What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Kerbital]

Just now, Nergal8617 said:

They do, it looks like RoverDude just took the textures from the Clamp-O-Tron Sr and the Advanced SAS module and make a sandwich with them and then made it bigger.

That makes sense.

[invision]

my craft wasnt working, couldnt move, extend antenna, or anything. i was convinced one of the new mods conflicted.

 

but it just turns out im dumb and forgot solar panels...carry on!

Edited August 26, 2017 by invision

[joacobanfield]

I sent two probes named Grace I and II to Thalia. I also started developing a new space shuttle, the Orinoco. I discovered a few things...

 

* The shuttle's engine and the booster's engine should be the same.

* One LF booster will not cut it, and flip the ship if both engines are not fired simultaneously on launch.

* Low-Thrust, high burn time SRBs work nicely. 

* The shuttle's engine needs to fire on launch, unless we use lots of SRBs

I don't know if these are right...help would be welcome. The ship is a Mk3 cockpit, Mk3 rocket fuel tank, Mk3 to 2.5 adapter, Mainsail. The wings are Big-S Delta wings, devoid of fuel. It uses FAT elevons on the wings. The booster is ventral, decoupler, two orange tanks, mainsail. It can barely make it into orbit.

[qzgy]

40 minutes ago, joacobanfield said:

I sent two probes named Grace I and II to Thalia. I also started developing a new space shuttle, the Orinoco. I discovered a few things...

 

* The shuttle's engine and the booster's engine should be the same.

* One LF booster will not cut it, and flip the ship if both engines are not fired simultaneously on launch.

* Low-Thrust, high burn time SRBs work nicely. 

* The shuttle's engine needs to fire on launch, unless we use lots of SRBs

I don't know if these are right...help would be welcome. The ship is a Mk3 cockpit, Mk3 rocket fuel tank, Mk3 to 2.5 adapter, Mainsail. The wings are Big-S Delta wings, devoid of fuel. It uses FAT elevons on the wings. The booster is ventral, decoupler, two orange tanks, mainsail. It can barely make it into orbit.

Pictures help with design advice

From my experience with shuttles (using random images from earlier)

*No, not necessarily.

Exhibit A)

Spoiler

Shuttle uses rhinos, LF boosters (4 of them) use mammoths.

* Again, maybe. Depends on the design (Exhibit B)

Spoiler

One shuttle with one big booster. Not fired at the same time.

* True, but sometimes cases exist for higher thrust times. (Same thing as Exhibit A)

Spoiler

Something like 32 kickbacks to help the initial TWR

* Again, not necessarily. One of my shuttle designs showcased needs its engines to fire at launch, the other doesn't.

(BTW, if you are interested, in the one design where the shuttle engines are not fired, it works because the angled vectors help shift the CoT to the CoM)

 

In conclusion, these assumptions can all be true or false with certain designs.

Edited August 26, 2017 by qzgy

[ShawnPhillips]

Friend challenged me to land a Tank on the Mun, I did. The Mun Tank was getting lonely, so I sent it a friend.

 

[adsii1970]

I've spent about six hours today learning how to write the config file to add a star to KSP. It took a while (nearly 6 hours) to learn the basics, but now I have to learn how to really fix the image for the corona. But other than that, the star is mostly complete.

And I dropped a satellite in front of it, to see the effects the light would have on it...

I know the corona is rough, but it is a work in progress. Anyhow, here's some info about this star:

This is the condensed remains of a collapsed star. It's named Nohochacyum - after the Mayan god who is a  creator-destroyer deity, the brother of the death god Kisin (or possibly another earthquake god also known as Kisin). He is the sworn enemy of the world serpent Hapikern and it is said that, in the end of days, he will destroy Hapikern by wrapping him around himself to smother him. In some versions of this story, life on earth is destroyed in the process. He is related, in some stories, to Usukan, Uyitzin, Yantho and Hapikern, all of whom wish human beings ill. Also the brother of Xamaniqinqu, the patron god of travelers and merchants.

The names in bold will be the names of the remaining planets, moons, asteroids of the system, when it is totally complete.

[CatastrophicFailure]

@joacobanfield what @qzgy said. Also, please note that STS-type shuttles in KSP are hard, because we lack the real thing's software to automatically gimbal the high-gimballing engines to maintain thrust through the center of mass. 

Vector engines are your friend here, excellent thrust, good efficiency, and lots of gimbal. The SAS can sometimes compensate enough with that to keep it stable, but expect lots of throttle adjusting as you go up. 

Also worth noting, there is a certain amount of voodoo involved. 

I once slapped together an STS-type shuttle one night, in 6.4x scale no less. I was, shall we say, not entirely in my right mind at the time, but the thing worked. The next morning I tried to make it work better, and as soon as I touched anything with the design it simply quit working (read: lots of badabooms). No matter how much I tried with my full concentration, I never did get the thing to work again. 

YMMV. 

[qzgy]

1 minute ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

STS-type shuttles in KSP are hard, because we lack the real thing's software to automatically gimbal the high-gimballing engines to maintain thrust through the center of mass. 

And this is why I'm a fan of the shuttle sandwich.  Very simple, classical, and no tinkering needed!

 

As a note, its probably possible for someone with kOS wizardry to write such a script. That could be cool...

[Whisky Tango Foxtrot]

Drills and ISRU are running. I've just got to wait a few days for the tanks to fill and we'll see if I've built a spaceship or a surface base.

Edited August 26, 2017 by Whisky Tango Foxtrot

[invision]

3 hours ago, joacobanfield said:

I sent two probes named Grace I and II to Thalia. I also started developing a new space shuttle, the Orinoco. I discovered a few things...

 

* The shuttle's engine and the booster's engine should be the same.

* One LF booster will not cut it, and flip the ship if both engines are not fired simultaneously on launch.

* Low-Thrust, high burn time SRBs work nicely. 

* The shuttle's engine needs to fire on launch, unless we use lots of SRBs

I don't know if these are right...help would be welcome. The ship is a Mk3 cockpit, Mk3 rocket fuel tank, Mk3 to 2.5 adapter, Mainsail. The wings are Big-S Delta wings, devoid of fuel. It uses FAT elevons on the wings. The booster is ventral, decoupler, two orange tanks, mainsail. It can barely make it into orbit.

okay so i built it and changed a few things

instead of mainsail we go for the vector as its 2 tons lighter and gives us almost the same thrust, i also angled the engine so it offsets the craft from pushing up or down so we stay in a straight line.

we rig up 2 big boosters to some assembly and a decoupler

 

and there we have it, a few small tweaks and we are in space  with fuel to deorbit

[joacobanfield]

Alright, I've made some changes. I added two SpaceY super-heavy boosters to the side of the orange tanks, to help it get up to speed. It does stall a bit when the fuel runs out, but starting the Skipper on the orange tank solves it. The circularization burn is managed by fiddling with the Skipper's thrust limiter. Also, LFO crossfeed is enabled so only the orange tank is drained.

I'll try the Vectors tomorrow...thanks for the tips.

[septemberWaves]

I worked on some medium lift vehicles for 4x scale Kerbin. Not many pics yet because they're not done, but my next launch vehicle series should be ready Soon^TM. I'll also be uploading my Quicksilver rockets to KerbalX soon, I've been optimizing them a bit to make sure they work perfectly.

[JadeOfMaar]

I just got inspired by SpaceX and launched some stock sats (ComSat Lx) aboard stock Kickback SRBs. I happened to get them co-orbital and nearly perfectly aligned opposite of each other.

Then I built a sat with greater range (ComSat H2) and launched it into geosync orbit also on a Kickback. All of these are a first for me in a very long time if not the first ever.  Their orbital periods are 2 hours and 1 day respectively.

[KerikBalm]

I thought about doing an "Alien Space Program" game at 3x scale

Starting with my Rald Space program mod (but using my new systemscale and settings)

Spoiler

But I wanted to see if I could get a good SSTO shuttle that can be loaded by cargoramp going for kerbin, as previously I had rather bad results at 3x:

^ No loading ramp, and only half an orange tank to orbit... not good.

So I made a new design to try and get to orbit first, and tried to find a more efficient ascent profile. I broke 10% payload fraction, which doesn't even include the useless mass of the 11.5 tons of cargobay and cargoramp (which does not compare favorably to 2.5m fairings, or simple inline payloads/fuel only payloads). Nukes were very much needed unlike the above design, and helped the massive problem the one above had with getting the right mixture of LF-Oxidizer.

Not in orbit yet, but clearly it will be close:

So I didn't quite get the whole 36 tons of an orange tank to orbit, but it was close:

I needed just a little more LF (and I'd need to siphon a little more out too, for the deorbit burn), but it can clearly get itslef to orbit to pick up payloads to take down to the surface, and should be able to take many payloads that would fit in ints bay back up to orbit if needed.

[Julien Kerman]

Voyager 6 arrived at Saturn, fulfilled the flyby contract and entered into a polar orbit:

[hellblazer]

Went to the moon and back using the FASA mod. RSS/RO/TACS/RemoteTech

 

[Kerbital]

Learned that solar panel are not much of use far, in Jool's vicinity. My lander ran out of juice several times. The lander needs a reactor and larger battery. Thanks for AmpYear mod:) Also, needs more powerful engines to take off from Laythe, this barely cut it. Scrapped the mission, too dangerous. Sending the crew back home for some needed time off.

 

[Bornholio]

Few launches last night

Needed a LEO coms coverage so i put up 4 Omni Sats with Taniwha's new solar arrays

Photo Recon Polar sat to get science

Launch Vehicle was reused for several sats, anything less than 4kkm for contract missions.

The Recon Sat was one of its largest payloads

 

Then it was time to do manned orbital, hard science gain left me with quite a bit short of mk1/mercury pods so X-15 style pods it is

First stage hoisted good, but i had to lob it a bit since the TWR on the upper and orbital stage is low.

Three days of life support and polar orbit to hit all the biomes, barely enough batteries, fixed in the next iteration. More RCS than needed so life support was also upped to 5.5 days

[Goddess Bhavani]

On 8/19/2017 at 1:47 PM, CatastrophicFailure said:

That looks baaaaaaaaaaad S. 

Thanks. 

Completed the craft and put it up for download

https://kerbalx.com/pandoraskitten/SpaceSheepOne

 

[Geonovast]

Sailed this guy to Eve.  Because apparently going to Eve is just what I do now.

Dumped 2 relay satellites in orbit roughly 180* apart.. they won't stay that way, but hopefully between the two of them and the ship (now a station) I won't lose signal with the stuff I'm about to send to the surface.  Once had a rover roll a good 5km down a hill because I lost connection a couple hundred meters from the top.

 

I know I'm using @Snark and @steedcrugeon's relay mod to essentially hammer in a trim nail with Mjolnir, but I don't care.  I'm obsessed with deployables.

Anyone know of a mod that will cause something controlled by a probe core to automatically engage the brakes at loss of control signal?  A fail-engaged system like trains have?

Edited August 26, 2017 by Geonovast

[Hoddd9000]

I built my first Duna base using KPBS, then built my first functional passenger SSTO (thanks to Mark Thrimm's awesome guide). I then delivered crew to the crew vehicle, which will take the eight Kerbals to their new home on the cheesecake.

The base performs it's Duna insertion burn...

The Base Core separates to be de-orbited at a site picked using my ore scanning satellite. The transfer stage will be left in orbit as a reserve fuel depot.

The base modules were de-orbited using a system inspired by NASA's shelved Constellation program. Unfortunately the front wheels were wonky and I had to unload the modules at the landing site and drive them to the base as one long sausage.

Assembling the thing was fairly simple. The modules will be fully deployed and a garage and re-useable lander added when the crew arrives.

 

The SSTO, in all it's glory:

Docked to the crew vehicle with 200m/s left in the tank. The lander and base garage will be sent to Duna on a different non-nuclear transfer vehicle.

 

[CatastrophicFailure]

1 hour ago, Geonovast said:

Anyone know of a mod that will cause something controlled by a probe core to automatically engage the brakes at loss of control signal?  A fail-engaged system like trains have?

Check out Smart Parts. IIRC, there's one that specifically triggers an action on loss of signal. Can also deploy solar panels, automate staging; good stuff all around. 

[DerekL1963]

2 hours ago, Bornholio said:

Needed a LEO coms coverage so i put up 4 Omni Sats with Taniwha's new solar arrays

Do you have a link for those?

[adsii1970]

Yesterday I began what would become a nine hour project followed by three hours today (to correct the orbit). I've created a new star, compatible with OPM by @CaptRobau and Extrasolar by @AndrewDrawsPrettyPictures. This morning I added another three hours trying to get the orbit right... I still have some more work (light tweaks to the star), like adding a few asteroids, a gas giant, and a few small and semi-frozen rocky worlds. Somehow, I managed to really crank up the heat this star generates. So... with that said, any probe that orbits too close will become fried pretty quick! It does give off a pretty (and eerie) pale blue light.      

The star is named Nohochacyum - after the Mayan god who is a  creator-destroyer deity. This star is indicated by the blue orbit. The red orbit is that of Valentine system from the Extrasolar mod.

Spoiler

 

Edited August 26, 2017 by adsii1970

[JadeOfMaar]

20 minutes ago, adsii1970 said:

The star is named Nohochacyum - after the Mayan god who is a  creator-destroyer deity. This star is indicated by the blue orbit. The red orbit is that of Valentine system from the Extrasolar mod.

 

I swear I hit the Like button on this post already with its similarity to your previous post. Ah well, here's another Like. Is there a dev thread for this?