What did you do in KSP1 today?

[NoPanShabuShabu]

Got the Eve Science Rover to the return ship. This return ship looks small compared to the rover.

Launch went smoothly and was just like the Suicide Simulator.

Nearly made orbit with the central main booster.

Things went to hell, here the boys have rendezvoused with the main ship, but Bill and Jeb have gotten knocked out. They're stuck in their seats, but are supposedly also on free EVA, so here Bob tries to knock them out of their seats, which doesn't work. I resorted to editing the quicksave file to put them back in their seats, which the first 2 tries resulted in them exploding when they left the seat. 3rd time, I got them out alive, but they went flying a good way away.

Well, we got everybody back home with 370 experiments, 12673.0 Science returned. Total for Surface Landed and Splashed from Eve was 23199.74. Also, drove the rover over 7000 km, which I tell you got pretty old by the end.

[soulsource]

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 went the "hard to steer and nearly impossible to dock" way and built a refuelling ship (using the ARM tanks and engines) that can bring up a full Kerbodyne S3-14400 to LKO. Docking it requires a lot of patience though. On the other hand, considering how much fuel was needed to completely refuel the lander for Eve (still waiting for its transfer window), the size kind of seems reasonable to me...

The screenshots are not from the same flight, the the RCS thrusters were moved to make docking less painful.

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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!

I'm looking forward to lunch break, when I'll have time to watch the videos ;-)

Yesterday I finally managed an SSTO that has enough fuel left to do a Mun flyby. Next goal: SSTO Minmus flyby. Final goal (for now): SSTO Minmus landing.

[THENEWJOEMAMA]

I made a rocket, but for some reason it wouldn't take off.

[AlamoVampire]

I did a Jool Atmospheric Exploration Mission. <Well, it was a test for application to Career mode while in Sandbox>

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Just before the thing detonated in the atmosphere at the -250 point, my Atmospheric gauge read 14 atmospheres of pressure!!!

[Duke23]

Tried my hand at a boat earlier but it didn't turn out well... This was just a test and I was going to build the rest around it, but I got discouraged. It would do about 20m/s with the nose down in the water, and when I tried to put it on shore it fell into pieces and my Kerbal rolled up onto the beach. (I enabled infinite fuel for the first time ever on this test because I realized I forgot fuel lines after finally getting it to water.)

I'm looking forward to lunch break, when I'll have time to watch the videos ;-)

Yesterday I finally managed an SSTO that has enough fuel left to do a Mun flyby. Next goal: SSTO Minmus flyby. Final goal (for now): SSTO Minmus landing.

Very nice! What's it look like? Mine is only good for LKO missions unless I refuel it in orbit but it's got a little over 5000 DV with all the tanks topped off. Pretty useful bird once I got some of the bugs worked out, it's great for sending up SCANSats and adventurous Kerbals with little green deathwishes (you'll see in the video) or tracking down anomalies... That's my next goal, to build a new one capable of visiting Mun / Minmus with no refuel. I think I'll go try to land this one in the flats on Minmus just to see what I'm dealing with since I've never really done much with horizontal landings off Kerbin, unless you count my rocket rover / hopper (Mun) which was much smaller.

[Kerbal01]

Launched another falcon 9 1.1, got the first stage mostly recovered (I had it hovering at 20 m/s at 130 meters) but I throttled down and it accelerated and hit the ground at 40 m/s before I could do anything. Second stage recovery was similarly bad

[DunaRocketeer]

^ Booster recovery isn't the easiest thing in the world is it?

I'm rounding off my Joolian mission and testing a new shuttle design.

[L3GO]

I did my third lets play.

Episode 3: A Kerbal Never Dies

In this episode we go out to get more science for our Mün trip in two episodes time. The Audio was a bit low and not how i want to to be. But i am getting a Blue Yeti in a few weeks.

[TrooperCooper]

After successfully completing my Duna project and then goofing arround near Mun and Minmus with new experiments for a while, I am now slowly getting the hang of SSTO planes.

This is the SSPX. Got her up to about 50 km and everything seemed to be working fine. Then the whole cockpit disintegrated since its not a pressurized pod. Prolly need a little more tech unlocks...

[Herbin]

Landed on Minmus, got into high orbit around the sun, orbited Moho, collected gobs of science points with my mobil research lab, then returned to Kerbin. Nuclear engines for ftw.

[NecroBones]

Continued my Jool-5 attempt. Returned from Tylo, and next stop was Laythe. Successful landing and lift-off!

[GeneralMDBK]

Decided to mess around a bit with 0.7.3

[Voculus]

I made this Kethane Miner/Refinery for the Mun:

I also made two Munar VTOL hoppers. One for ferrying Kerbals about, and the other for hauling stuff. It has KAS magnets underneath, and can haul a full tank with 16k units of Kethane, though I don't have screenshots of that just yet.

[the_bT]

A while ago I built a large tanker aircraft with a carrier-like deck because aerial refueling the traditional way is not kerbal enough. Earlier attempts to land on that deck failed due to SAS not keeping the carrier sufficiently on course and some weird glitch with procedural fairings.

SAS has been replaced by kOS custom control logic and the glitch can be avoided by never ever loading the craft (no quickload, revert to launch, switching to distant vessels, etc).

Result: my first carrier landing on a flying carrier. I present, the Aircraft Aircraft Carrier:

(screenshots every 5 seconds real time on approach, every second on touchdown)

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Carrier was controlled by a kOS script holding heading, speed and altitude stable, Fighter was flown manually. Might have been able to land it more centered, but I got jelly and hit the grappling hooks as soon as It seemed safe.

Edit: I'm not happy with the grappling hook. They don't work half the time, won't allow refueling and I think I can build some sort of robotic arm that moves with a docking port to the plane landing and dock it. That would be awesome XD.

Edited June 18, 2014 by the_bT

[Voculus]

Carrier was controlled by a kOS script holding heading, speed and altitude stable.

Can you explain this in more detail? Or more specifically, how would a noob like me with zero coding/scripting knowledge use this mod to create an altitude-holding autopilot?

[ximrm]

Here's help:

[the_bT]

Can you explain this in more detail? Or more specifically, how would a noob like me with zero coding/scripting knowledge use this mod to create an altitude-holding autopilot?

Well, it's not so much a problem of scripting. The script is rather simple. Also there are good tutorials on how to write them. One has already been posted I see

My script runs a tight loop (~100 times a second), in it it first calculates the differences between the set course/speed/altitude and the current values. Then it uses this difference (called error) to set new input values. (proportional)

I improved precision by also calculating the derivative well as the integral of the error and using those too. With altitude I didn't even need to calculate derivative as I could simply use the vertical speed.

Here is the corresponding line of the script:

set dp to (0.05 * (deltaalt / 10)) + (0.12 * (intAlt / 10)) - (0.1 * ((verticalspeed / 10))).

[...]

set ship:control:pitch to dp.

You can get away without the derivative and integral parts. However, without the integral part you will see a constant error that the controller cannot get rid of (if you set for example 5000m altitude the controller might hold 4912 instead). The derivative part will help with avoiding oscillations (I think, I'm no control theory guru )

The result is a PID (propotional, integral, derivative ) controller which needs tuning. That can get difficult (it is a per craft business) and I kinda guessed around until the script stopped ripping the tanker apart. It still only works when you are close to the height and speed it should hold. It's even worse with heading, mainly because I have not yet managed to read roll value and thus use heading to control roll. So if you're off to one side the plane will roll into a curve towards the correct heading, but it doesn't stop to actually fly a curve, it rolls and rolls and rolls and crashes

But if you are on course it works most of the time.

Edit: just to be clear, the lock steering to up + R(whatever) method that is shown in the video above didn't work for a plane as large as my carrier, that's why I rolled my own.

Edited June 18, 2014 by the_bT

[munseeker]

Flight testing my Duna lander design un-kerbaled to the Mün.

On the first landing I discovered that a 30-ton lander does not come to rest easy if there is any horizontal velocity left. All I found of the lander+rover once the dust had settled was one command chair at the landing site and one docking port in a highly eccentric orbit around the Mün.

Second try with various improvements went much better, but I'll upgrade the engines since the lander has a hard time slowing down, which feels like an oversight by the Kerbal engineers involved.

[SofusRud]

I was adding some parts to my space station, an orange tank, a lab and habitation module, and a claw today, when something weird happened. When I attached the claw and released the tug (It was attached by the claw to free up the docking port for docking) I got a massive phantom force on my station. Before I knew what had happened, Cloudbase Kerbin-1 went from a neat 87-by-88km orbit to a 41-by-132! Now this is a station that I have been meticulously assembling bit by bit with everything brought up on an SSTO cargo-shuttle, so I was not happy with the prospect of losing it.

The station itself is not balanced and has no onboard RCS system. All it has for manouvering is a probe tug (on the top left) and a MMU (on the bottom of the middle section) and these are not meant for moving the whole thing. But I decided that I had to try to rescue the thing regardless. I had to disable the RCS on the probe tug because it was causing me to rotate when I thrusted forwards, so that left me with 2 usable thrusters. I tell you, shifting 106 tons of space-station 36m/s on two thrusters is a daunting task, even without the fact that I was gonna pass through atmo. In spite of these issues, and another one which I'll get to, I eventually managed to put it on a 72-by-110km orbit, where the station will remain until I conjure up the patience to put it in a less eccentric orbit.

The Other Issue: Phantom Forces

After the incident that caused my stations' orbit to go all wonky, I noticed something else. Whenever I would start time acceleration, the station would be attacked by phantom forces, causing the two "arms" (the ones with the jumbo and all the RCS respectively) to be pulled backwards (away from Cupola) with great force.

These forces also manifested when the parts which they acted on were disconnected from the rest of the station.

Fortunately, asking for help on the forums proved helpful, and the issue is now resolved, and I can proceed to add stuff to the station in future.

Oh and I also did 3 SSTO flights without incident, but that kinda goes without saying.

[Floppster]

Found out that RemoteTech has been updated

-Got really excited

-Updated and checked in on my satellites

Tried KSP on Linux Mint 17

-Yay 64 bit

-Got a little bit irritated before i learned that the mod key was displaced to right shift

-Tested my Mint laptop by flying a 300+ part ship a little, approved.

Cleaned up my mod list

-Am now down to around 40 folders with many of them being single part stuff or gameplay/environment enhancements

-Found out what a horder I am...

Found and tested new mods/part packs

-All modders deserve an applause or a free hotdog

Also, that 300+ part ship mainly consisted of 1.25 m probes in 6-way symmetry, looked like an octopus. 10/10, would build tentacles again.

[LethalDose]

Just completed my first "official" SSTO spaceplane landing. Clean, on the runway, stopped before the end of the runway. Then taxi'd over to the hangar before recovering. This mission returned Jeb and Neilrick from a Minmus expedition, and Seando was the ferry pilot out to and back from Bifrost. The spaceplane brought back > 900 science with it.

The science has been spent to unlock the secrets of very heavy rocketry. I now understand why we need the big rockets to deal with Class E asteroids.

ANd then I read this:

Found out that RemoteTech has been updated

GLEE!!!!

Edited June 18, 2014 by LethalDose

[Vonar]

Jeb looking at the remains of his now shattered starfighter and wondering how he will get back to Kerban

[Evil Ed]

Today I started to build what will become my first station. After assembling is completed it will be shipped to an orbit around Jool or one of Jools moons. There will be 10 lifts to build the station and maybe an 11th with some kind of lander + the crew needed in the lab. 5 lifts done so a few more to go!

[Victus]

I started creating a cinematic called Above the Horizon.

[Hades514]

Was nearly hit in a MKO

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