What did you do in KSP1 today?

[coreross]

Trying out the latest patch, love the cargo bay

Going to build a new Space Station with my new shuttle, one bit at a time.

[Felsmak]

I disciplined some of my Kerbals with my new discipline machine.

[Kamuchi]

Extending the Mun base building with an extraplanetary launchpad base in the crater, habitat area so that less kerbals die with mishabs, pick a challanging overlook spot to plant my comms building and rebuilt a truck for easier moving base modules as a signle large crane is unstable for dragging stuff around.

Extra fun, it runs on Karbonite with 2 small nuclear generators to kickstart the main reactor, yup, it needs gas every few hours of use or get stranded

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[skeevy]

Started my 0.25 stock game; decided I'd try Normal difficulty at first and do harder levels later. Learned that the advice of "rolling the command pod around KSC" to collect enough early science to get to Basic Rocketry is sound, but I must've been doing it wrong; could barely deal with the command pod's natural camber. Worked though. Set up my contracts to favor additional science at the cost of funds, accepted the first four contracts, shot Jeb into orbit with a quad of goo containers and came back down in the sea east of KSC. Earned enough science on that initial hop to unlock all the Tier 2 and 3 nodes, and chose Electrics for my first Tier 4 node. One flight and I've already got solar panels and the ability to construct science packs. Almost had enough to go ahead and pick up fuel ducts too, so I did some parts tests to get that out of the road. Did another hop to unlock RCS; I've got my first rescue contract in the chute so I figured that'd be important. I do have to concur with the observation that Jeb doesn't really like to hang on to the side of the ship in 0.25; I had a couple of times when I was out trying to get an EVA report where he just kinda slipped off - this with the pod getting ready to come back down...

Tonight I'll do my rescue mission, and then I think it'll be about time to go to the Mun.

What I like to do is take two of the MK1 pods and stack the tops together and just "launch" that.

[capi3101]

What I like to do is take two of the MK1 pods and stack the tops together and just "launch" that.

Ah - now that makes sense. Will have to do that when 0.26 rolls around, or if I decide I want to do 0.25 again with the difficulty cranked up.

[sardaukar11]

i killed bill in the first mun landing on my new career in 0.25 and he isnt coming back

[Spacepigu]

Well thats... Interesting.

Not that i don't agree with punishing them. Stupid kerbals!

[stanz25]

Man i've done a lot. I just landed my Falcon lander at titan. (Im using RSS) I launched my version of New Horizons. And in a few minutes Im going to start working on a Phobos mission.

[Norpo]

Messed up a mun landing. Badly.

It was your regular mun landing..

Then I started my suicide burn too late and went in at 50 m/s.

I EVA'd going downwards, expecting the worst, and I figured kerbals could survive more than a fragile command pod.

When everything hit, I heard an explosion, and the lander went flying, but to my astonishment, it survived.

All of it survived. Except the LV-909, amazingly made, thoroughly tested, only one on the lander, rocket engine.

Looks like obdock kerman may be stuck there for a while..

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[numerobis]

Today I downloaded KSP again after a year-long hiatus, and everything old is new again!

The economic system is making me build very ... interesting ships. Lots more SRBs since they're cheap; and with the "test this part" contracts I end up firing up SRBs at strange times.

I also discovered that the science lab requires two kerbals, but isn't a command pod -- so actually you need a total of three kerbals on board. Oops.

[cantab]

No KSP today actually, but I did catch up partly on uploading my screenshots, with a whole bunch of new pics from the Magellan mission. Still not fully up-to-date mind.

[mielgato]

Today I did for the first time a mission with a "mothership" and a landing module, the plan was to orbit the Mun, detach the landing module, land and do some experiments then fly up to low munar orbit again and dock to the mothership for return to Kerbin, a much needed mission before I go to Jool or any other planet having one or multiples moon.

Everything was going well, until I run out of monopropellant about 300 meters from the mothership, which made my docking quite tricky using only the main engine and pivoting the landing module in every directions possible to correct the approach vector manually (mechjeb is evil and jebediah was having so much fun piloting:sticktongue:)

in the end everything went well (but I sweated a lot!) and both the module and the mothership returned and landed kerbin safely

Edited October 15, 2014 by mielgato

[cantab]

Congrats. Engine-only docking is tough.

[xub313]

My jool mission was a success! I orbited all the moons of jool and landed on three of them; Pol, Bop, and Lathe. All with unmanned probes for now.

Lathe Probe

The Lathe Probe doesn't use any parachutes. Those monopropellant engines worked great, but one did break upon landing.

[mielgato]

Thanks a lot Cantab !

I know i'm missing a good part of the game because I rarely do docking (even after 200hours and multiples tries I still find it so hard to pull off ) so I decided to train and do more mission including the need to dock back at a mothership or refueling in LKO, hopefully the landing module was lightweight and rotating it around wasn't so much of a hassle ! Now that i've pulled off an engine-only docking against my will, I feel like I can take over the univeeeeerse !!

In all honesty, no games made me want to learn as much as KSP did, everytime i'm launching the game I find something new to do or to experiment inside Kerbin SOI thanks to what peoples do here (I don't post a lot but do read the forum everydays, and yeah, I still havn't left Kerbin SOI trying to learn as much as possible before going for interplanetary missions, I like when my kerbals come back home sound and safe !)

Xub313, how many D/V had your probe with this monoprop tank ? (out of curiosity, I still wonder how to use those engines)

Edited October 15, 2014 by mielgato

[SRV Ron]

Tested a Career Manned Mun lander design. Prior missions and contract testing has unlocked a set of parts needed to make a highly efficient lander for both Mun and Minmus. Testing indicated that the third stage could be reduced in size which made the second stage efficient enough to complete the Mun intercept burn. Third stage will easily have enough fuel left to take care of landing until it is staged at the last second to land on the lander legs of stage four. The SRBs are tweaked to 90% power. Separtrons were added and tweaked to stop a bumping issue that while not damaging, is annoying.

The rocket

At booster burnout. The tweaked separatrons rotate the SRBs away just enough to clear.

In Orbit

Mun insertion complete.

If I use all the second stage fuel, I got the figure eight return.

[xub313]

Xub313, how many D/V had your probe with this monoprop tank ? (out of curiosity, I still wonder how to use those engines)

I didn't do it all with this little probe if that's what you were thinking. I had a single ship that separated into three different probes.

I don't know the ÃŽâ€v, but it landed with fuel to spare. Those engines have a super high TWR for a probe this size.

[Richard Head]

I'm so upset. I'm a newbie Purchased (10/8/14)and while in the sandbox I lost poor Jeb in an unplanned EVA gone awry. He's been traveling in an oblong orbit for days. Yes, I know I can terminate him, but its too cruel for my sensibilities. So, I built a new orbiter with three brave Kerbenites to fetch him. After about two hours I was able to catch up to him in his private orbit and park in a stationary position (relative to his position) about 400M away and then I switched to him and he flew to the rescue craft and grabbed on. I was so excited!m He has just .36/5.00 units of fuel remaining! WHEW! I figured he could just hope a ride back holding on to the capsule since the heat of re-entry doesn't seem to bother them much. Then I go back to fly my awesome orbiter and WTF...I can't get in it with him clutching to the exterior of the craft. I can't save with him in that position either.

Ideas??

Can astronauts grab each other? I am going to let him go, send another with a full pack in his place and try again tomorrow. I'd welcome any suggestions.

[Starman4308]

Got rolling on a new career mode game using the 6.4x config of RSS, NEAR, DRE, and TAC Life Support (all of which are new to me). Launch vehicles have grown substantially larger, and every kilogram of payload is now a torturous decision, as payload to the Mun has gone down to ~0.3% of total rocket mass. I gained ~700 m/s dV on my latest rocket by switching out an LV-T45 for an LV-909 on lunar transfer stage, though I re-learned the lesson of "TWR is important always": I wasted a bit of that dV because I wasn't able to circularize without a short excursion back into upper atmosphere. A short, fiery excursion back into the upper atmosphere. Nevertheless, Luna 9 is in transit to the Mun has juuust enough fuel to stick a landing... so long as I avoid wasting the gobs of fuel I'm used to on descents.

[General Rarity]

Columbus had an accident.

Hudson was rolled out.

Hudson met with Columbus and Jeb + Bill stuck a ton of parachutes on. I think you all know what this means.

edit:

NAILED IT!

Edited October 15, 2014 by General Rarity

[Captain Vlad]

An entire solar system to explore and I spend two hours building a dune buggy.

[Kowgan]

I'm so upset. I'm a newbie Purchased (10/8/14)and while in the sandbox I lost poor Jeb in an unplanned EVA gone awry. He's been traveling in an oblong orbit for days. Yes, I know I can terminate him, but its too cruel for my sensibilities. So, I built a new orbiter with three brave Kerbenites to fetch him. After about two hours I was able to catch up to him in his private orbit and park in a stationary position (relative to his position) about 400M away and then I switched to him and he flew to the rescue craft and grabbed on. I was so excited!m He has just .36/5.00 units of fuel remaining! WHEW! I figured he could just hope a ride back holding on to the capsule since the heat of re-entry doesn't seem to bother them much. Then I go back to fly my awesome orbiter and WTF...I can't get in it with him clutching to the exterior of the craft. I can't save with him in that position either.

Ideas??

Can astronauts grab each other? I am going to let him go, send another with a full pack in his place and try again tomorrow. I'd welcome any suggestions.

Kerbonauts can't grab anything other than ladders and a few other things, as far as I know.

Send him back to space, and send another vessel with less kerbals in it, so Jeb can get inside and land safely. Good luck!

[BJ Quest]

Just a few more science research.... No problem..... Jeb :-)

[GreeningGalaxy]

My Laythe mission finally arrived at Jool, captured into Laythe orbit, and made a successful (if stressful) landing.

I notably did not do this today, but it still bears reporting because it's probably one of my coolest missions to date.

The GGSS Aranaié, carrying the Aerulia lander. Both names are planet name random generations from my good ol' Spore days.

Bonehead moment 1: While wingless landers might work fine in the stock game, FAR is a different story. To be honest, though, I'm not sure how I would have built it differently, though; its centers of drag and mass were lined up just fine for an engine-first descent, but trying to fly it horizontally across the surface with any maneuverability is nearly impossible. It did make a perfectly satisfactory SSTO ascent from Kerbin prior to docking with the Aranaié, though, so that much should definitely be possible from Laythe.

Issue number 2: Turns out Laythe doesn't have a flat surface on it. I took the recommended landing site of some guy on IRC, but it still wasn't great. In the end I had to turn on infinite fuel - I mean, grab some water off the surface and electrolyze it into fuel real fast - so that I could use RCS to keep the blasted thing from falling over like it so badly wanted to do. The Aerulia lander works well enough, but I think it's going to need a big redesign - maybe more along the lines of a VTOL plane than a rocket - before it's doing any real exploring of Laythe's landscape.

In the other news, I also built a new super mighty power transit vehicle with KSPI stuff, this time powered by antimatter and fueled with a combination of ammonia and hydrogen (either-or, not at the same time). I calculated the total stage delta-V last week- it's over 68 kilometers per second! Maybe I should be looking into doing a grand-tour type of mission.

I love antimatter-powered ships, especially this one. It might not turn very fast, but that doesn't stop it from accelerating at over 2 Gs on full throttle!

More pictures:

All those big radiators still only dump about 1/5 of the heat that the reactor can put out. Good thing I'm just using it for a thermal rocket and not trying to convert that all to electricity for an Alcubierre drive or something!

Unlike the Aranaié mission, this vehicle uses a fission reactor for auxiliary power, which will run for a much longer time than a similarly-sized fusion reactor on much less-volatile fuel.

The hydrogen tank pictured is almost only there for structural reasons at this point; if the ammonia in the surrounding tanks is used first, it will give the ship its first 53 kilometers per second, with the remaining hydrogen adding just over 15.

As is standard on all my antimatter-powered vehicles, this one comes with an emergency separation system which will cut the entire propulsion section loose in the event that antimatter containment is compromised. Unfortunately, doing this would leave the ship hanging dead in space with nothing but RCS for propulsion (maybe I should put a few NFT plasma engines on the aft ends of those ammonia tanks for backup?), but 9 out of 9 kerbals agree that nearly anything is a better situation than finding oneself at the center of a multi-megaton antimatter explosion.

Antimatter is scary.

At the moment, the first prototype for this vehicle lives in a slightly-inclined Tylo orbit to survey the surface. It's barely made a dent in its fuel, though, so it could easily hop over to Laythe to pick up the Aerulia lander in place of the original Aranaié transit vehicle that carried it out there.

Finally, have a picture of my very fast fusion-powered plane dispensing spent shells at high speed as I fire the machine gun:

[Aragosnat]

I'm so upset. I'm a newbie Purchased (10/8/14)and while in the sandbox I lost poor Jeb in an unplanned EVA gone awry. He's been traveling in an oblong orbit for days. Yes, I know I can terminate him, but its too cruel for my sensibilities. So, I built a new orbiter with three brave Kerbenites to fetch him. After about two hours I was able to catch up to him in his private orbit and park in a stationary position (relative to his position) about 400M away and then I switched to him and he flew to the rescue craft and grabbed on. I was so excited!m He has just .36/5.00 units of fuel remaining! WHEW! I figured he could just hope a ride back holding on to the capsule since the heat of re-entry doesn't seem to bother them much. Then I go back to fly my awesome orbiter and WTF...I can't get in it with him clutching to the exterior of the craft. I can't save with him in that position either.

Ideas??

Can astronauts grab each other? I am going to let him go, send another with a full pack in his place and try again tomorrow. I'd welcome any suggestions.

Send up another craft with only 2 in the craft next time or you can unlocked the rover seat, the one Kerbals sit in, then all you need to do is manuever the craft close enough to Jeb so he can then just click on the seat or ladder.