What did you do in KSP1 today?

[jack gamer]

On 6/12/2018 at 2:36 AM, Steeeeve said:

Just a little teaser

To me it looks really cool from that view.

7 minutes ago, Kronus_Aerospace said:

Nope! My computer is only okay by any standard, I just don't care about lag.

Hopefully it doesn't explode like the others did.

[jack gamer]

On 5/1/2018 at 11:58 AM, Blue_J said:

I lost a Kerbal last night, on a very routine mission. RIP, Beaus Kerman. That mountain is yours now.

I feel ya

[The_rocket_fan]

1 hour ago, Kronus_Aerospace said:

It's my destiny to take any concept and scale it up to ridiculous proportions.

I think I'm slightly insane.

I would imagine if there was a plane that huge

[Atkara]

Took another look at suspensions in 1.4.4 and... they look fine. Landers etc don't seem to need the drastic spring settings I had to resort to in 1.3.1, so after some testing, I set them to 0.8. Only the ATV on Eve was jumping around, but as soon as I moved it out of the outpost's physics range, saved and reloaded, it had stabilized.

Now, I do have a bunch of monoprop users which will be affected by the new tank capacities, (nothing I can't replace) and I need to do some further testing in other areas. If all goes well, I might actually migrate.

[jack gamer]

7 minutes ago, Atkara said:

Took another look at suspensions in 1.4.4 and... they look fine. Landers etc don't seem to need the drastic spring settings I had to resort to in 1.3.1, so after some testing, I set them to 0.8. Only the ATV on Eve was jumping around, but as soon as I moved it out of the outpost's physics range, saved and reloaded, it had stabilized.

Now, I do have a bunch of monoprop users which will be affected by the new tank capacities, (nothing I can't replace) and I need to do some further testing in other areas. If all goes well, I might actually migrate.

Alot of people have been complaining about the game and I don't know why.

Edited June 27, 2018 by jack gamer

[eddiew]

Invested an embarrassingly large amount of money in a ridiculously cherry picked, overclocked, delidded CPU and premium motherboard and water cooling to make KSP run better.

I must be mad. It is not worth what I paid for the ~20% improvement I will get 

(It started by thinking I really should buy a little heatsink for my m.2 drive and somehow escalated. I'm actually embarrassed about the effort I've gone to to mitigate KSP's awful lack of threading. Sorry devs, you know it's true. One day, you must work out how to do this stuff on multiple CPU cores.)

4 hours ago, Tyko said:

Looks great, as always Which mods are those solar panels and the twin-bell engine on the transfer stage from?

Cheers    I believe it's a combination of Space Y Heavy Lifters (plus SYHL Expanded), and Near Future, but it's possible the panels are MK2 Expansion.

Edited June 27, 2018 by eddiew

[kerbinorbiter]

While using a car by @DarkOwl57 this happened:

 

i litteraly head planted jeb into the KSC

thats all that was eventful today as all i really did was mess around with stuff

[Triop]

Messing around with rovers.

[MaianTrey]

Don't have a picture on-hand, but I fine-tuned my shuttle orbiter (STS replica) and got it looking pretty spiffy. Switched to using actual OMS engines that run on Monoprop rather than using the Terrier I was using before, and fixed the OMS pods to look more to-scale. Also using the Mk3 monoprop instead of the Mk3 LFO tank makes the length of the orbiter match up. Also fixed up my egress hatch (previously was blocked based on order of attachments).

All-in-all, I think it's finalized for my ISS build to start. Just need to put the payloads together again. I had the first 10 STS ISS missions set-up, but with the orbiter re-design, I'll need to set them up again.

[eddiew]

58 minutes ago, Triop said:

Messing around with rovers.

Plz call it the Wheeliebarrow  

[Cavscout74]

Managed to get a Pioneer-based probe into Moho orbit in my newest career.   I substituted solar panels for the RTG's in the original design, and stuck a few extra science experiments on board

Then I caught a nice view of Kerbin from orbit during a routine mission:

[Lisias]

2 hours ago, eddiew said:

Invested an embarrassingly large amount of money in a ridiculously cherry picked, overclocked, delidded CPU and premium motherboard and water cooling to make KSP run better.

For the sake of curiosity, what are the specs of your rig?

[Zeiss Ikon]

Following up from my previous post about making first orbit in RSS/RO/RP-1/Principia, I flew a second mission, experimenting with early second stage cutoff to give a lower orbit (the good news with a 145,000 km apogee is that it's high enough for "space high" science; the bad news is the wimpy little transmitter aboard Explorer 1 can't connect to anything on Earth (late 1951) from way up there.

That of course, allowed me to get some additional pictures.  Here's Excelsior C on the pad:

Pretty ordinary rocket, except it takes roundly three times the dV to make orbit in RSS as in the stock game.  The little spire sticking out of the fairing is the actual Explorer 1 probe (I had a tooled fairing and didn't want to spend the money to tool a longer one or use a one-off for a rocket I was pretty sure I'd launch only twice); below it is the single Baby Sergeant, atop the 3x stage, which is nestled into the center of the 11x stage, all of which sit on top of a (probably overengineered) stage with three AJ10-42 engines and a couple tiny ullage motors.

The LR-79 core motor takes a longish time to clear its throat after the verniers are already going.  Fortunately, the launch clamps have fuel pumps so the tanks stay topped up until I disengage the clamps.  The verniers are LR-101s; they gimbal in one direction (I don't have them set up correctly, however, as I discovered during this launch -- they can't produce roll, but just assist in yaw).  They've got lots of travel.  The LR-79 also has a few degrees of gimbal, enough for this rocket not to require fins.

The Castor 1 strap-on boosters stage with the launch clamps; they come up to thrust in less than a second.  With them, instead of a 1.2 sea-level TWR, I get around a 1.6.  They burn for 28 seconds, by which time the rocket is 6 km up and nudging Mach.

I really enjoy having separation motors available from the get-go.  They're smaller than a Sepratron, with a little less thrust and just over half the burn time (for these "small" ones), but they're very useful for a variety of things like spinning up a stage that'll fire too high for fins to do anything, managing ullage, and so forth.  They work well for pushing boosters away, too.  Must remember to start putting parachutes on those things; from this altitude, they'd have time to deploy and I'd get back much of the cost of the boosters.

Not sure what was causing it, but I started getting uncommanded roll at around 25 km -- this was when I realized that the verniers are mounted sideways -- they can yaw, but they can't roll the craft.  That distracted me a bit, then I had to time my control inputs to match the roll as it built up, and I wound up going several hundred kilometers higher apogee on this launch compared to the previous.  I also forgot to take any more pictures, but I was able to cut off the second stage at about 3200 m/s (virtually horizontal by that point) and fire the Baby Sergeant clusters (which I now know are good for a bit over 5 km/s when pushing the tiny Explorer 1 probe).  I had the craft pointing below the horizon, trying to minimize the excessive apogee, and the resulting orbit has a perigee of only 164 km, but apogee is just 6600 km; it stays in contact through the entire orbit (not that there's much "near Earth" science left to get by this point).

Here's the orbit of the first Explorer -- the multiple traces are due to Principia keeping the orbit track, thus revealing the way the orbit shifts due to perturbations (in this case, mainly from the Moon).

In the same time frame, the lower, hence shorter period orbit of the second Explorer made several more loops.  All these tracks cross above/below each other at a location beyond the horizon of this shot.  Now I really understand why long term missions need to have maneuvering capability -- they need  to adjust their orbits to continue observing their targets or to keep their science instruments correctly oriented relative to the body they're orbiting.

[NightshineRecorralis]

I noticed that the J-90 Goliath has blades that spin backwards, like they're blowing air from the front rather than the rear. Kinda interesting

[Lisias]

2 minutes ago, NightshineRecorralis said:

I noticed that the J-90 Goliath has blades that spin backwards, like they're blowing air from the front rather than the rear. Kinda interesting

Is probably due the framerate. The time needed to a blade do a full rotation is less than the time the engine is giving to each frame.

Something similar to this:

 

[NightshineRecorralis]

Just now, Lisias said:

Is probably due the framerate. The time needed to a blade do a full rotation is less than the time the engine is giving to each frame.

Something similar to this:

 

Perhaps. but when you activate an engine it spools up from zero and the reverse rotation then is quite obvious

[NightshineRecorralis]

6 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Is probably due the framerate. The time needed to a blade do a full rotation is less than the time the engine is giving to each frame.

Something similar to this:

 

If you look at the the center spindle rotation and the blade pitch, it looks like it's spinning backwards no matter at what framerate.

[Lisias]

Well… Today, finally my dirty and cheap bean counting backfired.  

I got overconfident and took some tourist missions that needs me to orbit on a determined inclination without having enough tech level to have the advanced avionics such missions need (no radials, no normals, no waypoints). 

So… I launched a biplane, make a low pass over the launch pad while finding the bearing using the Lat/Long coordinates and found the needed bearing. Nice, now all I have to do is to manually roll/yaw the rocket while launching before it gets too much velocity. What could possible go wrong?  

Long story made short, at aproximatelly 1/3 of the ascent I completely loose control of the rocket. Boy, you need to see the tourists faces. 

In the heat of the moment, I forgot to activate the Automated Screenshots, so only the final moments are here (as uncontrolled rockets were a novelty around here…):

Since I'm not paying insurance, killing my customers would be too much expensive and, so, the rocket is somewhat over engineered - I managed to regain control by cutting the throttle until the Inertia Coupling stops to be a factor (yeah, I learnt about it this week, I'm using it for everything!  ), then throttled up a bit to a retrograde maneuver and then just used the fuel I have to a controlled descent until the parachutes could be deployed safely.

This last part of the mission is routine already, I could land it on terrain and probably without using parachutes if I wanted to.

Well… A reasonable Program Manager would invest some Science and Money on tech and facilities, right? Not me.

I'm committed to fulfil missions with the lowest tech/facility levels I can. Making/saving lots of money on the process is a beneficial collateral effect (I'm not complaining), but it's not the main objetive. So I remembered the biplane stunt for finding the bearing and decide to go Virgin Galactic: I made a tetra-plane launching vehicle.  

This huge lady carries a 50 tons rocket, more fuel enough to circumnavigate Kerbin. This is the maiden flight, full loaded, to a semi polar route to test fuel consumption and maximum altitude without and then with rocket assistance, in order to figure out the better flight profile for the launching.

The glass cockpit (from Airplane Plus) allow an excellent situation awareness, allowing to monitor engines and the rocket under the pilot's feet. I'm already on the part limit for this combo vessels (255 parts, 140 tons), but I'm trying to squeeze a part or two to put some external cameras for the launch!

I'll let her fly until (Kerbin) dawn and then I will edit this with one or two more pictures.  

(It's way more fun playing the game in the very inverse way as it was intended!  )

From now, a night shot with Interior Overlay:

POST-EDIT:

"Oh me, oh my, oh dear… oh its doomsday…" - as Hardy Har Har woud say. =P

Kerbin's circumference is about 3.770km. At the speed I was traveling, it would took 18500 seconds to circumnavigate - or about 5.2 hours. Almost a full day.

However, at the inclination I choose to travel (almost polar), it also means that I took the whole voyage by night. I was essentially running from the Sun. So, no nice pictures!

Ok, at least I mapped some Kerbin using Scansat's Altimeter Senson, right? no. I forgot to activate it. DAMN.

I'll scratch the mission and try again tomorrow.  

Edited June 28, 2018 by Lisias
last shot of the night; (un)mission report

[Mythical Donuts]

Today I landed an Apollo-style mission on Iota (Galileos Planet Pack) using an adorable little lander called the Beagle. In the end I ran out of fuel, but I made it to orbit with my unreasonably large amount of monopropellant and saved Jeb and Sigma.

[Ultimate Steve]

On ‎6‎/‎26‎/‎2018 at 6:37 PM, Hotaru said:

 

Sure enough, the crew came back from their year-long mission only about 10% radioactive. (And 43% insane after a year in cramped quarters with no gravity ring, but the experiment was about radiation, not sanity.)

What mod adds this?

[djr5899]

Just completed my landing and return from Minmus mission on KSP:EE for Xbox. Tomorrow and through the weekend, I hope to get some satellites up in this new save, get a small refueling station up around Kerbin, and hopefully this weekend, make my first ever Duna trip and return in any KSP version.

I do believe the current rocket and lander that I used to go to Mun & Minmus likely has enough fuel to get me to Duna and back as well, but, just to be on the safe side, I will likely refuel my main stage Mammoth engine before heading to Duna.

[Angelo Kerman]

This morning I launched some elements to my space station, and tonight I continued designing a Cormorant shuttle for my story that's competitor to the KSOS (the Cormorant one wins).

[JadeOfMaar]

I created a stock Stratolauncher (except for the Tweakscale in the intake...and the mod verniers have been removed).

This Pod Racer style lifter only holds half its capacity in LF and easily takes 50 tons to Mach 4... and still has plenty fuel and good handling to return to the KSC... provided the carried vehicle doesn't collide and break the wing bar.

It does not noodle. The nacelles are not attached after the wing bar. They're attached to the Mk0 core and offset that far out to maintain joint strength.

I tried replacing the Whiplashes with Rapiers but then it crawls to Mach 4 in a shallow climb with the added LFO mass and constantly drifts sideways (probably due to slanted fins on the other test plane)...and ceases to be recoverable. I'll put this on KerbalX once I have a good codename and updated screenshots.

   

Edited June 28, 2018 by JadeOfMaar

[Aeroboi]

I started my new KCT/UBM/SETI career using well over 100 mods with GPO/OPM and Extrasolar while having fun doing the USI sounding rocket missions. I'm a bit dissapointed about the fast deployment rate of the parachute and the nearly immediate speed arrest once deployed. I know it should be fast for a small sounding rocket but it still seems to fast. So far there's nothing but small details to complain about and more interesting launches are to follow.

 

[CobaltShock]

I'm a big fan of my 2 man capsule