What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Kerbuvim]

KSP Enhanced Edition (PS4)

 

Two-stage lander

Gravitational maneuver

 

[Norcalplanner]

I realized that being in a 1,130 km polar orbit above 2.5x Tellumo can mean that you're playing chicken with Lili twice on every orbit:

[mesocyclone]

5 hours ago, Urus28 said:

After a break of KSP playing civ 6.... It's time to finish my campaign objective. First finish the training of some kerbonaut.

  

They are now ready for a Duna mission.

For the veterans I built a new ship "La Valentina", it will visit the Eve system and will place two rovers and two observation satellite.

 

Wow, is that a texture mod? 

[Starman4308]

So, after the success of Apollo 5, two more Apollo missions were planned on the Gimel 2-Apollo stack: Apollo 6, which was to carry veteran engineer Craig Lane, with rookie pilot Joan Hill and scientist Vasily Tsvetnov, and Apollo 7, with veteran scientist Yana Gagarina, rookie pilot Anthony Alvarez, and engineer Stanislav Boyarov.

Everything was nominal until this happened:

There was no way the other LR-87 was going to last 2 minutes past its rated burn time consuming propellant for both engines, so the decision was made to abort within seconds of LR-87 cutout.

This was very disappointing for the brave crew of Apollo 6, but fortunately, the Apollo 7 vehicle was ready, and it took just a week to put them onboard Apollo 7.

Within twenty seconds, one of the LR-87 engines on Apollo 7 suffered a loss of performance, and the decision was made to abort.

 

Apollo 8 was intended to be an unmanned test of the higher-performance Apollo-Saturn 1 stack, but with sponsorship deals* on the line, the decision was made to put the Apollo 6 crew onto Apollo 8. It took two months to finish the Apollo 8 hardware, with no realistic opportunity for Apollo 9 before the sponsorship deadlines.

*Contracts.

In the meantime, however, a Reality Upgrade ensued, and our scientists whispered of things such as "Scatterer" and "RSSVE".

 

A routine communications satellite was the first launch in this new world, launching at dawn from Vandenburg Air Force Base.

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

After that, Apollo 8 was ready.

 

Spoiler

 

 

It was found from this mission that the Saturn 1-Apollo stack might just barely be enough for the lunar slingshot for which it was designed, if the launch profile was highly optimized and margins shorn to the bone. Since we do not needlessly risk our astronauts with foolhardy stunts like, say, putting them back into a spacecraft less than a week after a 14G suborbital abort reentry, it was decided that we needed more booster.

Where the Saturn 1 uses a single F-1 plus four RS-27 engines, the Saturn 2 uses a pair of upgraded F-1A engines, with an estimated payload of fully 49 tonnes to LEO.

As of now, the original Saturn 1-Apollo stack is Apollo B, which will probably not be used for much. Apollo A is intended for operations relatively close to Earth, deleting the RS-27 engines and shortening the F-1 propellant tank to compensate. Still, this is more than enough for low Earth orbit operations. Apollo C will use the Saturn 2 booster, and will be capable of a lunar slingshot. Apollo D will likely use a Centaur third stage to give Apollo enough delta-V for lunar orbital operations. Apollo E is the tentative codename for a lunar lander: design work has not yet started on Apollo E, though it is thought the S-IVB upper stage common to all prior Apollo models can be used for trans-Lunar injection.

 

Voyager IV, very distant from the Sun, also performed a minor course correction maneuver.

A multispectral imager has been sent to the Moon on an Agena-E with a STAR SRB for final lunar injection. This 1 tonne SRM is quite high performance for a solid rocket with 290 s-1 of vacuum specific impulse, and is likely to be used on many further small probe launches on the Agena E and Soyuz platforms, so as to avoid requiring the development of a liquid-propellant third stage.

[Castille7]

 

You just never know when you might need a Kerbal Pusher!! . During some filming I had a lot of Kerbals near the location and I got tired of running one Kerbal at a time so I made this thing to push those little green boogers! 

Desperate times call for desperate measures!

[Cavscout74]

Went back to my old career & launched my intrepid Laythe explorers back to Kerbin.   Totally forgot I hadn't had them fly by or orbit ANY other moons, so no extra xp for this crew.

 

Then jumped back to my newest career & launched my new version of a combined remote lander & relay.  The original dropped a small relay sat in orbit, then took the entire transfer stage & lander out of orbit, dumping the transfer stage on the way down.  Recently I had the idea - why waste the transfer stage, just use it as the orbital relay, so I came up with this:

The vacuum variant dumps the aerodynamic nose & chutes for another fuel tank. 

[SaturnianBlue]

I tested another "low-cost" heavy lift launch vehicle. The 8 or so boosters on the side give the rocket the kick it needs for relatively low cost, and the central core stage is powered by Methalox for high Isp and fair density. 

A big advantage of the rocket is the large upper stage, which provides both the thrust and propellant to put large payloads in orbit. Currently, the rocket can place about 60 tons into LKO, with some struggle, and around 30 tons to the Mun. If I recall correctly, the whole assembly adds up to around 80,000 funds, working to more or less 1 1/3 a fund per kilogram, which I would say is quite effective!

I also tried to make some sort of rendition of a Falcon 9 FT. The main problem proved to be thrust, which was low enough that it would practically crawl off the pad. 

 

I attempted to return the first stage to the KSC, but the graphics mods created a low enough frame rate that trying to carry out the landing was quite the struggle and it slammed into the ocean at high speed.

Edited March 5, 2018 by SaturnianBlue

[Ygdrasill]

I'm still fairly new. I managed to get to the Mun, land on the Mun, take off from the Mun......and.....be stuck in space forever for lack of fuel. I think I'll be able to do the whole thing tomorrow with some tweaks to the rocket and a little better fuel management.

[Ace in Space]

I, uh... accidentally built a ludicrously fast plane.

This morning, I made an excel spreadsheet of all the "basic" science in KSP (in other words, excluding such... shall we say, "dubious" situations as "splashed down in the desert" and the various KSC biomes). Through this, I found that I was actually missing a few for Kerbin, which I thought I'd already finished - mainly the biome-specific "from space" experiments for EVA reports and gravity scans, as well as the atmospheric analyses in the upper atmosphere.

Well, that was a bit of a challenge, because all planes I had to date didn't reach the 18km boundary to the upper atmosphere, and rockets tend not to stay in the upper atmosphere for very long. So I set out to build a plane that could sustain flight at 18+km, so that I could fly it to other biomes and pick up the atmospheric analysis data. This (and, well, not looking entirely stupid) was my only goal.

My first attempt was poorly balanced and kept flipping, and ended up unintentionally buzzing the control tower before banking sharply and slamming into the ground, destroying most of the plane (the cockpit, and Valentina by extension, was fine). So, I threw it out, marveling at how bad I am at planes, and started from scratch. My second attempt was very successful, if a bit underwhelming to look at. On its first test flight it controlled quite well, flew to 18km without complaint, and turned out to be much, much faster than intended. So I took it back to the hangar, added some airbrakes, configured the action groups, and took it out to collect data.

It has good fuel efficiency, it's more stable in flight than I expected, and it turns fairly well for something so fast. It cruises comfortably at 18-20km at speeds between 500-700m/s - though that was with me attempting to keep it from going too awfully fast so I could actually use it for its intended purpose. After swinging by almost every biome, landing at the north pole, and recovering the vehicle and its data, I decided to launch it again and see just how far I could push it.

Turns out, really far. It reached a maximum altitude of just over 25km, and it reached 1320m/s before the nose intake exploded (the rest of the plane held up fine). Holy cripes.

I've decided to call this plane the Galahad, in accordance with the knight theme I've been using for my planes (Paladin, Cavalier, etc). Though it was really, really tempting to break the pattern and call it the Phoenix, because tell me this doesn't look like a diving hawk made of fire:

I think I'll fiddle around with this plane a little more. It lacks rocket capabilities right now but I think it has the potential makings of a spaceplane. I'd also like to see if I can make it look a little cooler.

[Hotel26]

34 minutes ago, Ace in Space said:

I'd also like to see if I can make it look a little cooler.

You can't be cool at that speed.  First Law of Thermodynamics...

[magnemoe]

Finally launched moonshadow, 

That is the circulation burn. Yes I walked Ap ahead of me, nuclear only it has less than 0.2g trust.
A bit hot after the long burn.

Deplying.

done refueling from an fuel station.

Another view 

Rear is fuel and engines, then an resource storage section, lab, two greenhouses, part manufacturing and bridge, then the habitat and an small 0g habitat on top, more resources on top. 
Will add an refinery to it too.
Takes in to mun and minmus now because of contracts however its designed as an LKO space station. Original plan was to dump the mammoth engine but kept it to do the contracts who almost pay for the ting. 
 

 

[MaxwellsDemon]

Had my first real launch abort.

For some reason, the rocket started to head off course at launch-- after trying to wrest control back, pilot Piper Kerbin hit the red button.  The LES worked as intended, and she and her three scientist passengers landed safely 5.4 km from KSC.

Not sure what happened-- Gravity Turn didn't seem to kick in when it should have.  Almost certainly operator error, but not sure what quite yet.

I could've hit revert, of course, but then I wouldn't know if the LES worked in a real situation...    

 

Update Wed 7 Mar:  It happened again, in almost the same fashion.  I took a close look at the vehicle in the VAB, and it looks like something is out of kilter-- the vehicle's center of mass is off.   More investigation is indicated...

Edited March 8, 2018 by MaxwellsDemon
Update

[DarkOwl57]

6 hours ago, Ace in Space said:

I, uh... accidentally built a ludicrously fast plane.

This morning, I made an excel spreadsheet of all the "basic" science in KSP (in other words, excluding such... shall we say, "dubious" situations as "splashed down in the desert" and the various KSC biomes). Through this, I found that I was actually missing a few for Kerbin, which I thought I'd already finished - mainly the biome-specific "from space" experiments for EVA reports and gravity scans, as well as the atmospheric analyses in the upper atmosphere.

Well, that was a bit of a challenge, because all planes I had to date didn't reach the 18km boundary to the upper atmosphere, and rockets tend not to stay in the upper atmosphere for very long. So I set out to build a plane that could sustain flight at 18+km, so that I could fly it to other biomes and pick up the atmospheric analysis data. This (and, well, not looking entirely stupid) was my only goal.

My first attempt was poorly balanced and kept flipping, and ended up unintentionally buzzing the control tower before banking sharply and slamming into the ground, destroying most of the plane (the cockpit, and Valentina by extension, was fine). So, I threw it out, marveling at how bad I am at planes, and started from scratch. My second attempt was very successful, if a bit underwhelming to look at. On its first test flight it controlled quite well, flew to 18km without complaint, and turned out to be much, much faster than intended. So I took it back to the hangar, added some airbrakes, configured the action groups, and took it out to collect data.

It has good fuel efficiency, it's more stable in flight than I expected, and it turns fairly well for something so fast. It cruises comfortably at 18-20km at speeds between 500-700m/s - though that was with me attempting to keep it from going too awfully fast so I could actually use it for its intended purpose. After swinging by almost every biome, landing at the north pole, and recovering the vehicle and its data, I decided to launch it again and see just how far I could push it.

Turns out, really far. It reached a maximum altitude of just over 25km, and it reached 1320m/s before the nose intake exploded (the rest of the plane held up fine). Holy cripes.

I've decided to call this plane the Galahad, in accordance with the knight theme I've been using for my planes (Paladin, Cavalier, etc). Though it was really, really tempting to break the pattern and call it the Phoenix, because tell me this doesn't look like a diving hawk made of fire:

I think I'll fiddle around with this plane a little more. It lacks rocket capabilities right now but I think it has the potential makings of a spaceplane. I'd also like to see if I can make it look a little cooler.

3

Ah, congrats! You hit your first milestone, which I like to call "the First Monster". These are the planes that are your first absolutely insane planes, generally either hyper-fast (1200 and above), hyper-maneuverable (50G's or above), or, the best, both. I made an SR-71 replica, and I made it hit well over 1400. Circumnavigates too. 

[Pipcard]

Left Ike (on my second crewed expedition to the Duna system)

[papuchalk]

So after i had everything prepared for manned landing on Eve, i finally wanted to do that mission today. And eventhough i tested everything so many times and everything went well, in real mission it was so hard - with so many unexpected game errors and tons of reloads - that i can hardly say after all that i really enjoyed it. To be honest, i dont want to hear about Eve for several weeks. It took me 5 hours to get to Eve and back to orbit... pheeew

So what can go wrong?

1) Problems with refuelling main rocket at Kerbin

2) not enough fuel at Eve to slow down into a circular orbit at Eve

3) that means no chance to choose landing site

4) any site lower than 1500m means that i dont get it back to orbit, because not enough fuel to fight thick atmosphere. OK after many times i landed on highlands !! Pure luck!

5) ladders suddenly dont work, eventhough they worked on kerbin launchpad !!!

6) slopes on Eve cause your ship still move, and never stop still, so i couldnt plant a flag properly, because the landing construction did not allow the kerbal to leave the area.. see screen with flag

7) Ship still moving - thats why ladders were not working.. when ship moves the ladders dont allow you to cross more of them - so after two hours of swearing i got the kerbal somehow back to ship. I really though i can start the whole mission again

8) ok, lets go away - stage sequence went well, but ship started to turn backwards at height around 20000m. Eventhough it never did while testing. whyyyY?

9) figured out i must go under 250m/s to prevent ship from turning backwards (probably aerodynamic issue)

10) that means i had too low speed at upper stage. Many times i needed 5 more seconds of fuel, but there was none..

11) but after 50 tries i made it to orbit, and saved the game

 

I was so annoyed that i forgot to take  some important screens in the course of mission.

Finished. Halelluyah !

https://imgur.com/a/D4Xvx

i used some screens from testing, and not actual mission. but what the hell. i forgot to make them on the run 

 

Edited March 5, 2018 by papuchalk

[Delay]

First off: Yesterday I put a satellite into an orbit around Duna. It was for a contract.

 

 

And today, this happened:

My first Jool encounter! Laythe also said hello as it passed by Jool. I quickly adjusted my Tylo encounter to capture me...

... and then I got Tylo, Laythe, Jool and Vall all in one picture! What a beautifully timed first visit to the system!

This probe doesn't have any scientific equipment on board, unfortunately. So, upon arriving I decided that I want to use this probe to get as many encounters as possible. It has an ion engine; dV won't be a problem.

Next stop: Laythe!

[XB-70A]

Yesterday was the opportunity for me to realize that I had never placed any communication satellite on Eve, only probes, a small Venera-like lander, and a rover (in 1.0.5). The mission of the day was dedicated to correct this infamy, and also was an opportunity for me to return to the airborne launchers. Why?

Cuz' they are fun, uselessly expensive, and trippy (despite the fact the Valentina doesn't seemed impressed by it...)

 

 

With its four Goliath turbofans, the Areion II carrier clearly was overpowered, but who doesn't like moar poarwer?

 

 

Mmmh, I must admit that this craft probably is the strangest one I ever built... don't really know what passed through my minds to make such a thing.

 

 

10 km reached, launcher dropped!

 

 

 

"Enjoying" three seconds of free falling to adjust the angles, and to leave enough safety space with the carrier, then the Swivel was lit, providing an initially TWR of 1.2 only. Still enough to accelerate horizontally without any problems.

 

 

 

Then the AoA was raised gradually as the launcher became lighter, and the payload was able to enjoy the natural light once it passed over 40 km.

 

 

Still requiring around 300 m/s to place the apogee to 300 km. Hopefully, the launcher appeared to be much more efficient than what I expected it to be!

 

 

 

953 m/s is not so abusing, and the second stage should be able to take care of it easily, while the satellite will circularize by its own means. Now, this is without counting on Mechjeb's awesome accuracy for transfer maneuvers...

 

Well, a small satellite to the purple planet for 6053.1 Funds, it's pretty noice (without counting the 2nd stage of course, but shhhhh...)

This flight just made me fall in love again for the airborne launchers. I'm already trying to make my Pegasus copy to fly again, but something has been changed between 1.0.2 and the later updates about the atmosphere, and it made it uncontrollable after the drop... 

Also, another one has been built and tested at launch, destination: Moho!

It is the heaviest of all in the Areion family, carrying a medium airborne launcher able to send a 10 tons payload to Jool, and all of that for the humble price of 20 078 only. Enjoy it, this is a time limited offer.

[eddiew]

19 hours ago, Norcalplanner said:

I realized that being in a 1,130 km polar orbit above 2.5x Tellumo can mean that you're playing chicken with Lili twice on every orbit:

You know you absolutely have to wait for the next close pass, then adjust your orbital period to be exactly the same, right? I wouldn't want to waste a feature like that  

[joacobanfield]

This is Nadja Kerman reporting live from the KSC.

The newest satellite launched by our space program, the Minmusplotter, has refused to transmit its science data back home, arguing that it must "first be analyzed in a laboratory setting", the snotty brat.

As a result, it was decided to send one of our expert kerbonauts after it in the first mission to Minmus...Valentina Kerman took a new Collector-class rocket and went after those precious megabytes!

Our brave kerbonaut not only caught up with the rouge satellite and took the data succesfully, she also gathered some herself, and headed back to Kerbin.

Altough reentry was hotter than anticipated, her heat shield was made of some pretty cool stuff, and she splashed down safely near the space center.

 

[Urus28]

21 hours ago, mesocyclone said:

Wow, is that a texture mod? 

Yes, I use texture unlimited mod for the reflects on the engines and other metal parts

This in combination with texture from Electrocutor

For the kerbals texture I also use mods :

 

[Norcalplanner]

3 hours ago, eddiew said:

You know you absolutely have to wait for the next close pass, then adjust your orbital period to be exactly the same, right? I wouldn't want to waste a feature like that  

Once all the parachute probes are safely landed, the only rational use left for the mothership is to attempt a close Lili flyby. I look forward to seeing just how much science I can grab during the 10 seconds I'll be transiting it's SOI. :-)

[eberkain]

So I was trying to make a robot arm to deploy the seismic probes so I could pick them up and carry to another biome, then I was thinking about just having a set of three rovers, one with the hammer and two with probes.  But that sounds like alot of driving around remote rovers to pull it off for every biome.  So I decided I wanted to make a small rover I could send with a crewed lander so one of the crew could go deploy the seismic probes accurately.  After alot of googling for ideas I decided on making a Mun bike.  

[Zeiss Ikon]

18 hours ago, Ygdrasill said:

I'm still fairly new. I managed to get to the Mun, land on the Mun, take off from the Mun......and.....be stuck in space forever for lack of fuel. I think I'll be able to do the whole thing tomorrow with some tweaks to the rocket and a little better fuel management.

I'd venture to say that every one one of us has stranded a Kerbal coming back from the Mun on at least one occasion.  I once stranded one in Munar orbit, ran out of fuel in the rescue craft trying to rendezvous (and ran the stranded Kerbal's suit jets dry), and then ran the next rescue craft (with my last pilot) out of fuel trying to rendezvous to rescue both of them.

That was close to a year and a half ago; now, after some dozen hours or so of YouTube videos and several hundred hours in game I can usually rendezvous and dock (from a reasonably close orbit) with just a few units of Lf/O and a dozen or so of monopropellant for the RCS and I can EVA transfer a Kerbal across 20-30 m in less than ten minutes (real time), usually hitting the hatch so I get (B) to board before (F) to grab.

Keep at it, I might be learning from you in another year.

[Fraktal]

Having started the game barely a month and a half ago, I think it's time for me to graduate beyond the "new member" thread.

After starting, I spent about two weeks learning the ropes before I jumped straight into plane building and about three weeks ago, I completed my first SSTO using Mk2 parts. In the past few days however, I decided to went back to the roots and built one out of Mk1 parts instead. Mind you, I'm very much of an amateur yet.

Four ramjets in a quadcoupler, four nukes, single-stage-to-Minmus, 3498 m/s dV on full load, all stock. Oh, and it does not require manual control during takeoff: after lifting off, I just set a 15° ascent angle and aside from switching engines when needed, I don't have to touch anything until circularization, it flies up to orbital altitude entirely under its own. Not much range (enough to land on Minmus and return with 3-4 aerobrakes), I admit, but that monoprop's quite heavy and it's got a docking clamp to refuel in orbit anyway. I can add a pair of extra tanks to the rear for 4100+ m/s dV, but then it loses the hands-off-takeoff feature unless I empty the tanks and only fill them in orbit.

Why the monoprop, you ask? Because it's got four monoprop engines on the bottom that allow it to VTOL on the Mun and anything smaller. I tested it out repeatedly on the Mun and Minmus today, it can reliably cover the last few hundred meters on VTOL and land softly on the gears, even at maximum takeoff weight. Overheating's a bit of a problem, though; I had the cockpit reach 93.36% heat during a munar return aerobraking at 49 km altitude, but the radiators I put on specifically to extend aerobraking endurance. Solar panels too; during one test flight, I somehow burned completely through the 1000 energy reserve with reaction wheel use between burns and in another, I ran out of power during reentry, so I added on six small cells. No more power problems.

Oh, and it's got enough reaction wheel torque to limp back from the Mun with literally half of the engines missing without spinning out from 7° off-center thrust. I had the opportunity to test that too during the munar VTOL test. I landed in a crater on the terminator (and cut it very close: the monoprops ran out of juice literally the second the gears touched the ground), then tried to take off on the shadowed side but forgot to turn on the landing gear lights, hit a bump and tailstruck, destroying the entire bottom row of engines. The remaining two nukes had enough TWR to limp back into orbit from the short flight the tailstrike launched me onto, from where I limped back to Kerbin... and went EVA during a subsonic glide (the two top ramjets had enough TWR for sustained flight, but ran out of fuel over rough terrain and I was coasting downwards to find flat terrain for a parachute landing) to see if I could get an EVA report mid-flight. Results were predictable. Very next thing I did upon arriving back to the SPH was adding on a pair of small gears next to the bottom jets with maximum damping as a tailstrike countermeasure.

[Ace in Space]

1 hour ago, Zeiss Ikon said:

I'd venture to say that every one one of us has stranded a Kerbal coming back from the Mun on at least one occasion

I stranded a kerbal before I even reached Mun.  Very first time I successfully achieved Kerbin orbit, Jeb ended up stuck. I spend the next four or so real life weeks trying to recover him. And then he later got stranded again... coming back from the Mun. Granted, not even remotely his first trip to the Mun - it was (ironically) a rescue contract for some kerbal who'd gotten stuck on the surface at an awkward location. But at least that time Val rescued his sorry green butt without much trouble.