What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Nazalassa]

I don't know. Maybe with Unity but I'm not sure. If the FX is made out of particles, there's brobably a way to recolor them; it it's a group of images, it'll be a bit more difficult.

[Nazalassa]

Seems a bit weird, but it seems changing the colors of

/Gamedata/Squad/FX/plasma2.dds

effectively changes the color of the ion exhaust.

Then maybe changing

/Gamedata/Squad/FX/IonPlume.mu

with Unity will whange the look (but not the color) of the ion engine exhaust.

Weird.

[Akagi]

31 minutes ago, Nazalassa said:

Seems a bit weird, but it seems changing the colors of

/Gamedata/Squad/FX/plasma2.dds

effectively changes the color of the ion exhaust.

Then maybe changing

/Gamedata/Squad/FX/IonPlume.mu

with Unity will whange the look (but not the color) of the ion engine exhaust.

Weird.

Good to know!

[Akagi]

Made custom flags.

Beaut-E

[fleventeen]

14 hours ago, Volcomlancer said:

Got as close as 19km to docking with something in orbit. Teaching myself is taking a while lol i keep pushing my orbit to atmospheric levels when moving closer to it.

12 hours ago, bobcook said:

It does take some practice and a lot of patience. Try putting your target vehicle in a higher orbit (>100km) and be prepared for a rendezvous that requires multiple orbits. My first rendezvous had both vehicles in nearly identical orbits, same periapsis but one with a slightly higher apoapsis on the sunlit side of Kerbin. Took a number of orbits for the vehicles to close in on each other, but this also had the benefit that the speed difference between the two was pretty small as the distance separation also got small.

Agreed with @bobcook, it is a good idea to put the target at ~100km. This gives you the flexibility to either go into a lower or higher orbit than the target, allowing your relative positions to drift closer before doing a fine tuning intercept burn. For the intercept burn, aim for the closest approach to be within a couple km of the target (less is better, though 0 means you may collide ). When you reach closest approach, you can zero out your velocity relative to the target, and then start thrusting towards it to close the gap. If your separation is too great at closest approach (as you described), thrusting towards the target can have the opposite effect, and actually increase separation.

[Axelord FTW]

Started completing contracts that have been left standing for a while now, since I was focused on other stuff.

First, going to Gilly and back to Kerbin. I made a 'rover' for it. A self-sufficient micro-refinery on struts and entirely powered via RCS. After having had to deal with Moho dV shenanigans one too many times, I decided that overkill was the way. Even without the LF/Ox booster stage, the damn thing has enough dV to reach Gilly and come back to kerbin three times over. Once some science is collected, the 'rover' will dock back with the Li-powered stage and fly back to kerbin before being recovered. There's actually a non-retractable solar panel that will get in the way but I'll just let it break during the redocking procedure.
Then I got the 'unscrew' module to land on Moho and got to work making the factory there actually viable. Some troubles aside with rovers and KIS/KAS wonkiness, I was able to refuel to crew module enough so it could hop the few kilometers between it and the factory module. The Unscrew module was able to hop back by itself no problem.

Spoiler

The Gilly 'rover' of sorts. No wheels, just RCS fun and a small refinery so it can refuel by itself between jumps. The large LF/Ox transfer stage (which was later ditched into Eve) was absolutely not needed whatsoever.

The Nuclear Salt-Water Engine Stack on its way back from Moho by itself.

The NSW-ES picking up the Unscrew module in low Munar orbit. No refueling needed in the end, still over 10,000ms of dV. Fortunately, the transfer window back to Moho was still open and it left Kerbin's SOI right away after this.

Here it is after having landed on Moho. And engineer started modifying the already-present rover to work as a fuel truck. Just had to remove some stuff, and transfer over some baguettes.

Here is the Crew module, the Unscrew module, the factory/refinery module and the rover all together in one shot. I definitely am not liking this factory design and its first job will be to make a replacement. I'll probably have it churn out another Fat Cricket rover and work with that.

 

Edited April 25, 2022 by Axelord FTW

[fleventeen]

 

[Catto]

I did do to space. I orbited

[Akagi]

2 minutes ago, Catto said:

I did do to space. I orbited

So have I. It cost me 36 Kerbals.

[Echo__3]

Had some fun making a VTOL for use on Duna.

 

[Akagi]

1 minute ago, Echo__3 said:

Had some fun making a VTOL for use on Duna.

 

ver clever

[king of nowhere]

The last couple months I went through a few cycles of designing new ships, testing them, trying to get them to orbit in rss with stock parts, finding insane bugs randomly shutting down my game, ragequitting and swearing I'm done with ksp, going back to work after a couple weeks, finding new bugs, ragequitting again, I eventually reached the point where I could assemble my new mothership in orbit

It normally takes multiple days to assemble a mothership of this size from scratch, but I had a factor on my side: I was allowed to jump all the subships to rendez-vous, without launching them. No, I wasn't cheating; one of the many bugs that almost got me to ragequit scrambled the game after every launch, so that after leaving the launchpad I could not save, go back to the space center, change vehicle, or do anything whatsoever that would save my progress. Using alt-f12 was literally the only way to bring my ships to orbit. So, after launching them for real - a task I completed in the previous week - I am now entitled to just jump straight on the target.

The only piece that didn't crash like that is the venus exploration plane (yet unnamed, temporary name Dagger). For it, I did run the rendez-vous normally

It's a small, light plane meant to travel around venus. it can't come back to space, I have a special rocket for that. But I loathe landing somewhere just to plant a flag and leave immediately. This small plane has provisions to explore and perform science for one month with a crew of 3, and it weights a pittance compared to the ascent vehicle.

Approaching the mothership (also yet unnamed, temporary name A'Twin because it's derived by A'Tuin and it's made by two twin parts, but I don't like it much). Had to start braking a one hundred kilometers before the encounter because Dagger's orbital engines are barely capable of manuevering.

Second piece is the small rover Clamp. Meant to explore the small moons, and to be cheaper to operate than the bigger rover I use to explore the bigger places.

After that, it's the time of Fat Man, the taxi

ù

I called it Fat Man because from the right perspective those upper engines look like arm and the lower engines look like diminutive legs. Although, given that the "arms" are attached to the larger fuel tank, I may as well have seen it as a well-muscled man. Except that those engines-legs are so tiny.

Then it's Nitrogenie in a bottle. There's no nitrogen to be mined in planetary crusts in rss, so I had to make a plane specifically to go down on Titan and grab it from the atmosphere. Well, I needed a special lander for Titan anyway, this catches two birds with a stone.

And now the most complex part, the Venus ascent vehicle. Still unnamed, I'd call it helicopterocket if I hadn't already used the name for my latest Eve ascent vehicle.

Unlike its predecessor, to orbit Venus this rocket still needs some 8 km/s after clearing the atmosphere, so it's huge. Its rotors are encumbrance incarnate.

The rotors on the helicopterocket are too cumbersome, I can't use the remaining docking ports. So I send up a couple more docking ports. Realizing I forgot the antennas, I also send them up, to be placed by eva construction.

Running eva construction is always dangerous, stuff may accidentally get clipped explosively. it's exactly what happened here

how long ago did I last save?

I also see several pieces scrambled by the well-known alignment bug, here shown  on a cargo bay. Less evident, but the big tank on the Fat Man also suffered the same fate. The bug is not too dangerous, though, everything keeps working and it will occasionally revert. And I made sure to protect the engines by placing lots of manual struts.

Now that I installed more docking ports laterally, I can send the last shuttle: the Spider heavy lander.

It's got 4500 m/s of deltaV, and it can release a small rover. Ideal for the larger moons, like the Moon or Ganymede, which require around 2000 m/s to orbit.

It's got a couple of extensions attached to it; one for Mercury, an additional stage because going up and down Mercury requires 6000 m/s deltaV, and one for Mars, another additional stage with additional "parabrakes"

Looks like those "parabrakes" are too cumbersome for docking, though

No worry. A Service Probe (in the center of the image) will grab the Mars landing extension and allow it to dock on the other side.

Finally, all the small pieces are docked.

Damn, those are a lot bigger than I'm used to. rss forced me to make much bigger landers than I did for my previous missions.

On the plus side, I'm planning to lose some of those parts early on.

Still missing the big piece, the bottom of A'Twin. The part containing all the mining equipment to strip-mine celestial bodies, as well as the heavy high-thrust rockets needed to land there, and the oxidizer needed to fuel those rockets. It's smaller than the top part, but more compact and heavier, at 1200 tons dry mass.

Approach, seen from the respecting cupolas

The two huge docking ports are about to mate, when they stop

I have no idea what's making contact. I did check all around, and I didn't see any part slamming into each other. Yes, of course I already tested the docking procedure.

A bit of work with the rockets managed to push the docking to completion. Just as I was relaxing, something exploded

I reloaded, and this time it went smoothly. On the plus side, this manuever won't be needed more than a handful of times.

Lag and loading times are a lot better than I was hoping. One second in game is four seconds in real life, and it loads in about 5 minutes; something that may be unacceptable to most of you, but that's in line with the DREAM BIG, and a lot better than A'Tuin. Given that A'Twin is similar to A'Tuin, but bigger, more complex, with 20% more parts, and using more mods, this performance exceeds my most optimistic hopes. I was giving it a 50/50 chance of crashing the game immediately as soon as all the parts entered into physical range. I got worse lag as I was testing without the parts on top.

Maybe it's because I just cleaned the pc fans, so I got better cooling.

Anyway, 1349 parts and 4650 tons while half-empty. It can exceed 7150 tons when fully loaded. 2270 tons of dry mass, it's the reason I had to make a provision to leave half of it behind to reach the really difficult places.

 

There's still a lot of bugs that can make this unplayable. But if I can get to Phobos and run the first refueling, then I'll open an official mission report.

[Akagi]

On 4/24/2022 at 4:01 PM, Nazalassa said:

Seems a bit weird, but it seems changing the colors of

/Gamedata/Squad/FX/plasma2.dds

What am I supposed to be changing?

[Axelord FTW]

The Gilly 'rover' was a total success. In fact, by being a more efficient with my hoping, I probably could have done without in situ refueling.

That done, I focused back on the Moho side of things. I redesigned the Fat Cricket into the Fatter Cricket and built one in ten days. Ditched the two jr. drills for a senior and prettied it up majorly with some robotic stuff. It works wonderfully, and it churned out a small surface lab outpost thingy to level up the Kerbals that were on the surface (two of them were level 0). Thing is, I normally don't bother putting lights on swivels, and often just forgo light sources completely. As it is, the location on the surface of Moho is in perpetual darkness so I decided to 'splurge' a bit.

Here's the Fatter Cricket being tested on Kerbin: https://i.imgur.com/uRJtQ7s.mp4
here's the finished product, plus the surface lab: https://i.imgur.com/jGLzGtH.mp4

Edited April 26, 2022 by Axelord FTW

[fleventeen]

6 hours ago, Akagi said:

What am I supposed to be changing?

I'm no expert, but .DDS files are not text files. You will need to open it up in an image editing software like Photoshop or Gimp.

Also, have you checked out Waterfall? It has an FX editor that you can use to make some sweet looking plumes.

[MythicalHeFF]

I returned to the surface, nothing to see here.

[Akagi]

8 hours ago, fleventeen said:

I'm no expert, but .DDS files are not text files. You will need to open it up in an image editing software like Photoshop or Gimp.

Also, have you checked out Waterfall? It has an FX editor that you can use to make some sweet looking plumes.

Kind of a noob here: would Paint 3D work?

[fleventeen]

15 minutes ago, Akagi said:

Kind of a noob here: would Paint 3D work?

I'm not 100% sure, but I doubt it. I was able open it in Gimp, which is a free DL.

https://www.gimp.org/

[Akagi]

1 minute ago, fleventeen said:

I'm not 100% sure, but I doubt it. I was able open it in Gimp, which is a free DL.

https://www.gimp.org/

I think I'm going for either Blender or Gimp

thanks for tip

[fleventeen]

Beta test for Strato-1 is now open. 

https://kerbalx.com/fleventeen/Strato-1

Happy launching!

[Akagi]

3 minutes ago, fleventeen said:

Beta test for Strato-1 is now open. 

https://kerbalx.com/fleventeen/Strato-1

Happy launching!

Aww, I don't have DLC!

[dci]

51 minutes ago, Akagi said:

Kind of a noob here: would Paint 3D work?

Not sure, if MS graphic SW is usable for such image format. As fleventeen says, use GIMP instead. About a year ago I created my own agency and also needed to create one DDS image, GIMP was okay. But I am pretty sure, that default settings when exporting image to DDS will not work. In "save as DDS" window, which will appear after "export as" dialogue look at DXT5 compression (sorry, not sure which one) and select "Generate mipmaps".

[Lisias]

On 4/25/2022 at 8:21 AM, fleventeen said:

Nice view!

 

On 4/25/2022 at 8:21 AM, fleventeen said:

Nice launch!

 

17 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

Maybe it's because I just cleaned the pc fans, so I got better cooling.

Anyway, 1349 parts and 4650 tons while half-empty. It can exceed 7150 tons when fully loaded. 2270 tons of dry mass, it's the reason I had to make a provision to leave half of it behind to reach the really difficult places.

Nice rig! My own moaned in despair just on displaying it on a browser!!

(keep your fans clean and use good thermal paste - my MacPotato started to run almost 8ºC cooler last time I did this)

Edited April 26, 2022 by Lisias
Hit Save too soon.

[fleventeen]

31 minutes ago, Akagi said:

Aww, I don't have DLC!

I will work on a solution for this. It is hard given the current configuration, but I am looking at a higher lift config that may not require DLC.

[Akagi]

3 minutes ago, fleventeen said:

I will work on a solution for this. It is hard given the current configuration, but I am looking at a higher lift config that may not require DLC.

You could clip 10000 wings together