What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Guest]

9 hours ago, Dash8466 said:

Today I went out to duna and planted my first flag on another planet.

Cant believe it took me 1300 hours

That's KSP for you, sometimes you just get sidetracked making helicopters, or submarines, or trebuchets, or giant Kraken traps around Minmus.

Congratulations. I believe a small celebration is in order. You will only ever do something like this the first time once.

[Zeiss Ikon]

I've been playing since just about the time 1.3.1 dropped -- and still haven't landed on Duna or Ike.  I have done Gilly, once (easier than docking with an asteroid, in some ways -- which I've also done, and captured into Kerbin orbit).

[Atlessa]

Coming in to land on the Mün, happened to coincide with an eclipse:

[BadOaks]

I haven't done anything exciting lately, just a lot of logistics and legwork moving my space program forward. KTS Determination returned from Duna and its crew took a Trident space plane down to the KSC. Determination will stay in a parking orbit until I have another mission for it.

A couple of comsats and a survey probe I launched several years ago finally arrived at Dres. 

The KTS Morning departing Moho literally a few hours after the Moho textures got updated, so that was cool. Morning later arrived in the Eve system, refueled at Gilly, and is now waiting for a transfer window back to Kerbin.

Most of my play time this past week was spent designing a 4-stage Eve ascent vehicle. Normally I try to build my ships to be pretty versatile, but this thing is a beast with almost no margin to do anything except exactly what it was made for: land on Eve and return. Until it's ready to de-orbit, it's basically 110 tons of dead weight with a docking port. No long-range comms, very little roll control, no translation control at all, and ~400 m/s for maneuvers. Can't even dock under it's own power, the mothership will have to do the maneuvering.

But it's the first time I've tried to make an Eve lander, and I'm pretty proud of it.

Edited February 20, 2020 by BadOaks

[capi3101]

(1.8.1) Fairly minimal day to report to all y'all, though I did get some fairly major things accomplished. The day started with the Tango 3 rover, freshly off the presses at the Usumacinta outpost on the surface of Tylo with pilot Dunfred Kerman aboard. The rover proceeded the 175 meters distance out to the Spamcan 7e lander, which had been waiting for a refuel operation with tourist Nafel Kerman aboard for the better part of a Kerbin day. Upon arrival, Dunfred got out of the rover, discovering its major design flaw in the process: there was no provision made for anybody riding it to get back into the passenger cabins afterwards. This will be something I'll have to address if and when I can get OSE back up and running once again.  Anyway, Dunfred hooked Tango 3 up to the Spamcan, at which point its load of fuel supplies were transferred into the lander. Dunfred hiked the distance back to Usumacinta, after which the rover proceeded back as well. Dunfred went ahead and attached Tango 3 to Usumacinta for refueling operations and general storage, at which point he rejoined his fellow crewmates aboard the outpost.

At that point, with no further reason for delay, the Spamcan 7e launched and burned to meet up with space station Tyloport, rendezvousing with the station after a 35 minute flight.

Spamcan 7e approaching Tyloport, with Vall and Laythe visible in the background. 

After a much longer surface excursion than originally planned, the Spamcan finally docked safely back at Tyloport, at which point Nafel transferred over to J. G. Backus docked at the station. Fuel supplies were shot up to Tyloport from Usumacinta via mass driver, at which point Backus departed Tyloport and began maneuvering to head towards LSV House Harkonnen in high Tylo orbit. The craft reached an intersect point with Harkonnen after a seventeen minute flight and burned for rendezvous at that point. Rendezvous is scheduled to take place in just under 3.5 hours.

Most of the rest of my playing day yesterday was spent working on the Auk XVIII 20-passenger spaceplane. The original design had a pair of six engine RAPIER clusters, which proved to be a bad design owing to the fact that they all cooked each other off during the initial test flight. The redesign saw their with a pair of engine quads and the replacement of the tail unit with a third engine quad, which had the unfortunate side effect of shortening up the craft's length (fuselage length being one of the two critical factors - the other being mass - I use to determine all my design numbers). FAR was giving me both M_w and L_ß reds for Mach 3 at 15 kilometers with bad results for the dynamic stability simulations under those conditions as well, ordinarily a sign to move the wings back (or lengthen the fuselage, whatever gets the CoM forward) and lengthen the fin, respectively. But I elected to be stubborn instead...and to conduct a test flight with no-one aboard, just in case I was being dumb and stubborn. The second test flight did a little better in that the plane made it off the ground intact, but the engines went to closed cycle fairly soon after takeoff - a sign of insufficient intakes. Back to the SPH for some structural intakes after which a third test flight took place. I'm happy to report that the third flight was a complete success, with the plane taking off, docking at space station Kerbinport, deorbiting and landing without issue. I credit the Atmosphere Autopilot fly-by-wire mod for keeping the plane stable through the indicated unstable flight regime......truly a king among KSP mods there.

Auk XVIII on her third shakedown flight passing Mount Killakerbal nearing final approach to KSC 09. Flying by this mountain always makes me more than a little bit nervous...

Now, if I really wanted this thing to look like a space shuttle, what part(s) do I need to stick on the nose? I've never figured that one out...

All I have to report of note to y'all today, aside from efforts to print an orbital shipyard at the Aban Pearl outpost on Moho. I've still got a Squad of Krakens there - some of which have resulted in the base's destruction. Better believe I'm counting on the power of quicksave-and-revert there. The hope that it had just been a conflict with data between the north and south pads proved to be a false one, unfortunately. If there's a positive to this effort, it's that I cleaned up a bunch of old Extraplanetary Launchpad data from my quicksaves...shaved off five megabytes from the length of my persistence file in the process (currently sitting at 47 MB, so still fairly substantial...).

Plan for today: the big one is getting Backus back to Harkonnen. Once that's done, Harkonnen will be heading out for Duna after a quick Laythe flyby. Backus has a passenger wanting to land on Duna, after which it will be time to head back to Kerbin. I'll also be heading back out to Pearl to try some other print jobs. If I can get something else to print, I'll at least know that it's something endemic to the shipyard design that's causing difficulties and not the ExL mod in general. If not, I may try a print somewhere else just to see if it's something about Pearl itself. Either way, I might have to delve into craft files to ultimately track down what's going on. LSV House Atreides currently in high Kerbin orbit is still printing up its Bus Module, but aside from that all of the needed infrastructure for her big interplanetary mission is now in place and ready to go. Plan there is to send up two groups of nineteen kerbals each in Auk XVIIIs, one of which will deliver their passengers to space station Kerbinport while the other flies directly to Atreides. Ferry craft at Kerbinport will then deliver the passengers to Atreides and assist with passenger transport to orbital space stations at the various destination bodies for whatever needs to happen there. It's going to be a huge mission; I anticipate needing at least two of my larger Superfortress 7-type ferry ships and maybe one of the Minnow 7s at a minimum. No real reason why I couldn't go ahead and start getting people in place.

Still got a fairly large time window at the moment before Backus gets to Harkonnen (which is why I did Auk XVIII test flights), so I might go ahead with the long-delayed survey mission to Eve's north pole today. Who knows?

[Guest]

I sent the Scanning Bee to Eve. My beautiful sleek prototype grew a few appendages during development but it packs a good deal more stuff to do now. 

Here's how it was as I originally conceived it:

And here it is braking to enter the Evian atmosphere. I decided not to use a heat shield after all -- it was more economical just to pack a bit of extra fuel for a powered, safe atmospheric entry. She was going at well below 1000 m/s when the fuel ran out, and after that she just flew the rest of the way:

And finally arrived, on a butte in the foothills biome, scanning a basalt formation:

Edit: I also got a World's First for a fly-by of Laythe, which surprised me because I hadn't sent anything to Laythe. Turns out a bit of debris from my Tylo expedition was in orbit around Jool and ticked that box.

It must've been a pretty close pass because now it's on an escape trajectory out of the entire Kerbolar system.

Edited February 20, 2020 by Guest

[purpleivan]

More Out of Contract career gameplay, in which Jeb and Val went to Duna, passing by Ike on the way. This little trip was probably the first time I've taken a look at the place in about a year, due to boating around Kerbin's coastline, doing strange things on Eve and flying even stranger planes around on Kerbin. That makes it the first time I've been there since installing KS3P and I'm liking how the place looks with that in coop with Scatterer.

[AHHans]

5 hours ago, Brikoleur said:

Edit: I also got a World's First for a fly-by of Laythe, which surprised me because I hadn't sent anything to Laythe. Turns out a bit of debris from my Tylo expedition was in orbit around Jool and ticked that box.

Ah, yes. One more reason not to go around littering the solar system.

[Curveball Anders]

I pondered an asteroid mining mission (that I haven't tried before) and being a bit careful (or outright cheating) I created a copy of my current career save to "simulate" my mission.

So after creating and launching a seemingly workable craft (including lots of reverts to get it right) I had a class D rock locked and a miner in orbit.

The only issue was that my intercept was 66 days away, and since it was a copy of 'real' save it had several events happening in KAC until then.

Well, let's use this 'simulation' to see how the future will play out.

• My Moho TriSat comms network will result in the carrier and first relay failing to achieve orbit, leaving 2 relays in orbit but not in any planned orbits.
• My Moho Science mission, launched to use the TriSat comms to retain contact with Kerbin will fail to obtain orbit and can at best hope to do and transmit as much science as possible (and when the 2 possible functional relays have access to Kerbin) during it's flyby before ending up in some quite useless Kerbol orbit.
• My manned (or kerballed?) EveOne mission, including a Gilly lander, will fail utterly and in the simulation was a loss of all hands.
  (Thanks to this 'simulation' I think I can avoid that when I reach it in "real time").
• Finally my asteroid miner was found to be in an almost perfect orbit and inclination to intercept my class D target.
  Except that it was 180 degrees off ...

Tonight I'll go back to my actual save and do some milk runs to regain some confidence...

 

[Kerbolitto]

Space Péniche has been upgraded !

Wobbler Bester Faster Kerbster !

 

[Cavscout74]

I changed to the Probes Before Crew tech tree in my JNSQ game and started a fresh science save.   This may be a good setup to try a new career in once everything updates to 1.9.  I put a pair of low tech science/relay satellites into LKO followed by Jeb getting to be the first Kerbal to leave the atmosphere on a suborbital hop - it was actually pretty close to orbital, only about 250 m/s short.  I followed that with an Atlas-style rocket that boosted Val into orbit.

Jabbit 1 launching the first relay from the Desert space center

Coasting to Ap

The satellite uses a linear RCS port for an engine - I actually had too much dV in the second stage, and had to stage it early so it would burn up in the atmosphere.  Total waste was several hundred dV.

Jeb launching on his suborbital hop - the entire trip was in the dark unfortunately

Val's orbital flight lifting of from KSC

And staging away the booster engines after burning off enough fuel.  I want to put a pair vernier engines on the core but the Cub engine is really too much for this small of a rocket.  The Twitch would work, but I don't have it unlocked.

Sending back a crew report from LKO

Preparing for reentry as her spent orbital stage drifts away.  The reentry burn was poorly timed and she overshot KSC by several hundred km.

Getting a little warm - rather than being recovered at KSC, she actually splashed down just 64km from the Island Airfield

Edit: The PBC tech tree seems to have really nice flow overall.  I rearranged a few parts (mostly mods) that didn't make sense to me, and moved a few extra items to the start node like I did with my Out of the Sands career (prop engines, wings & wheels mostly).  I think this basic setup will make for a good "Out of the Sands 2"   

Edited February 21, 2020 by Cavscout74

[SlinkyMcman]

Sent some probes to Moho that are probably not going to get there. Sent some stuff to Laythe/Vall that definitely will. And the manned portion of my Duna Convoy arrived at Ike.

 

 

[michaelbezos1]

Hi guys still did not install the steam on second notebook would be advisable becaue i could play 2 games on two computers so i would not have to play so slowly. 

Quote

sudo add-apt-repository http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/precise/

when i clicked precise came unknown page. 

[Dafni]

22 hours ago, Brikoleur said:

... the Scanning Bee ...

 

 

What a nice little craft. Neat!

Nice missions too. Thanks for sharing.

[Retro Starship]

 Retro's 1st Space-Station 

Not a bad career assignment. Build a space-station to hold 4 kerbals in space at an altitude less than 250km.

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

[Guest]

Finally made it to Dres.

At this point I noticed I hadn't brought enough batteries to perform scans. :facepalm:

[Mr. Peabody]

Here we go again...

I'm back to take another crack at my own challenge:

 

After all this time I've finally found my first Mun-castle!

[pmborg]

Ending a new SpaceShip Journey from Kerbin to Laythe and then from Laythe to Kerbin...

Edited February 21, 2020 by pmborg

[Guest]

I really like my "Scarab" rover so I sent one to Moho. It is definitely overburdened with solar panels for this destination but somehow I liked the idea of having the standard model go there.

I'm also developing a liking for Moho. Place is somehow interesting and exotic. Tylo is booooring by comparison...

 

[Zeiss Ikon]

8 hours ago, michaelbezos1 said:

Hi guys still did not install the steam on second notebook would be advisable becaue i could play 2 games on two computers so i would not have to play so slowly. 

when i clicked precise came unknown page. 

Sorry, Michael.  I don't know how to make the board NOT display the part of that command that looks like a URL (because it is) as a clickable link.  Those were commands to be entered (copy/pasted) at your Linux  command line.  You can't click the link there and expect to get anything sensible as a result, because it's actually a link to the repository itself (which doesn't have an HTML page your browser can interpret).

[Cavscout74]

Continued playing around in JNSQ, with a satellite in high orbit, a probe in Mun orbit and the first two 2-kerbal launches - first a basic Mk2 pod with RCS but minimal dV in orbit then a more capable design with ~1200 m/s in LKO

My Atlas-esque Jabbit 2 launcher dropping boosters.  I added vernier engines to this one (60% scale Cub engines), which lets me drop the boosters a teeny bit sooner

Improved relay satellite adjusting orbit - final orbit ended up about 350km x 802km so it was just barely able to gather high orbit science.  I've never used the linear RCS port as a maneuver engine before, and I'm pretty happy with how well it is working on these small satellites.  

I also dust off the old Buffalo prop plane from my Out of the Sands career to see how it did in JNSQ

Getting a probe to the Mun called for more dV than the Jabbit 2 could provide, so an early version of the 1.875m Dawngrazer was used as the first stage

Coasting to Ap - the second stage has enough dV to circularize and almost reach the Mun.  The last ~100 m/s and the Mun circularization relied on the probe's single thruster to put it in a 30 x 2000km orbit

This marks the furthest I've been in JNSQ so far.  Looking forward to getting some kind of lander there soon

New Dawngrazer OMV (Orbital Maneuver Vehicle) climbing out of Kerbin's atmosphere.  A cluster of 8 Shrimp SRB's help the Bobcat lift off the pad, then a Schnauzer engine takes over after the Bobcat burns through its fuel. 

The second stage gets the OMV most of the way to orbit, where a pair of small monoprop orbital engines finish making orbit and provide for some limited maneuvering (~350m/s in LKO)

A pair of small antennas also fold out to allow improved communications.

Catching a final sunset before reentry

Safely splashed down

The final launch was an improved 1.875m craft - the Dawngrazer MPV (Multi-Purpose Vehicle), using a set of 6 Thumper SRB's along with the Bobcat first stage put it into orbit with over 1000 m/s for maneuvers.  The MPV also moves the payload bay between the pod & heatshield, allowing for recovery of the contents.  A small OKTO2 probe core also allows for uncrewed operations.

The second stage remains powered by a Schnauzer, followed by a Terrier for the orbital stage

 

[Mars-Bound Hokie]

I tried making a prototype for a Tylo lander and ion tug - and failed miserably. Some test runs (I teleported them to Tylo orbit) resulted in crashes, others ended up with not having enough delta-V for the ascent.

 

Below is the prototype I have so far. My ultimate goal is to put this thing in a mining-capable SSTO and do the Jool-5 with it.

• I only need one lander if my plane's mining-capable; if it can do Tylo, it can do Vall, Bop, and Pol as well. 

 

 

[Regor]

I built a 10,600tonne probe launcher with 17500 m/s of Delta V!

[AHHans]

13 hours ago, Brikoleur said:

At this point I noticed I hadn't brought enough batteries to perform scans. :facepalm:

Ah, welcome to the club!

The battery extension for my Jool 3 (Vall, Pol, and Bob) rover/lander is currently on its way to Jool.
(It has an RTG, so it surely doesn't need big batteries, does it?)

[Guest]

Guess where I took the Scarab? This one's a Mk 2, with a RTG for power instead of solar cells and consequently fewer batteries, otherwise identical to the earlier versions.

Eeloo is the last body in the Kerbolar system that I had never visited, so this is the end of the "firsts" for me. In fact I racked up Moho, Dres, and Eeloo this time around. I had previously only orbited Moho.

I think this also concludes my "only probes" career. I've got most of the tech tree and there isn't much left to do that wouldn't just be repetitions of what I've done before. There are a bunch of bodies I didn't visit in this career but they really pose no new challenges so there isn't much point. 

Besides the Scarab, I'm pretty proud of the Salticid probe I sent to Eve fairly early in the career -- it's not stable at high speed but it is tiny and versatile and brought a lot of Science -- and the twin Bees, Dunabee and Scanning Bee. Both are fun to operate, look cute, and pack a lot of performance into a rather small and light package. All of them took a lot of iteration to get right too -- despite the small size these were significant design and engineering challenges.

Scarab landing on Moho:

Scarab scanning a formation on Tylo:

Salticid landed on Eve:

Scanning Bee doing its thing on Eve:

Dunabee about to land: