What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Angelo Kerman]

I finished polishing up the latest patch to my flying saucers mod, and took the prototype for a spin:

[JadeOfMaar]

... I did a lot in KSP today.  

These are the test craft for my first pair of engines made from scratch.

And I installed my own sunflare (after having reinstalled scatterer in this test install in an attempt to help troubleshoot a planet pack).

2.5m plug nozzle cross-range fusion engine with built-in radial radiators (This kind of engine should not be used in the atmosphere of a planet that you value life on, just saying...)

3.75m interstellar fusion engine with array of magnetic coils and radiators

Edited June 14, 2018 by JadeOfMaar

[Zeiss Ikon]

Last night, in my new RSS/RO/RP-1/Principia career, I succeeded in building a WAC Corporal analog.  Performance is somewhat disappointing -- only about 30 km with very modest payload -- but I was able to recover the core and science instruments intact (had the parachute for the sustainer engine and tank staged wrong, it smashed) and between that and experiments in flight I got back enough science to unlock several more of the low tier nodes.  Still takes Way Too Long to get a rocket built or a tech node fully researched, though.  Upgrades, upgrades...

[cyberKerb]

I spent the better part of tonight adding resources to rocks. I then chucked them into the atmosphere at around 3-9k/s at various Pe heights to see how my custom ablator settings for said resources worked to vaporize the contents. Kerbal testing at it's best.  

[djr5899]

Not much......I had one of those days where I'm just trying to accomplish a small task, and nothing was going right.  Picked up a contract in my career to take some Seismic readings on Kerbin.  I built a small rover in the Hangar, and then built a rocket to launch it, so that I could just parachute the rover to the spot on Kerbin.  Sounded really simple, but I guess KSP doesn't like how I attached the rover.  When I go to take off from the launch pad, my Navball is set at the horizon, not pointing straight up.  As soon as I try to take off, the craft immediately pitches over.  Didn't have a lot of time to do a whole rebuild last night, and will hopefully fix it today.

I did learn something useful, which may cause me to have to start my career over.....money is important in career.   I realized that, between switching back between sandbox and this latest career, I tend to gravitate towards my heavier lifter models that I use in sandbox.  I often find that I have a lot of excess fuel or unneeded engines...just too much unneeded power that goes to waste.  In sandbox, eh, whatever.  In career.....I think I am flushing a lot of money into the space toilet.  Realizing now that building a 100K rocket, and only returning 30K of the parts, when I likely could have built a 50K rocket and returned 20K of the parts......that probably isn't a sustainable financial model to waste that much money on tanks and engines that aren't being fully used and being dumped to burn up in the atmosphere.

Hoping that I can recover and become more efficient in this current career save.

[RealKerbal3x]

32 minutes ago, djr5899 said:

Not much......I had one of those days where I'm just trying to accomplish a small task, and nothing was going right.  Picked up a contract in my career to take some Seismic readings on Kerbin.  I built a small rover in the Hangar, and then built a rocket to launch it, so that I could just parachute the rover to the spot on Kerbin.  Sounded really simple, but I guess KSP doesn't like how I attached the rover.  When I go to take off from the launch pad, my Navball is set at the horizon, not pointing straight up.  As soon as I try to take off, the craft immediately pitches over.  Didn't have a lot of time to do a whole rebuild last night, and will hopefully fix it today.

I did learn something useful, which may cause me to have to start my career over.....money is important in career.   I realized that, between switching back between sandbox and this latest career, I tend to gravitate towards my heavier lifter models that I use in sandbox.  I often find that I have a lot of excess fuel or unneeded engines...just too much unneeded power that goes to waste.  In sandbox, eh, whatever.  In career.....I think I am flushing a lot of money into the space toilet.  Realizing now that building a 100K rocket, and only returning 30K of the parts, when I likely could have built a 50K rocket and returned 20K of the parts......that probably isn't a sustainable financial model to waste that much money on tanks and engines that aren't being fully used and being dumped to burn up in the atmosphere.

Hoping that I can recover and become more efficient in this current career save.

You could try adding a small probe core or docking port to the top of your rover delivery rocket and 'control from here' to ensure the navball is pointed in the correct direction

[Lisias]

Not happy by going cheap while ferrying Tourists to the Karman Line:

I tried and tried to repeat the stunt on LKO! Man, that was hard because I didn't wanted to spend money on the Launch Pad, so I was restricted to 140T vessels. Kicking butts into Karman's line and letting the Gravity weel bring you back is one thing, but achieving LKO on the whole shebang and then burning back is another. I had to compromise somehow, and came to this contraption:

I managed to get LKO on it, but couldn't get back. The thing insisted in plummeting into water/ground at more than 30m/s, killing everybody: if I added enough chutes, I end up without fuel for the circularization. And without enough parachutes, she didn't bleed enough energy for a safe touchdown with the fuel she had left.

And yes, the reentry were induced by aerobraking - on the Apogee, I retroburned just enough to get the perigee below the Karman Line, and from now on aerobraking did the trick.

So... I had to spend more money than planned sending Tourists into LKO three times with three tourists each time, instead of doing it two times with 5, and using one spare seat to send a crew member into space to get experience. Well, you can't always get what you want, so (screenshots starts at deorbiting, as the ascension were pretty standard - except by no staging):

And I managed to successfully recover the full vessel while landing and splashing down!

(shot from the following mission)

If I manage to land/splash down the thing next enough to KSC, I will manage to recover 97% of the cost of the vessel. I doubt I could manage to land back in KSC itself, but still trying!

POST-EDIT:

This is the vessel on the VAB - yes, I added chutes to the Fleas to recover them using Stage Recovery!! (I'm really going on the cheap!  ).

Edited June 14, 2018 by Lisias
MOAR PICTURES!

[RealKerbal3x]

I guess this isn't what I did, but at the moment I'm sitting here on the forum while my stock prop aircraft flies slowly out into Booster Bay and Secondstage Ocean (great names)

 

[Cavscout74]

3 hours ago, djr5899 said:

Not much......I had one of those days where I'm just trying to accomplish a small task, and nothing was going right. 

Sounds just like my day - in and out of KSP.   Does anyone know if fusion pellets are toxic?  If so, there won't be much fishing near KSC in the foreseeable future, 'cause there's about 2 million worth sunk just to the east in the process of trying to launch a heavy fusion-powered planetary crew cycler to orbit

[Kerbal Design Bureau]

This. I don't know either. Jeb seems to like it, though.

[Zeiss Ikon]

3 hours ago, Cavscout74 said:

Does anyone know if fusion pellets are toxic?

Supposed to be just frozen deuterium or D-T mix, some designs with a polymer coating.  Very innocuous, chemically.  Just keep combustion sources away from the bay for a couple days while all the things thaw, boil, rupture, and the bubbles surface...

[Triop]

Trying out some simple sci-fi stuff.

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, Zeiss Ikon said:

Supposed to be just frozen deuterium or D-T mix, some designs with a polymer coating.  Very innocuous, chemically. 

Tritium is radio active, isn't?

[Kronus_Aerospace]

Since I just felt like messing around today, I decided to do some more work on my PTV, which at this point has become a vehicle for me to experiment (Metaphorically and literally). I decided to give it new engines which are stuffed full of whiplashes. I also took the opportunity to redo the back section to look a little bit less F-22-ish, which ended up giving me a bit more clearance for rotation.

Since my PTV previously was unable to break the sound barrier, and these new engines give it a much lower TWR, I thought that it wouldn't really be able to achieve impressive speeds.

Was I wrong!

The craft ended up reaching mach 3.96, making it faster than the SR-71 Blackbird. Overall this makes sense as this craft is about the same size and weight as the blackbird but has larger engines, even then this forces me to conclude that the craft's aerodynamics are not as poor as I previously thought.

Optimal cruising altitude ended up being 14 kilometers with the top speed being 1360 m/s

Edited June 14, 2018 by Kronus_Aerospace

[CobaltShock]

More GPP Stuff

 

Also, it appears as if Nova V has landed in a populated town. Let's hope they don't scrap the ship apart for scrap metal!

[Cavscout74]

I finally stopped dropping fusion pellets in the ocean & got my heavy crew cycler into orbit.  Initially I tried to brute-force my way to orbit, but that wasn't working so I gave in and threw a big shroud around the entire ship. 

Early brute-force attempt.  Couldn't even launch without blowing the pad up

Finally got to orbit - just testing in sandbox at this point.  I still need to make a few changes - notably my ring of edge radiators got moved away from the fusion drive & no longer provide any cooling so only 4 large radiators are available to keep the drive from overheating.

Still, it survived a 2500 m/s full throttle maneuver without blowing anything up, so I should be ok once I make my final tweaks.  I can't think of anywhere I would NEED to burn longer than that in a single maneuver.   Somewhere along the design process, it has just about made the jump from crew cycler to almost full-blown deep space exploration vessel - with over 43 km/s dV.

[djr5899]

OK, I am once again in a state of frustration with this game (it's a once a week thing these days).   I have a simple contract to get 3 seismic readings on Kerbin.  All I need to do is put a rover on a rocket, fly it across the ocean to the peninsula near the KSC.  Sounds easy enough.   You can see my craft that isn't that far from the KSC, and you can see the spot I need to go to, the green spot on the lower part of Kerbin on that peninsula.

 

Seems simple enough, except I cannot get any rocket I build to remain stable enough to reach the location.  I simply don't understand at this point.  Rockets that are very simple and should be stable start to wig out about a quarter of the way to my destination.  The whole rocket acts like the top of my rocket weighs 100 tons, when in reality, my rover weighs slightly over 3 tons.  Below is a screenshot of my current vessel, after recovering from it going crazy.  

 

I've tried larger rockets, like now I am using Rockomax Jumbo 64 Fuel tank with a Skipper engine.   I've tried smaller rockets, with Swivel core and  4 more swivels as outer engines.  I've tried only a swivel core with drop tanks assisted by vernier cub engines to help with liftoff.  I've tried with and without fairing over the rover. i've tried anywhere from 1/3 to full speed after liftoff.  I've tried trajectories like I am going into space, waiting until 8-10Km up to start my turn. I've done early turns.  I've tried adding wet fuel tanks next to my engine, with access to the fuel cut off, just to try balancing out the weight as the main tanks burn off fuel and weight.  NOTHING HAS WORKED.

I'm totally stumped, but this is not the first time I have seen this type of behavior.  Maybe I am missing some known ratio, stat, etc, where someone says, oh yeah, your flubbermeggudah value is too high causing you to become unstable, but, early on when I started playing Making History in career, I was seeing some simliar things with rockets that should be stable become unstable.....with no time warp engaged.   

Last thing I am going to try is building the rover in the VAB, rather than building it in SPH and saving it as a sub-system.

[kerbonara]

@djr5899 why don’t you try using an airplane? One that could detach its wings and fall using parachutes, with wheels so  it to turns into a rover. I done that already and I know @Triop did that successfully many times and has posted a lot of these designs some pages before.

Edited June 15, 2018 by kerbonara

[djr5899]

10 minutes ago, kerbonara said:

@djr5899 why don’t you try using an airplane? One that could detach its wings and fall using parachutes, with wheels so  it to turns into a rover. I done that already and I know @Triop did that successfully many times and has posted a lot of these designs some pages before.

I've never been great at airplanes, but willing to give it a shot at this point.

[kerbonara]

4 minutes ago, djr5899 said:

I've never been great at airplanes, but willing to give it a shot at this point.

Since it is not really far I think that it is worth it. It is also more precise.

[Kronus_Aerospace]

Okay So just now I was finishing up work on my PTV, I was wondering if I should add anything else, then I checked the part count.

I'm gonna call it done just because of that part count, it was destiny.

[CatastrophicFailure]

1 hour ago, djr5899 said:

I'm totally stumped, but this is not the first time I have seen this type of behavior.  Maybe I am missing some known ratio, stat, etc, where someone says, oh yeah, your flubbermeggudah value is too high causing you to become unstable, but, early on when I started playing Making History in career, I was seeing some simliar things with rockets that should be stable become unstable.....with no time warp engaged.   

You’ve got too many fins in the wrong place. 

Those fins in the middle are moving your center of lift too high, once you burn off a little fuel, your center of mass moves up, gets ahead of the center of lift, and your rocket makes like an acrobat. Eliminate the winglets in the middle, you should have an immediate improvement. All that rover on top of the rocket creates a lot of drag, especially right around the speed of sound (342 m/s give or take). If you’ve unlocked fairings, that would likely help too. 

Hang in there, this game has an incredibly steep learning curve at times. 

[netdomon1]

I have done absolutely

Edited June 15, 2018 by netdomon1

[Pipcard]

Emerald-2a and 2b landed on Bop and Pol, respectively

[Hotel26]

I recently took a spin in "Fireball" [1], an entrant in a highest-speed contest:

and the result was an ear-to-ear grin permanently stitched upon my visage that would make the Joker's Mom eternally proud.  By the time I was done, the Kerbals emerged glowing like baked potatoes from a Chernobyl microwave.  Blazingly fast (mid-1700s!!) and a ball of fun.

I realized there was a niche for a practical derivative of this amazing airplane, and I came up with Speedbird...  The objective was to fly ten (10) Kerbals to any location on Kerbin in about 20 minutes.

 

Speedbird cruises at 1650m/s @ 24km.  That's Mach 5.4+.  It clocked 20m 32s from take-off from KSC to passing over the exact, opposite point on Kerbin.

[1] aircraft's real name is unknown but author is Wanderfound

 

 

Edited June 15, 2018 by Hotel26