What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Davi SDF]

The Kerbals on my Duna colony decided to rebel against me, all that because they were "Self sufficient" and "Didn't need me anymore". So i decided to use my brain instead of my brawn, and make this!

Ladies and gentlemen! I present to you the brand new Mark 40,000 power armor!

Spoiler

It's big, powerfull...

Spoiler

It's pilots are loyal to the KSC!

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Can stand many harsh enviroments thanks to it's heavy, unwieldy and useless backpack survival unit!

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And most importantly, comes with a big-s gun!

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"Say that Eeloo isn't a planet One more time, and i'll find out what happens when i pull this trigger, Heretic"

Jeb definetly liked it

Spoiler

"I'll do unspeakable things with you, traitor to the KSC!"

...I just wonder if he can be trusted with it...

Spoiler

Edited October 10, 2022 by Davi SDF

[BadOaks]

I finally found some time to finish up my Duna mission this weekend, or at least the surface portion. After 240 days on Duna's surface Bob, Jaby, Mike, and Tandock left the habitat and boarded the DLAV.

Liftoff.

Roll to target heading and pitch down 20 degrees. Begin zero-lift trajectory.

Engine cutoff at 30 km altitude.

Stage separation.

Circularization over the south pole at 100 km.

After circularization, the AV maneuvered into a 115 x 190 km phasing transfer orbit to rendezvous with the Benevolent Encounter in 5 hours.

[Beamer]

KSP was not my friend today. Yesterday I launched my upcoming Duna base, 1410 ton, I knew it would fly like a turd on the wings of a bird through the atmosphere but all in all I got it in orbit reasonably easy. So I figured, we're homeward (or Duna-ward) bound! Raised my orbit to rendezvous with my orbital refueling installation, refueled, undocked and made a little distance on RCS, then I switched away to do other things.

I had recorded it on video and while scouring for a decent screenshot I noticed the blades of my DunaKopter had rotated 90 degrees and as a result were now sticking through the Mk3 cargo bay walls. Annoyed of course, why do the robotic components never stay locked when you lock them!? Anyway I switch to the vessel to correct it, and the game hangs endlessly while loading the craft. Tried various recent saves, all the same problem. Then I realized the base was still well within 2.3 km from my refueling station, so I switched to that. Horrible lag, huge explosions, I could see my base shatter in a thousand pieces - well, I saw the shadow of it against the refueling asteroid like some ancient chinese shadow play, everything was way too laggy to manage to turn my cam around.

I tried it again, this time hitting timewarp as soon as I switched to the refueling station. Turned my cam and I will forever kick myself for not screenshotting this, but every single component on my base was offset about a meter to the side of the component it was attached to, a bit like this:

It looked like a glorious piece of art, but very much unlike a functional base.

I'm pretty sure it happened when I timewarped during refueling. Sometimes with asteroid refueling stations, after using them for a while the claw attachments seem to 'drift' sideways somehow and when I go in and out of timewarp it 'snaps' back and forth between the offset and original position. This happened with the base but since nothing exploded I figured it would be fine. Guess it was not.

I released and re-attached my refinery to the asteroid, that should fix the issue, but I will have to go through the process of launching and refueling my base again today...

 

[tajwo]

Kraken sent my minmus science probe flying at 22km/s. Luckily I quicksaved

The probe in question, landed on Minmus' north pole

I like it.

[GDJ]

Been busy.











 

[Caerfinon]

10 minutes ago, GDJ said:

Been busy.

"Billy Bishop" - nice touch eh? 

[magnemoe]

22 hours ago, Beamer said:

KSP was not my friend today. Yesterday I launched my upcoming Duna base, 1410 ton, I knew it would fly like a turd on the wings of a bird through the atmosphere but all in all I got it in orbit reasonably easy. So I figured, we're homeward (or Duna-ward) bound! Raised my orbit to rendezvous with my orbital refueling installation, refueled, undocked and made a little distance on RCS, then I switched away to do other things.

I had recorded it on video and while scouring for a decent screenshot I noticed the blades of my DunaKopter had rotated 90 degrees and as a result were now sticking through the Mk3 cargo bay walls. Annoyed of course, why do the robotic components never stay locked when you lock them!? Anyway I switch to the vessel to correct it, and the game hangs endlessly while loading the craft. Tried various recent saves, all the same problem. Then I realized the base was still well within 2.3 km from my refueling station, so I switched to that. Horrible lag, huge explosions, I could see my base shatter in a thousand pieces - well, I saw the shadow of it against the refueling asteroid like some ancient chinese shadow play, everything was way too laggy to manage to turn my cam around.

I tried it again, this time hitting timewarp as soon as I switched to the refueling station. Turned my cam and I will forever kick myself for not screenshotting this, but every single component on my base was offset about a meter to the side of the component it was attached to, a bit like this:

It looked like a glorious piece of art, but very much unlike a functional base.

I'm pretty sure it happened when I timewarped during refueling. Sometimes with asteroid refueling stations, after using them for a while the claw attachments seem to 'drift' sideways somehow and when I go in and out of timewarp it 'snaps' back and forth between the offset and original position. This happened with the base but since nothing exploded I figured it would be fine. Guess it was not.

I released and re-attached my refinery to the asteroid, that should fix the issue, but I will have to go through the process of launching and refueling my base again today...

 

If you docks various ground modules together and some has landing legs or wheels do mining or refining or anything who changes the units weight and time warp the legs will adjust to the new load at an instance.
This is not an huge problem with an lander who can mine and refuel. Its an problem if multiple modules are docked together especially if spaced out so KAS pipelines makes it much worse. 

Solution is to not use landing legs, retract them during refueling or don't warp during refueling.

[Beamer]

I've had to abandon my glorious Duna base design. I relaunched it, refueled it, switched away, and when I switched back it hung again on loading the craft. I considered trying to remove some last added components to see if that would help, but I realized that for quite some time now I've been unable to do a "revert to launch" on this vessel - again this led to an endless loading screen. I can revert to VAB, I can launch it, fly it, refuel it, switch to a nearby vessel and back, but as soon as it is out of physics range, it becomes impossible to switch back to the craft. Since the inability to revert to launch has been going on for quite a while, I guess the craft must have gotten corrupted quite some time ago, too long ago to figure out how to correct it. So my Duna-bound Kerbals will have to do without the dance floor and poker table with mini fridge.

That said, I still need to fulfill a contract, and I need those 2 Mk3 loading bays to get my DunaBuggy and DunaKopter to their destination. So back to the VAB it is, going for a slightly simpler design this time, although I suspect by the time it's done it will be just as complex as the other...

It will be a bit more mobile than the old design, but without the large entertainment deck.

 

2 hours ago, magnemoe said:

If you docks various ground modules together and some has landing legs or wheels do mining or refining or anything who changes the units weight and time warp the legs will adjust to the new load at an instance.
This is not an huge problem with an lander who can mine and refuel. Its an problem if multiple modules are docked together especially if spaced out so KAS pipelines makes it much worse. 

Solution is to not use landing legs, retract them during refueling or don't warp during refueling.

In this case I was refueling at an asteroid base, no landing legs involved (or landings, for that matter). As for surface refueling, you need a flexible coupling between your miners and ship. I use Miners on wheels that connect to the ship using a slightly upward pointed hydraulic piston with a grabbing unit. After connecting, set piston motor force to 0 so the piston can freely retract and extend, and turn off the brakes on the miners so they can roll forward and back. When the ship sinks on its legs, the piston length will adjust and the miner will roll backwards or forwards to relieve the tension. Never had a problem with jumping ships ever since I started using that method. I also use this with the big piston and claw on large miners, it seems to work great for all sizes. Of course strutting the piston is still advisable, especially for heavy miners.

 

[magnemoe]

22 minutes ago, Beamer said:

I've had to abandon my glorious Duna base design. I relaunched it, refueled it, switched away, and when I switched back it hung again on loading the craft. I considered trying to remove some last added components to see if that would help, but I realized that for quite some time now I've been unable to do a "revert to launch" on this vessel - again this led to an endless loading screen. I can revert to VAB, I can launch it, fly it, refuel it, switch to a nearby vessel and back, but as soon as it is out of physics range, it becomes impossible to switch back to the craft. Since the inability to revert to launch has been going on for quite a while, I guess the craft must have gotten corrupted quite some time ago, too long ago to figure out how to correct it. So my Duna-bound Kerbals will have to do without the dance floor and poker table with mini fridge.

That said, I still need to fulfill a contract, and I need those 2 Mk3 loading bays to get my DunaBuggy and DunaKopter to their destination. So back to the VAB it is, going for a slightly simpler design this time, although I suspect by the time it's done it will be just as complex as the other...

It will be a bit more mobile than the old design, but without the large entertainment deck.

 

In this case I was refueling at an asteroid base, no landing legs involved (or landings, for that matter). As for surface refueling, you need a flexible coupling between your miners and ship. I use Miners on wheels that connect to the ship using a slightly upward pointed hydraulic piston with a grabbing unit. After connecting, set piston motor force to 0 so the piston can freely retract and extend, and turn off the brakes on the miners so they can roll forward and back. When the ship sinks on its legs, the piston length will adjust and the miner will roll backwards or forwards to relieve the tension. Never had a problem with jumping ships ever since I started using that method. I also use this with the big piston and claw on large miners, it seems to work great for all sizes. Of course strutting the piston is still advisable, especially for heavy miners.

 

The problem is that the pistons in the legs, the connection and the wheel suspension has 0.05 second to respond if lucky. 
With the narrow base of the lander, yes that will likely fall over, probably better than KAS pipes who are rigid but we also know robotic parts are bugged. 
None of my large stuff use landing legs or wheels who can not be retracted. 
 

[magnemoe]

I went close to the sun, real close, I was perhaps 1/2 the sun radius from the surface.  

Like Icarus I lost one of my wings but was able to timewarp out of it.

Timewarp affect heating: at 10-100x warp its much more effective than real time for cooling, at 1000x all part heat up fast as it looks like radiators stop working or at least heat everything the same.  This is also relevant for mining, 1000x or more and your base heat up 100x cools it down fast. 

The large radiators require you to have an very good alignment as the extend past the heat shield. They should been oriented north-south, letting them pivot to avoid heating. 
As you near Pe you need to rotate the craft to keep your heatshield pointing down. 
Plan to repeat this mission but then with lots of medium radiators who I keep protected by the heat shield. 
 

[Beamer]

39 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

The problem is that the pistons in the legs, the connection and the wheel suspension has 0.05 second to respond if lucky. 
With the narrow base of the lander, yes that will likely fall over, probably better than KAS pipes who are rigid but we also know robotic parts are bugged. 
None of my large stuff use landing legs or wheels who can not be retracted. 
 

People always say robotic parts are bugged, but I don't care about that, every piece of software I've ever used was bugged to some extent   I find out how they are bugged and then figure out how I can work around that. Hinges that seem fine in VAB sometimes don't hinge in the field, but that is a repeatable issue so can be worked around by doing a final field test before launch. For rotations (hinges and motors) locked doesn't actually mean locked as soon as you look the other way, which can be worked around by strutting things down until deployment. Pistons can 'jerk' very much like landing legs do, but that can be worked around by setting the motor power to 0 and locking them.

I have fueling operations like this on Moho, Mun, Minmus, Ike and Dress and all my STO tankers are on LT-2s. Once I developed a reliable method that doesn't go boom, I've never had an issue with either landing legs or robotic parts unless I forget to test or strut. Trust me, that bottle doesn't fall over, and I have significantly higher and heavier STO tankers on a similar footprint that have done dozens of refueling runs without issue. Note that I pretty much run full stock parts with only visual and UI mods, which probably helps with keeping things reasonably stable. The only non-stock parts I have are from the SCANsat mod, which I only use on simple probes for obvious reasons.

 

[Beamer]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

I went close to the sun, real close, I was perhaps 1/2 the sun radius from the surface.  

Like Icarus I lost one of my wings but was able to timewarp out of it.

Timewarp affect heating: at 10-100x warp its much more effective than real time for cooling, at 1000x all part heat up fast as it looks like radiators stop working or at least heat everything the same.  This is also relevant for mining, 1000x or more and your base heat up 100x cools it down fast. 

The large radiators require you to have an very good alignment as the extend past the heat shield. They should been oriented north-south, letting them pivot to avoid heating. 
As you near Pe you need to rotate the craft to keep your heatshield pointing down. 
Plan to repeat this mission but then with lots of medium radiators who I keep protected by the heat shield. 
 

I did an EVA at that distance once. I thought, my kerbal will be behind the shield so it will be fine. The poor thing didn't even finish the "grabbing the ladder" animation before it exploded. I hadn't thought of the fact that when a kerbal goes EVA, it becomes a separate vessel. One without any active cooling :s Shade alone won't save you that close to Kerbol...

 

[capi3101]

Had a very busy weekend, y'all. Translates to a lot of screenies today - consider youselves warned...

As I'd hoped, I was able to start my day off on Friday with a flight of an Auk I rescue spaceplane, which Jeb took up on a mission to rescue pilot Billy-Bobrett from LKO.

I'm not supposed to have favorites, but really, there's not much about the design of this plane that I don't love.

After successfully retreiving Billy-Bobrett, Jeb guided the plane down to a safe landing at KSC.

It's been entirely too long since I made the close pass of Mt. Killakerbal; forgot just how close you come to scraping the sides if you're in the NavUtilities glide slope.

That job done, I received another repair mission in LKO, and so Bill was sent up to go and fix it. Since I knew how to do these now it was a relatively simple affair; Bill successfully fixed the satellite after an eight hour flight to get out there.

Once again, whoever was running the space agency before me really overengineered things. Four Gigantors for a satellite? Come on...

He was able to return by the end of the day on Friday, spending a total of fifteen hours in flight for the entire mission. Bill's mission complete, I received a replacement of yet another satellite fixer-uppe which was tackled by engineer Munbald Kerman freshly returned from his last "get out and push" repair mission. Munbald's mission to add a cylindrical monopropellant to satellite D8D-5S tank went off without a hitch, his flight lasting a grand total of 97 minutes. At the time of the mission I had three Mr. Wizard 7 repair ships in flight, with both Bill and Billy-Bobly returning from their respective repair missions. All three were retreived safely.

With the Sandstone Yoke mission halfway returned from its historic flyby of Minmus, I next set myself to the task of setting up communications over the green moon. A Pink Noise 7 satellite carrier was launched toward Minmus where it arrived 42 hours later (on Saturday). Deployment of the constellation was pretty standard and by the end of the day on Saturday I had global communications set up.

Did I just draw the Deathly Hallows around Minmus?

Friday closed out with the successful return of Sandstone Yoke, landing in the water 1,259 klick east of KSC. I also finished up the long standing Core Samples Analysis experiment with the Mobile Lab parked right beside the Runway.

With a go given to head to Minmus, Saturday began with the design of the Sandstone Zebra 7.

I designed the Sandstone Zebra to arrive at Minmus with 5000 m/s of delta-V for surface landing ops. She also had what I lovingly called a Turd Probe atop the craft to handle the whole "get something back from orbit" part of the exploration contract.

Once ready, Bob boarded the craft and launched for Minmus, arriving 32 hours later. While still in flight, Munbald conducted a repair mission of a satellite in Munar orbit. His Mr. Wizard 7 craft successfully rendezvoused with the target satellite and returned to Kerbin after about twelve hours in flight, the capsule landing safely in the water about 1300 klicks west of KSC.

Note to self - the service module on all Mr. Wizard craft is inherently evil. Going to have to explain myself to Woodsy Owl on this one...

I also had to adjust the orbit of one of my Trash Can 7 satellites (satellite K-01015-0508 to be specific), which was made all the more harder when it encountered Mun about the time it would've reached its descending node (without which a simple single node burn would've been all that was required). It took a couple of burns but I finally did get it into a target 21,856.9- by 7,972-kilometer, 178.94º orbit for contract. I also had to adjust the orbit of the Doofus 7 orbital telescope for contract, and finished up a Solar Activity Analysis experiment aboard the telescope as well.

Once Sandstone Zebra arrived at Minmus, Bob burned the craft to put it into a high polar orbit, at which point the Turd Probe was released and sent back to Kerbin, arriving 26 hours later. 

I swear it took me half a dozen tries to get this stupid thing in without blowing itself apart on re-entry. Next time I'll have to pick a probe core that isn't wider in diameter than its heat shield...

After the probe touched down in the Grasslands 676 klicks southeast of KSC, Bob was given the go-ahead to conduct surface landings. Meanwhile he collected as much science as he could from both high and low orbits over Minmus. First setting down in the Poles, Bob eventually hit all nine Minmus biomes and collected all the science he could. He even conducted experiments with Green Sandstone, covering two additional contracts I already had.

Doesn't look like soft-serve to me...also, "Bob and the Green Sandstone" sounds like the title of yet another children's book...

Job done, Bob burned for Kerbin, arriving thirty hours later for a successful return to the highlands 900 klicks southwest of KSC. He collected just over 9000 units of science, enough to unlock all of the technologies I have available to me with the exception of Alcubierre Drive. I still need something like 17,000 units of science for that, and so it's likely my first trip outside Kerbin's SOI will have to be done manually (as usual). 

With my regular tech unlocked though, Sunday saw the beginnings of my efforts to get normal infrastructure set up at Kerbin. Jeb launched the Kerbinport space station to a 108- by 107.5-kilometer equatorial orbit, while Val piloted the Dystopia Planitia orbital shipyard up to a 130- by 128-kilometer equatorial orbit with Bill, Munbald and Billy-Bobly all aboard. 

So ready to begin cheating building craft in orbit again...

A ScanSat was launched to a 150-kilometer polar orbit to double-check resources in all of Kerbin's biomes, and a plane docking pier was added to the Kerbinport station. I still need to attach a mass driver to the station at this point, which I hope to be able to do soon. Last thing I needed to do was to try and re-establish South Base, since the time had finally come around. New Hires pilot Theoman Kerman, scientist Cergun Kerman and engineer Anmal Kerman all were sent out in a TBD 7e rover three klicks south of KSC and construction has been ongoing since then. 

Getting all new staff for this base was a bad idea. On the other hand, I think I've finally figured out how to build it without the whole thing shaking itself apart in the process.

Construction of South Base 2 is ongoing and will likely continue for the next couple of days (both in game and IRL). I've hit the problem of Anmal being a new hire, and therefore zero-star level experience, which causes its own headaches related to not being able to scrap individual parts (I'll need to get rid of that launchpad before I can begin putting the permanent structures into place). I'll likely have to send up a craft to Dystopia Planitia in the near future to bring down at least one of the experienced engineers there. Meanwhile all the eventual base parts have been printed up and I'm slowly getting things together. I need to remember what my old setting was for the Pipeline mass drivers to get them operating sufficiently for general orbital ops. I anticipate everything will be up and running by the end of the week.

TL, DR: Landed on Minmus. Got sci. Fixed satellites. Launched other satellites. Began the long process of cheating building needed infrastructure.

Edited October 11, 2022 by capi3101

[magnemoe]

13 hours ago, Beamer said:

I did an EVA at that distance once. I thought, my kerbal will be behind the shield so it will be fine. The poor thing didn't even finish the "grabbing the ladder" animation before it exploded. I hadn't thought of the fact that when a kerbal goes EVA, it becomes a separate vessel. One without any active cooling :s Shade alone won't save you that close to Kerbol...

 

Thanks you saved an kerbal's life  Now its one way to get an eva report by using an rover seat, you have to put the kerbal in the seat before it get to warm and wait an similar time before retracting. 

[jimmymcgoochie]

It’s not often that I get two engine failures on the launchpad and even less frequent that I go ahead with the launch, but the two failures were on opposite sides of the rocket so thrust was balanced and the eleven remaining engines still had the power for the ascent, even if it required a slower pitch over to compensate for the lower thrust. A third engine failed during the ascent and a fourth lost power shortly before staging but they didn’t affect the ascent much and the rocket made it to orbit as planned, sending a probe hurtling towards Saturn.

Engine failures give more engine data which improves reliability on all subsequent launches, so having those failures and yet still completing the launch as planned is the best possible result. Unlike the real-life N-1 which used 30 of those same engines and suffered four launch failures due to their (un)reliability, including the world’s largest non-nuclear man-made explosion.

[capi3101]

Going to take advantage of a short set of log notes and knock out a quick status update for y'all. Can't say I did much these last 24 hours. Most of it was focused on the ongoing construction of South Base 2, which is coming along pretty well at this point.

Always a big moment when the big dome finally goes up.

I decided I'd just leave the initial Rangeland pad in place rather than go ahead and recycle it to put the domes there. The domes will be at the base's south end, the overall assymetry of which may trigger my OCD but will otherwise be acceptable. Haven't decided on the layout of the rest of the domes either; I want to keep the mass driver pointed eastward when the time comes, so there'll be some rearranging going on at some point. The big pain will be hauling all those steamer trunks out there. Nothing particularly odd about that. 

(I did get the mass drivers re-tuned. There are reasons I keep backups of my old saves...)

Only other thing I've got on the log is the launch of my first Minnow 7 ferry craft for this save. Due to a change in the name of one of the parts involved, the old Minnows wouldn't load in 1.12.3, so the new Minnow had to be built entirely from scratch. 


Last time around, my Minnows were named after the characters from Gilligan's Island. This time around I think I'll go with the characters from Firefly, which would make this ship Mal.

With South Base 2 still sans a mass driver and therefore no rocket parts yet delivered to the Dystopia Planitia orbital shipyard, this craft had to be launched the old-fashioned way. I used the launch as an excuse to get five tourists up to space station Kerbinport; the craft rendezvoused and docked safely at the space station to close out my day, in the process finishing up a contract I had to build a space station over Kerbin. The new craft will probably be staying put for now until more infrastructure is in place within Kerbin's SOI.


TL, DR: Seriously? I continued building a base and launched one ship...

[Blufor878]

I updated and uploaded one of my oldest space station designs, the converted FL-TX core (super poetic I know).

More pictures here:

I actually had to spawn this in orbit to show it off. The one I originally launched has had a bunch of other modules added to it since then.
 

Edit: Didn't take me long to adjust the B variant.

Edited October 12, 2022 by Blufor878

[Blufor878]

11 hours ago, capi3101 said:

Going to take advantage of a short set of log notes and knock out a quick status update for y'all. Can't say I did much these last 24 hours. Most of it was focused on the ongoing construction of South Base 2, which is coming along pretty well at this point.

Always a big moment when the big dome finally goes up.

I decided I'd just leave the initial Rangeland pad in place rather than go ahead and recycle it to put the domes there. The domes will be at the base's south end, the overall assymetry of which may trigger my OCD but will otherwise be acceptable. Haven't decided on the layout of the rest of the domes either; I want to keep the mass driver pointed eastward when the time comes, so there'll be some rearranging going on at some point. The big pain will be hauling all those steamer trunks out there. Nothing particularly odd about that. 

(I did get the mass drivers re-tuned. There are reasons I keep backups of my old saves...)

Only other thing I've got on the log is the launch of my first Minnow 7 ferry craft for this save. Due to a change in the name of one of the parts involved, the old Minnows wouldn't load in 1.12.3, so the new Minnow had to be built entirely from scratch. 


Last time around, my Minnows were named after the characters from Gilligan's Island. This time around I think I'll go with the characters from Firefly, which would make this ship Mal.

With South Base 2 still sans a mass driver and therefore no rocket parts yet delivered to the Dystopia Planitia orbital shipyard, this craft had to be launched the old-fashioned way. I used the launch as an excuse to get five tourists up to space station Kerbinport; the craft rendezvoused and docked safely at the space station to close out my day, in the process finishing up a contract I had to build a space station over Kerbin. The new craft will probably be staying put for now until more infrastructure is in place within Kerbin's SOI.


TL, DR: Seriously? I continued building a base and launched one ship...

I see a fellow MOLE user. Good show sir, good show!

[Caerfinon]

Jeb and Bob in Sojourner III in a polar orbit slurping up all the orbital science with two service bays chockablock full of instruments...  mmmm yummy. 

[ColdJ]

2 minutes ago, Caerfinon said:

Jeb and Bob in Sojourner III in a polar orbit slurping up all the orbital science with two service bays chockablock full of instruments...  mmmm yummy. 

That command capsule looks like it is really sad.

[vossiewulf]

Heading to Duna for the first time in this career, which is JNSQ and USI Life Support so I need habitation/supplies/lot more Dv, etc., and for some reason I'm only using kerolox. The 20m Lifter/Injection Module boosted the 10m Maneuvering Module to orbit, plus as the name suggests it will handle the Duna injection burn. The Habitation Module and the Duna Excursion Module were boosted to orbit by another medium-heavy lifter and the two major ship sections were docked in orbit.

This design will be going to Eve also, albeit with a different lander.

  

[magnemoe]

Another close sun flyby with an updated design.
 
Down to 90.000 km, more radiators and they stay in the shadow as long as you keep the heatshield towards the sun. 
Radiators was not that hot, here they are at 36%, Did not knew radiators used power but that makes sense, so I only extended the rear part then close. 
It looks like the heat shield is close to its limit here independent on radiator cooling. 

This is how close it is compared to the sun. 

Not sure how to get much closer, as in don't think anything beat the inflatable heat shield with 3500 degree, because you will be in the heat for hours ablative will not work.  Still radius is 261 600 km, and is 1/3 of that from the surface. 

Edited October 13, 2022 by magnemoe

[miklkit]

Made it to Dres for the first time.  Now have a relay/science probe and a scanner/science probe orbiting it.  This is the relay.   Now trying to decide if it is worth it to set up a base with refueling there.

[panarchist]

Didn't have time to post last night, so "Today" means "in the last 24 hours".

Still plugging away at my Kerbal universe (meaning the customized install that I plan to write some fiction in - see my sig for the "old" one), and I've created my Kerbal cities and a custom citylights.dds for EVE. It's a 2.6667x scale Kerbin star system + OPM and eventually 1-3 other star systems. (haven't decided which planet pack(s) yet) Here's the map:

What I did yesterday was build an airship base with Kerbal Konstructs in the UK. (United Kerbdom) Left over from the Great War with Kermania, Koljester Army Air Base hosted both UK and US airships that fought the Von Kermans over occupied Keltika. After the war, the airships were mothballed at several bases around Kerbin. Recently, the Panarchist Space Agency made a deal to place 2 satellites in orbit (1 for the UK, 1 for the US) in exchange for 2 airships - the Lindy Kerman, a reconnaissance airship, and the Hornet, a flying aircraft carrier. I built both airships yesterday, after which Jeb, Bob, Bill, and new recruit Val lifted off from Koljester AAB in the Lindy, and piloted it to a refueling stop at Jeb's Junkyard and Used SpaceAirship Parts on their way to its new permanent home at KSC. 

More pics in the spoiler

Spoiler

Departing Koljester Army Air Base

The Lindy Kerman ("Lucky Lindy"), AS-03 (USK Navy airship) heads S-SE towards KSC.

Continuing south as the sun sets.

Flying over a city in Keltika at night.

Finally, parked at Jebediah's lucrative side business.

PSA's intent is to use the airships to recover space capsules and other recoverable items when they return to Kerbin. Critics have called it "putting the kart before the horse", since the KSC and other PSA facilities have yet to put any craft into space.

[Caerfinon]

"For here am I sitting in a tin can. Far above the world"