What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Atkara]

19 minutes ago, Geonovast said:

So did I! (because you mentioned it) I may have to re-install SVE now since Kerbin just looks weird compared to the skybox.

I use Space Kraken's skybox. It's somewhat stock-alike (in my eyes, that is) and doesn't make Kerbin look that much weird.

 

Edited March 3, 2018 by Atkara

[Geonovast]

10 minutes ago, Atkara said:

I use Space Kraken's skybox. It's somewhat stock-alike (in my eyes, that is) and doesn't make Kerbin look that much weird.

 

SVE it was

Honestly I don't remember why I uninstalled it.  It's not like I don't have the hardware for it.

[eberkain]

Testing a plane that can transport equipment to build a polar base on kerbin. 

[Atkara]

39 minutes ago, Geonovast said:

SVE it was

Honestly I don't remember why I uninstalled it.  It's not like I don't have the hardware for it.

No, I was referring to the skybox you mentioned, that makes you want to re-install SVE -nothing against the latter obviously, if you have the hardware

[Zeiss Ikon]

2 hours ago, Brikoleur said:

Let me put it this way: you don't know what tension is until you've done a Mun flyby with no patched conics and a level 1 pilot... in hardcore mode.

I can't begin to imagine playing this game without reverts and saves.  Going to the Mun before you have patched conics, and without reverts or saves?  Good grief!

[HansonKerman]

2 hours ago, Brikoleur said:

Let me put it this way: you don't know what tension is until you've done a Mun flyby with no patched conics and a level 1 pilot... in hardcore mode.

She survived. It was a much closer encounter than I planned however -- had to burn to avoid becoming a crater, then got flung out to a pretty high orbit and sweated about having enough fuel to burn back down for the return. Everything went well and ultimately it wasn't even that close; I had over 200 m/s left after the deceleration burn, which I used in-atmosphere to make re-entry less risky. Good thing I had thoroughly tested the rocket in the simulator and built in a significant safety margin for fuel!

Bet your Kerbal didn't like either of those and is going to retire .

 

Nice joke, huh?

3 hours ago, Grizzlitn said:

i just tested my first heavy rocket, the luanch was good i think for the first time i play KSP

 

Yeah, nice! Are you sure that was you first launch?

41 minutes ago, Zeiss Ikon said:

I can't begin to imagine playing this game without reverts and saves.  Going to the Mun before you have patched conics, and without reverts or saves?  Good grief!

Wow. 

[LordFerret]

My Eeloo-Colony venture is turning into an engineering nightmare. Seat-of-the-pants design and construction at its best - or worst - your view depending. Pictures soon.

[eddiew]

Given the surprisingly large overkill in the transfer stage, mission control is wondering whether Moondog might be a viable platform for a Ceti mission...

What exactly happened to the Cattercrawler during testing remains something of a mystery. One moment he was humming along nicely, the next there was an explosion and both the crew had been ejected, along with one of the tail fins and antenna. Still, no injuries, so the team is considering that a successful field test.

[Guest]

This no-reverts, no-quickloads thing is intense. 

At least now I have patched conics. So I made use of those by sending Bill the Scientist with the full suite of experiments to take a spin around Minmus in a rocket with an Okto for SAS. That went well and brought back a very welcome load of Science, except I had to do it twice because the first time the hatch wouldn't open because some idiot had installed a solar panel in front of it and he wasn't able to reset the experiments. That first mission turned into a simpler Mun flyby instead. 

These very simple, very basic things suddenly take on a whole new meaning when failure means a rescue mission at best, a dead crewman at worst. Even a routine re-entry is tense. 

[Whisky Tango Foxtrot]

A new shipment arrived at Jool.

This one consists of a return module for my current crew, a fuel tank module to complete my Laythe station and a new, redesigned base for Laythe's surface.

Installing the station module was fairly routine, so I then proceeded to land the new base on the surface.

After hooking the mining module up to the existing Laythe docking assembly (where it replaced an earlier design that didn't have enough clearance for its drills to run properly) I de-orbited an additional module to complete the base.

For this one, I bolted some wings to the sides of the module so that I could fly it to the base as a glider. The wings were on de-couplers, allowing me to eject them when I got close enough to the base.

After landing the module near the base I used the lifter that I'd used to land the docking assembly to manoeuvre it the rest of the way and dock it with the rest of the installation.

So my Laythe base is finally complete. It's got a mine, a science lab, habitation, a command pod and I can dock planes with it. Now all I've got to do is crew it.

[Atkara]

3 hours ago, HansonKerman said:

Yeah, nice! Are you sure that was you first launch?

Looks like it. An all solids first stage, possible influence by ISRO rockets, suborbital payload. A good first try nevertheless.

[XB-70A]

I decided to launch another probe to keep on the exploration of the Jool's system.

It was necessary to review a bit more the Hesperos V launcher, but once completed, and equipped with five Thumper, all conditions were met in order to succeed in the mission.

 

 

Of course, what is possible in reality is not absolute in KSP (and vice versa), and it was mandatory to lower the thrust of the SRBs to 89% in order to keep a good control of it.

 

 

Despite being officially known as Bop Express, the engineers found the name boring and without any intensity. Not to mention the fact that other probes and landers were sent well before this one.

Because of this, they nicknamed it Known Horizons.

 

 

Being incredibly lucky, the transfer window opened only 6 hours after the probe has reached its parking orbit at 200 km. The burn also appeared to be easy, requiring 1.5 km/s only.

 

 

Farewell Kerbin, we'll never meet once again. It is just the beginning of a more than 3 years long journey.

 

 

 

One slight correction maneuver will have to be realized in 163 days, but it will help to get a better fuel economy. It was also my first opportunity to plan a multi-maneuver trajectory, firstly to economize the fuel as much as possible, and secondly in order to not be too dependent of Mechjeb. The whole impulsion of the maneuvers will require 2294.8 m/s, so it should be O.K. with the current reserve.

[joacobanfield]

Mission Control was annoyed at the constant puns that the probe was making, but it got its just desserts upon return to Kerbin.

Edited March 3, 2018 by joacobanfield

[Kek-tus]

A casual travel at a low speed.

Edited March 3, 2018 by Kek-tus
Made an oopsie

[Pipcard]

7 hours ago, Geonovast said:

Disposed of this thing.  It took three tries of ramming it into the surface of Minmus at ~300 m/s to finally get it to explode enough.  Pics are after the first inpact, and orbital correction so it didn't leave Minmus' SOI and go back to a Kerbin orbit.

Why would you want to get rid of what looks like a fine interplanetary spaceship?

Edited March 3, 2018 by Pipcard

[Geonovast]

1 minute ago, Pipcard said:

Why would you want to get rid of what looks like a fine interplanetary spaceship?

It needs adjustments.

[eddiew]

Almost made mach 2 on wheeslies.

Almost.

I don't know if it's even possible, but I do now know that you can get those little engines glowing if you push them  

[LaydeeDem]

Tested the Mun capability of my reusable Jackdaw launch vehicle and practiced Near Rectilinear Halo Orbits around the Mun. NRHOs are useful because they're easy to transfer in and out of and they experience no comms blackout. Ideal for a Munar gateway station.

The payload in a NRHO around the Mun. Plotted Kerbin-Centric-Inertial the orbit looks like a delicate dance with the Mun. And it is.

 

The probe experienced an unplanned lithobraking maneuver with Munar surface after 2 orbits due to operator negligence. The results from this mission show that Munar NRHOs are just too much of a hassle to be worth the effort in KSP.  A Munar NRHO requires station-keeping at apomune every 4 hours, contrast with a real NRHO around Luna which would only require corrections once per week. The benefits just aren't worth it.

 

Because of this, the boys in Mission Planning decided that the Munar Gateway will instead be on a frozen polar orbit around the Mun and that a comms station will be situated on Minmus' north pole to cover for most blackouts. Also possible is a Munar satellite constellation, though the stability of those orbits are yet to be determined.

 

Having proven itself capable, the Jackdaw was given clearance to launch the Minmus Comms Station. One of the heaviest payloads ever launched by the reusable variant, the lifter still succeed in getting the comms station to Minmus while having enough fuel for a return and landing.

Edited March 3, 2018 by Nutt007

[Ace in Space]

Posting a little bit early today, and also including some of last night's events (I didn't have enough progress to be worth posting about at the time).

You may recall that I sent the original four on a mission to land on Duna a while back, which was successful overall, but failed to achieve the stated goal due to a shortage of fuel. The final stage did not have enough fuel to land and take off again, and return to Kerbin, but it had enough to do one or the other. Well, they weren't very happy about that. They were told they would be landing on Duna, and now that the infrastructure's in place to allow it, by George, they are going to land on Duna.

Incidentally, as I was combing through the offerings at Mission Control in preparation, adding to the growing hoard of Ike and Duna related contracts, I saw something very interesting. A mission called the Minmus 4 Rally, which required a new ship be launched and fly by Mun, Minmus, Duna, and Ike. Well, the plan was to update the Ruby slightly, so it would be a new ship, and I was already going to be visiting three of those four anyway (Duna, obviously, and required pit stops for refueling at Minmus and Ike). And because the plan was to refuel at Minmus, I could basically spend as much delta-V as I wanted before that point, as long as I could still reach and dock with Jade Station, and it wouldn't make any difference.

Turns out flying by Mun on the way to Minmus is harder than it sounds. In the grand scheme of difficult things in KSP, it's probably pretty low on the list, but it still caught me by surprise because it sounds absolutely trivial until you actually try it. So I spent quite a bit of time last night fiddling with maneuver nodes, but eventually found a rather elegant path.

I actually overshot the red maneuver node - was a bit too overzealous on the time warp. This turned out to work in my favor, though, because I hastily plotted another node up around the top-ish of that green oval in an attempt to recover the mission, and that one achieved the same effect for a quarter of the delta-v.

After filling up the tanks at Jade Station, Ruby 4.0 continued on its merry way. Since I had plenty of time before the maneuver node, I decided to do some station maintenance on Minmus and Ike. Produced fuel, flew it up to the stations, etc. I've decided that future versions of the fuel truck should have headlights. On Minmus, with its pastel colors, you can always see what you're doing, even if it's dark. Not so on Ike, and I assume, most celestial bodies out there. So that'll have to be tweaked for later missions.

Serena, the engineer on Onyx Base, also hitched a ride up to the orbital station on the fuel lifter on one of its round trips to level up at the science lab, which brought her up to level 3, so hopefully she'll do an even better job of running the base from now on.

And finally, I brought the science lander down to the surface of Ike for the first time, and the design works quite nicely (Jade Station has a hopper rather than a rover due to the low gravity on Minmus, so the rover design was untested outside of KSC). Driving it around on Ike in IVA mode also feels weirdly retrogamey to me. Anyway, it picked up a respectable amount of science and shuttled it back up to Onyx Station, where I sorted out the least valuable experiments and shoved them into the science lab to be researched, and left the rest in the science container.

Spoiler

I've decided to experiment with wrapping less-important images in spoiler tags to prevent the posts from getting too image-heavy.

Once I was done with all my maintenance, I went back to Ruby and proceeded with the Duna mission. Rather surprisingly, it all went without incident. The parachutes worked surprisingly well; I swapped out the drogues that had been on the original design's fuel towers for full-sized chutes, which was a good choice, I think. It certainly looks neat when deployed, at least!

Spoiler

The flag, in accordance with my traditional first flag protocol, bears a pun on its plaque: "I duna know what to write here!" (The first flags on Mun, Minmus, and Ike, if you care to know, respectively read: "Jeb was absolutely over the Mun to be the first Kerbal here!", "Without an atmosphere, this flag will remain in mint condition", and "We like Ike.")

After finishing up on Duna, Ruby intercepted Onyx Station and docked to it with something like 10 units of fuel left. Once again, the goldilocks rocket. In addition to fuel, Ruby picked up the experiments stored in the Onyx Science Lander, so they could be returned to Kerbin. From there, the triumphant astronauts returned home - they even got a fireworks show on the way in, courtesy of the discarded rockets, which seemed to delight them.

Spoiler

They splashed down safely and returned to KSC to be rewarded with a ridiculous sum of money for the completion of several contracts and a boatload of science, with which I proceeded to unlock the entire rest of the tech tree.

I'm not entirely sure what I want to do next. On one hand, I have picked up a contract to build a station or a base or some-such at Gilly, and Mission Control seems to want me to go to Eve, because that's the next Record Keeping Society mission, so I grabbed that too. On the other hand, the former doesn't expire for like 40 years, and the latter will last forever. And I've heard enough horror stories about Eve that I think I should probably leave it well enough alone for the time being and explore in the other direction (i.e. go to Dres).

Speaking of Gilly, I'm not entirely happy with all the mission designations I've chosen, including Gilly's. If you've got suggestions, feel free to pitch them.

Spoiler

Here's what I've got at the moment. Italicized orange names are the ones I'm not happy with.

Kerbol	Sunstone
Moho	Jasper
Eve	Amethyst
Gilly	Spinel
Kerbin
Mun	Munstone
Minmus	Jade
Duna	Ruby
Ike	Onyx
Dres	Quartz
Jool	Emerald
Laythe	Sapphire
Vall	Aquamarine
Tylo	Diamond
Bop	Agate
Pol	Topaz
Eeloo	Pearl

Incidentally, all the names I'm unhappy with are brown. There aren't a lot of brown gemstones with snappy names it seems. I like "Aquamarine" for Vall, but it's a bit long, and the backup name "Turquoise" isn't much better, so if you've got something shorter, I'd be happy to hear those ideas too.

 

[Hotel26]

9 hours ago, Whisky Tango Foxtrot said:

The wings were on de-couplers, allowing me to eject them when I got close enough to the base.

I LOOOVE this kind of stuff.  Fly low under the radar...  Pop-up over the target.  "Surprise, suuuurprise, SURPRISE!!"  [As Gomer Kerman used to say]    Join the parade under chutes.

I've been busy in the Fake Mission News Studio down on the KSC backlot.  [Remember that Duna mission we thought we were gonna lose...?]  And have published the all-new Minotaur v2 Super Tanker [link].

 

 

Edited March 4, 2018 by Hotel26

[Starman4308]

The Big Bad Wolf of Phobos, Chapter 2:

The Big Bad Wolf of Phobos came to the first little piglet's house. He drew a big breath from his oxygen tank, and then he huffed and he puffed and he blew himself to escape velocity. End of story.

And with that: the Arean Lunar Surveyor has reached Phobos with plenty of delta-V: about 2494 m/sec for its AJ10-118F main engine. The AJ-10 is ludicrous overkill in terms of thrust, but 315 s-1 of specific impulse can't be matched by the generic 1 kN thrusters.

The Arean Lunar Surveyor's task is not only to observe Phobos and Deimos, however. The HG-55 high-gain antenna used for most Martian missions is insufficient to reach Earth orbit: therefore, it's equipped with not just an HG-55, but also a Pioneer 10/11-class HGA with 20 Gm of range (and 160 W of power draw).

And as of typing this, that extended goal has been replaced by a new goal: utilize the 15.2 MJ of battery life and 2485 m/sec of delta-V onboard the probe to manage a Deimos flyby, with solar panels having been removed by the edge of the Stickney crater in a 7 m/sec scrape along the surface.

First task is to eject myself from Phobos orbit, where navigation will be easier: I should also be able to extend battery life significantly once the main Pioneer 10/11 20 Gm antenna shuts off and is replaced by the lower-power, 25W HG-55 HGA I'd intended to use to talk to other vessels.

As-we're-speaking: I now have almost 6 days of battery remaining after shutting down the high-power HGA. Plenty for a Hohmann transfer and non-trivial studies of Deimos.

Approaching Deimos. I think I had something of a bug while approaching: if I wasn't in timewarp, I would be sliding out of position and my approach would dramatically change. It seems to have mostly disappeared after switching back to the space center scene for a bit, though MechJeb is still being... strange.

Going to try to land this probe. Wrote an incredibly last-second kOS script, which... failed for some reason or another, so now I'm just going down at 3 m/sec.

And, uh, she bounced.

 

Other than that: got a backlog of stuff to catch up on posting.

The Mercurial probe made a close pass of Mercury, approaching to within 80 km at 16 km/sec. This one was fairly minimalist: a Ranger 1 core (limiting the probe to 300 kg) with a tiny little hydrazine supply good for about 300 m/sec of correction burns. As you can probably guess, not enough for Mercury orbit insertion.

Voyager V made its Moon-Earth flyby, and is now on course to reach Jupiter in a little under three years.

 

The Saturn 1 rocket flew in its full glory, mighty F1 engine and its four consort RS-27 engines at full throttle (not that they can be throttled...).

The J-2 engine on the S-IVB upper stage took over, providing the vast bulk of the delta-V for the 33 ton payload. More than the historical Saturn 1 by about 50%, which I think is on account of me throwing an F-1 engine at the problem instead of the historical Cluster's Last Stand of 8 H-1 engines (which evolved into the RS-27 engines I'm using for a bit of extra thrust).

 

Launched Apollo V, with veteran pilot Natalya Tsedleryina in command (who was hired 40 years ago!), along with rookie engineer Thomas Hudson and scientist Valentina Korablyova.

I should hire more American astronauts. It's a pain trying to correctly spell these cosmonaut names.

A moment before a revert-to-launch, as for some reason my steering went wonky. Most of my controls were unresponsive: I'm wondering if I needed to clear my input locks. Since it appeared to be a bug, I felt it was A-OK to revert.

I tried again, and rediscovered just how awful the Apollo C/SM is as a rocket upper stage. The TWR is around 0.4, such that even with a lot of lofting from the Gimel-2 core (to an apogee of 300 km), I needed to pitch up above 30 degrees to circularize.

They did, however, complete two contracts, two crew size records, and three crew duration records on their weeklong stay in LEO, with final apogee of around 1000 km.

Return was largely uneventful, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean just east of South America.

 

Also got a biome scan of Earth done, completing a pair of sun-synchronous satellite contracts while I was at it.

[Draconiator]

Going to send more of these Skyrovers to Minmus along with a REAL base.  I love these things but apparently they had a learning curve becauise as of right now, this is the only one left out of 4.  ehhheh....

 

Oh, and the engine is one of those Resonant Cavity Thrusters.  definately saves on fuel.

[XB-70A]

6 hours ago, eddiew said:

I don't know if it's even possible, but I do now know that you can get those little engines glowing if you push them  

I never made it horizontally, despite two to three attempts. Exactly like you, this is how I discovered the engine glowing during one of these flight.

The Triton; one engine, two lift surface, and a poor guy to sacrifice in the name of science. It was pretty nice to fly actually, so overpowered that it climbed easily to 24 km before running out of air.

 

The famous glowing. It started to appear during the descent, when to aircraft passed around 500 m/s.

 

The End.

[squeaky024]

Nothing too special but im pretty happy with how I saved the crew capsule. I was testing my new enormous SSTO and tried to turn around while at mach 1.5 to make a landing on the runway.... but then a wing broke off and took out one of the rocket motors and sent the thing out of control. I managed to save it by turning on SAS to radial out so the nose is pointing straight up and shut down a rocket motor on the other side so the thrust isnt asymmetrical. Everything is going good till I realized that while hovering over the ground its going backwards so that it would land on the top side if it were to tip over. I tried to roll it so that it would land on the gear but it already hit the ground and blew up half the plane. This made quite a bit of wreckage

[LordFerret]

12 hours ago, Brikoleur said:

This no-reverts, no-quickloads thing is intense.

I only revert on the launchpad when testing something new... usually shortly after it clears the tower. I don't use quicksaves/quickloads; I tried it once early on when I first started playing, and it screwed me up so bad I never used it again.

 

My Eeloo-Colony transport made its launch into orbit on the second attempt (after a few adjustments). Pilot Kenny was chosen for the mission... and, yes... I almost 'killed Kenny' on the first attempt. I sat here having a good laugh about that when I realized it. Assembly of the transport modules will happen in orbit; Already the lander is on its way to meet it. Next will be the Lab & rover, the Hab, and then the fuel pods and crew. I don't know the total tonnage yet, I'll have to figure that out, but the combined part count looks like it's going to exceed 1000. I could be wrong, but I think Ice Station Zebra has a part count close to that... I'll have to go check. Should be fun.

 

15 minutes ago, squeaky024 said:

tried to turn around while at mach 1.5

I've always found turns at mach pretty much futile, not without struts reinforcing the wings and such. I've also had to put small panel radiators on the engine nacelles, because I've had stuff blow up from atmospheric + engine heat... my Albatross 2 for example.

Edited March 4, 2018 by LordFerret
It posted without my saying so. Go figure.