What did you do in KSP1 today?

[capi3101]

Didn't have time to do much last night - had time enough to put a Barn Own probe into orbit and that was it; didn't even have enough time to go ahead and land the launch vehicle. Textbook flight up. Almost made the ascent entirely on jets; by the time of flameout I was at a 90x35 orbit. Still had to go a little ways on rockets - I was too low into the atmosphere and ascending to slowly at flameout, so the drag force was pretty substantial. Still made about a 78x78 orbit when it was all said and done. Tonight's activities will begin by landing the plane and then taking stock of the current contract set.

[DunaRocketeer]

I finished my Eve/Gilly survey mission - 3 unmanned surface probes to investigate Eves atmosphere and surface, and a manned gilly lander packed with science instruments, I found it was a very efficient way of gathering Science.

Once that was done I continued development of my spaceplane. It's still got a few rough edges (intakes look messy) and I need to place rcs thrusters in a balanced fashion so it can do station missions as well as satellite piggybacking deployments, but all in all it's shaping up to being one of my better designs:

[L3GO]

Ladys and gents may i present to you the Boeing X-37b

Built with the Mk3 parts and flies like a dream!!

The lifter needs some work but all else is great.

all images https://imgur.com/a/KoioM

[Starwhip]

I pulled of a #1 Badass Jeb moment today:

My challenge rocket fell down on Minmus

"Hokay. Bob, get out, stand right there. Little to the right. Perfect."

"Why?"

"We need you to give us a push."

*MAINSAIL ENGAGE!*

*BOOP*

Bob gets knocked down, rocket bounces as planned.

Bob then MMU's up to the orbiting ship:

Mission successful.

[Coam]

Today I tried to build a T-38 style training jet

Largely failed in aesthetic terms, though the result looked quite futuristic.

Decided to bolt it to a large fuel tank+booster set broadly similar to the US Shuttle

Toyed with this for a bit, rotating the booster engines and adding a silly number of reaction wheels to it (which later turned out to be unnecessary.)

Got it to Orbit, this being the my first ever functional shuttle design. Currently only useful as a training craft, theoretically the centre tank can be swapped to a cargo hold at the cost of requiring better piloting to attain orbit or reduced flight range after atmospheric re-entry.

Climbing to Orbit

De-Orbit burn

Re-Entry

Runway Approach

I'd like to note the very visible MechJeb module on this craft is only useful for delta-v statistics and theoretical orbital manoeuvres - ascent must be flown manually, tweaking the thrust limits on the engines, or the craft will lose control and fail to achieve orbit, as the design is not very stable.

Edited February 19, 2015 by Coam

[Finnan]

I finally managed to capture the Class C asteroid heading for Kerbin and put it in orbit between Kerbin and Mun. Then I did the asteroid survey mission which started all this.

[BJ Quest]

Been working on my Van series. Van 5 is finishing up testing with a landing at the space center. the model holds 6 kerbals.

[justidutch]

I did this a lot…

[cantab]

Flew the Dirty Rascal 2 (the one on the left). Looked for some kethane southwest of KSC, an adjacent hex in the ocean had it but it seems like the deposit has just missed the land. Then went to the known deposit in the desert.

She's not got much power, and landing is tricky even with the safety wingtip gears, but empty at least she does her job. How she's going to behave now she's a full 32 tons heavier I have yet to find out! Will the takeoff speed be safe on the rough terrain? Will the wings be strong enough? Will she be landable?

EDIT: Oh, and I flew it with my XBox 360 pad I needed to use an external program to map some button presses to keys - in particular I'm using holding the XBox button and pushing the Dpad to adjust trim. Still need to work out the rudder controls, so my turns were a bit un-co-ordinated, but overall it worked well.

Edited February 20, 2015 by cantab

[CatastrophicFailure]

Three months ago, after the massive components of the Münbase were in orbit, a relatively humble Oracle LV placed the very latest in unmanned technology into a low parking orbit: the Advanced Research, Nuclear Demonstrator, and Lander probe, or ARNDL.

This latest update to the Oracle launcher featured a cutting-edge nuclear-thermal upper stage that performed admirably despite the low thrust.

The excess of delta-v it brought to the lightweight probe allowed for an extremely aggressive transfer trajectory, putting it on course to reach Duna in only 90 days rather than the 144 of a traditional Hohmann transfer.

The main bus is a lander to thoroughly test aerobraking, parachutes, and propulsive landing in the unexplored Duna environment, and carries with it sister probes to thoroughly map and survey the system as well as attempt landing on the small moon of Ike, to fully demonstrate the potential of ion propulsion beyond Kerbin.

Once the assembly arrives, however, it's realized that the trajectory was perhaps too aggressive... the upper stage lacks enough remaining delta-v to brake into capture on its own, and it's calculated that even the thin atmosphere would generate far too much heat even for a conservative aerocapture without a full heat shield. After some quick thinking, a contingency plan is implemented. The main bus will use its descent heat shield to brake into orbit, while the ion-powered sub-probes will use their own engines. This will limit their extended missions, but still allow completion of primary objectives with a significant surplus of d/v.

First, the Electronic Lander & Surface Array separates from the top of the stack, immediately deploys its solar panels and begins braking many hours out from Duna. This is to gain separation so Mission Control can monitor the capture maneuvers one at a time.

This probe is bound for Ike. Once the separation maneuver is complete, a capture ionizing is planned to bring it into an encounter with that moon.

Shortly thereafter, the Atmosphere, Neutrino, & Navigation Array separates and begins its own separation maneuver, designed to put its periapse one hour between the other two probes, as well as lining it up for a polar orbit to fully map and analyze the planet.

There's not enough fuel in the main bus to slow below Duna escape velocity, but the main lander burns everything it has left, and discards the empty stage shortly before it hits the atmosphere.

The aerocapture is intense, with deceleration reaching nearly 10 G's. But the heat shield does its job, the lander eventually using its small thrusters to circularize into a low orbit.

After several days of mapping, a landing site is chosen, and the lander begins its descent. This time, the dip into the atmosphere is extremely mild, with only negligible heating. Still several kilometers above the surface, the probe goes sub-sonic and the drogue chute is deployed...

...followed shortly by the massive main chutes, and the heat shield is jettisoned before all horizontal speed is lost, so as to clear the landing site.

The probe sinks for a time under the main chutes, gathering crucial data on the atmosphere, before dropping out of its aeroshell and activating its engines.

The landing sequence runs perfectly, with the probe translating slightly as it brakes to avoid the aeroshell above.

Touchdown, and antenna deployment. The lander starts sending back incredible amounts of data, telling Mission Control exactly what they want to hear, and paving the way for a manned landing based entirely on existing and tested hardware.

Some time later, the aeroshell settles to the ground a safe distance away.

***

Meanwhile, on the Mün...

Edgas watched his display, feeling something he hadn't felt in a long time. Eighty-nine days here. Not even halfway yet. But with this... there would be virtually no chance of an extension. They might even be called home early. And Edgas was glad for it. He slept now, but he still felt terrible. The shadows still moved in ways they shouldn't. He scratched at his stubbly chin. He thought Edmund looked more and more haggard, and Billy... was getting worse. He felt so drained. A hundred and ten days. It sounded like forever. But for the first time in forever, Edgas had hope.

Hope.

Shadows of the Kraken

Edited February 20, 2015 by CatastrophicFailure

[Alchemist]

Today I launched KSP only to find that when it glitched yesterday it deleted all the contracts! I wouldn't care less about most of them, but there were three contracted crafts about to arrive at their destination (Eve/Gilly)! I was switching between multiple crafts arriving at Eve when the game suddenly refused to switch to other crafts or go back to the space center... there also was something that looked like double application of the administration to a survey contract payout just before that. And since I'm playing on hard, there's nothing to reload.

Lesson learned: don't switch the save/load off even if you are going to play without reloading. I can forgive the Kraken one craft eaten on ascent, and one ship almost eaten (managed to ragequit before that quicksaved), but this is too much.

[Falderappes]

Today I landed a science lab on Minmus only to find out that I'd forgotten to put crew in the lab. So now I'm building a shuttle to bring some extra crew to the lab.

Also my Mun expedition was 2 seconds of fuel short of being able to return to Kerbin.. So I tried and tried to get a more efficient return but was unable to get below a 70 km periapsis. Now I've just edited the quick save to be able to return mr. Kerman. I feel dirty for doing it.

[Spatzimaus]

It's been a busy day.

> I placed my last four DinkySat mapping/science satellites:

(Pol was the very last one placed, although I'm not QUITE done as I'm repositioning my spare satellite from Gilly over to a Jool polar orbit.)

Mass is ~2.5 tons, 80k roots, a ridiculous 23 km/s of dV, and enough power generation to support all the onboard electronics (and enough batteries for when it passes through a planet's/moon's shadow). The electronics include a Karbonite resource scanner, a ScanSat SAR (hi-res terrain) mapper, a ScanSat Multispectral (biome+anomaly) sensor, and a thermometer for completing science missions. The Gilly variant includes a gravity sensor as well, since the thermometer limit there is too low for safe orbits, but the rest of them all use the same basic design.

The best part is that it fits inside a half-length Mk2 cargo bay when stowed, so I can launch it with my light (10-ton) Dinky Weasel-class spaceplane. Also, while you can see parts clipped through each other, I did NOT disable clipping checks in the editor; it was all done through placing the parts in a specific order. This had the tendency to be very painful if I wanted to change things slightly, as I'd have to basically disassemble the entire probe and rebuild it back up.

(It's a bit on the big side for a probe, I know. I could have cut it down below 2 tons and 50k roots, while still having 18km/s of dV, but why bother short-changing this?)

> Thanks to the money I make from those science probes, I'm now transitioning to my larger projects. First up, my orbital fuel network, based around my Valdez-class mobile refineries (stations capable of landing on moons to drill for Karbonite):

The depot itself is now finally ready to go, and I'm just finishing up the lifter design. I'm going to put these around Mun, Minmus, Gilly, Ike, Pol, and Laythe (fueled from Pol) to support all of my various operations; I've done this in each release since 0.21, but in 0.90 I switched from Kethane to Karbonite so there are a few kinks to be worked out. I'm also working on my 400-ton spaceplane lifter, but that won't get used for this.

> Finally, today was the first full test flight of my eighth-generation Sleazy Weasel long-range spaceplane. Here's a picture of the previous generation; the design hasn't changed THAT much, so it wasn't worth uploading new shots:

It's a 33-ton plane with ion engines in the wingtips and hybrid ions (equivalent to two LV-Ns), so it's got a tremendous range. Jeb drove it to Minmus and back, which is hardly difficult as it's designed for Laythe trips; round-trip to/from Laythe requires only a single refueling at Pol on the way there, and that includes no refueling in Kerbin orbit after launch. This trip to Minmus was without using the ion engines, but with the xenon tanks still filled. I mainly wanted to see if I'd forgotten anything in the design, like the time I forgot to install batteries on the fifth generation of the design. As it turns out, I left off part of the SAS so I'll have to tweak it a bit more before I head to Laythe, but otherwise it was pretty solid. (There was a strange stability issue; it seems to be torqueing a bit when I maneuver, so I'll have to check for clipping issues.)

Of course, knowing my luck I'll get this all working just as 1.0 comes out, and they'll make me need to redesign everything AGAIN.

Edited February 20, 2015 by Spatzimaus

[White Owl]

I got Cpt. Kipard's Skylon working in 64x Kerbin. SSTO from runway takeoff, 20 ton payload to LKO, with easily controllable reentry and landing anywhere I want. Now I need to set up the MM configs, record a video, and share the beast.

[Superfluous J]

I learned at least 2 different ways to NOT fly a winged asteroid. Sadly, one of those ways is "with jets"

Back to gliding and trying to use a Mun encounter and the Trajectories mod to nail the runway.

Incidentally, the 2nd way is "with the tailfins attached to the wings." In hindsight it's obvious that the fins would cause massive torque in the wings.

And right after saying this I think I figured out a way to have jets AND tailfins.

Drawing board, watch out!

Edited February 20, 2015 by 5thHorseman

[Axelord FTW]

Got a contract for another Minmus orbital station and it was the perfect time to build and launch my minmus station hub. It included a lab so my planned hub station got a wee bit heavier than what it was planned as but I still got it in Kerbin orbit (circular, 150km alt). The tug will refuel at minmus, drop back to kerbin, pick up the whole hub and bring it back up to orbit minmus.

Still, with the contract the whole thing will come out to almost zero cost when it'll be completed.

[capi3101]

Not much accomplished yesterday - landed the Barn Owl launch vehicle from the previous evening with no issues. I finally decided to go ahead and build a pair of marker rovers for the two ends of the runway, though; got tired of sticking a powered probe core on the Launchpad so I'd have a point of reference every time I wanted to land a plane. The Barn Owl probe it delivered to orbit was sent towards the Mun to fulfill a contract.

I spent most of the rest of my playable time working on a 20-Kerbal, lab-equipped Mun base (for a contract) and the launch vehicle necessary to deliver it. Really should've tried to deliver it via a plane; it's been a bit since I've shot for a 200 tonne craft, though. Still over √200,000 as it is; since the booster is non-recoverable, that's really going to cut into the profit margin. Anyways, I did get the initial craft up...only to realize I'd forgotten to attach solar panels. Big facepalm moment there. Reverted the flight, so nothing lost; still didn't have time for a re-launch, so I'll be doing that tonight. Meantime I think I'll see about building a 200-tonne spaceplane...

[GloriousWater]

I attempted to run KSP on integrated graphics (GPU was faulty, long story). It did not go well.

Fully loaded Space Center screen. Terrain only loaded within 10-20m of the camera. Framerate is negative.

My space station does not like turning the camera.

But at least I could go to space today.

[KerBlammo]

Last night I did go to space. After many days of trial and error I was able to launch 5 modules of a space station at once into a reasonable orbit (with the idea of boosting it to 200k+ orbit later) Right as I was getting read to detach the upper stage from the station with (hopefully) enough Delta V left to de-orbit itself my PC crashed hard and will not reboot! I will not be going back to space any time soon. Hopefully I can recover my KSP stuff from the HD.

I was more upset about the possibility of losing my KSP launchers and mission than I was at the hassle and expense of replacing my PC...

[justidutch]

I have begun a new ring station. It will end up looking very similar to one I've previously constructed, but with the new 0.90 attachment, offset and angle thingamajiggies I can create this station with exactly half the parts, which means I'll actually be able to use it as a station without having ridiculously slow gameplay. In other words, this station will actually be fully functional, thank the Emperor. Several more launches to go but it is proceeding according to plan.

[Coam]

Today I started a new science mode game, then edited the savefile to unlock parts early so I could count all of the science earned from research properly. (Just using science to log what I've done.)

I performed various missions I'll hopefully get around to doing reports on later. (2 satellite launches, 1 piggybacked suborbital spaceplane flight, 1 suborbital capsule launch, 1 atmospheric research flight, 1 crew rescue flight, 2 LES tests and 1 operational LES use.)

Rescuing a splashed-down Kerbal from their capsule using a seaplane is pretty fun.

Launch Escape System pulls Jeb away from an uncontrollable rocket.

Piggybacking achieves little that a detachable SRB couldn't do cheaper and safer in this case, the craft becomes unstable at ~4000m so launching at that point is required. It is capable of reaching almost 130km on a suborbital trajectory, however.

My rescue flight ran out of fuel on the journey back to KSC. The plane left KSC with less than 50% fuel to ensure good STOL performance, ran out of fuel shortly after reaching nearby land, then fell over on the rough terrain due to the odd landing gear layout.

[Itsdavyjones]

Landed a plane on the side of a mountain, at 30+ degrees from the horizon on touchdown, with far. After the landing, traveled appx 10km to the contract site (hey, going down a 30+ degree slope is a bad idea), which also needed 30+ degree slopes uphill. Only took about 30 reloads to succeed. After taking off of the mountain i was on, 1k fall while gaining the speed to pull out of the dive, went to finish the circumnavigation of Kerbin, landing with enough fuel to go around again. Love that plane.

[Dazpoet]

Spending hours on end today trying to get a really low orbit around Kerbol to extract Karbondorum. Took of with about 42k delta-v but still not sure it'll be enough. Got told on irc the conventional way of doing things is making a "sundive" aka only put the crafts periapsis within the range needed to extract the resource. Seeing as I already spent about 3.5 hours getting into a 700km orbit which I'm currently slowly decreasing I'm content to go all the way down to a 2km circular orbit just to be able to say I've done it!

This is the craft I'm using

[problemecium]

Today I addressed an important problem menacing my Jool-5 mission: I can't very well go to Jool in a mothership that has no engines.

Some people forget the ladders...

Some forget the solar panels...

A few even forget the Kerbals... but only I would forget the ENGINES!

Just kidding, this isn't a Kerbal-style last-minute fix. I'd actually planned this out ahead of time (the engine blocks weigh 20 tons apiece, so it was impractical to launch them with the rest of the ship), but with the laundry list of other modules to attach I'd temporarily forgotten to add on the interplanetary engines. NOW it's just about ready to go xD

That is a neat little tug.

Check my signature for a download of a very similar one

Edited February 20, 2015 by parameciumkid

[cantab]

Flew the Dirty Rascal 2, fully loaded, back to KSC.

This was one of the toughest flights I've done. Takeoff speed was about 80 m/s and needed a huge takeoff roll over the bumpy deserts, I crashed lots of times before finally wrestling the thing into the air. Landing was tough as well and took three goes, with the third completely ignoring the runway as you see.