What did you do in KSP1 today?

[DAL59]

On 11/20/2017 at 6:05 PM, Zeiss Ikon said:

Before Apollo was a confirmed project, there were proposals to send Gemini to the moon in real life.  They'd have docked with a separately launched upper stage, like the Agena (later the name was changed to Centaur, still in service well into the Shuttle era) that was the docking target for Gemini 8 (?), used that to push them (backward) to Lunar orbit, then used one of several proposed Gemini-based landers to descend to the Lunar surface and return.  The whole thing could have been done with the same Atlas and Titan boosters that launched Mercury and Gemini capsules.  Atlas-Agena supplied a fueled upper stage in orbit, Gemini-Titan had enough spare delta-V to launch an upgraded capsule with lander stages, and Bob's your uncle.  Would have been possible to land on the Moon in 1968, but NASA decided it was too risky to push the Gemini capsule that far and by the time Gemini had demonstrated docking, Apollo and the Saturn family were already under construction.

 

 

[BRAAAP_STUTUTU]

I "landed" on GPP's Otho

Yup, on a gas planet...

[Stewcumber]

Today, after a long time of not playing KSP, I decided to continue my experiments in propshaft engines. I know other, more knowledgeable people use a nice, smooth, round cylinder as their rotating axle, but i seem to have more success with a nice, square girder. I am kind of reminded of this:

But never mind! I made a working air powered car with a square axle. What is the fastest speed anyone has achieved with an air-powered car? What do you mean no one has been dumb enough to try!?

Ignition...

Pulling away slowly

Cruising at about 12m/s

Disaster, sweet sweet comical disaster, with the grace of an elephant falling over. It would appear 13.5 m/s is its limit!

larger version: https://i.imgur.com/NperSgf.gif

I plan on locking down the axle in place with some landing gear legs that I will extend as I release the axel from its cradle. They're actually already installed (that is what the little arms with retracted landing gear on are for which you can see half way up the vertical stands) but I didn't enable them as they don't quite work yet. I also plan on making it a "four cylinder" that is having four engines firing per rotation instead of two, to make the rotation smoother, and placed on the corners of the square prop shaft so the engines are pushing over each corner of the prop shaft not into the corner.

Once these immediate problems are solved there is what I am assuming is genuine torque steer pulling me to the left (north) as I head down the runway, with my prop rotating anti-clockwise when looking down the runway (east). I'll have to look into how real planes overcome this, unless anyone can confirm this doesn't happen in KSP?

Edited November 27, 2017 by Stewcumber

[Zeiss Ikon]

3 hours ago, Rune said:

Today I landed a 100mT rocket on top of the VAB, after dropping 50mT on orbit, and all I got was a lousy 98% of my money back.

You'd have to land it back on the pad (ready to refuel and relaunch) to get 100%.  Now a whole crew of Kerbals have to climb up on the roof, dismantle the rocket, and haul the parts down by crane.  Or they have to haul fuel hoses up there and refuel the stage, so someone (I'm looking at you, Jeb) can hop it back down to ground level so a crawler can haul it in.  And a rocket like that burns through a heckuvalot of fuel hovering for that kind of move...

[L0ck0n]

Again sth russian: MiG 1-44/1.44

[Zeiss Ikon]

1 hour ago, Stewcumber said:

Once these immediate problems are solved there is what I am assuming is genuine torque steer pulling me to the left (north) as I head down the runway, with my prop rotating anti-clockwise when looking down the runway (east). I'll have to look into how real planes overcome this, unless anyone can confirm this doesn't happen in KSP?

Two different factors make airplanes want to turn on the runway.  Torque, certainly -- but the one that killed low-time pilots on their first Corsair flight was called P-Factor.  When the airplane pulls angle of attack, there's a period when the airflow into the propeller isn't parallel to the shaft; that angled airflow means (for a nose up, like rotation for liftoff) that the descending blade has a higher angle of attack than the ascending one.  This pushes the center of thrust off the shaft in the direction of the descending blade (still assuming a positive angle of attack) -- and with a right-hand rotating engine like virtually every single engine aircraft, induces a left turn.

You can feel this turning force in a Piper Cub or Cessna 180 (most readily in the tail-dragger versions, as they'll usually rotate more sharply -- I've even experienced it with radio control, with a fractional horsepower engine), but when you scale up from 80-180 horsepower to 2000 horsepower, the turning moment is ferocious.  Pilots of the bent-wing bird used to call it "the widow-maker" because, if you took a pilot from even another single engine taildragger like a P-51, and dropped him into a Corsair, his first takeoff was likely to result in a sharp left turn, with dihedral raising the right wing into a near-vertical bank at less than a wingspan of altitude.  Even a Corsair couldn't fly out of that.

BTW, the Corsair had this so much worse than anything else in WWII because it had the biggest engine ever (to that time) fitted with a constant speed propeller; at takeoff power the propeller pulled a lot of pitch trying to soak up the tremendous power of the two-row radial engine (which also produced a lot of torque reaction, but ailerons to counter torque roll are a lot larger than rudder countering P-factor turn).  Other planes with similar horsepower -- like the P-51 -- had either fixed pitch, or manually adjustable propellers, and other airplanes with constant-speed props (most of the Navy fighters of the day, plus the P-47 and a couple other land-based types) had less horsepower -- and land based aircraft weren't routinely flown for STOL performance like carrier airplanes were.

Your jet-prop monstrosity shouldn't be seeing P-factor; you're not nosing up.  Shouldn't be seeing torque turn, either -- there's no torque on the frame of your contraption, just as there's no torque on the fuselage of a tip-jet helicopter.  Most likely you're getting a vibration from the imbalance in the rotating parts causing flex in the frame that makes the wheels "steer" as it flexes and deflexes -- and the timing of the vertical component of the vibration causes the flex to mostly result in left turn (the matching right-turn flex occurs when there's less weight on the wheels, so has less effect on direction).

Edited November 27, 2017 by Zeiss Ikon
Correct P-factor turn direction

[eddiew]

Continued the tour of the saturnian system, slowly working inwards from Rhea to Dione to Tethys. 

They kind of look alike.

(Turns out that one problem of stock sized RSS is that there are a lot of Minmus sized objects out here. Still, at least it'll be easy to do a kermanned tour of these moons later, what with them all being 2.5% of a G.)

Enceladus doesn't look much different, being still grey and mostly icy, but it's polar regions are particularly lumpy and "interesting". For some reason, multiple contracts immediately come in, asking for seismic and laser ablation readings.

Also, Saturn is looking pretty swole.

With over 7km/s still in the tanks, mission control is starting to ponder whether it would be worth returning Tinlion to Earth at some point. Surely there would be some museum would pay to have him as an exhibit...

Edited November 27, 2017 by eddiew

[Colonel Cbplayer]

I built a flying wing "plane" https://gfycat.com/UnacceptableRareHeifer

 

 

Edited November 28, 2017 by Colonel Cbplayer

[Whisky Tango Foxtrot]

This is more of a "What did you do in KSP over the last couple of weeks" post, since I've been doing a lot of fairly mundane things that I didn't think warranted a post of their own.

For instance, I sent a new shipment to Jool.

This consists of three science/relay satellites for Jool's moons (I already have satellites over Pol and Laythe,) a smaller satellite to orbit Jool itself (with just the science experiments, no scanners or relay) and a comm/power strut for Laythe Station, this time including a pair of fuel cell arrays to give it enough electricity to run its ISRU.

I also sent some more tourists to Moho.

This mission was mainly done to bring a new fuel transport craft to the planet (with increased oxidizer and monopropellant capacity, making it easier to fill up my station and lander.) I mainly picked up the tourist contract (three of them, two one-person contracts and one for two people) to offset the costs. They arrived successfully and are now waiting for the mining outpost to rotate around to the day-side of the planet before landing.

I added a new extension to my Mun base.

This one increases the base's crew capacity to six (it originally could only support two) and includes a parking port for a rover.

My LaythePort mission arrived at Pol.

The main purpose of this mission is to drop a mining/refuelling base onto the surface of Laythe to support future spaceplane operations. It also carried a second fuel tank and power/comm strut for Foothold Station, bring that station one step closer to completion. I haven't sent it on its way to Laythe yet as that's going to be the most complicated and failure-prone part of my entire Joolean operation thus far, since I'll have to bring the mine down onto the tiny island that I've selected for my base (it has rover wheels so it can move around the island a bit on its own power, but hitting the island itself will come down entirely to getting the re-entry trajectory right) and then link it up with the docking assembly that I'm going to use to allow my planes to attach themselves for refuelling. I've also never done an all-in test of this procedure, although I've tested the various steps individually.

Finally, I sent a new rover to the Mun.

This rover was actually designed for use on Duna (I've made a post about it before) but I figured I might as well test it out on the Mun first. Here it is being carried down to the surface by my lifting craft.

Upon reaching the surface, the top docking port was detached via a radial decoupler and the lifting craft carried it far above the Munar surface, undocked itself, then returned to the base to re-fuel, allowing the port and decoupler to destroy itself on impact with the Munar surface. The next step was to bring the rover around to dock with the specially-prepared port on the Mun base's new module. I'd simulated this procedure on Kerbin, hacking gravity to ensure that everything would sit at the same height as it would on the Mun's surface, but I still had my fingers crossed for this part of the process since you can never be sure how things will go when you try something like this for real.

Fortunately, there was no need to worry as the docking completed successfully on the first attempt. Unfortunately I didn't notice until all this was completed that I'd put a completely useless atmospheric analyzer on the rover (it was designed for Duna, after all.) Ah well, better to have a part you don't need than to be missing a part that you do need.

[Agustin]

took a rover to Duna. A big one. My wheels broke so I had to send an engineer to fix them, then it was okay....
take a look:

(some images were bad copied/edited and have a line cutting the image)

https://imgur.com/a/l39f1

 

 

 

 

[TheKorbinjer]

First try, launched a 10,503.3 ton rocket and got my 120 ton payload into orbit in 10.625x Kerbin orbit. This thing is a beauty.

[L0ck0n]

Mil Mi-8

[capi3101]

Month's gotten away from me again; can't say I've done much of any real interest.

After the departure of the Duna expedition on November 15th, I landed the Auk VII 16-passenger plane from the Kerbinport space station that I'd used to bring up the expedition crew for Strange Cargo and followed that up with a flight of an Auk IX 4-passenger craft to the station with tourists Natabas, Hayrod, Raybart and Dottie Kerman aboard. From there, Next Objective left for Mun with tourists Wilfry, Sherdorf, Barmin and Natabas, while Necessary Evil departed for Minmus with a larger group of tourists. Raybart returned with the Auk IX to KSC 09 safely, his contract only involving an LKO flight. A pair of dedicated science/resource scanning probes were launched for Duna while the window was still open, bringing the total number of craft involved in the Duna expedition to nineteen.

On the 17th, an Auk VIII heavy tanker was sent up to Kerbinport to refuel the station, which returned safely to KSC 27. I conducted a four-waypoint seismic survey six kilometers south-southwest of the Deepwater Horizon refinery on Minmus, and then launched a Bates Hotel outpost module (dubbed Hojo Alpha) to Mün for contract, landing the module about 25 klicks south of the Piper Alpha refinery along Mün's equator. Next Objective arrived at Mün shortly thereafter and docked at the Munport space station, with the tourists landing near Hojo Alpha before returning to the station. Necessary Evil also arrived at Minmus, but due to the amount of fuel used in her transfer burn, I had to perform an emergency braking maneuver using the ship's RCS thrusters to increase her delta-V sufficiently to make orbit. She did arrive safely at the Minmusport space station, but she was most certainly on vapors at that point.

Nelny told me he thought we'd cut this a little bit close. I was all like "Whatever. You've still got a quarter of a tank of monoprop left - so suck it up..."

Tourists Dottie and Jotrey Kerman affected a landing with the station's Spamcan 7 lander, and after returning to Minmusport, Necessary Evil was refueled from the station's stores for a burn to Mun. Next Objective couldn't get a good solution for a straight Mun to Minmus transfer, so she slingshotted off to Kerbin to get there, arriving 12 days later. I also shepherded the departure of the craft of the Duna Expedition on the 17th; all of them should arrive at Duna in between 300-400 days. 

The 18th and 19th were pretty quiet. After a fueling run at Minmusport, Necessary Evil arrived at Mun and docked at Munport, just staying long enough to gas up before returning to Kerbinport safely by the end of the day. Two refueling runs were conducted for Munport on the 19th.

Last week began with Next Objective's arrival at Minmusport. After refueling, tourist Barmin Kerman went down in the Spamcan 7 lander to Deepwater Horizon, which was refueled before turning to Minmusport. Next Objective then departed for Kerbin and returned safely to Kerbinport. With ten tourists to bring down, I decided to go ahead and design a ten passenger spaceplane, the Auk XI, and flew it up to Kerbinport for her shakedown flight.

The mighty Auk XI 10-passenger spaceplane. Also known as "I really could've stood to spend a little more time coming up a better engine placement configuration."

The plane flew alright up to about 50,000 when it developed pitching problems at full thrust, a problem that was ultimately traced to an uneven lateral engine arrangement between the dorsal and ventral engine pairs. The plane returned to KSC 09 and aside from blowing the ventral portside engine at touchdown, it returned the tourists safely, clearing four contracts in the process. A replacement contract had me putting a telescope probe between Kerbin and Eve's orbit; to that end, I designed the Ray Charles 7 SENTINEL probe and sent it on its way; it'll reach its final position around the time the Duna expedition arrives. A Bill Clinton 7a mission was launched to rescue scientist Sigrey Kerman on a junk-and-kerbal mission in high orbit of Kerbin, which was a success. With a new rescue mission over Minmus and six tourists heading to Kerbin's moons, Sigrey was immediately loaded aboard an Auk II 8-passenger plane with tourists Lable, Gerdous, Ancal, Roly, Tanzer and Lanming Kerman, who boarded Laggin' Dragon upon arriving at Kerbinport. Laggin' Dragon left for Minmus first, arriving 5 days later; she arrived at periapsis a mere 2.8 klicks from Minmusport and so she went straight for the rendezvous, requiring no initial orbits before arriving at the station. While in transit, I launched a Tater Catcher 7 asteroid grabbing probe to pick up a B-type rock and put it in orbit of Mün for contract, and also used an Auk III tanker spaceplane on a mission to refuel Kerbinport. 

The Spamcan 7 at Minumusport was dispatched to rescue pilot Malcolm Kerman from a highly-inclined orbit over Minmus, returning him safely to Minmusport and letting him join the ongoing expedition with Laggin' Dragon. He, Sigrey and Lanming boarded the station's heavier Spamcan 7a lander on a run down to Deepwater Horizon for flag-planting training. After returning successfully, Laggin' Dragon burned for Mun and arrived ten days later, with a fuel run at Minmus conducted while the craft was in transit. The Tater Catcher caught up with its target while it was still 41 days from Kerbin's SOI; I'll be riding the rock into Kerbin's SOI before attempting further maneuvers, since I forgot to upgrade the design from v.1.1.3 with even a simple antenna (I have to wait until it comes back into comms range; this is a problem I'll have corrected for any subsequent Tater Catcher flights). Once Laggin' Dragon arrived at Munport, two Spamcan runs were made; the ship was then refueled and burned for Kerbin, returning safely to Kerbinport. All of the passengers and Malcolm were returned using the Auk II, which had remained at the station while Laggin' Dragon was away; the plane returned safely to KSC 09. Two refueling runs at Mün were required in the wake of the craft's visit. 

This past Sunday was pretty busy with small jobs - I put the Kerbin Mu probe in place for contract, hauled down a Mk2 Liquid Fuel fuselage with a Bill Clinton 7b probe, took a drive 10 klicks southwest of KSC, tested a Vector engine splashed, did a quick drilling job at Minmus, adjusted the Minmus Alpha probe, and finally tied up my last two contract spots with a station expansion mission for Kerbinport and an ore delivery mission from Duna to Ike. The station expansion mission was pretty straightforward, requiring only additional seating, so to that end I designed the Auk XII 6-passenger spaceplane.

Auk XII - the latest in the line of "oh my god, how many different passenger planes do I really need" spaceplanes.

The shakedown flight of the plane went well (aside from a triple bounce at landing, which required adjustments to the gear) and she fulfilled the contract requirements beautifully; the plane is definitely a hot rod, with way more thrust than she needs...I can only chalk that up to an overestimation of her required takeoff fuel load.

Started the day yesterday with the launch of the Mun Epsilon probe and the successful retrieval of an X200-32 from orbit for contract. Ended the day with the flight of an Auk IV probe delivery plane to a polar orbit. It'd been a while since I'd flown one, so I figured why not - and everything went well there, too. The rest of yesterday's activities...deserve a post of their own, one not as long winded. That one has more screenies too, so I'll do that here in a bit.

TL, DR: I did stuff over the last two weeks. It's not as interesting as the stuff I did two weeks ago, but I still did it. Built a couple of planes, too.

[Inverurie Jones]

I sent up another module to my new High Orbit Transfer Hub. The new part is the long docking section.

Then I completed a contract, got a bunch of money and sent up another one.

This started out as just a big relay satellite in synchronous orbit over the KSC with a hab unit attached to give me a place to do crew changes with my big, non-landing ships but it's kind of taken on a life of its own.

[LordFerret]

*sigh* It's no fun posting in here when you can't include Imgur images... a thing I still can't do.

Built another shuttle, full size. Was able to launch and get up to my space station, with much effort and stick management, and dock, although docking wasn't as easy as with my Zebra-Shuttle. The return trip was disappointing. For all my efforts to build a ship which could glide in, which all indications pointed to it being able to do so, it glided about as well as a dog turd. A cow flop would have soared better. I also overshot KSC by more than 20km, and ditched in the sea. The crew survived, barely.

PSA for new players building space stations: Keep in mind that action key assignments carry over (so to speak) to the station you're docking to, and that pressing keys you think will cause actions on that ship you just docked can also trigger assignments to station sections and/or other docked vessels that are using those same keys - but assigned to other actions. Case example: I hit key 3 thinking it would open the cargo bay doors on my shuttle... which it did... but it also jettisoned the heat shielding on the escape pods I had docked to the station. *facepalm*

[septemberWaves]

2 hours ago, Inverurie Jones said:

This started out as just a big relay satellite in synchronous orbit over the KSC with a hab unit attached to give me a place to do crew changes with my big, non-landing ships but it's kind of taken on a life of its own.

Interesting how that happens sometimes. Organically-expanded space stations can usually take on some pretty unique appearances.

[kraden]

48 minutes ago, LordFerret said:

<snip>

PSA for new players building space stations: Keep in mind that action key assignments carry over (so to speak) to the station you're docking to, and that pressing keys you think will cause actions on that ship you just docked can also trigger assignments to station sections and/or other docked vessels that are using those same keys - but assigned to other actions. Case example: I hit key 3 thinking it would open the cargo bay doors on my shuttle... which it did... but it also jettisoned the heat shielding on the escape pods I had docked to the station. *facepalm*

This is exactly why I always theme my action groups. For example, 0 is my "up and running" group. Everything from antennas to life support goes on 0. Once I hit space 0 comes on, once I hit atmosphere 0 comes off. If I want to keep something active, I make sure it's set to "on" and not "toggle" in the action group.

[capi3101]

1 hour ago, LordFerret said:

*PSA for new players building space stations: Keep in mind that action key assignments carry over (so to speak) to the station you're docking to, and that pressing keys you think will cause actions on that ship you just docked can also trigger assignments to station sections and/or other docked vessels that are using those same keys - but assigned to other actions. Case example: I hit key 3 thinking it would open the cargo bay doors on my shuttle... which it did... but it also jettisoned the heat shielding on the escape pods I had docked to the station. *facepalm*

 

45 minutes ago, kraden said:

This is exactly why I always theme my action groups. For example, 0 is my "up and running" group. Everything from antennas to life support goes on 0. Once I hit space 0 comes on, once I hit atmosphere 0 comes off. If I want to keep something active, I make sure it's set to "on" and not "toggle" in the action group.

I learned a long time ago that it was a lot easier to fly my planes if they all use the same set of action groups - all thirteen planes in the Auk series use that set and I've got all but my crappiest earliest surveyor planes using them too (as appropriate, anyway). 1 toggles the engine, 2 toggles the intakes, 3 toggles the docking ports (it also toggles solar panels on the designs that use them), 4/5 are for FAR flaps, 7 releases payload (pretty much exclusive to the Auk IV), and 9 toggles the antenna/airspike.  On my rockets, 1 usually toggles solar panels (if any). 0 is generally reserved for emergency actions after an abort.

[AngrybobH]

I realized today that I have never gone to the abandoned space center. So I threw Val in an old suborbital science plane and took a ride. I forgot how nice this plane flies. It cruises at mach 1.6 and a max of mach wingsflyoff(north of 1200m/s before wing and/or engine failure) plus I can set the autopilot with time warp at max without wobbles.

 

[KerBlammo]

After a little while off from KSP I'm back to mostly working on my SSTO.  I think I am making progress, but it is not yet an operational craft.  The latest iteration was able to dock with my KSS Core station at 125x125km, with 880 m/s in hand after rendezvous!.  It can carry up to 8 Kerbonauts  in its current configuration.  However the recent series of iterative changes added up to enough change in empty tank aerodynamics that after reentry the craft spun out of control.  The intern responsible  for checking such things has been severely reprimanded by the sub-sub-contractor in charge of Making Sure It Doesn't Crash. 

Progress Is Being Made, Probably.

 

 

[JadeOfMaar]

I've been brewing another new parts mod (mainly an air-breathing engine pack) populated with oldie goodie models. They are a "What if Deep Sky never met OPT and never shared the WarpJet technology?" scenario.

I just built this very loosely SHIELD inspired VTOL to test engine FX alignment. Air RCS included.

   

Edited November 29, 2017 by JadeOfMaar

[Whisky Tango Foxtrot]

LaythePort has arrived at Laythe.

Unfortunately, that's at Laythe, not on Laythe. I had to tap into the fuel that was intended for the landing in order to complete the rendezvous with Laythe Station. I might have enough LF left to send the tug back to Pol for more, but I don't want to risk it. Fortunately, my next equipment shipment is already in Jool's SOI (although it'll take a while to go through its arrival manoeuvres) and it includes a tug designed to remain in the Jool system permanently. I'll just wait for it to arrive and then use it to bring a tank of ore to the station, where I'll use the station's ISRU (powered by LaythePort's fuel cells) to generate whatever fuel I need.

[harrisjosh2711]

Put the new textures for the BFR in the game for the first time today and also fully integrated my RCS thrusters. 

 

 

 

Edited November 29, 2017 by harrisjosh2711

[eddiew]

2 hours ago, harrisjosh2711 said:

Put the new textures for the BFR in the game for the first time today and also fully integrated my RCS thrusters. 

Took me a while to work out what BFR might stand for xD

[kraden]

29 minutes ago, eddiew said:

Took me a while to work out what BFR might stand for xD

Officially it stands for Big Falcon Rocket, but yeah... yeah...