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What did you do in KSP1 today?


Xeldrak

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Bleriot XI, 1909.

Trying to build something with a top speed of 21 m/s is véry difficult, if the plane with the same size is more than 10 times as heavy (the original was just 230 kg!)
I couldn't do it. It takes off with 23 m/s and has a level top speed of around 30.

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I landed a rover on Tylo. After I established a 31-km parking orbit around that moon, I detached the nuclear delivery engines and initiated the landing sequence; the landing engine has a thrust-to-weight ratio of over 1.5 on Tylo and a delta-V of about 3,300 m/s when fully refueled. I thought I was going to crash on the surface from not slowing myself down in time, but I finally pulled it off.

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  • A Wally-class rover, named Apocalypse, on the surface of Tylo after detaching from the landing capsule.

 

Below is a message that Apocalypse sent after being deployed.

"WHY DO I FEEL LIKE I'M BACK ON KERBIN?"

 

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Yesterday, I continued my career with further exploration of Duna.  I got my Ike mining base landed, but it won't be crewed till they are done playing on Duna.  The fuel rover & fuel tanker ship are in orbit, but haven't done anything yet.  On Duna, first came a small ground base with limited fueling capability, landed at the southern mouth of the Western Canyon on a nice juicy ~13% ore concentration.  I have another outpost I can land somewhere, but it doesn't have any ISRU capacity.

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My intrepid explorers, however, were located at the other end of the Western Canyon, so a little rover trip was in order.  Actually, it's the longest trip I've ever taken by rover.  First, I had to land the rover nearby:

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Straight-line distance was ~190km, but the canyon has a significant bend in it, so actual driven distance was quite a bit longer. Most of the trip was driven through sandstorms, and they took a break roughly halfway through to wait for dawn.  I already had too many close calls to try night driving, plus daylight allowed the batteries to stay charged better.  The Lynx is primarily RTG powered, but it has some roof solar panels as well.

Lots of rover pics:

Spoiler

Entering the canyon, already ~40km into the trip

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Got some sand dune science done for a contract.   I love that you can drive up the sand dune, rather than the old terrain scatter rocks that you drive straight through.

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Ike rising over the canyon wall, just about time to stop for the night:

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From the driver's seat the second morning:

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There were a few breaks in the sandstorms, but not many. 

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Finally, Lancer base in sight:

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After that rover odyssey, I flew my Duna lander down to the base so I won't need to repeat that again.  Until I want to pack up the surface experiments anyway.

I also tried to land an emergency fuel station on Eve.  I briefly thought I might make it.  Then it turned sideways.  Initially, I still thought it might survive - it was spinning, so nothing was overheating enough to explode.  Then the drogue deployed & I attempted to shed the heat shields, but the sepratrons weren't strong enough & they heat shields smashed the base into pieces.

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The design has been modified with more sepratrons - and the staging moved to after main chute deployment - as well as adding robotic folding flight controls that will extend beyond the heatshields when deployed & hopefully will keep it pointed retrograde until parachute deployment.  The next Eve window is over a year away, so I have some time to consider refinements before trying again.  I may even make Eve my next large scale mission - the most recent transfer was eclipsed by the Duna mission.  I haven't done much at Eve in several careers now, so it should be fun.

 

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(Inspired by Azimech's posts above)  I've been working on and off for a couple years on a stock tech tree rebalance where the starting techs are these:

iEAh1E0.jpg

https://kerbalx.com/fourfa/Kerbal-Flyer-MkII

Which Breaking Ground will enable with no mods at all.  Surprisingly entertaining to fly!

Edited by fourfa
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Today Mün-2 started to the second Mission to the Mün in my KSP

In LKO they realised that the RCS-Thrusters are not on the spaceship, they are in the Box at the VAB :mad:, so someone is going the get there and attach the RCS thrusters like the Kerbals at the Mission Control calculated it.

 

 

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35 minutes ago, fourfa said:

I've been working on and off for a couple years on a stock tech tree rebalance where the starting techs are these:

The cavemen object. The tech tree is infallible.

WE5Gmkj.png

Edited by The Dunatian
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On 7/13/2019 at 11:04 AM, Frank_G said:

Yes, that is true, we donˋt have mixed purpose blades, 

I'm using the helo blades for my tilt rotors, and getting over 170 m/s in level flight, even over 180 in some designs.

The key as I see it, is to start designing with the blade deployed to -150, then rotate it to have just a little positive pitch, enough that it will do for hovering.

Then you have the range from -150 to +150 to increase blade pitch for high speed flight.

My latest design uses a pair of heavy rotors and a pair of the largest helo blades. I then have a pair of standard rotors and medium sized helo blades mainly for the purpose of controlling pitch and roll during hover, and allowing it to tolerate CoM shifts when carrying different payloads.

They also tilt and provide forward propulsion, but most of the power comes from the heavy rotors and large blades.... Needs 6 fuel cells to power it at maximum energy consumption.

So far I have calculated its range as over 800 km at 170 m/s with a 40 ton payload on kerbin

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Working on my prop vtol designs today, got pretty far.

This is the Gipagaa Mk I, an probe controlled crew transport with capacity for 18 Kerbals.

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Next up is the Banajaanh Mk I, a nimble craft, warranty void if flown responsibly.

Spoiler

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And finally the Gipagaa Mk II, the cargo version of the earlier mentioned Gipagaa Mk I. It can haul up to 10 tons and remain controllable. 

Spoiler

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Landed

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I finally got time to play with the new props. I built an ok helicopter that is almost stable. Then I tried a basic prop plane that turned out to be the most fun I have had in KSP in some time.

76503E0B74BBC6F85B7328E1A9ECA9EC0432759F

It's a little tricky to take off and land but it looks and flies like an RC plane I once had. Airspeed is ~80m/s max.

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Today I landed my new vanilla VTOL SSTO on the VAB to pick up Bob, then took him to orbit, and landed back on the VAB to drop him off again all without refueling (surprisingly it only took two quickloads to get the landing right, the Kraken be praised)

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Edited by Yakuzi
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6 hours ago, Cavscout74 said:

I also tried to land an emergency fuel station on Eve.  I briefly thought I might make it.  Then it turned sideways.  Initially, I still thought it might survive - it was spinning, so nothing was overheating enough to explode.  Then the drogue deployed & I attempted to shed the heat shields, but the sepratrons weren't strong enough & they heat shields smashed the base into pieces.

ARbGeXK.png?1

J5YapVG.png?1

The design has been modified with more sepratrons - and the staging moved to after main chute deployment - as well as adding robotic folding flight controls that will extend beyond the heatshields when deployed & hopefully will keep it pointed retrograde until parachute deployment.  The next Eve window is over a year away, so I have some time to consider refinements before trying again.  I may even make Eve my next large scale mission - the most recent transfer was eclipsed by the Duna mission.  I haven't done much at Eve in several careers now, so it should be fun.

 

I'ma gonna suggest adding AIRBRAKES to the design; use them as empennage to keep the craft pointed the way you want. Make sure you hit the brakes when you make atmospheric interface and don't let up until you're ready to cut them loose. When you slow down enough, turn prograde to dump off the forward shield first, then turn back to retrograde to dump off the aft shield; in my best experience, separating one of those big heat shields ahead of your craft will result in a RUD. Just some practical advise from somebody who's landed a fair amount of stuff on Eve recently.

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1 hour ago, capi3101 said:

I'ma gonna suggest adding AIRBRAKES to the design; use them as empennage to keep the craft pointed the way you want

That would work too.   Actually, I have some nice grid fins in various sizes, those would give me the best of both worlds.    Thanks for the idea

 

I spent some time today tinkering with my alternate install.  Part of what I wanted to do was basically impossible, so as a substitute, I loaded a trimmed down Near Future Construction & it seems like it will do nicely.  I rebuilt my single-launch crew station design & my crew cycler design - the latter took a little work to get it where I wanted, and I'm still not quite happy.  I'd really like some longer USI-Life Support supply & fertilizer cans - stacks of the short ones are racking up my part count, and I barely have enough for a trip to Jool.  It'll handle 4 crew, but if I go up even 1 more it becomes marginal at best.

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I did a fcouple of launches with this new test plane, for OPT Legacy's Avatar parts that I'm reviving or repairing.

The cockpit is revived (it's been out of action since KSP 1.0!), with some play-testing from @TheKurgan. I also did surgery on the cargo tail for this and cured the 1km spawn bug but I fought another losing battle to get cargo shielding working with it (cargo tails in general).

79eYGRq.jpg

Edited by JadeOfMaar
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15 hours ago, Cavscout74 said:

I also tried to land an emergency fuel station on Eve.  I briefly thought I might make it.  Then it turned sideways.  Initially, I still thought it might survive - it was spinning, so nothing was overheating enough to explode.  Then the drogue deployed & I attempted to shed the heat shields, but the sepratrons weren't strong enough & they heat shields smashed the base into pieces.

ARbGeXK.png?1

J5YapVG.png?1

The design has been modified with more sepratrons - and the staging moved to after main chute deployment - as well as adding robotic folding flight controls that will extend beyond the heatshields when deployed & hopefully will keep it pointed retrograde until parachute deployment.  The next Eve window is over a year away, so I have some time to consider refinements before trying again.  I may even make Eve my next large scale mission - the most recent transfer was eclipsed by the Duna mission.  I haven't done much at Eve in several careers now, so it should be fun.

 

I was thinking about using a robotic arm, to move the shield away from my Eve lander, before releasing the shield. The arm could then be used to support the landing gear and adjust the landed crafts position for optimal launch conditions.

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5 hours ago, JadeOfMaar said:

The cockpit is revived (it's been out of action since KSP 1.0!), with some play-testing from @TheKurgan.

Thanks for the mention :)

Very glad you revived it, It's an awesome cockpit... with a built in docking port!

lNcRS9g.png

Edited by TheKurgan
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(1.6.1) Not much else to show for my weekend; I was out of town for pretty much the entire time. Yesterday I had all of thirty minutes to play, which I spent getting LSV House Atreides into a polar orbit over Bop from an equatorial orbit over Jool. After warping to align planes close enough for jazz, I had to wait in my orbit for Bop to get overhead, after which I warped to a position to lose relative speed over Jool. At 450 m/s, the speed started creeping up again and so I warped to Bop at that point and finished getting into orbit on conventional drive. Since Atreides is unbalanced, I couldn't use more than one-third thrust.

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Yeah, this was about as exciting as it looks...

After twelve minutes, I got the ship into a 159.2 x 83.1 kilometer, 80.87° inclined orbit over Bop. While that was going on, I had rookie engineers Macnie, Gemul and Matdon Kerman join engineer Jergar Kerman in the ship's Bigby Workshop; the three rookies bumped the productivity rating of the ship's drydock to 18 - I could only imagine what it would've gone to had the three actually been trained up a little. Once Atreides attained orbit, the Pink Noise 7 communications satellite carrier the ship was carrying in the bay was released and burned for an 83.4 kilometer circular polar orbit; Bopcomm Alpha is still heading towards periapsis as of this post, which should be in another thirty minutes or so. Once Bopcomm Alpha was away, my four engineers set themselves to working on ScanSat Bop, an easy job that took a mere eighteen minutes for them to complete. Once printed and fueled, the new resource scanning satellite launched and burned for a 250-kilometer circular polar orbit, while my engineers began the print of a G-LOC 7a return-to-Kerbin craft; this craft is ready as of this post and I merely need to launch it at the next opportunity. The idea is to bring this craft back to Kerbin and land it, hopefully clearing the way for Bop landings in the process.

Today I've been gathering biome resource data from ScanSat Bop's narrow-band scanners in preparation for the establishment of a Pathfinder base. I've hit four of the five biomes so far (and I may actually have a valid set of readings from the fifth - the Valleys - but I'm not 100% sure just yet). The magic combinations of Rare Metals/Minerals and/or Rare Metals/Exotic Minerals is not present in the four biomes I know I've scanned, so I'm hoping that last set of readings from an unknown biome actually is from the Valleys, especially since in that set of readings all seven of the key resources I scan for were present in varying amounts - a condition I call "ideal". I may try to see if I can get an up-to-date Bop biome map somewhere to check the biome at the coordinates of the last set of readings. If it is the Valleys, I can proceed. If not, I can still establish a base where I took the readings. It's not along the equator, unfortunately, but I can still work with it.

Today's plan is to launch the G-LOC and get it docked up with Atreides for hauling, establish the communicatons satellite constellation over Bop, finish taking surface readings, and then get House Atreides to Duna; she's also currently hauling tourists and colonists heading in that general direction. I also want to get LSV House Corrino into a higher orbit over Eve so it can conduct a high-altitude rescue mission there. Longer term, Atreides will be heading over to Eve to drop off two of the rookie engineers to the new shipyards at Eve and Gilly, and I'll be building the base-seeding lander for Bop while still in orbit over Eve. I'm hoping all the planet hopping that Atreides is doing right now will let me get the Bop-bound crew seriously leveled up before they finally deploy. I should probably see just how much they can expect to earn experience-wise; might have to schedule landings for them at Duna, Ike and Gilly if needed...

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Did not get credited for landing on Ike, assume landing speed was a bit to high :)
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It was an as fast as possible ion probe finish an Explore Duna mission fast and cheap hoping for more high profile missions before the Duna and Ike bases is sent out.

Edited by magnemoe
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On 7/13/2019 at 2:35 PM, Azimech said:

No reaction wheels.

Nice :)  How did you manage the torque/thrust balance between main rotor and tail rotor?

My first attempts at a single-rotor heli, I had no way to synchronize the thrust output from the tail with the main rotor, so had to manage torque-induced-yaw mostly manually; lots of manual input and adjusting of trims/defaults.  Was a barely controllable mess, but did manage to go up, and come back down in one piece.

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8 hours ago, Frank_G said:

I was thinking about using a robotic arm, to move the shield away from my Eve lander, before releasing the shield

Typically, 4 sepratrons work just fine to get them clear.  I landed a lot of stuff on Eve and a few sepratrons are generally enough to push the heatshield down & to the side enough to clear it with plenty of room  I'm still baffled how the heatshields managed to destroy my base when they were staged away while the base was turned sideways to the airflow - meaning the shields should have been blown back away from the base by airflow.  Instead, one went forward, then came back & slammed the base hard, destroying the drill & converter.  The other actually started going back, then reversed course back into the station, but it didn't break much - just hung there with the sepratrons still trying to push it away till they burned out.   The whole thing was pretty strange - especially after not blowing anything up when it turned sideways during entry.

 

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On 7/13/2019 at 6:08 AM, Angel-125 said:

I finished modeling the S.L.O.T.H. rover body and put it into the game:

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As with the NASA Tri-ATHLETE system, a pair of S.L.O.T.H. robots work together to lift the payload off its lander and transport it around. I just need to finish the rover body and then decide if I need to make a cargo palette or not..

I did something similar a few games back with a "Spider crane" design to move modules around, with legs long enough it could dock to port on the roof of the base module.  The main problem I found was in low gravity with a big mass on it, the whole thing was very bouncy.  It was able to recover from a complete rollover though.

BLm3M3g.jpg 

 

 

 

 

 

Anyone else ever find themselves in search of unnecessary perfection?  I'm launching a Mun mission of a lander, orbiting fuel depot, and return capsule, and as I use KOS my launches are easily repeatable.  Initially the second stage got it to altitude and then had about half the burn time needed for the circularisation burn, so I've been playing with slightly different launch profiles to see if I can get the second stage to burn out just before it reaches altitude.  The last attempt had 7m/s of fuel left with a 70m/s second circularisation burn needed.  Increasing the initial pitch over angle by just a quarter of a degree meant it didn't make orbit. 

Basically I've just spent the last hour trying to get a perfect launch profile when I could have landed the thing on Mun multiple times by now :lol:

ETA:  +0.1 degrees leaves it with a 120m/s circularisation burn so a less efficient launch as it must be losing more to drag.  It's a fine line...

Edited by RizzoTheRat
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At least yours stayed intact. I tested my full-scale Saturn V with the Apollo spacecraft for the first time.

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It didn't go entirely to plan...

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But hey, at least the CM and the Kerbals survived!

One of the (forty-two!) Mammoths broke loose of its mounting. Since this thing is so heavily clipped, it only takes a couple of frames for all hell to break loose. Now I have to work out which one...

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