What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Bev7787]

I'm getting ready for my caveman Laythe trip. One way and its a probe lander

[Kaos]

Disabling reentry heat, setting to unlimited EVA fuel and then succesfully reentry from Mün and land with a single kerbal. Athmosphere is thick

[WinkAllKerb'']

some early test before adjustements and fine tunning ; )

[ayana]

Test flights. No explosions happened.

[oversoul]

Testing the Duna Buggy on the Mun first, and going on some sweet jumps. It needs pegs now.

---

This is going to be on phase one to Duna, the first time I have been to Duna in this career game actually. Phase one will send a wideband scanner sat, narrowband scanner sat, this buggy, a descent/ascent lander, and a orbital hab/pusher/return vehicle. Should be fun. Goal is to find the loots, mark it for phase two, and get these guys returned for some XP. Science tree is maxxed... soo...

^ pegs installed on Mark 2

Edited August 3, 2015 by oversoul

[ayana]

"I guess we can't translate sideways. Huh." - Jeb just now

I may have forgotten some RCS thrusters on that SSTO.

[User Unrelated]

Severely crashed my low-level workhorse atmospheric science platform (A small plane with some thermometers on it) while collecting data for a contract...

I went into the map to activate navigation to the next data site, and I guess i was much closer to the ground than I thought!

The only remaining parts of the plane were:

*1 wing segment

*1 simple steerable landing gear

*1 Mk1 Cockpit

*1 Thoroughly freightened Joncan Kerman

At least he survived!

[MrWolf83]

So, after an absence do to work and a 6 month old I finally made it to Minmus and back, with my newly designedish flag, can you guess where it is from and if someone else has already done the same flag, oops, and can someone tell me how to change the flag on the flag poles around the space center?

Anyhow got some serious science around Minmus, landed, flagged it, and finished a tourist contract there as well.

Need to work on my landings on these RoveMax M1s I popped one somehow.

Might just do legs and retract to ground.

Love the little details of this game.

[capi3101]

Spent the weekend taking a break from my career save for experimenting with strategies for the early game. I decided I needed some corporate sponsors...

[MaxwellsDemon]

Over the weekend, completed my un-Kerballed exploration of all Mun biomes (though the canyons took a couple of extra tries before I managed to find a flat place to land), had a rover blow up on me for some reason (it was on autopilot and I was looking away at the time, so I'm not sure why; but I suspect instability), did my first flyby of Moho, and launched the B612 probe toward Eve orbit.

Currently experimenting with ways to deliver rovers without breaking the wheels upon landing...

Edited to add: I forgot that I also managed a probe-rescue mission... one of my Munar probes made it back to Kerbin orbit but without enough delta-V to re-enter. I launched a probe with a Klaw that grabbed it, decelerated enough to get the original probe to re-enter, and released... voila!

Edited August 3, 2015 by MaxwellsDemon
Additional comment

[Goddess Bhavani]

Currently experimenting with ways to deliver rovers without breaking the wheels upon landing...

I'm not sure if this helps but it might be helpful to have a detachable pallet under it to absorb the shock of landing, or have the rover slow its own descent by the use of RCS thrusters. How large is your rover?

[annallia]

Currently experimenting with ways to deliver rovers without breaking the wheels upon landing...

Landing legs (depending on size of the rover) are a huge help on this. My mun train (few pages back) each car had landing legs because of this same problem, even at a low landing speed like 1.3m/s I was flattening wheels and despite having engineers at the ready to fix them... weird things happen on the mun.

There is always also landing gear. Put the small landing gears on your rover and land on those wheels, then raise the gear and off you go, it gets a little ugly if you are forced to use the medium gears though.

If you don't mind mods Kerbal Foundries mod has some great rugged wheels, I don't care for them much myself because of issues I have with the torque. I don't like slowly accellerating and when a wheel makes a 25 ton rover pop a wheellie on Kerbin you know it will be trouble on Mun.

[Varsi]

I built a shuttle capable bringing a full orange tank to LKO.

Got angry because the new Bandicam messes up the audio track.

Still managed to record my orbital speed run. Which was fun

I was slightly bored and noticed ShadowZone challenged others in his video! Never done any sort of a challenge in KSP before but this was kinda fun. I went with pretty much my first idea for the craft tho, so there must be alot faster ways to do this still.

OK... back to career then. Got an interplanetary comms network to build.

[Terwin]

I decided not to pick up any contracts for new missions until I had some Duna arrivals.

With the faster time progression(skipping up to 20 days one time), I managed to get my first asteroid capture mission completed, then discovered that if you have an asteroid Klawed, you cannot mine any other object.(had my drills going down into the Mun, and even when I pulled up the landing gear for deeper penetration(not required previously) the only 'start extraction' option I had was Asteroid extraction, and it kept saying no contact.

Putting the legs back down and dropping the asteroid let me finally fill up the tanks. Grabbed back up the asteroid and now that ship is running around the Kerbin SOI to collect all the different Asteroid samples it can.(it is an old 1.0.2 design, so it can't reenter safely, let alone with an asteroid in tow. Might send up a heat-shield/parachute just to bring down the asteroid as a trophy though, perhaps a pod to store the science in too)

My Duna ScanSat/Resource scanner probe captured at Duna with a little over 1km/s and has scanned the planet and is now in a somewhat inclined orbit letting me scan most of the non-polar regions in preparation for my manned missions(should probably go scan Ike too, but I figure I can wait for the refuel before getting tricky with orbits as I only really have practice with low-orbit intercepts)

Got my second asteroid mission captured at Kerbin and headed to the Mun for mission completion/sample collection

My second manned Duna mission arrived at the Duna SOI(this one benefited from a mystery thrust before leaving the Kerbin SOI cutting it's 210 day transit to 160 days, so it is arriving a few weeks before the earlier mission)

After mu initial Duna SOI science collection, I discovered that my low Ike retro-burn apparently drifted to be inside Ike, corrected that a bit and performed first retro-burn. Problem, only ~ 5 minutes to refine the ~2500 fuel needed for the Low Duna retro-burn, further problem, I am in Ike's shadow meaning my engine is my only power source for refining more fuel.

Note: had ~1700 ore, but only a 2500 fuel tank. Initial tank had ~1.9km/s d-v but needed more than 3km/s to stay in the Duna SOI.

Attempt 1: started burn early and kept refining fuel, but to no avail

Attempt 2: Burned sideways to get out of Ike's shadow. Helped, but still not enough time to refine fuel for burn. Made named save game in case this is the best option(a while after passing Duna and still trying not to leave the SOI)

Attempt 3: Aerocapture, Everything outside of the Mk3 components exploded, including the engines and most of the solar panels, still did not prevent leaving SOI

Attempt 4: Found a saved game right after initial science collection, did 1km/s retro-burn immediately and re-calculated braking burns. Was able to re-top fuel before burn 1km/s in Ike's SOI, and with the better fuel efficiency managed to have a good 200m/s d-v worth of fuel for the Duna burn over and above what was needed for an orbit inside Ike's orbit. Finished off the Ore during first orbit and went down to LDO (50x52, so just above the atmosphere) with ~1200 d-v left @ ~900m/s).

After collecting all the data I could, I made sure Had the game saved and made a landing attempt. Closed Gigantors and radiators, opened air-brakes then burned down about 600m/s. Watched parachutes closely and opened several that the engineer could get to fairly easily to re-pack once they were down to Risky. Managed to land without any breakages with a good 180m/s d-v left and deployed drills to start re-filling(don't think I can take off if completely full, but I can sure mine to get a full fuel tank and some reserve ore).

next step: get all the Kerbals out to get flag XP, get enough fuel+ore to get TWR down to ~1.2 and then decide if it is time for biome hopping(I have lots of empty nodes in the community tech-tree to unlock), Scansat refuel(so it can scan the poles and also scan Ike), or a trip to Ike.

This was my first Career Duna landing, with my only previous Duna mission arrival in a 0.90 sandbox game(I *think* I landed, not sure) that barely had enough d-v to a Kerbin fly-by outside the orbit f Minmus.

[percyPrune]

After all te huge stuff posted on the previous pages, this is going to look pretty silly:

There is method in my madness though. It has enough dV to take a kerbal cheaply from LKO to Mun orbit and rendezvous at each end.

And it fits in to the Mk2 cargo bay of my stretched 'Hotdog' SSTO:

There are parachutes in case an emergency re-entry is needed. The ship breaks up on impact but the pilot survives.

Now I must get back to my Mk3 SSTO.

Focus... focus...

[MaxwellsDemon]

I'm not sure if this helps but it might be helpful to have a detachable pallet under it to absorb the shock of landing, or have the rover slow its own descent by the use of RCS thrusters. How large is your rover?

The trouble I've had is trying to get the rover off the pallet after landing.

The rover's as small as I can make it.. a RoveMate with six RoveMax S2 wheels-- one pair at midbody, and the front and rear extended on outriggers using a couple of little "cubic octagonal" struts to lengthen the wheelbase, battery packs slung under the vehicle to keep the COG low, and every available surface plastered with solar panels (apart from the scientific instruments). Basically my attempt at a "Sojourner."

On my first go-around, I put it on top of a small strut with a TR-2V decoupler, on top of a heat shield, put a parachute on top, and lobbed it into a short suborbital flight from KSC to test it. It survived landing fine, but then the rover couldn't get off the heat shield. Removing the strut placed the wheels in contact with the heat shield, and evidently enough of a shock gets transmitted through to break the wheels... same when I put a 2x2 panel under the rover and ejected the heat shield before landing.

My fourth attempt, which I'll be trying this evening, is going for more of a skyhook arrangement, with the small strut and TR-2V on top, with the rover hanging from it, with the landing legs, etc., around it like a "garage."

I hadn't thought of simply putting landing legs on the rover and then retracting them. Another thing to try...

(I don't doubt this problem has been solved many times over... but I'm trying to go easy on looking over other peoples' shoulders except when I'm truly stumped. )

Edited August 3, 2015 by MaxwellsDemon

[ayana]

Four safe landings and a docking, without ever losing a part. I think this SSTO is complete. Yay!

[MaxwellsDemon]

Landing legs (depending on size of the rover) are a huge help on this. My mun train (few pages back) each car had landing legs because of this same problem, even at a low landing speed like 1.3m/s I was flattening wheels and despite having engineers at the ready to fix them... weird things happen on the mun.

I'll give the wheels-and-legs solution a try, too. Thanks!

[Alchemist]

Just some experimenting. I call it Mirage

Still has some balancing issues, but it got to orbit

Reentry was... well, I specially made it too steep and still nothing burned up!

And then I almost crashed into runway. Still getting used to the aerodynamics.

[Xannari Ferrows]

This:

PART{
name = MagnesiumCell
module = Part
author = RoverDude

MODEL
{
    model = Squad/Parts/Resources/FuelCell/FuelCell
}
rescaleFactor = 0.75

node_attach = .06, 0, .03, 1, 0, 0, 0

TechRequired = electrics
entryCost = 2250
cost = 750
category = Utility
subcategory = 0
title = MgO Cell
manufacturer = Zaltonic Electronics
description = A tiny fuel cell that uses Magnesium oxide for power generation.
attachRules = 0,1,0,0,0

// --- standard part parameters ---
mass = 0.05
dragModelType = default
maximum_drag = 0.2
minimum_drag = 0.2
angularDrag = 2
crashTolerance = 7
maxTemp = 6000 // = 7000


    MODULE
    {
         name = ModuleResourceConverter
         ConverterName = Fuel Cell
         StartActionName = Start MgO Cell
         StopActionName = Stop MgO Cell
         FillAmount = 0.95
        AutoShutdown = false
        GeneratesHeat = false
        UseSpecialistBonus = true


         INPUT_RESOURCE
         {
            ResourceName = MagnesiumOxide
            Ratio = 0.0023568
            FlowMode = STAGE_PRIORITY_FLOW
         }
         OUTPUT_RESOURCE
         {
            ResourceName = ElectricCharge
            Ratio = 1.7
            DumpExcess = false
         }
    }



    RESOURCE
    {
        name = MagnesiumOxide
        amount = 1.43
        maxAmount = 1.43
}

And this:

RESOURCE_DEFINITION
 {
  name = MagnesiumOxide
  density = 0.00358
  unitCost = 0.008
  hsp = 955
  flowMode = NO_FLOW
  transfer = NONE   isTweakable = true

Edited August 3, 2015 by Xannari Ferrows

[MoeKitsune]

Yesterday, I made a fairly decent light lifter.

[LethalShade]

I can't make this thing fly, it's getting me mad.

[MacGamer04]

Succeeded in getting the first 2 modules for my Duna Direct mission into orbit (finally, as in I failed with the second module 4 times )

[Dispatcher]

I can't make this thing fly, it's getting me mad. . . .

I think you should replace the multiple control surfaces with just lifting surfaces (but keep one set of control surfaces). I don't think your tail fin needs any control surfaces. Its hard to tell what there is on the ventral side of the plane, but you might not have enough air intakes relative to the jets. No way to see landing gear placement.

Is that a cargo bay behind the cockpit? If so, I'm guessing the payload is somewhat massive.

Good luck!

[DocMoriarty]

I can't make this thing fly, it's getting me mad.

http://puu.sh/jokjf/da666a1359.jpg

The basic rules for alignments of COM, COL and COT as outlined in my doc in my signature are still valid. Plus i don't see how two pitiful nukes are supposed to get this fat duck into orbit.