What did you do in KSP1 today?

[jdsutton]

Built this STTO for taking lots of kerbals into orbit and back.

[Remkeau]

This sums up my day quite well:

[KerbMav]

Was unsatisfied with the remaining fuel of my Moho probe's transfer stage, so I flew up some more.

Since I was building something anyway and had to bring a Kerbal for the KAS-plumbing, I took the Taurus for a ride and bring home some Kerbals from my space station after successfully transfering the fuel.

Either Ship Manifest or Taurus itself defeated my efforts to transfer the Kerbals - so I had to move four of them via EVA.

I think we had a transporter accident in the process and I lossed Bill while cloning a Mac ...

After splash down the seven veterans I hit another bug, I was unable to recover the Taurus, so I EVAd three of the kerbonauts out ... still my game seems to be damaged in some way - will let it cool down till sunday.

Went to a secret crater on the Mun and made a terrible discovery: the bodies of every Kerbal I've ever killed in my space program!

It is late at night and this shocking sight makes me actually ask ... is this for real?

[HeadHunter67]

It is late at night and this shocking sight makes me actually ask ... is this for real?

Of course not - Kerbals have never actually gone to the Mün... the landing was all done in a sound stage at the Kerbal Space Center.

(that's what's in that "Mission Control" building we can't select!)

[tofuace]

Visted Duna today for the second time ever in KSP. It's been too long! It was a trials mission for my new build, and also took along the first piece for a small orbital station.

[federicoaa]

@Deadweasel, what mod is that cockpit from?

[cantab]

Killed Halwell Kerman by driving an RCS-powered rover at 55 mph and applying the brakes. It did an endo and smashed the command pod along with the rest of it.

Then started work on a mobile Kethane base that'll be going to Bop and/or Pol (and Minmus in testing). Been running into an SPH bug which I think is related to symmetry and part clipping. Shame, since it's forcing me to compromise a bit on what was looking like a pretty sleek design.

[Liowen]

I made changes to Ker-Ploppo I and took the second Ker-Ploppo with the rover attached under the Seagull and came to some realizations. First brakes need to be applied BEFORE launching, I was a bit preplexed as to why I was losing power while under acceleration. Second, though this might be caused by the first problem, the wheels will have to be repaired once in orbit, they were broken once I detached the last of the lifter stage. Next phase will be to take the orbiter and Seagull out to Mun and do a return from a orbit around Mun. It is slowly coming together, and I may have to edit the orbiter stage some as looking at it now it seems like it is too much. Also I need to consider putting a material bay on the rover and on the lander as well, though I do not want to put too many on the lander but I want it balanced as well. Now for the pretty shot of it rearranged in orbit.

[Tw1]

Dodgy-est accent ever. Sort of. The first part was ok, once I stopped the engines falling of.

Ended up with an apoapsis of about 400km, as I didn't have much ability to turn the rocket. It kept rolling.

Then, I had a decoupler failure. The accent stage would not drop. I had to use alternate methods.

Once the boosters were clear, I repeated the exercise with the developers themselves, and activated the engines.

But it's now on its way to the Mun.

[Robotengineer]

I messed around with my new flagship rover in Kerbin City, still in development. (The rover, as well as KC.)

It has some battle damage, a lot actually. It should have a probe core and DP w/ lights on the front.

The way I made it so that it would have battery's and the SAS module in one place makes it prone to explosions and propelling Kerbals out of there seats at 100 mph.

The 1m plate is there to protect the SAS/Btry Module. Other wise it will do what it does above.

Beetle Mk2 Rover download https://www.dropbox.com/s/uczu0ojf3oa8x01/Beetle%20Mk2.craft

[problemecium]

Today I had the shocking realization that I have never been to Duna. This will have to be rectified once Kerbatar 2 is finished.

[DeepSpaceDutch]

I finished the orbital fuel depot of the KethEx Corporation in orbit around Kerbin, next steps in this career is filling it up with fuel extracted from Minmus and then getting ready for the Jool-5 challenge

The last piece of the fuel depot was the second of two huge fuel storage units;

Circularizing the orbit;

Land ahoy!

Getting Bill out to get some KAS struts in place

It's difficult to see, but he's enjoying himself!

Open for business!

[Concentric]

Internet was down, so I ran two interplanetary missions today. One is here. The other, I will elaborate on below.

So, I was looking at the orbits, trying to decide on a destination. Using a method of tangents that I found on this forum to judge transfer windows by eye, I thought I had a Dres transfer rather immediately. "Ah, great!" I thought, "Dres's gravity is about the same as Ike's, and I've designed an ion lander for Ike - so I just need a transfer stage on it." So, I took RedKing's lifter - which I've saved as a subassembly under RockLifter - and set about converting the Jumbo-64 tank into a nuclear transfer stage for the ion lander.

Four hardpoints, small tanks, LV-Ns and fuel lines went around the top of the tank, and a separator was fitted at the bottom, splitting the central column of the lifter. Fuel lines and struts were reworked, and it was time to launch for orbit. That wasn't difficult, and the last lifter stage was dropped on a just-about-suborbital path. The ship finished circularisation on the LV-Ns. At this point, I realised I had dropped my reaction wheel, so I needed to save my monopropellant for turning and not waste it.

Then, I looked at the orbits again. Apparently, I had gotten the wrong end of the tangent, and I didn't really have a Dres transfer window at all. So, I timewarped until I did. At this time, some kind of mystical event must have occurred, as the stars aligned and I had almost simultaneous Dres, Duna, Jool and Eeloo transfer windows. Unfortunately, having only one manned (and one unmanned) interplanetary mission under my belt and under 160 hours play time, I was in no way confident enough in my skill to launch three or more simultaneous interplanetary missions. Two was fine, though, so I launched another RedKing mission with the completed, tweaked lander - see the link at the top of this post.

The Dres window was first, and it wasn't as though I couldn't do a Duna mission outside of launch window, so I burned the escape and adjusted for an encounter on the correct side of Dres. Focus View's drawmode effect is very handy - I haven't looked into .cfg editing, nor have I needed to.

Then, it was time to get orbit. Routine, really...

"A completed tech tree is no excuse not to gather science!" - Jebadiah Kerman

At this point in the other mission, Bill had successfully landed on Ike with an identical ion lander. So, thinking that the near-identical gravity on two airless bodies was enough to imply identical descent paths, I detached the lander at a 10km orbit and began to descend.

This didn't go as planned. After a couple of attempts, quickloading back to before detaching from the transfer stage, I decided that there was clearly some difference I wasn't seeing. I didn't particularly want to lower my orbit much further (7km is where the timewarp gets even further restricted for Dres), and I knew the ion lander had a lot of delta-v. I was also confident that it could ascend to orbit on its own. Furthermore, the transfer stage was only a little over half-empty.

So I landed on it. No landing legs, a top-heavy ship landing directly on the end of a Jumbo-64 tank that can only really steer with RCS, but it still worked first time - for a given value of work. I forgot to retract solar panels when the at-that-point-completely intact ship fell over, and two of them were smashed off. I retracted the panels, undocked, rolled the lander into an upright position and deployed its landing legs.

Then Jeb took down a couple of reports, picked up a surface sample and planted a flag. Now it was time to test my confidence in the ascent. With twenty percent of the solar panels missing, could the DresIon lander get back to orbit?

It was a bit of a chore, but yes. And shortly (thanks to the magic of timewarp), it was time to burn for home. This was a right pain.

Constant stopping and starting, waiting for the batteries to recharge so I could continue to burn... At least the xenon supply wasn't stingy. 3200 xenon to start, and though I didn't note it down, I think I had between 800 and 1200 remaining at the end.

Pulled the Kerbin periapse in nice and low - it ended up becoming a direct-to-landing aerocapture, the encounter being two days after the other mission's return.

Edited May 9, 2014 by Concentric
Editing in a link

[soulsource]

Since I'm new to this thread, first I'd like to say "Hi" to everyone.

Now to what I did yesterday: I finally managed to land an ion propelled landing unit in the munar canyons. Twice. The first landing attempt worked well, but the lander came to rest on a slope (what I didn't realize, until it actually touched the ground), from which I failed to launch again - after throttling up the lander tipped over and I could not get it upright anymore. Nevertheless, I retried (from a quicksave with lander still attached to my munar orbital station), and this time, although just landing a few meters from the previous spot, everything worked as planned, probably because this time I switched on thrusters before attempting the launch. Bob brought back some interesting surface samples, and nice seismic data.

The next target will be the twin craters. Afterwards I'm going to refill the xenon and liquid fuel tanks of the munar orbital station. The first in order to do at least another 4 landings, the latter in order to achieve a (nearly) polar orbit with the station, so the lander needs less delta-V to reach the polar biomes. Not, that my lander would not have large enough xenon tanks to get there from an equatorial orbit, it's just that I still need a lot of experience, regarding fuel efficient landing...

Anyhow, my next post will have screenshots.

[KerbMav]

Not playing today, but came to notice that I get the "cannot undock bug" more often - at least perceivedly.

Pondering if I should MM-install some emergency explosive bolts to the docking ports like I did with my one-kerbal-pod.

Not sure which end should seperate though, the docking or the vessel side of the part ... would it be able to dock again after seperating? Would they even seperate if the parts are connected via docking game code?

Sunday will be a lab day, I think.

[RW-1]

Over the last couple of days, I -

Sent a lander up and over to Munar Station One, forgot batteries on this one while staging, but decided we'll do major ops in daylight

Sent the core for Minimus Station One to Minimus. On this one, I must have switched to target vice orbit just when doing my MOI, and ended up luckily in a polar inclined orbit. While nice for science, I would have preferred a more equatorial orbit.

That said though, the tug I put with it has RCS, but also one ION engine and 12 tanks of xenon, so I'm sure I can nudge it back to equatorial if need be.

Edited May 9, 2014 by RW-1

[Codey737]

Oops?

[Othuyeg]

Returned a science lab from Minmus orbit.

I had it there as a part of my space station. I sent a nuclear powered probe to collect it with the claw.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[Felsmak]

Oops?

-snip-

For some reason, this made me feel all happy inside.

[iDan122]

Docked MajorJim's Dragon to my ISS:

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[Codey737]

For some reason, this made me feel all happy inside.

How does this make you feel?

[Felsmak]

It is late at night and this shocking sight makes me actually ask ... is this for real?

No, there's really nothing creepy going on there. I placed them there myself.

How does this make you feel?

That's awful. Do you kill Kerbals just to see how people will react? Shame on you!

Edited May 9, 2014 by Felsmak

[iDan122]

How does this make you feel?

http://i.imgur.com/usEFqzX.gif

You could probably land that with a little trimming...

[CaptainKipard]

@Tw1 What's with those trees? What mod is that?

[r4pt0r]

Oops?

http://i.imgur.com/Ea3mH5Z.gif

i need to know whats happening and why.