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What did you do in KSP1 today?


Xeldrak

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I spent some time in an alternate version of 1.4.4, trying to figure out Pathfinder mod.  I was actually getting the hang of it and had a nice little base started next to the runway.  Then I meant to go back to the space center to bring in another vehicle with more parts & equipment.  Except I apparently hit "recover" instead of "space center."    :mad: 

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Well here it is in all of it's ridiculous glory. over 800 parts....over 13k tons.......13 engines......20 nuclear reactors....it took 12k units of monoprop just to turn from retrograde to prograde. It carries more fuel than some space programs have ever used in all their rockets. It's possibly the most kerbal thing I have ever created. Currently burning for Jool.

0DDE7781F8AD6F9F465EFFA4DBE954C3CB2E7F3E

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1 minute ago, Cavscout74 said:

I spent some time in an alternate version of 1.4.4, trying to figure out Pathfinder mod.  I was actually getting the hang of it and had a nice little base started next to the runway.  Then I meant to go back to the space center to bring in another vehicle with more parts & equipment.  Except I apparently hit "recover" instead of "space center."    :mad: 

Ouch. You may be able to find a few backup persistent files in your save folder. One of them may be from before you recovered the base.

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12 hours ago, Kronus_Aerospace said:

So today in KSP I decided to work more on my A380 an- OH GOOD GOD

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This, ladies and gentlemen, is why we use struts.

EDIT:

Upon further inspection it would seem as if my A380 is attempting to fly like an insect

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I question its effectiveness. I'll give it an A380  for effort though.

Reichtangle+represents+germany+from+1871

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Built a commsat network and then I dropped an A-class hot potato into Munar orbit.

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The ion probe still has about 60% of its fuel left even after redirecting the asteroid. Tempted to send her out to Dres or Jool after this.

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Did more work on my Failcan Guidance script. Currently my focus is on improving the aerodynamic steering loop and the path that the booster takes to the target landing site. A side effect of this is that I've been able to substantially reduce the delta-v required for landing the thing.

On one end, the rocket no longer has to follow a semi-ballistic trajectory back to the pad. While it isn't exactly the most glidey thing in the world, it can substantially increase its range by using its body lift to flatten the trajectory as it enters the mid to lower portions of the atmosphere. This also bleeds off a decent amount of speed, so it might end up being worth it to remove the airbrakes. I'll have to test that.

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(It can actually get a little bit flatter than this)

On the other end, with the improved aerodynamic steering, the rocket pretty much dead on on the pad* before the landing burn even starts, thus almost no maneuvering is required during the powered terminal descent. This, in combination with robust landing legs capable of deploying at up to 120m/s, allows the landing burn to be made significantly shorter, thus reducing gravity losses. This alone allowed me to make 33% delta-v savings on the landing burn, and I suspect a rework of the hoverslam equations I plan to do tomorrow will save even more.

*something that might be a problem if a landing burn fails, and in fact was a problem during an attempted drone-ship landing (shameless plug). I might end up setting it to initially target the spot immediately next to the pad and then shift over in the last second to land on the pad. Then again this is KSP. Who cares about the safety of the pad or drone-ship?

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I think my favorite landings are these ones where it lands with 4m/s or so in the tanks, or the occasions where it flames out exactly at the moment when it touches down. #Efficiency

Of different note, I really have no idea whether this should be here or in the WIP craft forum. I mean, it's a work in progress, but it's not the craft that I'm working on! lol :P 

Edited by EpicSpaceTroll139
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2 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Somewhere, Elon Musk is wondering how you managed to rip off his carefully guarded software... :sticktongue:

How hard can "balancing a rubber broomstick on your hand in the middle of a windstorm"* be anyways? jk it wasn't that hard.  Maybe at some point I'll try making an adaptation of the script for Realism Overhaul.**  Perhaps with a segmented fuselage to simulate slight bendyness. Then things get really hard.

* - Elon Musk

**Note the maybe part... Not sure I have the time or willpower to do that at this point, especially considering such scripts already exist out there.

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3 minutes ago, EpicSpaceTroll139 said:

Note the maybe part... Not sure I have the time or willpower to do that at this point, especially considering such scripts already exist out there.

I imagine if you do do so, you’ll suddenly be whisked away to Musk’s secret underground Bond villain base er, server farm... :D

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I made a loosely Gundam inspired mothership. Its part count is just over 100 but this is one of those cases where I use nearly only stock parts for the superstructure. The cupola (bridge) is scaled down to about 1.6m. I bent my rule against scaling crewed parts because I really don't want the cupola that big (2.5m) and there's no other appropriate stock part.

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Why not make it land-able? It took off so easy and I wanted to touchdown on Pol so I pondered wheel placement. This happens to work fine.

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More pictures but some reading in the spoiler.

Spoiler

Its propulsion system is a finely crafted combination of USI warp drive, The Spice, and WBI gravitic engine. Aerodynamically, it's horribly cursed with downforce and it's meant to have no elevons so I had to use WBI's Crazy Mode and sidestep aero physics for the ascent. ;) 

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The reaction engines on this are entirely unnecessary, and catering for them at first needlessly limited my design freedom. I took them out soon enough after the test flight.

The clipped Mk2 cabins (and shielded docking ports) in the largest Mk2 nacelles are unscaled for size comparison. I've contemplated upscaling the core section a bit. Mk3 bays can't hold anything fun for a heavy mod user imo.

Since this ship runs on WBI alien tech i thought of making its landers out of flying saucers; save myself the trouble of designing a big (or small) enough spaceplane and put a pair of that with this.

 

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I've just finished maps of Bop, and the satellite is currently heading into Jool's atmosphere.

Also, I successfully orbited and landed on Plock. That's an OPM dwarf planet. It was 14 game years old, before I had SCANsat, so I could not map it. I wished I did. Anyways, TIME TO PULL OUT THEM SUPER ROCKETS!

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Getting back into the game with a fresh space program (but with a nice boost by importing many of my 1.2.2 builds).

The first task was sprucing up my crew recovery plane, the Saguha. The genesis for this project was my desire to have a plane in KSP that actually flys and functions somewhat like a real plane I use it to air drop a rover for crews that land in rough terrain, which can then ferry kerbals to wherever the Saguha managed to land. The remodel consisted of trading in the 6 small jet engines for a pair of Goliaths, bigger landing gear, and a rework of the auxilary control surfaces (air brakes, spoilers, flaps).

Stall speed is down to around 65 m/s. By firing the spoilers while flaring, I've been able to achieve controlled landings down to around 50 m/s (fairly hard landings, but it works).

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More tense have been preparations for interplanetary missions. True to tradition, I have placed a station in orbit over Kerbin to serve as a docking hub and staging area for craft that need to be assembled or refueled in space. A couple of things were overlocked, such as a probe core to manage the station in the event it wasn't crewed. The first craft I sent up for a mission to Duna was a fuel tank, which is just a Kerbodyne S3 tank with a couple liquid rocket boosters and an RCS system bolted on. The stations large solar panels are fairly close to the standard docking ports, the idea being I would retract them as needed. Except I had no one in space to do that. It's a tight fit:

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That shot was taken by the Kerbal I sent up to take control of the station. In case the perspective of the shot is making it unclear, that fuel tank is larger than the rest of the station (it's about the same length with the nose cap, and much wider). The boosters provide an impressive 230 dV. Enough for a burn to match orbits with the station and not much else (refilled, I think they get enough dV to deorbit the empty fuel tank though).

 

And leading off the Duna mission is an interplanetary relay system. Each relay will place itself in a highly eliptical polar orbit, one above and the other bellow the orbital plane. The mission itself will have to be manned, as Duna will be on the far side of Kerbol when my ships arrive as I don't have relays on other planets yet, but it's nice to get this set up while the window is open. This picture is actually of the relays deployed for Kerbin itself. These relays keep Kerbin's moons from blocking the signal to other planets, as well as provide signals for craft orbiting Kerbin's moons at medium to high altitude.

These relays are named 'Hyperion' because I think when joined together on the carrier it kind of looks like an orbital death ray.

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I spent a good portion of this morning cussing at mods that suddenly (fine two days ago, no changes/updates made since) decided to start not playing nice*.  Then made another copy of 1.4.4, reinstalled almost all my mods and discovered that the one crewed vessel (Minmus station) that was active in my career save had parts from the removed mod.  Tried editing the persistance file, but it still won't load that station or let me delete it.  So I started another new career save, ran a few missions, then shut down for the day.  Accomplished a grand total of -2 weeks of career progression.

Spoiler

Specifically, Modular Rocket Systems radial tanks decided to start crashing the game every time I clicked on either of the 3 versions in the VAB/SPH.  No crash log - just "poof" back to windows.  AND Kerbal Launch Failure has decided to start failing parts of ships in orbit.  AND once again the Hitchhiker IVA disappeared - resulting in me removing SXT.  :(   I think there was one more mess up also.

 

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Last night (in my RSS/RO/RP-1/Principia campaign) I attempted to meet a contract to launch a sounding rocket test to 1700 km altitude.  I had a rocket that would do the job, in simulation; Super High Step, an A-9 booster and two upper stages that I call "Fat Aerobee" -- an Aerobee XASR-1 engine and a tank that holds a full rated burn of Aniline/Furfuryl/IRFNA, but short and squat to fit inside a fairing instead of long and slender like an Aerobee.  The ullage motors on the lower of the two are canted to spin the stages, which helps keep them in line (just in case there's a kilogram out of place somewhere in the payload).  Unfortunately, the A-9 on the first attempt conked out with about 15% propellant remaining, and on the second attempt both upper stage motors failed before they ran out of fuel (curse you, Test Flight!).

There was barely time for a third attempt before the contract expires; and for this I rolled out a new design, which I call Super Green Giant.  This one is an RD-102 booster, running on Ethanol 90 and LOX (instead of the Hydyne/LOX the A-9 consumes).  The upper stages are the same Fat Aerobees as on the Super High Step, because I don't have the tech for anything better (the Green Giant booster can't lift a full A-4, never mind A-9 stage off the pad, and clustering seems to be asking for trouble at this tech level).  Super Green Giant is waiting on the pad for me right now -- time to go launch!

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I decided to make a mining lander probe (engineer optional), rated for Munlike bodies, for which a Rhino is not massive overkill.  It holds 24,000 ore.  The inspiration was basically, "the first mining probe I made was okay, but what if I quadrupled it?" 

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I'm developing another fancy suspension-equipped vehicle. On the hunt for the elusive stable front suspension, I've landed on the… disappointingly simplistic "pogo stick" species.

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The front suspension is pogo stick Mk I, while the rear is trailing arm Mk IV. The trailing arm Mk IV is the lightest-duty practical trailing arm I've developed yet, since my foray into heavy-duty with the Mk III devolved into excessive part count and questionable stability. The pogo stick suspension has some issues with dragging on the ground, but the wheels are generally big enough to prevent that from being an issue in most cases. All the same, they're equipped with skid plates to protect the fragile pistons.
If you try this at home, you'll need to do a small amount of config hackery to set the pistons to move freely.

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The suspension is capable of the most severe articulations I could find on the KSC grounds, at least at the scale of this vehicle.

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It's also great fun to jump around. While it has some minor issues with slightly nose-heavy landings and steep slopes like the admin building's lawn or the runway sides near the far end, it soaks up almost everything else.

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Its twin gas turbines are more than sufficient to power its motors at full bore up slopes and across the plains. On level ground it peaks out at about 55m/s, and has enough fuel for over an hour of hard driving around the KSC.

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In the event of a roll, its srimechs are more than sufficent to right it from any likely position, whether it's on its side or belly-up. I haven't balanced it on its nose or tail yet, so there's no contingency for that unlikely case.

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