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What did you do in KSP1 today?


Xeldrak

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I spent my playing time yesterday and today building a rocket that can send back science from LKO -- with a launch mass under 1 T.  In fact, One Ton Tony 4 launches at 977 kg, and with a little care makes a 73x75 Kerbin orbit with 50+ m/s to spare (plenty to deorbit).  No solar panels -- just couldn't get to orbit with the extra 5 kg -- but the battery is good for a couple orbits and three data transmissions.

svi19Ef.png

 

 

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Did some experimentation today to see if I can scratchbuild an SSTO without nukes, ramjets or referring to existing designs. Used a Twin Boar for the rocket stage to go easy on the part count and a quartet of perma-wet Panthers for the airbreathing stage, with only one tank of fuel for each Panther to go easy on the weight.

After repeatedly failing to stay in orbit due to insufficient dV, on the third attempt I finally succeeded... kinda.

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Can reach a 70x69 orbit, but only with 45 m/s remaining. Also cannot break the sound barrier during takeoff and can barely reach 7 km altitude on jets only before running out of momentum, but when the Twin Boar lights up... hoo boy. Thing fell apart during the first test flight when I lit the big boy up during level flight at low altitude.

Still needs improvement, but it was fun to build nonetheless.

Edited by Fraktal
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I don't, actually. I know the Pathers can't give me much of a running start (at least compared to ramjets), I'm just trying to gain as much altitude as I can before lighting up the Twin Boar to squeeze out as much dV as I can from the latter by losing less to drag.

Probably not doing it right, though: jet ascent at 20° to 7-8 km, then light up the Twin Boar, pitch up to 45° and keep burning until apoapse is >70km, then cut the juice and set up a circularization node at apoapse, which usually takes around 1200 m/s and is where I run just slightly short. The Twin Boar is doing just fine, it's the Panthers that are anemic (top out below Mach 0.7 in level flight despite running wet all the time).

Edited by Fraktal
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I'd point you to my Twin Boar SSTO album, but it was on Photobucket, and now is gone (I wasn't willing to pay $400/year to let people see my images).  I just looked, and I don't seem to have images on my HDD.  I'll try to look for the craft file tomorrow.

Okay, @Fraktal, I found the craft file in my Dropbox, along with my original Stock Mass Fraction Challenge post for the reusable version..  Not a single photo remains, thanks, Photobucket, but I found the original in my (preserved) 1.2.2 install.  Given it's 100% stock, I think it's unlikely it would fail to work in even 1.4.3.

Edited by Zeiss Ikon
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2 hours ago, Azimech said:

@KerrMüthat's a very beautiful Daedalus! Mods?

That new bearing isn't ready yet, I don't think it will be strong enough for propeller planes in 1.4.x.

Thanks man :)

No mods on the "Doodadlus", but lots of MH parts and autostruts. I´ll upload it to kerbalX tomorrow. My hangar over there is too empty anyway.

That´s a gorgeous - and functional - Excelsior btw.

Let me know if you make any progress on those bearings. At the moment I´m using RCS-ball bearings and rings of 8 thermometers around stayputniks. If I find time this week I´ll try the ladders. Haven´t built stock propellers for a while now, but the Duna plane reminded me of how much fun it is to tinker around with those. :confused: Have read through the last pages of the turboprop thead today. I think I have to get back into Helicopters soon.

Cheers

Edited by KerrMü
typo
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On ‎4‎/‎28‎/‎2018 at 2:39 PM, Triop said:
I think it is ok to have the option of hiring women, but please don't force it.
Now I can't choose a male pilot, do I have the right to feel discriminated ?

I am 99.9% sure it's random. I seem to recall one time I wanted to hire any pilot and it was nothing but engineers and scientists all the way down. Random is random. No need to get worked up.

 

Well, as for what I did today, I may have celebrated too soon with regards to the two wagon trains. I started by cleaning up the mess around Eve; got the comm network locked in and assembled Tiger's Eye Station around Gilly.

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This completed the contract that had been spamming me for so long - just in time for the patch that fixes the spam. :/ At any rate, after all the annoyance it's caused me, seeing it completed and off my log was a sweet relief.

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Halle-freaking-lujah.

Of course, the station still isn't operational... Because there's still one piece missing. Remember the lander that got stuck going the wrong way around Eve? Yeah, that craft was never designed to travel large distances once it dropped its travel stage (which was used up in the course of flipping the orbit to go the right way). It just doesn't have the monoprop to capture into Gilly orbit. It was only ever meant to de-orbit, and then go back up to rendezvous with the station. It's not even equipped with an antenna because it's not meant to go very far from the station. So Eridin is stuck, and there are no rescue crafts this time around. I briefly considered using the abandoned test lander already in orbit around Gilly; while I can use it in a pinch, I'd prefer to have an engineer operating it for maximum efficiency, and I don't want to leave Eridin stranded anyway. I also can't use the existing lander as a rescue vehicle because it's subject to the same limitations as the stranded one. The only option is to send a tug on the next launch window to pull her to the station. Incidentally, while I was checking when that would be, I noticed a world's first notification for suborbital spaceflight over Eve, and briefly panicked because I thought the lander was going to crash into the Purple People-Eater. But it had just been triggered during the orbit reversal. Heart attack averted.

Quartz station is even worse off. None of the crafts have enough fuel to begin construction. When this happened around Duna, some of the crafts still had fuel, which I was able to reallocate so that the mission could recover itself. Not so here - tanks are just about empty all around, and all the orbits are so off-kilter and wide that my original Plan B of using RCS to move everything into place now seems wildly inadequate. While everything is safely in orbit and not in danger of drifting away, I'm a bit concerned that something's gonna smack into an asteroid - but the chances of that are fairly low... I hope.

So now both of these missions need a rescue vehicle sent.

I was also planning on launching Ruby 4.2, and decided before I started work on the rescue craft that I should check the planets' positions to get a sense of when my launch windows would open, and lo and behold, Duna was where I wanted, when I wanted. Imagine that. So that mission lifted off, short one kerbal so they can pick up a guy stranded in orbit for a contract. The plan for this one is to not only land on Duna but on Ike as well, because the WFS has apparently decided that landing on Ike and then returning the craft to Kerbin is what I'm going to do next. I originally considered sending Jeb, because he actually hasn't been to Ike yet and always gets the honor of leading the first science landings to new places, but I decided against it and sent some newbie pilot. Partly because there have already been science expeditions by the Onyx Station crew, so it's not really a "first," and partly because I wanted to send him to Dres along with the rescue tug - although now that I think about it that may be a bad idea; I don't know how long the cleanup effort will take or even whether it will work, and I do not want to strand him out there. Not that any of that matters to Jeb.

Then I set about building my rescue vehicle. This is just the travel stage and the tug itself - I haven't yet designed an ascent stage, which I have no doubt will be a major pain for such a large craft. But if I've calculated my delta-V correctly, it will be so worth it. On a related note, this game will be the end of me... I haven't done this much math since I took calculus. I've got a notebook on my desk with calculations scrawled all over it.

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I don't actually know if I'm doing it right of course. This is the first time I've tried to calculate delta-v for an asparagus-staged rocket.

lotsofmath_by_littlefiredragon-dca85gc.p

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Edited by Ace in Space
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2 hours ago, Tewa said:

diving platform

good attempt,but ,no

 

1 hour ago, RizzoTheRat said:

Base jump?

closer

21 minutes ago, Zeiss Ikon said:

If you're going BASE jumping, don't forget that only Kerbals with two or more stars have parachute

thx for the tip!

Spoiler

RD1lOHY.png

 

next round,?

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Finally encountered Jupiter.I visited with all moons, I put it into a parked orbit with a very high eccentricity. No communication problems, though the connection percentage got very close to zero. Hovered between 5 and 30% through my time at jupiter.

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Nothing yet, but when I get home I'll make a few bombers, fly them in formation with the BDAc autopilot/ AI (Which is sadly a better pilot than I am) and shoot them all down with my new defense fighter:

384D88A7601F2B5821CBDA71168F9ACFD2C35FFC

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