What did you do in KSP1 today?

[coreross]

I rendezvoused my test Shuttle with my station

[Ravenchant]

Fiddled around with stock fairings for a bit

2.5m: check!

3.75m: check!

[Concentric]

Attempted a manned ion landing on Mun - smashed all my solar panels on impact with a suicide burn that was more suicide than burn. But everything else survived, so there's that. Then I tried to get orbit - but lacked power, took off in the wrong direction and had some trouble with getting Jeb to circularise on EVA jetpack.

Also, messed about with multiple quicksaves - so Jeb ended up "deciding" not to go to Mun after all - instead testing the Abort system and return ability of the thrown-together little ship.

[Sufficient Anonymity]

I cleared out most of the other mods I have installed and replaced them with KSP Interstellar

[r4pt0r]

mun science lab, and matching science rover http://imgur.com/a/GGxWd

[John FX]

I put my Apollo replica onto the pad, entered IVA, launched, got into orbit, did a TMI, docked with the lander, adjusted approach to Mun, got into a stable 10km orbit around mun, went EVA, transferred two crew to the lander, went IVA, undocked the lander, landed on Mun, went EVA, walked about being amazed that I managed to land on a 30 degree slope without incident, got back into the lander and went IVA, took off, rendezvoused with the CM, went EVA and transferred two crew back then went IVA again, used RCS to set Pe to -1, undocked the lander and used RCS to get Pe to 10 again, went into map and set a node to burn home, went IVA and executed burn, entered Kerbin SOI, checked Pe, undocked landing pod from CM, opened chutes and landed.

Then I exited IVA and smiled. It was hardcore.

Also, from looking at this thread I learned the size of class `A` and class `E` asteroids. Myself I would only use class `E` for kethane for reasons.

Attempted a manned ion landing on Mun - smashed all my solar panels on impact with a suicide burn that was more suicide than burn. But everything else survived, so there's that. Then I tried to get orbit - but lacked power, took off in the wrong direction and had some trouble with getting Jeb to circularise on EVA jetpack.

Also, messed about with multiple quicksaves - so Jeb ended up "deciding" not to go to Mun after all - instead testing the Abort system and return ability of the thrown-together little ship.

Never suicide burn with low TWR craft. Adopt a very low orbit then burn retro and adjust your angle to control vertical speed. At some point you will be at very low altitude, very low horizontal speed and you will be placed to do a `stop and drop` but from only 1km or so meaning you have used a lot less fuel and also had more control. You should have saved enough fuel to control your vertical speed all the way down from 1km.

Edited April 12, 2014 by John FX

[MGCJerry]

Not today, but yesterday... Landed on Mun with Bill, Bob & Jeb, terribly. Sent a rescue mission that failed. Now Jeb is alone on the surface of the Mun... Upper Management is not sure how they are going to handle this situation. I heard talks about a reality show called "Survivor: Mun"...

[Kabistar]

Yesterday I managed to get a close flyby to Minmus, acknowledge that I wasn't going to have enough fuel and was able to abort and return to kerbin (With out death).

This was using the very basic rocketry parts as I've just started a Let's Play.

[Technical Ben]

I put an asteroid on the VAB

http://cloud-3.steampowered.com/ugc/615048258567616744/FDD16B02A121F04D64CCA00885983125E48CFC10/

That's no asteroid... it's a pebble.

I built this...

And it's just the drive section.

Edited April 12, 2014 by Technical Ben

[Pecan]

Today I decided to use Module Manager to add KER and MJ functionality to all pods so I always have them handy but my *.craft files can stay stock.

Then I deleted the parts so I could save whatever tiny proportion of memory they took up.

Then I resumed my last save.

Then all the flights were terminated because I'd deleted the parts from KSP before deleting them from the ships.

Then I facepalmed.

Doh!

[Collin Cutler]

I set up my Kethane scanners on Minmus. Yay!

[Technical Ben]

Today I decided to use Module Manager to add KER and MJ functionality to all pods so I always have them handy but my *.craft files can stay stock.

Then I deleted the parts so I could save whatever tiny proportion of memory they took up.

Then I resumed my last save.

Then all the flights were terminated because I'd deleted the parts from KSP before deleting them from the ships.

Then I facepalmed.

Doh!

Had similar with an update.

Other way to get the result, is to antecedently open 2 instances of KSP (forgot to close the old one, or hit the wrong button), and it will "part not found" as the files locked out by the first copy of the game running.

[astropapi1]

I built this...

http://benart.www.idnet.com/bggr.jpg

And it's just the drive section.

Is that a claw on top of the capsule? Then I'm gonna save you the pain and let you know that thrust doesn't go through asteroids. Unless you plan to catch a small A-class, most of those engines are going to produce 0 thrust when pulling the asteroid.

[Jouni]

Never suicide burn with low TWR craft. Adopt a very low orbit then burn retro and adjust your angle to control vertical speed. At some point you will be at very low altitude, very low horizontal speed and you will be placed to do a `stop and drop` but from only 1km or so meaning you have used a lot less fuel and also had more control. You should have saved enough fuel to control your vertical speed all the way down from 1km.

For any significant payload, ion-powered Mun landing is essentially one big suicide burn. You can't really have enough solar panels in a reasonable lander to feed all those ion engines, so you have to rely on batteries instead. This limits the amount of time you can burn the engines with TWR > 1.

With my ion lander, the best idea was to start from a relatively high 30 km orbit to give the lander enough time to kill horizontal speed. In the first phase of the landing, the lander used the sustainable 1/3 thrust at 20-30 degrees to reduce horizontal speed, while keeping the descent rate under control. This continued to to around 10 km above the surface, where it was time to start the suicide burn at full thrust. Ideally, the suicide burn would end a few hundred meters above the surface, giving a chance to pick the landing site before hovering down.

[Technical Ben]

Is that a claw on top of the capsule? Then I'm gonna save you the pain and let you know that thrust doesn't go through asteroids. Unless you plan to catch a small A-class, most of those engines are going to produce 0 thrust when pulling the asteroid.

AFAIK thrust did go through asteroids? It does not matter, the claw is for maintenance. This is not necessarily a rock mover. It's the craft to end all craft. I'll add a mid section that will have multiple points for docking anything needed. For rock moving I'll have a much larger possibly 6 or 7 spurred claw for the front.

Oh, here is it docked with HALF the fuel (the other half is slightly stuck in orbit as it's tugs are too small, so I'm sending bigger/better designed tugs).

[ayana]

"We've matched planes and will begin our approach burn in five hours. All this trouble because the engineers forgot the antenna."

"What antenna? All we've got are empty boxes."

...And that's when I realized I'd played enough KSP for the day.

[TerLoki]

I had two ideas fail in sandbox mode for one reason or another.

To celebrate STS-1 I decided to take the Tenacious out for a trip to LKO, carrying Bill and Bob as a nod to the two-man crew. Jeb also snuck on board, but that was for the other half of the tribute.

After all, we needed someone to pilot this little Vostok replica, in honor of Yuri Gagarin and Vostok 1.

Jeb burns retrograde to bring down the little capsule. I should point out that this little guy is totally untested and the result of approximately 2 minutes of slapping parts together in the VAB.

Which may have something to do with the fact that the parachutes burned up on reentry, despite the capsule being between them and the heat shield. I'll have to dig around and figure out what to change in the .cfg to keep that from happening.

The second project failed before even getting to orbit, but then again it was a bit more complex: A recreation of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Program.

The initial version of the Saturn IB. I'm very happy about how the CSM turned out, and I got the rocket to look the part too. Unfortunately it doesn't really fly that well in this configuration. Even with 8 KW rocketry Wildcats, the strongest single-nozzle 1.25m engines I have, this thing has just barely enough TWR to hover at lift-off. I'll either need to find a way to lighten the CSM or swap out for a single 3.75m engine.

The Soyuz half of the project. This one has plenty of thrust on lift-off, and it looks good too despite having to fudge a few details. The problem here (besides the fairings being stubborn) is that the payload wobbles like crazy. I had the same problem on the Saturn IB when I tested it with the SLS engines too, even after sticking 16 extra struts on it. So yeah, no historic launches in KSP today. Props to OrionKerman for the awesome capsules though.

[EuSouONumero345]

GO WHACKJOB GO!

[cantab]

Not much today. Mainly just messing about with some lifter ideas, but the game crashed before I could test one of them

And now I'm thinking of getting MechJeb for testing these things properly since I'm inconsistent with my ascents.

[Hans Dorn]

I learned that while you can put a one way lander in a lot of places, a returning lander should point upwards reasonably well, or bad things will happen.

D'Oh.

[xrayfishx]

Technically it was yesterday, but for GMT -2 (-1 when I started writing this) it was today.

I created a spacecraft with non-kOS automated re-entry and landing. I got the idea when I was making a Soyuz replica and ran into trouble with the landing retrorockets. So I turned to a gadget that came with Klockheed Martian's Shuttle parts, namely the altitude action group trigger. I was able to land my Soyuz safely using that. Then I decided to go for a full re-entry and landing procedure. The resulting craft is vaguely based on Soyuz, but functions differently in many ways. The important part is that once your Pe is around 10k to 30k, it will land without any human interaction. Now, if I could figure out how to post the album... the imgur tags are not working. Here's the link and I'd be thankful if some moderator could edit this post so that it would show correctly.

http://imgur.com/a/eku5o#0

Edited April 13, 2014 by xrayfishx

[Space_Can]

I brought a SCIENCE plane to the desert biome of Kerbin. Turns out sand isn't worth all that much.

[Tortoise]

I did this today, but I'm planning on doing some more missions now.

[Wooks]

I used a little spaceplane to put a flag on Duna´s ***EASTER EGG - REDACTED - CLASSIFIED***, marking the spot for the landing of my Giant Freaking Pyramid, now retrofitted with rocket engines.

[Jouni]

I did some random stuff while waiting for a Moho launch window.

First I launched some initial modules to the future kethane refinery orbiting the Mun. Class E asteroids are really big, now that I have something more mundane to compare them against. The construction is taking quite a long time, as I'm launching each individual module separately to the Mun.

Then I built a SLS-inspired rocket from Rockomax parts. Unlike the SLS parts, this rocket has real boosters instead of puny training wheels. Both of the boosters use Mainsails, while the core stage has just a Skipper.