters on the bottom. The thrusters are distributed so they can fire in any direction, allowing for relatively rapid maneuvering. Perfect for tracking enemy ships.

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Aerobraking over Duna. No damage, and a lot of fuel saved.

I'll probably make a cruiser next. Much bigger and more badass.

 

Edited by Mitchz95
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15 hours ago, Haruspex said:

...That didn't end well. The landing speed was still way over 100  m/s, so the experimental Duna Express now rests in pieces.

Must add more boosters...

More wing, my friend :)  Biplanes/triplanes/quadplanes... none of them are penalised by KSP's aero model and all of them work really well. If it takes off from KSC at 30m/s you're going to have a much easier time landing it on Duna.

That or retrorockets. Forward facing vernors can sometimes do the job.

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4 minutes ago, Delay said:

That is seriously one of the best things I've ever seen in Kerbal Space Program.

How do you think of something like that and how does it work?

Hey Delay thank you for the nice compliment! To answer that, I was wanting to do this Ferris Wheel a long time ago and mentioned it to Klond one day and he liked the idea as much as I. We agreed that he would do the Ferris Wheel and I worked on other rides I had in mind. @Azimech  was someone we've been wanting to work with for a while and he already had some very cool builds that fit the project. We hope to do another project together in the future because Azimech has a lot more to offer, we just caught him at a bad time in the RL.

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19 hours ago, fourfa said:

I updated my favorite SSTO design with MH parts.  New hotness:

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  Reveal hidden contents

Old and busted, for reference:

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Wolfhound engines for pushing to apo and circularizing meant I could get rid of 30 tons of fuel and tanks (16% of total launch mass! for the same cargo!) and 11 parts, the Soyuz style tanks are very low drag, and look pretty sharp to boot.  I never even have to switch to closed-cycle on the rapiers.

https://kerbalx.com/fourfa/ORCA-v3

 

Very nice improvement! Hope you remembered to take the solid fuel out of those... whatever they're called tanks :)

19 hours ago, Haruspex said:

VuXhyo2.jpg

...That didn't end well. The landing speed was still way over 100  m/s, so the experimental Duna Express now rests in pieces.

Must add more boosters...

You could land that at that speed.... takes a steady hand though.

I had a MK3 shuttle design that I basically HAD to land at that speed on Kerbin because it was horrible and and slower it would just stall.

Get KER so you can see your vertical speed! ...Horizontal speed really isn't that important unless you reach the magic speed where you fall through the floor (its over 1000m/s so dw about it)

8 hours ago, AngryKitty said:

Finished booster landing trials for the Artemis I stack, now that the Trajectories mod has been updated (!!!)

Great success. This thing is a monster...wonder what I'll call the 5m scale-up?

IXQLb2G.png

your aerobrakes appear to be upside-down? By their traditional use anyway... :)

Edited by MR L A
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The scout probe has reached its destination, passed through a short flyby of Dres, and is now following the dwarf planet carefully - and I've made absolutely sure that it's actually tracking asteroids around Dres. It's ultimately on a collision course with the dwarf planet but it'll follow it around for a little while before it slams into the surface. So far, I'm seeing very few asteroids, and most of them are quite far away from Dres. I'm not sure if I've done something wrong, or if using an asteroid base really isn't a viable scheme for a Dres mission. I'll see what comes up.

Meanwhile, the Duna followup mission is proceeding as planned. Ruby docked to Onyx Station and picked up the scientists. I've discovered that the RCS ports on the new command module only include sideways translation, and no up/down translation. Later models of Ruby will have up/down ports added.

On the surface of Ike, it was out with the old...

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...and in with the new!

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I make it sound so simple, but replacing the central module of the base was actually a long, tedious, laborious process of very carefully sliding the old one out, very carefully sliding the new one in, and very carefully nudging the rest of the modules so that they clicked back into place. It took a while.

Spoiler

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In typical Ike fashion, at one point the haulerbot simply exploded for no reason while under the central module, sending the entire base flying in more pieces than it started as. Hooray for quicksave and quickload.

Once I was done with the base, it was time to bring in the new fuel truck. First, I had to give it a little more fuel so it could safely land, so I sent the refueler from Onyx Station.

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After encountering a monoprop shortage when re-docking the lifter to the station, I decided enough was enough. Running out of monoprop has been a long standing problem for this craft, and I thought maybe as I got better at docking it wouldn't be so much of a problem. Turns out, it is still a problem. I can usually still dock anyway, but it's so much more of a hassle than it needs to be. Future models of the fuel lifter will have the new tiny spherical monoprop tanks from MH to rectify this.

Then it was time to land the fuel truck. The way this is landed is, bring vertical velocity to zero just above the ground, then stage the separator to drop the fuel truck, and finally tip the "snowflake" (the crane) away from anything important and let it use up the last few drops of its fuel, as it's effectively debris at this point. Well, the separator gave me some issues. First, after decoupling, it slid slowly down the side of the craft, which for some reason took out all the solar panels on that side of the truck (despite them being packed up at the time and the separator moving at a snail's pace). The next time, the separator slid down the side of the truck, hit the wheel, slid slowly off of that, and plonked gently onto the ground, where it then exploded, sending the fuel truck flying. This seems to be becoming a regular occurrence on Ike. Anyway, I've decided that future versions of the fuel truck will have upside-down decouplers rather than separators - I'm not sure why I used separators in the first place, to be honest.

Amazingly, the discarded snowflake crane wasn't entirely destroyed when it hit the ground. Left me quite a mess to clean up.

Spoiler

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Finally, the Gilly lander is full of ore now, so it's ready to test whether it can lift off effectively while carrying a full cargo. But not tonight.

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Designed and tested a big-wing VTOL SSTO for Duna a few weeks back.  Foxbat R2.  Enormous fun.  The big wing area is important on Duna.

The one last detail was how to get it into orbit from Kerbin.  I tried most of the vehicles in my repertoire and, most fervently, my new F.A.R.T. which is designed for exactly this kind of mission.  But that big Foxbat wing throws everything off balance in the thick Kerbin atmosphere.

Well, I thought...  let's fight wing with wing and gave it a shot on top of Brikoleur's Warangai Maathai...

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Mission: success.

Edited by Hotel26
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Werner kept trying to launch sounding rockets to reach the edge of the atmosphere... but they kept going just about every direction except up.  After one near miss on KSC, Jeb came up to him and said, "Doc, put a seat on that thing for me and I'll make it fly straight." *   ...And he did.

(Oh, sure, you can credit SAS if you want to.  I say it's because Jeb is the original BadS.)

The early days of a campaign are fun.  :cool:

 

* Translated from Kerbalese.

Edited by MaxwellsDemon
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