What did you do in KSP1 today?

[king of nowhere]

I finally managed to make my new mothership work, overcoming all the kraken attacks that killed it previously, by updating the game to the latest version, which is more stable. Now I no longer get the ship horribly twisted.

The propellers still twist and turn horribly

but miracolously, the moment i stop time warp (for the big propellers in the venus ascent vehicle) and remember to lock them (for the smaller propeller for the titan plane), they go back into shape with no damage.

I reached as far as Mars. It required a 4000 m/s burn, made with a heavily laggy ship with less than 0.1 twr. slowly raising apoapsis from LEO, took a whole afternoon of repeated burns.

I went as far as mars,

then i had to return for the silliest reason: I forgot a crap container.

for you see, my crew needs the greenhouses on board to grow to keep eating. the plants in the greenhouses require CO2 to grow. CO2 from astronauts breathing is not enough to sustain the cycle; the rest has to come from burning organic waste. but the waste incinerators need some crap stockpile to work on. without a storage container for crap, the waste is disposed immediately, the waste incinerators cannot work, the ship has a negative carbon balance and the crew will starve.

it only needs a tiny container, just 2 kg of mass, and all is fine. but that container, being a modded part, cannot be manipulated by eva construction - ok, some modded parts can, but that one was never implemented for it. otherwise, i could have just used alt-f12 to get one in place.

Ok, if it was just for that, i could have gotten one such container attached to a docking port. while i was trying to determine if i should replay the last day of playing or restart, i noticed that all the spare parts i did load into containers also vanished - an accidental effect of having to rebuild the ship in the VAB at some point, i lost most cargo parts stored inside.

Anyway, I'm back to painstackingly raising apoapsis for a 4000 m/s manuever

 

[Echo__3]

Tried my hand a recreating the SpaceX Red Dragon mission. A proposed sample return mission from the Red Planet.

 

[Admiral Fluffy]

Made a horizontally launched rocket. This was the first version.

It didn't work.

Second version.

It did work. (Yay!)

Also an SSTO. Don't think it can get back though.

[Akagi]

Finished that DC-10

[SkyFall2489]

Watched in horror as my Minmus base blew up due to the kraken, and sent the first ship to Dres for the asteroid colony.

[MythicalHeFF]

Began working on the mothership and lander(s) for my Whirligig World grand tour mission.

For those of you who don't know, Whirligig World is a Kopernicus planet pack made by @GregroxMun that starts you on another planet, called Mesbin (combination of the names Kerbin and Mesklin), in a completely new solar system, called the Kaywell System. As the planet pack's name suggests, Mesbin rotates extremely quickly, completing a rotation in less than 30 minutes. This rotation also gives it an oblate shape, and reduces the gravity at its equator to 1.3 gee, down from a crushing 13.2 gee at the poles. There is also basically no atmosphere on Mesbin, which completely changes how one plays the game, especially at the beginning of a career mode.

Here's a link to the mod's forum page. I suggest you read it to get some info on the various celestial bodies in the pack. I've had a lot of fun with it so far, I suggest you give it a try yourself!

 

Here's the mothership that I plan to use, called the Kilonova. Fully-fueled, it has about 8,000 meters per second of delta-V, which should be enough to get to most places in the Kaywell system without the need for any refueling. For the places that are not reachable with this delta-V range, such as 1P/Fophie, Ammenon, and probably 2 Wolda as well, I will send ion-powered landers from the Kilonova to reach them.

(Ion landers with around 12500 m/s delta-V. One in each side cargo bay.)

Of course, any interplanetary cruiser needs a good lander and a means of refueling itself. For these purposes, I have built the Universal Surface Lander (USL), (feel free to suggest an actual name), which will land on every celestial body apart from Imterril, Derbin, and Valyr (and by extension the three other places I described above). The lander has just over 3,500 meters per second of delta-V, and is powered by a single Aerospike engine, which should be enough to land anywhere apart from the aforementioned three places. In addition, the Kilonova also has a cluster of Advanced Grabbing Units mounted on a piston, which will allow it to grab onto asteroids for refueling. In the upper cargo bay (not shown here) there are two ISRU units for converting the ore into fuel.

Of course, we can't always rely on asteroids for fuel, and in these cases I will land the whole ship on a small asteroid/moon in order to refuel it. Instead of using landing legs like I normally would, I've decided to go with large landing gears here instead, as I think they look a bit better when retracted.

Also for the purpose of landing, there are 4 Thud engines placed on opposite ends of the ship, yielding a center of thrust very close to the center of mass.

Finally, there is the secondary lander for the three bodies that the USL cannot land on and return from (Imterrill, Derbin, and Valyr). All three of them have one thing in common that prevents this: they have very dense atmospheres, with Derbin and Valyr having about 7 atmospheres of pressure on the surface, while Imterril has a whopping 15 atmospheres. While I could make a lander that could ascend from Derbin or Valyr, (especially Derbin, since it only has about 1.5-2 atmospheres in the highlands), such a lander would be extremely heavy and greatly reduce the Kilonova's overall delta-V. As for Imterril, such an approach would be next to impossible, especially given that the whole place is one gigantic ocean. Even if it weren't for these atmospheres, both Derbin and Valyr are super-Kerbins, each having an orbital velocity of around 5 kilometers per second, which would be too much for the USL, anyways.

In order to solve this issue, I made a separate lander, called the IDL Lander, which is powered by propellers during its initial ascent. Once it reaches about the 0.5-atmosphere level, the propellers are jettisoned, and the rockets are ignited, propelling a single Kerbal back into orbit. Here you can see me testing it on Derbin, the place with the highest delta-V requirements. It reaches an altitude of about 15 km before the propellers become ineffective and we light the rocket engines.

Spoiler

Ascent into orbit

Orbit Achieved!

Testing on Imterril

 

[Pipcard]

[JAXA+] The Zeta rocket is an upscaled version of the Epsilon rocket launching from Uchinoura Space Center, capable of launching over 50 tonnes to low Earth orbit, or a geostationary satellite network in one launch.

[Axelord FTW]

Built my AM harvester in Munar orbit. With all the scrap metal already on board, I only had to do a single delivery of rocket parts. It can hold over a million units of antimatter, though I don't think I'll fill it up completely before I head back to Kerbin.
Lowered it to LKO and lifted up some crew to man it. Two pilots and two engineers, no scientists. I had to add some LH2/Ox tanks back afterward, as I always forget that for bipropellant RCS thrusters you need oxidizer! Everytime I make a nuke-powered ship I forget about and all the RCS thrusters are useless with only LH2. The crew transfer also included a small exospheric detector pack, just in case. Most of the bands I'm interested around Jools already have been discovered, but there was no harm including them for future prospects.
I could have gone for another NSW driven craft but I decided to give Kerbal Atomics some love again, and I also used parts I normally don't touch (spaceplanes, ew!). The ship's direct dV is pretty puny in comparison and I can definitely strand myself if I screw up. 

Spoiler

 

Edited May 9, 2022 by Axelord FTW

[Akagi]

8 hours ago, Pipcard said:

[JAXA+] The Zeta rocket is an upscaled version of the Epsilon rocket launching from Uchinoura Space Center, capable of launching over 50 tonnes to low Earth orbit, or a geostationary satellite network in one launch.

Sea Dragon 2: Electric Boogaloo

[Pipcard]

30 minutes ago, Akagi said:

Sea Dragon 2: Electric Boogaloo

I get it, the appearance is similar, but the H-Z is closer to the Sea Dragon's size and launch capacity. And the H-Z Heavy surpasses it.

Edited May 9, 2022 by Pipcard

[Piatzin]

And here......here we can see a wild boat venturing to the outermost reaches of its natural habit as it searches for nourishment. Like some massive, bloated mosquito, it extends two drills and penetrates the sand, searching for ores with which to muster fuel and rove the seas for another day.

Not far off, a pair of the same species appears to be having an unfortunate time. It is evident that they have misjudged the slope of the shore: the drill-feeders of one are torn from the ground as its body slips backwards; the other appears to have attempted to pull off a faster approach in the hopes of counteracting the pull of gravity, but has failed and now struggles crippled against the sand. Without the ability to feed, it will become easy prey for punk-pirates within a day. Two if it avoids the afterburners...

Spoiler

I'm fiddling around with some ISRU-capable ships for the Elcano challenge (doing it with a fleet instead of just one craft). It ain't looking so hot though, I gotta say. Might just make them deploy rovers instead...

 

[Akagi]

The DC-10!

During the takeoff, I pulled up and stalled. After doing a loop, this happened.

In the first image, you can see the boarding assembly. A medium and small cargo bay put together have a MK3 ramp in them. You can see the closed ramp in the image of the crashed plane.

Doodger Kerman broke his entire body and died. RIP.

[cantab]

Tintin flies to the island. One day he might fly to the Mun.

Making something that looks like the classic cartoon rocket and flies like a plane took me way too long. The fins are a bit fat, but better to have too much wing than too little.

[Axelord FTW]

Yeah but does it have a rover and a crane system that can unfold out from its side?

[ColdJ]

4 hours ago, cantab said:

Tintin flies to the island. One day he might fly to the Mun.

That is an excellent build. I love the creativity.

 

[bigyihsuan]

When the hotel contract wants 50-kerbal capacity but you only have 5-kerbal habs available...

[Akagi]

8 hours ago, bigyihsuan said:

When the hotel contract wants 50-kerbal capacity but you only have 5-kerbal habs available...

Pain

[MythicalHeFF]

Visited Hell Imterril, an Eve-sized ocean moon of the gas giant Tyepolbynar in Whirligig World.

Spoiler

Doesn't look so bad, right?

While it may look like another Laythe and thus a pleasant place to visit from space, with its inviting blue oceans and swirling white clouds, on the surface, it is anything but. For one, there's the atmosphere. In my previous post on this thread, I talked a little bit about this place, seeing as I plan to visit it again for my upcoming grand tour mission (of which this mission was more or less a dress rehearsal), and in that post I mentioned that Imterril has a whopping 15 atmospheres of pressure on the surface, as much as Jool has in the stock game. That on its own wouldn't be so bad for habitability, but there's also the atmospheric composition and temperature to consider: the atmosphere is almost entirely water vapor, heated to over 250 degrees Celsius. Yeah. The whole place is basically like the inside of a steam engine, or high noon in Florida during the summer. In fact, given the humidity, I was curious about what the heat index would be on such a world, and apparently the result is 9,440 degrees Celsius. 

Given these hellish conditions and the difficulty of returning through an atmosphere that is 180 kilometers high with 15 atmospheres of pressure, I named my vessel the Tartarus, the dungeon of torment and suffering used as a prison for the Titans in Greek mythology. 

Launching from Mesbin was fairly trivial, but the ejection burn took me more than ten passes with my extremely low TWR, as the Tartarus is powered by only two nuclear engines.

Once this was complete, it was off to Tyepolbynar, which Rodrick Kerman arrived at about 200 days after leaving Mesbin.

Before I went to Imterril, however, I decided to take the opportunity to conduct flybys of some of Tyepolbynar's other moons, Jifgif and Tannor.

Spoiler

Approaching Jifgif (true pronunciation unknown). It's a tiny, contact-binary body orbiting closely to Tyepolbynar, which it is transiting in this picture.

The actual flyby lasts only a few seconds, as Tartarus's velocity relative to Jifgif is several kilometers per second. 

Literally 30 seconds later, and it's over. I probably spent no more than about 5 seconds in Jifgif's SOI.

Next, Tartarus plotted a course for a flyby of Tannor, which is a highly reflective, icy moon about the size of Moho or Vall in the stock game.

 

After conducting these flybys and getting some quick science out of them, the Tartarus heads for Imterril.

Orbital insertion is made fairly easy with the high gravity and large atmosphere.

After entering orbit, I then orbited Imterril a few dozen times to complete a contract that required me to take gravimetric surveys from orbit.

Landing, Ocean Exploration, and Ascent:

Spoiler

Landing on Imterril is very easy; the atmosphere slows you down quite readily, and, really, the only difficult thing about landing is having the patience required to sit through the whole descent.

Descent. At least the science definitions in this mod are amusing.

Deploying the parachute. Immediately after deploying the chute, Rodrick Kerman is able to conclude that the atmosphere does not contain significant amounts of oxygen, or else the extreme heat would certainly have set the chute on fire.

Side chute deployment. After all of the chutes had been popped, the Tartarus was descending at a blistering 3 meters per second.

Splashed down

Surface samples

Once the basic science had been completed, I decided to explore the ocean using a simple "submarine" that I made by just cramming a bunch of ore tanks into a service bay, where they produce no buoyancy force. Since I sent a probe to Imterril a while back, I was always curious about just how deep the global ocean goes, and if it even has a bottom at all. Once detaching from the Tartarus, Rodrick Kerman began sinking rapidly in his submersible.

Still sinking..

Still sinking, we're deeper than most of the ocean on Earth now..

Finally, at minus 10,000 meters, I hit the bottom. Rather strangely however, the terrain appears to be invisible here, maybe Imterril was never given a proper surface map because it was thought that no one would ever go to the bottom of the ocean?

Visible or not, it's still the ocean floor, and so Rodrick Kerman went on EVA to investigate. Upon taking a sample of the ocean floor, he was surprised to find that it was in fact made of ice, albeit only so because of the immense pressures.

In addition, since I was on the ocean floor, I was also able to do experiments that one can't normally do in an ocean, those being the seismic scan and the atmospheric analysis.

After a few minutes on the ocean floor, and after getting anxious about the creaking metal sounds, Rodrick Kerman wanted to get out of there. As such, the ore was jettisoned and the service bay door opened, which sent the submarine on a slow ascent back towards the surface, which took quite a long time.

After surfacing and collecting all of the science data and after a few more days of waiting, it was finally time to leave this wretched place. The propellers were spun up, and the Tartarus began ascending out of the boiling waters. Soon after clearing the water, the flotation beams were jettisoned to reduce weight. 

Propellers work exceptionally well on Imterril. In addition to having a very dense atmosphere, its gravity isn't too high either, being only around 0.8 g. The main issue now was keeping the craft pointed upwards, as it kept wanting to pitch over to the right for whatever reason.

The ascent was slow and took a very long time to complete. I must have been going for upwards of half an hour before the propellers finally started to lose strength at around 70 km altitude.

Once the propellers started becoming ineffective, I jettisoned them and fired up the six Cub engines to begin the ascent into orbit. Rather annoyingly, the Tartarus still had to be pointed more or less straight up for the first stage's burn, as I still had over 100 km more atmosphere to get through when I activated the engines.

Once the first stage was spent, I was able to pitch over more and make a fairly standard ascent into orbit with the second and third stages.

Finally, a stable orbit of around 217 km altitude was reached. Now Rodrick Kerman's only got to wait however many years before my grand tour mission arrives at Tyepolbynar to pick him up.

 

 

[Akagi]

13 minutes ago, Jack Joseph Kerman said:

The whole place is basically like the inside of a steam engine, or high noon in Florida during the summer.

"Florida" and "inside of a steam engine" are synonyms. What remarkable redundancy!

[Piatzin]

I built this bugger:

Still a prototype. It's possibly about as small as a carrier-compatible VTOL can get. Took a bit of tinkering to get the rocket engines to line up with the CoM and at present if it consumes too much liquid fuel and oxidizer combined, it moves backwards a little bit, but it's workable. Besides that I'm not sure I like the look of the radial intake. Might move it up a bit. I also wish there was a fin small enough to attach to the back, because the way it tapers downwards itches me the wrong way

Anyways I built this thing because the scale between navy ships and planes is kind of off. You can make full-fledged boats that look massive, but drop a plane next to them and you'll find the wingspan is greater than the breadth of the ship. Irrespective of how small you get with Mk2 parts, a plane will always end up looking gigantic on top of a ship, unless the hull alone is well into 100+ parts.

And so....navy gnats.

Edited May 10, 2022 by Earthlinger

[Akagi]

Is KerbalX back?

[Admiral Fluffy]

13 minutes ago, Akagi said:

Is KerbalX back?

No

[Rakete]

Hauled this nasty chunk of rock to kerbins Orbit with my biggest nuclear tug powered by a big nasty NSW-Engine... but the rock is almost almighty.

Mining for graviolium.... Let's crack that nut...

Edited May 10, 2022 by Rakete

[obnox twin]

1 hour ago, Rakete said:

Hauled this nasty chunk of rock to kerbins Orbit with my biggest nuclear tug powered by a big nasty NSW-Engine... but the rock is almost almighty.

Mining for graviolium.... Let's crack that nut...

Nice I am wondering does dres have graviolium but on the other hand started a science mode because career mode first contracts decide not to show up so wacky contracts so science mode does the job for now

[Axelord FTW]

Well the Jool harvester is a bust. It works, that much isn't being disputed. I can collect exospheric LH2 and antimatter, but the rates at which this happens is slow enough that even counting all the extra EnUr I included on board, I wouldn't be able to fill up the AM tanks even a third of the way before the powerplant ran dry. Math kinda checks out for the LH2, but barely. That's roughly thirty years in game time, which is ridiculously long and inefficient compared to me just refining everything groundside. Only thing I can't produce handily is deuterium, but I'm thinking of making a patch over one converter or another to allow me to make it. ³He I'll keep as something that can only be harvested. It can theoretically be produced using a special sort of nuclear reactor... so maybe the FFT exotic fuel plant could do it?

In any case, with the quasi-inability of getting new fuel, the return from Jool is looking iffy. The remaining dV margins are getting slim, so I'm sending up a 'rescue' craft that will also act as a Tylo lander, something that will come in handy because of the Tylo mega refinery-factory-rover. It has automated controls but no antenna strong enough to reach Kerbin at the moment.

EDIT:  Actually, since ³He can be made... So I'll also patch the AM facility for lithium-bombardment to be able to make small amounts of Helium-3.
Also, it works! I'll tune the amounts for balance purposes, but it works perfectly for now.

Edited May 11, 2022 by Axelord FTW