What did you do in KSP2 today?

[GalileOh-No]

I'm fixin to get silly on Gilly

[Socraticat]

I'm working my way through Minimus' hills, attempting to circumnavigate. I estimate It will take me around 8 sittings, but It's a really zen ride. I'm going right to Gilly when I'm done. I know exactly where this is going this week... but I have a new vehicle for that trip.

Taking a break before continuing up the slopes. Despite Minimus' low gravity, it's still tricky to power up ludicrous inclines. I'm following the flats and paths of least resistance to reach my goal.

I'll be continuing from here around 9pm PST

Spoiler

 

 

Edited June 2, 2023 by Socraticat
Attached raw live archive in spoiler.

[LoSBoL]

Weekly challenges take month for me to finish, creating a backlog wirth things to do in KSP2 

 

 Minmus it is for the Dragon

 

[herbal space program]

Over the last week I've completed the first 3 modules of my Jool5 mission, the first of which was a MK3 SSTO space plane (for use as a Laythe lander), which I built relying heavily on the design tips in Kerman Von Braun's excellent KSP2 SSTO YouTube videos:

It makes orbit with about 3.9km of dV and 2.5 tons of methane in the tank, which is not quite enough to make the Laythe round trip independently, but fairly close and plenty if it's going to be integrated into my Jool5 megaship. I could probably squeeze in enough to get there, but this version handled so well during de-orbit and landing that I don't want to mess with it anymore:

I also built and launched my core Jool5 station module:

The booster was de-orbited and splashed down safely after reaching the 100km parking orbit:

Finally, I built the second Jool5 station module and docked it up to the first one, delivering a second Wayfarer module, a SWERVE engine, some hydrogen, and a bunch of extra methane/methalox for the landers. Again, the booster will be de-orbited and recovered:

I guess this would count as a belated entry in the space station challenge, but this is only the beginning. The ultimate plan will be to dock up both the Mk3 space plane and a Tylo, etc. dual-stage vacuum lander, each with its own SWERVE, to the rearward-facing facing small ports on the side arms. Once that's done (and provided my computer does not melt down), I'll be docking 4 jumbo spherical hydrogen tanks to the other large ports, giving the whole mess something like 12km/sec of dV for the trip to Jool and back.

Edited June 4, 2023 by herbal space program

[Casellina X]

Been away from the game for a while after having to reinstall Windows to get off of the Windows 11 Dev Channel. Served its purpose during the 10->11 transition, but they started pushing bad updates that made life miserable. I put together a craft capable of getting stranded in space. The idea was to make it to another planet and Eve just happened to be near enough to try for. A maneuver or two in Sol's SOI got me towards an Eve trajectory. Several save reverts later due to things just... not working like I thought they should, I managed to get Bill into an Eve flyby. Didn't have enough dV to capture, and certainly not enough dV to return home. Bill finds himself fortunate that I included a docking port. Realistically, he'll be in that sad orbit forever. I'm sure the next patch will drop before I attempt a rescue. I really need back the accurate dV and TWR calculations in the VAB, as well as the calculations relative to SOI. The mission was never going to be a success, but at least I showed myself I can get to another planet on my own. I just need to build my stages properly. My nuclear stage was woefully anemic in regards to dV. 4 NERVs was always a foolish endeavor. Why you ask? Because.

Within 35km. So close I could touch it. Unfortunately, the intercept node distance doesn't seem to correspond to closeness to the body. I thought 100km distance in the intercept node would mean a 100km PE. Looks like you need to get that distance as close to zero as possible to affect an SOI change.

[GalileOh-No]

Tried to figure out how to get this crazy thing into orbit so I can do the Moho challenge!

 

[Socraticat]

I just finished circumnavigating Gilly. Vid is linked to relevant timestamp: Journey can be found in my LIVE archive. Going to upload a condensed version probably by end of weekend.

Good fun. Back to Minmus.

Edited June 9, 2023 by Socraticat
It's Minmus? I keep calling it Minimus... Oh well.

[Casellina X]

I decided to retry the last journey but with much more dV, and ditching the unnecessary NERVs. Took a few tries to get into orbit, an efficient gravity turn was all but impossible with how top heavy the craft was. Pitch too soon or too much and it tipped over like a lawn dart.  By the time I got to the Kerbol SOI, I decided to switch things up and aim for Duna instead of Eve. While it took a while to get into the right window for a transfer, I plotted the maneuver correctly and was well on my way... at least until I got too greedy with warping to a point on the orbit. This may very well be a bug - seems like every time I try to warp to a point inside another body's SOI, the game will fail to cancel the warp on entry, then continue the warp well past its conclusion and try to orbit back around to that point. My work around is to warp just before the point and then manually time accelerate to where I need to be.

Ultimately it was a good mission. Twice in as many days have I thrown space junk at another planet and more or less got there. This time I was even able to capture two bodies. I mean, that's basically a Jool 5 right there. Maybe the biggest breakthrough of these missions was not being concerned with in-game time. Part of the reason I never did much beyond Mun and Minmus was some psychological hang up about letting months, years pass while waiting for a transfer window. Maybe because I was playing using contracts as a carrot. But since the Kerbal is a durable creature, time simply doesn't matter. As you'll see in one of the screenshots, I'm 11 years into this save - 7 of them tied up in those Eve shenanigans. Bill ought to get comfortable watching Eve slip from view, and Bob should too when I work up the motivation to set down on Ike.

Oriented to burn out of Kerbin's SOI.

And away we go.

What's that strange dot?

I'm not sure I can adequately explain the sheer terror I experienced while panning the camera around trying to find Duna, then stumbling upon a black void. I was 100% convinced that Kerbol had condensed itself into a black hole and was out for blood.

Fortunately rather than Kerbol seeing red, it was in fact me seeing red.

I didn't trust the TWR in my final stage to comfortably land on Duna, so I plotted a capture with Ike.

And now Bob awaits his first class ticket to a new crater on Ike.

[herbal space program]

3 hours ago, Casellina X said:

I decided to retry the last journey but with much more dV, and ditching the unnecessary NERVs.

I'm finding that with the immense bulk of the new hydrogen tanks the Nerf has basically become useless as an interplanetary transfer engine. They need to either up its ISP to be comparable to the SWERV or else increase its TWR, or it will pretty much never be the best choice IMO, especially once they get the high ISP deep space engines implemented.

[sumghai]

Decided to put my brand new laptop through its paces by loading up KSP2 for the first time, and was greeted with this sunset upon completing my first non-MechJeb orbital flight around Kerbin:

JebCamp△ DLC when?

[LoSBoL]

On 6/9/2023 at 7:11 PM, herbal space program said:

I'm finding that with the immense bulk of the new hydrogen tanks the Nerf has basically become useless as an interplanetary transfer engine. They need to either up its ISP to be comparable to the SWERV or else increase its TWR, or it will pretty much never be the best choice IMO, especially once they get the high ISP deep space engines implemented.

The Nerf will probably have its use within the tech tree progression while the SWERV will be almost end game. 

[Socraticat]

Today I finished my Gilly Circumnavigation video. You can see the smallest celestial in all it's glory in a nicely packaged 45 minute video.

Now I can get back to testing my vessel for the weekly challenge:

[herbal space program]

In the last few days I've finished assembling my Jool5 mothership, flying 4 missions to dock up one jumbo hydrogen tank each:

First tank docked:

Final approach of 4th tank:

Finished mothership:

The finished ship weighs 464 tons, has 639 parts, and has 8.2km/s of dV at a pokey TWR of 0.15. That poor TWR will be significantly improved when I have my two landing modules, each with a SWERV of its own, docked to the open rearward-facing ports visible in the image above. Not sure exactly how much dV it will have in that configuration, but I'm sure it will be enough to get to Jool and back as well as do a fair bit of maneuvering around in the Jool system.

Lastly, in a bizarre case of the disappearing strut bug apparently working in my favor, both times  when I docked the second member of one of my 2 symmetrical tank module pairs to the station, it magically reconnected all the broken struts that were holding it to the booster (as well as some of those holding it together) to the module on the opposite side!:

The resulting rats' nest of crisscrossing struts is pretty ugly, but fortunately it does not block any important docking ports, and most fortuitously, it is going to stabilize the overall structure immensely. I was quite concerned that the protruding H2 tanks were going to end up being so flopsy that they were going to cause all kinds of problems, but it looks like that definitely won't be happening! Now I just have to build my 2 stage Tylo-Vall-Pol-Bop vacuum lander in a manner such that it and my Laythe space plane (which will be docked to the opposite port) can be balanced for the ejection boost by moving fuel around. Then it's off to Jool at a roaring 40 frames per minute!!

 

 

 

 

 

Edited June 11, 2023 by herbal space program

[Heretic391]

On 6/3/2023 at 6:05 AM, GalileOh-No said:

I'm fixin to get silly on Gilly

Love the light strips, nice colour

[Heretic391]

Built the space habitat (yes, rocket trees in space) for the Dres station. This will definitely be the last part of the station given that I'm at 4 fps with lowest graphics settings.

 

Our Dres station progress:

 

Last video for reference: 

 

 

Edited June 15, 2023 by Heretic391

[ShadowZone]

While @Heretic391 went big in the post above, I went the completely opposite direction:

 

[herbal space program]

I finally got my whole Jool-5 platform assembled, 562 tons, 862 parts (probably half struts), and 7.4 km of SWERV dV at a not-too-shabby 0.37 initial TWR. Framerate is about a glacial 4/s, seemingly without regard to the graphics settings, so some other calculations must be borking that:

I've already shown the Laythe plane, and docking that up was surprisingly easy, but then I had to add my dual-stage vacuum lander. It has a SWRV-powered Tylo descent stage that will also serves as an orbital transfer engine on the full ship. The descent stage will land and then provide about the first 300m/s of ascent dV before the Poodle-powered upper stage completes the journey to orbit. That stage will do the landings on every body besides Laythe. If I manage to finish the Jool-5 with enough dV on the mothership, I'll probably do a side trip to Dres or Duna/Ike, both systems the smaller lander could manage:

On the frowny side, successfully getting that docked up took me 7 tries (only counting good trips to orbit), including completely rebuilding the whole stack in the middle because something got irretrievably corrupted in the first version.  Time and again, everything would blow up or bug out as soon as I made contact, even if it was dead-on at 0.2m/s. I was almost ready to give up in disgust, but the last time it finally worked, probably because I turned off the SAS on both vessels right before they connected. Still, both the plane and the vacuum lander were wagging back and forth like dog tails for no good reason for quite a while, but thankfully the vibrations damped out that time  instead of amplifying themselves into oblivion as they had previously. Sorry, but you guys have got a long way to go before colony ships! Anyway, I just need to FF about 40 days to the Jool transfer window, and off we go!

 

[goldenson]

Built one mid-size SSTO and one large cargo plane, they randomly explode in this version. Hope that I can fly them next week.

 

 

[Socraticat]

 

The Raw Footage:

Spoiler

 

 

[TwoCalories]

Today in KSP I had a bit of an incident with Bob Kerman.

Originally, Jeb was going to do the river run mission, but Bob got auto assigned.

Whoops.

[Socraticat]

 THIS VIDEO CONTAINS SPOILERS

(Minmus Anomaly)

Raw Gameplay "In Good Hands"

Raw Gameplay "OneOscar" FG2X Spark-Spider/ "Tip-Top-Spot"

Spoiler

 

 

 

Edited June 21, 2023 by Socraticat
Timestamped bits of raw gameplay, rather than my random editing hobby

[Socraticat]

Here's to hoping for more participation with the latest update!

This was a livestream. The full stream can be found here:

Spoiler

 

 

[Astr0Guy5]

Today I played KSP2 again after a two month break (time flies, wow) and tested an air launched SSTO.  The mission plan is a return trip to the surface of the Mun, but I have some serious modifications to make before then.  In its current state, the ship didn't even achieve orbit; however, I glided through a magnificent cloud layer after reentry.  Honestly, it was a really relaxing way to end the night.

[Socraticat]

I took the "FleetOscar" on a sunset test to see how 0.1.3.0 performed. I had twice as many frames and the lighting effects were just awesome. Can't wait for more!

 

[goldenson]

The test flight of my Cargo SSTO went well, happy to see that the drag bug has been fixed.

My new rover fits perfectly in the cargo space.