What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Cavscout74]

11 minutes ago, XLjedi said:

I just watched a rather skilled pilot (definitely not me on the keyboard) fly it through the tunnel

The tunnel resulted in explosions & screams with me at the keyboard. 

[Kronus_Aerospace]

Today I decided to finally try out the Camera Tools mod, It was pretty neat. This Duna spacecraft had just arrived in my main career save, so I thought it was the perfect opportunity to test the waters in KSP video-making.

I'm definitely gonna have to buy Bandicam at this point, I'm getting tired of that watermark.

Edited November 8, 2018 by Kronus_Aerospace

[Loskene]

So someone gave the Kerbals some "historical documents" and I think it gave them ideas above their station.

 

 

If you're curious about the details it is a fully functional spaceship, made at roughly half-scale to the "real" Daedalus-class explorer. The hull is made from procedural parts (interesting to see the number of shapes you can get from a distorted cylinder), and the equipment and supplies to support a crew of over 100 for 5-year missions is inside, along with fuel tanks, nuclear reactors, ISRU stuff and pretty much anything else I felt like throwing in there. The ship's 80 metres long so there's enormous volume for whatever internal arrangement you want. In fact the primary hull (the sphere) is almost completely empty since I fit everything inside the secondary hull and it kept the centre of mass in a more reasonable place. 18 fusion engines are arrayed in the semicircle above and below the shuttlebay at the very stern, and I plan to add a warp drive when I can figure out what config parameter to change to override the bubble radius. I'm not sure what else I'd add since it's already nearly 300 parts and over 1200 tons. RCS turnabout takes... some time.

[GDJ]

@Loskene:

Magnificent work!

Colour me impressed as hell.

[Zosma Procyon]

I finally got 1.5.1 to work. The problem I was having was my impressive collection of over 1000 pieces of debris, which has now been reduced to 100. Also I did a rescue in Kerbin Orbit, and for the first time in my 155 year career succeeded in landing a rocket within the grounds of the KSC.

Looks dead on.

Playing chicken with the ground here.

Brake!

Could have waited another second.

Don't have to pay a recovery commission this time! The Kerbal was another engineer. I have more than enough of those.

Edited November 8, 2018 by Zosma Procyon

[Servo]

A lot of news to report on, and all of it good!

Firstly, this:

I finally got my 1:1 STS to a releasable state. The addition of movable ore allows for stability during atmosphere and maneuverability on final approach. Moving 6 tons around does wonders for shifting COM, even on a 100 ton glider. 

I spent much of my evening doing multiple deorbits and reentries until I managed to nail down exactly how to get over the KSC. (start 80x80, lower Periapsis to 25km over the far landmass, prograde hold all the way home)

This was an extremely welcome sight. I quicksaved here and took a number of tries to nail down the landing procedure as well. (Nose down 50 degrees until 6 seconds before impact, pitch up hard and land with less than 8m/s vertical velocity)

On the sixth try, flawless success. That marked the end of the hard part for me, since now all I need to do is record a good launch sequence (already done), get cinimatic shots (partially done), and edit it all together (not even started). But, most importantly, this marks the beginning of the end of the months-long process that it took to build, test, and finalize this craft. It's been easily the toughest project that I've ever taken on in KSP, but it's been a challenge against which I have measured the best of my abilities, to paraphrase Kennedy.

Edited November 8, 2018 by Servo

[Guest]

I broke down and started a new career. Theme of this one is KIS/KAS and Duna first. I've never played with KIS/KAS so this ought to make things fresh. 

I uninstalled all of my other mods except KER. 

It's amazing how those early-career challenges are still interesting, and still hard, every time. Of course I'm also pushing myself harder now than on earlier careers, for example I'm building a 5-kerbal Mun flyby tourist launch with extremely low tech and a 30-part limit; I would not have attempted that before. 

I also have to say that I like the visual style of 1.5. It's less adorably wacky than the bottle rockets and oil drums in 1.3 and before, but... well, the things do look more like real spaceships. 

[Hotel26]

My first crack at a recyclable booster: Archer

I fooled around with wings and power plants for a while and then decided Kerbals should Keep It Simple.  [Click the first and use right arrow for a slideshow]

The booster sets an apoapsis of 75km for the payload (which will need to circularize itself).  The payload separates and fires its circ burn.

Mission Control returns to Archer which will land on the next peninsula east across the ocean from KSC .  At the equator, this peninsula's isthmus is very narrow, so we perform a short northerly inclination adjustment burn that takes the trajectory over a long swath of land, then turn retrograde.

Watching the navball carefully, since the rocket wants to swap ends, we fire one click retro to use the gimbals to stay in reverse.  One big burst at a couple of thousand meters to slow to chute speed and then the chutes (8 radial + 4 Mk 16-XLs) bring the speed down to 11m/s.  8 landing struts down and one click on the throttle just before touchdown to ensure an intact landing.

I'll set up a recovery center somewhere on that peninsula and my rules will be that boosters do not get recovered until an inspector flies in to supervise the operation.

I'm going to set the fuel priorities so that that last central column tank at the stern is the last to empty, just to help with the tail slide.

See how long before the fun wears off...

Edited November 8, 2018 by Hotel26

[MR L A]

On 11/7/2018 at 6:33 AM, Zosma Procyon said:

That was two notches. It got hung up on the clamps.

You could hold shift to make the notches smaller... unless you already are?

[Mrmrbrown89]

Today I finally landed my first base station on Duna and my long range rover  just thought I would show you it and the  deployment of my short range rovers. 


My Duna Bade Station

[Atkara]

Gradually gathering funds on my new career, ferrying tourists, placing sats, rescuing kerbals and training crews. Not going after the science this time around -I'll just park one orbital lab around Mun and Minmus respectively, grab some science on the surface and get the rest from them.

During one of these early training flights, I took my time to look back at Kerbin, something I rarely do anymore:

Something to be said about the simple things, right?

[Acestin]

I just landed the first half of a fuel/materials refinery on Minmus. The site also has a laboratory and green house for extended crew stay. I plane on setting up surface experiments (the mod) there as well, hence the ability for extended life support and lab.

The second half (fuel storage and further material processing) will be attached to a existing space station that orbits Minmus.

[capi3101]

I spent a fair amount of the day yesterday farting around with a new Pathfinder base-seeding craft which I dubbed the Coydog 7; the idea was originally to use the basic Hellhound 7 rover chassis with a few parts from the Buffalo mod. By the end of the day, all traces of the Hound were gone except for a few RTGs. Had some problems with exploding wheels when I called it a day last night; this morning I added some Buffalo ground stabilizers to the craft and that seems to have fixed the issue, though I won't know for sure about the efficacy of the design until I have time to make a full test. Hopefully that will happen later today.

Not much else happened yesterday. After docking up a Glass Cannon 7 orbital mass driver module to space station Kerbinport on Tuesday, two more Glass Cannons were launched - one for space station Munport and one for space station Minmusport. The Munport module arrived and docked successfully to the station, while the Minmusport module is still en route; it won't arrive for several days. The only other thing that happened was the arrival and final entry of the probe I had printed up at the Boot Hill outpost on Mun, carrying a Pathfinder Temperature Survey to the surface for splashdown:

Once again kiddos, always remember your stack decouplers...

Despite a harrowing re-entry and temporary loss of control over the craft, the probe did finally make a safe entry and splashed down on the far side of KSC. Despite fulfilling all of the conditions of the contract, I didn't get credit for it when I recovered the craft, so I may be doing all of this again anyway. Not really looking forward to that, in all honesty...

[Zosma Procyon]

9 hours ago, MR L A said:

You could hold shift to make the notches smaller... unless you already are?

I thought you meant the full notches. Maybe I'll try with half notches some time in the future.

[Cavscout74]

4 hours ago, capi3101 said:

Despite a harrowing re-entry and temporary loss of control over the craft, the probe did finally make a safe entry and splashed down on the far side of KSC. Despite fulfilling all of the conditions of the contract, I didn't get credit for it when I recovered the craft, so I may be doing all of this again anyway.

Sadly, those contracts seem to fail to credit about half the time for me, maybe more.  I rarely do them now, and if I do, I quicksave shortly before landing because (assuming you've met the other requirements) it DOES vary each time whether it credits the landing/splashdown or not.  The worst one I've had was returning three or four different experiments for contracts on a single ship.  Quickloaded multiple times, and each time it varied which of the contracts completed.  I finally gave up & just used alt-F12 to complete the rest of the contracts.

[DerekL1963]

Moved all the stuff for a thing I'm planning from 1.3.1 (my last fully populated install) to 1.5.1.  There were a few assemblies where the newer version of a mod is incompatible with it's older sibling, but those are easily rebuilt.  The majority moved over w/o any issues.

[Tonka Crash]

My Mun orbital station had an evacuation drill and recovered to the Mun Mine and Refinery. This is on final descent.

[NHunter]

There hasn't been much going on in my GPP career recently. Just flying tourist contracts and doing other small jobs. Today, though, my space camp #1 finally was finished and granted me three new Gaelan astronauts. The camp itself was held in three 6-seat crafts held together through the magic of docking ports and struts.

Not very pretty, but, hey, it was the lightest craft of required capacity I could build at the time - I hadn't unlocked Mk3 or OPT parts yet when I launched this thing. Deorbiting this thing was done by splitting it into three separate landers, and due to very limited fuel, I had to land at Rook's Glory instead of GSC. And I really need to brush up on my targeting: only one of the three landers actually landed within Rook's Glory site.

[Schwarz]

Suddenly felt the urge to VTOL in the middle of a test flight:

[Lisias]

Do you remember this?
 

Well… I think I still have some work to do.  That wings need a lot of caring yet.

 

Well… part of the crew survived, so… Not a total loss.  

Edited January 29, 2019 by Lisias
updating images URL

[Lisias]

43 minutes ago, Schwarz said:

Suddenly felt the urge to VTOL in the middle of a test flight:
 

Nice! Now take off!  

[Cavscout74]

I've been mostly ignoring Eve in this career, except for a few unmanned probes, so its about time I finally sent a crew to Eve after nearly 11 years.  No landing this time, but I had a small, 2-seat Eve Skimmer that took a quick dip through the upper atmosphere before docking back to the Eve station.  It's main purpose is actually to complete a "return from Eve" exploration contract since the crew cycler isn't able to land back on Kerbin.  The skimmer got pushed all the way to Eve by the cycler & will get pushed all the way back, but should be able to complete the contract. 

Crew cycler & Eve skimmer docked to Eve Station

Eve skimmer coming out of the atmosphere from its quick dip.  The cockpit got a little warm, but everything else is looking good, and the small radiator was able to cool down the cockpit fairly quickly once back in space.

Eve skimmer moving to dock back with the station.  Now the crew has just over a year to wait before coming home.

[Schwarz]

3 hours ago, Lisias said:

Nice! Now take off!  

I messed up my first try diving too little, and now i have to get the plane back up there again for a second try

[Hotel26]

Found a spot with a pretty view of the KSC...

...flat enough to land easily...

...have been exploring nooks and crannies in the mountains to the west.  A great proving ground for VTOL machines.

Life is good when you are a Kerbonaut!

 

Edited November 9, 2018 by Hotel26

[Xurkitree]

I played too much KSP today

Not only did I do some early career stuff in my moderately modded OPM install (LS,NF,other stuff), I also managed to fix my docking problems in my Grand Tour save, and then went to Ike, landed and went to orbit.