What did you do in KSP1 today?

[jimmymcgoochie]

Flew planes for about 10 hours of in-game time, which even at x4 physics warp (it was more like x3 as it usually is when using physics warp) took a looooooong time. Two long-duration flights netted a decent haul of science though and for a relatively low cost as the plane was recovered on a runway every time so only the fuel wasn't refunded.

[Neil Kermstrong]

After almost 400 hours I believe (steam says 178 but I know I have way more), I have FINALLY landed a rover in another planet for the first time. (Duna)

I needed to disable crash impact because the rover wouldn't decouple from the rest of the rocket, it's wheels were stuck between the decoupler lol, so forgive me, but now I'll try to land kerbals in duna and go back to kerbin

Edited September 21, 2020 by Neil Kermstrong
Idk

[RP1IsSuperior]

13 minutes ago, Neil Kermstrong said:

After almost 400 hours I believe (steam says 178 but I know I have way more), I have FINALLY landed a rover in another planet for the first time. (Duna)

I needed to disable crash impact because the rover wouldn't decouple from the rest of the rocket, it's wheels were stuck between the decoupler lol, so forgive me, but now I'll try to land kerbals in duna and go back to kerbin

activate windows

[Tonka Crash]

The first tourists to orbit the sun braking into Kerbin orbit using the Wyvern Command Pod @Stone Blue resurrected.

[Astrionix]

@ValiZockt Is that Camera Tools you're using for that camera sliding effect?

[DunaRocketeer]

I put my Laythe Lander on a diet, and eked out a bit more Delta V from the design:

I also started figuring out the ship that would take it out to the Jool System:

[Pipcard]

I put Hatsunia in Real Solar System

(the Hatsunese Space Program series will be restarted)

Map made with GIMP and Inkscape

Heightmap made with World Machine

Terrain textures used deepart.io

Edited September 22, 2020 by Pipcard

[Mikenike]

Imma do a flight from the KSC to Woomerang.

[Grogs]

Jeb and Bob went flying around in search of an anomaly. The space plane seemed a bit much, so I took something a bit slower.

Spoiler

It turned out to be a monolith in a high mountain valley. This was the best landing I could manage. The crew walked away, so I guess that counts as a success.

 

Then Val and Bill went out on a second flight with another plane to check out a second anomaly.

Spoiler

I landed the plane intact at the base of the mountain and Val 'hiked' up to the relay station to check it out. And by 'hiked' I mean I used the F12 menu to put her up there. No way was I going to spend an hour or more RL making that walk.

 

I found out the hard way that if you walk a kerbal onto the gears they get spaghettified and then explode. Luckily I had a quicksave so Val was unharmed.

 

I launched the 3rd piece of my Duna expedition, which is the ISRU rover, a small station core, and a refueling tanker.

Spoiler

The rover is piloted by Naman Kerman and I also sent all my kerbal newbie 0/1 star recruits along for the experience. The first stop was Kerbin station in LKO to take on enough fuel for a trip out to Minmus.

 

Everything flew straight, which bodes well for the transfer to Duna. The junior crew will deploy the rover on Minmus, then land the tanker nearby and refill it. This will provide a test run for the real mission refueling tankers on Ike.

 

 

[king of nowhere]

i learned a new valuable lesson

I shall not assume i can do something just because i can do something similar

I shall not assume i can do something just because i can do something similar

I shall not assume i can do something just because i can do something similar

i made a ship to visit all the outer world. it has good amounts of fuel, but I need to send resupply missions to it every once in a while anyway. still, a resupply mission is much cheaper than a new ship, so it's worth it.

I went to duna, landed on duna and ike, grabbed a refueling mission, all fine. i went to dres, and i had enough left that i could go to another destination before refueling. after seeing how much deltaV it would take to go to jool or eeloo, i decided to go to jool; it is cheaper to go there because i can use aerobraking to circularize. so, once i have the jool intercept, i need only 200 m/s to enter a stable orbit, then i can aerobrake until my apoapsis reaches laythe, then i can get to laythe with just some minor course corrections, and on laythe i can aerobrake.

before going further, i must stress that i never made any mission in the jool system. i launched several missions to it on my main career, with isru implements and everything, but none has yet arrived. and i put that on hold to run a challenge. so, no actual experience. but i ran a lot of missions to almost everywhere, and can it really be any different that the kerbin-mun-minmus system?

I shall not assume i can do something just because i can do something similar

anyway, the plan was that after i pay for the 2000 m/s to get a jool intercept from kerbin, i could set up a rendez-vous cheaply. so i sent 3 resupplying probes and a special lander for tylo and laythe (the regular lander has too little thrust for those planets). Since i am in a challenge i must be tight with money, so i only equipped a basic antenna on my probes. they connect to the main ship, and the main ship has the big antennas. i also put small engines on them, which caused no shortage of problems, with burn time exceeding 20 minutes in LKO.

No matter how attractive the prospect of saving weight is, I shall not try to make a 2000 m/s burn in LKO with a TWR of 0.1

needless to say, i spent more fuel in course correction manuevers than i gained for saving half a ton on a 20 ton payload.

anyway, i launched the 4 missions to jool. then i discovered that they would reach jool before the main ship. i launched the main ship from dres half a year earlier, so i didn't bother to check. but of course it moves slower. and since my probes rely on the main ship for communication, it means those probes would be out of communication all the time, and would be lost. so i had to change the trajectory with the main ship, losing 1000 m/s to arrive before the probes. and i only had 1500 m/s to start with.

so, i arrived on jool, and i made the injection burn. i now have 200 m/s left. the first probe arrives. and i realize that since jool system is much bigger than kerbin system, the probes are still out of control most of the times.

the biggest surprise came from aerobraking, though. i set a "safe" passage at 180 km, and my ship... disintegrated. heat shields? what? i made this manuever hundreds of time on kerbin without need for heat shields, just stay a bit higher and make a few more passes. well, you don't enter kerbin atmosphere at 9000 m/s. after some trial and error i managed to pass at 193 km, the ship barely survived, and i slowed by an astounding 5 m/s!

ok, it will take some time, but it can be done. and surely i can use gravity assist from the various moons to help me.

yes, the gravity assist. i found myself on an encounter with tylo. as it is, i will slow down and fall into jool. if i pass on the other side of the planet, i will accelerate and be kicked out of the jool system altogether. i tried to play with small correction manuevers, i even managed to set up a very complicated course where my first tylo intercept would kick me to a second tylo intercept, which will put me on a trajectory to laythe... but still, i have the choice between falling into jool or be kicked out of the system. a capture burn would be 3000 m/s.

incidentally, if i were to rocket brake on jool periapsis and get on course to laythe, it would only cost 800 m/s, plus 400 m/s for capture. and then i could truly circularize with aerobraking. hey, i used to have just enough deltaV for it, before i had to hurry up my jool encounter....

and of course, trying to set up a rendez-vous with a probe would be hopeless. they all arrived at different times and resulted in trajectories with different orientations. jool is too big to make manuevers around it conveniently.

I shall not assume i can do something just because i can do something similar

Moral of the story, i should have made some dummy trials on jool before sending 5 ships to it, the main one with barely any fuel left. i have to reload for a couple dozen hours of gameplay. at this point, i think i'll just restart the challenge and do it better.

at least i learned how you navigate the moons and the atmosphere: you don't. you spend those 1200 m/s to get into a laythe orbit, and from there it's all right.

 

the jool system offers some stunning views, though

Edited September 22, 2020 by king of nowhere

[DerekL1963]

3 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

No matter how attractive the prospect of saving weight is, I shall not try to make a 2000 m/s burn in LKO with a TWR of 0.1

It's not impossible to do.  The trick is to ensure your burn time doesn't exceed 1/4 of your orbital period. (Preferably closer to 1/8.) If you have a 20 minute burn, you want to be high enough to be in an 80-160 min orbit.

That minimizes the amount of correction you'll require because of spending too long thrusting off prograde.

[king of nowhere]

12 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

It's not impossible to do.  The trick is to ensure your burn time doesn't exceed 1/4 of your orbital period. (Preferably closer to 1/8.) If you have a 20 minute burn, you want to be high enough to be in an 80-160 min orbit.

That minimizes the amount of correction you'll require because of spending too long thrusting off prograde.

I know. i tried those solutions. the problem is, they are still wasteful in fuel. i line up for a perfect jool intercept, and instead of having a 500 km periapsis i find myself with a million-km periapsis. so i have to make a correction for 100--300 m/s, that negates everything i gain. I mean, i could use a cheetah engine instead of a terrier, it's 500 kg heavier, but over twice as powerful, and slightly more efficient.

oh, the whole thing would not be a huge deal if i could have just pointed the probes generally towards jool and made a course correction midway. then i could just burn prograde and if the burn is long, i can raise the orbit first. but my probes had little communication capacity, i could control them close to kerbin and i could control them once they got near my main ship, but during the trip, they were out of control. for communication they would have needed at least a HG-55, which is expensive. shaving the costs to the bone and recovering anything that could be recovered i managed to spend 15k to send 8 tons of fuel in jool intercept; adding such a big antenna would have increased cost by 10% at least.

so i had to line up a perfect intercept while launching from kerbin. in that launch window, it generally involved burning something like 1900 prograde, 800 antinormal and 500 radial. and you realize that trying to make that kind of careful trajectory while orbiting around a planet is a bit of a lost cause.

in fact, in the future i will just join those probes together, put a poodle on the last one (or even a nerv if the thing is big enough) and put a single antenna somewhere. that would allow me to make the midway course correction, so it won't matter that the first burn is inaccurate. i will need to spend the antenna money only once. and i can discard some fuel tanks as they get empty, so it's even more fuel efficient.

[Fraktal]

Having unlocked Mk2 parts and the Panther in my long-time save, I did some plane engineering today. One of the test flights involving a twin-engine plane resulted in the fuselage snapping in half along the cargo bay during a high-g turn at Mach 1.5, separating the cockpit from the rest of the plane. I nearly reverted when it occurred to me that duh, the kerbals have parachutes. It needs to be mentioned that the last time I tried out the parachute was right after it was introduced into the game and the kerbal died on impact. This time, however, it was 100% success: first Val bailed out and popped her chute, then Jeb followed after about ten seconds of freefalling inside the cockpit later. Jeb landed in the water first, followed about half a minute later by Val, about 680 meters apart from each other.

If anything, I'm having more trouble with figuring out the steering of my planes. At low altitude they turn so sharply that I can literally snap the plane in half if I don't just tap the pitch buttons, at high altitude they don't turn at all and instead tend to go into flatspins. One time I tried to do an Immelmann turn at 23 km altitude and the plane literally STOPPED (as in, 0.0 m/s surface-relative speed!) instead of the prograde vector following which way the nose was pointing.

I'm also considering trying to see whether I can build an SSTO without ramjets. Will two Panthers, one Reliant and two Terriers be enough? Two Panthers and two Terriers took me up to around 30 km before the Terriers ran out of fuel and the game crashed before I could try again.

[IronMaiden]

5 hours ago, Fraktal said:

I'm also considering trying to see whether I can build an SSTO without ramjets. Will two Panthers, one Reliant and two Terriers be enough? Two Panthers and two Terriers took me up to around 30 km before the Terriers ran out of fuel and the game crashed before I could try again.

You can make a good SSTO with Panthers and Terriers. The Reliant wouldn't be a good idea, Panthers can get you up to at least 900m/s and 15km. At this point Terriers are near max Isp and are thrusty enough to get a well designed plane into orbit, the Reliant would just be useless, inefficient mass. Here's an example of a Juno-Terrier SSTO.

[A Fistful Of Double Downs]

I put an unnecessarily fat 164 ton drill rig on Minmus, complete with an utterly superfluous seven-kerbal crew. It's by far the biggest lander I've used to date so I'm pretty chuffed about it even though I didn't install enough solar panels. Or any landing struts. Or a docking port.

 

 

Oh yeah and since it was all sent up as a single unit, it's a teensy bit unaerodynamic and steers like a cow during launch. But that was a design choice rather than a mistake, because I wanted to get a feel for what it's like to just brute-force a larger payload into orbit instead of designing it with launch in mind.

 

[Fraktal]

8 hours ago, IronMaiden said:

The Reliant wouldn't be a good idea, Panthers can get you up to at least 900m/s and 15km. At this point Terriers are near max Isp and are thrusty enough to get a well designed plane into orbit, the Reliant would just be useless, inefficient mass.

I was planning to include the Reliant specifically to bridge the gap between the Panthers running out of air at around 900 m/s and the Terriers not having enough raw power to even defeat the drag I was still having at 30 km altitude. My AoA was above 10° at apoapsis.

The plan was to use the Panthers in wet mode to get going as fast as I can, switch over to the Reliant once the Panthers run out of air to power through the remaining drag and give myself enough time to apoapse so that the Terriers can take over and finish circularization.

Edited September 23, 2020 by Fraktal

[Grogs]

Another day, another anomaly hunted down.

Spoiler

Turns out it was another tracking station. Val and Bill buzzed by so close I thought they were going to hit.

 

I was able to land the plane on top of the mountain mostly intact.

 

Bill hiked up to check things out. Yep, it's a big dish. Nice view from up there.

 

 

I put the rescue pod carrier into action and rescued another kerbal stranded in orbit.

Spoiler

I was a little worried the lander can would overheat and explode, but this was as bad as it got. I think the brick-like shape actually helped because it slowed down really early in the descent.

 

Successful landing not too far from KSC.

 

There's a Jool transfer window coming up in a few days, so I went to the VAB to design something I could send. Once I got to the VAB, I realized I had already designed this a couple of days ago. Guess my mind is going. Anyway, it's a carrier with a swarm of 9 relay satellites attached. I haven't figured out how to deploy them yet, but that should be enough for pretty good coverage in the Jool system. I also put science instruments on the carrier. If there's enough fuel left after deploying the relays, I can use it to visit some of the moons.

Spoiler

I added a transfer stage to do the injection burn from Kerbin. That will leave the carrier with its full 4700 m/s to capture at Jool and deploy satellites.

 

Then a giant S4 stage to get the whole thing into orbit.

 

Launch was routine and the oversized fairing didn't cause any major stability problems.

 

Fairing deployed. Everything made it safely to orbit. Now I just need to recover the booster stage and wait a few days for the optimum transfer window.

 

 

 

[IronMaiden]

3 hours ago, Fraktal said:

I was planning to include the Reliant specifically to bridge the gap between the Panthers running out of air at around 900 m/s and the Terriers not having enough raw power to even defeat the drag I was still having at 30 km altitude. My AoA was above 10° at apoapsis.

The plan was to use the Panthers in wet mode to get going as fast as I can, switch over to the Reliant once the Panthers run out of air to power through the remaining drag and give myself enough time to apoapse so that the Terriers can take over and finish circularization.

Oof, yeah you don't want to have that much AoA, ever lol. Use some angle of incidence, that way you can hold prograde for super low drag. You can see my AoA when I switched to the Terrier in the plane I linked above was 0.003° and never went above 0.008°, and pitch never went over 4° until nearing orbital velocity.

Don't think of it in terms of giving your Terrier "enough time" to circularize, instead you should take a more shallow trajectory (never pitch over 10° once you get past 10km, preferably never more than 5°), then you just need more thrust than drag and you will go to orbit. Notice when I switched to the Terrier at mach 2 and 10km, I had 25kN of drag, less than half of my thrust. And drag continued to drop and thrust continued to rise the further I got. Down to 10kN at 20km and 4kN at 30km.

Edit: I forgot about the new Terrier model. I used the old model Terrier here because the new ones are bugged and create a lot more drag. Same with the Poodle and Spark. Probably the Skipper and Mainsail too but I haven't tested those. You can access the old Terrier through the advanced menu. Wing incidence is more important though.

Edited September 23, 2020 by IronMaiden

[Fraktal]

I use angle of incidence all the time for my smaller planes, usually combined with 1°-2° built-in trim for my tainfins/canards and a separate elevon pair used exclusively as flaps for takeoff/landing. However, this craft's wings are made up of three parts, of whom two (the main wing root and the forward wing strake, I literally don't have enough room on the fuselage for more) are attached directly to the fuselage rather than each other, so I don't have a single wing root I can simply pitch a degree or two to give the entire wing built-in incidence with a smooth look.

This plane usually has less than 0.5° AoA during low-altitude supersonic flight, climbing over time due to Kerbin's curvature and SAS not liking each other.

Edited September 23, 2020 by Fraktal

[IronMaiden]

Try going with less wing area but more incidence, up to 5°. I go with about 1m² per 5-6t of plane. That should give you the best lift/drag during the most critical part of the flight, when the Terrier takes over. AoA should be negative at low altitude and supersonic speeds since you have excess thrust, you want to optimize the plane for the speed run and the switch to Terrier at higher altitudes. I also wouldn't fly with SAS unless you're using prograde hold, trim results in a lot smoother and therefore less draggy flight.

[king of nowhere]

9 hours ago, A Fistful Of Double Downs said:

I put an unnecessarily fat 164 ton drill rig on Minmus, complete with an utterly superfluous seven-kerbal crew. It's by far the biggest lander I've used to date so I'm pretty chuffed about it even though I didn't install enough solar panels. Or any landing struts. Or a docking port.

 

 

Oh yeah and since it was all sent up as a single unit, it's a teensy bit unaerodynamic and steers like a cow during launch. But that was a design choice rather than a mistake, because I wanted to get a feel for what it's like to just brute-force a larger payload into orbit instead of designing it with launch in mind.

 

 

if i may give a little hint: you can put some stage separators under those nose cones. this way, they do their job during launch, but you can shed them in orbit. it saves a couple tons of dead weight, which on a mining vehicle means a couple tons extra fuel for every trip.

you can even put docking ports on those towers and attach the nose cones to the docking ports.

Edited September 23, 2020 by king of nowhere

[RizzoTheRat]

Dammit!  I can put my SSTOs down on the runway every time regardless of payload but I just cannot hit the flipping pad!

 

 

[Fraktal]

4 hours ago, IronMaiden said:

I also wouldn't fly with SAS unless you're using prograde hold, trim results in a lot smoother and therefore less draggy flight.

I can't fly at all without SAS.

 

Gave it another try just now. One short Mk2 tank's worth of liquid fuel for the Panthers, the "Mk2 to dual 1.25m" adapter and two FL-T800 tanks' worth of LF/OX for the Terriers.

• Barely even got past the transsonic region even with afterburners on.
• Fired up Terriers at around 11km because the Panthers were starting to have serious difficulty maintaining thrust.
• Panthers flared out at around 13.5 km due to lack of air from doing Mach 3 with two of these intakes (I don't have anything better yet).
• Panthers began cyclically flaring on and off at 14.8 until 17 km where they died completely. Not asymmetric flareout, both engines toggled on and off simultaneously with "Air combustion failed" as the reason.
• Terriers kept pushing against drag for several more kilometers with NO increase in airspeed at all. I only started seeing any acceleration at all above 25 km.
• Terriers finally ran out of fuel at T+7m55s around 580 km from the KSC at 34.61 km altitude, 37.0623 km apoapse, -441.211 km periapse, 1317.8 m/s airspeed (Mach 4.05), 15.885° AoA at with 40.246 kN drag at 22.9° pitch. Panthers had 153 LF left.

Currently testing a more aggressive ascent profile to see if that'll do the trick. Latest flight ran out of fuel at 2079 m/s at 46.7 km altitude after I forgot to retract my flaps until I reached Mach 2, which might be why I ended up a few hundred m/s short.

Edited September 23, 2020 by Fraktal

[Kerbals_of_Steel]

After trying out the K.I.S.S ascender, and helping Bob tidy up around the North Rim base, Jeb and Bill made the trek back to the main base, pulling the final first generation rover behind them as a trailer. Normally Bill packs along a Mechjeb controller for the trailer brakes, but he was in such a hurry to catch up with Jeb's test flight that he forgot, so they had to improvise:

Bill wasn't thrilled to have to ride down the North Rim in reverse, but things got worse even before they got to the bad part:

Jeb just put the periscope up and the hammer down:

And they eventually pulled through the Munar quicksand:

Bill isn't talking to Jeb right now...

 

[IronMaiden]

3 hours ago, Fraktal said:

Currently testing a more aggressive ascent profile to see if that'll do the trick. Latest flight ran out of fuel at 2079 m/s at 46.7 km altitude after I forgot to retract my flaps until I reached Mach 2, which might be why I ended up a few hundred m/s short.

Sounds like you're pretty close, retracting your flaps should help a ton lol.

I quick thew this together based on your description. I used a couple engine nacelles as well as the circular intakes to make sure there was enough intake. They also provide more than enough liquid fuel so I swapped the mk2 liquid fuel tank for a rocket fuel tank. There's nothing in the cargo bay but based on the Δv remaining in orbit it could probably take a small (<3t) satellite to orbit. Not sure how much drag you're getting at 25km but you can see below that I'm getting about 12kN. It had no problem accelerating between ~12km and 25km.