What did you do in KSP2 today?

[nanib53766]

On 3/29/2024 at 2:19 AM, Kimera Industries said:

But they are side missions. Not exactly spurring. I'm sure it helps, though.

I think it’s normal, but not everyone may like it, but it depends only on the player’s preferences link

Edited April 15 by nanib53766

[Casellina X]

I've wasted some time off and on over the past few days putting together this monstrosity, only to discover... not enough dV.

Back to the drawing board.

[Scarecrow71]

So after spending weeks and weeks to get to Tylo...I was able to get to Eeloo's SOI and back in one go.  It's a side mission to get into Eeloo's SOI, but this was far easier than getting to the surface of Tylo.

I collected some Science along the way, and I transmitted back what I could.  But the samples have to be returned to the KSC, so I tried to get this thing home.  And failed.  I underestimated how much dV I'd need to get back to Kerbin by about 1000 or so, so I attempted the all-too-common direct descent.

That shot shows me using all of my available fuel, but I actually stopped burning just as soon as the red indicator for a collision came up.  Which left me with about 1500 or so m/s of fuel, which I started burning as soon as I hit the upper atmosphere.  I was able to slow down enough to pop the parachutes at about 6500 meters, which is far better than I thought I'd get.  Unfortunately, I brought along the wrong chutes, so I only got down to 25 or so m/s of speed.  Crashed upon impact.  Oh well, at least I got some science out of this, plus the 8k for getting into Eeloo's SOI.

For what it's worth, I think the mission to Tylo comes way too soon.  "Orbit Kerbin.  Now go to the Mun.  Now Minmus.  Now Duna.  Now shoot for the edge of the solar system and land on one of the densest rocks out there."  Way too soon.  That mission shouldn't come up until we've at least gotten large hydrogen engines.  Which begs the question:  If contracts in KSP1 can be available based upon what you've already accomplished and parts you already have, why can't KSP2?

[magnemoe]

48 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

So after spending weeks and weeks to get to Tylo...I was able to get to Eeloo's SOI and back in one go.  It's a side mission to get into Eeloo's SOI, but this was far easier than getting to the surface of Tylo.

I collected some Science along the way, and I transmitted back what I could.  But the samples have to be returned to the KSC, so I tried to get this thing home.  And failed.  I underestimated how much dV I'd need to get back to Kerbin by about 1000 or so, so I attempted the all-too-common direct descent.

That shot shows me using all of my available fuel, but I actually stopped burning just as soon as the red indicator for a collision came up.  Which left me with about 1500 or so m/s of fuel, which I started burning as soon as I hit the upper atmosphere.  I was able to slow down enough to pop the parachutes at about 6500 meters, which is far better than I thought I'd get.  Unfortunately, I brought along the wrong chutes, so I only got down to 25 or so m/s of speed.  Crashed upon impact.  Oh well, at least I got some science out of this, plus the 8k for getting into Eeloo's SOI.

For what it's worth, I think the mission to Tylo comes way too soon.  "Orbit Kerbin.  Now go to the Mun.  Now Minmus.  Now Duna.  Now shoot for the edge of the solar system and land on one of the densest rocks out there."  Way too soon.  That mission shouldn't come up until we've at least gotten large hydrogen engines.  Which begs the question:  If contracts in KSP1 can be available based upon what you've already accomplished and parts you already have, why can't KSP2?

Agree, now the next is enter Jool system, then land on Tylo, Laythe could be better, it also has oxygen so planes works there. 
Without the spoilers you would first enter the Jool system. Either with an flyby probe or an fleet, I sent 4 ships but had already launched towards Eve, Moho and Duna. 

[Poppa Wheelie]

7 hours ago, Casellina X said:

not enough dV.

You need more than the 6867 you have, but you definitely don't need 13,060.

The text for many steps of the Trip Planner is misleading.  Here's how it should really read for Kerbin to Duna and return:

• 3400     Kerbin to LKO
• 930        LKO to Kerbin SOI Exit, Kerbol orbit
• 140        Kerbol orbit to Duna intercept, flyby
• 250        Duna flyby to Duna highly elliptical orbit
• 360        Duna high orbit to Low Duna Orbit
• 100       Low Duna Orbit to Duna Surface (using aerobraking, parachutes, and final landing engine assist)
• 1450    Duna surface to Low Duna Orbit
• 360       Low Duna Orbit to Duna high orbit
• 250       Duna high orbit to Duna SOI exit, Kerbol orbit

Total:  7240

With your departure from Kerbin to Duna, and your departure from Duna to Kerbin timed appropriately, this is all you need.  The Kerbol orbit you end up in after the last line of this Trip Planner should get you a Kerbin encounter.  If the Kerbin Pe of that encounter is not within the Kerbin atmosphere, a very small correction burn should take care of it.  Then you land on Kerbin with aerobraking and parachutes.

Of course, bring a little extra.

[Kimera Industries]

17 minutes ago, Poppa Wheelie said:

Of course, bring a little extra.

To me, a "little extra" dv is at least 2k...  

[Casellina X]

17 hours ago, Poppa Wheelie said:

With your departure from Kerbin to Duna, and your departure from Duna to Kerbin timed appropriately, this is all you need.  The Kerbol orbit you end up in after the last line of this Trip Planner should get you a Kerbin encounter.  If the Kerbin Pe of that encounter is not within the Kerbin atmosphere, a very small correction burn should take care of it.  Then you land on Kerbin with aerobraking and parachutes.

This is the common sense part that was escaping me. I didn't plan to land any other way - evident by the 2 parachutes in stage 11, but was trying to account for the landing dV anyway due to the trip planner.

[ConsoleCoder]

Landed on Duna and returned for the first time ever, and it was in Exploration mode. This is the first manned two-way trip to another planet I've ever done. Not even in KSP1 have I done a manned interplanetary mission that doesn't involve stranding Kerbals. 

Edited March 30 by ConsoleCoder

[Ninemeister]

Playing with some more high speed/high altitude air-breathing designs to get a stable 1700m/s 24-35k cruise, or better. At these extremes every minute detail counts!

 

[Casellina X]

Break out the champagne, I completed my first crewed Duna landing this afternoon.

This was the craft that done it. It's not winning any beauty contests or efficiency awards. This was the "final" design after a couple of launch tests which showed the potential to be able to complete the mission, but also exposed the lack of EC as soon as I got to 50KM AGL.

After adding batteries and panels, with another quick flight test, I wasn't pleased with the SAS oscillations on the pad so I added launch clamps. Originally I was only going to use the minimum height needed, but why not get your money's worth? What you see is just about max height with the nose touching the roof of the VAB. We can put together some rather tall craft if need be.

I put this image in to show the difference in dV calculations  by just moving the clamps to stage 2. There was even more variation but the two images suffice. Setting up your craft to link fuel to the center tank makes it hard to understand what your dV will be so keep an eye on that.

Heading to the pad I was greeted with this vantage point.

Zoomed out to give an idea of the height possibility. I know people have made tall things before, but typically they launch from the runway.

This was another look at the dV calculation swings. I believe I got much more out of that first stage than 1442.

At any rate I pushed out to 1Mm, waited a long time for a launch window, then set up a node for a Duna encounter. This particular stage I'll have to redesign. I was forcing NERV usage and ultimately I only got a little over 1000 dV out of them. Just enough to finish circularization and complete a portion of my Duna maneuver.

For the second time, by design, Duna and Ike come into view. Unfortunately this was the start of the part highlight bug which would upset the composition of my images.

Circularization burn in a reverse orbit. 

Now right before we got to about this point we realized a fatal mistake - a distinct lack of parachutes. Add this with, well you see the dV number, and I knew this mission was too fargone. But since we came this far, might as well attempt an actual landing near the monument to get some practice in. I did expect the touchdown point and the monument location to close in distance... but it really didn't. I remember going through hell trying to get lined up with the Minmus monument. With this one I was seemingly at the same latitude, but just too far ahead. But you don't know what you don't know until you know it.

Now I knew I was parachute deficient at this point so I had intended to use what was left in the tank to touch down. But then I (think I) remembered why I only had the three parachutes. I was going to use them and repack them on the way back up. So I adjusted the altitude to 5km and hoped for the best.

I staged the chutes and.... nothing. I had to fumble around in the Parts Manager to get a deployment. Somehow the chutes weren't armed? So I toggled the arming switch and hit deploy and fortunately you see the result.

Moments before this I was pretty upset that I wasn't even close enough to get the marker to appear in flight view. But I had 2 wins: 1) the parachutes slowed me to less than 30m/s and 2) I was just close enough to be within range. Unfortunately I had a big loss upcoming.

My landing area was not particularly flat. I also was ambitious on throttle. I touched down, bounced, throttled, panicked, then had to try to touch down in a slightly flatter area, panicked again, and then destroyed the engine and tipped the rest of the craft in the process. BUT if you put all that to the side - I successfully and safely made it to Duna! Planted a flag, took a sample, but this was only be going through the motions because I planned to revert to VAB.

I took a moment to ponder where it all went wrong.

[Kimera Industries]

4 hours ago, Casellina X said:

Originally I was only going to use the minimum height needed, but why not get your money's worth? What you see is just about max height with the nose touching the roof of the VAB. We can put together some rather tall craft if need be.

I did this in KSP1 for a while when I was desperate to cut costs in my career save. Ultimately, I figured a percent of efficiency didn't matter compared to my bad flying skills at the time.

[stephensmat]

So, last time I was trying to land a rover on Eelo...

Spoiler

for the 'Surf The Wave' mission.

Since I already had a Science Station in Eelo Orbit, my plan was to send a Rover, land the two craft near each other, and have one of my Kerbalnauts walk over to take a spin.

I also figured I could make a craft that would deposit the Rover, and have a heatshield, chutes, a docking port so that it could connect to my Hydrogen Drive and head back to Kerbin... and a single Rover seat so that I could transfer data. I've successfully brought samples and data back to the KSP that way.

It took me about a dozen disastrous tries to realize the landing wasn't going to work. Not the for the 'Deposit and Return' plan. I was using up too much Delta-V to land, and I dramatically underestimated returning to space.

After a dozen tries, I gave up on 'return', and just tried to soft-land the Rover. Another task that took a stupid amount of re-tries. Finally, after playing around with 'Control From Here' and traction/brake/steering controls, I managed to detach the rover, and get it to stay upright.

And that was when it hit me:

Spoiler

Pilot or not, a Rover drives the same way under remote control, so there was no real need to try and land Kerbals in the same spot. The real 'Points' value of the Rover was the mission, and the Brief said nothing about the Rover being manned.

It's been a long while since I made a decently long rover journey across a planet. With more gravity than the Mun, and more experience in Rover settings, it was actually the most enjoyable part of the whole mission.

I'm adding a shot of the journey with 'telemetry' included. The one thing I managed to do 'right' was land on the correct side of that big ravine.

 

And finally: 

Spoiler

...We made it to the Wave! 8000 Science Points, with which I've unlocked the 'Space Truckin' parts.

 

Ladies and Gents, I present to you: The smallest Rover with the Biggest Heart! The Little Rover That Could! The Rover trekked across Eelo all alone, even without a driver, and won the day!

 

I think I'll name it 'Herbie'.

[Casellina X]

Another successful failure? Or failed success? I built a plane to go to Kapy Rock in order to complete the mission.

My strategy was to fly south across the pole. For those of you familiar with the mission, you can probably already see my normal fatal mistake.

"Sunrise" over the pole was a welcome change over the pitch black moments-from-disaster cruise prior to this.

That pesky highlighted part bug messed up some spectacular images.

Make sure you're careful flying over the south pole. there are some mountains that are a little taller than you might think.

Case in point, the ice shelf as we exited the cap.

On to the fun part, ignoring the poorly designed plane, Kapy Rock is in sight and I have no plan to get this thing on the ground. I throttle down, bleed airspeed, and try to get close to stall speed. Well, Houston we had a problem.

I clipped the ridge and put myself into an unrecoverable situation. But on the bright side, that darn fuel tank that was preventing EVA was no longer an issue.

So if you've reached this point thinking that the EVA blockage was an issue and the failure was the landing? Nope. Read the mission specs kids. Even if I had managed a successful landing, I didn't bring along the part required to do the crew observation to pass the mission. I'll leave Jeb and the wreckage there for another handy target for next time.

[Ninemeister]

Playing with a new high altitude design. This one holds very well at 25k-26k altitude at around 1640m/s. Still have to fine tune a bit with the wing/stabilizer limits and CG, but she's almost super steady!
 

 

[Urus28]

This week, I finally performed a mission to Eeloo !

Surprise opening in orbit, no real problem to put this large craft in orbit. Hopefully the SAS problem I suffered during all the testing was no more present with a proper launch !

Arrival at Eeloo, this place looks superb !

Trying to put myself in orbit... Why the hell the ground is 10km high !?

Rover and return vehicle descending on Eeloo surface.

Flag, most important part of the mission !

 

Spoiler

The easy part of the surface exploration !

The icy surface of Eeloo is nice, but the canyons seems far more interesting ! To go inside one in one piece was really a challenge !

The bottom of an Eeloo canyon... It's an amazing place.  But still at more than 2000m of altitude...

These walls of ice are just one Evrest high !

Having fun exploring the canyon !

Getting in canyon was difficult, but getting out is another challenge !

Trying to escape the canyon... My game was plagued with bugs, 1000m bug, rover sinking in the ground, no time acceleration possible, rover jumping in the air after loading... Trying to climb 7000m in a big rover is really difficult but with bugs it became impossible. So I cheated and teleport it next to the lander, even driving on flat surface was no more possible.

After a bunch of new bugs at docking... I transferred my crew with EVA and finally leaved Eeloo.

Arrival at Kerbin, final staging of my big hydrogen tank, at least the fuel calculation was good !

For this mission, I decided to not have a dedicated landing system for Kerbin. The crew return has been made with a space plane this time I have been able to properly docked, despite a navball refusing to show the proper craft orientation.

A very difficult mission mainly due to bugs all around the place... I'm not sure that escaping the canyon with my rover was possible without the bugs, and a rescue mission was perhaps necessary. But with all the bugs suffered, I was just too tired to even tried one.

With this mission, I finally completed the tech tree ! I also now landed on all celestial body in the game.

I'm now waiting for colonies.

 

[Meecrob]

I finished up a cinematic I've been working on and started testing for my new project.

 

[Kimera Industries]

13 hours ago, Ninemeister said:

Playing with a new high altitude design. This one holds very well at 25k-26k altitude at around 1640m/s. Still have to fine tune a bit with the wing/stabilizer limits and CG, but she's almost super steady!

Great job on a stable design! But how maneuverable is it?

[Ninemeister]

Just now, Kimera Industries said:

Great job on a stable design! But how maneuverable is it?

Thank you! It's fairly maneuverable considering it only has the single vertical stabilizer/rudder and no horizontal stabilizers/elevators. Slow speed turns definitely aren't it's strong point, but once over 300m/s it maneuvers well. Turning off gimbal control with the rapiers definitely degrades the maneuverability quite a bit.

[Kimera Industries]

1 minute ago, Ninemeister said:

Thank you! It's fairly maneuverable considering it only has the single vertical stabilizer/rudder and no horizontal stabilizers/elevators. Slow speed turns definitely aren't it's strong point, but once over 300m/s it maneuvers well. Turning off gimbal control with the rapiers definitely degrades the maneuverability quite a bit.

Do you plan for it to be an SSTO or just a high-altitude science plane? As an SSTO, an unpowered landing would be tough if it needs engine gimbal.

[Sliver989]

I went to the VAB and started to create a plane only to discover there is still no controller support. Turned off KSP2.

[Ninemeister]

Just now, Kimera Industries said:

Do you plan for it to be an SSTO or just a high-altitude science plane? As an SSTO, an unpowered landing would be tough if it needs engine gimbal.

Primarily just trying to hit some personal goals with having a consistent speed an altitude. When not doing the typical KSP exploration I usually play around with designing aircraft just for fun. So far this one is the best candidate for an SSTO for sure. I've been fiddling with adding a jettison-able rear JATO  assembly to it for SSTO duty. I honestly haven't explored a single bit of the Kerbol system with an SSTO/Spaceplane yet.

[Kimera Industries]

1 minute ago, Ninemeister said:

I've been fiddling with adding a jettison-able rear JATO assembly to it for SSTO duty. I honestly haven't explored a single bit of the Kerbol system with an SSTO/Spaceplane yet.

I'd recommend saving a rocket system for a high altitude. Using jets to push vacuum engines to an altitude where they work more efficiently is a proven SSTO strategy.

[Ninemeister]

4 minutes ago, Kimera Industries said:

I'd recommend saving a rocket system for a high altitude. Using jets to push vacuum engines to an altitude where they work more efficiently is a proven SSTO strategy.

That's what i'm using, Jet Assisted Take Off. So far mainly played with quad Whiplashs.

[Kimera Industries]

Just now, Ninemeister said:

That's what i'm using, Jet Assisted Take Off. So far mainly played with quad Whiplashs.

*Facepalm* For some reason I saw RATO, Rocket Assisted Take Off.  

[Well]

Today I've play again after a long break, to discover the update "for science"

The game is more fun to play, still too many bugs, but it is playable in large part, the missions bring a lot.  Thank you for offering an almost complete french translation during this early access phase.

I still hope for way more gameplay and content than that, and i was suprise on my return to see so little news and info about the developpment of the game, but at least "For science" give me some hope for the future, and i'm finally probably going to play this game.