What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Red Dwarf]

7 minutes ago, JadeOfMaar said:

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.

All of it! The Stock Visual Enhancement suite (EVE, Scatterer, SVE, SVT) makes a great addition to both stock and 64k games. Brings a certain amount of life to the game. I've noticed that SVE clouds appear really high up in 64k, like 30 or 40 km. It's a little distracting, but other than that, the whole package is great.

[JadeOfMaar]

I already have all the others, and I'm afraid of the maker's quote that once you install it you can never play again without it.

[Galileo]

3 minutes ago, JadeOfMaar said:

I already have all the others, and I'm afraid of the maker's quote that once you install it you can never play again without it.

Oh you can totally play without it. It just won't ever be the same  

[moogoob]

Recently Scott Manley did a video where he pulled off a Mun mission without instrumentation of any kind. To do so, he made a Mun lander with a nuclear engine and a ridiculous amount of delta-v.

I rather liked the design, so I recreated it, and decided to see where over 7 km/s of delta v on the first stage alone could get me. I figured Pol and Bop at the very least, Ike as well if I have the gumption. So first step in my journey: Pol. Did a slingshot at Tylo saving me whole kilometers of precious fuel:

 

Landing was uneventful, fun even. Bill planted his flag, and next time you will hopefully be seeing his smiling face from Bop.

Edited August 28, 2016 by moogoob
my, me, whatever!

[JadeOfMaar]

@Galileo So, landing on Pol...with SVT installed........ _{Mother of Squad?!}

@moogoob I find your mission most fascinating as well. Consider me tuned in.

[Corona688]

I got better at landing things on top of things.

When you're close and slow enough, it's kind of like a regular docking where you need to hit 'N" a lot more often.  A pair of upwards-pointing engines basically used for hovering help slow the process down.

 

Edited August 28, 2016 by Corona688

[Corona688]

Also my first "almost single stage to orbit" and fully reusable rocket:

It's an "almost" because the Twin Boar runs out of fuel most of the way through circularizing, and the fully-fueled twin Swivels finish the job much more efficiently.  Passive staging I guess you could call it, since stages are not involved, but the craft still does very different things at different times.

It's 100% reusable because sometimes you want to send empty orange marshmallows to another planet and this is one way to do that.  I'd thought of sending the twin boar itself, but once in space the boar engine is overkill.

All remaining fuel is transferred back to the upper stage, which blasts off to Minmus 97% empty, and lands on a heavy miner 99% empty.  (The twin Sparks should be able to lift it once fully re-fueled, unless I've severely miscalculated.)

The lower stage fires seprotrons and re-enters, abusing the Twin Boar's high impact strength for an eventual tail first landing.

Edited August 28, 2016 by Corona688

[Red Shirt]

Started a science mode game. I've always played sandbox. Originally learned KSP before science and career existed. Having launched many a small city sized craft just to get to orbit, trying now to do so with as little as possible is kind of fun. Can't get the hang of figuring out how to earn lots of science so progress is a bit slow. Tried building a small Juno powered craft to drive around KSC with, but the small landing gear is a bit flaky. Embarrassingly skidded turned it over shortly after driving off the runway. Not much science in that. 

I'm thinking going to Mnimus would be easier but no batteries or solar yet

Edited August 29, 2016 by Red Shirt

[Sharpy]

There's a problem with Curtana. There are no asteroids sized for it in the game.

Also, not many screenshots, because I kept pressing F12 while playing with KSP64, not linked through steam.

Anyway,

I began in sandbox, creating Quilt, an experiment in simulation of cloth physics in KSP

It starts as a solid platform...

...but once TWR and aero kicks in, ...stuff happens. It bends, it ripples...

It folds in half...

And finally, it implodes.

 

Then I went back to my career. A Class D asteroid was passing by, and I sent Curtana. This is Curtana:

Long story short, after an exciting chase I caught the asteroid... then depleted it without filling up even halfway! What the heck?! That's supposed to be a notch smaller than Class E!

And so, on escape trajectory from the system - and in such a direction the burn would bring me into an orbit inclined halfway between retrograde and polar, anchored to an asteroid sucked dry, and with fuel tanks half empty... desperate times, desperate measures. Dumped the asteroid, burned retrograde to get *any* orbit, Then hiked a gravity assist from Mun, maneuvering in such a way to get roughly equatorial retrograde orbit, then lowered periapsis to some 160km, and spent rest of fuel lowering apoapsis somewhere below Mun, so that it wouldn't eject me from the system...

While Curtana was skirting edges of Kerbin SOI, spending weeks at her apoapsis, I noticed a Class E on a trajectory that doesn't meet Kerbin, but passes nearby. I'd send Claymore, but it's uncrewed currently. So - need to send an engineer.

Instead of going with some shuttle, I finished the launcher for Ugly Duckling, and sent it to where Claymore was docked, with engineer in the cockpit.

Duckling docked with the rear klaw, and refueling began. 2 drills of Claymore, 1 of Duckling. Plus 6 ISRUs. The asteroid stood no chance. Claymore *just* managed to fill up, and got maybe 20% of ore, when the asteroid ran out of juice.

Physics of asteroids is broken. I detached Claymore's Klaw, and things went a bit explodey. Claymore lost one of its gigantors, the Hub attached to the asteroid ripped free of the docking port, duckling survived undamaged.

I spent a good hour trying to re-anchor Hub again, in darkness. No such luck. Physics kept glitching, game kept crashing, at one point I nearly smashed one of its ports against the anchored docking port, straight head on, and it still didn't engage. At last, sick and tired of it, I deorbited it and went back to Claymore.

It's a damn good graceful craft though. The chase went without a hitch, the docking was a bit troublesome as the asteroid for a good while insisted its center of mass is some 300 meters to the left from its surface, but once anchored... just look at these numbers.

 

Somehow, in the process, I got a Kerbin encounter. A bit of orbital mechanics magic to get it into equatorial plane, and I had the asteroid with 70% of resources left, placed in 250km obit.

Well, back to Curtana. In retrograde orbit, without fuel, with no means of deorbiting, and with engineer on board. Time for a rescue mission.

I hacked together a lander, with a pilot, added a KIS box of parachutes, lots of fuel, and sent it on its merry way. Too bad "hacked together" is the correct wording...

Not only were there problems during launch...

(it actually righted itself and began flying properly a moment later!)

...retrograde orbit takes way more fuel, the encounter was really nasty, and Curtana was in a rather ungrateful orbit. The rescue rocket ran out of fuel right on approach - and actually lost one of the fins, knocking against Curtana at some 30m/s.

Oh well. I detached the reentry piece with the pilot, and using RCS and monoprop finished the encounter.

At that time I realized: in retrograde orbit that intersects orbits of a large number of rockets going prograde, Curtana is a serious risk.

So, regretfully, the engineer unpacked two charges of C4 from the storage, attached it to the craft, set timers, activated them, and moved to a safe distance.

Last pic of Curtana, maybe 10 seconds before the charges went off.

The reentry - other than constant flapping of airbrakes that kept overheating when extended, cooling when closed, was mostly uneventful.

Oh, in the meanwhile (as both Curtana and Claymore were on their way) I moved Moho Temple to a different biome - Midlands.

It also revealed a serious shortcoming. Vectors abuse their gimbals and overheat the nukes to the point of explosion. And the Temple is built in such a way that try as you might, I can't rightclick the Vectors to disable their gimbals. Oh well, burns with Vectors are performed with SAS off for now. And I need to use them - as fully fueled, Temple's TWR on nukes alone is below 1!

 

[kepicness]

I flew a SSTO to duna, messed around with the rover it was carrying and came back. I also managed to get a couple of nice pictures in the process

Low duna gravity + high speed/performance bike = fun

aaaaaaand we're back

Here's a hotlink to the full mission report if you're interested

Now it's time to make something that can refuel and go on flying for eveeeeer (but I need to learn how the resource system works for that :P)

Edited August 29, 2016 by kepicness

[foamyesque]

 

I am working on a thing.

[Aragosnat]

Not much did take this nice screen shot: 

Edited August 29, 2016 by Aragosnat

[Guest]

I started a new career because I wanted to re-do the early game challenges with the knowledge I've acquired playing so far.

Up until the Mun and back it was easy going; I made a really low-tech Mun return mission which worked well enough although my Mun lander looked like something out of 1930's sci-fi -- tall pointy thing on spindly legs that barely stood up. Very hairy return also as I had no fuel for slowdown burns; I had to give it a couple of tries until I found the sweet spot of around 44k for the return periapsis -- the usual 35k blew up my fragile return system, and higher than that would make so many passes my ablator would wear out.

Anyway, then I got to the point where I want to build some infrastructure. I got the science module and decided to put that in polar Mun orbit so I can squeeze it dry of Science doing repeat lander missions. 

Ow was that hard. No fairings, see.

Somehow my Mun station generates so much drag that my rockets would inevitably spin out somewhere between 10k and 20k altitude unless I flew them so slow I couldn't actually get into orbit. 

I eventually managed it by making a horrid monstrosity of a contraption with three fat rockets stuck to a triangular mess of girders, pulling up the Mun station dangling from the centre of the triangle. I juuuust got it into LKO, and from there on out it was plain sailing as I already had a reusable orbital tug up there; it RV'ed, docked, drained the last drops of fuel from it, and dragged it into place. The contraption makes an impressive piece of debris as an orbital monument to the hubris of kerbalkind.

Next up is sending up a lander + return pod + scientist + pilot, and then all it needs is regular cheap fuel launches to science it out. I'll send up another tug at the same time so I have two up there. Once the Mun is dry of Science I can drag that big ol' canister to Minmus and beyond...

[Sharpy]

10 hours ago, kepicness said:

How did you get KSP not to protest about the wheels being blocked?

[Guest]

@kepicness That is one mean looking spaceplane. In an extremely good way.

[NightshineRecorralis]

I built a contrarotating turboprop

album:http://imgur.com/a/tQfTC

[capi3101]

My kid wanted to watch me play Stardew Valley for the better part of the weekend but I found some time to sneak KSP in late last night. I really could stand to relocate my box to a locked room somewhere ten stories below ground...

So not much done over the weekend. Bob's still on his way to Mun for contracts and sci. Launched a low-orbit rescue mission, the first in my current career save. Game crashed on me when I decoupled the rescue ship from the paywad; I figured it might have had something to do with the chute that was indicated for the next stage instead of the engine that was supposed to be there. Had some real VAB issues last night, which I thought I had taken care of but apparently hadn't. If I can avoid having to harvest parsnips tonight, I'll see where that mission is standing and determine if I need to re-launch or just adjust the staging.

[StrandedonEarth]

2 hours ago, capi3101 said:

I really could stand to relocate my box to a locked room somewhere ten stories below ground...

Me too, preferably wife-proof...

With help from the Anomaly Contract Pack, I visited TMA-1, the monolith in the mountains near KSC:

I also modified the Space Camp Bus from LKO ops to 3-Star trainer capabilities, but I forgot to factor in the needs-to-still-be-attached heatshield during the Minmus Landing stage of the flight:

[septemberWaves]

Today I completed the infrastructure for my Extended Kerbol Grand Tour. A mothership that can land and refuel on Moho (and therefore also refuel in any planetary system in the extended Kerbol system), a HAAV (Heavy Atmospheric Ascent Vehicles) each for both Eve and Richell, a single stage lander for other celestial bodies with dense atmospheres, and another single stage lander for everywhere else (which has separate descent modules for both Tylo and Slate). These vehicles were significantly less difficult to create than I had anticipated.

@Corona688 If you're open to suggestions, there's a couple of things that may help to improve your SSTO rocket. Firstly, placing a fairing directly between the heat shield and the Twin Boar and using it to protect the tank at the top would make it far more aerodynamic and therefore mean that you lose less delta-v on ascent. Secondly, running fuel lines both ways between the Twin Boar and the side tanks with the Swivels would cause all of those tanks to be treated as one, and also having all three engines on the launch vehicle fire simultaneously from liftoff. This may allow the vehicle to completely make orbit with a reasonable amount of delta-v left, because Swivels are much more efficient than the Twin Boar and so firing them all together may improve the fuel efficiency of the whole launch vehicle.

[Red Shirt]

Another one of those days... sigh. Sunrise is pretty though, so there's that.

[Jaeleth]

I fought bugs... And after 6 or 7 playing hours of krakenizing ships, or unable to switch ships for one of them was accelerating(?!?!.!) (none of it my fault)... I finally managed to send my large orbital mining station enroute to refuel at minmus on its way to Jool system...

oh... Krakenizing a smaller ship in the process, fortunatelly a spare ship lying around that I had the unfortunate idea of also sending to minmus for refuel, not saving before touching it (unwise) and ooopssss... The kraken ate it.

which reminds me I have to edit the game file to refund the money lost (bug related, of course, that's not cheat)

 

Way more than 1000 playing hours so far... Maybe half of it fighting bugs... That is: reloading / editing  game files / and finding inventive ways to go around them...

*sigh*

 

 

[kepicness]

4 hours ago, Brikoleur said:

@kepicness That is one mean looking spaceplane. In an extremely good way.

Thanks! Having my planes look good is one of my objectives/priorities, so I'm glad that you like it :D. I would have covered up the entire thing in wings (because I hate exposed parts), but it ended up being too heavy for a duna mission. In the end I settled for having the rocket fuel tanks in the middle covered up by wings and the jet fuel on the outside, for a better matching color scheme. Yes, I know thag it's borderline OCD but hey, it works :P, and the plane actually flies better thanks to how the CoM shifts. Here's what it would have looked like if the additional wings didn't add 3 tons: 

 

4 hours ago, Sharpy said:

How did you get KSP not to protest about the wheels being blocked?

I used every single pixel of non-"blocked" space. After some trial and error I found that if the suspension mechanism and inner portion of the wheels aren't blocked (aka have nothing clipping into them) then it works fine. The wheel's exterior mounting block (the solid plate of metal that attaches to the vessel) can have stuff clipping to some extent, and the external portion of the wheels is ok as well.

[Corona688]

1 hour ago, eloquentJane said:

 

@Corona688 If you're open to suggestions, there's a couple of things that may help to improve your SSTO rocket.

Absolutely open to suggestions.

Quote

Firstly, placing a fairing directly between the heat shield and the Twin Boar and using it to protect the tank at the top would make it far more aerodynamic and therefore mean that you lose less delta-v on ascent.

Originally the fairing was omitted as it kept ending up as orbiting space junk.  If I can ever remember to deploy it before orbit is achieved I'll think about it.

Quote

Secondly, running fuel lines both ways between the Twin Boar and the side tanks with the Swivels would cause all of those tanks to be treated as one, and also having all three engines on the launch vehicle fire simultaneously from liftoff. This may allow the vehicle to completely make orbit with a reasonable amount of delta-v left, because Swivels are much more efficient than the Twin Boar and so firing them all together may improve the fuel efficiency of the whole launch vehicle.

They already are.  They're attached using the slanted nosecones attached radially, which crossfeed fuel outwards (much to my surprise!)  They fire all the way up, and are still full when the twin boar runs out.  Passive staging FTW.

Edited August 29, 2016 by Corona688

[FlyingCola]

Lanching up the kassini for preperations of my cinematic.

also, lots of composing

[septemberWaves]

2 hours ago, Corona688 said:

Originally the fairing was omitted as it kept ending up as orbiting space junk.  If I can ever remember to deploy it before orbit is achieved I'll think about it.

Because of your current design, the safest way to do a fairing is to rotate the base 90 degrees and have it deploy as a 2-part clamshell. Also, the best time to deploy a fairing is once your intended apoapsis is reached, your engines are shut down, and you're past about 50km up (which is quite convenient because most launch systems tend to reach the intended apoapsis a little before 50km in altitude with a properly executed gravity turn). But in any case, fairing segments get deleted once they're past a certain distance away from a vessel regardless of where you are when you deploy the fairing, so they shouldn't become space junk.