What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Tw1]

Made use of new kerbal engineering techniques:

No rover wheels? No problem!

I did have to get out and push, but I managed to get to each part of KSC.

There was the odd acident.

I like the pic though, almost considering changing my forum picture

"I've fallen, and I can't get up!"

He really couldn't though, had to hack gravity.

At the end of the day, I let my new kerbals relax on their deck chairs. I like the deck chairs.

[alphamone]

I have found that the part limit restriction has taught me to design far simpler landers. With the rockomax parts unlocked, I managed to build a lander capable of reaching laythe with very efficient areobraking, and can supposedly land on Dres according to delta-v charts. Hopefully I can use science from some planets to upgrade the VAB to use more than 30 parts so I can build proper manned landers.

[GloriousWater]

Like a lot of people, I decided to make a shuttle. Let's just say Jeb's lucky the new cockpit has a huge impact tolerance.

[Yuuray]

Bigger SRBs for shuttle-goodness.

http://www.necrobones.net/screenshots/KSP/KSP%202014-12-16%2022-36-02-76.jpg

http://www.necrobones.net/screenshots/KSP/KSP%202014-12-16%2022-36-22-12.jpg

That's a great looking Shuttle! How do you deal with the shifting center of mass?

[Cuky]

I started playing KSP after some time (never really got deep into 0.25) and now it seems that I have to learn all of it again.

I have started to use FAR again instead of NEAR and I am having problems with keeping early-career small rockets pointing up. Might be because of mystery goo's on top though...

anyways, seems interesting so far to try and build my rockets with part/mass limits forced on me by tier one space center.

[soulsource]

I installed 0.90 and started a new career at hard difficulty. This time completely without mods, because I want to see the new features the way Squad intended them to function.

I must say, the souposphere is a pain, once one is accustomed to FAR, even though I always combine FAR with KIDS which I set at FAR->Stock (Universal). It just doesn't feel right to me any more, to plough through the broth of the lowest souposphere layers right after launch...

Anyhow, I'm pretty happy that I didn't start with mods installed, because without them I could fully appreciate the new limits imposed by the upgradeable buildings. For instance the 18 tons limit with the starting launch pad is just enough to go to orbit with low tech parts, but probably one cannot get much further. Also the fact that one first has to upgrade the Astronaut Complex if one wants to EVA greatly adds to the games difficulty, making it much harder to obtain science, since one cannot simply spam EVA reports while orbiting Kerbin.

The funniest and most exciting part was nevertheless my first rescue contract, which I finished without upgrading the tracking station, so I had to perform orbital synchronisation by bare eye. You can imagine how proud I was when I had that little bugger finally aboard the ship.

Sadly I was too stupid to realise that I could have misused the presence of a Kerbal outside the capsule to gather lots of EVA reports from LKO before upgrading the Astronaut complex... Well, maybe next time...

No rover wheels? No problem!

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

My first craft in the new save looked exactly the same .

[capi3101]

Still in 0.25, launched the Small Fries Mk-II on its mission of spud catching. Got the plane into orbit but started low (around 28k) and wound up needing 400 m/s to circularize the orbit, more than the plane had for its own use, so I wound up having to cannibalize oxidizer from the payload. End result was that the spud probe it was carrying had only about half its fuel. Needless to say, I'm not confident about the success of that mission. Fortunately the spud in question is still well outside Kerbin's SOI, so I should have time to try again if need be.

[lordmuffin]

After *finally* discovering that NEAR was messing up my rockets, I removed it and started my career.

[L3GO]

Shuttle testing for the past 2 days. I wanna do another video for the .90 release but having a blocked nose does not help.

This is going up in my shuttle

This is the abort with a flyby.

[NecroBones]

That's a great looking Shuttle! How do you deal with the shifting center of mass?

Thanks! But, well... I didn't. It looks great, but completely loses control after the SRBs run out.

(I just made it for looks)

[phunk]

I learned that the "follow retrograde" option is nice for landing, but terrible for taking off again...

[Thorium]

I continued my newly started career mode (hard mode, with revert and quickload). I did some contracts, and found at the same time out that everything is harder in 0.90. I did one mission to rescue a guy from orbit, and that was really hard without maneuver nodes and target vectors.

Appoaching the rescue craft.

Back on Kerbin.

[GloriousWater]

My shuttle misadventures continue. Note the interesting "landing" system I used.

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[Jouni]

I continued prototyping ships built around Mk3 hulls. While triple-hull ships look nice, they won't work after the launch, because cargo bay doors will clip into neighboring hulls. It seems that the final ship is going to be single-hull after all.

Meanwhile, I tried hiding the ugly nuclear engines into a technical compartment.

The ship looks better now, and the entire cargo bay is available for payload, but the rear still looks a bit weird.

[cantab]

Neat. Do the engines thrust effectively with the bay doors closed or does the game regard them as blocked?

[Concentric]

Brought up KSP for the first time in a while - an update appears! Started a new 0.90 career: Hard Mode, but with reverts and quicksaves reenabled. Had to do this a second time a few contracts in, as I'd filled both active contract slots with things I hadn't the ability/parts/launch capacity to complete - and cancelling them would bankrupt me. Whoops.

Anyway, played around with the offset, completed the 32km altitude record contract, and got all but Survivability of the second tech tree tier. Did some other part tests and Mystery Goo, too.

[Jouni]

Neat. Do the engines thrust effectively with the bay doors closed or does the game regard them as blocked?

The engines work with the bay doors closed. I already tried similar things in 0.25 with the Mk2 cargo bays, but they were too small to be useful.

[SofusRud]

Having started a new career yesterday, on a custom hard mode (reduce cash and science), I found myself at the bottom of the tech tree and in need of some cash. So I took a contract that seemed easy.

Basically I had to get surface EVA reports from two spots close to each other to the north of KSC, and a crew report from above 18,200m just east of the mountains near KSC. Seemed simple, deceptively so, as it turned.

I had no ladders, so my first design had the capsule at the very back of the craft, which was also a tailsitter that used chutes to land, because I not yet unlocked landing gear, It was a pain to balance, I basically had to add fuel tank as no more than ballast in order to shift COM forwards, because I also had to be careful that the wing parts didn't hit the ground. I also had to contend with the fact that I could only use 30 parts in total.

It was a total failure. The ballast tanks meant that it was inefficient and had severe difficulties reaching the target 18,200m altitude. It was constantly trying to flip wrong-way forwards, possibly due to the way the rudders were in the front. Due to parts restrictions it had too few chutes per required landing (3) and so it often bounced, fell over or just broke on landing. In short: not very successful.

I was broken but not beaten, so I tried again. With the help of the magic that is our new building Gizmos I built a new plane, this time with a cockpit angled down. This way, my pilot could just stand on the craft, and it would count as doing EVA reports from the surface. I also shifted to only one engine, although the craft necessarily had to be a tailsitter that landed with cutes.

Results were better this time around. Because the controlling part was angled it produced odd responses when I tried to change orientation with anything but pitch controls, but i eventually got the hang of it. It no longer spun out and was all in all a better craft.

Unfortunately however, it still suffered from mission wrecking tip-overs and falls and such. I tried to correct it with more landing legs on the wings to increase size of the base, but it didn't help.

It was a this point that I realized that my problems were mass related and could be solved by simply removing half the fuel and re-positioning the other stuff. I did and got this:

Finally it worked perfectly and I completed my contract. Took a lot longer than most contracts normally do, but I really appreciate the variety and new mission parameters that I have to design for now that FinePrint has been implemented.

Also note that in the last three pictures, the fuel tank on the aircraft has shrunk for some reason. I don't know when it happened, it didn't affect the mission, but it does look weird. I thought this bug had been fixed by now.

[RobertR]

Did 4 survey contracts and rescued Jorbal Kerman from space. The first zone was supposed to be surveyed above 18,000m so I just caught it while I was rescuing Jorbal. The next 3 were all low altitude so I made a small plane with the limited parts I had. It can hit about 11,000m before it starts to run out of intake air. Put a couple parachutes on it in case I lost a wing or something wouldn't want to lose Jeb this early in the game. It's nothing special but it's been getting the job done in the early stages of the career so far. Having to do a lot of contracts to earn funds.

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I really like the pilot's skills. The retrograde/prograde options make docking or matching something's orbit much less trouble. Not necessarily easier but it saves you the hassle of spinning the ship around manually. Jeb's only a 1 star pilot right now so I haven't unlocked anything else yet.

[zekes]

Someone asked me to build a quick plane in KSP - I delivered.

[Torquemadus]

Today, I sent my 17.9t rocket to Mun orbit.

[Kamuchi]

I... well, dunno... overpowerd?

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[greg12]

I built a very efficient Shuttle in my opinion. The shuttle uses the main engine and the lifter`s engine to balance until the lifter runs out of fuel. (I barely used fuel from the orange tank to complete the orbit.) The shuttle capable of getting anything to orbit that fits into the cargo bay.

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[KerrMü]

It´s been a Space Shuttle week for me.

First I read Mike Mullanes "Riding Rockets". A very funny book. I can only recommend it.

And since 0.90 I´ve been busy building one. And finally it works! (wow, shuttles are not easy)

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[cantab]

Returned the KSA Munar Trainer from its "detour".

Then looked at escape pods after discussion from someone in Das's chat. I considered sepratrons, but decided the O-10 engines might be better, and came up with this little guy.

10 parts and under 3 tons. And it also has some crossrange capability in FAR and presumably stock too.