What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Ace in Space]

7 hours ago, SwissSpace93 said:

Is it bad that my first thought on seeing this was this old thing?

 

As for what I did today, let's begin with a recap, since I, as always, had altogether too many irons in the fire:

• I was on a science binge on the Mun using a lander-orbiter combo
• Another Ruby mission was on its way to Duna to pick up a stranded Kerbal
• Wrong-Way Eridin in the Tiger's Eye Mining Lander was stuck in orbit around Eve and unable to reach Gilly
• The whole Dres mission was a hot mess
• I designed the vacuum-faring parts of a high-delta-v rescue craft called Ohana 1

I started my day with the Mun mission. There were a couple anomalies within biomes I needed to stop at, so I made a point to try to land near them. For a certain value of "near."

I didn't land too close to this one because it was at the top of the crater's edge and outside the biome I needed. Better to land in a flat-ish area inside the biome and go over to the arch on EVA. Of course, because of the steep cliff and the presence of a smaller (but still huge) crater between the landing site and the arch, this meant jetpacking over.

The arch was bigger than I expected.

And I may have been a bit too liberal with the jetpack on the way over.

Spoiler

Still, I figured I could make it, since I was going down instead of up and would therefore need less fuel. Bardard's jetpack got him all the way to the edge of the smaller crater when I decided the fuel levels were critically low and I needed to use the rest of it to brake. I underestimated how long it would take to slow down, and Bardard ended up smacking into the cliff wall at high speed - but not lethally, and kerbals are made of tough stuff, so he just bounced right off toward the interior of the crater, and used the rest of his propellant to stop his fall and get back up onto the plateau. This time there wasn't enough left to brake, but the speed was low enough that Bardard could just take the impact - he bounced a good distance, too. Since the ground was more or less flat from that point on, he could walk the rest of the way. But it was gonna be a looooooong walk.

Spoiler

1.8 kilometers on foot, yay.

After a few minutes of holding the W key, I decided I had better things to do.

I then went to do the laundry and make hot dogs.

Spoiler

Bardard finally got back to the lander and rendezvoused with the orbiter, transferred the science, reset the experiments, refilled the fuel tanks, and then it was off to the next biome. This time, I wanted to land near the Armstrong memorial. Despite having the coordinates, I was having some trouble locating the memorial (as I've said, I'm really bad at navigation), and ultimately I decided to just go ahead and land anyway, memorial or no memorial. As luck would have it...

Spoiler

With that, I wrapped up my shenanigans on the Mun. I probably could have gotten the last couple biomes, since I actually had plenty of fuel left, but I'd decided enough was enough. I could come back some other time for the last two.

Spoiler

Next, the launch window for Dres came up, so after some tinkering, I launched the rescue craft (Ohana 1.11 after I was done fiddling with ascent stage designs) - as you may recall, it was a rather large craft. So it needed a large ascent stage. Which led to this monstrosity:

It is much more stable than it looks, and got nearly into orbit on the power of the SRBs and bottom stage alone - though I did need to tap into the first pair of asparagus tanks to circularize. It was all fairly standard - orbit, slingshot off the Mun, burn to intercept planet. Since it's been a little while, I'd admittedly forgotten about Ruby entirely, so I initially just timewarped straight from burn to flyby, only to realize that Ruby was now at T+200ish from its scheduled maneuver. I reloaded a save from just after Ohana's burns and corrected this mistake. Then the Eve launch window came up and I sent out a second Ohana, completed its burns, and then went back to Ruby to dock it to Onyx Station to top off the fuel tanks.

So that's where we are now: rescue crafts are en route to Eve and Dres, Munstone came home after a productive journey, and Ruby is orbiting Ike and ready for its mission.

[ARS]

Landed on The Mun

And returned from The Mun

Does anyone know how to fix RCS effect? Mine's looks like an erupting krakatoa and the visual effect is reversed

1st test: 4-point stock RCS and 4-point RCS from probes plus mod. I press the button to hover (RCS thrusters firing downward) and as you can see, stock RCS has correct visual effect and pointed at right direction, while the one from probes plus, while does thrut upwards, the visual effect is far larger and pointed upwards instead downwards

2nd test: Same test, but with stock vernor engines and HRP vernor engines. Same result: Incorrect thrust effect direction and larger plume

Anyone know how to fix this?

[Delay]

Landed a first stage! Kind of?

And I, once again, went to Minmus for science! And a contract...

I had so much dV that I decided to go into a polar orbit...

... and later back into an equatorial one to go back to Kerbin!

This time I was able to get a screenshot of the whole trajectory!

And after going back to Kerbin I still had enough fuel for not only slowing down, but also to do a plane change to reduce my inclination.

By the way, after both maneuvers I still had about 190m/s of dV. It was a simple two-stage rocket with a small fuel tank, I didn't know that it would have this much.

 

Oh, and for some reason I decided to take a screenshot of the crew. I was playing around with the pod overlays and got the camera inside the capsule.

[Freshmeat]

I finally came home from Eve. Next up is installing an SSD, so my entire rig is down for a couple of days (new windows install). Then I can finally upgrade to whatever version of 1.4 is up when I get my computer back from service.

[KerikBalm]

So @Geonovast still had some critiques about the part clipping of my last mk3 cargobay deployable rovers.

So today I remade a set of rover, adhering to rather strict rules about part clipping, making sure they work on kerbin and on Mun, and I tried to make them fairly easy to use -- thanks to a bug related to the mk3 cargo bay and extendable bits lit radiators and solar panels, some of my old designs needed one to use a few tricks and be very careful to get the rovers in and out without having their extendable bits break off --

So then I tested them, made use of MH's mission editor to test them on Mun too:

The assembled surface base (simply moved from the launchpad)

In the VAB, all modules put together:

 

The rover starts to go too fast for its own good:

Here as it tumbles, you can see that the wheels aren't clipping anything:

It lost some bits... but it wasn't catastrophic:

 

 

 

[Azimech]

Based on my old stock 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz I'm converting this huge thing into the Ecto-1. The car is twice the size of the original otherwise I wouldn't be able to do it justice. The original Eldorado is already massive at 5.7m, the 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor is 6.4m. In the pictures you see how much length I had to add. This will take a while to get right.

[Tyko]

On 5/20/2018 at 7:51 AM, ARS said:

Landing a small probe on The Mun: Yui-02 [FLOATING MATERIAL] (The one with solar panels on the background is science probe, while the one on the foreground is relay lander)...

Let's do some science...

 

 

Which mod are those landing legs and the antenna from?

[Mr. Peabody]

16 hours ago, Angel-125 said:

I don't like the current design for the lavatory so that'll change a bit.

Don't forget to add the dreaded...

[Delay]

Did anyone order a wormhole to Kerbin?

[Cavscout74]

2 hours ago, Tyko said:

Which mod are those landing legs and the antenna from?

The legs are from Probes Plus & the antenna on the other lander looks like the ground plane antenna from the same.  The legs are actually part of the "Landvermasser" probe, not seperate legs though.  It's built to match the NASA Surveyor landers.

[Delay]

The previous image was taken while in a parking orbit, waiting to rendezvous with (and capture) an asteroid!

Easy does it...

At this point I was still speculating about whether or not I had enough dV with the asteroid to capture it. Turns out, I did.

Releasing the asteroid...

...and going back home.

 

Edit: A launch window to Eve is open. I'm going to land on Gilly soon!

Edited May 21, 2018 by Delay

[Ace in Space]

7 hours ago, Azimech said:

Based on my old stock 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz I'm converting this huge thing into the Ecto-1. The car is twice the size of the original otherwise I wouldn't be able to do it justice.

I love how, given any sandbox or open world game, players will inevitably use it for something completely different than the original theme. I took a fantasy game about slaying dragons and turned it into an interior decorating sim. You've taken a game about space exploration and turned it into a car-building sim.

Edited May 22, 2018 by Ace in Space

[Supercheese]

1 hour ago, Ace in Space said:

I love how, given any sandbox or open world game, players will inevitably use it for something completely different than the original theme. I took a fantasy game about slaying dragons and turned it into an interior decorating sim. You've taken a game about space exploration and turned it into a car-building sim.

To be fair, even SpaceX considers some parts of space exploration to be car-related...

[Cavscout74]

Mostly I launched multiple Jool-bound probes for the approaching transfer window.  Resurrected my Nexus reusable launcher for several of them.  Also got a second lander probe to Moho & tested a new spaceplane.

Nexus V parachuting back to KSC:

New spaceplane project - it was a bit short of dV, but flies quite nicely.  This was on the way back to KSC:

Moho lander on the ground.  Mistakes were made on the final burn -  notice the scattered solar panel bits in the background.  Luckily I had a small RTG attached also, so it will slooowwwwllllllyyyyyy charge the batteries.

[Ho Lam Kerman]

I landed a crew next to the rover that I already had on the Mun, and started a Mun Elcano.

I'm currently about 53.1 km from the initial landing site.

Wish me luck.

[Pipcard]

Established a comsat network around Ike and scanned for ore to prepare for an Ike base

Note: I'm stuck on KSP 1.1.3 (for mod compatibility reasons) so there is no CommNet functionality (and I'm not using any mods like RemoteTech).

[mystifeid]

Landed my two mobile base parts (12t and 18t) on Tylo from 6000km orbit after topping up the tanks at my station.

 

[MattJL]

After a semester-long hiatus from KSP, I finally set out to update all of my ships for 1.4 and beyond.  (I swear the latest version's 1.4.3, but for some reason, I'm still stuck in 1.4.1).

But I've also been working on updating my Duna lander to something more cosmetically attractive/functional.

It's based heavily off of what von Braun presented to the Space Task Group for what would turn out to be his final Mars expedition proposal in 1969:

I'm particularly proud of the ladders that run through the heat shield, which I unfortunately don't have a great picture of.  But I do have a better shot of the habitat built into the descent stage:

Edited May 22, 2018 by MattJL

[Hotel26]

I've been Kerbin-bound, foolin' around...

I did get to build the planned, bigger (Mk-3) version of my original Paxjet, though:

I also built a version of this with the 4th Whiplash mounted up in the tail-fin like a DC-10, shifting the spike intake from the nose to the tail, and it looked pretty spectacular, but the performance wasn't quite as good.  So I had to nix it.

SuperPaxjet seems to like 19.5km for cruise.

Edited May 22, 2018 by Hotel26

[maceemiller]

Hi all  

So after not really playing much of KSP due to real life issues and a complete lack of drive to play if im honest, Ive come back with a new hunger for the game by simply making up my own story to follow and its going like this......

Just built a rover that Im going to simply parachute onto Eve's surface with Jeb and Bill on-board and there they will cruise around sight seeing....Ive only ever been to Eve once in the last few years of playing so time to enjoy it there.....

Then I will try to send a rescue mission to bring them back home (if I can....havnt got that far yet) but Im excited about trying.

Please feel free to view my simple rover and the launch craft on the pad waiting to go

EDIT--------Stage 2 seperation in orbit. Now just have to wait for a transfer window

Edited May 22, 2018 by maceemiller

[ARS]

I made something... I named this Umi-03 [DEEP EYES]

Getting into water...

Detaching wheels... And off we go!

Controls are really responsive and I think it's pretty good so far

I might modify this further as a small full-scale research submarine

[Kebab Kerman]

Does anybody happen to know how to make a taller cargo bay door for this?

https://kerbalx.com/KebabKerman/LA-735

EDIT: I would have tried myself, but KSP is being mean and not loading 

Edited May 22, 2018 by Kebab Kerman

[ARS]

Updated the design, now featuring more ballast tanks as well as being able to carry scientific instruments. It's also more compact than previous version

The controls are much more responsive, and far more stable than previous version. I can literally point it to any particular direction and it'll stabilize itself before propelling towards the designated point

Jeb, that looks cramped, but your face shows that you doesn't seem to mind about it. I wonder if you can find an actual kraken deep beneath the ocean?

View from the window. It feels... So alien...

If the engine is turned off, it'll float slowly to the surface at 4 m/s. To dive, simply point downward and fire up the engine

I declare that the test has been successful and the craft is officially named Umi-03 [DEEP EYES]

This submarine actually reminds me about Turtle submarine, The first real-life submarine used in naval combat

Craft file: https://kerbalx.com/ARS/Umi-03-DEEP-EYES

[SpannerMonkey(smce)]

Today, i mostly frittered hours away racing Kerbals around in very large circles,  whilst recognizing that @Azimech builds an amazing stock car .  Lowell Blackout modified  , and CanAm racer on the wall ( 2.2 km across, 6.9km track surface loop)

Running hands free at over 100m/s

 

Spoiler

 

 

[Tyko]

I realized last night that I've spent the last 3 months not really playing. The first month I was waiting for 1.4/MH. The last 2 months have been waiting for a less buggy 1.4/MH.

I gave up and moved back to 1.3.1 which has it's own quirks, but they're well understood by now. Played for 4 hours without a major glitch and was very happy.