What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Goomblah]

My cargo transport has successfully hauled the first bits of my mining operation over to Minmus. The payload included two mining vehicles (with refineries) and two fuel haulers capable of landing and docking with the miners.

I decoupled one miner and landed it safely, though it was strange flying an eight-wheeled truck:

Unfortunately, the miner is crewed by a pair of scientists for some reason, so now I have to switch them out for engineers in order to actually efficiently produce fuel.

However, I recovered the ship Bill, Bob, and Val were stuck in (not enough fuel to return to Kerbin), which is perfect for shuttling crew to and from the surface.

UPDATE:

I dropped off the second miner, which also landed safely, though about 10km away from the first. While driving to meet up with the other, though, I rolled the vehicle badly while traveling down a mountain. As it turns out, a cylindrical vehicle body has a lot of rolly bits which don't like to stop rolling on low-gravity inclined planes, particularly ones followed up by low-friction flats...

So now I'm stuck watching a Rockomax docking port roll downhill for a while until it stops and I can switch vehicles to recover the crew.

UPDATE 2:

Apparently this docking port was simply VERY committed to completing the mission. It rolled halfway to the target miner before finally coming to a rest...

UPDATE 3:

It seems the kraken got a hold of the lander can; it's disappeared from the tracking station and no longer exists near the crash site, but there's nothing in the area that could have blown it up; much less resilient parts survived somehow, so I don't know what happened to them...

RIP Tilian and Jenchel Kerman, Minmus Miner Test Pilots (Kerbin Trials)

Edited May 18, 2015 by Goomblah

[RyanRising]

Though this was actually yesterday, I finally went to another planet, Duna. I landed a small probe there, and had Bill, Jeb, and Bob do a flyby. After running out of fuel in a solar orbit near Duna, I realized I had forgotten to take screenshots.

Bleh.

[Mat2ch]

I'm starting my Minimus exploration mission. Also doing Biome-hopping there. And fullfilling some contracts.

Introducing: The Space Hammer!

[Snarfster]

I was in need of more kerbals, the cheapest way was to get them from Minmus orbit.

http://www.twitch.tv/snarfsterksp/b/660371804

[ScriptKitt3h]

I decided to let my more destructive thoughts take over...

[Xacktar]

I picked up a contract to land something on Eve and found a base on Gilly. Decided to do both at once.

Rigged up an odd little lander with tow side-pod probes. I used Eve to gently aerobreak then broke the pods off and sent them down to the surface. I equipped them with air-breaks on a lark, but WOW were they effective on Eve's outer atmosphere. I barely got any burn.

The lander then continued on to Gilly where it bounced around to two biomes before settling down.

[FawkesFTK]

.

Edited June 28, 2016 by FawkesFTK

[mdkendall]

I have three contracts to rescue three Kerbals from Munar orbit. My "Triplex Munar Rescuer" needs a bit of work (by which I mean much, much less drag at the front).

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Not as aerodynamic as I had hoped. Also, there was a bit of a staging accident, but subsequent test flights show that even without that it won't make it past 10km.

[yorshee]

Finally completed my manned Moho mission I've been working on for the past few days! The thing that took most of the time was assembling that huge rocket for the mining vehicle. I had to turn the graphics down while piloting it because the lag was so bad.

[BDelacroix]

Today, the Kerbal Empire launched the Argo I. It received a bit of damage on the way up but nothing bad enough to scrub the mission. It is a huge craft. It now waits in orbit to be fueled (it was launched empty). It will then have science landers docked to it and a crew put on board before heading out to the outer planets. Will need to finish that mun and minmus fuel refinery I guess. Would certainly make it easier to fill up.

In the meantime, I'll continue to collect ore for cash, rescue those poor sods that work for the other space agency, plant flags, etc. etc. etc.

If I can figure out how, I may even have the argo fly by duna to pick up the shipload of poor fellas who have been stranded there for a long time.

[problemecium]

I'm continuing to brainstorm designs for my next mothership. Julia never got to go to Jool, so to make up for it I want the successor to make Julia look like a sepratron.

[mdkendall]

So it turned out my "Triplex Munar Rescuer" didn't need a wholesale redesign, just a few extra strategically-placed struts, an additional reaction control wheel, and some more careful piloting.

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Also, in vaguely related news, recent investigation of various power-related problems revealed this:

(Those caps are bulging). So Mission Control is getting a new computer.

[CatastrophicFailure]

Today I reached way back into .20 and recreated my reusable A-class, this time with a fully recoverable booster.

The lead ship is designation A-72, "Nymph." A light utility ship with an extremely low but usable payload capacity. Can put around two tons into orbit, haven't tested how many it can return, but still no proper satellite retrieval contracts anyway, so...

First crewed liftoff after several uncrewed test flights, with Summer & Siry Kerman pulling the first duty.

The Daedalus I booster lobs the ship to a low apoapse around 90 km, with Nymph circularizing on her own engines...

Daedalus then corrects its landing trajectory and re-enters over Gednalna (the peninsula east of KSC). Airbrakes help with stability and slowing down to landing speed.

Perfect landing at a very rough recovery base in Gednalna. Lovelovelove the new ground smoke FX!

Meanwhile, Nymph's crew has activated the onboard fuel cell and finished their orbital check out. After a successful launch, first order of business: Engineer Siry practices orbital construction techniques with the awesome new Kerbal Inventory System mod. This has definite potential (altho there's now a random solar panel floating around that got away from Siry).

After constructing a very ugly but functional satellite, Nymph heads to rendezvous with Wenthy Kerman's scrap... to tell her there's no room and she won't be coming back from space today.

Hi Wenthy.

HIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

(Siry's a bit... special. Her brother recently left the corps to pursue a musical career.)

After laughing and pointing at Wenthy banging against the glass of her pod for a while, the crew begins their return to the KSC.

Once again, airbrakes maintain aerodynamic stability on the descent, but they throw Mechjeb's trajectory calculations way off, and Nymph comes up several kilometers short of the Center.

Other than a long walk back for the crew, the landing is perfect, tho Nymph is running on fumes by the time she touches down. Future landings will make use of an auxiliary parachute to save fuel at touchdown.

Unfortunately, there's a known visual glitch with the Near Future landing gear, so they look a little... off.

[Mitchz95]

Got four of my (five) Kerbals killed during a Duna expedition.

There were two ships, K.S.V. Edford (crewed by Will, Haddas, and Sidbal Kerman) and K.S.V. Lulo (crewed by Chadwig and Burbles Kerman). Both were sent to Duna, with contracts to run seismis scans on both Duna and Ike. Edford did a landing on Ike and completed the contract as planned with a rover, then returned to Duna's orbit and transferred some fuel (and Sidbal, and the rover) to Lulo, which then landed ... about two hundred kilometers short of the south pole, where it was supposed to touch down. Worse, the ship then did a belly flow and I couldn't stand it up to take off again. So three Kerbals were stranded on the surface, on the other side of the planet from where they were supposed to be. And neither ship had enough life support to last until a rescue mission could arrive from Kerbin.

I eventually decided to make their sacrifice count for something, and sent Burbles off in the rover to make the trip to the south pole. Which he pulled off with forty minutes of oxygen left, out of a supply for eighteen hours. So the contract was complete, but now Burbles was dead and Chadwig and Sidbal were still stranded.

Edford was supposed to make its way back to Kerbin at the next window, but instead Will and Haddas elected to go back for their friends. They managed to land very close to Lulo, and brought Chadwig and Sidbal aboard with a load of life support supplies. They then took off and managed to crawl back into orbit, completely out of fuel but with just enough life support to await rescue.

I got a bit ambitious at this point, and decided to attempt to rescue Lulo herself from Duna's surface. In addition to a big tank of life support, the rescue craft (Burbles, of course) was designed to land on Duna and allow Haddas to strap some 24/77s onto Lulo and lift her back into the correct orientation. From there Haddas took the battered cruiser back into orbit and docked with Edford again. The five Kerbals now had plenty of life support and the resources of two cruisers, as well as just enough fuel to get home.

They made the transfer as planned, but I unfortunately aimed too shallow for the aerocapture and I didn't get the ships into the planned LKO. Instead, it stuck them into a Mun encounter which then dumped my Kerbin perigee below 500km. And I had 24m/s to counter it and save the ships (still docked together).

With no other alternative, I launched a tanker to rendezvous and deliver fuel. Which it did exactly ten minutes before impact, and it wasn't enough. In the end, both Edford and Lulo were completely destroyed and only Sidbal survived on one of the command pods that thankfully had a parachute built in just in case.

TL;DR: Saved a stupidly-overcomplicated dual mission to Duna and Ike, only to lose both my ships and all but one of my Kerbals to the fiery atmosphere and the G-forces of Kerbin.

[algwat]

Oh no! Dalek MechJeb ..... poor Jeb has been assimilated.....

Elevate...Elevate...

Edited May 19, 2015 by algwat
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[GDJ]

Circumnavigated Kerbin in 1 hour 8 minutes 26 seconds.

Not bad. Not my best time, but respectable.

[KerbMav]

More tourists - even a lot of tourists that have no contract anymore because of something deleting my complete contract history - at least I got my Explore Duna once more.

Funfact: My Minmus sightseeing cruiser completed both a Build Station at Minmus and at Kerbin contract.

Planning another Mun mission - might include some lander-hopping, as wheels are not there yet - slowly going through the tech tree (cut science gain in game options), finally unlocked the Lab and will set up a station shortly.

Rescued some more kerbonauts around Kerbin and Mun - one of them starved to death, because his derelict capsule got into physics range while doing a week of polar orbits to survey the biomes from orbit and therefore his LS counter started ticking ... my staff has grown quite a bit by these contracts.

[The Destroyer]

Tested out bunches of mods. Finally settled on some texture replacer mods, and the endurance:

[Jesrad]

I successfully designed, launched, filled and crewed my Low Kerbin Orbit Science Station project:

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My exploration/science vehicle has autopilot so I can put newbie scientists in it and have it fly painlessly (for 2 full XP levels on return), the "long" version requires struts on its space stage, while the "short" version probably need a pair of airbrakes on top for reentry stability. But otherwise a very successful series - and that was the "underdog" challenger of the design competition ! It beat both the Hermes and Nix series at the finish line.

[Edit] How do I embed the imgur album ?

[Edit2] Thanks kitten !

Edited May 21, 2015 by Jesrad

[Esme]

I, erm, managed to muck up my lovely Jool exploration probe fleet somewhat. Once in orbit, it consisted of four parts (all 1.25m parts) from the rear forward:

- nuclear powered 'interplanetary bus'

-probe with Scansat radar, materials bay and two goo experiments, with monoprop manouvre jets and a small tank of fuel for a couple of small radial-attachment engines. The intent was that this one would do the bulk of the work of getting the other 2 probes into position.

- similar to above minus the fuel + radial engines (so monoprop only)

- unpowered probe with materials bay, 2x goo, intended to land onLaythe.

So - my interplanetary bus exceeded expectations by not only getting everything to Jool,but also carrying out lot of manouvering to get the probes into the same plane as Laythe. Unfortunately, it was a retrograde orbit, but I wasn;t too concerned about that.

Having ditched the interplanetary bus as it had run out of fuel, I now set about working out the Laythe encounter. I carefully amended the trajectory so that it'd just scrape the surface of Laythe, expecting that, due to the geometry of the encounter, the velocity imparted by decoupling the lander would place the periapsis at somewhere between 10 and 30km. Unfortunately, as it turned out, the probe ended up missing Laythe altogether, at least on this orbit, so i can only hope that it might hit the target on a later orbit. It did take a goo reading near Laythe and radio'd teh results back home though.

The othe rtwo probes now had problems. Whilst manouvering to try to miss Laythe by about 200km, something odd happened to fire the engines unexpectedly. At first I was baffled, then realised that the keyboard, which was in my lap, had probably come into contact with the underside of the left arm of the armchair I was in. This happened twice before i realised what was going on, leaving me with barely enough fuel to get the two main probes somewhere nearer their planned approach distance. Unfortunately, about 1,000km was the best I could manage, and a very quick test with the monomprop jets showed it was pointless at this point trying to use them to adjust my orbit further.

Still five days out from perilaythe, I tried to work out what I could do to try to get the best out of what is left of things. I decided on making sure that the lighter of the two probes had full monoprop tanks, leaving the heavier one with just about 20 units. I then separated the two. The heavier one will simply have to take pot luck with whatever comes near as it will only be able to make relatively minor orbital changes, whilst the other - now redesignated the main probe - has some chance of actually getting into orbit around Laythe or Tylo, or at least doing flybys close enough to do radar scans,with a bit of judicious and very careful tinkering with its trajectory. But it now means that the scientific side of my Jool mission, which was expected to be all done and dusted within a couple of weeks of arrival at Jool, will now take months. That's OK, I'm prepared to take in-game years, if need be!

On the plus side, I've had my first glimpse of Tylo, Jool and Laythe - and returned two packets of scientific data from the Joolian system for the first time!

Lessons learnt

- if I use a similar set of probes again, use docking ports instead of decouplers, so that any unpowered probe doesnt have its trajectory altered by much on separation.

- put the keyboard on the desk, not my lap!

I haven't had this much sense of achievemnet from a game before, ever!

[capi3101]

Tourist contracts mainly last night. Had a contract to send two tourists on a Munar flyby; took three tries but I finally got the ascent correct enough to have the delta-V to pull it off. Returned to Kerbin with 7 m/s of delta-V left. Figured out the problems I'd been having with StageRecovery and FAR were due to me having an older version of StageRecovery installed - I got most of my cash back last night. Had √500,000 before the night was out so I uprated the Launchpad to Level 3 - that's now two of my KSC buildings fully upgraded in my 1.0.2 career game.

Still trying to launch a Geschosskopf Munar Sci lander successfully with 1.0.2 and FAR...damn things are too wide, you put them under a fairing and the drag is still pretty substantial...

[pendant]

I successfully designed, launched, filled and crewed my Low Kerbin Orbit Science Station project:

http://imgur.com/a/eOglL

My exploration/science vehicle has autopilot so I can put newbie scientists in it and have it fly painlessly (for 2 full XP levels on return), the "long" version requires struts on its space stage, while the "short" version probably need a pair of airbrakes on top for reentry stability. But otherwise a very successful series - and that was the "underdog" challenger of the design competition ! It beat both the Hermes and Nix series at the finish line.

[Edit] How do I embed the imgur album ?

I think you can only embed single images here, not entire albums. My blog post here may perhaps be of some help. You will need to identify the URL of each image you want to embed separately; to do that, point your mouse at the top right-hand corner of a picture in your album so you reveal the 'cogwheel' icon, left click that, then left-click 'view full resolution', copy the URL of the resulting page, paste it into the input field on the insert image icon in the reply field:

[Orange_Slime_]

I still haven't managed to make a orbit without infinite fuel in career, made some bad money choices along with flight planning. My mun mission was powered by the giant SRBs, I hit the mun, but not much else.

[Goddess Bhavani]

Started my first 1.02 career game with -1000 reputation and all sorts of mighty handicaps!

I must say the early 'krash test kerbal' phase of the career is extremely enjoyable, especially with the enforced part and tech limitations. This sad little excuse of a spaceplane soon became the mainstay of the space program, handling everything from supersonic research, atmospheric survey to low orbit ops.

It's heavy, but pretty much the only streamlined two-man design possible with stock parts at low tech levels, as I didn't want to do ridiculous stuff like sticking multiple capsules together...

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[loch.ness]

Today I did my Apollo 4 mission including CSM boilerplate inspection:

Engine inspections

and of course, Lift off: