What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Fizwalker]

Landed on Minmus:

[Pics Removed]

They survived, however jeb looks nervous

Problem is that they has only 10 hour life suport left so I have to make an mini lander in the orbital construction facility and send down to rescue them.

Never liked that miner anyway.

That's a pretty short window! Godspeed!

[magnemoe]

That's a pretty short window! Godspeed!

Not an huge issue and did it, lucky about the orbital shipyard, if not I had to send an lander in very fast.

[Fizwalker]

Today we mourn Jebediah and Bill Kerman, for although their ship made it into orbit, the Krakken disassembled their ship quite neatly and they did not survive the experience. They are our brothers in space, and I hope they look favorably upon our future endeavors. Godspeed. Amen.

[Fizwalker]

Not an huge issue and did it, lucky about the orbital shipyard, if not I had to send an lander in very fast.

I wouldn't have made it.... Fastest I've gotten to Minmus is 5 days. Mind you, I don't have an orbital shipyard to build such craft.

[Specialist290]

Not exactly "today" so much as "over the weekend," but I got the urge to reproduce my self-landing rover in 0.23.5:

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[Commander Zoom]

Launched a rocket to John Williams' "The Flying Sequence", from Superman. Results: pleasing.

[Duke23]

Finally took the Valkyrie V4T-B (Telemachus enabled, Bus edition) out from my space station to get my stuck Kerbals from Munar orbit. The whole reason I built that variant, in fact.

Too lazy to bring it any closer... And I still keep forgetting how big this thing is compared to most other ships I putt around Kerbin's general area with.

Overall things went well, but this was based on the model BEFORE I messed with some of the balance issues. I had to do my landing approach twice... The first time I was aiming for an anomaly I found where another Kerbal was waiting. I messed something up while balancing the tanks and when I engaged the engines for final approach I went into a flat spin and crashed

Second landing I balanced correctly but came in way farther West and just landed it out in the grass because I didn't have the patience to fly that far. KSC was never the intended target for this landing, and after that last minute change of plans it was pretty much impossible... Or at least impractical, as it was almost on the other side of the planet.

[problemecium]

Today was all about cargo deliveries. I brought a new crew accommodation module to the Spinel station, I brought an ion probe and mini space tug to Kerbatar 2, my latest mothership, and I swapped out one of Kerbatar 2's landers for an atmosphere-compatible one.

That reminds me, I should stick a couple rovers on there too. And maybe a skycrane.

[RobertR]

I made a kethane scanner and sent it to Duna. I'm still pretty new to kethane so I don't know if it's the best set up for kethane scanning but it ultimately got the job done. Working on a base type thing to send to duna to start a mining operation.

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[Duke23]

I was watching a

basically how not to crash VTOLs because that's all I've ever done with them, even though I "know" the basics I kept getting frustrated and quitting. So I decided to make a couple and try again. The first couple were really just hovercrafts that ended up in pieces as usual. Then I thought hey, I have a spaceplane that I keep modifying the crap out of, why not mess with it some more?

First attempt wouldn't lift at all as I expected (it's heavy) so I just decided to do some stunt piloting. I lit all the air breathing engines and lifted off, shut off the vertical ones then pulled up as hard as I could, stalled, then the thrust overcame it and I was able to flip it over. Got out of an accidental (stalling again) dive followed by a flat spin that this plane is so fond of doing at low speed (No screenshots of this part unfortunately, too busy cursing) but I barely regained control. Then I went to buzz some of my old junk in the KSC South Yard and came a little too close... For reference, I just have a flag planted ~2.5km from KSC to the south for placing things I don't want to lag the area. There's another one about 3.5km to the north with a small asteroid sitting there, labelled "Basketball" in the screenshots.

Knocked two of the engines off but this thing has a fair amount of torque, enough to counteract one VTOL engine being shut off among other balance issues. I powered down and landed then circled around to see what I hit. It was my old asteroid truck.

I mounted two more engines in SPH and tried again. This time I got some lift but the balance was off so I transferred some fuel.

Success! Sort of... Not a whole lot of thrust. But on the bright side, it's pretty stable (vertically at least) because of how much throttle I have to give it to actually lift.

Managed to get it on top of the VAB. I always go for that when I'm messing around with hover / VTOL stuff but I usually crash before I ever get there, or fall off it. This one I was able to set down gently to my surprise.

Pretty useless exercise overall since this plane just isn't built for VTOL capabilities (uses WAY too much fuel to do very little), but it was fun to try and helped me learn to control them better

[soulsource]

I had fun with spaceplanes - again. My latest design, which I lovingly call "Crashtest 2" is the most successful up to now. Apart from the issue that I still need to pack more oxidizer in order to actually do something useful with it, it also has a problem regarding the landing gears. For reasons I do not fully understand those things keep "getting stuck" in the ground... Maybe I should add a few additional gears to spread the weight...

[Whackjob]

Worked on getting this to orbit and failed. Will get it up there without a doubt after a good power-nap.

[L3GO]

Planning SUPER SECRET STUFF with the A-team for the next challange and i also made this

[Tw1]

Launched from the roof of the VAB.

Because BadS.

I also took a lot of cool photos, but they must remain supper secret for now. I'll make an album eventually, until then, have this ordinary capsule reentry.

[NecroBones]

Continued my Jool-5 attempt, and made our first stop at Tylo (to get rid of the heaviest lander first). My landing wasn't the most efficient this time, partially because I was so focused on speed and altitude that I forgot to eject the first stage until the second stage was nearly spent. Duh. Fuel reserves aren't great, but I expect to be able to get to an orbit that at least misses the mountains, and the tug can come down to match that.

[rogu3ish]

Managed to design and test a pretty efficient orbital fuel tanker. My previous design the day before was a complete disaster. I managed to get about 6000 kg of fuel into LKO with it, but it proved nearly impossible to steer and thus rendezvous. The new design flies like a dream, and can deliver a bit over 3000 kg of fuel, depending on the height of the target's orbit.

I managed to fuel up the first stage of my Jool probe and do a bit more in-orbit assembly. With over 35 days left until the launch window, I should now have time to add a bit more to it so I can harvest more science.

Here's the fueling in action. KAS is great for refueling (so long as SAS doesn't shake your ships to pieces)

The first stage mostly assembled, just a bit of rearranging to do:

After fueling up the first stage (with fuel and monopropellant) there was just enough left in the tanker to de-orbit and tidy things up

[Kerbal01]

Launched a dragon v2 on a falcon 9 1.1, the stack rotated twice around and I still made it into orbit. Also launched my first Duna probe on the only vehicle big enough to handle it, the Saturn v from FASA.

[Razor235]

Rescued Jebediah after his extended stay on the surface of Minmus.

Here he and Bill are just before touching down, with Mun and Minmus looking upon them. Bill is in the capsule, Jeb in the module just above it.

I also flew to the pole and back in about an hour:

http://imgur.com/a/QKev9

[Concentric]

Something rather silly.

I decided on a whim that as I'd proven to myself that I didn't need maneuver nodes to do basic Mun/Minmus missions, I should try to do a Mun mission without using the map screen at all. A quick note before I get further into this - this is the first time I've done a launch without using the map screen. You can already tell that this isn't going to go ideally.

First, I needed a little information. I looked at one of my flight-planner probes in 100km circular Kerbin orbit and made note of its orbital velocity and the dV of a maneuver to Mun encounter. I also made note of the travel time to the encounter so I'd know what was too long timewarping. Then, I threw together a lander that I thought should be able to do the landing and return portions of the mission, and still have fuel to spare. However, I didn't know this for certain, as it was entirely untested. I didn't even check the mass, not that I've made note of how much my Light Lifter subassembly can get to LKO.

And so, bright-eyed and optimistic, I timewarped on the launch pad until morning for the launch, remembering not to look at the map screen. The lander sat atop the Light Lifter and launched.

I started to turn at 10km, but with the benefit of hindsight, I think I turned too sharply. At around the point you can see in the image above, I was beginning to get a little worried about the lifter. I also realised about then that I'd never even tried to get to orbit without using the map screen, and in fact, I was very heavily reliant on data about the apoapse to get to orbit. Even with my burning, I reached apoapse below 35km - so I definitely turned too early/sharply. So, I burned up, desperately trying to at least get orbit without the map on this attempted Mapless Mun Mission.

Lifter fuel ran out, and in my boundless optimism, I had not attached a transfer stage to the rocket. As such, I was forced to burn lander fuel in atmosphere. Getting orbit without the map screen (and without planning, or testing, or... you get the idea) is difficult. How did people do it, back in those old premap versions?

Eventually, I got out of the atmosphere and started to circularise. I waited until I began to fall before firing that burn, which was probably a mistake. I consulted my notes: an orbital velocity of 2250m/s should work, and sure enough, it did. The orbit wasn't wonderfully circular, of course - I could tell by looking at the changing altitude meter roughly where my apoapse and periapse were (I think it was about 115 over 78?). I saw something that I think was Minmus, but without checking the map screen, I can't be sure.

On the right, in line with the top of the lander, the bright blue thing.

Now, despite having used a good chunk of my lander fuel just getting into orbit, I wasn't about to give up on this here. I timewarped to Munrise, consulted my notes, and fired.

By adding the orbital velocity and maneuver dV of the planner probe from earlier, I worked out a TransMunar Injection velocity of roughly 3100m/s. So, I burned until I got it, then started to timewarp. According to my noted time, it should be a little over a day until the encounter. It turned out to be shorter, but that's fine too.

As I was coming in over the light side and had no way of knowing my Munar periapse, I decided to burn to land immediately when I began to rise away again. So, I burned until my surface velocity's retrograde marker was pointing straight up, and kept timewarping and firing retrograde as I got closer. Eventually, fuel ran out on the descent stage, so I activated the ascent stage. I didn't immediately drop the descent stage because a) I could fire the ascent stage without dropping it, and it had the landing legs on it. This may have turned out to be a mistake, as as I got closer, it looked more and more like this was going to be a crash, not a landing.

The fuel in the ascent stage was running out fast, and the ground was fast approaching. I dared not take a screenshot, and dropped the descent stage anyway. Perhaps I could land on the engine? Fuel was down at the wire as I began to see my shadow on the Mun... and then, it ran out and I began to fall.

Then, a miracle.

A lithobraking miracle. The ascent stage's engine and fuel tank's destructive impact was enough to set the capsule down on its decoupler, safe and sound. Hardly able to believe it, I quicksaved - almost fearing that physics would suddenly decide "No, that can't have happened" and destroy the lander after the fact. Then, with the safety of a quicksave to come back to, I decided to try something really stupid. I'd previously determined that with six sepratrons and the right ejection angle, you could return a Mk1 capsule from Mun orbit safely. Lander cans are lighter, so maybe, just maybe, I could use the monopropellant and the same number of separatrons to do the same from the Mun's surface?

No. Don't be silly, that's not going to happen. I didn't even get over 40km, and I quickloaded as I descended. Perhaps Mun orbit would have been possible, but return was utterly out of the question. So, I got Dozer out on EVA to plant a flag, and put him back in to await a rescue mission.

Well, it'll give me something else to do.

Even so, a (somehow) successful "Land on the Mun without using the Map Screen from Launchpad onwards" mission. And I think I learned a bit more about KSP from this experience, too.

Edited June 17, 2014 by Concentric

[Razor235]

Something rather silly.

I saw something that I think was Minmus, but without checking the map screen, I can't be sure.

http://i.cubeupload.com/Bg56kq.png

On the right, in line with the top of the lander, the bright blue thing.

No, that's just a background star. Minmus looks like a tiny flickering dot, it's pretty easy to find after the first time you see it. Look at my post above to see what it looks like, it's just above Mun.

[Concentric]

No, that's just a background star. Minmus looks like a tiny flickering dot, it's pretty easy to find after the first time you see it. Try looking for it during the day, so you can see what it looks like.

Ah. Thanks, Razor. I'll look for it a few other times with the assistance of the Map until I think I've got it narrowed down - it should be handy for if I ever make the mad decision to try a Mapless Minmus Mission.

After the trouble I had getting to the Mun without the map, that's unlikely to happen any time soon.

[Crashy_McSplodey]

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/entries/1548-3rd-Post-First-Flight%21

I survived my rocket breaking in half, AAAND got a significant amount of science done. And then I went for a swim...

[Duke23]

I made a demo video for my Valkyrie series SSTO and the VTOL variant prototype. I swear I had the video named and sitting on my computer before soulsource said he had fun with spaceplanes

Video is sped up 3x throughout to make the boring parts less boring and less obvious when I do something stupid. The VTOL variant hasn't actually made orbit yet (I doubt it will with the extra weight / drag), or transitioned from horizontal flight to vertical landing. Edit: I take that back. Kind of rough, but it worked!

Edited June 18, 2014 by Duke23

[Mokmo]

Dusted off B9 (still works fine!), tried out their demo ships, somehow landed their Strugatsky at Island Airport on the first shot...

[Commander Zoom]

Topped off the monopropellant tanks of my three-ship Jool Flotilla. 70 hours to optimum transfer window (according to Kerbal Alarm Clock). Mission crew - Jeb, Bill and six other hand-picked kerbals - boarded Veda 2 28 hours ago.