What did you do in KSP1 today?

[AngrybobH]

I made a Minmus base. Well, mostly anyway. It has a nice view and plenty of living space but it is still lacking the mining equipment. Turns out that the return ship was highly flawed and the mining equipment has the actual electrical system. It also turns out that the backup circuits can't keep a crew of 5 alive for a night. They were a fine construction crew but, on the plus side, the local government can say they hired 5 new employees(and their first job is cleaning out the popsiclized old crew).

The now frozen crew did a fine days work.

 

[RealKerbal3x]

1 hour ago, AngrybobH said:

I made a Minmus base. Well, mostly anyway. It has a nice view and plenty of living space but it is still lacking the mining equipment. Turns out that the return ship was highly flawed and the mining equipment has the actual electrical system. It also turns out that the backup circuits can't keep a crew of 5 alive for a night. They were a fine construction crew but, on the plus side, the local government can say they hired 5 new employees(and their first job is cleaning out the popsiclized old crew).

The now frozen crew did a fine days work.

 

What are all those random parts doing lying about on the surface?

[Zeiss Ikon]

Last night, I took the "X-Planes Low" contract (in my "Take Four" RSS/RO/RP-1/Principia career), and finally got some good results with the "Jet Trainer" that I built in the first days of this career (when it takes 60+ days to rebuild after making seemingly minor changes, tweaking takes a while -- and KRASH won't let me simulate anything that lacks a probe core and won't fly uncontrolled).

Finally got the thing flying well -- landing problems are on me, I think.

Rotation works well at about 40-45 m/s, then there's a little juggling of up and down pitch while getting cleaned up (gear and flaps retracted), a few taps of trim, and then it'll fly for a long time with a tap or two of trim from time to time.  Top speed in level flight is yet to be determined, but is well in excess of 200 m/s; V_ne is probably just under 350 m/s.  Powered by the Derwent V, the earliest jet engine in the RP-1 tech tree, with a Bonanza cabin, procedural wings and tip tanks, and stock tail fins for tail surfaces.  Had to put 25 units of lead ballast in the cabin to keep the balance where it needs to be with near-empty tanks, which makes it a little nose heavy when fully fueled -- I can live with that, lots of aircraft have minor trim changes with fuel burn-off.

What astonishes me is the way this craft, which can cruise straight and level at 170 m/s below 40% throttle on this primitive jet engine, can shed altitude when I put the flaps down 30 degrees and lower the gear.  Flaps are quite modest, only the portion of the trailing edge inboard of the gear nacelles, and the engine doesn't throttle down very low (1.5 kN is the lowest thrust it'll produce; it'll taxi at up to 30 m/s with the engine at idle).  It'll drop at about 30 m/s while keeping airspeed below 100 m/s, and then flare down to 45 m/s or so for landing.  Still a handful to land, though, with the idle thrust of the engine wanting to make it float and float; I've taken to killing the engine entirely when I start the flare.

A different angle shows the air intake, nose gear as far forward as possible for balance management.

Jeb gets his turn, flying into the morning sun.  It was Jeb who actually managed to complete the "X-Planes Low" contract, holding altitude between 3075 and 4075 m for three minutes (by the MET clock, which with E.V.E. and Scatterer eating into my system performance was about twenty minutes of my time) and then landing without completely destroying the plane.  I don't think it'll fly without the tail boom he knocked off, though, so back to the SPH for repairs.

[Hotel26]

Wrote this article about putting relay sats into concentric rings around Kerbol at 4, 25 and 50Gm...  would estimate it's well-known to probably most of us, but I've only just worked it out for myself... (slow learner) 

Really love my new Escort.  It's a cyclic transit booster.  [I don't really know what that means.]  I had been happy to guide it with a pilot tug but I've just put a 750-unit MP tank on it [not pictured] to make it more independent for docking.

How can I explain Escort?  It's basically a rocket sled...

Attach it to an interplanetary expedition.  Make an Oberth dive to 70km Pe.  THUMP!!

Separate.  Turn around.  Burn back to recapture home.  Second screenshot shows it's then pretty easy to capture the Mun (depending upon its position).

Escort is fuel & engines.  (The Kerbals are calling it "Blood & Guts".)

And, in a related idea, I want to see if I can land the last stage of my Aquila booster on the Mun, fuel up and then see if 12 nukes will be sufficient to boost it and the fuel high enough (about 2Mm) to make it economical to use for this purpose.

Edited July 12, 2018 by Hotel26

[Triop]

Testing refueling jets.

I couldn't make it work at first, because the grabbing unit couldn't transfer fuel.

Some searching on the internet saved my day, the key is to have a converter behind the grabbing unit to allow fuel to flow through.

[Atkara]

40 minutes ago, Triop said:

I couldn't make it work at first, because the grabbing unit couldn't transfer fuel.

Why not disable the "resource transfer obeys crossfeed rules" option and live happily ever after?

[Triop]

42 minutes ago, Atkara said:

Why not disable the "resource transfer obeys crossfeed rules" option and live happily ever after?

I've been playing since 2015 and I never knew this until now. 

Thanks for the tip dude, learning something new every day.

EDIT:

 

Edited July 12, 2018 by Triop

[AngrybobH]

12 hours ago, RealKerbal3x said:

What are all those random parts doing lying about on the surface?

The base is built from the delivery ship. The left overs will either be incorporated or assembled into the fuel delivery ship once mining operations are set up.

[Draconiator]

I didn't actually do anything in the game itself, but used my meager knowledge of BASIC to do this - I.E. it's known that NASA has somewhat old technology to interface with spacecraft, since apparently old things are better than new things?  I dunno.

Anyway, looks like Gene caught Jeb using orbiter software to hide the location of his secret stash.....

Fun Fact: This was actually programmed on a TRS-80 Model 200 emulator in the Basic language it has.

[Triop]

I just pimped my tanker jet.

I'm really happy with the result, it handles like a fighter jet and can hold 1900 LF.

 

[EpicSpaceTroll139]

I got tantalizingly close to my kOS script landing a Failcan 1 Block 2 1st stage back on the Lauchpad

(note 1 leg got despawned by the server... I should really be testing in singleplayer)

Edited July 12, 2018 by EpicSpaceTroll139

[Atkara]

Busy day today.

The final pieces of equipment arrived at Dres, along with a rescue craft and a recovery drone. A drone also entered orbit around Duna to recover another pod.

A sentinel probe arrived at it's pre-designated orbit and started monitoring Eeloo which, around the same time, received the expedition sent to it. As expected, all craft were low on fuel after circularization, including the miner. So it borrowed fuel from the rest, in order to land and in turn, prep them for landing. A rather decent ore concentration (11.5%) was located inside a crater along the equator and the process began.

Most of the craft are now on the surface, the customary flag has been raised and the first bunch of data was sent back to KSC. There's still a general purpose lander in orbit and Jeb's ship, which also arrived. Once they're down, I'll start working on those rescues.

 

[Triop]

First mission with my fuel tanker; go to the dessert air base and refuel a jet that just returned from a nearby survey contract.

[ARS]

I make a British Mark tank

 

 

[Lisias]

I crashed my blimp AGAIN. I solved the problem of she stomping her nose on the ground due the tilting from the thrust, but now I'm facing some problems on manoeuvring as now I need to throttle down, and I'm missing the runway for some meters.

Engineering is lovely, no?  

 

4 hours ago, Draconiator said:

 it's known that NASA has somewhat old technology to interface with spacecraft, since apparently old things are better than new things?  I dunno.

It's not necessarily better, but usually sturdier. As the chips get faster and work at lower voltage, they became also more prone to radiation interference - any loose electron coming from God knows where can now change a bit on the RAM, or some register on the CPU.

Shielding costs mass, and mass costs money exponentially - so it's usually cheaper (when not the only choice) to use "old tech" on space crafts and use the sparing  mass for more experiments/fuel/whatever.

And since you are kicking "old crap" into space, you need the equivalent "old crap" here to communicate and control the thing.  

Edited July 13, 2018 by Lisias
bad grammar fixed.

[ARS]

5 hours ago, Draconiator said:

it's known that NASA has somewhat old technology to interface with spacecraft, since apparently old things are better than new things?  I dunno.

Older things, especially spacecraft computer, despite being slower and perform less than modern computer (Even regular cellphone is better) is still used since because they perform slower, they generate less heat, which means less chance of system overheat since in space, heat dissipation is extremely hard. Thus, they're far more reliable in the long run with long service life. Especially important for probes, since they often goes on a mission that can be measured in decades. Modern computer is good and can be used, but user interface beyond simple command line eats a lot of memories, and faster processor generates a lot of heat, which is not good in space. Simpler system also less prone to failure, since the chance of failure increases as the device gets more complex

[Srpadget]

It was bound to happen sooner or later, I suppose.

The last few meters in Yet Another Launch Vehicle Docking With Space Station.  Crabbed in a bit sideways, so had some lateral velocity to kill once I was aligned; no big deal.  Reach for monoprop controls when almost-aligned so as to ease the lateral to zero, and I brushed another key with the side of my hand.

The Z key.  Oops.

Full-throttle acceleration right at the space station.  Which rang like the proverbial bell upon collision.

Luckily, I'd put some rather severe throttle limiting on the launcher's main engine once in orbit, so the actual collision happened at maybe 2 m/sec, and at a slight angle so it was a glancing blow.  The launcher even managed to "thread the needle" during the collision such that none of the really fragile bits (solar arrays, TCS panels) hit anything--and I have NO IDEA how that happened, as the core station plus a couple other docked vehicles made it a veritable forest of fragile arrays.  It looks as though every part is completely intact.  Freakishly good luck, that.  (Other than, y'know, the whole "slamming the throttle when only a few meters away from docking" bit which started it all!)

So in the end, all I had to do was stop the runaway SSTO, swing back around, re-orient everything (the station didn't break, but oh boy did it tumble), and do the docking RIGHT this time.

No pictures of the exciting bits.  Sorry about that--I was too busy a) panicking, b) stopping the runaway, c) checking the timestamp of my most recent quicksave (TWO DAYS ago...!?), d) looking for damage, and e) making a PAINFULLY CAREFUL (re-)rendezvous and dock, to even think about screencaps.

[Cavscout74]

Picked up an contract to explore a magnetic anomaly on Kerbin.  For a change, I fired up an old fighter design from the back of the hangar & after a few quick changes due to tech limitations, I had Jeb fly up to check it out.  Managed a "good" landing in the mountains near the anomaly - good meaning I used the aircraft drag chute & brakes instead of Jeb's personal chute.  Jeb wasn't going to be flying back to KSC though.

Climbing away from KSC

After landing.  Nevermind that missing wing.  It's still a "good" landing.

I also surprisingly turned my Moho fly-by probe into a Moho orbiting probe - starting at a 20km Pe, I had just enough fuel in both the transfer stage & probe to close the Ap down to ~2000 km.  Didn't snap a screenshot of that though.

[EpicSpaceTroll139]

More very close landings:

 

[EpicSpaceTroll139]

Da dada Da Da DA DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!

 

Not precisely in the middle of the pad as I would like, but it's just as well because there are launch clamps there. I can probably fix this by having it do some corrections during the landing burn itself as opposed to all with aerodynamics during the main portion of the descent.

(Sorry for doublepost) 

 

[Castille7]

4 minutes ago, EpicSpaceTroll139 said:

Da dada Da Da DA DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!

Really nice! ....Also you have me really curious about that landing gear 

[Lisias]

FINALLY!  

And she taxis very well.

 

And now that I gained some more science, I added the landing lights (would saved my sorry SAS more than once) and the needed search lights so I can do nigh search & rescues!

 

Edited May 4, 2022 by Lisias
Fixing the image links

[EpicSpaceTroll139]

1 minute ago, Castille7 said:

Really nice! ....Also you have me really curious about that landing gear 

I will be sharing it on KerbalX Soon.^TM

[SaturnianBlue]

Messed around with a pair of tanks in BDArmory with a friend, and I finally tried out the ground AI function. 

After that, I took a ton of screenshots of a pair of bombers based roughly around 60s-70s era designs, and a bit of my own input. I plan to use one of them in a story I've written...

Edited July 13, 2018 by SaturnianBlue

[Guest]

Greetings Kerbonauts, the Brikoleur is back.

I started a new career after a bit of a hiatus. I don't know how far I'm going to take this but at least for now I'm having fun again. The new Soviet-inspired parts are fun. They make things a lot easier too, so much so that if I was new to this I'd probably miss the design challenges needed to work around the limitations of the base parts. For example, the Pomegranate pod is a built-in rescue ship: before, it was a significant engineering challenge to make a ship that does that at that tech level.

I also took Valentina and Haddas the engineer to Duna. A round trip vessel was much easier with the new parts. I took my Onion-based Mun lander, upgraded it to a Pea, and added a Docking Port Jr and a couple of radial chutes to the top, with a matching docking port on my hauler module which is really just a couple of tanks and an engine (no control at all). With the 'chutes, Duna landing was virtually free; Haddas repacked the 'chutes for reuse when returning to Kerbin, and I RV'ed with the fuel tank left in orbit to refuel for the trip home. It's a fully self-contained mission with no need for recovery, refueling, or other support launches.

These Soviet-style parts also look very cool. Here's a shot of my young pioneers on the Red Planet.

And here's the vessel a bit earlier, upon arrival in Duna orbit, before the lander separated.

Finally, a glamour shot of the lander about to land. Terminal velocity on Duna was about 14 m/s so it only needed a puff of retro for a soft landing.

Edited July 13, 2018 by Guest