What did you do in KSP1 today?

[AlamoVampire]

two things. gathered a second data point for the crashing threads. and spent 3.5 hours building a big ship to take a tiny probe to Bop. has 4 more docking ports, maybe i will send up some satellites for the rest of the jool system? anyway, here it is after its fourth assembly flight:

If you look closely in the above picture, you will see 2 clamp-o-tron seniors, above that with 1 of those aforementioned docking ports is the probe for jool. ya, i think i just channeled @Whackjob by going with 25 nuclear engines to punt such a small probe to Bop. Which is why I may send 4 small satellites to the thing to make it seem worth while lol.

here it is after its 6th assembly flight - prior to flight 7 with fuel:

Edited May 31, 2016 by AlamoVampire

[Kertech]

Made it to Duna in the Mercury 1

Ships not designed to ever meet atmosphere so it's ridiculous Dv (about 6000 remaining still with weight of landers) 

Detached the Landers (Ares 1,2,3) Ares 2 and 3 are a light class, the extra fuel tank is so they can move about the system by themselves (sod taking the Mercury everywhere) They only have 30days of life support so no waiting around!

Here's Ares 2 at Ike

Ares 1 Landed, it's a heavy lander for two and more science stuff!

Ares 3 Landed on Nyke

Ares 3 now back in orbit, science module detaches, too heavy to waste fuel on! gonna meet up with the orbital fuel pod and head back to Mercury with science! 

[awfulhumanbeing]

Put bill on a KAS-based slingshot and tried to shoot jeb. When bill died I replaced him with billy-bobbles then james and finally bob sacrificed his life to kill jeb. That was fun.

Also started a career mode on RO and broke the game with the persistent rotation mod. Then i made a SSTO that didn't fly and rescued jeb and bob from it, then realizing that I forgot a parachute. All died. 

[Columbia]

Today was pretty productive.

I was able to build a decent De Havilland Mosquito for once, performance was really good:

Did a rendezvous to my station to bring some crew there after I forgot to fill up the crew roster during the second module's flight (Docking is getting easier and easier every time I do it) and managed to take a few good screens in the night.

I then managed to build an Aichi D3A1 replica which was pretty big but it worked well:

And finally, I swapped out some of the turbofan engines I had in my 747. They were too big for the wing and looked off. I usually never added turbofan blades to engines, but damn it, I've had higher part count planes.

Looking at it again.. It's wingspan is too short. Way too short, really. 

[justidutch]

Mission Control gave the go-ahead to launch a ship to fulfil a Gilly-6 contract.  Flybys of Gilly, Ike, Duna, Mün and Minmus, ending suborbital in Kerbin are on the menu.  The engineers came up with this ship that will hopefully make it all the way without refuelling.  This ship cost about $270,000, and the contract is worth $1.2M.  It is currently waiting in LKO for 15 days until the prime transfer window to Eve opens up.

 

The Rhino stage should get it to Gilly, the nuclear stage to Ike, and the Ion stage should handle the rest.

 

[herbal space program]

I spent practically the whole day yesterday working out the formulas myself for calculating transfer window times and positions between planets. using nothing but pencil and paper. Boy have I forgotten a lot of math since college! I used these formulas, all the orbital data from the Wiki, and the calculated transfer phase angles from Olex.biz to construct an Excel spreadsheet that allows me to determine the date and position of every transfer window between all of the planets from Moho to Jool, from day 1 to eternity. The first transfer window in the game, for those who care to know, is Kerbin-Moho on day 9, 3hrs, 40 min. The next Kerbin window is to Jool on day 183, followed by Duna on day 226. There is no transfer window from Kerbin to Eve, which was the body I was particularly interested in analyzing, until day 550. Successive Kerbin-Eve windows alternate between sides of Kerbin's orbit every 679 days,  processing  68.8 degrees prograde every other window, and return to just retrograde of the same spot every 5 cycles. And on and on. It looks like my best window for a cheap Kerbin-Eve-Moho transfer is number 24, occurring in year 30, which was what I originally set out to determine.

Edited May 31, 2016 by herbal space program

[Jasper_f]

Work in process: I tried to re-create the Orion spacecraft:

 

 

[luizopiloto]

Today I did nothing in KSP....
But someone did this: http://www.deater.net/weave/vmwprod/ksp/

[Thatguywholikesionengines]

I Made a Minmus mining base. Then I realised it was like right in the middle of a big spot with no ore. Am now currently moving it.

[StrandedonEarth]

Space Casino Alpha is complete! Muncan Kerman was sent up to remove parts that were no longer needed, such as the engines that brought the asteroids to the core, along with a bunch of vernors. Now he is manning the casino while he waits for guests to arrive.

[Delfinus]

While landing a Space Shuttle I noticed some debris, further investigation revealed it to be from another Shuttle that didn't land completely intact.

Spoiler

The part of the shuttle that the crew was in was recovered, but apparently I forgot about the other parts of the shuttle, the Mk2 Bicoupler even has a lot of fuel left in it. It's neat to accidentally discover debris from some old mission that you completely forgot about while conducting a mission, I'll probably leave the wreckage here as a landmark, so that I may find it again someday.

[autumnalequinox]

On 5/31/2016 at 11:03 PM, Geschosskopf said:

I made my 1st interstellar trip in @Sigma88's Galactic Neighborhood.  I decided to go to Kalgol because it's relatively close and it was spectacular.  This is a very close binary of monster starts and one star is visibly (with animation) getting eaten by the other one.

Using the small USI warpdrive, the trip took 3.75 hours of gametime, which I spent playing a lot of solitaire at 4x physical warp.  But it was worth the trip.  The ship had to be refueled twice en route with HyperEdit but this was just to see how such trips work.  I learned a fair amount, which was the whole point.

So pretty.  You really make me want to try Galactic Neighborhood.  I'm waiting until I finally complete a full career with just OPM and stock system.

[Bigbootie]

More base parts.

What I like about this next screenshot is that in the past I could never have this many craft with this many parts in close proximity without some pretty severe lag. 64 bit cured all of that. Not the slightest bit of lag and there are several other craft outside of this screen.

[Geschosskopf]

11 minutes ago, autumnalequinox said:

So pretty.  You really make me want to try Galactic Neighborhood.  I'm waiting until I finally complete a full career with just OPM and stock system.

Doing OPM in career is quite a challenge but lots of fun.  That's what I did in 1.0.5.  I wish you every success.  But if you visit the Monolith on Orvok, don't be surprised if you feel a disapproving ghostly presence

As to warpdrive, I've only used the USI version so can't speak for the KSPI-E version.  The USI version has 2 modes of operation, conservation of velocity or conservation of angular momentum.  You must pick the mode in the VAB and can't change it in flight.  These operate very differently.  I have only used the velocity mode, which some say is less realistic (as if warpdrive itself was more than speculation to begin with), but it fits better with the windjammer ethos of my Kerbal civilization.  But either way, warpdrive just saves you travel time.  You still have to wait on proper transfer windows, you still have to plan your "burns" carefully with knowledge of the underlying principles, and you still have to execute those "burns" properly.  And once you get as close as you can with the warpdrive, you still have to do conventional orbital maneuvers.  If you don't do the warpdrive stuff correctly, you'll end up WAY further from rescue than any worst-case scenario with conventional rockets.  So even staying within the home solar system, warpdrive still presents many of the same challenges as conventional rocketry, with the added bonus that none of the conventional mods that aid navigation (such as MJ) work with it.  If you want such a thing, you'll have to write your own kOS program for it.

Interstellar crossings in Galactic Neighborhood aren't nearly as complicated as intra-system warps.  The stars are all in approximately the same orbit when viewed from the very distant galactic core, so you can just pretty much aim at a star and go there.  The catch, however, is that it you have to "burn" the whole trip, which is never less than several hours of gametime for the closest stars to the home system.  Going to more distant stars can easily reach double digits of gametime hours.  All of which is under thrust so you can't use regular timewarp, you can at most use 4x physical warp.  So, my little jaunt to nearby Kalgol at 4x physical warp required nearly 1 real hour of my life.  IOW, interstellar trips are at least as painful, if not moreso, than the worst ion burns.  And I demonstrated that the small USI warpdrive can't even make that trip without refueling, which adds a major level of complexity.  Bottom line is, even with USI warpdrive, the useful mission payload at the interstellar destination will be very small for the size and cost of the ship taking it there, due to the need to refuel en route.

But hey, what would be the fun in KSP if it was easy?  Warpdrive is not a magic bullet, it creates its own challenges.  All it does is keep you from having to wait years / decades / centuries to get there.

[autumnalequinox]

On 6/1/2016 at 0:14 AM, Geschosskopf said:

Doing OPM in career is quite a challenge but lots of fun.  That's what I did in 1.0.5.  I wish you every success.  But if you visit the Monolith on Orvok, don't be surprised if you feel a disapproving ghostly presence

<snippity-snip>

But hey, what would be the fun in KSP if it was easy?  Warpdrive is not a magic bullet, it creates its own challenges.  All it does is keep you from having to wait years / decades / centuries to get there.

Awesome that's a great summary of the USI warpdrive!  I use nearly all the USI mods and have been eyeballing that one but was a bit intimidated by it.  I figured it was definitely not a "magic bullet" since that's not RoverDude's way.  The whole 1 hour RT "burn" scares me a bit.  I'm so impatient I've wasted precious delta-v just to slap on more LV-Ns so I don't have to wait!  But this seems worth it to see some awesome sights.  

What somebody needs to make is a wormhole network for Galactic Neighboorhood.  Make it a challenge to reach it and enter properly (gravity gradients and other fun stuff with bad approach vectors).  

I think you have inspired me to give it a try though on a day off when I have time to burn, pun intended.

[Geschosskopf]

20 minutes ago, autumnalequinox said:

The whole 1 hour RT "burn" scares me a bit.

This is why you should always run KSP in a window at lower resolution than your monitor can do.  This enables you to talk smack on the KSP IRC, reply to your emails, do your Facebook stuff, read this forum, debeer and rebeer several times, and play solitaire, all simultaneously, while still keeping half an eye on the slow progress of your ship.

 

20 minutes ago, autumnalequinox said:

What somebody needs to make is a wormhole network for Galactic Neighboorhood.  Make it a challenge to reach it and enter properly (gravity gradients and other fun stuff with bad approach vectors).

But all such things require you to enter the wormhole / Stargate just so, which will necessarily require time-consuming and carefully planned and executed conventional orbital maneuvers.  Those could easily take years / decades to come to fruition, and still need transfer windows to get to the right place at the right time to meet the wormhole / Stargate at the right angle and velocity.  And once you come out, you'd have to match inclination and velocity with wherever you were going, so you'd still need beaucoup dV.  There is no magic bullet even there.

 

20 minutes ago, autumnalequinox said:

I think you have inspired me to give it a try though on a day off when I have time to burn, pun intended.

Before you try an interstellar trip, try warping around the home system.  Don't go interstellar until you understand how intra-stellar works, because you'll need to know that after the uneventful-but-interminable interstellar crossing.

[cantab]

I know there was a jump beacon mod at one point. For that you had to take beacons to their destinations manually, but once there you could instantly jump a suitable-equipped ship to them. No idea if it's up-to-date for KSP 1.1.

[hellblazer]

Launched Endeavor today with the Unity module inside. After 5 hours I docked with the Zarya module. First ISS connection complete. 

[AstroBovice]

Hello everyone! I just wanted to share what I am doing with this game lately. I am completely obsessed with it, and none of my friends play! If there is interest in what I'm doing, i will for sure update. Also, I feel I should say I JUST recently installed MechJeb to help with interplanetary maneuvers, but I made multiple successful flights to the Mun and Minmus and returned with no mods.

 

This is Apollo IX landed on the North Pole of the Mun.

Apollo IX

This is the 6th successful landing (Apollo II crash landed killing Jebediah-RIP) on the Mun and 9th total mission of the Apollo Program.

Along with Apollo, the Artemis Program to Minmus is going strong! Artemis III is the most recent and the second successful land and return.

No pictures on Minmus, but will be returning soon on Artemis IV!

Also, I currently have the Frieza Probe orbiting Eve, which was the first mission of the Raven Program to explore Eve and pave the way for interplanetary travel!

Frieza Probe

Upcoming missions and programs:

The Shenron Space Station will be put into LKO.

Shenron Hub

The Senzu Refuel Module will be added to the Shenron Space Station. 

The Hermes (name pending) Program to explore Duna will begin with a flyby and return!

 

Thanks for reading! Keep looking up!

[msasterisk]

Nothing yet, but my friends are starting to tell me "Just stop talking about KSP". Maybe I need a break...

[Padishar]

1 hour ago, msasterisk said:

Nothing yet, but my friends are starting to tell me "Just stop talking about KSP". Maybe I need a break...

Or some different friends...

[cantab]

Kerbal Forklift Program!

 

[Cuky]

I (almost) nailed the landing. Just ran out of fuel about 80-100 meters above the ground and landed too fast for legs to hold the engines clear of the ground

[The Aziz]

Lost my Duna orbital "station" due to maneuver fail. I don't care much though, it was in terribly inclined orbit, which made it useless.

[Bishop149]

Over the course of the last few days, Kartine Kerman has been on a somewhat epic drive around the Mun, taking in 6 or 7 biomes, 1 anomaly and covering over ~500km

It was slow going (rovers average speed was probably about 15-20m/s, but topped out at a slightly nerve wracking 40m/s) but actually pretty good fun, plotting the most efficient course around / between craters with slopes I wasn't confident the rover could manage.I was my first serious drive in KSP, I've previously used rovers to only pootle around short distances.

A few shots of the rover itself, the candle engine (KSP-IE) was on the back purely to provide a steady constant supply of electric charge, the rover actually landed under the power of the 2 downward facing Twitch engines. However I found that firing up that candle was sufficient to push the rover up some steep slopes (abouth 40 degree +) that the motors weren't able to handle alone, whilst burning very little LF. Got me out of a few tight spots that trick!

 

 

Kartine eventually called for pick up from an orbiting lander and returned to Kerbin with her data netting over 4200 science in total, leaving her trusty rover on the surface of the Mun.

Edited June 2, 2016 by Bishop149