What did you do in KSP1 today?

[tajwo]

I visited a dead science probe on Minmus. I recovered the remaining science it had and brought it back to Kerbin.

All of its solar panels broke due to it hitting the ground a little too hard. One of the 4 engines on the probe was also completely destroyed. It attempted to transmit the remaining science data that it gathered. It failed and ran out of power in the middle of one of the transmissions. I just so happened to have a contract to get science from Minmus surface. I think this is one of my only successful precise landings that got within 5km of a craft.

Spoiler

Today I learned you can use KER to help with landing. I fiddled around with the normal, antinormal buttons for a bit before I was at the right spot.

This is not the first landing, I first landed ~2km away from the probe. I hopped from there to about 10m away from the probe. Pretty good I guess

The 'Akapello' rocket blasting off carrying Jeb, Bilsy and Luvis.

The liquid fuel boosters are discarded. Shorty after, the core stage (Mainsail) is also discarded

I did not take a picture of the spacecraft on this flight, here's a screenshot from an earlier mission to the Mün.

I already posted a picture of the Minmus probe here.

[Mignear]

Following the development of the AL-M-74, a project for a larger airliner type aircraft was started, it was decided that it would largely based on the AL-M-74 to reduce development time.

In the darkness of night, a new airliner type aircraft was rolled out for test flights.

[panzer1b]

Made BCorp's newest ship, the mark-4 variant of the Victory class cruiser.  Took aspects of various ships that i liked and mated it with a pretty nice bridge design.

The first variant of this ship with a truly massive interior.

View from the back of the observation deck/seconday bridge.

View of the overall layout, the main bridge is somewhat integrated with the hull and the secondary bridge is atop it sorta sticking out.  Ofc in combat no sane kerbal will go into the bridge that sticks out of the hull (and is notoriously likely to get shot off if anything hits the dorsal section near the center of the ship), but it actually works as sacrificial armor for the main bridge and the view of the entire top of the ship is cool.

Hangar is somewhat spacious and unlike the earlier variant is decided to go back to the mark-2's concept where the hangar doubled up as a weapons bay, if using it as a carrier its generally a good idea to ditch the heavy torps anyway due to part count and dV issues.  Anyways, with the torps removed it can fit 90% of all fighters/bombers i have available and with the torps it can fit 2 small fighters and 1-2 reloads per fighter.

Front of the hangar is where smaller fighters or utility things (probes, 0.6m weapons, ect) can fit.

You can see more or less what my inspiration is for this thing, front based on BC304, center based on the standard star destroyer, engine cluser from venator class, and well the bridge is sorta something i came up with that would somewhat integrate with the ship.

In other news, made a high gravity rated variant of the Dragon APC i made a while ago, with 2 more wheels and a small propeller fan in the rear to give it a hair more push since in higher gravity the energy consumption of wheels is so insane in stock you are pretty much forced to use propellers which despite common sense dictating otherwise, require a fraction of the electricity of wheels to maintain a higher speed then the wheels provide.  Not entirely sure what the devs were going with here where a propeller alone can accelerate this thing to around 40m/s on flat ground (while using the electricity of a single wheel) while 6 wheels just eat the batteries in a matter of minutes (under a minute when going uphill without prop assist).  Its not that i dont like to experiment and come up with different concepts, and wheels burning energy is a challenge that you need to overcome, but common, a land vehicle using 6 times the power of a plane makes no bloody sense as electric motors in the wheels should be way more efficient then sticking an airboat motor on the back of a rover.

And finally a nice beuty shot of the older low gravity/airless variant.  Sofar tested and functional on every planet but Eve (it can drive there but you need infinite electricity and it can barely go up the shallowest hill), Kerbin/Laythe/Tylo (works but requires inf electricity to go anywhere far between recharging), and some of the super low gravity moons like gilly, pol, ect (no RCS means this thing is just unable to stop if you can even get it going in the 1st place).  Aside from that, it can more or less just plow through parallax colliders with the exception of things like spikes, ice crystals and very large rock formations, which it can easily avoid as this thing steers very well and isnt very prone to flipping over (ample reaction wheels and suspension tweaked for quite a while until i got it perfect where it was grippy but not so grippy as to flip constantly in normal driving).  Overall it can maintain a sustained speed of around 15-20m/s (with x2 time accel) through any terrain but aforementioned spikes and or larger rocks, and it does this with no use of RCS whatsoever.

[The Aziz]

Planted a flag on Dres and Eeloo.

Only Joolian moons are left, and the ships are already coming.

[Robin Patenall]

Today, Jeb, Bill and Bob arrived in the  second half of my Moho mission "Hot Shots" and docked with the first part.

We have the rover component with the tiny pathfinder rover on the top and the main science roved beneath. The science rover supports two and with the orange and grey long range tank has a total of 3260m/s deltaV (1700m/s in the long range tank for going down and 1560m/s  in the rovers booster packs for going up). It will definitely get down but I'm not going to rely on its ability to get back into orbit on its own.

The lander supports three and has 2160m/s of deltaV, which is enough to get it down once and return. It includes storage with a set of surface experiments. This will probably not initially be landed as if the rover breaks down or gets stuck, the lander can go and retrieve the Kerbals on the surface.

 Of the three nuclear pushers, two are empty (of fuel, they has some mono-prop) and Pusher 7, the hitchhiker storage container and the  MK1-3 command pod form the return stage with about 6500m/s of deltaV which should be enough to get the Kerbals back without aerobreaking.  That deltaV is the minimum as there is quite a lot in storage, including  parts for  an ion powered lawn chair that should be able to get two Kerbals back into orbit from the surface.
 In the case of a serious system failure, in about 100 days a rescue ship should arrive which would allow the Kerbals to be rescues and returned to Kerbin, having over 7000m/s once in orbit of Moho, as long as they don't mind being rather cramped. It should have arrived already (before the Kerbals) but there was a slight issue with transfer window timing (If you put a vessel outside Kerbin's SOI, the transfer window moves by a few days and, in the case of Moho, that makes a lot of difference) 

[Blufor878]

You know those old rocket drawings we made as kids? My older brother has one of his lying around in my bedroom (used to be his room), so I decided to make it into a reality (or kerbality, whatever)

[swjr-swis]

Jeb got his latest online purchase delivered: AlteraCo's Invisible Phantom. He wasted no time unwrapping it, fueling it up and taking it for a spin.

 

But Jeb wouldn't be Jeb if that's where it stopped. 3.5 hours of metal banging and grinding sounds later, the Invisible Phantom II emerged from the SPH. And Jeb had another little try out...

 

(With thanks to AlteraCo for an entertaining end of my weekend.)

[Mignear]

The larger airliner type aircraft was completed. It carries 138 passengers+6 crew, with over 9000 units of fuel.

[Beamer]

The engineers at KSC have continued working on their jet. Its design has now solidified, no longer a prototype but a production vehicle it has been named the "SuK-Hai Mk-1 Kerbut". Marked changes from the prototype are a cobra-like curve in the fuselage that this astro-scribe must admit looks pretty BadS.

According to Valentina Kerman It performs great, and who are we to question our very own top-gun. One of the changes they made was to replace the short Mk-2 liquid fuel tank with a short Mk-2 cargo bay which can fit a Mk-1 and four Mk-0 liquid fuel tanks for some extra range. In addition, without the Mk-0 fuel tanks there is plenty of space to fit in a load of science equipment for atmospheric science runs. The pilots have taken to naming this craft the "5-star Kerbut", supposedly because only the very experienced pilots are capable to get the most out of this high performance jet.

An engineer I spoke to mentioned that Valentina repeatedly managed to break the 20g barrier in sharp turns and loopings. Consequently it is not surprising that KSC is now taking on orders for "High-g adventures" where the rich playboys and girls of our time can experience how it feels to pass out while weighing as much as one would standing on the surface of Jool. Several versions have been created of this craft, I've been told the "Engine pre-cooler" directly behind the cockpit can safely be replaced with a two person crew cabin or an extra fuel tank without "starving the engines". Whatever that means. Those engineers and their jargon!

During testing of this craft many trips were made to the Desert Airfield and on one such trip Valentina recorded some images of strange old ruins in the nearby mountains. The boffins were very interested in this discovery and demanded that an expedition be mounted at once to carry a rover and a science team to the Desert airstrip so that the ruins can be inspected close-up. At the same time, the pilots were also making demands. Although the new jet can comfortably make it to the Desert airstrip, it lacks the fuel to fly back again and, as one of the test pilots put it: "What's the point of flying out to the desert if we then have to tow back the plane?" In short, they demanded refueling capabilities be planned for the Desert airfield.

Never afraid of a challenge, the KSP engineers got to work immediately to design an aircraft that could carry heavy equipment to the Desert location. It wasn't long before the first test flights were made, and let me tell you, not all of them were successful! After a large number of designs and iterations though, the engineers finally reported success and presented the "Kargo Karrier Mk-1".

Powered by four of the heaviest jet engines available this craft can cruise at an altitude of 5-6 km at 750 km/h and has enough range to fly from KSC to the Desert Airfield. Its cargo bay is divided in two partitions. The back bay with the loading ramp contains the "DunaBuggy" science rover (which despite its name will also work on Kerbin, they assured me).

Also visible in this image is the centrally placed ore refinery. The front bay meanwhile contains the other gear needed for producing fuel, a mining drill of course, as well as two arrays of fuel cells, ore and oxidizer storage and cooling equipment. The bay door opens to the bottom allowing the mining drill to reach the ground so this enormous craft can fill up its fuel tanks when landed.

Once completed, the craft was flown to the desert airfield. The pilot complimented the engineers with a job well done, according to her the approach to and landing on the arguably short and uneven Desert airstrip could be done entirely by the autopilot, requiring only minor inputs from the three person crew of pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer.

To facilitate the refueling of other vehicles, the back loading bay contains a contraption of various pistons, hinges and servos with a claw at the end that allows it to grab on to anything rolled up to the back of this heavy carrier. Once locked on the Kargo Karrier can refuel other planes or ground vehicles directly from its built-in fuel refinery.

Ingenious indeed!

Of course the science team didn't waste any time heading out on their first excursion, although they misjudged the terrain causing them to take a lot longer to make the approximately 25 km trip than they expected. Although the DunaBuggy has some nuklear power to keep it heated and lit during the night, driving in the mountains requires quite a bit of electricity so they decided the make camp when the sun set at the halfway point and will continue their journey tomorrow. Fortunately they packed plenty of snacks in the rover's Experiment Storage Container to make it through the night. During their trip they were able to test the DunaBuggy's roll-cage design in the field as they took a tumble down one of the steep mountain slopes. I've been assure that "This is fine".

 

[tajwo]

I'm just going to the Mün to rescue someone, nothing to see here....

[capi3101]

Hey y'all. Not dead, just been figuring out workarounds for lingering bugs these last couple of weeks. Hoping these ultimately get fixed, though since some of them have been around since 1.4, I'm not really holding my breath at this point. Maybe in KSP2. Who knows. I'll do a full report later this week when I'm not two hours behind on every last damn thing I have to do.

Edited October 31, 2022 by capi3101

[ColdJ]

Been trying out a new method to work out how to build an SR71 Blackbird.

Much left to do and it hasn't got it's own texture pic yet.

Funny, I had never realised it had kinks in the outer wings till I started building it.

[Hotel26]

This is Spike 2:

 

30 docks (large & medium).  24 kerbals.  267,000 kallons LF/OX.

I launched it on a 3-stage Dreadnought.  The third stage, a Rhino, may be retained for transfer to site of duty.  Refueled in LKO, Spike has 6.7 km/s dV.

Time will tell how robust the construction is...
 

Spoiler

Smaller brother, Spike:

 

Edited November 2, 2022 by Hotel26

[magnemoe]

An weird idea I got yesterday.  
Sent up an rocket with 144 tiny probes who I dumped after setting them on an free return trajectory from the Mun.

They would not seperate so I gave them an tiny bump with the second stage, decopler strength was 1% the 8 to the rear was pressed out on decopling and would not be bumped. 
Well after that Mun flyby and one orbit they got another Mun encounter, one probe impacted the Mun the 8 behind passed behind the Mun and will get kicked into sun orbit. 
The rest will crash into Kerbin.

Final orbit 

They are mostly 30-70 km apart so its not much to look at during impacts. 

Pe after free return trajectory was 50 to 250 km. 

Edited November 1, 2022 by magnemoe

[Blufor878]

10 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

An weird idea I got yesterday.  
Sent up an rocket with 144 tiny probes who I dumped after setting them on an free return trajectory from the Mun.

They would not seperate so I gave them an tiny bump with the second stage, decopler strength was 1% the 8 to the rear was pressed out on decopling and would not be bumped. 
Well after that Mun flyby and one orbit they got another Mun encounter, one probe impacted the Mun the 8 behind passed behind the Mun and will get kicked into sun orbit. 
The rest will crash into Kerbin.

Final orbit 

They are mostly 30-70 km apart so its not much to look at during impacts. 

Pe after free return trajectory was 50 to 250 km. 

What is your computer made of, and can I have some?

[magnemoe]

5 minutes ago, Blufor878 said:

What is your computer made of, and can I have some?

The computer I did this on is actually pretty weak. 
It's not as bad as it looks, Its around 300 parts here 144*2 + 10 for second stage. The map screen lagged pretty bad as its 145 trajectories but outside of map it was no issues. 

[Rakete]

--- preparing to launch this nuclear powered behemoth up to the mun to collect LqHe3 ---

A sky crane is already mounted and should do the job. The machine kinda reminds me of our german street cleaning trucks ("Kehrmaschine"). Now I need a nice transmunar-stage and a big launcher. I estimate about 150t to lift into orbit, once the transmunar-stage has been built.

I think, I'm gonna use my Javelin - Block A standard launcher with 15.000 kN, that I built for 180t payloads.... a bit more safety margin is always good. Maybe some downstripping.... let's see with how much lift-mass we end up...

The vehicle uses parts from Near Future, Far Future, Heat control and Planetside Mods

 

Edited November 1, 2022 by Rakete

[Beamer]

I decided my Desert Airfield was still missing something. Guess what. Well, it fits in one of these.

After an uneventful flight and the world's most hairiest landing, the Kargo Karrier arrives at the Desert Airfield and starts unpacking, because its cargo has to get to work right away.

After managing to unload it without breaking any of the many wheels (good thing too, I forgot to pack repair kits) I drove it to the front of the plane it just came out of.

Guessed what it is yet? It's an Airplane Tug! Took me a looooot of test runs to figure out a coupling that worked. I tried various claw configurations, but they just end up launching the tug into the air when they lock on. In the end I went with 2 heavy hinges attached to a heavy piston, contact areas covered with grip pads, to grab on to the front wheel and make a physics based connection. Another 2 heavy hinges form an adjustable V stand to rest the nose on. The first 2 heavy hinges grab on to the wheel and the piston pulls the plane's nose onto the V stand so the front wheel is lifted off the ground. One of my requirements was it had to be able to tug a fully loaded and fueled Kargo Karrier, as well as light and low-nosed jets, so I tested with both of those.

Here's a shot of the open coupling.

And here a series of shots showing the coupling process.

Spoiler

First back up to the nose wheel.

Close the 'claw' hinges and start pulling in the piston.

Adjust the V stand hinges to lift the nose wheel a little off the ground.

We have a solid coupling!

All 12 ruggedized wheels are powered, the front 2 axles steer, and in the back there are 6 additional landing gear wheels to support the weight. The front and back carriage are connected with 2 perpendicular hinges and a servo to ensure good wheel contact with the ground when going up or down a runway side or end or hitting a few bumps and to allow for making turns. The torque strength of all 3 components can be adjusted from 0 to 100% by moving a KAL controller's play position from 0 to 10.0. When empty a setting of 6 or 7% works well but with a heavy plane on the back a setting of 20% does a better job of keeping everything in line. The limits for the hinges and servo are set at sensible levels and they are powerful enough to pull the front carriage back in line. If it threatens to veer off all I need to do is pull the KAL controller to the 10.0 second mark and everything straightens out.

Still, occasionally I have to switch back to the plane (remember these are not hard docked, they are 2 separate crafts) to hit the brakes. I found that leaving the brakes of the plane on and setting them to 5% strength still allowed me to tug it with a lower risk of a runaway situation. Once that plane goes it keeps going so managing speed is a must and tight turns are not a thing. I managed to make it all the way without breaking anything though.

Did I say the landing at the Desert Airstrip was the hairiest landing ever? Well I managed to beat that record when I came back to the KSC. I completely forgot I had set the brakes to 5% :s So yeah, yay for reverse thrust engines, but with my landing skills I still needed a tiny bit of extra runway...

Pfew, that was too close for comfort, 10 more meter and I'd have had wet tires... But hey, any landing that you can taxi back to the runway from without damage is a perfect landing in my book!

I also ferried back the science team that was exploring the mountains near the Desert airstrip, leaving only a skeleton crew of a pilot to drive the tug and a high level engineer to crew the mining equipment. They were playing Happy Families until deep in the night.

 

[panzer1b]

Made another battle, this time without any support ships as just 2 of these are laggy enough for my tastes.

Rearmed the Victory class with thermal cannons (pirate tech, cheaper, faster firing and not that much weaker then the usual BCorp plasma weapons, 90m/s vs 100m/s).

The ships are actually quite matched in broadsides.  The dimension has 6 turrets vs the Victory's 4, but the Victory fires each barrel faster so they are actually more or less the same there.  Armor is not so useful (against fireworks which pretty much bypass all but very thick armor and gut the interior) but both ships have a crapton of redundancy (15+ command pods/seats, 7-8 engines, lots of fuel tanks ect) making them hard to really hurt with turreted glancing blows (outside of true point blank turrets are usually going to hit at best 50% of the time anyway against ships of this size (and are borderline useless against smaller things like corvettes and fighters, need guided 0.6m for those).

Headon firing is a whole other story since the Dimension has that massive double forward firing AT gun (same thing as on all my tanks) which is overclocked to 300m/s and will gut armor albeit unreliably (velocity is so high it's chances of phasing through the target outright are very high).

The heavy cannon does cut armor apart as you can see here with the engine mounting girder being blown clean off.

Might look terrible for the Victory but after the fight it actually retains 1 engine (and around 400m/s dV), 2 of the 4 cannons (with a little bit of ammo left), and is still controllable albeit barely as the only control is RCS which has lost a few emitters leading to an inability to roll without also pitching (and correcting that pitch makes it roll the opposite direction but you cant both stop it from rolling AND aim where you want it to aim at the same time).  The Dimension has 2 engines left and around 1500dV (they are nukes afterall), albeit i cant engage them above 30% throttle due to both being on the same side), lost the nose gun, and 3 turrets, but took no real hull damage due to the Victory lacking anti-armor capability with it's turrets (only the squishy internals went down).  Still, its what i expected would happen since the Dim is larger, heavier, and like 3-4 times the cost.  Now if only i could do something about the part counts to prevent these things from being relegated to heavy torpedo sniping (both of these vessels carry 4 heavy torps as their primary firepower).  Wish i could have 1 Dim and like 2 Victorys engaging at the same time, but its just too laggy to do quite that much (Dim could main gun one target while firing turrets at the 2nd one).

[Kerbalsaurus]

My install broke! I have to move all the flags, screenshots, saves, and mods that weren't installed by CKAN moved to another folder, and then I have to re-install the game and everything!

[ColdJ]

6 hours ago, Kerbalsaurus said:

My install broke! I have to move all the flags, screenshots, saves, and mods that weren't installed by CKAN moved to another folder, and then I have to re-install the game and everything!

I know that using a service to install games is in fashion but this is why I bought direct from Squad, now Private Division, and why I get my mods from Spacedock. You download once for each thing. You then have them on your computer or on a safe backup drive. If anything fails you can easily do a fresh install without needing to go online and waste more data. You know what is installed because you put it there. You can move mods out to another folder if you are not currently using them, simple cut and paste. And you always launch from the direct executable, not from a launcher.

KSP is a nice, straightforward game, that is very accessable and has a logical folder layout. So it is better that the average user be aware of how it is layed out. You install 1 mod at a time when you start (plus dependencies if they are needed), that way if something conflicts you know straight away what caused it.

Due to this method, the only time I every crash to desktop is if I create an engine config with a bad tangential curve that Unity can't handle. Never crashed due to anything else.

[Krazy1]

On 11/1/2022 at 8:18 AM, magnemoe said:

Sent up an rocket with 144 tiny probes

Scott Manley did something similar to demonstrate Principia, but not as many probes.  4:40  https://youtu.be/eU-kLLeE7n0

[magnemoe]

4 hours ago, Krazy1 said:

Scott Manley did something similar to demonstrate Principia, but not as many probes.  4:40  https://youtu.be/eU-kLLeE7n0

Thank you, that was interesting. I think that with patched conics you have to have Ap outside of the Mun orbit for something interesting to happen. Usual result else is that you get kicked out into solar orbit. 
With Ap higher you will either crash back to kerbin or kicked out depending on who side you pass on.

[panzer1b]

Yeah, this is about the most chaotic and laggy thing ive done in years, the last time i remember dealing with lag THIS bad was with 1000 part warships back in 0.25...

3v2 fight with ALL ships firing simultaneously, believe it or not its not even quite in seconds per frame...

The frigate was the only ship that was actually knocked out early with its crew taken out, ill have to replace the internal command pods with the mk1 cockpits which have better armor at least against the likes of 100m/s fireworks, the observation deck which is the only armored bridge happened to be unmanned for some reason (i just randomly stuck 3 kerbals inside the ship without thinking what pod they were in).

Moving in the starfighter since the Dimension lost 2 of its 3 port side turrets through some dumb luck shots (its really hit or miss, sometimes i can unload an entire 128 round turret without damaging a single weapon, sometimes the 1st few bursts shots blow half the guns off).

Which ofc was prolly not the smartest move given the ship has turrets, luckily the damage dealt wasnt too bad (not to mention it's ammo was pretty much depleted by this point).

Ended up engaging with the starboard turrets which were still intact, and by this point the corvette and fighter was out of ammo, the frigate was dead (even though it was still firing randomly due to being unable to shut down the firing sequence with no control), the Victory lost both its turret controllers (no more autofire,might move em somewhere better protected), and the Dimension lost half its engines (the one thing that sucks with nukes is the massive hitboxes combined with the very weak impact tolerance making them extremely easy to shoot off) and also all its port side turrets.  Still, i think turn based 1v1s make more sense as the lag is more manageable and the fireworks make for a really nice stock slugging match with some amount of randomness regarding who wins (its usually the ship that looses its guns 1st) and both ships able to engage at the same time.  Not gonna bother bringing 5 ships into load range while firing anything as its too painful to watch and extremely chaotic to have to constantly shift between ships to adjust their aim or make them maneuver to counter the recoil...

[Kerbalsaurus]

I didn’t really do much today (or rather yesterday). All I really did was install new mods, and tried them out. I’ll list the mods here if you want them.