What did you do in KSP1 today?

[DeltaDizzy]

Hello everyone im back and no I don't have a Patreon so you cant donate.

[EpicSpaceTroll139]

@qzgy According to wikipedia the V-22 can fully transition in as little as 12 seconds, however most videos I've found of it show it making the transition in somewhere between 15 seconds and 25 seconds. I'm guessing the low number of 12 second transitions is because that likely requires maximum power from the engines to accelerate the aircraft at the required rate, which would put unneeded wear and tear on them.

So if we go for an average of 20 seconds, that would put the rotor tilt rate at 90 / 20 = 4.5 degrees per second.

If we go with the minimum transition time of 12 seconds, that would give 7.5 degrees per second.

Whatever you choose, if you're working on one, good luck!  They're hard.

[Triop]

So I took this surface survey contract, when I got there it seemed that I have to climb a mountain.

So now I'm sending in this buggy to get it done.

Wish me luck.

[DeltaDizzy]

14 hours ago, Cupcake... said:

<snip>

Part of that video seems familiar...

[StupidAndy]

never underestimate the power of the grind
i got 350 science from one mission with the 4 experiments from USI Sounding rockets
and a beauty shot

[Kronus_Aerospace]

My 747-8 replica is nearly done! This baby ended up having a LOT of problems that really bogged down the building process. However, the end result is my most accurate replica to date. Still have a bit of work to do until I would consider it entirely finished.

Edited April 8, 2018 by Kronus_Aerospace

[Triop]

Can't believe this actualy worked.

Ready to climb the mountain I guess

EDIT: To be continued...

Edited April 9, 2018 by Triop

[Kek-tus]

ksp pls 

[Bill Phil]

Decided to do a Vall mission with a crew led by Val. Wasn't too eventful, but fun nonetheless. Gravity assists using the moons of Jool are quite an effective method of maneuvering. I'm thinking about a similar mission targeting Bop and Pol. I had so much excess Delta-V I think almost any target is possible, at least for orbit. Except maybe Moho, not while towing a lander, at least. I use KAC and KER.

Pics in the spoiler:

Spoiler

This is the stack in orbit. I didn't take any screenshots during launch. The rocket itself took some test flights to perfect, but it works like a charm. Off to the side you can see the second stage of the launcher.

Here's the ship performing its first burn. I split the ejection burn in two to take full advantage of the Oberth effect.

Almost time to get rid of the first set of drop tanks.

Course correction to improve my Jool encounter.

My initial Tylo encounter. I set up a maneuver to raise the periapsis. Not today, Tylo!

After some orbital shenanigans, I got an assist from Laythe, with Vall in the background.

Capture burn at Vall. Not too expensive, considering. I probably could've gotten capture for much less if I was patient enough.

Jool, Laythe, and Tylo while in orbit of Vall.

Time to land.

Firing the aerospike to land on Vall.

Just above the surface.

Touchdown. Huh... the landing legs didn't explode.

Sadly, the view wasn't very pretty. Here I clipped the camera through the terrain to see Laythe and Jool. Tylo is above the horizon, at least. I didn't want to go back to the tracking station to warp for a landing site with a good view to be in sunlight.

The crew posing for a photo op. Don't worry, I planted a flag.

Back to orbit.

Docking.

Casting away the lander.

Now that's a view! Vall, Jool, Laythe, and Tylo! 

Planned transfer to Kerbin. I waited for a Jool -> Kerbin transfer window, although that wasn't strictly necessary.

Here's the braking burn. I could have probably survived reentry (I had a heat shield), but the vehicle I had was so over powered, I just went for it.

Back home. About to drop the last tanks, with engines attached.

Reentry. Not too hot, since it was from LKO.

And we're back! 5 years and 419 days later!

 

[Cavscout74]

While my massive Jool mission is enroute, I was thinking about trying my hand at some writing.  It'll be based on this mission, but I'm not sure where the story will go or if I'll even finish it.  I've started it, but it requires my horde of ships to be either in orbit or landed already.  I'm partly pulling from previous missions to Laythe for the start until this one catches up to the story.  While doing the writing on another computer, got most of my mid-course corrections done, a contract sat to Eve, totally botched a Moho return probe - only 1000 m/s dV shortfall at Kerbin - and put a new remote lander on Eve.  Too bad it went onto the night side & landed in the explodium sea instead of on land.  So its a floater instead of a rover.  Still counted for the contract at least.

[Corona688]

Built my favorite VTOL yet.

It's a well balanced airplane that just happens to have four vectored engines plus landing legs on its butt.

[CatastrophicFailure]

This was a weekend of wrestling, and generally losing to, Krakens. And not the cuddly in-game sort, either. 

But I did manage to get a cool long-range booster sep shot. 

[Ace in Space]

I swear, this mission...

So, today I got a visit from my old "friend" allergies and got to do delta-v budgeting in a haze of benedryll and sneezing. That was "fun." Unfortunately I don't have that excuse for when I calculated my budget in the first place. The original plan was to intercept Dres by way of three consecutive maneuvers, the last of which I had written down as a very small adjustment requiring only 55m/s. I am not certain whether I got spectacularly lucky with my nodes when I first found and wrote these numbers down, or if this last maneuver was supposed to be 550m/s and I somehow failed to write the zero down. Either way, while placing nodes today I discovered that my crafts were several hundred m/s short of having enough delta-v to make these three maneuvers to intercept Dres, as the last node consistently ended up coming out to 500-700m/s, with most at the 700 end of the spectrum. This means that even with leftover fuel from ascent, nearly all of the crafts would not be able to make it to their destination and have enough delta-v left to actually achieve orbit instead of flyby.

But I may still be able to salvage this situation. For one thing, after extensively fiddling with the maneuver nodes, I was able to find a combination of only two burns that required less delta-v overall. I only completed the first of the two maneuvers tonight, but now I've got some time to work with before the next set.

23 hours ago, Ace in Space said:

Incidentally, this time I was able to measure how much delta-v was left over from the ascent stage on the comm sat, and it turns out it was a good 540m/s. I probably won't adjust the numbers in future reports for this, but it's good to know.

This turned out to be absolutely critical, and because of that, I am adjusting the numbers now.

	Drill	Tank	Conv.	Com1	Com2	Com3	Com4	Com5
Initial Delta-V	4302+	5351-	4419	~4880	~4886	~4886	~4889	~4889
Spent This Phase	1745	1941	1864	1987	1713	1789	1858	2039
Current Delta-V	2557+	3410-	2555	~2893	~3173	~3097	~3031	~2850

You might have noticed that the habitation module, science module, and rover are missing from the table. Incidentally, these are the three kerballed crafts. No matter how I tried, I just could not get the rover or the habitation module to intercept Dres and still have enough delta-v to achieve orbit; they were always short by a couple hundred m/s. Since they were not yet out of Kerbin's SOI, having just left their Munar flybys, I quickly redirected them to Minmus. Because they've already used a few hundred delta-v to achieve an escape trajectory, they have a few hundred delta-v worth of empty space in their tanks. If they refuel at Jade Station, they should be able to return to an escape trajectory from the much-easier starting position of orbit around Minmus, and still have enough extra fuel to make it to their destination.

As for the science module... uh.

It was actually lucky that the shroud did this weird thing because that's what prompted me to investigate further, which is how I noticed that this one also had an empty travel stage. The first one, I immediately accepted as my own fault. This time, I'm starting to question what's going on here. I didn't really make that same stupid mistake twice, did I?  

I'm lucky that I noticed this before I'd completely spent the ascent stage, since I was able to move the last few precious drops of fuel into the empty tank and ditch the ascent tank. Turns out it had just enough juice left in it to redirect this craft to Minmus as well. There's just one problem: Jade Station is woefully unprepared and unequipped to handle this situation.

The station had a nearly-full Rockomax-64 tank, which is normally sufficient for refueling several crafts. However, there are now three rockets docked for refueling at once, one of which has a nearly empty Rockomax-64 of its own. Jade Station just doesn't have enough fuel. So Hairy, Anger, and Buzz are just hanging out on the station while waiting for more fuel to be shuttled up from the surface base.

[Aaodon]

22 hours ago, DeltaDizzy said:

Hello everyone im back and no I don't have a Patreon so you cant donate.

That looks awesome. Which addons do you use?

Edited April 9, 2018 by Aaodon

[Zeiss Ikon]

Last night, Tridin, Jorlan (both pilots) and Tatiana (scientist) made the second first landing on Minmus in my career game.

"Second first landing" -- because of a mistake (loading an old save), I lost 50-ish days and several completed contracts from my career.  I'm now approximately caught up with the days and achievements lost, ready to continue forging ahead.  The Minmus crew remembered to run their experiments and brought back more than 500 science (from a single landing on the Greater Flats); with the unspent science from Val's recent Mun landing, that's exactly 1000 stored up.  The R&D Kerbals will have a field, er, lab day with that.  Plenty to open up the remainder of the 160 tier and start on the 300 level of the tech tree.

The Minmus landing itself was relatively routine (that's what the "flats" are for).  All three Kerbals disembarked from the vessel, using EVA packs to fly down to the surface (and I can now confirm that a two-star Kerbal has an EVA parachute in career 1.4.1).  Tatiana forgot the names of both pilots in her excitement to set the first boots on a new body, but Tridin and Jorlan corrected her on their own flags.  Surface sample, EVA report, crew report, Goo, temperature, barometric pressure ("It's as if the instrument were in a vacuum!"), and the Science Jr. materials experiment.  The routine landing left the lander still oriented, so for takeoff it was just a matter of a quick burp from the Poodle and slap the staging switch to eject the drop tanks and landing legs (had enough fuel to make a biome hop, but we'll leave the fancy stuff for future missions).  Then pitch over to the east, and burn to 150 m/s, watch for terrain (no problem, still had upward momentum from launch), and set up a node at Ap to bring Pe above the surface.  Then wait through an orbit to make the burn for home.

At recovery time, the MET read 26 days and a couple hours.  The Mun is usually just over a day each way, plus orbit and surface time; Minimus is 12-13 days, depending how far you swing past the orbit setting up your encounter.  Going to need an extra snack cabinet when it's time to visit Duna...

[HafCoJoe]

In the glorious land of KrakenTech^tm things went quite splendid today  

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/248362235

[dangerhamster]

The Deliverance 2 with Jeb and 2 nobodies aboard finally reached Duna. Not having to swerve to avoid Ike caused a brain fade episode so it wasn't until orbit had been achieved that the idea of doing a lap of Ike occurred. Luckily the "slightly" overspec DV available allowed a quick excursion and some bonus experience for the crew. A touch and go was briefly contemplated but wussiness won the day.

Landing was uneventful and even hit the target area.

However just before deploying the Globetrotter a slight fly in the ointment occurred. Jeb found himself unable to transfer into the rover or EVA. "No problem" piped the nobody engineer, "I'll just park the rover and lop off that silly parachute..... And this was the point where everybody realised the toolbox fitted to all Globetrotters had somehow been removed. So no screwdriver. Ooops.

After some soul searching and with a limited snack supply in the capsule mission control cast aside their scruples and lobbed a supply probe into Duna orbit using the forbidden magik of alt+F12. But they did make it more expensive than needed to try and appease everybody's conscience.

The nobodies managed to trundle out to the loot crate and pick up the holy screwdriver and once back at the Deliverance it was a simple matter to remove the offending chute and free the Jebmeister.

With the problems behind them and safely landed on an alien world with no support and no way to return the crew settled down to systems checks and a little light mining to satisfy a contract. There may or may not have been questions asked to control as to the parentage of whoever certified the Globetrotter as mission ready. Ok, there definitely were. Lessons were learned, blame apportioned let us never speak of it again.

 

[luizopiloto]

3 days later... and I finished my new heavy cargoplane...

[Aaodon]

 

Kerbal Space Station. It looks like a small space station  

[MaxwellsDemon]

Rolling along...

The upgrade to R&D is finished, and Werner and Linus report that research is now proceeding twice as fast in the new facilities as before.  (Translation:  I spent a Kerbal Construction Time upgrade point to increase the research speed, which, according to my personal rules, I only do when R&D gets a physical upgrade.  Helps spread out and delay the research of new techs.)

In the meantime, it appears that several private companies have been successful at launching Kerbals into orbit, but not so successful at getting them back.  So, the Thoth capsule is undergoing redevelopment to make it into a rescue pod.

The makeshift commnet works acceptably, though the slight variations in orbit at a low latitude mean the commsats keep bunching up and spreading apart again, but there's enough of them to compensate.  With advances in flight control, a kerbosynchronous commsat is now a practical possibility, and those will be launched soon.

(Interestingly, I noticed that Woomerang is by default a tracking/comm site, even when I have the other tracking sites turned off.  The line looks faint, though, so it must not be a big antenna...)

[Tyko]

On 4/6/2018 at 11:40 PM, Norcalplanner said:

 

Cool design for Thalia. the ship on the left looks a lot lime the one I built. Mine was powered by a Nuclear NTR Lightbulb engine, but otherwise they're very similar. Just wondering did you need any special protective measures to work in Thalia local space? I think the "radiation band" was reduced, but wasn't sure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On 4/7/2018 at 7:58 PM, jack gamer said:

I made an eve base, it took me 6 hours to make this, due to a couple failures.

Nice! how did you launch, land and assemble it?

Edited April 9, 2018 by Tyko

[DarkOwl57]

This isn't really something that I did "today," but I did do something quite fun. With an idea in mind and a car to be built, I went to KSP to get to work. For most of the afternoon, I spent multiple hours tinkering with multiple vehicles in my saves. First was a motorcycle-like thing that works kind of okay-ish. Still some work to do there (Mainly balancing out the grip and SAS module settings). Second was a dune buggy that is meant to go inter-planetary but is waiting on Kerbin until I can get a rocket strong enough to carry it to either the Mun, Minnmus, or Duna. The buggy itself is able to take corners at high-speed, all-electric, grippy, able to handle jumps with its suspension, and loaded down with every single science instrument in the game. It's got two seats, doors that open and close (The magic of airbrakes), and best of all: Cupholders.

The final part of my KSPing for the day was spent on creating a formula car. No, not Formula 1- I've got loads of those and more to spare. I was thinking about creating a lower-tier car for my story, Life At The Top, and came up with a fairly good-looking car. By tinkering around with @Azimech 's Formula One 2017, I created a nice trainer car. On the main look of the car, I: Re-worked the front wing (Removing the complex 3-elevon piece and converting it to a simpler configuration of a single Elevon 1 and two Elevon 4s), moved the nose in a bit (with mixed results- most of the early tests resulted in Midsey getting kicked out of the car before it even got going), changed the sidepods (Changed from an air intake to a radiator covering and elevon side-cover). Other technical bits include: Changing friction settings to lower grip (Less grip = More fun), Lowered engine thrust (More speed = More crash, More crash = Not a good trianing vehicle), Changed the rear wing values (Way too much aero grip), Created a steel undertray, and lowered ride height. Why? Well, KSP physics is interesting when dealing with cars and downforce. I have the aero bits angled down to push the car down into the track, creating downforce. When the car gets pushed down, the car gets closer to the track. When the car is at speed, is has a good chance to bottom out (with the new ride-height), creating beautiful sparks (If you have CollisionFX installed). I'm still tweaking multiple aspects of the car, including (but not limited to): Making the car less grippy and more fun to drive, messing with ride-height to lower bottom-out chance, changing the aero settings around some, and minor engine tweaks to improve speed while still making it a good trainer. Pics will be soom!

Over the past week or so, I was working on a project meant to replicate GTA 5's X80 Proto- a futuristic-looking car. My version looks okay, but has multiple problems. Suspension is either too stiff or too soft, the car itself is far too heavy to be a good racing car, there's not a ton of stability, and in high-speed turns the car has a chance to either roll over or snap-understeer (A weird phenomenon where I believe the rears have too much FC and snap the nose back forward). Multiple tweaks are coming, but I'm fairly okay with how the aesthetics look using only stock parts. I could possibly make it better with Tweakscale, but who knows

More to come soon!

[Norcalplanner]

1 hour ago, Tyko said:

 

Cool design for Thalia. the ship on the left looks a lot lime the one I built. Mine was powered by a Nuclear NTR Lightbulb engine, but otherwise they're very similar. Just wondering did you need any special protective measures to work in Thalia local space? I think the "radiation band" was reduced, but wasn't sure.

The main station on the left is powered by an Osprey engine from Near Future Launch Vehicles. Both it and the Thalia Express (bottom portion of the photo) can get away with only with only 3 medium extending radiators each, as they stay in high Thalia orbit (currently 1,000 km). 

The Karborundum miner, on the right side of the photo, is a different story. It has six large curved radiators around its 2.5m reactor, plus eight medium extending radiators and four large extending radiators. You also need to be aware of the heating bug - pausing the game while mining, or going beyond 1000x time warp can mean destruction for the unwary.  The surface of Thalia is not for the faint of heart. 

[Delay]

Airplane construction!

This plane is my first "real" Mk3 aircraft (I have a space shuttle, but that doesn't count). A lot of trimming is required to keep it stable (about 1/2 to 3/4 upwards pitch), but other than that, it flies really well.

You can (and this is surprising, to be honest) start pulling the nose up at ~65m/s! It still takes a while before the gears leave the ground, though.

Here's the AoA of the craft (compare nose and exhaust attitudes):

Landing at the old airfield as a test. It's difficult to land with full tanks, but in real life you don't do so anyway!

... Followed by a landing back at KSC. And hey, look where I came to a stop!

Oh and I also fulfilled an "Explore Ike" contract by docking these two vessels. One of them has a tourist who wanted a fly-by of Ike, so I killed two birds with one stone!

[Triop]

So yesterday Val flew a buggy to a mountain area for a surface survey contract...

Today she drove a few miles up the mountain until the sun went down.

She is now stuck over night and will continue her trip tomorrow...

X = Val's current location

X = Estimated location of the survey

In the mean while Jeb got his MiG back and we are now planning on taking out the science instruments and replace it with a seat so Jeb can get Val back home after her mission.

TBC

Edited April 9, 2018 by Triop