What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Klapaucius]

I took my gargantuan jet for a scenic flight in the southern polar mountains.  It's not very fast, but it is the most complex thing I ever built.

[RealKerbal3x]

16 minutes ago, Klapaucius said:

I took my gargantuan jet for a scenic flight in the southern polar mountains.  It's not very fast, but it is the most complex thing I ever built.

That is the coolest jet I’ve ever seen.

[Klapaucius]

3 hours ago, RealKerbal3x said:

That is the coolest jet I’ve ever seen.

Thanks!  It's great to get feedback like that. It keeps me going   It's up on KerbalX if you are interested.  https://kerbalx.com/Klapaucius/Gormenghast-300-Person-Luxo-Liner

Edited September 10, 2018 by Klapaucius

[Kernel Kraken]

I built a B.O.A.T.

A boyancy operated aquatic transport.

I stole that from Phineas and Ferb.

[Hotel26]

Kerbal inter-space-station rivalry pranks:

Spoiler

 

"Yo!  Kerbals in da space station!  Yo order mono-prop!?"

"Uh.  Noooo....  pizza...  Youse guys Dominoes...?"

 

 

Edited September 10, 2018 by Hotel26

[capi3101]

7 hours ago, Klapaucius said:

I took my gargantuan jet for a scenic flight in the southern polar mountains.  It's not very fast, but it is the most complex thing I ever built.

 

 

Trurl put you up to that, Klapaucius?

In seriousness, that's an amazing looking design.




Had a pretty slow weekend in KSP my own self, though that's largely because I spent my time playtesting a new board game prototype I've been working on of late. With the Exploration contract to put a craft into Munar orbit and Jeb and Val already in orbit of Kerbin aboard twin Gurney 7 rescue ships late Friday, the decision was made to sent Val on towards Mun for the contract on account of her craft having more available delta-V. Jeb went ahead and returned safely to Kerbin. I picked up a Mun satellite contract and my first rescue mission for this career save. A Boop-Boop 7 probe was launched towards Mun and another Gurney 7 was launched to LKO, where a successful rescue mission of scientist Lemgun Kerman was affected. I pulled another LKO rescue mission on Friday, successfully retreiving scientist Antrey Kerman from LKO. Enough money was made to upgrade Mission Control to Level 3. Next was the first tourist mission this career save, a job to send tourists Donler and Pomeroy Kerman to Kerbin's orbit. Jeb sent the pair up in a Kerbal Tour Bus 7 craft.

Pomeroy is just absolutely thrilled about this expensive trip he booked. Seriously. Just look at his face, right?

The mission was a success, with Jeb returning the pair to Kerbin not far from KSC.


Trajectories is an awesome mod. It's even better when you figure out how to use it correctly. Me, I'm still not used to all the changes that have been made to KER in my absence. I think I like them, though...

Last thing that happened Friday was a four point temperature survey in the vicinity of KSC. My tech tree isn't far enough along for a proper rover design, so I conducted the survey with a Kerbal Shopping Cart...craft. Let's call it a craft.


A Kerbal Shopping Cart. Good enough if you ain't got better.

I did have some early problems conducting the mission with the Shopping Cart of the unnecessarily 'splody kind, but then I slung twenty tonnes of NRAP test weight to the underside to lower its CoM; solved that issue quickly enough. Love the new inline test weight design on that mod...

Weekend itself saw Jeb performing an aerial survey aboard a Bad Idea 1a craft; his plane developed issues with its tail section upon landing (namely, it lacked a tail section once it came to a stop) but otherwise he was successful. Another Kerbal Tour Bus run took place on Sunday, with Jeb sending tourists Gileny, Tedrigh, Digun and Leedard to LKO and back. Finally, Val reached the Mun, where her craft was put into a polar orbit.

 
I finally won the argument of periapsis...

Val has been collecting low orbital EVA reports from the Mun's biomes. She's still at it as of this morning, with all but the largest craters covered. Her craft doesn't have any other science instruments and it's not equipped to land, so one she's done she'll be heading for home. Meantime, the Boop Boop 7 has also reached Mun and I'll be putting it into orbit in just over an hour's time. Hopefully I'll get it into its contract position on the first go.

Edited September 10, 2018 by capi3101
just fixing some formatting.

[Cavscout74]

My Bop lander arrived, so I sent the crew lounging around in Laythe orbit over to do some exploring there. 

PCC-05B Everstar Grove in polar Bop orbit, waiting to rendezvous with the lander

Heading down to investigate an anomaly

Spoiler

There it is, don't set down too close.  Just in case

Once again, send the expendable scientist to check the anomaly while the engineer & pilot prep the lander for a quick escape

Up close and personal.   My first time ever meeting the dead kraken!!

After finishing their exploration, this crew is already heading back home.  The next crew will arrive in the same wave of ships as the replacement Laythe spaceplanes.

[purpleivan]

Today (well actually yesterday)... a couple of things.

Big Rover

Decided to send a self refueling lab rover to the Mun, because, well why not.

 

Mini Boat

At the other end of the scale, both in terms of size and distance from the KSC was my mini boat. This was the first time I've tried to make any kind of boat and I thought I'd start small, which in hindsight might have been a mistake.

Here's version 1 at the water's edge on its transporter.

After deployment from the transport things did not go well... ah well, back to the old drawing board.

Version 2 got stuck on the transport and the pilot had to jump into the water and give it a shove to free it. Needn't have bothered as it too was a failure.

Several redesigns later I finally got something into the water that didn't roll over immediately

So off our brave pilot goes, the salt of the sea in his face, the sounds of gulls overhead. What could be better... hit the throttle and give it more power, that's what. I mean what could go wrong.

I guess that could...

A little dazed the pilot survived the ordeal, but now refuses to have anything to do with boats. Flying around at thousands of metres per second in a vacuum is much safer.

Edited September 10, 2018 by purpleivan

[Mr. Peabody]

                                                    I did get this today: 

                                                 

                                                    No, I don't have a craft named "runway." 

 

 

Edited September 10, 2018 by The Dunatian

[ProtoJeb21]

Today I did some mid-course corrections for Ausra II and Hera II. The latter is going to use a close Laythe flyby to get captured around Jool in a little under 2 in-game years, while the former was going to do at least one Duna aerobrake to slow down. However, since there was still over 200 in-game days until Ausra II would reach its target, I decided to do a few more things.

First, it was time to land the Hermes III Lander on Moho, regardless of whether or not I could get back to Kerbin. I already had all of the main vessel's fuel transferred into the lander, so it ended up having around 1.9 km/s of dV to use. I thought that would be enough to get back to the main vessel if nothing went wrong. Key word: if. When I landed the first time, the lander was about to fall over and break something, so I had to fly it off and try landing again. Once that ordeal was over, I didn't nearly have enough fuel to get back to Hermes III, so I had no choice but to transmit all my science data. I was hoping to recover the Mystery Goo and Science Jr data and get max science points, but I still got tons of it anyways.

With still so much time until Aursa II's Duna arrival, I decided to do the first of many missions meant to take extensive science analyses of the less explored biomes of Kerbin, the Mun, and Minmus. I checked the R&D science archives and found that I only had two total science reports from the Mun's poles biome, so I quickly assembled a small unmanned lander named Polus I (for obvious reasons) and launched it on a small but surprisingly efficient booster. The lander itself had almost 3 km/s of dV, which was enough to get it to the Mun, settle into a polar orbit, and land with over 500 m/s still left. Landing was a bit tricky due to the extremely rugged and uneven terrain of the Mun's north pole, but noting broke, and I may have enough fuel to hop over to the Polar Lowlands biome. Polus I is the first of two more probes meant to get complete science reports from the poles of Kerbin system objects.

Finally, I ended up timewarping until Ausra II's arrival at Duna and got it into orbit while gathering some orbital and high atmosphere science. My initial plan was to do a few Duna aerobrakes to lower my apoapsis to less than 100 km, then to circularize. The whole procedure would've saved about a few hundred m/s of dV for the return home. However, I misjudged how low my perapsis should've been and I ended up having to capture myself the normal way while saving absolutely no fuel. Oh well 

[Zeiss Ikon]

22 hours ago, djr5899 said:

I have been fighting a game bug the last few days.  Have two missions to retrieve objects from space and then recover them on Kerbin.  I built a rocket/shuttle hybrid with a cargo bay, to open the cargo bay doors and allow the Pomegranate rentry module to just float into the cargo bay, and close the doors.  This part worked pretty well and as planned.  The first Pomegranate module was in very LKO, with Apoapsis of only 78Km.  The problem became, once I had the module in the cargo bay, ANY type of time acceleration makes the module clip through the cargo bay module and back into space.  I was able to get the LKO module back home and on the ground, but, the other one is in orbit of the Mun, so, I see it as impossible to retrieve without allowing any time warp to take place.  I mean, technically, it is possible, but I'm not leaving the game running for 20 hours just to prevent the module from clipping back into space.  

This is a known issue, going back to at least 1.3.1 as I recall.  You need to attach the collected module in some manner to keep it contained during time warp.  This is because the game doesn't calculated collision while warping, I think.  I'd suggest mounting a KLAW inside the cargo bay of your rescue vessels...

29 minutes ago, The Dunatian said:

                                                    I did get this today: 

                                                 

                                                    No, I don't have a craft named "runway." 

 

 

I wonder, would you have a craft called "Runway" if you allowed the game to recover Runway for you? 

[Crocket]

A little sneak peak of what's to come, because I love you all so much:

[RoboRay]

I designed LR79 boosters for my Titan'ish rocket from the previous page so I can do contracts for heavy comsats in GSO...

I also finalized the core and upper stage designs, tooled everything that's procedural (all the fuel tanks, decouplers and fairings), made it all purty, and put the launch vehicles into serial production.  I've got a dozen of these queued up in KCT (minus payload), which will take a little while because I've only got two High Bays in my VAB.  I need to upgrade that again, too.

My space program has received a couple of contract proposals for Venus and Mars flybys, and I think this rocket can make those happen.

Edited September 10, 2018 by RoboRay

[Triop]

Edited September 13, 2018 by Triop

[Crocket]

With the success of the Artemis 2-RL in biome-hopping and tech-tree-chopping, the KSC was scrambling to create a rocket that could give the same treatment to Minmus on short notice. The engineering department thinks they did a rather good job with the parts they "salvaged" from a private scrapyard.

Spoiler

Here is a profile of the Spearmint 3, with the dream team of Lisley and Wehrdan at the helm. Well, less dream team than meme team.

I actually got quite a bit of science from determining that boosters could, in fact, be camera-shy.

One of the main problems of this mission was that I neglected to put any batteries on the craft, leaving the craft with only 10 electric charge from the probe core. This meant that, even with the upper stage's alternator, I could only perform maneuvers in the sunlight. In short: yikes.

My dear, prepare to be probed.

On the Spearmint 3's first stop, the Lesser Flats, Lisley stopped to investigate a strange alien construction that looked surprisingly like the booster she just dropped.

I took this because I noticed how much the Spearmint 3 looked like some sort of exotic bird.

Their next stop was the Midlands. It was wild trying to stop here, mainly because of another problem: the craft relied entirely on the probe core's reaction wheel and the engine gimbal. In short: double yikes.

After the Midlands, the dynamic duo jetted straight up to the Poles. Since Lisley had explored pretty much every biome she could see on the bright side, she vied to take a quick trip to the dark side and wait for day to explore more.

From Lisley's new vantage point, she and Wehrdan jetted off to the Greater Flats. Lisley just couldn't seem to put it down, and Wehrdan screaming vague instructions didn't help.

Wehrdan had seen everything. It was time to leave.

I always seem to take painfully dark screenshots, so here's a painfully bright screenshot.

Oh, and third problem: no heatshield. Luckily, I slowed it down enough with the lander stage to keep anything from exploding.

Lisley had to put up the solar panels to maintain the guideline of "pointy side up".

Alright, say it with me, kids: bad design works and gives you a huge profit.

Real talk, though: I think -- think -- I should have sufficient tech for Duna with that extra 2.6k science. Wish me luck: the window is 28 days away, and is my next mission for sure.

 

 

 

[Zosma Procyon]

I got Screenflick2 and started a Youtube channel. Mostly because I have a boat base almost at Laythe, might land it tomorrow. Hear is my first clip. Revetting film.

 

[Elowiny]

Recently, I built a mighty massive Eiffel Tower spacecraft, using some tweakscale.

Each of the large white tanks is 20m in diameter. (Here shown with large vector engines, but final design uses Rhinos to go to other planets)

It is currently about 550m tall (Larger than the real thing, yes). I plan to build it a launcher, to get it into space. This is the size of the fuel tanks used for the launcher. Yes, that's a mammoth engine.

Not sure where to send it, though.

Edited September 11, 2018 by Elowiny

[hargn]

Hi @RoboRay and @kurgut

Very nice designs for your first manned orbit.

Do you use RP-0 or RP-1 ?

I have an issue with the procedural fairing textures : I cannot switch any texture for my fairings (as I was able to do in my RP-0 career on KSP 1.2.2).
But, as I can see, your designs have some of them.
Did you add an mod/texture package that I missed?

EDIT : Maybe that comes from Procedural Fairings - For Everythings. I do not know if it's installed in my game nor if it's avaible for KSP 1.3.1.

Edited September 11, 2018 by hargn

[RoboRay]

1 hour ago, hargn said:

Hi @RoboRay and @kurgut

Very nice designs for your first manned orbit.

Do you use RP-0 or RP-1 ?

I have an issue with the procedural fairing textures : I cannot choose any texture for my fairings (as I was able to do in my RP-0 career on KSP 1.2.2).
But, as I can see, your designs have some of them.
Did you add an mod/texture package that I missed?

I'm playing in RP-1 on KSP 1.3.1 and haven't had any issue selecting textures for Procedural Fairings, either by picking the desired fairing part from the VAB parts list or by cycling through fairing textures from the part right-click menu once it's attached to the fairing base. 

However, I'm only using the Procedural Fairings parts for the payload fairing on satellite/probe launches.  The manned launches didn't use PF at all.  Here is what I'm using for the "production" version:

Edit: I do have Procedural Fairings for Everything installed, too, but I don't think it was actually used for any of this. 

I've only recently started using SSTU, and found that it is indispensable for building low-part-count and good-looking proceduralish rockets in Realism Overhaul (which is also new to me...  I've only been using RO for about a month).

 

Edited September 11, 2018 by RoboRay

[Hotel26]

I took Kannonball for a high-speed trial on the Brighton run: 20 km at a sustained 100m/s (360 kmh / 220 mph, for about 3 minutes)

Smooth as silk, no serious crests...  will explore the speed limit on this route...

 

Edited September 11, 2018 by Hotel26

[capi3101]

I spent a fair amount of time yesterday with Val aboard a Gurney 7 rescue ship in a polar orbit over Mun, collecting low orbital EVA reports in my (still early) career save. With her mission completed after a pass over the Twin Craters, Val burned for Kerbin and returned safely, having collected 450 points of science from EVAs alone. This gave me enough sci to completely unlock all of Tier 5 and a few parts of Tier 6, enough to bring the much more advanced Bad Idea 2 surveyor plane to a usable state. She also unlocked enough funding for me to fully upgrade the Runway. I also finished putting a Boop Boop 7 probe over Mun for contract, requiring one minor correction burn after the orbital insertion burn. 

Rest of my day was spent with Jeb aboard the Bad Idea 2:

Bad Idea 2 at sunrise #1.

At this point I was deciding whether to get that other contract on the right side of Kerbin, or turn around and head back to the space center...


Best screenie I've got of the Bad Idea 2 plane. Panther-equipped for less sucky maneuvering.


Jeb forgot to pay his electric bill yesterday, so he figured he'd fly around Kerbin to the previous day. That's how temporal mechanics works, right? We'll see how well he can look that up using candlelight...
 

I hadn't intended to perform a full circumglobular flight when I started, but that's what I wound up doing. Jeb returned to KSC 09 with the 90 units of liquid fuel, the fuselage, both engines, the tail, all the landing gear and one-out-of-two wings, what Yeager would call "a good landing" though not an outstanding one. Still, after two hours flight, Jeb cleared five aerial surveying contracts in the process. The funds were used to fully upgrade the Launchpad and Astronaut Complex and put the Administration Building up to Level 2. At this point I've got Admin, the VAB, SPH and R&D all at Level 2 and everything else at Level 3. So things are going well for the early game.

Earlier this morning I launched Bob towards Mun aboard the Flaming Death Trap 7:

Generally, I try to name my craft ironically, not literally. There was a point during the launch, though, when the engine clusters were cooking one another off and the whole rocket did two full loops, that I thought I may have been a bit too literal in this case. That said, I was able to recover and get the craft into orbit. Once there, it's under-powered transfer stage did a 9 minute and 30 second burn to put the craft on a trajectory towards Mun. I'll probably continue my hijinks with Bob as the day continues today.

[kurgut]

In RP-1 (career mode for RSS/RO), manned rockets are hell: Since it is manned, your rocket will loooooong time to build (realistic, just think to the modifications needed for the R7, or the redstone to be able to bring some human safely there: pogo effects/g-forces/etc), and also will be very expensive (very high rollout costs), then imagin having an engine failure in a manned mission after all this, is just a bit disapointing Without saying your astronauts need to be trained for each spacecraft (mercury, gemini capsule, shuttle cockpit, etc), and those training time are also VERY long. Then, manned missions are very rare, as in real life.

So I'm working in a shuttle right now, but unmanned, you've guessed all the advantages. I'm doing it in sandbox, then I hope to use it in my career:

So here, basic design, just testing aerodynamics stability when coming back from earth (I put some fuel for the main engines to just take off the stuff, take off was done in 2s, with 7g haha):

(first design)

Then balanced a bit, added tails fins, and first landing!

Then I fine tuned all that, and I managed a landing without touching the commands with a nice 4 m/s vertical velocity :

Few meters before touch down, no imput right now, only aero forces!

And done!

Now, I've to add the RCS all around this, and finally, put it on a "launch stuff": fuel tank+2 boosters

 

 

[Triop]

Edited September 12, 2018 by Triop

[Cavscout74]

A fresh round of vict... er... kerbonauts arrived at Duna today, along with some fresh new designs.

First up was the sole "C" variant of my crew cycler design, with a centrifuge for crew comfort.  Docking with the station was smooth, then the crew transferred to a spaceplane once it rendezvoused.

The core of a large planetary base arrived as well.  I didn't have time to attempt to land it yet, that'll be a job for tomorrow.  A mining wing & a reactor wing arrived as well.

Finally, for the first time ever in career (I took a few test flights in sandbox), I performed a spaceplane landing on Duna.  The design was from kerbalx, the Duna Operations Plane by @blakemw    Touchdown was a little bouncy - like about 5-6 bounces - even with ~60 m/s touchdown speed.  The plane flew beautifully, and the bouncing I'm fairly certain had a LOT more to do with my flying and the terrain than the plane design.

Gliding down through clouds to the western canyon with Ike rising.

Final approach in the canyon

 

 

[Cyrious]

Couple days ago, I decided I was going to get a fuel station constructed around the Mun, and decided on a modular design instead of a more monolithic design that I usually go for in things like this.

I ended up with a 400+ ton dry 45Hx35Wx24L (meters) behmoth. BEHOLD!

Bit hard to see, but there's a mess of girders and solar panels on a girder pillar beneath the center module of the station. It also has the cooling necessary (10MW core heat capacity!). Center of the image is the core module, containing some service girders, extra monoprop, some living space for a crew , and 4 docking ports for crew transfers from the main Mun station, Kerbin, and the Mun's surface.

Background Right is the Processed Materials Module. It holds 4 Jumbo tanks, 2 XL Liquid Fuel Girders, 8 Xenon Kontainer tank clusters, 8 Large Nuclear Fuel Drums (both for use and for sale, nuclear material is valuable stuff ), 2 XL Xenon Girders, and 8 XL Lithium Girders. I'd rig up some Argon as well, but none of my spaceborne converters do that.

Background Left contains the Converter Module. It contains some ore and Large service Girders as the structural elements, with a whopping 16 Convert-o-Tron units in 4 clusters of 4. Additionally, there's 4 Whirlijig nuclear reprocessors and 4 Karbonite Converters.

Front Right is the Cargo Docking module. Exactly what it says on the tin, 7 docking ports meant for handling the cargo this station sends and receives, while also serving as the mother-station for the various transfer barges and lander barges. Also, more service girders.

Finally, Front Left is the (Incomplete, still need some tech unlocked) Raw Materials module. It simply holds a crapton of ore (I'm aiming for something like a quarter million units reserve, whats currently there is just a placeholder) and lesser but still significant amount of Karbonite.

Ore-based outputs are purely for cargo/payload. Karbonite subsequently is for fueling the crafts visiting and leaving the station. I'm debating swapping most of the solar power module on the bottom of the station for a chunky 2000EC/S reactor unit just so i can do the "Ore > Enriched Uranium > Depleted Uranium > Xenon" entirely on-station, but that requires tech unlocks for the requisite reactor units and about 700k cash by itself. Something to think of for the future.

 

Naturally, since I've started this, I've also got ore mapping satellites online (their contracts are paying for the station), and once the station is fully up, I'll be hucking landers (and eventually base hardware) at the Mun. Figure if I have 37 in-game days before I have to capture my Moho probe, I might as well do something productive with it. Just need to get KAS, and then the fun begins.