What did you do in KSP1 today?

[purpleivan]

Val's made her way up from the surface of Laythe in her spaceplane, then rendezvoused and docked with Jeb in the return vehicle. Once they get home that should be it for my "upgrade all KSC buildings to the max, with nothing but milestone payments" challenge attempt.

Jeb says hello to Laythe.

Val says goodbye to Lathe (the surface anyway).

The last rendezvous this career game will see.

Val retrieves the science for transfer to the return vehicle, before the long wait for the transfer window.

Edited March 23, 2020 by purpleivan

[juvilado]

You people make amazing crafts!!

[purpleivan]

It's done, it's done!

The big KERCHING from the trip to Laythe was enough to take my no contracts career playthough challenge attempt over the top, and all KSC buildings are now fully upgraded with over 300k funds to spare.

Jeb and Val are back home and looking forward to some well earned vacation time.

Full write up with lots of pics (as normal) in the usual place tomorrow.

Edited March 23, 2020 by purpleivan

[RoninFrog]

7 minutes ago, purpleivan said:

Jeb and Val are back home and looking forward to some well earned vacation time.

They look a little tipsy.  Probably either some furious aerobraking or too many snacks.

[GEPEG_Unconscious]

A routine launch uncovered an anomolous area on Nodens. Jedbin and Hilvey went to check it out.

[panzer1b]

Had a teensy bit of freetime, so i made a quick battle to test out the new PAK-1M i finished recently. 

Opening salvo from the torpedo sorta invalidated the test entirely (no idea how, but apparently the ship i purposely designed to survive that specific series of torpedoes got instantly flattened).

Aside from the fact that the ship is completely vaporized, it did make a beautiful cloud of debris

The leftover crew did its best to take down the target, but given it was a cruiser and those were lightweight anti-fighter SRMs, it didnt go very well for them...

Boom...  Yeah, it was sorta a warcrime to shoot at immobile exposed bridge from facehugging range, but it was the only way to stop it from firing.  Point blank shot from a PAK-1M mass driver (engine thrust propelled ibeam cannon thing) made short work of the leftovers.  Its somewhat weaker then the older SRM-4M series of weapons (long ibeam+4 sepatrons), but its way more accurate, can be fored at any range to good effect, and has configureable firepower which allows the ship to use less then full velocity against weaker things like starfighters or in this case; exposed bridge (for some reason weapons fire is way more reliable at low velocity againt unarmored things, while it needs full power to blow apart structural crap like panels+ibeams+girders).

While my preliminary testing has shown it to be useful against armor (and i would have tested it as such had the torpedo not done so much dmg), ill need to put this up against an intact warship to truly determine if it will become a permanent staple in the AKS fleet.  Sofar, part savings alone make me heavily weigh in favor of the cannon, but it has still to prove its firepower against armored things (aside from MK-2 armor which is has proven to suck against when fired above like 30% power rating and at such low rating it has a good chance of bouncing rather then taking out said mk-2 armor panels).

[Goaty1208]

21 hours ago, juvilado said:

Witch mod is those suits? Ilove them!

are you using 1.9? In that case, witch mods are you using for those visuals?

Is not a mod is breaking ground

 

[capi3101]

(1.8.1) Not really much to show for my day yesterday but that was to be expected. Can't exactly play and walk on my breaks when the walking workstation is at my workplace and I'm stuck at home until this damn plague blows over. Walking is winning out for as long as it can. 

So at last report the ferry ships Strange Cargo and Necessary Evil had both arrived at space station Laytheport hauling eighteen colonists between them. Day began with putting the two ships into dock.

Only took two screenshots yesterday; this one was far and away the more interesting one. With over 400 parts present, the FPS wasn't all that great while this was going on...

Once the two craft were docked up, the eighteen colonists aboard along with the two colonists and three tourists aboard Gilligan already docked at the station all transferred over to the Auk XVII 24-passenger spaceplane docked at the station (that'd be the big plane that's nearly the same length of the station itself in the screenie above). A resupply mass driver shot from the C. P. Baker outpost on the surface to the station happened next, replenishing available fuel stores. At that point, Strange Cargo departed to LSV House Atreides in higher Laythe orbit, with Necessary Evil following suit ten minutes later. Owing to a major botch that happened at the intercept point, Strange Cargo will not return to Atreides for another 90 minutes, with a total flight time to rendezvous of over three-and-a-half-hours. Meanwhile, Necessary Evil has already made it back to House Atreides, docking without incident after a two hour flight back. The plan is to hold off on the plane's departure from Laytheport until after Strange Cargo has returned.

While I'm waiting, some construction work at the Montara Wellhead outpost on Eeloo has taken place. The base was able to melt sufficient Rock and produce Konkrete conventionally to deploy the main Castillo dome. Sigzer is currently outside the base on EVA, where he has attached and inflated four of the five Walkway units leading out to the remaining base structures, and has finished attaching the structures that will be put up at the end of those Walkways. He's also installed one of the remaining exterior lighting units. At this point, he's got one more structure and light to attach, and once that's done all that will remain to do will be to produce enough Konkrete and Equipment to get them all inflated. That'd be a simple matter of finding sufficient time to take care of it. Were I on a normal play schedule, I'd say I'd have construction done today; tomorrow is a more likely assessment given the circumstances, though.

So aside from getting construction at Montara finished and getting the colonists/tourists down to Baker, I don't have a great deal going on. After Montara's built I'll be beginning the process of putting up a shipyard in Eeloo orbit, which itself will print up space station Eelooport when the time comes. After delivering colonists to Baker, I'll have to get the plane back up to Laytheport with the tourists and then they'll head back to House Atreides, which still has stops at Vall, Duna and Ike before she can head home. Somewhere in all of that I have a satellite to launch over Bop and a pair of survey missions waiting in the wings.

Hope to have a little more to report to y'all tomorrow; I imagine things are going to be scarce for a while though.

[kspnerd122]

I just made a mun base, but the crew module crash landed(the kerbals are fine, my lander is not) so now i have to send a new lander and that lander cost me 100000 not to mention the launch vehicle which costs 100000 of which only the 1st stage engines are recovered(Put parachutes and probe core on the engine block) the second stage engine is also brought back with iffy success. and this lander goes up to the mun and is capable of refueling and other important activities for a reusable lander. this lander is upgraded and is capable of taking cargo to the surface, this upgrade cost me 50000.

[Retro Starship]

4 minutes ago, kspnerd122 said:

so now i have to send a new lander and that lander cost me 100000

  

Really tho, all of us KSP adventurers are of the right stuff!

 

[kspnerd122]

fine but this lander also was not saved as i dont do serial missions or missions to the surface of a planet i have already been to the surface of.

[NHunter]

The last of Gateway relays has been put into it's final orbit.

Meanwhile, mapping satellites began their work around Kohm and Eidos

I've also experimented a little with Gateway probes in sandbox... Well, that place is rather tricky to land as going too steep will result in your probe quickly burning up in the atmosphere even if you put several heat shields in front of it. On the other hand, if your probe survives through the fiery reentry, you're in for a long, long descent as even a probe dense enough to sink in water will still have a terminal velocity of maybe 30 m/s. And by the time it slows even to half of that, you still have ~170 km of atmosphere left. Even with physical timewarp the descent takes a lot of time.

[CBase]

I finished up with adding "Air breathing Gravity Turn" to MechJeb. Of course it needed some tests, but rocket purists in HQ did not wanted to risk too much money, so a smaller launch vehicle was used for first tests:

Everything worked well. Since the idea of this GT is to stay low and burn as much in air breathing cycle, I did get rid of turn start altitude (fixed at 500m) and "Intermediate" settings, instead added speed when I switch the initial closed cycle to air breathing mode (~200/220 m/s depending on TWR worked for me) and a minimum TWR at which it will throttle down any conventionell rocket engines to save fuel. For real workloads a mixed engine layout with vectors help to get off from launchpad and they are more efficient later on as well.

During tests it got obvious that efficient GT are very shallow and do get hot...

So I did some work on thermal limiter, which previously was mainly designed to control core heat transfered from engines and will now prtect entire vessel including all skin from overheating. In the picture it can be actually seen that it completely throttled down to keep criticial parts skin temperature around 97%.

If anyone is interested to push to main MechJeb give a note here. Commits are https://github.com/cbase2/MechJeb2/commit/d18719272ec01dd6d7b2296bdcd1717b64c77822, https://github.com/cbase2/MechJeb2/commit/eeb80f321eebc4ce750dfbd1c759c03b287a0453 and https://github.com/cbase2/MechJeb2/commit/3d2bf21b3cff074291d82d0bc9b82e390664d92a

Afterwards I got inspired by some other post about how to control Starship like stages: Hmm actually two set of control surfaces on a SSTO rocket sound interesting and nice to control landings.

SpaceX mentioned some 60° entry for Starship, if this would work ? It does And with a PE of 15km it was very smooth, although in lower atmo the angle needed to be reduced to 15 to 20°.

The MCS near the engines bleed of speed very well at their high angle while the other has just enough control to prevent wild spinning. Perfect landings at runway got very easy to reproduce.

Let's see how steep we can go without overheating from a 80km orbit: PE at 5km no heat problem, next PE -10km fine as well, -25km , -50km , -80km , -120km , -250km ... and never it got beyond 80% of critical heat. I did stop at that point because just the deorbit burn cost 400 m/s and slowed down so substantial that it was clear that it would be fine on reentry.

Personal favorite design choice on SSTO from now on: two pairs of B9 full moving control surfaces.

All this tests got back my interest from last year to get Mechjeb to do perfect landings with Trajectories on Kerbin...

Edited March 24, 2020 by CBase
typo

[StupidAndy]

accidentally got to -1107m after a mun return mission

[purpleivan]

Well it's done... what's done, well my entry to @5thHorseman No Contracts Career Challenge. I still need to make my final post to that thread of the final mission, and of the 2nd part of the mission report to my own thread, but the flying part is done and all are safely home.

After a trip to Laythe by Val in a spaceplane, with Jeb following along in a return vehicle, I finally had enough funds to complete my upgrade of all KSC buildings to level 3, paid for with nothing but milestone rewards.

Jeb arrived in the return vehicle.

Val left Laythe's surface and I've got to say, that place is beautiful for launching spaceplanes... so easy to make orbit.

The pair met up.

Then returned home... for cake.

Oh yes... there will be cake.

[Goaty1208]

9 hours ago, StupidAndy said:

accidentally got to -1107m after a mun return mission

How did you do that?

[Hotel26]

Having loads of fun in a 45-degree incline.  The yellow-marked target is the KISS (Kerbal Instructional Space Station; or "Keep It Simple, Stupid").

Three other ships are "invisibly-tethered" nearby (orbital period tuned within a few milliseconds) while the newcomer approaches with a key connector part that will break the log-jam.

Learned so far:

• launching east from Woomerang into a 45-degree incline passes you overhead of Dessert Runway.  (not useful)
• Dessert and KSC get two launches a day while Woomerang only gets one.
• really, really difficult to dock with anything at 65km even though the atmo is so thin there.  (so don't get snookered there.)
• KAC (Kerbal Alarm Clock) has a special Launch Rendez-vous marker.  (Useful for anti-asteroid launches, too)
• no longer afeared of non-equatorial launches: Orbit (your incline) and Surface (what you are doing) won't match because Orbit includes the initial launch rotational component but you can null it out, using Surface to drag Orbit onto the heading you want
• the NavballAlignmentIndicator is the Working Astronaut's goto for docking.  It slices; it dices; it cans and preserves.  It does rotational alignment.  It is the only Docking Aid you will ever need.  Or your money back.  (I used the NavyFish mod for a very long time before switching).  The red dock alignment pole marker on one side of the target and the yellow prograde on the other give you a very pleasant, stress-free asymptotic ride into dock.  Simple Is Brilliant.

• and the scenery...  wow.  after five years in equatorial orbit.  It's a Fresh, New World!

 

 

Edited March 25, 2020 by Hotel26

[Hotel26]

5 hours ago, purpleivan said:

 

 

How lovely.  What a beauty.  And its name?

"Cakewalk", did you say?

Edited March 25, 2020 by Hotel26

[Mars-Bound Hokie]

I submitted an entry to the Asymmetrical Aircraft Challenge. Watch the video below to see it in action.

 

• https://kerbalx.com/Mars-Bound_Hokie/Asymmetrical-Aircraft

 

[Servo]

some recent things that I've done:

Got stuck on Laythe

Crossed the Atlantic (Craft: https://kerbalx.com/servo/Spirit-of-St-Louis)

Released a monstrosity upon the world (Craft: https://kerbalx.com/servo/Biplane-F-104)

[purpleivan]

4 hours ago, Hotel26 said:

How lovely.  What a beauty.  And its name?

"Cakewalk", did you say?

I'll go for that

[rettter3]

I buil this small rover:

[Mars-Bound Hokie]

I made this video, which shows what happens when you text and fly.

Please feel free to like/comment/subscribe.

 

[Chequers]

Man - I'm reading through some of these amazing things you guys get up to... and here I am, proud as punch that I just landed on Minmus for the first time.

Significantly easier than the Mun! I was able to get the full science package to the surface. Probably didn't need to leave it there either (top of the lander detaches for direct return to Kerbin), but didn't want to risk it (not playing with quicksaves/reverts). Thanks for your help, KSP community - your advice has been paramount in keeping Kerbals alive.

[KerbolExplorer]

I went once again to the mun, I went with a Apollo style spacecraft.

The landing surprisingly good.Once i decoupled the lander from the main ship i started burning fuel in what semmed a fight against gravity, normally I make my aircraft ridicusly overpowered for mun missions(I used my Duna spacecraft to launch the ship).But when it came to the lander I was really cutting it close.

The lander the following setup:

A single terrier for landing and then I used what remained of fuel + the other 4 terriers for take-off.of course I was ready when if the single terrier wasn't enought to stop the ship to use all of the engines(that luckily didn't happen)

EDIT:Now that i look at the lander closely I realize I messed up my own setup

The landing went well and now I have this nice view

 

Tommorrow I will go to minmus(haven't visited that fella in more than a year!)

Edited March 26, 2020 by KerbolExplorer