What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Kebab Kerman]

Oh, and this is the rocket I launched the ring module from:

The fairing has nothing in it, it's just to make it look better in the screenshot.

[FinalFan]

So I've been going through career stock and I happened to notice that I was in the middle of an Eve transfer window.  This inspired me to get really ambitious and try to do an Eve land and return mission.  I designed the whole monstrosity myself—it's probably way oversized because I tend to do that, but according to the math it should be able to put my kerbals back into Eve orbit where they will rendezvous with another group. 

Obviously a setup rated for Eve is capable of SSTO, which I did, but I didn't really plan very well so I needed to send a refuel mission.  I just so happened to have a couple of very large tankers lying around which seemed perfect.  I sent them to the Eve ship and very, very carefully set up a docking maneuver that was close to the normal-antinormal ideal.  I came in, decelerated to 0.1 m/s, and ... the Eve ship spontaneously exploded.  What? 

[edit:  TinyPic is dead; long live Flickr.  Original link for insanity posterity:  http://i64.tinypic.com/ibi0i0.jpg ]

Even Jebediah was shocked.  I wasn't really sure what would provoke such a violent reaction.  I mean, sure, the part count was getting a little high, but the docking maneuver was almost as gentle as humanly possible, and I'd already spent many minutes in physics range.  Maybe the reaction wheels are the problem?  I turned SAS off and docked on pure RCS ... the final connection was noticeably more wobbly, and it took longer after the connection was made for the explosions to begin, but ultimately the result was no different.  I'm very frustrated right now. 

Edited September 23, 2019 by FinalFan
TinyPic is dead; long live Flickr.

[Hotel26]

I completed Swordfish recently and posted a couple of shots here in WDYDIKT.  It is a 1.3.1 stock re-rendition of JadeOfMaar's version of Reaction Engines A2.

OK, so I had to go do Skylon (not my first attempt).  I've just finished flight-testing it and am pretty happy this time!

So, this is it, dubbed Sailfish:

64 tourists to space!  "We specialize in birthday parties [for the very wealthy]"

 

And a pretty sight:

First docking -- with the Kathedral space station in my Lab world.

Edited September 21, 2018 by Hotel26

[FinalFan]

1 hour ago, FinalFan said:

So I've been going through career stock and I happened to notice that I was in the middle of an Eve transfer window.  This inspired me to get really ambitious and try to do an Eve land and return mission.  I designed the whole monstrosity myself—it's probably way oversized because I tend to do that, but according to the math it should be able to put my kerbals back into Eve orbit where they will rendezvous with another group. 

Obviously a setup rated for Eve is capable of SSTO, which I did, but I didn't really plan very well so I needed to send a refuel mission.  I just so happened to have a couple of very large tankers lying around which seemed perfect.  I sent them to the Eve ship and very, very carefully set up a docking maneuver that was close to the normal-antinormal ideal.  I came in, decelerated to 0.1 m/s, and ... the Eve ship spontaneously exploded.  What?

Even Jebediah was shocked.  I wasn't really sure what would provoke such a violent reaction.  I mean, sure, the part count was getting a little high, but the docking maneuver was almost as gentle as humanly possible, and I'd already spent many minutes in physics range.  Maybe the reaction wheels are the problem?  I turned SAS off and docked on pure RCS ... the final connection was noticeably more wobbly, and it took longer after the connection was made for the explosions to begin, but ultimately the result was no different.  I'm very frustrated right now. 

It turns out that landing legs don't like it when you dock and the heaviest part is on the OTHER ship.  Thanks to @bewing I was able to continue the mission without cheating or re-launching. 

Edited September 21, 2018 by FinalFan
added attribution

[Ho Lam Kerman]

Today, I replanned my Cassini-Huygens mission a bit. (A lot.)

Now, I will fly by Slate before I begin my Orbit Insertion Burn. The OIB puts me straight onto a Tekto impact trajectory. As soon as I enter Tekto SoI, I decouple Huygens, and perform a 58.4 m/s burn to 1. get out of the way of Tekto and 2. get into a Slate flyby, and 3. get into an Eeloo flyby after the Slate flyby.

So, yes. Excluding the OIB (which I would have to do anyways), I would fly by Tekto once, Eeloo once and Slate twice for the grand total of 58.4 m/s. The Cassini team would be proud. 

Unfortunately I ran out of conic patches to see where I would be going after the Eeloo flyby. After I finish my first Slate encounter, I should be seeing where I'm going after the Eeloo flyby, so I'll try to engineer the Eeloo flyby so that it puts me into a lower orbit. I want to try flying by the small moons, but I have a really high apoapsis right now.

If that looks confusing to you, then here's the timeline:

1. Enter Sarnus SoI

2. Slate flyby at 3,749,501 m

3. Orbit insertion burn at 696.1 m/s

4. Enter Tekto SoI

5. Release Tekto landing probe (Huygens)

6. TCM at 58.4 m/s

7. Tekto periapsis at 478,767 m

8. Exit Tekto SoI

9. Slate encounter at 4,911,450 m

10. Eeloo encounter at unknown altitude

I hope all these SoI changes aren't going to affect my delicately-balanced mission plan. I hate it when the SoI changes, and then everything glitches and all my encounters are gone. Anyways, all cameras will be trained on the Sarnian moons. Meanwhile, they'll just have to look at these images taken by Kerbin's greatest orbital telescope.

Hale and Ovok

Slate

Tekto

Eeloo

Edited September 21, 2018 by Ho Lam Kerman

[Stunkfish]

3 hours ago, FinalFan said:

It turns out that landing legs don't like it when you dock and the heaviest part is on the OTHER ship.  Thanks to @bewing I was able to continue the mission without cheating or re-launching. 

That is useful information!

Do you happen to know if it makes a difference if the landing legs are extended or retracted? Or all the same...?

My experience with wobbling space stations after docking another vessel to them: If I dock with only RCS but then instantly turn the SAS on again on the whole thing, once docking is done...the SAS then managed to get everything steady out again.

[capi3101]

No screenies today, y'all. Sorry.

Not much to talk about, either. I spent most of the day getting the two Gusmobile 7 craft - one carrying Jeb and scientist Lemgun Kerman, the other with Val and Bill - back from Mun, getting the Leeroy Jenkins 7a science recovery ship out to the Fireball 7a science lander stranded in a highly inclined LMO with scientist Antrey Kerman aboard, and getting Bob back from his epic science mission to Minmus. All four craft returned safely to Kerbin, with Bob bringing back a whopping 5580 units of scientific research and Antrey bringing back 1,025 in her own right, which was enough to unlock the high-end parts necessary to get most of my old standard craft operational. The few Auk-series spaceplanes I still can't fly yet are the huge ones; I didn't get the Heavy Aerospace tech node unlocked. I also have some still locked that use Inline Clamp-O-Trons; there were other nodes with higher priorities. Still, I felt an Auk flight was in order, and sent Jeb aboard an Auk I rescue craft to go pick up Philmal from orbit, even though technically the craft doesn't require an onboard pilot. Haven't finished that flight yet; Jeb does have a rendezvous with the target craft and is coming up on the ascending node in about another six minutes.

With more sci needed, I went into the archives this morning to see what else could be gleaned on a second Minmus mission. Gravioli Detectors are now available to me, and I was dismayed to discover a few missing experiments from the first pass. To go finishing tapping Minmus out, I spent some time this morning designing the Fireball 7e lander (I don't really know if I'm up to "e" in the series or not - I got started before I thought to check names and by then it was too late). The design should be flight-worthy, though I still need to go in and set some action groups before I launch Bob back towards Minmus. I've also started thinking the time has come to get a communications network up and running... 

[Kebab Kerman]

I need ideas on modules for my station, got any ideas? I'll probably add a module for getting to other planets and a refueling thingy, but I'm honestly not sure what else. The most recent images of the station show the habitation module and the core. In case you didn't see it, here it is.

[Tonka Crash]

@Kebab Kerman I really like that you have the Mk2 cabins oriented so the floor is "down" in your rings, not many seem to get that right.

 

[Aeroboi]

I made a stock seaplane/super jumbo carrying 1048 Kerbals that can also travel over hills at 90m/s without disintegrating so doesn''t require a runway and travels 260 m/s at 8000m for 1650km while weighing just over 930 Tons.

Name:Kilobus A1080
Height: 17.7 Meters
Width: 70.9 meters
Length 101.1 meters
Cruising altitude 8500 meters.
Cruising speed 253 m/s.
Passenger capacity: 1048
Part count: 279
Engines: 28 Goliath Engines
Takes off without having to pitch due to highly inclined airfoil.
Can steer on the ground.
Price: 2,322,585 Funds.

Pics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 21, 2018 by Aeroboi

[Kebab Kerman]

54 minutes ago, Aeroboi said:

-snip-

-snip-

Imagine the sacrifices...

3 hours ago, Tonka Crash said:

@Kebab Kerman I really like that you have the Mk2 cabins oriented so the floor is "down" in your rings, not many seem to get that right.

Actually, it's a single part with rotating animations. I didn't make it, it's from some mod. It might be MRS, not sure, though. But yeah, the original ring was going to have cabins orientated like that, buuut it ended up being around 277 parts. I'll try to make a new ring using Mk2 parts instead of the 1.25m parts I used. Mk2 parts are better suited for that. This is a crappy image made in Google Docs on a chromebook of a section:

Spoiler

Anyway, I'll be replacing the boosters on the bottom of the rocket I used to get the habitation module to orbit with something more powerful later today. This is the rocket, in case you haven't seen it. I think it can carry up to around... What, 500 tons? Not sure to be honest, but a less powerful version with four SpaceY Athena SRB's carried the core.

I'll be using that 5m giant engine cluster as a replacement for the current booster engines, might replace the first stage engine block with something more powerful as well. I was actually tempted to use 6 Mk3 turbofans instead of rocket engines, because they had 520 kn of thrust. That's more than most stock engines have. I think... Anyway, once I test the payload capacity, I'll start a new station with 4 ore refinery modules, containing some empty LFO tanks as well as 8 2.5m ore tanks at each end, and some more solar arrays, possibly 8. Then, I need to get it to Gilly, because taking off from there won't be a problem, which means gathering resources won't be hard, either. I moved Kerbin, the Mün, Minmus, Duna, Ike, and Eve to orbit around Jool, because I liked the idea of being in orbit around Jool. Gilly is also there, but it's orbit around Eve is many times smaller. Thats how I got the triple-eclipse in that one screenshot. But it does make for some interesting gameplay, to say the least.

Edited September 21, 2018 by Kebab Kerman

[FinalFan]

10 hours ago, Stunkfish said:

That is useful information!

Do you happen to know if it makes a difference if the landing legs are extended or retracted? Or all the same...?

My experience with wobbling space stations after docking another vessel to them: If I dock with only RCS but then instantly turn the SAS on again on the whole thing, once docking is done...the SAS then managed to get everything steady out again.

According to @bewing, the problem lies in autostruts.  

1.  Landing legs are automatically autostrutted to the heaviest part.  

2.  This feature cannot be disabled by any means.  

3.  Upon docking, landing legs that find themselves on a ship with a new heaviest part will suddenly revise their attachments accordingly, involving "large forces" that can be "extremely violent" for large and vulnerable objects.  

I would not expect whether the legs are retracted to matter.  

[Cavscout74]

Made some more progress in my new career & unlocked the Panther, so the jet I made the other day is now substantially faster.

Cruising dry, not much faster than the original version with a Wheesley

Turned on the burner, this is more like it.  Topped out at 843 m/s at around 15 km

Maybe I should've brought a VTOL.   Let's hear it for personal parachutes - Jeb managed to land more or less intact - only minor, temporary spaghettifcation.  The jet cleared the peak and smashed into multiple bits in the valley below.  I might have actually pulled it off if I had parachutes on the plane.  I was on the ground, done to around 30 m/s when I ran out of semi-flat mountain.

Dawn satellite launch from the desert launch site

And finally a new version of my high-g tourist deathtrap.  I used the modular SRB from MOLE by @Angel-125 and didn't even need any seperatrons or sounding rocket motors, it was more than capable of knocking those two tourists out in less than 7 seconds on it's own.

[Zosma Procyon]

I succeeded in my quest to get two science labs and an ISRU into the air from the water.

The trick was adding canards to the floats. It just lifted itself out of the water.

And then I crashed it.

But in the next test I successfully landed a plane on land for the first time.

Edited September 22, 2018 by Zosma Procyon

[Hotel26]

Waiting for a long maneuver node in LKO, I thought I'd take @Triop,s Blackbird for a jaunt...

 

Might be hypoxia -- because it's unusual for me to get ideas -- but I have a base at the South Pole (coincidentally one at the North Pole, also)...  and it could be fun to base this Blackbird (SR 2000) at the South Pole and then, once a week, run a pole-to-pole photo recon mission over some randomly-selected coordinates.  It's a ton of fun, this 'plane.

 

And...  this just in from our Control Room...  ah, we had an incident a few weeks ago in which Cathat Kerman had to EVA from a doomed ship sub-orbiting the Mun with no fuel left onboard except in her jet pack.  We figured she might, ahm, attempt her own rendez-vous with some freighter left somewhere else in Mun orbit but -- here it is -- we did forget about her.  Busy with other stuff, etc. 

Anyway, happy ending!  (We'll make it up to her...)

 

Spoiler

 

 

And, yeah.  Still not happy.  (Such language!) 

 

 

Edited September 22, 2018 by Hotel26

[kurgut]

After pioneer-5 orbital insertion, I just had a natural encounter with callisto (quite lucky huh!), only 60 m/s fine tuning! I was hoping to flybys all others moons with this one, still 1,100 deltav left, and already in their plane of course (thanks to DPM before Jupiter ):

Then,  after some 500 Dv fine tuning (plane change, because of my earlier Callisto flyby), Pioneer-5 orbiter is now going to visit IO!

See you IO:

Then, only 18 days after this, for a 150 dv maneuver, I just had an Europa flyby!

Confirmed: Ganymede encounter in 49 days, holy crap!

Allthe flybys were aimed to pass only a couple of km above the surface, to earn the most valuable things we could with each flyby (+++ science!!)

I think this is maybe one of my more rentable missions, since I completed all Jupiter's moons flybys contracts, and I earned something like 9000 science data points in totality.

[Ho Lam Kerman]

Today, I started science operations for Cassini-Huygens. It's amazing.

Slate and Tekto flybys achieved.

Huygens landed on Tekto.

Extremely close flyby of Eeloo achieved, closest approach ~150 m above surface.

Photos in spoiler.

Spoiler

Slate flyby.

Tekto flyby.

They took the liberty of putting a KerbPro on Huygens. At first the employee was fired, but after 7 years, he's hailed as a hero.

Pass through the rings. Ring composition and particle size was studied.

Eeloo flyby.

I kid you not, this isn't some sort of crazy zoom. This was taken about 150 meters above Eeloo's mountains.

Feel free to use this as a desktop image.

Next up, the inner shepard moons- but they have really tiny SoI, so this is going to be a technical challenge. I'll need a gravity assist to get into the right inclination- I'm going retrograde right now- then a bunch of burns to get into the right encounter. I'm thinking of a 1000 m/s budget for the inner moons- costly, since I still have 3500 m/s on the spacecraft. No worries, Resident Orbital Mechanic Ho Lam Kerman will fix this.

Edited September 22, 2018 by Ho Lam Kerman

[eberkain]

Finally got a reliable way to launch my shuttle, just put some big ass wings on the first stage booster.  

[Tyko]

2 hours ago, kurgut said:

After pioneer-5 orbital insertion, I just had a natural encounter with callisto (quite lucky huh!), only 60 m/s fine tuning! I was hoping to flybys all others moons with this one, still 1,100 deltav left, and already in their plane of course (thanks to DPM before Jupiter ):

 

I think this is maybe one of my more rentable missions, since I completed all Jupiter's moons flybys contracts, and I earned something like 9000 science data points in totality.

Nice work! How'd you launch this with the RTG arms sticking way out? did you have a really wide fairing or is there some mod with folding arms?

[kurgut]

1 hour ago, Tyko said:

Nice work! How'd you launch this with the RTG arms sticking way out? did you have a really wide fairing or is there some mod with folding arms?

They're integrated in the Probe, from the glorious Raidernick US probes pack. Kinda essential with RO/RP-1, since custom built ones are heavier, more expensives, more parts (because have to put all the science stuff, etc, etc). But I still enjoy making my own probes of course

[RoboRay]

My first lander probe on the Moon (ever) in RSS/RO/RP-0...

The launch vehicle is an improved version of the D-series launcher I've been using for a couple of years (and will probably keep using for satellites and probes for a long time to come). 

• The booster engines have been upgraded to LR79-NA-13s, with more thrust and a bit better specific impulse.  Also a much longer rated burn time (4 minutes and 20 seconds), which I'm not yet making use of.
• The second stage now features an LR91-AJ-5, burning Aerozine50 with dinitrogen tetroxide, for a significant thrust and Isp improvement.
• The booster and second stage tankage has increased slightly as well, but only within the limits of what I could accomplish without retooling the production line.

The AJ10-104 third stage will perform the trans-lunar injection.

The hypergolic propulsion module below the lander's support frame will capture the spacecraft into lunar orbit, set up the approach to landing site, and provide about a third of the deceleration needed for powered descent.

Passing low over the Ocean of Storms.

Reorienting for powered descent to the Sea of Fertility.

The lander's starting thrust to weight ratio with the TD-339 engine is only 0.9:1, necessitating use of the constant-height landing technique.  Pitch adjustments will maintain a sink rate between 5 and 10 m/sec throughout the deceleration phase.

I either miscalculated how much MON10 oxidizer I would need, or some of it boiled off during the flight*...  the TD-339 cut out just a few meters above the surface.  Velocity was about 1 m/sec at that point, and the RCS thrusters were sufficient to complete the soft-landing.

^{* Note that I did have to let the probe orbit the Moon for a couple of weeks to get daylight on the landing zone, so I'm leaning towards a little boiloff.} 

It's January 2, 1965, so just over a year ahead of the historical accomplishment!

Edited September 22, 2018 by RoboRay

[Aeroboi]

@RoboRay Congrats on your first real Moon landing

Long live the motherland!

[Kebab Kerman]

I made this and am currently testing to see if it worked!

I FINALLY MADE A DS RAMP FOR MY MOD! WOOHOO!

I mean it's also 20 meters long but hey I wanted to make it look good.

EDIT: Oh, and it has some weird collision boxes. Just saying now. Mod isn't updated yet, need to make sure it works correctly.

Edited September 22, 2018 by Kebab Kerman

[kurgut]

RO real scale Concorde! Its first testflight

Take off at 100 m/s, just a bit unbalanced, it refuse a bit to pitch up, will change this after.

Retracting all this stuff, and going supersonic!

Here we go!

Max nominal speed was mac 1.7

[Delay]

Look at that FLAT horizon!