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What did you do in KSP1 today?


Xeldrak

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If you try to symmetry parts that already have symmetry, this happens, and it permanently corrupts the craft.

Lol yeah. I found out the hard way. The thing is I didn't do anything I haven't done before. I work on a branch, then I duplicate it with 3X symmetry; but while I'm working on the staging one extra magical branch appears for no reason inside one of the others. I don't know why/where it comes from, but it's not there at the time I use symmetry to triple the original branch.

After you scrap a build 3 times, you start being really methodically careful to try and prevent it from happening again. I gave up after the 5th time!

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Today I finished my new KSS One. Took me 17 flights because I split the station in reasonable payloads with fairings, to keep it more or less realistic (unlike my last station). I also stopped using quickload (unless something bugs out), which can be really time consuming if you want to perfectly align all your modules and satisfy your OCD, but it's way more fun nontheless.

It's mainly made of OKS modules because I'm not so creative as I thought...

<iframe class="imgur-album" width="100%" height="550" frameborder="0" src="http://imgur.com/a/fREol/embed"></iframe>

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Had a nice moment the other day when I stupidly got a Kerbal stranded in orbit early in a game. Except... hmmn.. still have the last stage attached, and the periapsis is only 70.1 km, and I still have a decent amount of electricity left.. - so I started spinning the whole shebang, then detached the capsule just as it was swinging down toward Kerbin. It now had a 68km periapsis, and several orbits and much high-altitude aerobraking later, landed safely. Made me grin!

Thats Scott Manley quality right there. +1 for you, Sir. :D

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Got an early start this morning - decided to try to land a 22-Kerbal base on Duna. The first two attempts failed miserably, so I reverted them (I never leave dead Kerbals dead - that's just me). Third time was the charm....

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I haven't decided how big to go with my next bases yet. I do know that I need to do a complete redesign, because tipping over sucks. Plus I'd like to figure out a way to make them look cooler - this Leaning Tower of Duna may have nearly doubled my total Duna population, but I feel that it's missing something. Lots of superfluous lights, for one. Maybe a couple radio dishes, if I could figure out a way to make them stay open. Any ideas? (still running stock, otherwise I bet a mod or two would have a bunch of stuff to add)

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Today I posted a tutorial video which covers all aspects of KSP (pretty much), from construction and flying basics to complex things like docking, travelling to other planets, and building vertical-takeoff-and-landing single-stage-to-orbit spaceplanes!

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Today i advanced a little in the tech tree, allowing for some updates on my space station. I launched a new larger solar truss, exchanged the escape vehicles and rearranged the whole module configuration to a more versatile one. Also, i finally got the LV-N engines and constructed an orbital service vehicle with around 6km/s of deltaV and room for 2 kerbals. This will save lots of money and time for sure.

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I made a spaceplane that had an insane top acceleration of 92m/s^2, and a TWR of 9.5. Still didnt get me to a full orbit. *sigh*.

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Then, I set out to construct my a start to a munar colony. My setup for Moonlab1 involved jettisoning the final stage shortly before landing (landing struts were too short), but I misjudged how far the ground was, and had to finish the final km of decent on RCS trusters. Apparently, 47m/s is "slow" enough for the struts to hold, but I'm afraid my Kerbals did get a nasty whiplash. Sorry, guys!

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I tested yet another design for my overengineered Jool-5 mission. Today it was the Laythe lander. The design ended up a bit strange, as I had some constraints to fulfill. The lander must be reusable, so I had to find a way to replace the heat shield during the mission. As it doubles as the main command pod of the mothership, I could not put fuel tanks or other non-accessible parts between the pod and the docking port. Playing with FAR and DRE also limits the possible designs a bit.

laythe_lander_test_1.jpeg

To simulate a Laythe landing, I launched the lander to a 120 km orbit, deorbited it on its own power, landed on Kerbin, and tried to reach orbit again.

laythe_lander_test_2.jpeg

The inflatable heat shield slows the lander down quickly. Even though I did a steep reentry with a 300 m/s deorbiting burn, I didn't get any reentry effects. When I passed over the mountains at 2000 m/s, I thought I was going to overshoot and splash down in the ocean. Then the lander braked hard at 5g and landed before even reaching the coastal plains.

laythe_lander_test_3.jpeg

When I tried to take off, the low thrust of the RAPIERs came as a surprise. While I had used similar designs with turbojets before, the ground was too uneven for the RAPIERs. When the engines were spooling up, the lander started drifting horizontally and eventually crashed. Ultimately I had to take off with the engines in closed cycle mode, before switching to airbreathing mode.

The ascent was quite difficult. Climb too fast, and the engines run out of air prematurely, just like with stock aerodynamics. If the climb rate was too low, dynamic pressure went up, and bad things happened. Because the ship needs a relatively high angle of attack to maintain a stable climb rate, it gets out of control when the dynamic pressure rises too high. My best attempts were 200-300 m/s short of reaching orbit, which should be enough for Laythe. Still, I'll probably tweak the design a bit just in case.

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So, I've come to find out I suck at building a completely resusable aircraft or spaceplane that will make it into orbit and back. Why do I want one you ask? Because Kerbals have the tendency to blow things up with such great force, they blow themselves straight into orbit. And I got bored with sending up something to go save them each time.

So, to save us all time and effort, because we all know they will keep blowing themselves straight into space, I've placed two of these in orbit. There's no crew on board, they're oversimplified, it looks terrible and cuts back on my profit by a bit, but now I can just send one of the 8 escape pods to their rescue and land it. The pods themselves are obviously very cheap, I just need to find a way to bring a bunch of new pods to these Orbital Rescue Stations cheap.

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Edited by Redd
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asparagus stages...Apollo style
The Saturn V never used asparagus staging...

Anyway, I haven't played KSP in the past week due to faffing around with my PC. But now I've got Windows 8.1 and Xubuntu 14.04 installed on my new SSD, so hopefully I'll get a bit done later tonight.

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Today I played for hours on my modded "no revert, no quicksave" career.

I did 5 part testing launches, one of them atmospheric, one on an escape trajectory from Kerbin, the others in orbit. Two Kerbals that were stuck in LKO were also rescued.

Well, I reverted the second rescue mission a few seconds after launch, since I forgot to make sure that the ships cockpit is empty. Nevertheless, I did not revert any of the 11 failed launches, which luckily were all unmanned. I'll also avoid reverting in the future, except in such stupid cases as Kerbals in a cockpit that should be empty... I was also tempted to revert another mission, the atmospheric part testing, since I placed the antennas wrongly, on a part that would be decoupled. Well, I managed to change staging while flying, what allowed me to still make this mission a full success.

And now the in my opinion coolest part: I built the first ring of relays (Remote Tech 2) in LKO, each equipped with an omnidirectional antenna for connections between the relays and KSC, and 3 directional antennas for Mun, Minmus and Active Vessel. At first I miscalculated the diameter of their orbit, and placed them 300 km too low. Luckily they still had plenty of fuel, and the Communotron 16 has just enough range to allow an equilateral triangle configuration on the now corrected orbital radius of 1400 km. It's really fun to build such things early in the tech tree.

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Spent my time making these landers.

My first mission will use this Apollo style Munar Module.

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And every one after that will rendezvous with an orbital space lab using these lil' babies.

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My recent failure at replicating the Apollo 11 visually and procedurally cut me deep; but I'm moving on in my own way. If it goes well enough I might continue to just use the Munar Module instead of the Orbital Lab/Lander setup, but money is an factor now so it's undecided. I want to do at least one Apollo style mission first.

EDIT: Still a work in progress. No RCS among other small issues. Soon Kerbal kind will see if it's possible for Kerbals to walk on the Mun!

Edited by Mister Kerman
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Built a lander for eve today. Delta V requirements to get off Eve are good, but had to plan out some significant heat dispersing due to using DRE, and I've never acutally landed on EVE before. The lander itself has just over 12000dV to get off eve, will be landing using just parachutes. The lifter to get it and it's transfer stage into orbit generates aroudn 64MN thrust on the ground, and lags my poor lappy to around 3-5 frames a second till a few stages are burned off. Suffice to say, I just hope this monstrosity works.....

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i finished the tech tree of my 0.24.2 career and was on my biggest mission. i visited duna (orbit & landing) and ike (orbit & landing) in 1 mission and back in a 100km kerbin orbit i had 180m/s delta V left :D. It was a hell of an adventure for jeb, bob, bill and me :). 4000 science because i had a mobile lab with me. the craft was putted together in LKO and contains a lander and a transfer&science stage. great craft for a great mission. for a duna landing or ike landing only the craft has more than enough delta V..

now i finished the techtree and have ~8mio funds :D

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Edited by KingPhantom
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Launched my most expensive payload and rocket to date (in .24)

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For a grand total of 262485 funds this monster will explore the joolian system and all of it's moons whilst also landing on 3 of them before returning home with all the science!

More pictures to come.

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I built a Kethane mining and storage base! And only had about 50% of the missions sent to it tip over on landing because it's on the slope of a crater and I've tried too many times to land in the dark XD. But it drills, stores the Kethane in manifolds on the same module, then uses a KAS pipe to send it to a larger tank (which is tipped over). Now I've got to send up a conversion module and empty fuel tanks to get that puppy fully operational. :D

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A manned low fly-by of Minmus, science returned... an unmanned rover on Eve, which worked well sending science until I trashed my solar panels going too fast... and a test fly-by of a mountain on Kerbin which I want to try to put Jeb on. (see thread http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/89306-Tips-for-sub-orbital-flights-on-Kerbin )

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