What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Atkara]

Launched the first bunch of flights in LKO, bound for Eve:

• 1x Eve crew extraction vehicle.
• 1x mobile surface miner (MSM) to land and fuel the thing up.
• 1x drone tug to pick up the upper stage and bring it back.
• 1x Surface outpost. With a reliable way to safely extract Kerbals from Eve's surface, no reason not to process the science on-site.

The following will make a pit stop around Eve, then head for Moho:

• 1x drone tug to recover a part in orbit, for a contract.
• 1x generic lander.
• 1x MSM.

Started fueling them up with the new XL fuel drones and their respective SSTOs. Speaking of the latter... God, these things are heavy. No less than 120m/s on final... I haven't seen the runway coming in so fast before. The first time in quite a while, I actually had to deploy the drogue chute of a plane, after touchdown.

I'll get used to their quirks -after all, I'll be flying them a lot. But for the moment, each landing scares me as hell.

Edited February 20, 2018 by Atkara

[Guest]

Duna Kosmodrome planning continues, with a hat tip to @Hotel26 who appears to have volunteered as a test pilot.

I've now got a release candidate for the Duna liaison/science craft, formerly known as HELBAT X1-2-3, now known as Zephyr. Big difference from HELBAT-X3 is greatly detuned thrust: it's now optimised for Duna which means it won't even take off on Kerbin. I'll have to figure out how to get it into orbit but I'll think of something.

It can do any kind of landing or take-off -- VTOL, STOL, HTOL -- has rather decent crew capacity, and carries the full science monty. It's also got all the control surfaces I was able to pile on, beefy reaction wheels, and very beefy RCS so it ought to be as easy to fly on Duna as I can make it. Thrust has been cut to about 1/4 of what it was on the X3, giving it what ought to be sufficient TWR on Duna, but it's definitely no kind of hellbat at this point. It is also exquisitely balanced: CoM barely shifts at all as the tanks drain.

Development on the orbital lifter is also nearing completion. It has also had its power detuned -- Vectors downgraded to Reliants and Darts -- and has gone through the full suite of utility tests (load, unload, crew operations). With the better atmospheric performance on its engines, it can fly on Kerbin, barely. 

I have also worked on landing zone markers, the habitation module, and its associated utility rover. These have switched from atomic to solar power (largely), and acquired a few other tweaks, notably the utility rover now has autonomous operating capability and more rugged wheels because I got fed up fine-tuning the others to keep the wheel kraken away.

Once work on these modules is complete -- which should be soon -- I'll figure out how to get them up there. That will present a challenge as unlike their Laythe equivalents, these have no way of getting to orbit from Kerbin under their own power.

[Atkara]

24 minutes ago, Brikoleur said:

I'll have to figure out how to get it into orbit but I'll think of something.

The amount of the necessary for Duna, lifting surface, has me say that "you're not launching this a-la STS".

Detachable Rapiers, maybe? If 3 can do the job, try the "Terrier-Stack Decoupler-Inline Intake/Precooler-Rapier" arrangement. Just make sure the decouplers are facing the right way -you don't want them stuck on the Terriers, after separation.

Edited February 20, 2018 by Atkara

[Cavscout74]

Finally got Kerbals back on Laythe in my newest career.  Set the modified Star Ranger (by XLJedi) down right next my 3-man outpost/fuel station (< 1 km after I managed to stop)

Then dropped my Laythe floating base with attached 6-seat pontoon boat into the nearest sheltered bay.  It did manage to straighten out before splashdown

THEN I realized what I forgot this time:  A rover to run from the fuel station & landing site the 30km to shore to get picked up by the pontoon boat.  Oh well.  I guess this batch of explorers will just have to hop back up to the space station & wait until the seaplane arrives in a year and half.  I don't even have another Jool window for another half a year to send them a rover.

[Fearless Son]

58 minutes ago, Brikoleur said:

I'll have to figure out how to get it into orbit but I'll think of something.

As always, the evergreen answer on these forums is, "Moar booster!"  

(Seriously, some lifting liquid fuel rockets with their own fuel supply on detachable points should take it a long way toward orbit.)

[capi3101]

1 hour ago, Brikoleur said:

I'll have to figure out how to get it into orbit but I'll think of something.

I might suggest JATO. Plop a set of Hammers or Kickbacks on the underside of that sucker, light 'em at takeoff, get up to 15,000 as quickly as you can. Once you're there you've got the same atmospheric pressure as the Dunan surface. If thrust is an issue at that point, maybe carry a second set of SRBs for the ramp up to orbit.

[Kronus_Aerospace]

Decided to rebuild my previous spark rocket, only this time I decided to take a different approach.

[Starman4308]

Voyagers III and IV have passed perijove, with Voyager IV performing a 136 m/sec burn at perijove, passing a mere 5230 km above the edge of its atmosphere, traveling at nearly 58 km/sec. While it would have been more efficient to simply use a higher perijove so as to reduce the acceleration from the slingshot, arbitrary contract stipulations required a 20000 km pass and I wanted a backup to Voyager II's pass scientists wanted a really close approach. There are, of course, no possible ill effects from passing so close to Jupiter's enormous magnetic field.

It might have benefited a bit from the Oberth effect traveling at 58 km/sec. Just a touch.

One curious thing: I was timewarping fairly fast to perijove, much faster than previously, and the probe core almost burnt up. It's possible Voyager IV was only saved thanks to Science Alert dropping me out because it was the first time I'd passed low over the Great Red Spot.

I'm also currently scrambling to figure out if I'll get Voyager III* to Saturn in time for my flyby Saturn contract. I slightly misread my flight path on Voyager II, to the tune of "the Saturn flyby isn't on the way out: it's on the way back in!". Because of that, Voyager II will be making its solar ejection burn near Neptune, and Voyager III is my only hope for the Saturn flyby contract.

*Yes, I know I said Voyager IV would be the Saturn orbiter. At the last minute, though, I switched Voyagers III and IV, as I felt Saturn was higher-priority; thus, if the Voyager III launch failed, I wanted Voyager IV as a backup.

EDIT: You know what? I'm just going to ignore these unpleasant contract deadlines in RP-0 from now on, and feel entirely free to use the debug menu. I think I previously had a mod that let me modify contracts as they came in automatically: if I can get that working, I'll try to increase contract duration so I no longer basically have to have a mission and its backup ready before I accept a contract.

 

I've also designed Voyager V and its backup Voyager VI, cut-down versions of the Voyager I-IV probes. The original program is placing orbiters at the outermost three giants, but no orbiter for Jupiter. For the innermost of the giants, the Voyager V design:

Has been strictly limited to 1-ton mass (using a 1-ton satellite bus with no supplementary custom avionics).

Uses a weaker, 20 Gm antenna.

Because of this lower-power antenna, needs only two MHW (Multi Hundred Watt) RTGs.

Has strongly cut down on the battery reserve, down to a mere 2.4 MJ from the original 15.84 MJ.

Will, instead of a direct Jupiter transfer, use an EEJ slingshot, cutting down ejection delta-V down to a mere 5.4 km/sec vs. the original 6.5 km/sec direct transfer.

All of this permits use of the smaller Aleph-Centaur 442 and a cost reduction of 27.5% versus the original four launches. The primary downside is that, with a mere 2.4 km/sec on the probe itself, the orbit will be more elliptical than usual.

Edited February 21, 2018 by Starman4308

[CatastrophicFailure]

49 minutes ago, Starman4308 said:

EDIT: You know what? I'm just going to ignore these unpleasant contract deadlines in RP-0 from now on, and feel entirely free to use the debug menu. I think I previously had a mod that let me modify contracts as they came in automatically: if I can get that working, I'll try to increase contract duration so I no longer basically have to have a mission and its backup ready before I accept a contract.

 

Ah yes, I feel your pain. Nothing like those “get to Planet X in a quarter of the usual transit time” contracts. Of course, you only see the deadline after you see the reward and hastily click “accept.” 

[Starman4308]

4 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Ah yes, I feel your pain. Nothing like those “get to Planet X in a quarter of the usual transit time” contracts. Of course, you only see the deadline after you see the reward and hastily click “accept.” 

In the specific case of RP-0 and the outer planets, they seem to be pegged to the duration of a Hohmann transfer, which means no fancy slingshot trajectories, you have to accept with the hardware ready, and if it fails? No real chance to try again at the next Hohmann transfer window. 

[Guest]

Great suggestions for getting to orbit, folks. Any of those would work, and each of them presents its own challenges. I'm thinking the RAPIER stack would be the easiest solution, and also the easiest to make recoverable which is something of an obsession of mine. I'd have to give the RAPIER block wings anyway because otherwise it would shift the CoM back causing instability (this thing is balanced on a razor's edge -- it can be because the CoM barely shifts at all as fuel burns down), which means I can just fly it back down and pick it up again, if I give it just a drop of fuel and a probe core.

Strapping a couple of boosters -- liquid or dry -- around the hull would also be pretty simple, main downside is that it would be hard to make them recoverable, and as stated recoverability is a bit of an obsession of mine -- only my big Eve missions have been designed with discardable stages from the start.

And then there's STS-style (asymmetrically set up boosters). Only reason to do that would be that it's an interesting challenge: it would be less efficient aerodynamically and certainly much harder to manage the CoM/CoT.

[RizzoTheRat]

3 hours ago, Starman4308 said:

I'm also currently scrambling to figure out if I'll get Voyager III* to Saturn in time for my flyby Saturn contract. I slightly misread my flight path on Voyager II, to the tune of "the Saturn flyby isn't on the way out: it's on the way back in!". Because of that, Voyager II will be making its solar ejection burn near Neptune, and Voyager III is my only hope for the Saturn flyby contract.

*Yes, I know I said Voyager IV would be the Saturn orbiter. At the last minute, though, I switched Voyagers III and IV, as I felt Saturn was higher-priority; thus, if the Voyager III launch failed, I wanted Voyager IV as a backup.

EDIT: You know what? I'm just going to ignore these unpleasant contract deadlines in RP-0 from now on, and feel entirely free to use the debug menu. I think I previously had a mod that let me modify contracts as they came in automatically: if I can get that working, I'll try to increase contract duration so I no longer basically have to have a mission and its backup ready before I accept a contract.

I had a similar issue with a Duna contract a while back.  I think I worked out that it was the penultimate number for the contract in the save file that was the  duration...

[Ace in Space]

Well, today was interesting. After considerable fiddling and tweaking I came to a design I liked for the Duna landing mission. Unfortunately I didn't take a screenshot of the exact build I used before launch.

Anyway, I had found in earlier test runs that the craft was having some difficulty getting from the Launchpad to orbit around the sun without using up most of its fuel. So this model was equipped with a docking port, and what would you know, Ruby had just enough fuel after achieving Kerbin orbit to intercept Minmus and dock at Jade Station for refueling (as you might have noticed, I use gemstones for my naming scheme). I know I have too many landers docked to the station; the one with the poodle on the left is Ruby (the others are maintenance craft for the station and associated surface base).

After filling up the tank, the transport stage was able to get Ruby into orbit around Duna, but ran out of fuel just before being able to lower the craft into a landing trajectory. The three terriers are the final engine stage and were initially intended for taking off and flying back to Kerbin, but I had to use a little bit of fuel to drop my periapsis into the atmosphere (which was as much as I was willing to use, because that final stage's fuel budget is tight). Duna's thin atmosphere means that aerobraking takes forever, so I ended up making several passes through the atmosphere, collecting lots of science as I went. But before the aerobraking was actually complete, I had second thoughts - first, I had a lot of science and I am not one to keep gambling when I'm in a good position. Second, with the poodle already spent and ejected, if the parachutes turned out not to be enough (which in the thin atmosphere they might not have been) I would have to use precious, precious return trip fuel to slow the landing. And third, even though it seemed like enough at the time I launched, when I was sitting in orbit with only those three little tanks of fuel, suddenly it didn't look like enough to take off from Duna's surface and fly all the way back to Kerbin.

So I quit while I was ahead. Ruby made a flyby of Ike on the way out for the dual purpose of gathering yet more science and eking out just a bit more fuel efficiency by slingshotting off its gravity, then stored the data and ditched the heavy science module.

Once again, the amount of fuel turned out to be just right and allowed me to intercept Kerbin at a low enough periapsis, turn the flyby trajectory into an orbit, and then have a small amount left over to help slow the craft down as it entered the atmosphere. Inability to actually land aside, I really should have named it Goldilocks. 

I didn't get to test the parachute system on Duna but I can confirm it works just fine on Kerbin!

Ruby landed in a rather scenic area, so the crew piled out for a picture before heading back to the space center.

Despite not achieving the actual goal of the mission (landing on Duna), I'd call the flight of Ruby 3.23 a success overall. The craft needs a couple small tweaks but the mission proved that it's a pretty good design overall. Completed a couple contracts, got a boatload of science out of it, everybody hit level four, and a good time was had by all.

 

The plan going forward, as of right now, is probably to set up another refueling base, Onyx Station, on/in orbit around Ike. It would basically be a copy of Jade Station with a couple minor modifications, since the existing station seems to be working out so well. This way I wouldn't have to worry about trying to land and take off again while saving enough fuel to go back to Kerbin - I could just go back to the nearby base, refuel, and go on my merry way. It might also be a useful stop when trying to venture further out into the Kerbol system.

[Guest]

Good work there.

About 'chutes on Duna: IMO it's a bit pointless to pile on so many you can rely on them exclusively. It's enough if you can get your terminal velocity down to 20 m/s or so. From that to a safe touchdown is just a puff of retro.

[Hotel26]

16 hours ago, Kronus_Aerospace said:

The craft file must have gotten corrupted,

I had this happen recently and I got to the bottom of it using the excellent Kraft.1.3.1.2 tool.  There was a cycle in the parts tree (courtesy (excessive compulsive use of) the infamous Reroot tool) which was exhibited by Kraft infinitely looping on the two parts in question.  Deleting a link then solved the problem...

And, were you using the infamous Reroot tool on the craft with all those many, many, very numerous sparky little engines, perchance, to tell...? 

[Kronus_Aerospace]

6 minutes ago, Hotel26 said:

I had this happen recently and I got to the bottom of it using the excellent Kraft.1.3.1.2 tool.  There was a cycle in the parts tree (courtesy (excessive compulsive use of) the infamous Reroot tool) which was exhibited by Kraft infinitely looping on the two parts in question.  Deleting a link then solved the problem...

And, were you using the infamous Reroot tool on the craft with all those many, many, very numerous sparky little engines, perchance, to tell...? 

I'm not sure, I might have at some point. Whatever the case I've already rebuilt the craft, but I will keep that in mind should I encounter this issue again in the future. Thanks!

[InterplanetJanet]

5 hours ago, Hotel26 said:

[...] using the excellent Kraft.1.3.1.2 tool.

Not that you had anything to do with that tool, of course.  *downloads tool* The version number in the README needs to be updated, btw.

[Hotel26]

40 minutes ago, InterplanetJanet said:

of course

Moi!  "Shameless self-promoter"!?  Jamais!  (Although I do like the sound of it quite well.)

I might be a bit lazy, though.  I believe this predicament, this contretemps has now been resolved...  Thanks for mentioning it.

[Tyko]

- GPP 2.5x Launch of Gael Low Orbit Station 1 - 

This is probably my last new game on 1.3.1. Started mostly to play with @Nertea's fantastic SSPX parts pack while waiting for 1.4 and all necessary mods to be ready - I'm thinking I have a few months.

I used the 1.25m parts to build an early Salyut-style station. Single launch to orbit. Below are pix of the station alone and during the stay of the first 2 kerbal krew with more pix in the spoiler below to save space.

 

More pix in spoiler section  

Spoiler

 

[Whisky Tango Foxtrot]

My Duna crew made it home.

As did my Dres tourists.

In fact, they both arrived at Minmus Station at about the same time, to the point where I had to alternate between them to perform their various intercept and rendezvous burns.

My portable Jool station is still stuck in Tylo orbit until the ESU on my science module can have its data fully loaded into the station's MPL, but I had an unmanned rover sitting in Bop's orbit for ages and thought that it was about time that I landed it. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten that the dorsal-mounted docking port on the rover was Jr-sized and I didn't bring a 1.25m-.625m adaptor module with me.

Luckily, the rover had a 1.25m port on the back and Bop's gravity is low enough that wheels-down landings aren't strictly necessary.

I had my lifter land the rover on its nose, then release and land itself a short distance away. In that time the rover fell onto its back, but its reaction wheel was more than powerful enough to right it without damage.

Bop isn't exactly the ideal place for a wheeled rover (and this particular rover was designed to land on Eeloo before changed plans necessitated a new destination) but now I've got a permanent science-gathering probe on yet another Joolean moon. The lifter returned to orbit without issue and docked with its tug, and now they're waiting for a transfer window back to Pol.

Finally, Explorer 1 embarked on her final voyage.

Like her first mission, her final one is a trip from Kerbin to Eve. However, while that first mission involved transporting station parts to Gilly, this time Explorer 1 herself will become part of Gilly Station, as her final task will be to dock with that facility to become its science lab. She's also carrying a new mining lander (similar to the one already at Gilly but with some extra radiators to compensate for the change in cooling in 1.3.1) and a monopropellant tug. As I don't have any plans to re-established a manned presence at Eve any time in the foreseeable future, this mission is unmanned.

[Guest]

One of my orbit design problems is solved. I honestly didn't think it would work without extensive tweaking, but... it did, and really easily at that. 

I just went and stuck the Cyclone on the nose of the Wangari Maathai, and it just flew itself to orbit. Almost full fuel on the Cyclone too, and my gravity turn was a bit off so it wasn't even as efficient as it could be. I'm starting to like her, despite my aversion to ballistic launches.

The Zephyr will go up with RAPIER assistance. I have a prototype but I'm not entirely satisfied with it. Needs some more work.

The Aelita Kosmodrome will initially have three launches: Zephyr, Cyclone, and the base modules which Cyclone will ferry to the surface. I've pretty much finished designing the components, so remains to package them into a launchable payload. I'm going to try to fit the payload into the dimensions of Chausiku Kibowen, but if that doesn't work out, it'll be another job for Wangari Maathai.

 

[Kebab Kerman]

1,600th page! Woo! We must celebrate!

 

RELEASE THE KRAKEN!

[MinimalMinmus]

I completed my 5th caveman challenge, this time with one of the custom very hard careers. I started my mission report, too.

 

[Guest]

Hmm, you reckon there's enough RAPIERs on this one?

...

Naw, maybe add a couple more.

...

You may be wondering, how did the always eminently practical Brikoleur Aerospace Combine build something as absurd as this?

This is why.

[RealKerbal3x]

Hey guys, have you noticed that there are now 1600 pages in this thread??? 

Didn’t do much in KSP, just a tourist contract in my career save.