Shuttle Challenge v4 - The STS thread [Stock and Mod Friendly] [THREAD CLOSED 06.08.17]

[Sivonen]

Getting the fuel can back:

https://goo.gl/photos/wLFdnRwyyqQcAGr19

[Sivonen]

"Reach an orbit of 350+km and deploy three or more comsats with spin stabilization to equidistant geostationary orbits. De-orbit and land at either at the KSC, the Island Airfield just off of KSC, or at any Kerbal Konstructs airport."

 

How am I supposed to do the spin stabilization for STS-2a? Just slam reaction wheels into the satellite and press E to make it spin? Like this?

 

 

[armegeddon]

And now for a baked potato.  

This was my third attempt at this one. Since I was using version 1.3, and the Sentinel Telescope is now stock, and I had put that on my Space Telescope from STS-3, I re positioned it to a Solar Orbit just inside of Kerbin's orbit to track asteroids. Managed to find a Class B 'roid that came within 10Mkm of Kerbin without having to wait over a year.  My first attempt was to try grabbing a Class D, but it was soo big I could not grab it anywhere near the cargo bay. Second attempt I misjudged where the potato would shift my COM, even after mining all the resources out of it and couldn't land.

As you can see in the video, I still had a few problems grabbing the rock and landing, but did manage to get it done.

I messed up some of the screencaps so, most of the launch is not there, but it was similar to my previous ones, except I launched into a nearly polar orbit for rendezvous with the 'roid.

Mod list in in the video description. 

 

Now to figure out how I'm going to land on the Mun.

[Speeding Mullet]

On 6/17/2017 at 0:41 AM, Sivonen said:

 

I'm a bad pilot, so I brought two fuel pods up at once, if I mess up the first one somehow.

This was a failure, but I hope it's worth showing anyways.

 

It's implicit that the fuel in the pod is not used at any point in the flight.  Having said that taking 2 and filling the fuel pod before you un-dock it is fine in a way really as you are taking the fuel up there regardless.  As long as the tanks on the pod are full when it's deployed then I guess I don't have an issue.  Remember the fuel is contaminated though

 

On 6/17/2017 at 1:41 AM, scottadges said:

Awesome, thank you!

Pleasure!  Look forward to seeing the next missions....

 

17 hours ago, Sivonen said:

And here we go, with a boring design. The landing was my first successful one from orbit to runway.

 

Nice work!  The first shuttle I agree looks much cooler, but this one is clearly capable   Have a badge!  

 

SM

[Speeding Mullet]

9 hours ago, Sivonen said:

Getting the fuel can back:

https://goo.gl/photos/wLFdnRwyyqQcAGr19

Ha look at that Kerbal about to explode in the last photo!  Neat little landing markers you have there also.  Well done on returning the fuel pod, it's definitely a challenge!  

 

9 hours ago, Sivonen said:

 

"Reach an orbit of 350+km and deploy three or more comsats with spin stabilization to equidistant geostationary orbits. De-orbit and land at either at the KSC, the Island Airfield just off of KSC, or at any Kerbal Konstructs airport."

 

How am I supposed to do the spin stabilization for STS-2a? Just slam reaction wheels into the satellite and press E to make it spin? Like this?

 

Ah there's various ways to do it, but basically the spin has to be imparted as or before the comsat separates.  Easiest way I found to do it was a decoupler arrangement with sepatrons.  This one is more of a "If you've made a decent attempt to impart spin you cover it" thing.

 

5 hours ago, armegeddon said:

And now for a baked potato.  

Seriously, Bravo!  I mean, if NASA was serious about doing an Asteroid Redirect Mission then they'd better get serious about following this thread .  Very enjoyable video to watch on a lazy Sunday morning with coffee and croissant in tow!  

Genuinely pleased to be able to award you the gateway to interplanetary missions:  

 

Oh yeah - If you can land the potato, then you will find the Mun a little easier!  Well done!

 

 

Mini announcement - I'm aware that 1.3 is out, and I totally don't have an issue with people using 1.3 to compete in this challenge, so I'm going to totally remove the KSP version number from the thread title.  I'm doing a massive mission to Moho at the moment which is taking ages because I have no time, but once that is complete then I am likely to temporarily close this thread while I give it a major overhaul.  Don't worry though - That could be weeks or months away, and I will give plenty of warning.  It will also not affect anything that is in existence already so keep doing those missions!

 

SM

[Sivonen]

Ok, here's my design plan sketch for the three satellites.

-Put the shuttle into an orbit with Ap 2 863 333.52 m and adjust Pe to get orbit time of 4 hours

-Launch a satellite at Ap

-Satellites have small engines that will be used to circularize the orbits

-Sepratrons will give the satellite some spin

-Decouplers will detach the small engines leaving Okto probe core with battery, antenna and solar panels into orbit

-Repeat twice after one orbit of the shuttle

 

Edited June 18, 2017 by Sivonen
image

[Sivonen]

And here we go:

http://s38.photobucket.com/user/M_Sivonen/library/KSP STS-2a

I hope the spin stabilization is ok... First I can align the satellite, then make it spin and then detach the engines.

Edited June 18, 2017 by Sivonen

[battlekruiser]

Looks like I have something in a sleeve... something *big*, haha. And i'm not cool with my STS-9 results...

Edited June 18, 2017 by battlekruiser

[Sivonen]

And a little peek to the telescope in cargo bay:

 

[overkill13]

A pair of shuttle launches to assemble parts for my trip to Jool.  Also isn't she the cutest shuttle evah?  Yes she is.

 

[armegeddon]

On 6/17/2017 at 7:55 PM, Speeding Mullet said:

 

Seriously, Bravo!  I mean, if NASA was serious about doing an Asteroid Redirect Mission then they'd better get serious about following this thread .  Very enjoyable video to watch on a lazy Sunday morning with coffee and croissant in tow!  

Genuinely pleased to be able to award you the gateway to interplanetary missions:  

 

Oh yeah - If you can land the potato, then you will find the Mun a little easier!  Well done!

 

SM

I must be backward then as I found the Mun mission to be much more difficult.  I lost track of how many tries this took me, from trying to figure out how to land a semi-atmospheric craft on a body with no atmosphere, to trying to figure out how to get the research facility out of the cargo bay (ended up having to put an upward facing probe core SAS control, which then caused a problem with landing on the far side of the Mun out of LOS of the comsats, necessitating adding a couple mini-sats to put in orbit of the Mun), realizing I forgot the research facility crew (twice) and having to restart, crashing three attempts in a row while trying to get back off the Mun, discovering that there is not enough fuel left for an easy return (4-5 air-brake maneuvers took care of that), two restarts due to last brake maneuver pulling me too low and ended up on opposite side if planet from KSC, COM issues with nearly empty shuttle crashing while attempting to land.  Eventually it all worked out, even if some of the maneuvers were not pretty.  

On a good note, I have gotten really good at figuring out how to land on the Mun now. Wish there was enough semi-flat land to go a horizontal landing though (I want to recreate the landing from the movie AirPlane 2). And I can pretty much land every shuttle at the KSC manually now. In my modded game before I tried this challenge I used to always use Pilot Assist for flying, and either MechJeb or Gravity for launching and MechJeb or TCA for landing on other planets/moos.

Anyways, here's Mun STS-1:

 

[scottadges]

On 2/8/2017 at 2:23 AM, Speeding Mullet said:

Tolerances:

70-1999km - 100m

2000-4999km - 500m

4000-5999km - 1km

6000-8000km - 10km

8000km+ - 50km

Hi there, I'm starting to work on the STS-1b mission, but I'm not sure I understand the Tolerances part or the 70km+ maximum?

Appreciate if someone who has done this or @Speeding Mullet might clarify for the uninitiated? 

[armegeddon]

24 minutes ago, scottadges said:

Hi there, I'm starting to work on the STS-1b mission, but I'm not sure I understand the Tolerances part or the 70km+ maximum?

Appreciate if someone who has done this or @Speeding Mullet might clarify for the uninitiated? 

It means that if you want to place the fuel pod in an orbit in one of those ranges, the difference between the periapsis and apoapsis has to be less than that number. ie: if you want to put the fuel pod in an orbit with an apoapsis of 75000m, the periapsis must be between 74900m and 75100m in order for the mission to be considered a success.  The range allowed increases the higher the orbit.

Edited June 19, 2017 by armegeddon

[scottadges]

9 minutes ago, armegeddon said:

It means that if you want to place the fuel pod in an orbit in one of those ranges, the difference between the periapsis and apoapsis has to be less than that number. ie: if you want to put the fuel pod in an orbit with an apoapsis of 75000m, the periapsis must be between 74900m and 75100m in order for the mission to be considered a success.  The range allowed increases the higher the orbit.

Oh OK, so at an orbit of 8,000,000 meters (8000 km) the maximum apoapsis / periapsis difference is 50,000 meters (50 km).

But lower orbits i.e. below 1,999,999 meters (1,999 km) the maximum difference is 100 meters. 

Got it. Also sometimes thinking between kilometers and meters unfortunately makes my metric-challenged American-brain hurt. LOL

[Sivonen]

My entry to STS-3, telescope design and assembly.

We had only one telescope-looking blueprint at the KSC, but it seemed to be some kind of space telescope. Only silly bit in the blueprint was that inches were abbreviated as "mm"... Think about it; 200 millimeters long tube would definetly not make a space telescope! KSC engineers, you so silly!

 

edit: GODDAMNIT IMGUR!!! Again the image order is messed up after editing! Wait a bit, I'll try to fix it... For me it shows one of the latter images first. Just click it and it should be in correct order.

Edited June 19, 2017 by Sivonen
fkn....g imgur

[Speeding Mullet]

21 hours ago, Sivonen said:

And here we go:

http://s38.photobucket.com/user/M_Sivonen/library/KSP STS-2a

I hope the spin stabilization is ok... First I can align the satellite, then make it spin and then detach the engines.

Wow Photobucket burns my eyes.  I used to use it, but it's just an absolute garden of pop ups and ads now.  Shame!  Anyway, everything looked great here, and while you missed off your actual landing photos, I can see from the mission report that you were screaming towards KSC in a fiery rage, and have a decent history of sticking said landings, so I'm happy to award you the badge   

 

19 hours ago, Sivonen said:

And a little peek to the telescope in cargo bay:

Looking grand!

 

3 hours ago, overkill13 said:

A pair of shuttle launches to assemble parts for my trip to Jool.  Also isn't she the cutest shuttle evah?  Yes she is.

Nicely done with the Launch aborts on the Klipper.  It really is tiny considering you used the Mk3 cockpit!  28.9 g's though - They'd better have superb bone structure!

So am I right in saying that this wasn't really part of the Jool Rank 1 mission?  Only really saying that as it appears that you launched to crew your station, and you launched some comsats.  So that's two launches, none of which leave your shuttle ready to fly to Duna.  If it's part of a wider story then that's absolutely fine - crewing stuff is fun, and obviously it's expected you'd have a comnet in place around the destination planet, but if not then I'm afraid it's looking grim for a two launcher hehe

Looking forward to seeing this progress!

 

2 hours ago, armegeddon said:

On a good note, I have gotten really good at figuring out how to land on the Mun now. Wish there was enough semi-flat land to go a horizontal landing though (I want to recreate the landing from the movie AirPlane 2). And I can pretty much land every shuttle at the KSC manually now. In my modded game before I tried this challenge I used to always use Pilot Assist for flying, and either MechJeb or Gravity for launching and MechJeb or TCA for landing on other planets/moos.

Anyways, here's Mun STS-1:

Looks and sounds like you had fun along the way though, and isn't that the point!  button bash F5 F9 until things go right!  To the mission:

Ahhhh there you see!  Wasn't the shuttle just designed for things like landing on airless bodies and deploying heavy ground cargo from a top opening platform?!  This was a great mission report, and I was genuinely worried for a minute after watching about 12 minutes of de-orbit burn that you were going to smash into the ground, but the suicide burn was completed nicely.  It made me think of @Alchemist's hilarious (sorry) Duna videos which featured heavily on the landing bloopers.

Great mission, great payload and great for landing it back at KSC.  Here's your badge!!  

 

I wonder which you will do next!

 

2 hours ago, scottadges said:

Appreciate if someone who has done this or @Speeding Mullet might clarify for the uninitiated? 

@armegeddon nailed it.  Basically the higher you go the more likely your AP etc just bounces around so much tolerances are wishful thinking which is the reason for the increase.  Not sure if that's been bug fixed since 1.2.x though.

 

1 hour ago, Sivonen said:

My entry to STS-3, telescope design and assembly.

We had only one telescope-looking blueprint at the KSC, but it seemed to be some kind of space telescope. Only silly bit in the blueprint was that inches were abbreviated as "mm"... Think about it; 200 millimeters long tube would definetly not make a space telescope! KSC engineers, you so silly!

Order is looking fine to me!  I seriously don't know why Imgur doesn't upload in order, forcing you to rearrange hundreds of images though.  Oh brilliant - You've literally gone and made a pair of space binoculars that's fantastic haha!  Skunkworks for sure - 

Also the mission was well played out so you can have the less important mission badge   

 

Nice I'm staying up to date!  I wanted to see if I could get to 1000 likes at the same time as getting to 1000 posts, but with the amount I review I doubt that's going to happen.

SM

[Sivonen]

13 minutes ago, Speeding Mullet said:

Wow Photobucket burns my eyes.  I used to use it, but it's just an absolute garden of pop ups and ads now.  Shame!  Anyway, everything looked great here, and while you missed off your actual landing photos, I can see from the mission report that you were screaming towards KSC in a fiery rage, and have a decent history of sticking said landings, so I'm happy to award you the badge   

 

Order is looking fine to me!  I seriously don't know why Imgur doesn't upload in order, forcing you to rearrange hundreds of images though.  Oh brilliant - You've literally gone and made a pair of space binoculars that's fantastic haha!  Skunkworks for sure - 

Also the mission was well played out so you can have the less important mission badge   

Thanks for the badges!

Yea sorry for that photobucket adpoop, I was trying to find a better alternative to imgur. edit: Also there is pictures of the landing, just check your dev/null folder... I have no idea where those went.

Seems that imgur is the best for watching, but worst for uploading. I guess it's best for the uploader to have more work done, so all the viewers can watch the mission reports with ease.

Edited June 19, 2017 by Sivonen

[battlekruiser]

I found that uploading images one by one in reverse order works pretty fine with Imgur. And that *should* be less painful than manual rearrangement

[Sivonen]

STS-4/4R:  Can You Rescue Me?

This time I managed to delete the screenshots of the first shuttle launch. Well, the launch was quite indentical to the second one, so I guess it's not a big deal.

Bill was bored at Jebediah, because he didn't seem to respond to any music at all. Bill thought Jeb needed to be more reactive to the radio.

The radioactive reactor was assembled and launched to space. Plan was to insert some radioactivity in Jeb to make him less boring of a co-worker.

But oh noes! As the injection process was about to start, the craft suffered a serious hit from a meteor from the Object Thrower galaxy!

The meteor destroyed one wing completely and severely shuffled Valentina's snackbox.

 

Time to launch a rescue mission. Engineers to engineering stations!

Luckily there was a rescue ship designing handbook in the KSC library. "The most important thing to have in your ship rescueing ship is ladder and rope."

So the engineers looked at the parts bin, and found a bunch of ladders. But they had sold all the ropes to a rival company called KIS/KAS. As there was no time to go to Rope shop, they innovated a boom with attachment system at both ends. That would tie the shuttles together. They substituted the lack of rope with more ladders.

 

Let the slideshow show how it went!

 

 

Edited June 19, 2017 by Sivonen

[LordOfMinecraft99]

Alright, I will do this challenge. It will be with RealFuels, RealPlume, Procedural Parts, Procedural Fairings, and TweakScale

EDIT- and some visual mods.

Edited June 19, 2017 by LordOfMinecraft99

[Alchemist]

11 hours ago, Speeding Mullet said:

This was a great mission report, and I was genuinely worried for a minute after watching about 12 minutes of de-orbit burn that you were going to smash into the ground, but the suicide burn was completed nicely.  It made me think of @Alchemist's hilarious (sorry) Duna videos which featured heavily on the landing bloopers.

Yeah, I surely didn't expect 100 m/s horizontal velocity to be that much of a problem when not on the runway. Of course, this craft has got couple upgrades since then and so it should... Ah, well, I wouldn't leave all of that in that video if it it wasn't just hilarious with half of the issues attributable to Kraken himself!

Speaking of upgrades, guess where it is going. And yes, it carries all the deployable hardware for the mission. Still need to upgrade the second ship a bit, though...

 

 

Upd:

here's the second craft - based on normal HRO, but with some landing-grade upgrades

Yes, it carries the third set of ISRU. And the only one that is not going to be left behind in the same place.

Edited June 19, 2017 by Alchemist

[battlekruiser]

If a challenge doesn't allow separate supply launch, will the 2 shuttle 1 rocket do the job?

[Sivonen]

Question about mods.

What is the line between stock and modded badges? For now I have only used Hyperdit  ....only to test the crafts before running the missions full stock.

Visual mods should be good, but how 'bout MJ or KER? Joint reinforcement? "Stock-like" part mods? RO with no other than recommended mods?

 

The info should be included in the first post, so you don't have to answer it many times... And sorry for not reading through a million pages again.

[Speeding Mullet]

23 hours ago, Sivonen said:

Thanks for the badges!

Yea sorry for that photobucket adpoop

No worries.  Imgur is definitely more pleasant for viewing.  I actually find its uploader not too bad, if they could just change the photo ordering system.  There's probably a setting somewhere..

 

18 hours ago, Sivonen said:

STS-4/4R:  Can You Rescue Me?

Haha nice story around Object Thrower Galaxy!  Definitely a risk re-orbiting Kerbals on a ladder.  I actually had no idea you couldn't save under those circumstances but it sort of makes sense.  It's totally an invitation to the Kraken party.  Great work on recovering the re-entry under pressure, and a nice mission report once again.  Space station time me thinks!  

 

17 hours ago, LordOfMinecraft99 said:

Alright, I will do this challenge. It will be with RealFuels, RealPlume, Procedural Parts, Procedural Fairings, and TweakScale

EDIT- and some visual mods.

Look forward to seeing your shuttle, welcome to the challenge!

 

15 hours ago, Alchemist said:

Yeah, I surely didn't expect 100 m/s horizontal velocity to be that much of a problem when not on the runway. Of course, this craft has got couple upgrades since then and so it should... Ah, well, I wouldn't leave all of that in that video if it it wasn't just hilarious with half of the issues attributable to Kraken himself!

Speaking of upgrades, guess where it is going. And yes, it carries all the deployable hardware for the mission. Still need to upgrade the second ship a bit, though...

I would be sorely disappointing if you left it out my friend!  Good to see the HRO getting even more of an upgrade.  I believe one is Jool bound!

 

14 hours ago, battlekruiser said:

If a challenge doesn't allow separate supply launch, will the 2 shuttle 1 rocket do the job?

Hmm.  It doesn't count as a second launch so in theory yes, but then again the missions are designed to be completed by 1 shuttle, as the challenge is in integrating payloads etc.  If you use more than once shuttle then that opens us up to Shuttle abuse for payload capacity, so I'm going to say yes/no/maybe in this case.  You could do STS 5-8 in one mission with 4 shuttles bolted to an absurd rocket, that would be against the spirit of the challenge.  For example though, if you have something like a Shuttle boosting a Shuttle to orbit, then the delivery Shuttle may have wasted payload capacity, in which case why not.

In summary - See what you can get away with, but be prepared to be squashed like the arbitrary-and-known-only-to-me-on-a-whim rule breaker you may or may not turn out to be .

 

2 hours ago, Sivonen said:

Question about mods.

What is the line between stock and modded badges? For now I have only used Hyperdit  ....only to test the crafts before running the missions full stock.

Visual mods should be good, but how 'bout MJ or KER? Joint reinforcement? "Stock-like" part mods? RO with no other than recommended mods?

 

The info should be included in the first post, so you don't have to answer it many times... And sorry for not reading through a million pages again.

It's generally considered to be as follows - "If the shuttle and rocket is stock its stock".  to expand a little:

Visual mods totally fine - You can remain stock.  MJ and other autopilots - Totally fine (please see rule 2 for MJ clarification) - You can remain stock.  Part Mods (including stockalike) and part/planet modifying mods (including KJR and RO) will see you housed in Modded.

There's exceptions of course, for example if you are using a modded part on your shuttle that allows you to place handrails, or landing lights etc then you can still be in the stock category as that's really "visual" also.

 

It's actually way easier to not explain it in the OP and field questions (of which there aren't many), rather than endlessly iterate the rules when someone tells me about their 500 mods I have no inclination to research 

 

SM

Edited June 20, 2017 by Speeding Mullet

[Sivonen]

Makes sense, thank you. Just one more clarification that came into my mind.. Is it ok to jettison fuel with a mod? I mean I could just burn my monopropellant before landing, for me I don't see the difference with burning it with hyperedit...?