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What did you do in KSP1 today?


Xeldrak

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Well, folks, normally I write my updates at night, but today I'm gonna post early. I may or may not post a second update tonight. The reason being, I want to write this down while the insanity of what just happened is fresh in my memory.

Everything started normally enough - there was a bit of excitement that I knew would make it into the report, but it was still fairly normal stuff. I did a standard fuel lifter run for Onyx Station, and sent Ruby down for another Duna landing.

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Due to the landing site being very close to another biome, I decided to push my luck and hop over to the other one for extra science. After that, it was time to lift off and return to the station. But Ruby has a fairly tight fuel budget, so even this small hop pushed things dangerously close to running out. And that would have been a major problem, I realized, for several reasons. First, while Ruby has plenty of monoprop, as I've mentioned earlier it lacks vertical RCS ports. This would make maneuvering only on RCS extremely challenging. Secondly, it uses a small docking port, which the station tank is designed to accommodate - but since the fuel lifter wasn't designed to be a rescue vehicle, it only has a regular docking port. Which means it wouldn't be able to rescue a stranded Ruby.

Thankfully, disaster was just barely averted. Using what little fuel I had left, I was able to intercept Onyx Station and zero the relative velocity, with a small amount of fuel left over. After orienting the craft, I used the RCS to line Ruby up with the docking port on the fuel tank, and lightly tapped the throttle for a moment to get some vertical velocity. Then it was just a matter of using the RCS to keep the craft from drifting out of alignment.

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Ruby 4.1 has several annoyances in its design that I've noticed during its run here, including a lack of kerbnet that makes biome finding difficult, no flat solar panels to provide power when the folding ones are tucked away for safety, and no means of righting itself should it flip over (which I may have discovered the hard way and then quickloaded out of). But this episode took the lack of vertical RCS thrusters from "annoyance" to "critical design flaw," and I've decided that Ruby should head back to Kerbin as soon as possible. I am also considering adding a small docking port to the underside of future fuel lifters, just in case.

At any rate, I saved the game after docking and refueling Ruby. This turned out to be a very wise decision, because this is where things got weird.

 

Since I hadn't seen any new asteroids pop up around Dres in a while, I decided to check on the probe and make sure it was still mapping the area. As far as I can explain it, the reason the probe wasn't picking up new asteroids anymore was that it had apparently entered the shadow realm. Because when I went to fly it, I saw nothing. My altitude was red zeros. My velocity was NaN m/s. The craft was just gone - as was everything else. No probe. No asteroids. No Dres. No sun. Just stars. Unfortunately I was too dumbstruck to take a screenshot.

I tried going to the tracking station, only to see the same empty void. Clicking my crafts on the sidebar did nothing. Zooming did nothing. Again, only stars.

Spoiler

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Exiting the tracking station took me to what I can only describe as a nightmare realm Shadow Space Center.

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The ground was completely black. The atmosphere was missing. There was no Mun. The shadowed portions of the buildings were pitch black, except when they were holes in space; from certain angles, the starry skybox showed through them. The screenshot does not do the trippiness of the place justice. It was really quite unsettling to look at.

Naturally I quit the game and started it back up. To my relief, KSC looked normal again. I went to the tracking station and confirmed that the solar system did, in fact, still exist. Everything was normal... with one glaring exception.

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The probe was gone. Alarmed, I went through the list of tracked objects to verify that nothing else was missing, but everything else was where it should have been. So my only explanation is that the probe did, indeed, leave this reality and enter a shadow realm, and when I tried to pilot it, I was dragged in with it.

But there is good news. Remember how I saved right after docking, before I tried to fly the probe? I loaded that save and checked the tracking station.

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Sure enough, the probe was right where it had been. Confident that reloading this save file could restore everything if things hit the fan, I decided that I would try to fly the probe again - if the same thing happened, I could get a screenshot of the NaN weirdness, then reload and simply terminate the probe to rid the Kerbol system of its curse once and for all. But, somewhat to my surprise, it didn't happen again. I was able to fly the probe without incident. And yes, it was still tracking Dres.

 Man, and I thought what happened on Ike was weird.

Edited by Ace in Space
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I've never been much good with catching asteroids. So I decided to remedy that by designing a simple, and hopefully elegant system for capturing small asteroids which is 100% reusable. This system consists of three different vehicles which are all based off of the same basic design. The main craft has Gigantor solar panels, some radiators, as well as many reaction wheels, and it launches first. The second craft delivers the mining unit located inside a payload fairing which then docks to the main craft. the third craft is a fuel shuttle and launches several times in order to refuel the main craft, the exact number of launches required will vary. All of the craft are SSTO's which utilize propulsive landings. The main craft has several docking ports making this a very flexible system.

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A lot of waiting. Timewarping ahead a day at a time, checking to see if there are any easy/interesting contracts available, transmitting data from my MPL and then loading new experiments into them, counting down the time until the experiments are all loaded and I can move my ships to the next parts of their missions.

I did, however, manage to send a small shipment to Duna.

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That's a replacement power/comm strut for Duna Station (one of the solar panels on the existing one got destroyed; not sure how or when) and a science rover for Ike.

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Dropping the rover onto Ike's surface.

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I now have rovers on the surface of every solid body in the Kerbol system other than Gilly and Kerbin itself. A rover wouldn't work very well on Gilly due to its low gravity (I've got a lander with science experiments that I can send down to Gilly's surface instead) and if I want science data from Kerbin's surface I can just deploy a fresh rover from the SPH.

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I landed a mobile base that looks like a shrimp on Duna.

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Here it is decelerating into orbit.

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And maneuvering onto an orbit to pass over the Northwestern Basin, where I've never been.

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Decelerating out of orbit.

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Great picture. Those are Vector engines by the way, and when not constrained the move around a lot.

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Drogues deployed.

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Main chutes deployed. I programmed their settings wrong so I had to deploy them manually.

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Final deceleration.

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Touch Down!

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Jettisoning the tower supports and landing rockets.

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Ready to roll.

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The tower was much more of a problem taking off than landing. Kerbin has too much atmosphere.

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I'm going to drive it down that valley.

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1 hour ago, Zosma Procyon said:

I landed a mobile base that looks like a shrimp on Duna.

... You know, it does look like a shrimp. Also, holy high contrast screenshots batman! :confused:

 

Well, after my earlier post covering my frightening excursion into the Shadow Realm, I haven't got a whole lot else to report. Ruby has departed from Onyx Station and is on its way back to Kerbin.

Val and Jeb got to test a boat I built on a whim. It works pretty well. Turns nicely, nearly impossible to capsize. Not as fast as they'd probably hoped, but what is?

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Got to see a nice enough sunrise, too, I guess. Stock atmospheric lighting effects could use some improvement a lot of improvement.

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It totally wasn't a date. Not at all. :rolleyes:

And, most importantly, the test asteroid drill/station hub reached its target and successfully latched on! And it did fulfill the requirements of the "dock around the sun" contract, just as I'd hoped.

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Edited by Ace in Space
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Landed on the Mun.

On a decently steep slope.

Above a cliff.

And the lander was sliding down the slope.  5 tourists on board, Jeb at the helm.

Dropped the ladders.  Jeb bails out, gets the flying EVA report while jet packing downhill.  Grabs the surface sample.  Writes the EVA report.  Plants the flag.  Lander has now slid by Jeb  Jetpacks to catch up, grabs the ladder mid flight. Scrambles up the ladder, boards the lander.  Pops the Goo and Materials experiments.  Retracts the ladder as the lander starts to teeter off the edge of the cliff.

And then Jeb pauses.

He waits until the lander has tilted over enough to give the perfect gravity turn for the ascent, fires the engines and off he goes, whistling all the way.

I was way to busy to grab a screen shot. 

But maybe @Just Jim could use this for some Emiko inspiration..... I'd love to see this played out....

Edited by Gargamel
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Back, back from the dead! I've had so much stuff to do over the past year, and whilst I haven't been able to post, I've definitely been reading all of the fun and mishaps you guys have been having. I'm extremely late to this, but I've been messing around with reusable boosters, but instead of instantly firing back to the KSC like I should have been doing, I decided to make a full orbit before coming back down. Reentry obviously doesn't make landing a poorly-weighted first-stage easy, but the real hardship came at about cloud level, where my booster would oscillate and sway relentlessly. This caused all but a few landings to be complete disasters, and I think this picture really sums up my situation with reusabilty right now:

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I was really excited for Making History, and I luckily received it free of charge. I've mostly been messing with the parts, although I would like to experiment with the Mission Builder later. Here was my Saturn V (of course) taking off at grand speed of 6.4m/s. It was accelerating at an astounding 0.8m/s for the first 10 seconds of flight, which makes it the second slowest (serious) rocket I've ever launched, which was my old Jool 5 back in something like 0.25, which ended up going back for redesign as it only inched up at x3 warp speed.

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Here was rover being detached, which as a hasty last minute decision was slapped to side of the lander, making descent much more annoying:

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Oof. I forgot. Never deploy stuff on a downwards slope. Val had to jump out without any momentous speech and chase after the damn thing, which was of course headed for the edge of a deep crater. Here she is not looking too pleased about sliding past the runaway rover:

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She eventually caught up to it, after it missed the edge of the crater by meters, and drove it back to Jeb, who had already planted the flag and spoke to the people of Kerbin.

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After the science was collected, I quick-saved and had some fun :)

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Dukes of Hazard style.

Edited by AccidentsHappen
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The 1.4.1 campaign is chugging along... it's in that "pause" phase between the time of the first breakthroughs and when I can really start moving, when I'm somewhat dependent on contracts to fund the space center expansions.   I've upgraded the launch pad, Mission Control, the tracking station, the astronaut center, and the VAB, and now I'm scraping to upgrade R&D.  (Since I'm using KCT and my rule is to not upgrade R&D capabilities until I upgrade the physical plant, this means that research is on the slow side right now... a 90-point 5th-tier tech takes 180 days to research.)   But I know from past experience that things will pick back up again once I'm over this hump.

My principal concern right now is getting to the point where I can launch some comsats.  Because this time I decided not to allow the tracking stations other than at KSC, my comm network will be more important.

I've been fiddling with the old HGR (Home Grown Rockets) mod, which has some nice parts that complement the newer parts, especially in the 1.875m size.

On a whim, I renamed Bill and Bob to Wally and Malcolm, partly in tribute to Wally Schirra and Malcolm Scott Carpenter, and partly so I can better keep in mind which one's the engineer (Wally) and which one's the scientist (Malcolm).

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Today I bought Making History (Seems pretty stable. No bugs yet). What's the first thing I decided to do? I strapped together five 5m cores, of course! I decided to aptly name the resulting rocket: "What have I done?"

https://imgur.com/a/ynoJX

Speaking of the KE-1, is there any news on whether it's going to get a balancing pass? I feel like it needs more power.

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13 hours ago, Whisky Tango Foxtrot said:

I now have rovers on the surface of every solid body in the Kerbol system other than Gilly and Kerbin itself. A rover wouldn't work very well on Gilly due to its low gravity (I've got a lander with science experiments that I can send down to Gilly's surface instead) and if I want science data from Kerbin's surface I can just deploy a fresh rover from the SPH.

Unless ... you have a rover designed for Gilly.

https://kerbalx.com/Azimech/77I-GRRM-The-Gilly-Rover-v10
 

Note that with 1.4.x the standard wheel friction settings are too high and need to be adjusted.

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On 3/1/2018 at 7:22 AM, LordFerret said:

Very weird! That looks like you've run across some serious seam issues, or some manner of Kraken. Of the docking port and ISRU issues, I've only dealt with the ISRU one; I had the same problem with my asteroid catcher, overheating. Never could get it to work right. Never did think of putting an engineer in charge either, so now I'll have to try that.

Dres is dark. I find nightvision a must!

And as I just said, Dres is a very dark place (reminds me of that Riddick movie, Pitch Black)...
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So, I won't go anywhere on Dres without nightvision! :wink:
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Makes rovering so much easier!

How do you DO that?!

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8 hours ago, Azimech said:

Unless ... you have a rover designed for Gilly.

https://kerbalx.com/Azimech/77I-GRRM-The-Gilly-Rover-v10
 

Note that with 1.4.x the standard wheel friction settings are too high and need to be adjusted.

That's a neat design but the purpose of these rovers is to have a mobile science probe that I can just leave on the surface of a body and that can be operated indefinitely without resupply after that. An ion engine would need regular shipments of Xenon gas, which would kind of defeat that point.

Oh, and as a slight correction to my earlier post, I also don't have a rover on Laythe, since with it being mostly ocean it wouldn't be practical there. I've got a science plane there instead and a surface base where it can be refuelled.

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11 hours ago, MaxwellsDemon said:

The 1.4.1 campaign is chugging along... it's in that "pause" phase between the time of the first breakthroughs and when I can really start moving, when I'm somewhat dependent on contracts to fund the space center expansions.   I've upgraded the launch pad, Mission Control, the tracking station, the astronaut center, and the VAB, and now I'm scraping to upgrade R&D.  (Since I'm using KCT and my rule is to not upgrade R&D capabilities until I upgrade the physical plant, this means that research is on the slow side right now... a 90-point 5th-tier tech takes 180 days to research.)   But I know from past experience that things will pick back up again once I'm over this hump.

Except for me not using KCT, that just about described my last few days - new 1.4.1 career, getting facilities built up & setting up comm's, getting ready for the first Duna window

 

Edit: And then things got more interesting.  While picking up a random lost Kerbal around Mun, I noticed an unidentified asteroid in Kerbin's SoI, heading for Mun in a few days.  So now in the middle of launching a fleet for Duna, I'm scrambling to catch an asteroid too.  Not enough time today to actually get to the capture though.

Edited by Cavscout74
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18 hours ago, AccidentsHappen said:

Oof. I forgot. Never deploy stuff on a downwards slope. Val had to jump out without any momentous speech and chase after the damn thing, which was of course headed for the edge of a deep crater. Here she is not looking too pleased about sliding past the runaway rover:

Anything I have relating to a rover, at launch, my checklist includes setting the parking brakes before liftoff. This prevents stuff like that. :wink:

 

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13 hours ago, bridgetronic said:

All waves of peace of my mega-spaceship are in space yet I am to imbecilic to dock... so that is my assignment today...again

Welcome to the forums. There are several tutorials and YouTube videos on docking... you should check some of them out. Docking, once you get the hang of it, is very easy, no worse than driving your car into the driveway and parking it in the garage. :wink:

 

4 hours ago, HalcyonSon said:

How do you DO that?!

I guess you're talking about the nightvision? It's a really great mod that I use... you should check it out.

 

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I decided to send an SSTO to Laythe. Ambitious, I know. Well, at least for me, that is. I realized that this may not be possible without refueling, so I also launched a tanker. Then the two spacecraft rendezvoused, and the tanker gave the SSTO enough propellant to get to Laythe, and then some. Then they separated and burned for Jool. The real purpose of this mission was to test out gravity assists in the Joolean moon system. I was able to get a Tylo encounter for both spacecraft long before entering Jool's SOI, although the trajectory needed tweaking. Luckily for me the two vehicles had encounters with Jool spaced quite far apart. I put the SSTO into Laythe orbit just days after the tanker entered the system. The gravity assists for the SSTO were somewhat troublesome, and eventually I gave up and just used an aerocapture to get the SSTO into Laythe orbit. 45 km did the trick just fine, although it did get a bit hot near the command pod. The tanker was much more lucky, though, and only needed a 50 m/s burn to capture into Laythe orbit after pulling off some maneuvers. The two spacecraft, after performing their celestial dance, once again met and exchanged propellant. This time, the tanker was completely dry afterwards. And I finally realized that I forgot to put ladders on my SSTO. Ouch. Well, no reason to not continue, I thought to myself. And so I did. The SSTO flew like a brick, and crashed, mostly intact, onto one of the islands of Laythe. Oh, well. Time for a rescue mission.

All in all: Success. The real purpose of this endeavor was to experiment with Jool's moons. Gravity assists in the Jool system are actually kind of addicting. I will definitely do this for future missions. It saved a great deal of delta-v.

Check out some pics (pic heavy):

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Above you can see the SSTO docked to the tanker, and a little bit of fuel transfer as well. I'm using KER, KAC, and Docking Port Alignment Indicator.

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Right here is a nice shot of Tylo, Laythe, and Jool. 

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Laythe and Jool. One of many gravity assists.

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A shot without any clutter from the GUI. I would use some visual enhancement mods but I decided to spare my computer today.

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Got to admit that this was a little surprising. But if something looks to good to be true, it probably is. 

Now for some tanker shots:

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Here it is over Jool with some moons.

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A small maneuver at Tylo periapsis to tweak the trajectory.

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Look at that. 50.3 m/s for a Laythe capture. Perfect.

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This thing flies. But it doesn't fly well. That one's on me, though.

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The end result.

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