What did you do in KSP2 today?

[hatterson]

16 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

Doing a fairly restricted version of Kerpollo, I've found just how little Science there is in Kerbin's SOI, especially when you do no missions and restrict yourself to a single region on both Mun and Minmus.

I was able to unlock all of Tier 1 in the tech tree, but in Tier 2 (after that first entry node) I could only unlock 1 of the first 4 nodes. It wasn't a hard choice, luckily. Fuel Lines are more important than everything else in that tier, even accounting for the fact that the node costs more and only has them in it.

But it's funny that I can't unlock a 2nd science instrument with the points I got from my first 3 missions (LKO, Mun, Minmus) so must avoid Duna on my first interplanetary launch (because with an atmosphere, I want to be able to do the atmospheric science before I go).

You're surprised how little science there is when you intentionally limit the science you're collecting?

[Superfluous J]

2 hours ago, hatterson said:

You're surprised how little science there is when you intentionally limit the science you're collecting?

Yes.

[Casellina X]

Launched my lander and docked with the tug. Orbit lines reappeared after reopening the game. Docking went off without a hitch although there's still much to be desired with my launch planning. I thought I had a good enough positioning of the tug in orbit relative to the KSC for launch, but wound up waiting several orbits before I could get out to it. Someone mentioned probably in the UI/UX thread, but the skip orbit functionality on the maneuver planner needs to make a comeback.

I think some of the parts on the tug shifted, but I didn't experience any control issues.

There was a tiny bit of fuel remaining in the stage that was floating away, so for once I was nearly optimal inasmuch as I didn't have several hundred or a thousand dV left over after everything.

Circularized with the Mun and was about to get set for the Arch when I came across the no fuel bug. Couldn't seem to get it to work right. Maybe I'll see some luck the next time I open the game.

I did try moving around some MP from the pod to the tanks, but hit what looks like a visual glitch when trying to remove the completed entries from the right side. I did close the Resource Manager and reopen it before attempting that.

But changing to the Tracking Station and then back to this craft fixed that. Alas, still no dV.
 

 

[magnemoe]

My first game was kind of a mess so started over. 
Got to the Minmus monument, picket up the rest biome science and launched two ships to Eve.

This with two probes to gather science in Eve atmosphere and then land on the surface and a Gilly lander who can be used as an probe or manned by crew from the manned ship who follows. 
Yes its day 9, been kind of busy. Still miss two locations on the Mun as its been on the night side, will wait for Minmus mission to return before launching more. 

Design was for using  small fairings but managed to upgrade to medium before launching. 
More than enough dV, relative velocity with Eve is 3.5 km/s. 

Edited February 15 by magnemoe

[magnemoe]

Also I managed to miss the ground. Yes that is the point of getting into orbit but not then returning from an routine Mun mission. 
This is just an visual bug.

Ok I think I missed the ground trying to land. 

Has an bug there warping time on smaller bodies like Mun can get crafts to fall trough the ground. 
It looks like it only affect legs or wheels. not struts, fuel tanks or if upside down. 

Edited February 14 by magnemoe

[magnemoe]

My probe carrier reached Eve.

Now Bill had sneaked onboard.  I wondered there he had gone, it only has rover seats so not the most pleasant rides. 

This was lucky as I can now do surface samples before the manned ship arrives and picks him up. 
Double luck next orbit give me an Gilly intercept after just changed plane to match it. 

Deployed one of two Eve probes. This I plan to fly at 89 km attitude to gather atmospheric science.  The rover seat is for an kerbal to pick up the samples. My initial plan was to drop the lander module and keep the engine and seat in orbit but as I have no batteries and only the small probe with 5 power this is probably not smart. 

[kdaviper]

Finished the tech tree today!

[Biggen]

Landed on Tylo to finished the monument mission. Never again. Pain in the you know what to land there. Had to walk 1.5km at 4x speed to get there from the lander and then walk back. Glad this one is over. Just gotta send a rescue craft to pick up Jeb from orbit of Tylo.

Edited February 17 by Biggen

[magnemoe]

5 hours ago, Biggen said:

Landed on Tylo to finished the monument mission. Never again. Pain in the you know what to land there. Had to walk 1.5km at 4x speed to get there from the lander and then walk back. Glad this one is over. Just gotta send a rescue craft to pick up Jeb from orbit of Tylo.

Plan to use an unmanned rover for this mission. Tylo scares me. 

Doing atmospheric science at Eve, found an weird bug, if I'm flying at the edge of the atmosphere, 89700-89900 meter both Ap and Pe increases and Ap takes me out of atmosphere.
I have to do small braking burns to keep me inside, I guess its some error in drag calculation. 

You can also cheat getting atmospheric science in small biomes like shallow. Simply instrument collect for 1:55 over some other area, pause and continue to finish last seconds in small biome. 

[rogerawong]

I restarted the campaign (woah, I forgot how many million FPS you get at first!) and progressed to Mystery Signal on Minmus and Lil Chonker. I have a fairly typical tech level for this point in the campaign and just unlocked NERVS. So I thought to myself. "Well, let's do both missions at the same time, because Lil Chonk is /totally/ worth the 35 science points reward." (sarcasm).  

So, got to work with a 260-ton lander with 4 poodles, several reaction wheels (because landers have to be maneuverable) and a couple NERVs for Minmus orbital burns and landing. We don't have landing gear long enough yet to clear poodles, so we're going to use some medium horizontal stabilizers as landing struts instead. Should be fine in the low gravity of Minmus if we touch down softly.

13 mainsails and 12 skinny solid boosters for the launcher, with little rocket engines on top and bottom to safely carry each stage away.

And away we go (thanks to K2-D2 for controlling launch profile leaving me to concentrate on rotating the vessel to ensure each asparagus stage could drop cleanly).

It turned out that the Kerbin TWR of the lander was about 0.50, which just coincidentally was very close to the TWR of the final stage of the launcher. So this meant I could just perform one continuous burn from LKO to Minmus and the projected trajectory would still be fairly accurate. I'd use up some of my lander mass, but that's why the lander is 260 tons and not 200. 

I like to put my vessels into polar orbits because it means with enough time I can reach any particular point on the body. This was no different. On reaching Minmus I gave the vessel a high AP and burned to change my inclination to 90 for about 50dV.  After settling into a 16 000 m orbit, the landing site was only a few orbits away.

This is a completely manual landing, thanks to Micro Engineer that gives you separate readouts for vertical and horizontal velocity. I've come to learn that the ideal burn for landing has you saying "too fast, it's gonna crash, too fast" until about the last 10 seconds. 

Also look at the pretty green reflected lights on the skin of the lander near the glowy bits! So pretty. Good job KSP2 devs.

I had like 4700 dV remaining after the landing. So I scopped up all remaining science on minmus and head back to orbit for a Kerbin return.

But, why waste dV on a direct burn when you can gravity assist off the Mun and return back for only 98 dV?  Yes, I did that.

Landed in the mountains, which I had yet to visit on Kerbin, so performed some science there and recovered the vessel!

Yeah. That was TOTALLY worth 35 science points.

Edited February 17 by rogerawong
added links

[JavaSaBr]

Return the crew from Gilly surface and go to the Eve low orbit to collect science:

 

[rogerawong]

2 hours ago, JavaSaBr said:

Return the crew from Gilly surface and go to the Eve low orbit to collect science:

If you were just doing Gilly, the lander has almost enough dV to get back to Kerbin all by itself!

[JavaSaBr]

15 minutes ago, rogerawong said:

If you were just doing Gilly, the lander has almost enough dV to get back to Kerbin all by itself!

Possibly yes, but I prefer always to use orbital transport

[Biggen]

6 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Plan to use an unmanned rover for this mission. Tylo scares me. 

Doing atmospheric science at Eve, found an weird bug, if I'm flying at the edge of the atmosphere, 89700-89900 meter both Ap and Pe increases and Ap takes me out of atmosphere.
I have to do small braking burns to keep me inside, I guess its some error in drag calculation. 

You can also cheat getting atmospheric science in small biomes like shallow. Simply instrument collect for 1:55 over some other area, pause and continue to finish last seconds in small biome. 

I mispoke.  It was Valentina that drew the short straw and know needs a ride home from orbit.  I didn't realize the Kerbals move fast when holding down the shift key so I walked all the way to the monument at a steady .7 m/s. Even at 4x speed that was no fun.  The run back to the lander was much better!

 

 

Edited February 17 by Biggen

[magnemoe]

52 minutes ago, JavaSaBr said:

Possibly yes, but I prefer always to use orbital transport

Also to pick up all the sweet science, I have 6K in an atmospheric probe in low Eve orbit, I also has an probe carrier and soon to be tanker there. 

This is my Gilly lander, I say it fit the size of the moon.

Bill sneaked on to the probe carrier and get the honor of being the first kerbal to land on an body outside of Kerbin SOI. 

[Robin Patenall]

The Kerbal Space Centre press department presents... "Mun Lab 1"

This is a very basic space station used to support a detailed survey of the Mun and recovering science and samples from a variety of sites across the surface. This is possible as the station was placed in a polar orbit, allowing landings to be performed anywhere. It is based around a MK1-3 command pod that has been reconfigured as sleeping quarters, a MK2 lander can reconfigured as living / work space and tanks holding the Methalox fuel for the lander, which you can see is docked to the forward spinal docking port.

Docked to the dorsal and ventral docking ports are two crew return modules that can return a kerbal back to Kerbin. One of these has just been brought up by the latest refuelling mission which you can see in the background. This is the first flight of the V2 refueller model which added a parachute and the ability to detach the command bay so it should be able to act as a sample return system so we don't need a kerbal to hand deliver any collected samples. With the current refuelling mission the tanks are about 75% fuel giving Mungee Kerbal, the current occupant, the capacity for about 16 landings. 

Mungee Kerbal was joined for a short time by Bob Kerbal to help set up all the systems and for Bob to test the lander. Bob did this by landing in an area of the Mun that was extremely boring, so boring in fact that no kerbal should ever go there again. Any data and samples he collected while on the surface, and immediately returned to Kerbin with (in the crew return module he came up in), were just as boring and, according to public records, were immediately thrown out before anybody else saw them.

Since Bob left, Mungee has visited the surface four times, collecting vital scientific data from diverse regions of the Mun.

[NexusHelium]

I was today years old when I realized that the Tylo Monument was probably meant to be a sundial. I don't know if a lot of people realized that or not but I sure did slap my hand on my face when I saw the resemblance.

At least Bill has a way to tell how long he's been stranded on Tylo before I can finally launch the Jupiter IV without crashing my game.

[stephensmat]

Okay, took another run at this.

Got it right this time, and unlocked the next mission...

Spoiler

...which was activating a Jet Engine on Laythe, so I kinda got a two for one deal.

Next target is Bop. I've unlocked some of the 'hydrogen' engines, so I'll be experimenting with those, at least to get my standard Landers into position.

 

[Urus28]

This weekend, I repaired the terrible injustice done to the Mun in my game... The lack of rover !

I decided to go for a two seats rover for extended exploration and a return vehicle.

My rover has a pickup truck design and kerbals can check scientific instrumets in the back of it.

Edited February 18 by Urus28

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, Urus28 said:

This weekend, I repaired the terrible injustice done to the Mun in my game... The lack of rover !

I decided to go for a two seats rover for extended exploration and a return vehicle.

My rover has a pickup truck design and kerbals can check scientific instrumets in the back of it.

You know with that lander design you could make an reusable rover. Have an docking port on bottom of lander and one on top of rover, place them correctly and retract the landing legs. 

[magnemoe]

Landed on Eve.

1000 science for the environment data, 1200 from the sample arm.  This was on the small island with impact sites biome. 
Has a second lander but can not used it before the manned ship has collected all the science from it, aim for foothill with that so just hit land.

[Urus28]

11 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

You know with that lander design you could make an reusable rover. Have an docking port on bottom of lander and one on top of rover, place them correctly and retract the landing legs. 

Yes, it's true, I could do that, thanks for the suggestion =)

[magnemoe]

There is an bug with the monument on Minmus. 
It cast an huge shaddow around it. 

And I reached an pretty low orbit around Minmus

Unfortunately I could not leave the probe here, landers can fall trough the ground if you use warp while landed. 
Unfortunately I can not leave the probe here. 

[Aeolica]

I can hardly ensure that my large SSTO (KLO payload 40t) can land safely on an aircraft carrier

Edited February 18 by Aeolica

[BigBA]

Built an Eve Lander that can carry 10 Kerbals and gets me back to orbit. I used Lazy Orbit to get myself landed and tried for eons. My solution is a giant rocket with 12 asparagus staged boosters and 195 vector enginges in total (and a terrier to get orbit on the last stage). Recommendations are welcome. :-D

I suffered through 1 fps ascends. As of now it's basically impossible to finish this mission in one go. Starting from Kerbin I'd need a behemoth transfer stage and ten times as much power to lift that monster up in the sky.

I really hope they somehow improve the performance cause right now missions with big vessels are no fun. Small to mid-size are working atm.

Got a 3700Ti mobile.