Lyra

Started a challenge with a friend who's new to KSP: she's sending at least one probe to orbit every body in the system, and I'm doing the same except using only cargo SSTO's. I found an old design and refurbished it a bit to make it into a proper workhorse, and made a smaller one for the Mun and Minmus. Also, landed back at the KSC for the first time! Many many missions, most of them with that big Mk3 plane you see there. I'm still deciding on a name for it, its placeholder designation is P-CRG-205 so if anyone has any ideas then tell me Might refine it a bit more and throw it up on KerbalX, at the moment I'm only using it to carry very light payloads and it's overkill for that

Over the past week or so I started a Vall-focused save and then got bored of it almost immediately, here's some miscellaneous pics from the missions that I thought were kinda neat At the moment I am working on another heavy SSTO, a smaller version of the massive one I posted a while ago

I'm currently trying to get a base to the surface of Vall in a science save, along with a rover sent separately at the same window, but every time I load up the base the game's FPS drops massively, down to slideshow levels. I tried loading the rover, and it's a bit better (mostly smooth but with frequent frame drops). Everything else seems to be working fine. Both craft in question have under 100 parts as they are now, and I launched a 250+ part SSTO earlier on a different save and it was nowhere near as laggy. Is this a known issue? My friend said it might be a memory leak or something, or it could just be the fact that I'm on an older computer and it's acting up, but I don't know if that would affect one specific ship only. EDIT: Tried messing around with patched conic limit and setting it to 2 fixed it for some reason? My guess is that it was trying to calculate a bunch of future orbits at once, but was stuttering because I had that flickering orbit line bug

I'm using version 1.12.5, which is the latest

She's finished now! LX-300 Crescendo is now officially complete (at least, I'm tired of working with it for now anyways). Max capacity of about 315 tons to LKO and payload dimensions of slightly wider than 5 meters. I'm extremely proud of this thing even though better craft have been made. It's also available for download on KerbalX, for everyone to use

So that's how they make the mystery goo...

The current prototype of Crescendo, a superheavy "practical SSTO" designed to lift big, bulky, and unusually-shaped payloads to orbit, with as low a part count as I could manage, and look great doing it. Test payload here is slightly over 300t but she can probably haul a bit more. Needs a bit of tweaking but after that I'll post the craft to kerbalx for everyone to enjoy. Also just noticed that all my other craft's photos are dead links now, I'll upload them to imgur at some point this week! FYI, Discord links to media will now expire after a certain amount of time, so don't use discord as a sole image host. Thankfully I still have the files locally.

Finally got this massive SSTO to fly. Slightly over 300 tons of payload to LKO with fuel to spare, with a part count of around 250 (I hadn't added thrusters for the test flight but did immediately after). Haven't tested reentry and landing but she should fly fairly easily. Needs a bunch of tweaking and optimization, after all that I'll post the craft on kerbalx for everyone to use

Not to be outdone, [REDACTED] Aerospace's light SSTO program produces another liquid-only craft. Roaring into orbit with 3400 m/s left in the tanks, it can easily get to the Mun, Minmus, Ike, or Gilly and return home safe and sound. A refueling base at its destination could bring it to Duna or even Laythe, with a few modifications.

145 tons to LKO in an external-payload SSTO. It's more than a little overkill and has a few issues, but i'm sure it'll work very nicely after some fine-tuning and removing a bunch of the excessive reaction wheels. At least it looks sufficiently cool.

Made my first successful gravity ring station! I just cheated it into orbit to test the expanding mechanism after it had some trouble earlier. I'm working on the bottom portion next and planning for it to be a refueling station, possibly over Minmus The previous attempt was uh... suboptimal.

Made a post about it in a different thread already, but I forgot just how terrible the Science Jr's heat tolerance is and put it directly behind my heat shield for a Minmus mission... leading to this.

Yesterday I started a save where I try to colonize Laythe and maybe some of the other moons in the system. It's got 60-70% science rewards (forget which one) so every science report is valuable. I sent a mission to the flats of Minmus and forgot that the Science Jr has a horrible heat tolerance, resulting in this very fun and definitely not at all terrifying reentry. Yes that large orange dot in the second photo is my heat shield flying off. I made it down safely but that didn't make it any less scary Also set up a 3-satellite relay in a fairly routine mission. Next stop: the Jool system

Havent done much kerbal lately as I caught covid and had to self-isolate in my evil lair for a few days. I'm mostly recovered now and made this cool and functional yet impractical warship. It uses overclocked KAL fireworks and has a functioning turret!

Yesterday I started an automated SSTO and today I tweaked it a bit more. At the moment it can go from launch to engine cutoff by itself. It has six KAL controllers (although I could probably get away with three or four if i was better at organizing them) and isn't practical at all but it's definitely cool. Orbital insertion is the most annoying part and that's next...

I was messing around with overclocking things with the KAL controller with my friends yesterday and ended up making this monstrosity: a working, fully stock (with DLC) version of TF2 Heavy's minigun. Featuring overclocked fireworks and rotating barrels, this thing took me over an hour to build and longer to calibrate. Best used with Infinite Propellant cheat on and Building Damage Multiplier set to max, so you can destroy the KSC. Uploaded to KerbalX right here. Have fun.

I did a few test runs with the craft to figure it out. It's got plenty of fuel left and I'm very familiar with flying it, so that helped with predictions. I've noticed that with a consistent periapsis and angle of attack, you can roughly predict where the skip will occur (usually quite high in the atmosphere before heating effects even show up) and account for it when planning the burn. I think after finishing this mission and a few more test flights with different craft I'll try to write a basic guide to Laythe entry, to save others the pain of finding out the hard way

Sorta figured it out - 45km periapsis and deorbiting about 270º behind the target seems to work fairly well. In general you just have to anticipate atmospheric skipping and account for it when planning a deorbit burn. Laythe's atmosphere is weird compared to Kerbin's lol

I'm flying a Jool 5 mission with a big old SSTO and just circularized at Laythe, but have yet to perform the landing. I know how to control roughly where I land on Kerbin after deorbiting, but Laythe is a very different beast and I have trouble predicting where I'm going to land. I have some experience with Laythe landings but almost every time my craft would skip off the atmosphere and mess up my trajectory. My craft is in a 60x60 km low orbit and my target is an equatorial island at about 109º longitude. I have plenty of fuel left to run the rapiers in air breathing mode but would prefer to land as close as possible to the island, ideally just east of it. Any tips?

Sent up a relay in kerbostationary orbit for my new career save. First time playing with the DLC and first time playing career.

Update: Just got a Karbal Kerman tourist. She wants to go to the Mun and Minmus... with five others.

I think I had a Phil Kerman once? I'll have to find the save

Made progress on another big SSTO design and skimmed 19 m above the water before the plane finally started to level out... quite a scary moment tbh

99% of the time "personalization" or "personalize your experience" is just corporation-speak for "we want to sell your data to advertisers and vomit targeted ads in your face" - and if my experience with Ublock Origin has taught me anything, those ads will make everything 3x slower. So yeah, opt out of that data collection. (I don't think KSP will ever have ads in it, but they'll probably appear elsewhere. Seeing a "watch this short video to revert to quicksave" prompt would be nightmarish lol)

Command pods can hold one of every unique experiment completed, so you should be fine. As for dv, I've been able to return to Kerbin with ~600 and my go-to dV calculator says 556 is the minimum; if you have 700 or more then you're 100% fine. If you really need to push the limits, transfer the liquid fuel, use EVA construction to put unnecessary parts (like extra solar panels or even empty fuel tanks) on the lander while it's docked, and then ditch the lander in Duna orbit. Good luck!