What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Hotel26]

I built and posted Light Saber on Boxing Day:

2.6 km dV.  10 krew.  (And no clipping.)

                                                                                                                                     

One nice aspect of it is that it is extensible -- so this is its heir, the Magellan Light Cruiser, or LMC, for short:

3.5 km dv, 2.3 m/s² and a TWR (Mun) of 1.6.

I'll post the LMC as soon as I have it mounted on a Spunk lifter...  and have 'shaved' its ugly legs.

And  ...oh yeah: no clipping.

Edited December 28, 2019 by Hotel26

[Tim_AZ]

What I've been doing for the last couple of days.  https://kerbalx.com/Tim_AZ/X-29-2

 

[Okhin]

Started a sandbox and no mods game with my nephews (4 to 9 years old) during the holyday.

And now, Jeb is stranded on the Mun on this game. So, that was the Kerbal way of doing it I guess.

[Delay]

8 hours ago, Manwith Noname said:

I did this a while ago but I was just browsing some screenshots. I call it "The great landercan in the sky".

Wha... What!?

How did that happen? And in wireframe, too?

[Retro Starship]

(1.8.1, Making History, Breaking Ground, Kerbalism and many mods)

Last night I created a new very odd rocket. One I call "Shell Squared" aka as Cryer 6 for it having cryogenic engines. Why such a funny name? First ever contract to try bringing two air stream protective shells on the same launch. One small shell inside another surrounding the capsule. Here is a pic:

Not sure if I will get an error similar to one where you have a parachute inside a protective shell and when you launch it nothing happens. This makes sense but I thought the explosion may cause issues with one inside the other. It did not, so here is the mission.

Please note, the capsule also has a pair of small hardpoints which makes it look kinda like a batman tool or something.. lol

Mission of the Shell Squared launch.

Spoiler

Here is the staging of the inner 1.875 shell.  (hmm no issues with it at all, only the noise)

Now the outside 3.75 shell and bang, all worked well.

Now I need to align myself to make sure I am getting towards land for the last test.

Ok lets go home for the test.

Hello Batman! (hehe)

Spoiler

All tests done, thank you Valentina!

[eddiew]

Having recently tested and rejected a concept for a solar-powered Eve drone, mission control locks up the snack machine in the engineering department and instructs the team to try harder if they want to see it again. This seems to spur many brilliant ideas, and a new, more efficient design is put forward, using an alternative type of electric propulsion (as provided by the Thor Tech mod, which is far more powerful than stock propellers, and doesn't fall apart in timewarp, but also costs a lot more electrical power to run).

At this altitude, Evodrone's solar panels are functioning far better than on Kerbin, and the drone can open up the throttle and head for its destination at a comfortable 150m/s (and 4x timewarp).

As we dip lower however, either due to increasing temperatures or a layer of thick cloud above, the energy income begins to suffer, and Evodrone has to restrict itself to ~60% throttle for sustainable cruise. Fortunately, that's quite enough to keep it airborne. Almost anything will fly on Eve, and it's surprisingly hard to crash.

The lack of satellite signal at the landing point was a gaffe, but happily not a fatal one, since it turns out there are some functions that can still be controlled even after the main link has been lost, and combined with the low falling speed, Evodrone manages to touchdown with no damage.

And apparently landed in a very feature-rich environment, finding three different things to scan within a few minutes.

While we didn't test Evodrone for its aquatic capabilities, it turns out it is indeed capable of landing on Eve's ocean... and taking off again.

1000 units of electricity turn out to be sufficient to allow Evodrone to make a full-throttle burn up to the cloud layer again, at which point it returns to full operating power and is able to recharge on the longer hops between biomes.

Other than the looks, there is one design flaw: when flying with the sun on one side, the scanning arm will cast a shadow over 50% of the solar panels. While it is possible to enter a sustainable cruise, it does mean the fastest speeds are only reachable when travelling east-west. This is basically fine, because the original goal was to check out some surface features and land in 3 biomes, which has happened

Edited December 28, 2019 by eddiew

[cubinator]

I took this picture at Moho and was reminded of that frog in one rocket launch photo...

[Stamp20]

Landed on the Mun Apollo-style at a Mun Arch.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1950968171

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1950966798

[Okhin]

I cloned a tourist.

Not the first time it happened. I think it's due to some mods asking me if I want to load passengers when going on the launchpad, and the craft takes some time to load (at some point it's probably in an empty state, hence the popup asking me if I want to get passengers, then it load the crew saved in the VAB, and the extra passengers).

Note that both the original and the clone seems totally not OK with taking of.

I also did had some weird staging gone wrong due to autostruts.

Replacing the autostruts by mechanical struts fixed it. But at least that was some fun unplanned rapid disassembly tests

[RealKerbal3x]

I took one of my capsule recovery airships, UKS Led Zeppelin, on a bit of a shakedown cruise.

Out of the hangar (provided by Kerbinside Remastered).

After clearing the hangar, I decided to take the airship to its maximum altitude. It will never need to do this in normal operations, but it's nice to know the limit of its performance.

Turns out, it can reach around 15km before losing static lift. The sky is black at this altitude.

With that complete, Captain Jenzon ordered that the ship be returned to its hangar - but not before a maximum speed test is completed. I did not get a screenshot of this, but it reached around 85m/s.

Finally, with the ship returned to the hangar, I took a little 'family photo' with the crew.

Many thanks to @Angel-125 for the excellent Heisenberg mod

Edited December 29, 2019 by RealKerbal3x

[Delay]

Hmm...
Maybe the fuel tanks are bit too metallic?

I don't think a real fuel tank would receive that much planet shine?

[Lisias]

So, that's the thing: I found this on the web, and boy... What a hell of a concept. This can be done on KSP?

Spoiler

 

Well.. Let's see!

First attempt (with FAR, that I'm using on another Sci Fi vessel lately and though it could help):

 

Well, looks promising!!!

 

But it was not. Damn.

 

Well... Back to the drawing board - and getting rid of FAR, this thing made things realistically hard, and I'm doing SciFy unrealistic crafts, right?

So, a bit longer tail and engine vectoring to assist on the taking off (thrust vectoring? for what? Vector the whole engine!!!  )

 

Taking off worked as intended...

 

It's flying!!! Ohoww!!

 

Now let's hit the afterburner and get some altitude! This looks promising!!

But it was not. :(

Well... With the pod sunk, all what's left to be done is some swimming back to KSC. Really, KSC should really had invested on some rescue ships by now....

 

Ok. Back (again) to the drawing board. What I did wrong?

Some balance, some tweakscaling , some more fuel, reworking the CoM and we are back to business!

Looks promising!!!

 

But it was not...

 

 

I need more authority on the control surfaces, as it appears. So, after some rebuilding, let's give it another shot!

Yeah! The thing is more controllable now! Looks promising!

But it was not.

 

After a lot of further testing, I figured out that the vectoring engines where misplaced, I needed to move them closer to the CoM, that was the problem since the beginning! So I finally made the thing to fly properly!

Looks fine. Time to hit the afterburners to gain some altitude! (crossing the fingers)

And she flies! Boy, how she flies!!!

Without the afterburners, the pod can't sustain the altitude, but it kinda glides controllable to near ground - I should try this with the Ground Effect Add'On!

Now, for some good looking views of KSC:

Excellent! Now going for landing, this one looks promising!!!

But it was not.

Well... The thing didn't exploded, but it was going away!! Let's chase it!

 

And now, how I turn it flip it back? (the engine are still burning!)

 

Let's try a stunt. I will cut the inner engines and accelerate the outer ones, taking advantage of their lower position, in order to try to flip it back! Looks promising!!!

But it was not. DAMN!

Okey, no more flying today!  

Lots of pictures were ripped off (and reduced) to prevent choking (too much) mobile phones. The whole (better resolution) picture set is on my site here.

Edited December 29, 2019 by Lisias
Some entertaining grammars made less entertaining.

[KerikBalm]

I finally used the KAL controllers from BG for something... they weren't so hard ot use after all, but its annoying that I needed to use 3 for 3 functions (unless there's a way I'm not aware of).

Anyway, I set up quad rotor controls for my quad tilt rotors like this:

So that they have motor/aero control while in a hover, and don't just need tons of reaction wheels for hovering. Pitch/yaw/roll control in a hover is acheived by modifying motor outputs.

[RizzoTheRat]

Finally researched the parts to put be able to put up an LKO Kommunications network, so built a launcher and 4 satellites.

It got to orbit with over 2500m/s remaining, bit of an overkill so I removed the entire third stage.

...and it still made it to orbit with nearly 1500 m/s.  I clearly need to practice my builds, but with my new low TWR upper stage launch profile it's taking a bit of getting used to.

Annoyingly I ended up with the solar panels clipping though the kOS module but couldn't be bothered to revert and change it.  

I do love a nice resonant orbit though

 

[eddiew]

Brought them home!

...which wasn't all that hard, since most things went to plan.

What had been forgotten was to actually put a decent antenna on the Dunaworrybehappy's crew section, with the result that as soon as it left Dunan orbit, all signal with home was lost until it entered Kerbin's SoI. This meant that instead of spending 250+ days processing and transmitting data from the lab, it instead arrived in LKO with over 5000 raw data points. 

While the initial descent plan involved discarding the empty lab and letting it burn up, mission control really didn't want to say goodbye to all that data... but nor did they want to leave Sakura and Lilly up there to crew it for another year, since the press were already asking if there's a technical problem in bringing the crew to ground. Instead, we had engineering quickly cobble together the Deorbinatrix - a one-purpose probe that first attached a control module to the lab so's we won't lose it amongst the other junk up there, and then provided the means for the Dunaworrybehappy's un-engined command pod to begin the descent. With this done, we are now free to send up additional crew to the Dunaworrybehappy's lab at any point if we wish to tap into that un-tapped data reserve.

Also, we made a cool new spaceplane with three engines and reversed wings... but forgot to give Val and Astra a camera when they flew it to return the crew of the Pielab to ground. Nonetheless, it was a successful flight and not a single wheel exploded upon landing. Definitely not.

With all active crew back in the kerbonaut quarters at KSC, thoughts turn, inevitably, to further goals. Questions are being asked about Moho but... it's kind of small and round and boring. There are legends of a planet called Dres but... we haven't been able to verify them. No. Jool, we think, is the right target. That shining, healthy-green jewel of the night sky that has called to astronomers and scienticians since Kalileo first turned his telescope upon it.

Soon Jool. Soon, we will come for you. Prepare your bodies.

[Manwith Noname]

On 12/28/2019 at 2:08 PM, Delay said:

Wha... What!?

How did that happen? And in wireframe, too?

Kerbal Object Inspector will render the mesh of an inspected object in wireframe. Typically, this is shown like an overlay of the model so you see it in place. This occured because I had previously been inspecting meshes inside the cabin from IVA, when I jumped back to the external view, presumably due to positional data changing with reference to the camera, or perhaps something like the reference for that part of the model disappearing, the wireframe appeared in the heavens.

[Tim_AZ]

Today's KSP project.  This is the first time I've made a video like this.  Please let me know what you think here or in the video comments.  Thanks.  The craft file is below.

https://kerbalx.com/Tim_AZ/KH-43

[LittleBitMore]

Got KIS and KAS. Had fun with a crane and a DIY reentry capsule (actually, a lot less fun and a lot more pushing the lander can in the general direction of the heat shield). Also attempted a DIY Minmus ground base, but I scrapped it after I learned that it's really hard to bolt a base to the ground so flying kerbals don't knock it over. With KIS, i also made a Krakenbait physicsless rover which rapidly disassembled, which was actually planned.

I also grabbed Physics Range Extender and tried to see how hard it would be to create a geosynchronous space elevator thingie with KAS ropes and things. Turns out it's very hard, and very tedious.

Yesterday, though, I completed the Kerbin Tour: basically Jool 5, but with Mun and minmus instead of Jool's 5 moons. The center of mass was off because I couldn't find a way to dock the Mun lander inline, and so it offset it majorly and affected all maneuvers by a lot. And the Mun lander was already pretty stripped down: it had to use over half of its docking RCS to get back into Munar orbit. I bet it would've been easier with a command chair design like the Minmus lander.

[KerikBalm]

Still waiting for Kopernicus, enabled the new graphics, and tested a new quad rotor on Duna.

First I tried the medium sized  heli blades, and it flew empty but not with the desired 40 ton payload.

Then I increased the rotor and wing area, it got over 150 m/s empty, but couldn't transition to full forward flight with the 40 ton payload... it still managed about 80 m/s with semi-tilted rotors.

Rotors stopped and at no AoA provide a lot of effective wing area, and it glides quite well like this:

Edited December 30, 2019 by KerikBalm

[purpleivan]

21 hours ago, Lisias said:

So, that's the thing: I found this on the web, and boy... What a hell of a concept. This can be done on KSP?

  Reveal hidden contents

Ok.... gotta make one of these now, just with more engines.

[Francois424]

On ‎12‎/‎29‎/‎2019 at 7:52 AM, RealKerbal3x said:

I took one of my capsule recovery airships, UKS Led Zeppelin, on a bit of a shakedown cruise.

That must've been some awesome music on that cruise !  

[Cavscout74]

23 hours ago, Lisias said:

Well, looks promising!!!

 

But it was not. Damn.

I love the idea!!!   And if I had a dollar for every time I've had those two thoughts back to back in KSP, I think I could retire & just play KSP full time

[cubinator]

My mission to Moho ended with a proper Kerbal flourish today, as I realized while burning towards home I'd forgotten to put parachutes on the return capsule. No matter, I thought, the Kerbals can just grab the science and bail out after the ballistic flight has settled down. I managed to do just that, and Bill, Bob, and Valentina glided safely down to Kerbin...

Unfortunately, none of them could hold on tight enough with their little mittens to pull the science data from the capsule, so I lost two landings' worth of science. Oh well, I mostly did it for the fun of it and the challenge of the enormous delta-V requirement.

[RealKerbal3x]

42 minutes ago, Francois424 said:

That must've been some awesome music on that cruise !  

Haha, yep! I decided to name my first airship after Led Zeppelin, since it seemed fitting. I then continued this theme of rock bands - I named another airship Deep Purple

[Francois424]

( KSP 1.8.1 - No major mods... yet ! )

After spending the last 3 days doing only that, I'm pretty much done fixing my KSP1.8...
Revamped some plumes for my own "End game ion engines" you've been seeing in 1.7.3 - and getting better playing around with RealPlume.
Then got all my mods... Still missing OPM because Kopernicus is not updated yet, and also no SVE either because the links to the config files are dead (see SVE thread about that if curious...)
Also gave ReStock a try and fixed a few incompatibilities...  Upgraded most of my parts at the same time, including many hours fixing broken internals and other errors I saw in the KSP.log.

Finally I got a DMagic's mod to change the science multipliers of every body in KSP (save for Kerbin) and set their science multiplier to 1.  Which means a temperature scan of Moho, Mün, Jool or Eeloo is *ALWAYS* worth 8 science. 
Since I am playing a Science GrandTour (and hopefully follow thru this time around ) I want science to be slower but not nerf the early game.  The mod is perfect for this.
Basically each body will have it's own Plane/Rover/Hopper that my Kerbals will use to go to every biomes...

... So I imported/fixed my Laythe Seagull plane from KSP1.22, and teleported her on Laythe for shakedown cruise. 
I still need to fix a few glitches here and there, but she can set throttle at 1/3 once in the air and maintain ~105 m/s speed.
When I start my 1.8 career, these need to be ready not to waste all my free time designing stuff.

Here are two pictures of her (not yet final version, I think) :


            The 'Seagull' Seaplane, powered by a small nuclear reactor and 4 'Falcon' Electric engines. Ladders/Breaks/Antenna deployed and science bay opened.
 

She can't keep her antenna deployed while flying, because that would break it.  So each biome w have to come down to transmit science and clean experiments.
The back seat is used by a Scientist, so he can do just that.  The middle part with 4 windows? roleplay it as a shared 'bed room', and the cockpit obviously to handle the plane.
So 3-kerbal crew taking shifts between sleeping/working.

Why the solar panels with a reactor?  Reactors do not fill the batteries 100%, and the Reactor does not need to operate when the engines are off. 
The final version will feature more of the gorgeous ReStock large solar panels as they only give ~0.8 electric charge each.
Also need to fix some lights, adjust some nosecones and a few nagging little issues.

The craft has a tucked-in science box to gather experiments (Good for repeats, I like to transmit once then keep another batch stored for eventual return to KSC), and one of each experiments (ReStock as a very nice material's bay!)
It also has a docking port bay, which will be used to get this thing to Laythe in the first place, the legit way... First a large Solid Booster for high-Kerbin altitude when props shutdown, then the transit/Laythe insertion maneuvers.

Thanks for reading and have a good day everyone !
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

[ EDIT ]
 @Warro You're a genius man.  I was getting a lot of NRE about 'FSplanePropellerSpinner' module... and have been for as long as I can remember with FireSpitter. Doing a Google Seach. I found a KSP thread from 2 years ago.
Well, I tried your fix and ... well... IT WORKED !  No more exceptions spamming the logs.  Such an easy fix too. 
In case anyone has this driving them crazy, I am referring to this post :

Thanks again Warro !

Edited December 30, 2019 by Francois424