What did you do in KSP1 today?

[regex]

Unlocked all the engines for Thor-Delta this morning, looking forward to building the/a rocket (undecided on whether to go for a straight replica or not).  Having a controllable upper stage is going to be nice.

But first, going with my wife and kid to see some hot-air balloons!

[eddiew]

The mood aboard Discovery One is... a little low, in the wake of their encounter with the anomaly.

But the long and the short of it is that there's nothing to be done about it. In this case, it seems, events were not a dream, and life for the remaining crew, must go on.

As such, co-co-pilot (mmm, cocoa pilot) Ellie Kerman takes Jay's pod and sets out to perform his mission on Bop; namely seeing whether the space melon is indeed sweet and juicy.

Confessional: I realised upon separating the pods from Discovery that there had been a mess up in the VAB. In turning the pods into a sub-assembly, the fuel lines had become detached from the main cabin and neither could access their fuel cans. Thanks to KRnD's wizardry, they were designed with over 5km/s each, which is far and away excess for their jobs. I've turned on infinite fuel to allow them to complete their intended assignments, whereupon they will be returned to Discovery, then labelled as debris for the debris-eater to eat. Assuming the Discovery returns home successfully, it will be equipped with fresh and fully-tested pods in Kerbin orbit. In my mind, it's not so much cheating, as compensating for a bug.

Mission control had totally forgotten that this was also the final stop of the Vall-iant, the little probe that never cheated. With the last few m/s of it's fuel can, it was able to hop just far enough to refresh its orbital science instruments, allowing Ellie to get a copy of the data without transmission losses. These will be welcomed at Skyball Station - thanks, Vall-iant. Sorry we don't have a way to bring you home... maybe in another few mega-sciences.

Also, dem landing legs yo? Any attempt to set down resulted in springboarding back into the air, usually with more speed than could possibly be accounted for. Meanwhile the Vall-iant was happily sitting nearby, stable on its own three feet... Eventually, Ellie got fed up and just dumped the pod sideways, which apparently is acceptable to the physics engine. It has more than enough torque to right itself, so job's a good un.

Lyssa Kerman, meanwhile, will shortly be starting her transfer to Pol. This leaves the Discovery un-piloted, and prone to some cray-cray swinging around if nudged. Hopefully nobody on board will trip over anything while the pilots are away.

 

47 minutes ago, Red Shirt said:

I love the ship design. Part mods?

Primarily Near Future Construction for the central 2.5m girders/fuel tanks. Solar panels are also NF, while the sticky-outy science instruments are DMagic Orbital. Rest is pretty much stock, with some welding to keep the part count down. Of note, Kerbal R&D was pretty mandatory to get a ship so 'small' to have this much range. It really needs researched super-nervas to be practical

[Leopard]

Minmus #3 launched and recovered after a successful mission, +400 odd science and two contracts completed. Valentina unskilled, success all round.

Few simple 'since from around' missions using orbiters and landers already in place at Minmus and Mun.

Attempting a simple 'haul airstream fairing to 2,000m' mission... have given up for the night due to near constant control failures on the eggbox, e.g. pressing 'B' to select something resulting in no action and 'no target' displayed on screen, unable to return to KSC or recover the craft etc, after the 5th or 6th encounter with that I gave up.

Didn't help that the thing is forgetting staging info, or more annoyingly scrambling parts of it on almost every mission as well.

One of them days at KSC I guess, switch it off and on again...

Try again tomorrow.

 

Also worked out that one mission I thought would be reasonably simple (small base on minus) means either lifting some 130T to LKO in one go, or about four 25T launches, then more to lift the required fuel (mission wants 6k units on Minmus). Wanting to make the base actually useful as well.. Think this one may wait a while

[Andem]

I accidentally recreated STS - 107 while testing my shuttle design. 

[Benji13]

8 hours ago, eddiew said:

First kerbals around Jool!

Discovery One is a marvel of kerbal technology. Heavy investment in KRnD resulted in nervas capable of pushing 100kN at 1000isp. Combine with materials technologies yielding lighter command pods, the Discovery delivers a gigantic 11km/s at a not-horrible 0.3 TWR. For orbital ejection, two drop tanks with aerospikes are used to provide a little extra kick, but after that, the ship becomes a true all-in-one interplanetary cruiser. Equipped with the latest science toys, and enough docking ports to add boosters or landers, it should see service for some time into the future.

Warning; the next report is a massive spoiler for Anomaly Surveyor. Don't open it if you don't (want to) know what's around Jool.

  Reveal hidden contents

...I did not expect that... I hope he finds his way home :/ 

 

Craft file?

[MrWolf83]

Well I over the past few weeks, 5-6 KSP years built an orbital Mün station into a redirected asteroid. Took a bunch of ships mainly to redirect asteroid and flip or it of asteroid. I'm very proud of myself in this one.

Edited August 27, 2016 by MrWolf83
Pic Fix

[GwynJHawke]

With a Duna transfer window fast approaching, I designed (this save file) Kerbin's first interplanetary and fully reusable spaceship. From the back moving foward, the KSPS Discovery is propelled by three NERV engines and carries 10000 units of liquid fuel just for the nuclear engines. Also in the fuel section is enough Lf/Ox mix to completely refuel the ship's lander, the KSPS Wanderer. The Wanderer holds enough fuel to land and launch from Duna to orbit twice, with a healthy margin of error, allowing the lander crew to visit multiple biomes on the planet. Foward of the fuel section is the habitat ring and auxiliary docking ports. The habit ring can carry a total of 48 Kerbals to Duna orbit with another threein the lander command momodule. foward of the habitat ring is the main docking port for the Wanderer. 

The ship looks great, easily one of the prettiest ships I've ever designed. The habitat ring is made up of Mk 2 crew cabins in a 12 sided ring. The interior of the ring is lit by soft green light and looks spectacular. I can't wait to see what it's going to look like when back dropped against the red of Duna.  I'm 4 24/hour days from my launch window and all I have left to do is rendezvous the fuel tanker to top up the reserves before leaving. I'm thinking about docking a few auxiliary fuel pods on the ship before it leaves, maybe just a little extra for the Wanderer so it can do some prospecting on Ike as well. I've only ever been to Ike one in any game file, which is less than I've been to Moho or Laythe. I could dump the fuel pods after I'm done with them. If I have the time, I might do exactly that.

[eddiew]

The mission must go on. 

Pod 2's landing legs turn out to be just as bad as Pod 1's, with the result that alternative landing mechanisms needed to be found. I'm blaming the engineering team for welding the leg assemblies to the tanks to the RCS to the lights. I'm not sure what this 'part count' they keep talking about is, so they have been instructed to quit moaning about fps drops and get their sleep between frames.

Neither Lyssa nor Ellie trusted their pods to dock with Discovery. Not only did the fuel have to be manually pumped, but the RCS turns out to be so imbalanced that thrust on any axis invokes movement on at least one other axis as well. Kerbal brains were not made for this kind of mathematics, and jetpacks turned out to be easier to handle.

Mission control also learned a valuable lesson about doing rendezvouses in high Joolean orbit - namely, never do it again. It can take months to swing around, and the autopilot some have nicknamed Mechanical Jeb doesn't do well with calculating the burns on this scale. Future motherships are planned to be left orbiting Laythe or Vall, since transfer to bodies with gravity is vastly easier to plot.

As a side note, I have decided that I really enjoy this mothership+landers style of mission. Yes, it takes literally 2 days to execute and 2-3 more of planning, but it's nice to dedicate my focus to just one thing and not be flippety flopping between different planets all the time. I think I need to come back with landers for Vall, Laythe and Tylo, though I realise these will probably be much tougher. I figure if I can SSTO Tylo (potentially viable with Near Future + KRnD) then that lander will do for all the moons, as long as the mothership can refuel it. A mining rig is also a possibility. Maybe space krakens will make a good fuel source  

 

11 hours ago, Benji13 said:

Craft file?

Apologies, but I don't know that I can post something usable... There are some custom welded parts in there, plus an uncertain number of mods. The chances of it loading for anyone else are kind of slim :/  That said; the main spine is made from Near Future Construction girders with liquid fuel contents. The head end is a simple 6-sided girder hub from the same mod, and pretty much everything else is fairly obvious  

[Fred Cop]

Bob was sick of travelling to and from the Space Center everyday, so today he decided to move closer to his place of work;

 

(...but in all seriousness, I have no idea why I made this.)

[LN400]

Did the final burn for the double orbital moon scanner, courtesy of RT's flight computer. From Kerbin to Mun and now on its way to Minmus. No link to KSC so it was a bit of a gamble seeing there wasn't much margin for error but it hit bullseye with encounter in 9 days. Got a full day to mess around with designs and tests until the next event. Woot!

[TheEpicSquared]

Got the next chapter of my KSP Megastructures done

[AstroBovice]

Today, I designed my version of the Space X Falcon Heavy rocket. I had been wanting to try to replicate some Space X type stuff anyway so I decided to make this. Also thought it would be cool to try to make the 1st stage liquid boosters fully 'reusable' AKA recoverable . Really happy with how it turned out overall! I was in need of a uniform heavy launcher to start building a new space station and was really struggling with shuttles, so I decided to go with the Space X (wanna be) route. Also, wanted to experiment with video for the first time and show off what I did a little lol.  Soon will start building a station 10x the size of my current one with my new Falcon Heavy Launch System! Thanks for reading, enjoy!

 

Edited August 27, 2016 by AstroBovice

[mrclucks]

Got a contract to land at Gilly so I made a smallish 1.25m craft that had wayyy too much dv to go visit all the biomes there.  I was tired of having to physics time warp so I got cheaty and displayed all the biomes ( all 3?!) So I wouldn't have to come back for it.  Returned/reentered kerbin for so measly science. 

Made a craft that had oodles of dv (interelstellar mod I believe but might be the near future ones) using hydrogen for 18k dv, to make a craft that could get all the science from the jool system without needing to land ( Scansat mod as well as a mod I forget the name of that collects the science you can do automatically.  Also, I could probably land on these moons, but that too much hassle). Currently in the process of farming it.  

Got a bunch of tourism contracts for Eve, Duna, Gilly, and Ike that thankfully did not include landing on any of them, but did include atmospheric flight( which I kerbaled into aerobraking ) and is on its way home with minimal dv to spare.  

[eddiew]

Fixed my Firebird SSTO - then Hyperedited it to Rald for flight testing  

And thanks to the power of Kerbal RnD (and about 3000 science points invested in rapiers and nervas) there's a very good chance that she can make LKO, get to Rald, land, and return to Kerbin without a refuel...

[Spartwo]

Worked with rotors quite a lot.

Also crew vehicles and other near future looking stuff.

[Guest]

Design and initial trials of a smallish S2-based shuttle, using hollow wings inspired by a design by @eddiew.

I wanted to try something advanced with a hydrolox lifting stage, fuel cell power and VASIMR engines, all in a compact and aesthetic package. Only the middle of these features still remains as I struggle to find an engine setup that works with the vehicle's profile and offers it any actual payload capacity. The shuttle itself has no main engines, only OMS and a tiny jet to sustain a better glide slope during landing.

 

I also took a pretty picture of my modified Manai, previously posted about.

[JadeOfMaar]

Manaiiiiii! *has seen some of these prior posts*

Eddie's Rapiers are turbocharged, eh? By chance do they have a version number now?

As for me, I designed a fuel hauler with NearFuture Construction, and finally found a use for Infernal Robotics. I should've fully engineered the robotic arm behind the claw as I still needed to use KAS pipes to refuel the MaterialKits supply lander. In any case that goal is accomplished and the outpost has access to that supply now.

Next up, develop a stylish thing to ferry crew between Mun and Minmus. This UFO-based 6-seater translates like a hockey puck and should be able to (not tested yet) make at least 1 round trip from moon surfaces before needing refuel. Jebediah's aching to get away from that outpost and back to the SPH. All he's done for the past kerbal munth is serve in survey stations while Valentina gets to hoard the Mach 6.

Edited August 28, 2016 by JadeOfMaar

[Benji13]

On 27 August 2016 at 10:31 AM, GwynJHawke said:

With a Duna transfer window fast approaching, I designed (this save file) Kerbin's first interplanetary and fully reusable spaceship. From the back moving foward, the KSPS Discovery is propelled by three NERV engines and carries 10000 units of liquid fuel just for the nuclear engines. Also in the fuel section is enough Lf/Ox mix to completely refuel the ship's lander, the KSPS Wanderer. The Wanderer holds enough fuel to land and launch from Duna to orbit twice, with a healthy margin of error, allowing the lander crew to visit multiple biomes on the planet. Foward of the fuel section is the habitat ring and auxiliary docking ports. The habit ring can carry a total of 48 Kerbals to Duna orbit with another threein the lander command momodule. foward of the habitat ring is the main docking port for the Wanderer. 

The ship looks great, easily one of the prettiest ships I've ever designed. The habitat ring is made up of Mk 2 crew cabins in a 12 sided ring. The interior of the ring is lit by soft green light and looks spectacular. I can't wait to see what it's going to look like when back dropped against the red of Duna.  I'm 4 24/hour days from my launch window and all I have left to do is rendezvous the fuel tanker to top up the reserves before leaving. I'm thinking about docking a few auxiliary fuel pods on the ship before it leaves, maybe just a little extra for the Wanderer so it can do some prospecting on Ike as well. I've only ever been to Ike one in any game file, which is less than I've been to Moho or Laythe. I could dump the fuel pods after I'm done with them. If I have the time, I might do exactly that.

Do you have any pics? Sounds good. 

[eddiew]

Finally... everyone is home! I think this has eaten the last 5 days of my life vacation 

On the up side, the Truffleshuttle is amazing. With turbocharged rapiers and nervas from Kerbal R&D, she hits orbit with over 3.5km/s left - which turns out to be enough to get out to Rald/Minmus, and perform three dockings. She's also surprisingly well balanced, and the CoM barely shifts during flight. Naturally I the engineering team failed to take advantage of this by forgetting to put any RCS on. Luckily it's still possible to dock because of the frontal clamp-o-tron, but it certainly is fiddly. The wing pieces are enlarged 20% with Tweakscale, and having doubled them up, the ship really floats when empty - and is surprisingly easy to fling around while full, too. And yes, yes I did pull the old ram intakes out of retirement. Gave them exactly the same config/stats as the modern ones, but they look about 20% cooler when used in a bi-wing design.

And nothing did donuts on the runway! Though there were a couple of little bounces. It looks like most of the landing gear issues are from small gear, but the big ones here are much more stable.

Ironically, no science at all came home with the crew, but promotions were aplenty, with the Lyssa Kerman and Ellie Kerman reaching 5-stars, and the rest of the crew hitting 4. Time to powerlevel the scientists so they can go take over Starcrossed station and max it out.

The complete Discovery album (including massive Anomaly Surveyor spoiler) is available on imgur for easy reading. Yes, I know it has some typos, but I've lost the photoshop files and I don't care any more...

http://imgur.com/a/sJHOT

 

[eddiew]

10 hours ago, JadeOfMaar said:

Eddie's Rapiers are turbocharged, eh? By chance do they have a version number now?

Mk 2-3 on isp asl, thrust, and weight. About 20% better/lighter all around, and what a difference it makes! Add a nerva with 1000 isp and you have a seriously long range scout plane  I changed up the config, so all told it cost over a grand of science... worth it

[Red Dwarf]

Today I flew my last mission before returning to school. It's going to be a couple months before I can play again, so I decided to do something simple yet fulfilling, a 64k Mun mission.

Snowy Egret enters final landing phase at 30km

Bill and Jeb enjoying the view

Stock Visual Terrain makes for some pretty big rocks

This was a fun final mission. I really love the landing site, which I've dubbed Transcendence Crater. It was a nice sendoff!

[JadeOfMaar]

@Red Dwarf how is your kerbal able to stand on the rock? Does Stock Visual Terrain add scatters with collision boxes?

Spoiler

I'd name that the Rock of Kibraltr. But only if that's the biggest.

 

[Red Dwarf]

1 minute ago, JadeOfMaar said:

@Red Dwarf how is your kerbal able to stand on the rock? Does Stock Visual Terrain add scatters with collision boxes?

  Hide contents

I'd name that the Rock of Kibraltr. But only if that's the biggest.

 

Yeah, aside from the higher ground texture detail, that's the main feature of Stock Visual Terrain. Big rocks that you can actually interact with. It's a simple change, but it brings a lot of depth to surface missions.

[Gamax19]

Well nothing compared to the guys in this page.

I have just seen destruction to much destruction...

[JadeOfMaar]

All the scatter? Or just its own? It's a little scary but not unexpected. I've intentionally avoided stock scatter at times and wished that I could interact with them, for better or worse. So much Win right there.