What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Guest]

10 hours ago, Cavscout74 said:

• Because it is a really, really slick idea, and I must go try it myself now just because.  

 

Awww.

I did think of another use case. Thing is, you can stick things to the outside of this fairing, unlike the procedural ones.

Think in-orbit cargo transfer. Say, a lifter lofts the cargo to orbit, where a deep-space tug picks it up and flies it to the destination, where a surface shuttle snags it and brings it down (through an atmosphere, so you still want the fairing). This would be rather tricky with a cargo pod built of two back-to-back fairings. You'd need both craft to do some careful manoeuvring to hand over the package, or else use something like a KAS winch or similar stuff.

However, you can turn the P5 into a self-driving truck: let's call it the P5-A (for autonomous).

Stick a few RCS jets on the outside, and if your payload doesn't already have them, some monoprop, a reaction wheel, some batteries, and a cheap probe core with hibernation on (togglable with an action group), under the fairings covering the caps. Stick docking ports wherever you want them, including the caps where you can have a structural element clipping through the fairing to hold it (not a problem because you're not going to ever deploy those fairings). 

Now all you need to do is RV your craft, detach and activate the P5-A, and fly it to dock to the other one, using RCS. This is gonna be much easier than transferring over a "dumb" cargo package.

Edited November 21, 2018 by Guest

[Kebab Kerman]

9 hours ago, Fraston said:

Shot a fuel tank into orbit for no particular reason.

Hmmmm... This gives me... Ideas. This needs more research.

[Tonka Crash]

I fulfilled a contract to do scientific surveys of a C-class asteroid. This is the third asteroid intercept using the same ship I launched months ago. It refuels and swaps crew between missions at my Minmus orbital station. To the right is an auxiliary drone to carry the DMagic Asteroid Sounding experiment to the far side of the asteroid. In flight it docks to the side asteroid interceptor. 

[Tonka Crash]

I followed up the asteroid intercept with a simple contract to do a temperature scan while docked at my Minmus station and return it to Kerbin. Here's initial approach to the station for the sample return probe.

[magnemoe]

Long day, went both high and low. 
Some commercial resource modules overshoot and landed in the water.
Being some hundred tons they sunk. 

Luckily the parashutes worked underwater so they sunk at 4 m/s so I thought I just wait until they hit the bottom. 


That was an bit unnerving the sun is shining trough the planet but it landed sucessfully and was recovered. 

No penalty for recovery from 1000 meter deep. 

Also sent away my jool mission. Minmus to high Kerbin orbit then down to LKO for the insertion burn. 

All lined up. 

Seperation. 

Plenty of fuel left, had to dump the center tank with 9 LV-N however. Might be able to keep it as I also hold ore who can be converted to fuel but did not take the risk. 
 

[Guest]

I regret to inform you that the P5 does not, in fact, work. Kerbin's physics threw a curve ball. It turns out that anything inside a structural tube looks to the aero model like it's outside. Massive drag spikes. I'm reporting a bug about this though.

[panarchist]

Mostly I flew around the awesome SR-71 that Steam user str(bean) created and posted to the Steam workshop, after tweaking the textures with Dark Texture Pack.

Valentina and Bill had a great flight from KSC to Area 110011, although they outraced the sun getting there. The final pic is much later, after sunrise by a bit. Obviously, other mods used were EVE, SVE, Scatterer, Kerbal Konstructs, Kerbinside, etc, etc. This particular SR-71 is a real joy to fly, especially at 18,000m. I got 1,148m/s at that altitude, which is a bit better than the 980m/s speed record of the RL SR-71.

[Guest]

I believe I have finally tamed my fairing problem.

First I tried replacing the structural tube with an interstage fairing. It seemed to work beautifully... except that when I blew the cap off, the payload wouldn't budge. KSP physics still treated it as stowed. No way to get it out without blowing the interstage fairing too, which is what I wanted to avoid.

Looks great. Won't work.

At that point I figured that if KSP physics don't play fair, then neither shall I. Clipping to the rescue.

Introducing the BAK Mobile Fairing (Pat. Pend.). Wheels! They poke out! Also a bit of structural panel, just visible as a seam outside the fairing. So, I decouple it, roll it to a safe location away from the plane, retract the wheels, and...

POW!

Then just roll the cargo off the bed, and we're done.

I believe those retractable wheels are key. Bad Things happen when fairing debris interacts with wheels, but when they're retracted, they're not wheels, they're just plain old objects, which is much less dramatic.

I made ten trials. No explosions. Nothing dramatic in fact. I'm not sure how it'll behave on a lower-grav world but I guess we'll find out.

 

Edited November 21, 2018 by Guest

[Katten]

 

Today I'm happy to be going to Jool for the first time! Despite having spent 100s of hours playing KSP, and creating a couple of mods myself, I have only been to Duna and Eve so far, hehe. This is in real scale solar system (think it is called Rescale) and Historical Progression. You can see the extenders from my Rocket Emporium mod and Animated Attachment mod working in the video too.

 

[Cavscout74]

53 minutes ago, Brikoleur said:

I regret to inform you that the P5 does not, in fact, work. Kerbin's physics threw a curve ball. It turns out that anything inside a structural tube looks to the aero model like it's outside. Massive drag spikes. I'm reporting a bug about this though.

That's disappointing.  I found that a 5m tube does fit a Buffalo or Feline Utility Rover.  I was thinking about using them as a rover landing system, to protect during atmospheric entry and the initial landing.  Does explain why it slowed down so quick when I cheated one to orbit then reentered with it.  On the plus side, the actual landing & rover exit worked pretty good, except the can "top" wanted to stick. 

In my career game, the Avalon returned to Kerbin pushing the Eve Skimmer with it - needed to complete a "orbit Eve & Return to Kerbin" contract.  i would have preferred to leave the skimmer at Eve station if it hadn't been for the contract.

Eve Skimmer gliding back towards KSC after overshooting on reentry.  For a "plane" that was thrown together in a few minutes & test flight exactly once before its mission, it flies remarkably well. 

I also had my Laythe Lightning spaceplane arrive in orbit and head down to replace the destroyed Pumera-Laythe #1.  I was quite happy with how it handled during entry - even during the plasma blackout, it stayed rock steady, wings level & slightly nose high.  I don't usually do drone spaceplane flights, but I had no choice in this case, and I wasn't sure how the Lightning would handle Laythe entry without a pilot.

Made a nice, smooth night landing at the Lancer-Laythe ground base, now just have to wait for the crew to come back from the floating base at the end of their tour.

[papuchalk]

hey guys, after long time without KSP, i bought Expansion Making History last week, and downloaded some mod for historical missions,

so i followed Luna 16 story today 

not that i am very precise in details but..

 

 

more pictures here

https://imgur.com/a/wjkrzXF

 

Edited November 21, 2018 by papuchalk

[icanhazurhp]

I got my Duna crew back to Kerbin by building a rescue vehicle with a claw, and 4 seats.  My Duna Direct Ascent Module had run out of fuel trying to aerobrake into Kerbin, and with a 38k Periapsis, I was going to fly off into Kerbol. I managed to capture using RCS thrusters, but my engineer was only level 1 and couldn't repack the chutes in the nosecone.  I launched into their plane, matched their velocity, transferred my science over with my scientist through EVA, then grabbed the Duna module and moved the rest of the crew over at about 300km over Kerbin's atmosphere. Cutting it kinda close.

I spend the last two hours trying to do a proper touch-and-go landing on Minmus with a Mk2 SSTO spaceplane... meaning, no vertical landing... come in for an approach, get your horizontal speed under 140m/s, and your vertical speed below 10m/s, land on the Greater Flats, and then take off again for a Munar flyby without ever orbiting Minmus. I challenge ye all.

[Stunkfish]

On 11/20/2018 at 2:07 AM, Kebab Kerman said:

Ok, so it turns out, my laptop does have an internal GPU. I have an AMD Radeon 530 GPU and it sucks for gaming. Good to know that now. Thanks for the help!

 

I wonder what happens if I plug in 4 eGPU's at once...? That'll definitely make a very happy framerate!

@Kebab Kerman
Maybe you should make sure that the game is actually running on your AMD Radeon.

If the correct driver-package was never installed for it,
or if an update has messed things up,
KSP might actually be running on the inbuilt (very bad) graphics-capabilities of your intel CPU.

Happened to me not only once to have bad experiences in games until realizing it was not running on my laptops GPU (which was physically there!), but just using the CPU-graphics....

[Xurkitree]

Before I forget, HUGE shoutout to the Twin-Boar engine for making launches so quick and efficient. Highly adaptable fuel reserves, great thrust for high TWR or high payloads, and most importantly, able to SSTO probe payloads handily.

Another thing - last night I landed on Duna & Ike in my new career! Dealing with Life Support, Commnet, and Purely Chemical Rockets is hard but i did it!

But then my Duna lander ran out of fuel on Ike because I forgot to refuel in orbit, thinking it would be enough to get there and back. 

So I had to use my transfer stage to land on Ike, transfer my crew while RCS keeps it constantly balanced, and then take all the science and go.

Weird. But hey! I have 3 years worth of Supplies on the transfer ship, so the crew is happy.

come to think of it, I could do a biome hop with the lander with the remaing fuel.

[Guest]

What do they make these fairings out of, explodium?

... indestructible explodium???

Seriously though, that was user error -- firing a decoupler inside the fairing, rather than deploying the fairing. This actually works perfectly so far -- I did a rehearsal base deploy on the lawn outside KSC, and the fairings worked flawlessly. Had some other glitches which I've now fixed.

Next up is a general rehearsal. We'll be flying across the bay and setting up the base there. 

The current mission plan is:

• Dunyazad - S/VTOL craft. Delivers tractor, drill, and ISRU. Crewed by pilot + engineer.
• Shahrazad - Dunyazad's near-identical twin: apart from a different paint job, she carries a semi-permanently installed fuel tank in its centre cargo node. The two wing nodes deliver the command tower + science/utility rover.
• Sindbad - Conventional ballistic launch. Return vessel (crew capacity of 10), which doubles as a delivery module for our ultra-rugged survey rovers and 100G link.

I decided to go with identical sister ships for simplicity and redundancy. A dedicated tanker would not be much more efficient since they already have quite good aerodynamics. And this way the base can survive loss of one entire craft.

I'm quite proud of my rovers actually.

The tractor is incredibly versatile -- it can tow, winch, supply auxiliary power, move around kerbals and inventory, and serve as a supply station for spacecraft. 

The science-utility rover is pretty cool too. Crew capacity is five. The twist with it is that it's fast, can get up crazy inclines, can right itself if it flips, and is pret-ty robust: I did some tests on the runway and reached 48.5 m/s land speed, which launched it right off the runway at the other end, and it survived the landing with damage only to nonessential parts (nose cone and headlights). It handles like a Cadillac SUV, meaning, springs are extremely soggy and it really doesn't like to go around corners, but it's really hard to flip and it has really high ground clearance.

The ultra-rugged survey rovers are fun too. They will scoot along at 45 m/s or so, and have a togglable reaction wheel that allows control of attitude as they land. And they can survive a drop onto the Dunian surface with parachutes only -- I've tried on Kerbin and a 25 m/s touchdown is no problem at all. Makes me wonder what they make those wheels of, and why can't they make everything else out of the same material?

I have about 90 days to go until my launch window. That's enough to do the general rehearsal, work out any bugs discovered there, and then get going.

(This is an incredibly intricate project by the way, the Laythe Kosmodrome was easymode by comparison.)

Edited November 22, 2018 by Guest

[Hydrothermalventclam]

I have been primarily playing in my RSS/RO save for the last week or so.

I started working on a moon landing mission, roughly based on the Constellation program architecture.

The lander and transfer stage launch on an Ares V rocket.  (Well, almost an Ares V rocket, the upper stage is a bit small)  This launch was just a test of the lifter system, which preformed flawlessly.

I also practiced landing on the Moon and practiced Earth-orbit rendezvous.  Launching far away from the equator is tricky.  Also, the probe lander engine could not throttle.  There is so much more stuff to think about in RSS/RO.

This is my Orion crew vehicle and my automated station resupply vehicle.

 

Edited November 22, 2018 by Hydrothermalventclam

[XLjedi]

Today I tried to explain to a facebook friend how I go about docking two spacecraft in orbit...

 

Edited November 22, 2018 by XLjedi

[Delay]

16 minutes ago, XLjedi said:

Today I tried to explain to a facebook friend

...successfully?

[XLjedi]

4 minutes ago, Delay said:

...successfully?

Well...  you tell me?  It's the way I go about doing it.  His issue was mostly with the Approach phase.  I don't think he's actually seen the video yet though.

Edited November 22, 2018 by XLjedi

[NHunter]

I've been playing around in a sandbox, trying to design a better EL/resource refinery base architecture. Better = same or better functionality with less parts: current 99 part monstrosity I have on Ceti slows my PC to a crawl even when there are no other crafts in vicinity.

So far, I've managed to reduce part count by 24 (actually 30, since I was using a different set of cradles for the sandbox-base modules).

...Now, I just need to figure out how to deliver enough rocket parts to Ceti to rebuild half of my base...

That, and I need to figure out why my survey stakes keep exploding because they "collided with Ceti".

Edited November 22, 2018 by NHunter

[Hotel26]

Back in February, I was playing on Duna and made a couple of designs, called Foxbat and Foxbat R2:

Fun to fly but woefully short on range.

 

This is Batwing, which I started yesterday and have now finished tuning:

Of course, I am now using ultra-economical NERVs.  At altitude, it uses 0.6 kal/sec to cruise at 720m/s and it can go to and return from orbit as well.

So far, I'm only permitting my ex-military Kerbals to fly it -- with instructions: "aim it at the ground and bang it on with the brakes locked."  The carrier pilots understand that full well!

I've got the VERT Terriers inline, in service bays, so the pilot can fiddle with the differential thrust settings but, so far, seems like the fuel balances are good.

How well it flies out of Kerbin atmosphere atop a lifter is the last question mark to answer... 

Edited November 22, 2018 by Hotel26

[Tyko]

2 hours ago, XLjedi said:

Today I tried to explain to a facebook friend how I go about docking two spacecraft in orbit...

That's a good demonstration of the concepts. A few tips you may already know, but weren't illustrated in your video to your friend:

• Using maneuver nodes makes the whole rendezvous a lot easier because you can plan your maneuvers instead of just guessing where to burn and where you'll end up.
• You can do your rendezvous in 4 burns
  1. Plane Change to match target - This is similar to the maneuver you performed, I just used a maneuver node to get as close as a could to burning at the AN
  2. Circularize your orbit above (or below) your target - you didn't perform this step.
     • If the two orbits are both circular planning your burn to bring your PE down to match the target becomes a LOT easier.
     • As you can see in the video below, you can drop a maneuver node, lower the PE then grab the center ring of the maneuver node and drag it along your orbit until you get your close encounter
  3. Drop your PE
  4. Fine tune your rendezvous - this should be a quarter orbit before your encounter so you can affect changes in all 3 axis. Quarter turn ahead is the most efficient place if you have to burn normal or anti-normal.
     • As a side note, you can hover your mouse over one of the node handles and scroll your mouse wheel to change it to. If you roll your mouse wheel slowly you can affect very small changes.

Really sorry there's no voice over. This is the first time I've made a demo and don't have a mic set up. I hope it's clear what's going on. I started with a pretty close approximation of your same starting conditions.

 

 

Edited November 22, 2018 by Tyko

[panarchist]

I've been working on my KSP story so I can resurrect my long-idle Mission Report thread. As part of that, I spent a lot of time getting my game set back up with the desired mods, most notably @Angel-125's outstanding Heisenberg (airship) mod and BARIS. I haven't worked with BARIS in a while, but I finally figured out how to use the Integration feature properly, and I tuned the settings a bit to make the chance of failure a bit less. My game is currently in the pre-KSP days, when the USK and UKKR had competing space programs, but were trying to learn how to cooperate. The UKKR was having a particularly hard time with Kerputnik.

Whoops, that didn't work.

Uh... no, that didn't work either. Let's try that one again...

Hooray! Ok, so there's that. On the USK side, The unmanned space probe program was having even more trouble, so Jeb went out and did some aerobatic maneuvers in the F/A-4 Tigerhawk

After that, Jeb, Bob, and Bill headed up to Dull Spot to pick up the Amelia Kerman. The Amelia was the first airship built by the Allies in the Great War. After the war, it ended up in Kanada at Dull Spot, sitting idle but maintained inflated. The crew picked up the Amelia Kerman to fly to KSC for a conversion to a capsule recovery ship.

Departure from Dull Spot at sunset. The flight was timed so that the crew could hit the refueling stop at Coaler Crater and the KSC both in daylight, since it's way easier to cast off the lines and lift off in poor lighting than it is to arrive in the dark and try to secure the craft. (in reality, I was too lazy to advance the time and wanted cool lighting for pics)

Jeb at the controls. The Amelia has been in storage for a long time, so her avionics are shut down and most of the electronic systems offline other than ballast and lift controls. The crew flew her manually for this mission. (I have MAS installed but not RPM, so the "normal" gauges in the Heisenberg mod are not present)

Next stop: Coaler Crater!

The electronic issues and other problems might also be due to the Amelia Kerman's age and condition, plus these little glitches that happened at takeoff. (thanks BARIS!) If you look carefully, you may see the Amelia flying with a bit of a list in several photos.

Dull Spot is far enough north to have the aurora.

Sunrise over the ocean on the approach to Coaler Crater.

Turning to line up with the base on approach.

That's a BIG antenna down there! The crew refueled, and flew the airship to the new hangar at KSC for retrofit. It took most of the day to get there from Coaler at 90m/s.

Final approach to KSC.

The next morning, the USK / UK managed to get a satellite into a high eccentric orbit, but the PE is below 70km, so eventually it will decay enough to come down. The UKKR has a successful launch, so the question is what happens next? I'm having a lot of fun crafting a narrative and putting the pics together, but writing the mission reports is going to take a while. There have been some great stories told on the forum over the years, and I'm hoping that I can add something which isn't TOO reminiscent of what's gone before.

Maybe there will be a bit less of this:

(uncontrolled second stage after all the first stage boosters failed and had to be separated early. I think this was attempt #5 at Kerputnik)

 

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Hotel26 said:

How well it flies out of Kerbin atmosphere atop a lifter is the last question mark to answer... 

You might want to consider just sticking a  couple of RAPIERs with a bit of fuel/ox on detachable pylons on the wings.

-- I am happy to report that the general rehearsal for the Duna base setup was a success. 

We had a couple of incidents but nothing unrecoverable.

The stupidest and entirely self-inflicted one was when an over-enthusiastic engineer ran straight into the drill's Gigantor panel, which had been deployed completely unnecessarily before the full base setup was complete.

It also turns out that even with the wheels removed, our permanent installations tend to slide on inclined surfaces. In anticipation of this, we have packed some surface anchors and cable attachment points, with which we can anchor them into place permanently should this be a problem.

Was like this when installed. The ISRU drifted off a fair way during the day.

The test also uncovered a few subtle engineering errors -- again nothing unrecoverable, but annoying.

• Our command tower turned out to have a docking port permanently stuck to the floor (it was the assembly root, and KIS can't remove the assembly root); it was also insufficiently stable when being pulled upright -- we did do it  eventually but it was much harder than anticipated.
• The ladder on our utility rover was badly placed and could not be reached, which means that we would have had to move it.
• There was some parts clipping in the pod carrying the drill, which resulted in some unplanned disassembly, but fortuitously nothing of value broke -- that has been fixed.
• Our demolition charges were badly placed; the engineers charged with detonating them couldn't easily reach them to set them off.
• And finally, the utility rover's docking port was slightly off and it could not easily dock with Dunyazad for a trip to orbit: this could also have been fixed in-situ but has now, naturally, been corrected in the SPH.

All the design bugs we discovered have now been corrected, and we're as ready as we can be. Let's head for Duna!

Edited November 22, 2018 by Guest

[EpicSpaceTroll139]

I made a thingymabobber that gimbals a Mainsail.  It should be readily scalable to gimbal Rhinos and Mainsails.

It only really needs 4 of those side engines, and I plan to reduce that to 3 this evening.  Should be useful for large space shuttles.

My apologies for the hiccup audio.  I have no idea what happened there.