What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Louella]

Today, I built a rescue vehicle to rescue a Kerbal who had somehow become trapped in low orbit (presumably from a rival space program).

After much confusion regarding how to make a rendesvous and several attempts to match orbits with sufficiently low approach speed...

Jack Kerman has now joined our space program and is on a return to Kerbin.

[Norpo]

You know. The usual.

It went really fast when I added radial orange engines...

...And unleashed the NaN Kraken, but other than that, great!

(and yes the body of the bike is made out of SAS modules)

[Louella]

I just now built a "Crew Training Bus", which lofts into low Kerbin orbit, a command pod attached to two hitchhiker containers, and a small engine and fuel tank, which allows me to train a pilot and 8 other Kerbals to level 1, with one mission, heh.

[justidutch]

Created a ring station, using 90 of the MK3 crew cabins. So it has accommodations for 1440 Kerbals! I have attached the second phase which is the fuel tank depot: 12 of the Kerbodyne S3-14400 tanks, a capacity of 77,760 units of fuel. It took 11 launches so far. Next is a cluster of science labs, and then an observatory.

[capi3101]

That right there is a thing of beauty. Seriously.

Myself, I haven't had time to fart around with the Mk3 parts to much yet - just long enough to be disappointed (once again) that there aren't wings dedicated to handing Mk3-sized craft...

[Jouni]

I took some Dres contracts in the career mode. As I didn't have much time, I launched a simple probe instead of sending a manned mission.

The payoff was ridiculous, and I was able to unlock the tier-3 R&D. Next it's going to be Laythe and/or Vall, as I'm not going to get a Tylo exploration contract in this game.

[klesh]

I went to the tallest peak on Kerbin with the same boys that went to K2. I'm hoping to deploy a weather station there shortly.

[DGonzalez]

I've been hitting the F5 key like every hour or so in the daily Kerbal forum.. Waiting for ANY news on new updates and so. And to think its almost wednesday :'(

[Treldon]

Didn't do much, still in early stages of career. Lots of test contracts.

But I did build this little fella for the survey missions

[DBT85]

Well following on from my successful launch of ComSat 2 above, ComSats 4, 5 & 6 were also all put into the same 1000km orbit around Kerbin with a 90 degree separation between them. Their orbital periods vary by 1.5 seconds between them. Never done that before so quite proud.

ComSat 3 splashed down somewhere downrange of KSC after a staging malfunction thanks to me removing the fairing to make a change and putting it back and assuming the staging would remain! As Mr Manley says, "check yo staging".

Also today I put my first ever SCANSat into a perfect 75km polar orbit around Kerbin.

[Slam_Jones]

Performing some Kerbal-based tests for my planned Laythe Kolony

So far I've got the Science Hub and a Jet Boat designed.

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[Concentric]

Tested a payload-carrying RATO spaceplane, used it to finish a survey contract and complete a satellite contract, and put Seanski on his return trajectory, with a periapse of 25km.

Haven't named this one, either, but it needs a little work, still. The jet engines come on and rev up, then the RT-10s ignite as the launch clamps release. These get the plane climbing immediately, without the need of the runway, so I can use more parts than my SPH allows. It's a rather straightforward flight to orbit, and Engineer Nelton got it to a ~90km circular, though I think I wouldn't like him to fly it without the Okto's stability assistance. Those fins on the payload satellite ensure that the CoL is in the same location relative to the CoM with or without the payload attached, which is nice.

It was at this moment that I realised that the target orbit for the satellite went around the other way. My quicksave in orbit (and quickload to same) had removed the ability to revert the flight, so I decided to go ahead and salvage it.

First, I disabled access to 55 units of the plane's oxidiser, then burned prograde until the rest of the plane's oxidiser was used. Those 55 units would be reserved for deorbiting the plane to go to the survey locations and land. Next, I detached the payload, and had it raise its apoapse to half-way between the target periapse and apoapse. Then, a burn retrograde until that became prograde, reversing the orbit and bringing the periapse to 1Mm. A prograde burn with some radial components put the periapse in about the right place, and a burn at the descending node fine tuned that and matched inclination. Finally, I made a burn at periapse to get the target orbit, and there was still a bit of fuel left over.

---

After the first burn of the payload satellite, I worked out some timings. Using a Keostationary satellite I put up for another contract a while ago, I determined how many orbits it would take to bring the survey locations almost exactly under the plane's periapse, and from there how long before I wanted to deorbit. I also checked the times of the burns for the satellite and Seanski. It turned out that the satellite would perform its reverse, then about an hour later was Seanski's escape from Mun SoI (and thus his burn), then an hour and a half before Nelton's deorbit in the plane, and about another hour after his landing was the satellite's inclination burn.

Burning the last of the fuel brought the periapse just under 190km, so it was clear that Seanski would have to use the miraculously-refilling EVA pack, get out, and push. I determined that it was probably easiest to push from the bottom of the capsule, so one long shove later his periapse was down below 55km - I left 0.25 units to get back in. Now, that'd work, but it would take several passes, so I got Seanski out to push again.

I don't know the exact point, but there is a particular height of periapse where the camera angle of a Kerbal on EVA changes. It's somewhere between 20 and 50km, I know that much. Every time Seanksi's periapse crossed this mystery point, the camera turned 90 degrees, changing the "downward" direction between radial in (below) and antinormal (above). This was rather irritating when adjusting the periapse to roughly 25km, and when subsequently trying to get back in, but I managed. This trajectory should bring Seanski home without any additional passes, I think, and that'll be about a Kerbin day away.

---

Finally, Nelton's flight back. I used all the reserved oxidiser to deorbit with the 30km periapse roughly at the survey locations, which were both >18km on pretty much the opposite side of Kerbin to KSC. In fact, these were the two left over from the mission I sent my VTOL on. Making use of the wings and drag to adjust course, I got the westernmost survey location first, then fired up the jets to fly to the other one, climbing back over 18km altitude in time to get that too. Next, I cut throttle, quicksaved, and glided down to the grasslands below. Deceleration and low speed, low altitude behaviour was horrible, uncontrolled loops, spins and sudden lifts all over the place, but fortunately Nelton had parachutes to make the landing easier. This still wasn't great, but I guess it's because I never checked against the dry CoM when I adjusted the wings. Perhaps there was a bit much lift, too.

However, Nelton did eventually land safely, and was recovered - and the combined rewards from the contracts brought my funds to 1038k, finally enough to upgrade my R&D centre to level 2. With 790 science and all <100 science nodes unlocked, this is an important step for the space program, even if it makes me near-broke.

[Liowen]

Today I decided to test my Laythe SSTO and tug combo, and they docked so easily it made me worry.

Jeb takes a moment to secure the Smig to the tug, or pusher really, and hopes it doesn't just spin out of control....

And off he goes!

It did start off fairly uneventful but of course that didn't last. During the burn I decided to take a look from the cockpit like I normally do, this is a VERY bad idea I found out. I never knew that it would change the "control from here" of a craft, and having it locked on to the maneuver node it began to spin to correct itself. A quick jump back to the main screen and hitting control from here on the probe got it sorted, but I am sure it wasted a lot of fuel LOL. Well hopefully tomorrow I can get to Jool and see how this works on Laythe.

[TrooperCooper]

During my Duna operation I ran into the problem of having to do precision landings for contracts without beeing able to visually tell where I have to land. So I figured I need something that can drive arround after it made it to the ground. As a first try, I came up with this:

Needles to say it ended in a catastrophy. Thankfully it was unmanned.

So instead I am now working on this:

A heavy drop-ship that can deliver a real rover to any point on Dunas surface and pick it up afterwards again, once the mission is done. First time ever I am using a KAS winch system. I'm 99% sure there are more efficient and less monstrous solutions possible. But the design looks promissing to me,... and its also the first time ever that I use a non-self propelled rover system with return-capabilities. Handling is good and TWR is high enough. Fuel consumption per run is... acceptable. The part count appears frightening to me though. Docking this to my orbital outpost for re-fueling certainly wont be much fun...

The rover is performing great. At least on Kerbin. Built symmetrically for easy handling during the transport stage(s) and with a low profile, its fun to drive arround. Will see how long it takes me to crash it within Dunas lower gravity...

[Kowgan]

@TrooperCooper: If you're playing modded, maybe In-Flight Waypoints will help you.

[BJ Quest]

Added floats to one of my aircraft. I Like it. Take off from the water/ocean requires a bit of a special technique but otherwise it did fine. :-)

[tygoo7]

I made a Minmus colony for Jebediah and Bartley Kerman. It's called MiniBase. I don't have any pics from further away to see the whole base because I forgot to take one.

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[TrooperCooper]

@TrooperCooper: If you're playing modded, maybe In-Flight Waypoints will help you.

See, thats what I ment with likely more efficient solutions.

Meanwhile though, this little bugger has already arrived at its first destination...

And after spending the better part of an evening designing it and about half a million K$ in launch costs, I cant resist to crash it try it out now.

Thank you for the link though. That seems like a very usefull mod and it will definitely go into my GameData directory one of these days.

[Parallax]

Learned to kOS. Began work on new walker script:

I have a feeling this is going to turn into something awsome, there are so many things you can do with kOS and IR (that you cant with autohotkey)... very exciting stuff

[kinnison]

As I mentioned before, I had a High orbit polar probe around kebin that didn't have enough fuel to de-orbit. So I transferred it to the Mun. When I got into the Mun SOI I just needed to do a 50m/s burn to get it close to a unmanned rover that was on the mun. Obviously this was not part of the military program, this was FOR SCIENCE!

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It revealed a minor bug/Kraken in the process

Edited January 7, 2015 by kinnison

[soulsource]

My mission(s) to Duna left Kerbin orbit. It's a crewed ship with an attached lander for Duna itself, and a heavy unmanned probe with 3 Science Jr.s and Goo containers for Ike. The ship with the Kerbals will of course return, but the probe will probably be stuck on Ike, so its data will just be transmitted. After launching these two ships, I accepted a contract to put a satellite in Duna orbit, so I launched another lightweight probe, and then another contract for an orbit around Ike popped up, so there are now 3 probes and one ship on their way...

While preparing the probes for Duna I realized that Eeloo looked suspiciously close to a transfer window as well, and indeed now a lightweight probe is on its way to land there.

Apart from that I did some grinding - visual surveys of Minmus and temperature scans of the Mun - in order to finance the Tier 3 upgrade of the R&D at some point in the future...

[WWEdeadman]

Finally started a 0.90 career. In my version of "hard mode"

[Cuky]

My KSP lately runs as it wants...sometimes I can launch it with no problem at all, play for 2-3 hours and than exit the game without any problem. Yet sometimes (like yesterday and today) while loading game crashes and I get "Too many heap sections" message. I know it is related to me running out of memory, but I am not really sure why sometimes it works, and on other occasions it doesn't. I have never used less mods than now in my 5-6 months of KSP experience and after I have added few base mods I like to use I haven't added any new one since I started my career (while removing RealChutes because I had problems with it). I am using RemoteTech, DRE, FAR, KW, NFSolar, K2 pod, Tweakable everything, few module fixes and twealable landning gears.

[capi3101]

After transferring my flags from 0.25 to 0.90 I ditched my first 0.90 career save and started up my "official" one. Spent the evening with parts testing launches and fulfilling the four initial "milestone" contracts. Was able to launch a Stayputnik single-stage to orbit. That one I didn't get any return on the flight but it only cost a little less than √4,000, so it wasn't too big of a hit. Upgraded the Administration Building and Mission Control to Level 2 and by night's end I had my first survey plane built. I'm thinking of taking the design and copying it to 0.25 to check the balance. I really need to work on beefing up my coffers so I can afford some facility upgrades at this point - I'm about to hit the limits of what you can unlock with the Level 1 R&D and the 18 tonne VAB limit is a serious nuisance. At the moment I've managed to save up a little over √100,000.

[Loerelau]

Continued my travels on Duna after a cold night.