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What did you do in KSP1 today?


Xeldrak

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Today was the first time I ever used Rockomax parts, as well as my first multi-crew mission to the Mun (that wasn't a sandbox SSTO, that is).

Took me over an hour and a half in real time and about four days in-game time, as I ended up coming up with a 130-ton beast the RA-1 first stage's Skipper could barely lift into orbit. First time I tried taking off, the engine ran out of fuel at 50-something km apoapse. So I swapped the Thumpers for Kickbacks and staged the Skipper after SRB separation... and ended up with a booster so powerful it almost circularized on its own; the RC-1 transfer stage's Poodle barely had to do anything.

Not to mention that thanks to the use of Rockomax tanks, adaptors and the Poodle, the shiny new Pathfinder-3 spacecraft actually looked like a proper spaceship instead of the uniformly skinny skippers I was using so far. I definitely liked what I saw.

Anyway. After munar transfer and insertion burn, I still had about 1k m/s remaining in the transfer stage. So I thought, let's try landing on the Mun's poles since I have the dV to spare.

Worst half-hour of my KSP experience followed.

The terrain was absolutely horrible, with the flattest terrain I could find being a 10+° slope that caused my lander to tilt over due to lateral velocity causing the landing struts on that side to kick out like a horse and flip the whole thing over faster than SAS could compensate. It also didn't help that said landing struts are the Micro Landing Strut variety and as much as I wanted to put them on the sides of the Rockomax tank the lander's Terrier was being fed from, the struts simply didn't have the length for sufficient ground clearance to not smash the Terrier on landing.

Anyway. I tipped over and took about 30 minutes to get back up and stay up. It helped that between the Mk1 command pod, the Mk1 landing can and the extra reaction wheel in the transfer stage, I had no shortage of torque. Even so, the munar surface was slippery like ice and I ended up using about three-quarters of the 300 EC I packed for transmitting science with nearly the entirety of the crater I landed in being shadowed by nearby mountains, so transmission was out of the question. Bob got out of the lander can and went about his business; I put the lander together in such a way that when he climbed to the very top of the landing can's ladder, he could just about reach every bit of science gear on the lander at the same time, which was a big improvement over the Pathfinder-2B where Bob was forced to bounce up and down with his MMU in front of the instruments like a stoned bunny.

And when Bob got out for flag planting, I noticed to my great surprise that I accidentally landed about 30 meters away from the boundary between the Poles and the Polar Lowlands biomes. So once I hauled over enough surface samples to fill both cockpits plus the experiment storage, I tried to hop over to the other biome. Naturally, I tipped over again and took another 20 minutes of flailing around on the slippery munar surface before I got angry and gravity-hacked myself upright because I did not have the EC to screw around. Even once it was back up and Bob was doing his thing, I periodically had to return to the lander can and repeatedly flip SAS on and off because Bob's weight on the ladder was causing the landing legs to harmonically lean back and forth with slowly but steadily increasing amplitude and I didn't have the power to leave SAS running.

Eventually my science storage was completely full, so I blasted off and headed home. Arrived back to Kerbin with nearly 700 m/s remaining; burned all of it just before reentry, which unfortunately brought my periapse down from 50 km to negative, so I reentered steeper than I planned. But as a result, less than 20 ablator burned off from my heatshield (I packed 100 and frequently reenter gently enough to use up 60+) and although the lander can heated up to 76% (it was directly behind the heatshield), that was the highest it got. I still had to jettison the heatshield, however, as I only packed one parachute and the unexpectedly high remaining ablator was so heavy that the lander was descending too fast for the lander can to take it. So I dropped the shield, the lander can splashed down in one piece and I was 82 science richer (I'm playing with 10% science gains, so that normally would've been 823 science from a single mission) on the first try of a completely untested design. I promptly used that science to grab better landing legs for the Pathfinder-3B, although I'm currently scratching my head as to whether just use the legs and call it a design, or wait until I have ladders.

Note to self: add more chutes and try offseting the Terrier into the Rockomax adaptor to gain enough clearance for mounting the landing struts wider apart. I'm almost finished harvesting the Mun for science; only have about 3-4 biomes left. Once I'm done, it should give me enough science to finish off the rest of science tier 5, which means beginning construction of what will eventually be an orbital fuel depot around Kerbin. Then it's on to Minmus for more science towards building interplanetary craft.

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23 minutes ago, Fraktal said:

Arrived back to Kerbin with nearly 700 m/s remaining; burned all of it just before reentry, which unfortunately brought my periapse down from 50 km to negative, so I reentered steeper than I planned. But as a result, less than 20 ablator burned off from my heatshield (I packed 100 and frequently reenter gently enough to use up 60+) and although the lander can heated up to 76% (it was directly behind the heatshield), that was the highest it got. I still had to jettison the heatshield, however, as I only packed one parachute and the unexpectedly high remaining ablator was so heavy that the lander was descending too fast for the lander can to take it. 

Negative Periapsis is the best way to go for heat purposes; hanging about in the upper atmosphere might heat you less per second, but it takes a ridiculously long time to slow you down because the air density is nearly zero, so you actually accumulate more heat in my experience.

 

Dive deep and get into the lower atmosphere ASAP; once you get down to 20km you *will* slow down fast. 15g deceleration isn't unusual (the Scientists and Engineers pass out, but the Pilots should be fine).

 

I've done direct atmospheric insertion from both Mun and Minimus to no permanent damage. Going from 3.5km/s to a dead stop is a hell of a ride.

Edited by Espatie
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I was busy filling up LKO with more Duna & Jool bound vessels today - both transfer windows are approaching - and Kerbal Launch Failure decided I was having too easy of a time.  about 3/4 of the way through the radial boosters, it blew up the right booster engine.  I thought I staged away the boosters fast enough to possibly save the core & payload, but it went sideways on me.  On the plus side, the payload was a rover setup for parachute delivery on Duna. so I staged away everything else & popped the chutes.  I figured I was less than 30 km from the desert launch site, I would drive the rover back for recovery, but I got a little too fast, rolled about 4 times & bent the whole rover.   Since it was trying to drive in circles at that point, I just had to recover it in place.  The worst part of the whole thing is losing the 20 days between launches I impose on myself.  I'll still get the new Duna base core launched, and probably the mining wing, but I'll possibly need to skip the reactor wing.

Parachuting down after the aborted launch

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Roving through the desert highlands.  Before I bent the rover

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Finally, I made a few small tweaks to my P-38 clone, and it flew.   Initially, I thought it was still a dud - didn't to go much past ~90 m/s, but once it finally broke 100, it sped up fairly quickly and got up to ~170 m/s before I turned back to land.

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8 hours ago, Triop said:

@eddiew Is that a first version of the Millenium Falcon I see ? :cool:

Sadly I suspect that wouldn't fly without some very cheaty engines x) 

On the other hand this... this went to space, survived re-entry and landed. Carried about 4-600 oxidiser more than it needed, and has a slight tendency to roll to the left, but on the whole it did surprisingly well :) 

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"...BUT why wouldn't it work?!", snorted an indignant Tanul Kerman for about the thirteenth time.

"You simply taxi a Peg 2 over the device and then...  well...  just sit on it!"

In the end, the boys in the hangar had to give Tanul the keys to a Pegasus 2 parked out on the apron just to quieten him down.

It didn't quite work out the way Tanul imagined...

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The Gryphon attached itself to the underbelly of the Pegasus like a limpet mine; however its weight made the Pegasus sit back on its tail when Tanul re-lowered the gear...

But the smoothly co-ordinated application of heavy brakes and heavy thrust, gingerly juggled, put the Pegasus back on all three -- which the triumphant Tanul quickly converted to a take-off and a victory lap around the KSC precincts.

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Hurrah for Tanul Kerman!!  Hurrah for Gryphon and Pegasus!!

Edited by Hotel26
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(The narrator does feel compelled, however, to mention that Tanul forgot to repack the device chutes on the ground before attaching it to the transporter.  Even if they had been packed, there would have been no clean way to trigger them after cutaway, not without a probe controller -- nor a Kerbal -- onboard the gadget.  The chutes had been automatically triggered when the Harp deposited it on the green, next to the runway...  oh well; (one more charred, smoking crater in the KSC green.)

No one cared, though, and everyone still bought Tanul round after round that evening in the staff lounge!  Hurrah for beer!!

Edited by Hotel26
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Logged a little over two hours playing time in aggregate yesterday, and I don't have a lot to show for it. A fair amount of the time was spent with the second run of a Crater Maker 7 8-passenger lander between the Piper Alpha outpost on Mun and space station Munport in orbit. The Crater Maker was at the outpost at the beginning of the day, having delivered eight of nine colonists the day before. The lander affected a successful return to the station, docking and refueling before colonist Sonden Kerman boarded. The lander then departed and affected a second landing at Piper Alpha, with Strange Cargo departing Munport for Kerbin while the lander was awaiting its de-orbit burn.

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I parked the lander just a shade too close to that new Castillo module I added the other day...yes, it's touching.

Pilot Patrod Kerman got out and hooked up the lander to the outpost so Sonden could disembark and the lander could be refueled once again. Job done the lander was unhooked and returned to Munport, docking there safely by day's end. Piper Alpha then conducted a set of mass driver shots to Munport to refuel the station and the landers parked there.

LSV House Harkonnen completed her build of a TBD 7c base-seeding rover while still in orbit of Kerbin. I had failed to reorient the rover vertically in the VAB and as a result it did indeed come out sideways when I went to finalize the print. A test release-and-revert took place; the test showed that the rover could still be safely deployed, so plans to use it to colonize Duna proceeded as planned. Harkonnen took on the resources the rover would need to conduct its mission via mass driver shots from the South Base outpost near KSC. Once fueled, Harkonnen proceeded to its apoapsis point above the fail-safe altitude for the ship's Alcubierre Drive and proceeded from there to warp to the ramp-up point over Kerbol. As of this morning, Harkonnen is about 1.5 GM over Kerbol on a direct free-fall course, gaining speed to enter parking orbit into low Kerbol orbit; the ramp-up will take about 8.5 hours to complete. From there the ship will wait until she's vector-aligned with Duna before conducting the ramp-down and final direct warp (knock on wood) to LDO, at which point the fun begins...

With all other operations effectively in a holding pattern, engineer Haydorf Kerman at Piper Alpha grabbed her trusty screwdriver and jetpacked the three kilometer distance to Mun Outpost 1, where she proceeded to disassemble the outpost and pack away all the structures aboard the Wisent 7 utility rover I'd parked out there a few days prior. Once that job was finished and the outpost was no more, she drove the Wisent back to Piper Alpha, parking it on the station's launch pad. Haydorf then got out and jetpacked back to her reactor module, at which time the launch pad's recycler unit was activated and the Wisent was successfully recycled. The completion of Mun Outpost 1's decommissioning effectively secures all ongoing missions at Mun for the time being, at least until the first of the colonization missions completes itself seven days hence. 

This morning, I'm pretty much still in a holding pattern. Strange Cargo, Necessary Evil, Next Objective and House Harkonnen are all currently en route to their various destinations, as is the Bill Clinton 7b probe I've got bringing a garbage payload to Kerbin from Minmus. The final positioning of the Kerbincomm Hotel communications probe - which will finally finish Kerbin's comm satellite constellation after nearly a hundred days - will occur before all of these happen; that should be a fairly straightforward job.

Printing of LSV House Atreides at the Dystopia Planitia shipyard over Kerbin is also nearing completion. The ship will be tasked with setting up an outpost over Ike, and with Harkonnen already having established a good chunk of the needed orbital infrastructure and orbital surveys, the ship can go straight ahead with preparations for colonization. I already had a capable pilot - Janpont Kerman - available, so yesterday I went ahead and hired scientist Elidun Kerman and engineer Thombles Kerman to make up the remainder of the Ike-bound crew. I may go ahead and try to do some early training with the trio before they head out to Ike; certainly I've got time for it at this point. I'll probably bring engineer Ceri Kerman along for the ride; a third star's worth of experience certainly wouldn't hurt for her to have...

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18 hours ago, Triop said:

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Okay...completely random, but I've been playing a lot of Fallout 4 recently and this home layout with the hallway and the shelves on the left looks just like the standard home layout in Sanctuary. 

EDIT: I realized those are stairs, but first glance it triggered my memory of the FO4 shelves...Is that a robot Dogmeat?

Edited by Tyko
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1 hour ago, MiscelanousItem said:

First post in this topic:lol:In my career save (also my first save):

I sent Val in a low moon flyby,first time I get a Kerbal out of Kerbin's SOI^_^

Then I got a contract for a space station so I started to design that

 

Ain't out of Kerbin's SOI yet boi.

You're still orbiting it, you're just also orbiting the mun at the same time!

Keep us posted and post some pictures using imgur or something too when you do.

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My space station has finally arrived to Niven and was put into a secure 100 x 100 km equatorial orbit.

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And thanks to the extreme efficiency of its nuclear aerospike engine, the transfer stage actually had enough dV to return to Gael and even power-land there. Unfortunately, there was no dedicated antenna on it - only the internal one on the probe core - so I decided to dispose it by crashing it into Niven instead.

I've also sent my warp-jet spaceplane to Tellumo, even though I wasn't able to noticeably improve its ability to survive extreme reentry heat. The power of F9 will let me land it in one piece. :cool:

Finally, my Grannus mission is all ready for departure (which is still 128 days away).

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Yep, I'm definitely using MJ for this burn...

On the upside, the mission will arrive to Grannus in mere 5 years.

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The early career continues, slowly. I really dislike the early part of most games where you know how you want to play, but you haven't what you need to do that. I did manage to complete a contract for a Mun probe and return to Kerbin mission. I've been using USI Sounding Rockets which adds a bunch of smaller parts, so this probe has around 1700dV in a .625m lander. The Kerbin-Mun transfer stage got me close to landing,. I only to staged it away 200m up to get the landing gear out. This is also in the Snarkiverse, so the Mun is in a 62 degree inclination, eccentric orbit relative to Kerbin. No dV chart exists and I'm winging it on sizing rockets. 

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Planned last September, today I did an extended recce of KSC Mini-Biomes (the building areas) and Micro-Biomes (particular buildings) at all facility upgrade levels.  Did so for familiarization and information confirmation, assisted by the mods Tree Toppler and Kerbin Environmental Institute.

Unless otherwise identified, all pictures and data are from KSP 1.6.1.

As such a recce would have taken way too long for Jebediah to walk, whipped up a rover distantly inspired by @Triop's in his latest challenge, Around Kerbin in 80 days.

 

Very distantly inspired.  As in what I could put together in under 5 minutes that did the job, albeit with a large number of rollovers and pilot ejections (now I know why rover autopilots have a setting to apply the brakes on pilot ejection :) ).

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Triop wisely sunk the command chair inside the rollcage while I settled for the open air and airborne look.  I found the TR-2L wheels he used a touch too fast and instead went with the familiar RoverMax Model M1's.  The 4 Z-400 batteries were more than sufficient for the short jaunts around KSC and were underslung to keep the CoM down for better handling.  Rare cases of battery loss lead to lowering the wheel mountings down for better underside clearance.  Topped out just over 33m/s and could brake from that with no risk of flipping.  Steering needed a lot slower speed to avoid rolling, but the rover never broke anything in its final form here, including wheel breakage.  Unfortunately, it was too heavy for Jeb to flip back onto its wheels.

Tooling around KSC also tested out some other settings of mine.  Found turning up the Building Impact Damage Multiplier to max lead to an unfortunate...incident.

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But not a scratch on the rover!

Checked out all the KSC facilities at all building levels.  Confirmed a report from @dvader, stated here:

...that the R&D Level 1 "Main Building" is a trap!  Drive up the "steps" and I'm "Flying" :)

Spoiler

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And can just back up to get clear.  But try to walk Jeb up those steps and...won't go.  Okay, jump onto them.  Bad idea.  Now Jeb is "Flying", can't move, RCS isn't strong enough to get clear, and since "Flying" can't recover.  Fortunately, unlike dvader, I could revert out of the trap.

Spoiler

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But courageously pushing the frontier, even while laying down, was never easy.

Spoiler

 

Confirmed a few of the oddities of the KSC building Micro-Biomes.  The R&D Corner Lab at Level 1:

Spoiler

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But at level Level 2, it's now part of the now completely safe R&D Main Building.  And at Level 3, that particular building is gone and quite a different building is the "Corner Lab".

Spoiler

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The VAB South Complex does indeed only exist at Level 2.

Spoiler

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But contrary to reports, the LaunchPad "Platform" doesn't appear to exist at Level 2.  I only found it at Level 3, apparently a couple of tanks on the side of the pad.

Spoiler

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But like all KSC LaunchPad structure Micro-Biomes, they don't provide separate Science returns.  They all just identify for Science return as "LaunchPad", same as the pad itself and its surrounding grounds.

Similarly, for Mission Control, the Astronaut Complex, and Administration, the buildings may be separate Micro-Biomes from their surrounding grounds Mini-Biomes, but both members of each pair are the same for Science return, with nothing extra for the buildings.

Finished up with a quick jaunt to the Monolith.

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Well, that's a touch larger than before.  Here's the much smaller KSC Monolith from KSP 0.23.5.  Yes, it was floating above the ground back then.

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In KSP 0.90, it was the same size as in 0.23.5 but was mostly below the ground.

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(Also pictured, an old Mun rover under testing by Jebediah.   The design was flawed and it never flew.)

I imagine if the other Monoliths through the system are now as large as the KSC one, they'll be easier to find.  The KSC Monolith hasn't moved and being larger is much easier to find in 1.6.1 than it was in earlier KSP versions.

However, I do prefer the more subtlely shaded Squad image from the past as more appropriate that the current emphasis.

Back to KSP 1.6.1 and on returning from the Monolith, prior to the end of the recce, Jeb stops at the old Mk1 Pod memorial and reminisces.

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(The pre-0.16 design could hold 3 Kerbals!)

Edited by Jacke
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