What did you do in KSP1 today?

[ARS]

Just flying around with new aircraft, M21 Balalaika

[Triop]

14 hours 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.

@djr5899 Here is a simple but effective design:

Goodluck.

@Kerbal Design Bureau Welcome to the forum, eh.

Edited June 15, 2018 by Triop

[Cavscout74]

Today I fine-tuned my mid-size DSEV/crew cycler design and got one into orbit in career, then landed a Lancer ground station on Moho for a contract - which also provides me limited refueling capability on Moho, so win-win.

Prototype DSEV-01 Arcterra in orbit as the launch crew departs in the Pomegranate reentry pod.   I'm pretty happy with this design - has room for up to 28(?) kerbals, ~42 km/s dV, fusion primary power with RTG & solar backup. 

Rear view

Lancer-Moho ground station after landing - surprisingly intact after initially landing on its side.  Happily the reaction wheels & RCS had enough strength to turn it upright.   For landing, the base has fuel tanks, rcs & engines attached to the docking ports on each end, plus a skycrane near the center, all equipped with Tac Self-Destruct charges for disposal after landing to reduce part count.

[Triop]

Upgraded my flying car for a surface mission, the design looks crazy, but it handles much better now.

Touch down !

Edited June 15, 2018 by Triop

[Zeiss Ikon]

On 6/14/2018 at 6:29 PM, Lisias said:

Tritium is radio active, isn't?

Well, yes, but only a but more than half the reactive mass of the fuel pellets is tritium, if in fact they're D-T type.  That depends on the exact fusion technology they're designed for.  For a Daedalus drive, I'd expect to use an aneutronic reaction like deuterium-₁₁boron.  Boron in the water isn't great, but it should react into borates pretty shortly.  And nothing in those pellets would be radioactive at all above background.

[eddiew]

Couple of useful but largely unexciting rescue missions.

Nothing hard about low Gael orbit, so just the standard Skylance spaceplane. Had about 800m/s left over...

[Scaprod]

Touched up on a mothership mission and a ring station.

[Xurkitree]

I finally finished docking the science equipment module to my space station. 

And it’s weird how it happened.

me: spends 15 minutes carefully lining up docking ports and try to let them dock naturally only to find that the acceleration bangs it so hard the reaction flings it away.

MechJeb: Give up and hand control of Space station to it, SWINGS the station in one movement and docks while traveling in a curve.All done within a minute.

Me:What?!??

[GDJ]

Getting familiar again with BDAC. So far so good.

[mystifeid]

Put a 16-wheeler on Tylo and drove it 1000km to pick up the Kerbals before starting the 1200km trip to the cave.

It has two verniers for the hills and driving it without risk means keeping it down to 80m/s although it handles well up to 100m/s. Faster than that and bumps will eventually push it around in a very soft 180° slide. Either that or something will explode.

So far it has survived a 30m jump above the surface at speed.

I thought I'd get bored quickly but going that fast is fairly gripping. I probably look like my pilot in the middle below.

Edited June 16, 2018 by mystifeid

[AngrybobH]

In my search for a long range plane to fly around to anomalies on Kerbin, I made this small plane with really large engines.

I fought inertial coupling (I didn't even know KSP would simulate that correctly) for sometime before remembering some planes made the tail anhedral to counteract it. That worked very well and this plane outperformed my expectations. After building that I decided to try my hand at a flying wing.

 

It flies. But, like the Northrop YB-49 it has severe yaw stability problems and stalling the wings is a death sentence.

 

[Enceos]

Returned my heavy freighter from the fueling trip. Brought back some sweet combustibles :3

Edited June 16, 2018 by Enceos

[CobaltShock]

Did the first tourist mission in our space program. Pictured is Kirbald Gaelan on an EVA during the mission in orbit of Gael

[Gargamel]

Well, after many years of playing this game, I finally landed on Eve!

 

Well, it counts as a landing.   I'm only missing like 90% of the ship!  The flag stopped the pod from rolling down the hill.   This is the most Kerbal thing I've done in a long long time.  Usually my designs work as intended.   Love it!  The surviving drogue chutes and the not rated for atmosperic use OMS engine slowed it down enough to not break anything.  

The rest of it burnt up during entry (re-entry?  Never been there, so....).  I had run multiple tests on Kerbin to make sure the lander could survive the heat, the aero, and have plenty of dV left to launch again (about 7800 left after landing).  This was my first test on Eve.   I think it'll work, just gotta figure out what to do about the heat buildup in the leading heat shield.    The heatshield on top is for stability.  But it's gonna make docking this thing a pain, as it will travel to Eve unmanned, and then dock with the mother ship there.   I plan on having an ISRU rover and a Hab/science rover there too, as the Life support on this thing isn't long enough for more than 50 days or so.  I plan on taking the Mothership to Moho, and then back to Eve to pick up the surface mission. 

 

Edited June 16, 2018 by Gargamel

[Zeiss Ikon]

Last night, I lost both Jeb and Val in my RSS/RO/RP-1/Principia career.

No, not in a crash -- haven't yet flown anything manned, and that's the problem.  They retired -- Jeb in late 1957, and Val a year later -- because they hadn't been assigned any interesting missions.  That, in turn, is because (due to Kerbal Construction Time) it's taking more than a year to build and roll out a large sounding rocket, like a Bumper (A-4, aka V-2, with a WAC Corporal in the nose).  The real world flew eight of these Bumper rockets in two years, starting in 1948 -- one of them was the first rocket ever launched from Cape Canaveral, in 1950.  It's taken me seven in-game years to launch a couple WAC Corporals, an upgraded WAC (second Tiny Tim booster added), a couple unmodified A-4, and IIRC three Bumpers.  If the real world space program had proceeded at this pace, we'd still be flying Gemini capsules and figuring out docking.

Clearly, I need to look at the settings for KCT -- the RP-0 preset is toooooo slow...

[Lisias]

So, after two days diagnosing constant crashes while trying this mission (what was solved by deleting Kramax and recompiling KAX, Atmosphere AutoPilot, KER and Firespitter locally - not sure if all of this was needed, but the problem has gone after this recompile fest), I finally managed to really use my QuadraPlane  Long Range Explorer.

The Primary Mission was to take measurements on the low atmosphere near that island on the South Pole neighborhoods. The Secondary Mission was to map the the whole region in order to plan some Contracts I have there (using the SCAN Radar Altimetry Sensor). The Tertiary Mission was to land on the island once the mapping is done and a nice plain is available.

The Primary and Secondary missions were accomplished, but I found that the extremely low clearance of the lowest wing set from the ground would made impossible land there without damaging the airplane. Since at the time we would had less than half of the total fuel needed for the mission, this wing set would not be really needed and could be sacrificed - but I choose to keep the airplane intact and the crew safe. If anything goes wrong, I don't have a plane that simultaneously can land on rough terrain and fly long distances - while the Long Range can fly for approximately 2800Km (almost fully used on this mission), my next best plane that could land there can reach a bit more than the half: I probably could reach the location, but would no be able to come back (not to mention the insufficient seat count).

So, after 7 hours of torture and landscape sighting, the mission is over and it was a success: terrain mapped, contracts fulfilled and airplane field proven. I couldn't be more proud of my cheap'n'dirty approach to carry on my current contracts.

Spoiler

Landscape viewing (not that much to be seen, but beautiful skies):

The Mission Profile. The leg to the East was mapped on the Long Range Explorer maiden flight. This mission is the leg going south:

Arriving at home after more than one Kerbal Day of continuous flight:

That low clearance from the ground is a PITA even on the airstrip, you have to land almost perfectly leveled, or you will loose some parts on the lower wing-set. This big lady will not be used for landing on dirty lands. Airstrip only, baby.

Another issue is handling this baby with low fuel. She need to be stable with tanks full, so all the control surfaces were trimmed to the full weight. But on the end of the mission, she's too light! While turning to enter into the downwind leg, I hit the rudders a bit too more than I needed, and she yawed 180º on me! Instantaneous deep stall!!!!  However, the huge lifting surface and the now tremendous overpowered engines recovered from the stall in less than 100 meters - not bad. But that would be fatal on the final approach. 

On the aftermath, I need now a low-tech solution for the surface measurements contracts, not to mention the high atmosphere ones that my planes don't even dream on reach.

Well... Time for some blimps.

 

Edited June 17, 2018 by Lisias
better choose of words.

[Addemup2002]

Yesterday, I landed a probe on the Mun... well, sort of:

[KerikBalm]

Yesterday I was re-examining my mission that is coming together in kerbin's SOI for dpearture to the Duna-Rald system... I decided that my surface base would go on Duna first (and that I'd revert duna to the dry and lifeless version, not my version with seas and green around the edges... too similar to Rald) for role playing reasons (a base to study stuff before taking the greater contamination risk of going to Rald).

My Duna cargo shuttle was still sub-par... I had used the "bandaid" of putting chutes on it, but then it can't operate over multiple trip independently of an engineer Kerbal... so I went back to the drawing board, and I figured that I'd stop trying to make plane designs- they still need vertical lift rockets, and its really hard to design them to be balanced for vertical and horizontal thrust, with and without payload/a full fuel load. Furthermore, the ramp angle was too high, and I wanted something that could get lower to the ground to make loading certain modules easier. Keep in mind this is a custom 3x Duna, surface gravity increased to 125%, atmosphere density decreased to 95%, atmosphere height set to 90km (not 150km, as you'd get by taking the stock 50km and multiplying by 3).

So... I tried a design like what I use on airless bodies, land vertically, and tip over, with a burst of a2nd set of rockets to bring the nose down gently... add in some airbrakes and body lift to save dV, and it should be good eh? nope, not really:

This isn't going to stop in time

Even when I started the burn in time, the stronger gravity and much larger craft mass made pulling this off (its pretty easy on Mun) too challenging

Its a shame, it looked cool coming in:

Spoiler

So I went with a winged design with a single aerospike at the back that I can tweak the thrust in real time for balance. To save part count I used the big airliner wings, but its more part-clippy than I'd like:

Spoiler

After it passed its payload test, I remembered to add an antenna to it (didn't have comm net enabled in the sandbox test), and sent it up piggyback on my large cargo SSTO, the airliner wings barely survived the heat during ascent:

It had just enough fuel to do the plane change for Mun (moved to where minmus was), do the ejection burn for Mun, and capture into low Munar orbit for refueling.

After completing the ejection burn, I realized that I forgot something fairly important....

I didn't give it an external docking port!

I don't have anything with claws at Mun meant for this, and I wasn't going to use claws at Duna-Rald either... 

Spoiler

I think I'm going to edit the save file to add one to this.... what a pain in the arsch

Its currently equipped module has a claw at one end... so I can try and do something like this again:

Of course, that ship did have an external docking port at the back, a 2.5m one, but my station/ship/mun lab and fuel depot that I launched earlier in the career only had 1.25m and 0.625m ports

[Azimech]

Work has started on the 1966 Dodge Charger. Here you see it next to my '69 Charger. It's a bit slower than the '69 (85 m/s) and too much lift on the rear makes it nervous & jumpy but that's something I'll solve soon.

As always 100% stock. This is version 0.3. What do you think?

 

https://imgur.com/a/uF2ybUR

On 6/13/2018 at 7:02 AM, Bakkerbaard said:

I wasn't gonna post, but then Space Oddity played during one of my many Space Station docking procedures and since I'm high on Mechjeb I had all the time to enjoy the show with the right soundtrack. 

Also, the station is supposed to build rockets so it's called Corellia. Nobody cares, you'd say, but I have to put it somewhere. I don't wanna be the only one that thinks that was an awesome idea.

Als ik niet oppas ben ik een baardbakker. Of was 't baardschroeier?

[Bakkerbaard]

27 minutes ago, Azimech said:

Work has started on the 1966 Dodge Charger. Here you see it next to my '69 Charger. It's a bit slower than the '69 (85 m/s) and too much lift on the rear makes it nervous & jumpy but that's something I'll solve soon.

As always 100% stock. This is version 0.3. What do you think?

I think that forking awesome. If there's gonna be a '70 Challenger, I wanna download it and send that to the moon to survey.

28 minutes ago, Azimech said:

Als ik niet oppas ben ik een baardbakker. Of was 't baardschroeier?

Hangt ervan af hoe dicht ik bij de uitlaat sta. ;o)

Do we know eachother?

[Azimech]

3 minutes ago, Bakkerbaard said:

I think that forking awesome. If there's gonna be a '70 Challenger, I wanna download it and send that to the moon to survey.

Hangt ervan af hoe dicht ik bij de uitlaat sta. ;o)

Do we know eachother?

I do have a '71 Challenger and I'm updating it right now to KSP 1.4.x specs. I'll post the link when I'm finished.

And I don't believe we know each other (yet).

[eddiew]

Bumped into Tora Gaelan while she was stranded in a perilously low orbit above an alien world orbiting an alien star... Fortunately the engineering team overspec everything, including seating room.

She might have to sit in the airlock on the way home, but that's better than it could have been, eh Tora?

Darn tootin' it is.

 

[Triop]

22 hours ago, GDJ said:

Getting familiar again with BDAC. So far so good.

I should do the same...

Anybody got a link to the final working version for me ?

Spoiler

 

Edited June 17, 2018 by Triop

[Zeiss Ikon]

I restarted my RSS/RO/RP-1/Principia career with different settings.  I think I've got Kerbal Construction Time set a little too lenient this time; I'm cranking out Bumper-Hi (A-4 booster with what amounts to an Aerobee 100 -- upgraded WAC Corporal, good for about 935 km alttitude) in 10-13 days, depending which VAB is doing the work; a Hyperfly (butterfly tail attempt at an X-1 analog, complicated by the fact there are no larger aircraft to air launch the supersonic hopeful) takes a similar amount of time in a significantly less upgraded SPH.  Seems to me it should take something like twice this long, but I'm not sure how to change the KCT settings to achieve that goal.  Then again, I've already gotten Jeb and Val to extend their retirement dates, and hope to get the Hyperfly off the runway in one piece (ideally, back on in the same condition as well) soon.

No photos at present; too busy building and flying and forgot to hit F1. 

[Mythical Donuts]

Hello forum world! I have lurked on here for a while now, and now I decided to stop being a lazy toad and sign up!