What did you do in KSP1 today?

[ARS]

I made a flying wing...

It's very stable in-flight, but the control is a bit heavy, but those heavy steering gives it an unusual feature...

Set yaw... Deploying airbrakes...

Mid-Air drifting 180 degree turn!

*Insert Eurobeat track here*

(To be honest, even if it's able to do that, it came with a cost of losing a lot of airspeed. At least 250+ m/s of airspeed and 500 m minimum altitude is needed to regain stable  flight control of the craft)

 

Edited October 23, 2018 by ARS

[Kebab Kerman]

Ok, so I'm trying to find the mod that has the engines that are on this plane, can somebody get me the name of the mod?

I know the engine's name has "Corkscrew" in it, but I can't remember anything else.

EDIT: Found it, it's from NearFuture Aeronautics.

Edited October 23, 2018 by Kebab Kerman

[capi3101]

Yesterday saw the start of the next tourist expedition to Mun. The day started with the flight of an Auk Ia dual-passenger spaceplane to space station Kerbinport, ferrying tourist Milpont Kerman up to the station. Milpont joined tourists Bilbald, Siecott, Merrey, Joner, Natafield and Aldfurt Kerman aboard Next Objective with Val in the command capsule, at which point Next Objective departed from the station and burned for Mun. The Auk returned safely to KSC 09 with a pair of KSC staff members aboard who had recently returned from flag-planting training on Minmus. They also returned a surface sample that Jeb had collected from Mun several weeks prior; something I'd been meaning to do for quite a little while. An Auk II 8-passenger spaceplane was flown up to Kerbinport next, anticipating Next Objective's return.  

This morning saw the launch of the rover Lunkhead II towards Mun; owing to a good transfer, the booster should crash into the Munar surface while the rover itself will reach a 0.02 degree-inclined, 10 kilometer orbit in 3 hours and 15 minutes. Next Objective is still about 90 minutes from the Mun's SOI at the present time. I haven't decided where Lunkhead II is going yet - she could either go to Piper Alpha or to the Michael Collins Convention Center. Leaning towards the MCCC, just cuz.

On the Pathfinder front, I switched over to Lite Blue mode; rapidly discovered that the ongoing head-bumping between that mod and the Community Resource Pack was what was causing my headaches to date. Made a lot more progress with working with the mod last night. I still need to do some planning to incorporate how Pathfinder works into my existing infrastructure, but I no longer feel like putting a discount brick through someone else's computer, so I call that a good day. Next up is figuring how much crap is needed to inflate a Hogan (the more difficult, but not terribly difficult, part), and then figuring out how I'm going to get it all out to Minmus (the should-be-easy part). 

14 minutes ago, Kebab Kerman said:

Ok, so I'm trying to find the mod that has the engines that are on this plane, can somebody get me the name of the mod? I know the engine's name has "Corkscrew" in it, but I can't remember anything else.

Might be Firespitter. I don't recall a "Corkscrew" engine from it. Definitely has propellers, though - a couple of versions back I was trying to see if the mod's electric propellers would work as a viable way of getting a plane up high enough off of Eve to switch to conventional propulsion for a semi-normal launch. Never made it that far into my research, unfortunately.

Edited October 23, 2018 by capi3101

[BRAAAP_STUTUTU]

[Francois424]

Today, I finally completed the assembly of my Explorer II Mothership.
Unfortunately, I had to get rid of the ring as it caused explosions and rapid disassembly
Tho that could have been caused by over using the Autostrut feature... to be honest I'm not sure at this point, so I might get it another try in a future design.
Also had to get rid of the yellow procedural xenon tanks covering the huge engines, as that ALSO cause spontaneous 'xplosions and other phantom force problems... 
I'm telling you guys I didn't struggle this much since 0.23.5 trying to make a huge launcher that always blew up on the pad.

So there we are, the quad "Aurora Engines" (450 thrust Ion engines, model based on the now defunct Ares mod) drive section, with two origami antennae, science lab, a 2,5 meter xenon container with a lot of Xe (compensating for mentioned bugs, no choice).
The lander and the Miner, which I've featured in the last few posts... And at the rail, the Inner Kerbol System power module.  Eventually to be discarded (might be good up to Dres or Jool, at most).

I'm only missing my heat shields (Making a 5 points node for 10m heatshields with decoupler, so I get one as I need 'em for the lander). Which I'll send later with missing crew.
Obligatory screenie of everything assembled :

 

EDIT:  Yes, it was from too many AutoStruts.  They are quite hard to use in fact.  I was trying to save part number by auto-strutting and it's not a good idea.  But At least by removing 90% of them and only keeping the essentials, IT WORKED !
Took me 2 days, but now I know the concept is sound and usable when I begin my grand tour.   374 parts is a bit much given KSP's performance (I still wish for a "green clock" until 500 parts) but it's manageable.
 

Edited October 24, 2018 by Francois424
Success !

[NHunter]

Following the relays closely behind, a lumbering behemoth that is KSS Discovery arrives to the Jool system.

Back when it was launched, it was the pinnacle of Kerbal engineering and the first crewed ship capable of reaching the outer planets. Now, a mere year later, it's an outdated design with many flaws: it is big, extremely heavy and under-powered in both engines and reaction control*. It also look not as cool... Too bad, sending a replacement ship will be both too expensive and require waiting for over a year for it to arrive...

* dry weight: 98 tons, fuel: 150 tons, engines: 2x NV-500 Poseidon nuclear engines (which, even in LOx-augmented mode, provide only 6.65 m/s² of max acceleration) and it has to rely on just a few reaction wheels to reorient itself. Compare and contrast with the much more advanced KSS Voyager exploration ship I had sent to Sarnus: dry weight: 68 tons, fuel: 44 tons, engines: 1x Vista fusion engine (13.25 m/s² of max acceleration) and similar amount of torque from reaction wheels to rotate half the mass. And it's much better in the looks department:

-----

Meanwhile, in a far-away Gael system, the first space hotel has been put into orbit. Accommodations aren't exactly 5-star and it pulls a double-duty as a communication relay, but it does provide the guest with some nice views of their homeworld.

[Cavscout74]

Quite by chance yesterday, I noticed a  near-Kerbin asteroid about 10 days from entering Kerbin's SoI.  The track showed it coming down to a ~110km Pe before shooting back out to space.  Only had a 14* inclination too.  So I launched a pair of capture vehicles - also equipped with DMagic asteroid scanners - and got them in orbit with matching inclination to wait.  Today, the asteroid entered the Kerbin system & my career first asteroid capture was a "go"

Capture vehicle 1 enroute to rendezvous

Approaching Pe.  With the 48t asteroid, it only had about 280 m/s dV, but it was enough to close up the orbit & drop Ap to only ~2000 km.

After that, the second capture vehicle rendezvoused & added it's dV to get a lower & slightly less inclined orbit.  Both capture vehicles were then dropped & sent to crash in Kerbin while a larger asteroid miner came up to finish cleaning up the orbit & start mining.

[Francois424]

@Cavscout74 I think it's the first time I see someone else using the FTmN 280 engine on their craft.
Did you fix it yourself or has someone (finally) updated the mod ?  The original author as been MIA for over 4 years now.

Edited October 24, 2018 by Francois424

[linuxgurugamer]

4 minutes ago, Francois424 said:

@Cavscout74 I think it's the first time I see someone else using the FTmN 280 engine on someone else's craft.
Did you fix it yourself or has someone (finally) updated the mod ?  The original author as been MIA for over 4 years now.

Its now available in the Spacetux Industries Recycled Parts mod

[Angelo Kerman]

With the Lesser Flats Refinery almost done, I started expanding Minmus Station into the Minmus Orbital Shipyard:

Currently, kerbals are restricted to no more than 200 days on orbit in zero gee, or up to a year on the ground, so the centrifuge is an experiment to see if it can enable kerbals to stay in space longer. It's also the backbone of the shipyard itself.

Edited October 24, 2018 by Angel-125

[capi3101]

10 hours ago, Angel-125 said:

One of these days, I certainly hope to have a sprawling Pathfinder base like that one...still having issues with the mod myself; will post my latest set of headaches over on the Pathfinder thread shortly.

 

Incidentally, have any of the rest of y'all ever encountered the problem of a mod functioning, then not functioning the next time you fire up the game, then functioning the next time after that and so on and so forth? If so, were you ever able to fix it, and how?

 

Anyways, on with the thing...

(1.4.5) With the need to provide some extra fuel for space station Kerbinport in the wake of Necessary Evil's return, I went ahead and started yesterday with the launch of an Exxon Valdez 7a very heavy emergency tanker. It affected a successful rendezvous and docking, and there should now be sufficient fuel present to support the next three or four excursions to Kerbin's moons. Up next was the successful retrieval of a Mk2 Liquid Fuel fuselage from LKO for contract, a mission affected by a Bill Clinton 7b grabber probe:

One of these days, I still hope to put one of these things right on top of the administration building just to see what happens...

The probe returned the target module safely into the ocean about ten klicks west of KSC. 

With the rover Lunkhead overturned forty klicks to the west of the Piper Alpha refinery on Mun for the past several weeks and no plans to go out there and right it (on account of it being overturned on a 35-degree grade), I went ahead and terminated it (sadly, of course), leaving me without a rover on Mun. To rectify this, I launched another Hellhound 7 rover - unimaginatively dubbed Lunkhead II - to Mun, landing it at the Michael Collins Convention Center near the Neil Armstrong Memorial. 

Man, the graphics have really improved since the last time I was here...

Lunkhead II is the first Hellhound 7 rover to visit the NAM since the rover Bullseye way back in v. 0.21 - August 18, 2013, sez the imgur album...

A very old screenie. The rovers in the pic were called Hellrider (left) and Bullseye (right); Bullseye was first Hellhound 7 ever launched. The one that Jeb and Bob are riding...I'm not sure it ever received a name.

Next Objective also arrived at Mun yesterday and safely put into dock at space station Munport. A Bill Clinton 7b was sent up to collect engineer Haibur Kerman and her debris from LKO, returning to Kerbin successfully about 35 klicks east of KSC. Engineer Julfry Kerman at the Deepwater Horizon refinery on Minmus also conducted a five waypoint surface sample survey using the rover Fwot, which wound up going thirteen klicks away (and three klicks up) from the refinery into Minmus's lowlands. At night. The return trip was a tad interesting, but both rover and kerbal returned safely to the refinery.

Earlier this morning, tourists Siecott, Merrey, Aldfurt and Milpont Kerman made their way from Munport to Piper Alpha aboard the station's Spamcan 7a 4-passenger lander, landing safely thirty meters from the station. The lander was refueled and since it was during the day for once, the refinery affected a successful recharge operation. The returned burn to Munport was almost spot on; there was only a five second delay between the end of the ascent burn and the beginning of the rendezvous burn, with the Spamcan a mere 150 meters from the station upon completion. I'll be bringing the tour group into dock later this morning, and then Next Objective will be returning to Kerbin shortly thereafter.

[Hotel26]

This is Boom Vang:  [click the first screenshot below, then right arrow for a slide show]

 

 

Boom: Mammoth off the pad to go sub-orbital.  Vang: Twin Wheelseys to cruise to pin-point the target (Mach 0.6).  Descend under chutes to house 33 Kerbals at some base.

(Vang has landing gear and can be flown conventionally in an out of airfields until final deployment.  Boom has a pod attached on the launchpad that allows personnel to be loaded incrementally.)

 

Edited October 24, 2018 by Hotel26

[Raptor42]

14 hours ago, Angel-125 said:

With the Lesser Flats Refinery almost done, I started expanding Minmus Station into the Minmus Orbital Shipyard:

 

From what mod are those modules on your base?

Edited October 24, 2018 by Raptor42

[Angelo Kerman]

21 minutes ago, Raptor42 said:

From what mod are those modules on your base?

They are from Pathfinder. Chech my sig for the link.

[Cavscout74]

I only ended up with a few minutes of KSP-time today.  Just barely got the Duna Operations Plane landed to investigate an anomaly.  I ended up having to change my difficulty setting & load a quicksave due real world issues cropping up while flying up to the ground base after the anomaly visit.

Duna entry

Spoiler

Hmm, how'd that get there?

 

[EpicSpaceTroll139]

I've finally gotten the new guidance loops debugged, but now I'm running into a new problem.

Despite having changed nothing but variable names in the terminal descent / landing portion of the script, I am now getting inconsistent results with the landings.  Sometimes a booster lands just fine.  Other times it seems to start burning too late, or cuts off an on-time burn early, and just slams into the ground with the legs halfway deployed. WHABAM!  In the picture above, one booster landed fine, the other did not.

In this one, one booster landed with too much horizontal velocity and tipped over, the other did the WHABAM! thing.

 

Edited October 25, 2018 by EpicSpaceTroll139

[Xurkitree]

I created the mothership for my grand tour - The Regulus.

I had already calculated how many Mk1 LF Fuselages i Needed for the whole trip (24, with 1 extra for emergencies), but I was a HUGE challenge getting every module onto it symmetrically, while getting my target payloads and fuel and the engines lined up properly. Then I added a bunch of reaction wheels (maybe I should remove some? idk) and batteries and power. Even then, Its no perfectly balanced, as all things should be - one of my ion crafts is slightly heavier than the other, but they both weigh 1.0 tons atleast, so Im not too worried.

Boy, I must tell you, it takes up the entire VAB now. Considering adding hangar extensions...

[Geonovast]

1 hour ago, EpicSpaceTroll139 said:

This is today's favorite thing.  I was too busy staring at the hinges that I didn't even notice the fail in the background.

[DerekL1963]

1 minute ago, Xurkitree said:

Boy, I must tell you, it takes up the entire VAB now. Considering adding hangar extensions...

I usually design/assemble large vehicles and space stations in the SPH because there's a lot more room and the camera is more flexible.

[Kebab Kerman]

What if, and now just hear me out, what if we take Kerbin's heightmap, change it so that there's a ravine in the ocean that's at least 15km deep, and then try to get all the way to the bottom and build a base there?

[EpicSpaceTroll139]

38 minutes ago, Geonovast said:

This is today's favorite thing.  I was too busy staring at the hinges that I didn't even notice the fail in the background.

The rocket should be released Soon.^TM  Maybe I'll give some closeups of the working hinges this one has when I get back to my dorm.

Edited October 25, 2018 by EpicSpaceTroll139

[CatastrophicFailure]

30 minutes ago, Kebab Kerman said:

What if, and now just hear me out, what if we take Kerbin's heightmap, change it so that there's a ravine in the ocean that's at least 15km deep, and then try to get all the way to the bottom and build a base there?

Do you want manta-Ray aliens and giant water tentacles? Because that is literally how you get manta-Ray aliens and giant water tentacles. 

[Delay]

2 hours ago, EpicSpaceTroll139 said:

I've finally gotten the new guidance loops debugged, but now I'm running into a new problem.

Chaos theory is back!

[anoldtincan]

Been away for about two weeks but got back into the my career game after tragically losing Bill and Lealong in an airplane crash. 

The first of two missions was a supply drone ship to the Valentina, undergoing a gradual refit in prep for her next mission. 

This was the third flight of the RT-2 and the first that was recovered (mostly) intact after mission completion.

The second mission to the Val was the long awaited crew rotation. The Valentina's new crew includes Archibald "Archie" Kerman, command pilot on his tenth mission; Matdorf Kerman on his second mission but first to space as chief scientist; and Theoley "Ted" Kerman, new scientist recruit. Their mission for now is to process Minmus science from Sortie 1, and oversee construction of the as yet unnamed KS-2 exploration ship.

Docked to the Val.

The crew swap was quick and supplies and fuel offloaded; the Sortie 1 crew was eager to get home. Look how excited they are!

A targeted landing attempt put the Vaquita down just off the island airfield.

Next, a big Kulan flight - halfway around the world for two survey contracts. Although a ruddervator failed on ascent, Verlan is our most experienced pilot and was easily able to compensate.

The aerial one was a cakewalk, and the landing for the second one went flawlessly. Bob hopped out for the surveys and reboarded the plane without difficulty.

So close to an earlier survey contract that wasn't completed, Bob elected for the airdrop to wrap it up. It took two approaches to the DZ, and Bob double checked to make sure he was strapped in this time. 

Verlan circled until she had eyes on a good chute:

And then flew back to KSC. Bob wrapped up the last survey marker putting the space program north of 1 million funds for the first time.

 

[Sharpy]

I was short some 20k science to get the Alcubierre drive, and I drained Kerbin and Eve dry of science, plus had both Jool and Sarnus explored by minilanders. What's left? Strip-mine Duna of all science. First, a scansat to map it and get all the orbital science there is to get. So I made a VTOL nuclear-powered airplane.

 

Fun thing. I'm playing with KSPI, which severely nerfs all nuclear reactors - from other mods too. The Roentgen nuclear jet from MK2 stockalike would overheat like crazy, core meltdown within 20 seconds. It had limited fuel, limited lifetime, and the jet itself was just as underwhelming as originally. BUT. KSPI adds 'thermal jets' that use 'waste heat' for running... and Roentgen was so horribly nerfed with excessive heat production, that I just started it for some 10s after entering Duna atmosphere, to get it hot, then switched it off... and from then on I could fly using the thermal jets for free... by the end, after crossing Duna in all directions several times over it was hardly any cooler than after I shut it down, and the thermal jets operated at... excessive efficiency. At one point I left the plane unattended, going to the toilet, and found it with the trajectory going to a 300km apoapsis and maybe 100m/s from stable orbit. Most of the time I was operating it at 10-20% throttle.

Landing in VTOL mode was quite challenging, as the throttle was rather sluggish to respond, but I visited all the biomes, all the anomalies, and...

...got my FTL tug ready.

Then after delivering a dumb station to Valentine to finish a long-overdue contract, I spent over 2 hours trying to get my tug back into Kerbin orbit. Not easy to shed 22km/s of excess velocity using only gravity assists against Kerbin, repeated through warping from the system edge back to Kerbin atmosphere, over and over.