What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Frank_G]

Today i finished orbital assembly of my first space station in the new .24.2 career mode. It is by far the smallest station i ever built, but it was a lot of fun... and it doesnt lack any functionality in comparison to the large ones i built before.

Its main purpose is to have the ability to refuel craft in orbit, especially small landers and transfer stages to do SCIENCE on and around Mün and Minmus and in space around Kerbin too. Also it will be a relay point for rescue missions.

Costing only a 100000 funds (excluding launches), i hope it will help saving funds and cutting down mission times. Scientific results will be collected in the lab and when a satisfying amount is reached, it will be brought to

the surface in one of the lander pods or in a craft that will need to land anyway.

Next step will be designing an orbital service craft, that will do the rescue missions and deliver science equipment to special orbits. Future plans will include a truss with some deep space probes docked to it, so i can immediately

launch interplanetary science probes and scanning missions on demand when a launch window opens.

[Frank_G]

Spice might be found on Duna, never a drop of rain there. Haven't seen a worm yet, though.

Have you deployed some seismic probes yet? Maybe you can confirm existence of sandworms on Duna that way... some impacts from orbit might lure them to the impact sites...

[edit]

Hmmmm, Harkonnen, like the Harkonnen cannon from Hellsing

When i remember it right, the sniper rifle in Hellsing was called Halconnen - It was a Dune reference for sure. Go watch the movie, youre missing something.

Edited July 29, 2014 by Frank_G

[palker]

Build a plane designed to test a small jet engine in high altitude and low speed, went for a high aspect ratio wing that i had to string together from square wing segments. As you can see the plane's performance was rather poor.

After that i struted the wings and while the plane became more or less flyable it could not fly slow enough high enough. In the end i just made unmanned VTOL took of reached the test condition altitude and speed and then landed on runway with ease.

[smysha]

Today I experimented with physicless parts. I understood that you can build physicless spacecraft without mass, but with thrust. That mean infinite acceleration.

Behold! My masterpiece.

Board into seat, ditch the capsule and you are golden!

Now, this is strange. Let's look to the map.

Sweet mother of mercy.

And it still accelerating...

UPD: I've tried to do some maths and count acceleration according to the speed change per second. But nubers changing too fast...

Anyways: acceleration of this thing is ~30000000 m/s^2

Edited July 29, 2014 by smysha

[Tandy45]

For the first time ever I managed to leave Kerbin orbit and intercept with the Mun in the career mode. Too a painstakingly long time and many a tear were shed but by the Kerbals I managed it, No one died on route.....

Bob Kerman happened to be volunteered for the next mission, however his apprehension to go to the Mun is apparent.....

[TrooperCooper]

Jebediah preparing to launch his Minmus exploration mission with the Moon Jumper II.

Under the fairings sits the actual lander, protected from aerodynamics. It can do a few hops on Minmus and re-fuel at a pre-positioned depot with labs in orbit. And of course it will function as return-vehicle as well...

[ghost22]

Did my first docking today thanks to mechjeb

[LordCorwin]

Today I experimented with physicless parts. I understood that you can build physicless spacecraft without mass, but with thrust. That mean infinite acceleration.

Behold! My masterpiece.

http://i.imgur.com/oKrO3XS.png

Board into seat, ditch the capsule and you are golden!

http://i.imgur.com/mSLjdNi.png

Now, this is strange. Let's look to the map.

http://i.imgur.com/oeV9D1V.png

Sweet mother of mercy.

And it still accelerating...

UPD: I've tried to do some maths and count acceleration according to the speed change per second. But nubers changing too fast...

Anyways: acceleration of this thing is ~30000000 m/s^2

I think you've just built the first warp drive :-)

[SofusRud]

In trying Scott Manleys latest infinite fuel challenge, I made an unexpected discovery. apparently atmospheric flames only happen over a certain altitude, I think it's 10k, regardless of how fast you are going.

[Concentric]

Landed a part-test ship on the runway with its 'chutes. Then, many, many attempts to accurately deorbit the old Eve-Gilly probestack at KSC. Eventually, I figured out a height that got me close enough.

Also, got Bill off Minmus. First, he had to dock with the Minmus satellite to leave the science module there.

Rendezvous was not too difficult, just putting the intersect at the descending node, then burning there until the next intersect separation was minimal. The inclination was dealt with at that rendezvous while orbit-matching. A modified Exley Maneuver?

Docked the science module to the satellite and left it behind. Next, to work out the return burn.

Kept getting Mun encounters, so I decided to take a quick Mun-assist to bring the periapse into Kerbin atmosphere for extremely little delta-v.

And Bill's on his way back!

After that, I redesigned the Eve-Gilly stack. Three times the xenon, and replacing the Hecs probes with Okto2s, then adding landing legs made from cubic octagonal and octagonal struts: by my calculations that should be considerably more than enough. The first xenon tank is on the Eve-lander probe, providing much-needed bulk, and almost all of the fuel for the Eve transfer (using 90% of the monopropellant first makes it a touch more than enough, according to the delta-v map). Even if the monopropellant is unused, though, the other two xenon tanks on the ion drive/Gilly lander make the probe-stack capable of landing on Gilly and returning to Kerbin, by the raw delta-v numbers.

Tried to put it up and perform an orbital rescue with a new cargo-spaceplane. As I don't have the RAPIER now that I completed that test contract, I put two turbojets, six 48-7Ss and ten 24-77s on a similar plane-shape. The wings making the body were tilted somewhat, and a pocket I-beam served to hold the payload in the bay. Unfortunately, I kept running into asymmetrical fuel-drain, no matter what I did. Eventually, the SPH glitched out, removing wings and fuel tanks, duplicating large portions in the same place, and creating floating tanks and intakes. So, I stopped and did a few simple contracts. Just flag-planting and orbit-transmissions.

[Poryy]

Sent a probe and Bill to the Duna system. I did an aerobrake, dropped the probe while my periapsis was still at 13k metres, boosted the manned lander to a periapsis of 50k metres, landed the probe, preformed a transfer burn to Ike with the manned lander, landed. I completed two contracts. "Explore Duna", and "Explore Ike." Currently working on returning Bill from Ike.

[rennsport27]

Ran a good chunk of my first Eve mission in career mode. Packed several probes as well and a manned Gilly lander. Used it to put satellites in Eve and Gilly orbit, and drop two probes to Eve's surface. Haven't done that yet with Deadly reentry and NEAR, so that was rather interesting. Also, I went on EVA to gather science info, and the ship exploded spectacularly as I got out. This is why I'm a big quicksave fan.

[MrXenox]

My Tantalus 3 mission landed on Pol for the first time, I just barely had enough fuel to get home, with about 200 delta V remaining after my Kerbin de-orbit burn, I completed two contracts at once Explore Jool and Explore Pol, I'll have to come back later though, as I still have contracts to explore the other moons.

[sumrex]

The game seems intent on me testing the most overpowered engines in crazy locations so I pushed back!!! It wanted a solid rocket booster test in water so I chose the true Kerbal way and used 2 instead!!!!! And yes Bill survived. I also started rebuilding a space station for .24 and loading it up with rescue pods for stranded pilots.

Shoehorning multiple ships in a confined nosecone comes in handy a lot. Especially with landers.

The first 3rd of my new station with a few pilot rescue pods docked.

Edited July 30, 2014 by sumrex

[User Unrelated]

Killed Jeb on my first ever mission in KSP 0.24

Successfully got to orbit with solid-booster staging, and a single liquid engine

The lack of a decoupler under the pod was the issue

because the craft re-entered the atmosphere, and began to tumble

that's when deadly reentry took over and oh-so kindly boiled away the parachute.

The capsule survived, but jeb was streaking through the atmosphere doing like mach-3 or something silly, mach visual-effects everywhere (FAR will do that to you on steep descents)

I booted him out of the capsule and tried to land on his helmet to save him, but I think he was just going TOO fast...

I think with some strange interaction between my "stage recovery" mod (which assumed "control" of the capsule when it was abandoned) and the new KSP system, I didn't appear to lose any reputation for killing poor Jeb.

I had a bunch of successful launches after that, though.

My next mission is to land on the moon.

on the topic of "testing things in silly places"...

I had to test a small gear bay on an escape trajectory out of kerbin...

1x stayputnik

1x small battery (probably unneccesary)

1x small gear bay

1x inline decoupler

6x medium solid rocket booster

1x flight engineer system (because watching the TWR climb like that is hilarious)

...mission complete.

Edited July 30, 2014 by User Unrelated

[Guber K.]

A couple of firsts today. I did my first challenge (K-Prize) and finished it with my first SSTO mission.

As a bonus, launched a satellite from it in the process.

[GusTurbo]

Nothing! I took day one of the bar exam. Day two begins about 7 hours from now!

Soon, I will make my return.

[KingPhantom]

i copied this one:

changed the yellow part of the texture to a purple and wrote a new CFG file for it. now i have a 1400 units xenon tank! tested it on minmus and pol. works great for a lander!

[Mister Kerman]

I finally have all the parts unlocked I need to start going to the Mun in style. Can anyone guess what I'm building?

(And I know you guys are gonna tear me to pieces for enabling part clipping, which I wouldn't normally do; but I really wanted this to look right!)

PS: Can anyone tell me why I can't attach the top of my lander to anything? It simply won't. I've tried all the obvious stuff! That's why I had to make that weird I-Beam arm thing to attach it to something so it wouldn't be transparent when I took the screen shot...

Edited July 30, 2014 by Mister Kerman

[KerbMav]

My Jool Ion Probe has a few problems, its energy reserves only last 1min under full thrust, the edited solar panels regenerate power really slow, the needed changes in dV to achieve orbit around anything are to high under these circumstances. So, except for some temperature and gravitational readings from Laythe, Vall and Tylo (mostly only high orbit ones) - and Jool of course - it did not manage to do much else. But! passing all these three moons puts it into a Kerbol orbit crossing Eeloo's! A couple hundred more m/s for a plane change (in nine years!) will align it to wait for any lucky encounter - although solar power levels might very well be zero out there.

The Explorer III meanwhile is closing in on Jool's SOI (which is HUGE btw.!). By thrusting a mere 17m/s I ensured a Laythe encounter that - corrected by 1.7m/s after entering the Joolian system - captures me into an orbit around Jool crossing that of Pol, my first waypoint to refill my Kethane tanks.

Generally I noticed that I tend to have less fuel on my missions than I expected. This is especially bothersome when I intend to do more than just one landing.

Nothing! I took day one of the bar exam. Day two begins about 7 hours from now!

Remember me to never engage in any emotionally charged discussion with you ...

Good luck!

PS: Can anyone tell me why I can't attach the top of my lander to anything? It simply won't.

You can only attach something that is more than on part at the same node you detached it at.

The SelectRoot Mod might give you options around this.

Edited July 30, 2014 by KerbMav

[Red Iron Crown]

Nothing! I took day one of the bar exam. Day two begins about 7 hours from now!

Aww, just when I was starting to like you I find out you're a lawyer. (Kidding of course, good luck!)

(And I know you guys are gonna tear me to pieces for enabling part clipping, which I wouldn't normally do; but I really wanted this to look right!)

Replicas get a pass on part clipping accusations, the whole point is to make it look right (and yours certainly does).

[Mister Kerman]

You can only attach something that is more than on part at the same node you detached it at.

The SelectRoot Mod might give you options around this.

Edited July 30, 2014 by Mister Kerman

[soulsource]

Jebediah drove the Evo-O-Rover (in)to the sea. While the trip took a while (and a little while more since my stupid PC decided to crash...), everything worked according to plan. The rover was slowly driven into the sea, so that the wheels just lost contact to the ground. Then all mounted scientific equipment was used to gather data, including a material study and a goo observation. Afterwards Jebediah climbed down the ladder to get a liquid sample. He also gathered all instrument data and stored it in the rover cockpit.

The cockpits reaction wheels were then used to rotate the rover around, and luckily the wheels touched the ground again, so it could simply drive out of the liquid, without activating the rocket engine which had been included in the rover to make it capable of short distance sea travel. Next goal: drive back to the ship and depart from Eve. The rover will be left on Eve for potential future remote use.

<iframe class="imgur-album" src="http://imgur.com/a/3uYvw/embed?background=f2f2f2&text=1a1a1a&link=4e76c9" frameborder="0" height="550" width="100%"></iframe>

With a little bit of luck I'll finish all currently running missions in .23.5 today and then switch to .24.2.

I'm planning to start a new career and to use several addons, including FAR, DRE, KIDS, RT2, TAC and maybe more. Considering the added difficulty of TAC and DRE, which preset for KIDS would you suggest?

I'm also planning not to use quicksaves and reverting, making the game more difficult as well.

[nremies1]

I've accomplished two things recently that I was pretty stoked about:

#1 was my first manned Duna mission...brought back about 2500 science, including the lander can. I'd designed something with a smaller payload but same basic configuration that *almost* worked, then stopped working on it and grabbed a ship out of a tutorial instead...turns out that I was on the right track with the original design, made some changes to the lifter and presto-changeo, it worked. The notable firsts were an aerobraking maneuver (I was shocked at how effortless the capture was) and the use of the mobile processing lab to actually clean and re-use experiments.

#2 was the launch of version 2.0 of a space station on Kerbin orbit. It's very simple and is more a proof-of-concept than anything really useful, but it has a full orange tank for refueling. It has twice as much fuel and better part positioning than version 1.0, which was damaged during a docking maneuver when somebody "accidentally" nudged the CSM engine throttle open. That was a fun mission...the whole CSM blew up, requiring Jeb and friends had to get out and push the naked command module to prevent it from de-orbiting (somehow even the parachutes on the CM were destroyed...), then wait for rescue. However, Jeb had no misgivings at all about piloting v2.0 into orbit, probably because he thought the cupola module was cool.

In between all of that, we ran another Mun landing - #7 or 8, I think - this time dropping a lander in one of the big craters I hadn't visited yet.

Edited July 30, 2014 by nremies1

[Mister Spock]

I continued my noobish march through the tech tree, this time to build my first rover:

Edited July 30, 2014 by Mister Spock