What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Triop]

Set a new speed record (55 m/s) in my 80 days around Kerbin adventure.

Special thanks to @NBDesigns for the wheel settings.

[Cavscout74]

10 hours ago, Hotel26 said:

Totally intrigued by this aircraft because, (having done some flying on Duna), I can't get how you can make it perform there as it does.  My hat off, mate!

Give it a try:

https://kerbalx.com/cavscout74/Duna-Explorer-S

I was able to delete a few extra mod parts - mostly science gear from Probes Plus & DMagic.  The "unidentified part" is the battery wedge from Universal Storage II.   Also, I was already tinkering with the changes I was thinking about.  The uploaded version has the wider stub wing for the gear mount, but not the rear-facing braking fan - that didn't work very well, at least on Kerbin.  I'm hoping the wider gear mount provides a little better lateral stability on takeoff & landing, but actual testing has been limited to the KSC runway so far, so I can't tell you how well it'll work.

Hmm, I probably could've just ditched US II completely for the upload - the only parts it uses are a 4-slot core & battery wedges.  I may re-upload later with just stock batteries.  Edit: Deleted US II parts & replaced with stock batteries.

Edited February 8, 2019 by Cavscout74

[Yakuzi]

Today, worked on this unit:

 

Not today, not Korolev, not cross:

[OrbitsR4Sissies]

After a lot of research and (explosive, out of control) trial and error in understanding the significance of centers of mass, thrust and lift, I present to you my very first rocketplane: The Kingfisher.

This--unusual design made for a perfect stability during flight with that single Vector. But the stack was a lot of weight. The total delta-V gives it exactly what is needed to reach 70 to 74 km, no more--for now at least.

I almost wanted to call this the Seperatron 5 because the thing has no fewer than 16 Separatron retro solids to pull away the booster elements safely away from the rocketplane itself and from each other. A recent tweak (not shown) reconfigures the Seperatrons so they separate and then retrofire all elements to keep LKO clean of debris.

As for the rocketplane itself, it's meant as a LKO crew transfer for up to 5 people (plus 1 required pilot), great for carrying my Duna Exploration Vehicle crews back to Kerbin on their happy return to LKO or from my space station used for safe-haven orbital rescues. The aft has a docking collar for this.

It has the Mk2 Rocket Fuel part that gives it a very modest 700 dV for making a few changes in LKO, but it needs half of that for deorbit. I'm studying the addition of a service module with fuel and replacing that Mk2 tank with the Mk2 cargo bay (where I can load more fuel or anything I want--kinda.

If the short stubby delta wing design reminds you of a Space Shuttle Orbiter, good. Because the thing flies like one--it's a flying brick. It's lifting force is small. I overshoot a little for a target and then nose-dive at the landing strip, flaring at the last minute for a nice landing. Handles fairly well during re-entry.

All things considered, I don't think I did too badly for my first one. Still not interested in SSTOs, but I love tinkering with Kingfisher. I even love that I have an Edwards AFB-like desert landing strip to practice my landings, just like the first Shuttles did, without the penalties of putting it in the drink as I would for KSC landings until I get better and master the feel of the thing.

Video of the Kingfisher at work (4 min), also my first KSP video. Sorry for the quality--I was rushed and YouTube makes nasty videos on early channels.

 

 

Edited February 9, 2019 by OrbitsR4Sissies
Clarified

[Triop]

PITSTOP

I love the KIS mod.

 

[Hotel26]

4 hours ago, Cavscout74 said:

Give it a try:

Thank!  I downloaded KerbalX unit #001 off the line and Upvoted. 

I'll report back on how I go with a stock simile...

[Espatie]

So to follow up on the previous day:

 

The Bus took a turn around the Mun, with a Retrograde burn just before exiting the Mun's SOI changing the inclination of the Kerbin orbit from 60 graden to only 9 (why does burning Retrograde in Mun's SOI do that for the Kerbin orbit? Trying to follow patched cones mystifies me sometimes).

 

However, while the inclination is good, the Ap and Pe aren't so friendly; it's going to take a couple of weeks before it swings back into near-Kerbin space. It's only just avoiding going into Kerbin orbit! Working out the Faust's intercept also shows that it will be out for a while to set the intercept up properly.

 

With the Faust gone construction on The 90th Kilometre Market is going to be at a standstill; the station's little LKO runabout simply doesn't have the grunt for shifting the launched mass into intercepts. At the same time, I've gotten a contract to build a station around the Mun (how useful would that have been when the Bus came in?), so I have decided to bring forward the construction of the second OUV. This one is getting the Retractable Deployable Solar Panels instead of the OX-STAT ones (the Faust has had this change retrofitted with the magic of KAS). I'm also going to fit it with KIS/KAS Container holding frames (which I plan to retrofit to the Faust as well, when I remember). Sadly there's no 1.875m in-line KIS parts, or I'd add those.

 

I'm also experimenting with fitting a Service Bay to hold minicraft and drones. I don't know how useful it will be, but ultimately I can take it out if it's a hindrance once in orbit. I'd like to give it more Monopropellant as well, I think.

 

Lastly, I finalised and launched my next Mun Science mission, which aims to land a rover which is carrying 9 sets of Surface Experiment Pack equipment. This should keep the Science Department busy for a few weeks!

[Hotel26]

In a joint project with @FleshJeb I've devised a procedure to load the mobile fuel truck, Gryphon, into the Manta transporter using this Cargo Bay Hoist system:

The procedure is quite straight-forward.  (The highlight is that Gryphon is capable not only of docking within Manta's cargo bay, but is also able to raise itself up inside Manta to establish good clearance before the bay doors close.  If this has been done before, I've never seen it, which makes this an independent idea, if not actually an original one.)

 

As a result of using a cargo bay to carry Gryphon, instead of packing it at the tail in a cargo ramp, aerial discharge now works very simply and without casualties:

This is the Holy Grail, now firmly in the possession of Kerbalkind!!!!

                                                                                                                                                                                                

The intention with Manta/Gryphon is generally to land conventionally and deposit Gryphon on the ground.  Manta provides up to 16K kallons of LF plus a generous amount of OX and parks up, acting as the Mother lode for fuel reserves at a remote airport/operation site.

Gryphon -- which FleshJeb very aptly dubbed "a hose on wheels" -- is the mobile, universal conduit for refueling almost anything that needs it.  When Gryphon needs more fuel, it parks under Manta's nose and nose gear retraction results in mother and child docking for fuel replenishment.  (Theoretically, Manta does not need the nose claw although it means that Manta has some capability to refuel other craft directly.)

The new, re-factored Gryphon has been uploaded now to KerbalX as an upgraded Gryphon II.

Edited February 9, 2019 by Hotel26

[MaverickSawyer]

Mostly worked on Stigmun's Folly, but I did launch a new module for my LKO station, as well as some extra scientists for it...

Also trimmed the orbit so that it's exactly circular (to within  a few centimeters) and perfectly equatorial.  

Launched a radar mapping satellite to Duna, as well as a second transmission-only science lander. I have a sample return lander lined up and ready to fly, but I'm waiting just a bit longer to cut down on the dV requirements... It's able to do the mission, but it'll be tight if I launch it now. If I wait a few more weeks, it'll have plenty of dV to spare.

[MiscelanousItem]

Yesterday I landed on Minmus:

Jeb hopes that Whittaker's will be able to make a new recipe from the surface sample(I tipped the lander over on purpose because it wasn't stable without SAS)

That mission got me about 440 science

Today I began designing my Munar orbital station:(this is still a WIP)

The idea behind this is that it will serve as a base of operations for exploring the Mun(and that I have a contract for it)

Edited February 9, 2019 by MiscelanousItem

[ValleyTwo]

Well, the Nuke-Tug and the Basic Lander made it to the OSS - after a little issue caused by me forgetting to tell the Tug which way was forward and which way was backwards.  And the Senior Docking Ports were set up correctly.  Yeah!  

So the Tug's Liquid Fuel was topped off.

And Mono was taken from one of the Crew Taxis.  They don't need it for the "downward" return to Kerbin.  HA!

Now I just have to decide on the crew.  The Lander is for two and has science stuff all over it.  So Bob will be going because he is the only scientist on the payroll.  Bill will stay in the OSS till I have a mining platform ready for the Mun.  Then he can be its engineer.  But which pilot will be going?  Valentina flew up one of the Crew Taxis after they were tested and Jebediah flew up with the OSS after it was designed and tested.  I guess I need to flip a coin.  

 

Edited February 9, 2019 by ValleyTwo

[Delay]

I installed Trajectories. Naturally this was the first thing I did.

Trajectories actually showed me something I didn't know before: At speeds greater than ~90m/s the stage behaves like an aircraft.
I have to point away from where I want to go!

[RizzoTheRat]

Phase 1 of my KOS docking script completed.  "Docker" launched in to a 80km orbit and then successfully rendezvoused with Agena in a 150km orbit.

Pretty happy with <150m seperation from a Hohmann manoeuvre without using nodes

That's the easy bit though.

 

Edited February 9, 2019 by RizzoTheRat

[Espatie]

Science Mission made it to the Mun. Things... did not go according to plan.

 

The plan was to drop a well-equipped rover with a large skycrane lander onto a site where I had a rescue mission for an Engineer, Beawell. I was to leave the Rover, Beawell and a Scientist (Maduki) to roam about a bit and put up some SEP packages, while the Pilot (Heldred) returned back to orbit and helped build the new station before returning with a pickup lander (or possibly just bringing down a permanent base).

 

The first sign of trouble was when the Science team go to orbit and found (with the assistance of an engineer at the construction site) that the lander design was flawed - it wasn't possible to fit the supporting arms to hold the required thrusters with KAS tools, for some reason (need to investigate why KAS and Structural Tubing Restructured parts do not play well together).

 

With the help of some spare parts from the station build (nobody will miss 'em, honest) we worked around the problem and went in for landing. A mild amount of overshoot (8km) from the target site, but nothing *too* bad... until Kerbol suddenly vanished over the horizon and my landing zone went pitch black.

 

I tried to cautiously retro down, but the terrain was both higher than estimated and treacherous. The first impact blew off the left side wheels and some of the AKI storage lockers, and the second took out one of the 4 thruster pods. Thankfully the 3rd was sufficiently gentle that the rest of the craft survived, but with only 2 wheels it's not roving anywhere any more.

https://imgur.com/i4g1pKS

It's a bit bent - the Mk1 lander pod for the ascent stage is *inside* the tank that was used to replace the strutwork. The whole thing is also wobbling in a way that makes me think that if I unload physics for any reason the whole thing will cease to exist in an explosive fashion.

 

The first thing I'm going to do is get the SEP packages away from the wreck, as well as both the crew. If it does spontaneously cease to exist I don't want to lose 2 good Kerbals. After that I'm going to send Heldred the 8km to get Beawell. If we can salvage any kind of minimal launcher from the wreckage (assuming it doesn't just explode) then that'll be a good start.

 

So, I've gone from one Kerbal needing rescuing from the Mun to 3...

 

In other news the OUV Faust is still a week away from rendezvous with the Slingshot Bus that was stranded earlier.

Edited February 9, 2019 by Espatie

[Fraktal]

The mission of the RV-1 rover ended today, successfully. Two sessions ago, the rover arrived to Minmus, landing near the highlands just east of the Great Flats. After visiting all four nearby biomes, the rover spent over an hour rolling downhill and surveyed the Great Flats before firing up its thrusters and jetting westward on a suborbital hop, landing in the Lesser Flats. From there, it spent another hour rolling north to survey the nearby Flats. Once that was done, the controllers noted that the Greater Flats were currently on the night side of Minmus with Kerbin beneath the horizon. So instead of jetting there directly, the rover instead jetted north and landed near the north pole, from where it proceeded to roll eastward along the arctic circle until it reached the terminator, at which point it dropped anchor and shut down until morning.

When daylight came, the probe fired up its thrusters again and jumped to the south in its largest hop ever, arriving over the Greater Flats. However, despite the controllers having waited with the maneuver until the Greater Flats had LOS to Kerbin, the rover ended up dropping out of contact less than two minutes before the suicide burn. The result was a hard landing that destroyed the rover's front right wheel, but miraculously left everything else intact. Once contact with Kerbin was reestablished, the rover transmitted its last batch of science data before attempting to use its thrusters to climb up to orbit with the intention of leaving Minmus and deorbiting into Kerbin. But with one of the landing wheels gone and the rover's dual Baguette tanks almost empty, the rover's engines ended up producing too much asymmetric thrust for the probe core to compensate and by the time the proper power ratio was manually set, it was too late: the rover hit the ground hard enough to lose the probe core, the science package and one of the Baguettes along with its thruster, causing the other thruster to fire 460 m/s of dV in a rapid, uncontrolled spin that hurled the rover up to nearly 300 km altitude before it fell down and was destroyed on impact.

Still, the mission was a success: the rover visited every single biome and sent back data from each. From the experience, the RV-1 design was overhauled, removing one of the Baguette tanks and encasing the other inside the rover's central structural element to make the design more robust. In addition, the decision was made to remove two of the rover's three antennas and instead include an RS-1 relay satellite into the launch payload, as said design already proved its reliability with three satellites in semi-synchronous orbit around the Mun providing uninterrupted connectivity to any missions on the far side, even those without a dedicated antenna. The rover itself also received an additional thruster on the rear for improved controllability during both ascent and descent, as the forward-facing OKTO core's navigation system couldn't see the prograde direction of the downward-facing thrusters and thus all prograde/retrograde burns had to be eyeballed completely in the blind.

With the mission concluded, the brass greenlighted a manned mission and within a day, Explorer-3B blasted off for its first manned Minmus landing. In the end, Jeb and Bob visited and surveyed no less than five biomes; in particular, when the lander passed over a Slopes biome on its way to the nearby Flats, Bob got out and jetted back to the hill to verify if the biome had a flat enough spot at the top of the hill for the lander. Once he verified that there was such a spot with a 6.2° elevation about 600 meters uphill, Jeb locked onto his position and flew the lander to him instead of waiting for him to return. They had enough spare fuel for one more biome, but the brass decided not to take any chances and brought them home with 500 m/s remaining between the main engine and the RCS. Although the engineers desired to use this opportunity to test whether RCS thrusters could be used to cancel lateral velocity during landing, the result was disappointing: the thrusters did not have enough power to meaningfully affect the lander's trajectory while it still had fuel for the main engine, nor did lander's monopropellant capacity grant them enough endurance for a long burn.

In the end, Jeb and Bob returned to Kerbin on a shallow reentry with 45 km periapse, almost bouncing off the atmosphere but having burned all their remaining fuel before reentry, they did not have enough upwards velocity to escape and ended up landing with less than 2 units of ablator remaining on the heatshield out of 60. They brought with them a massive treasure trove of scientific information (15 surface samples, 15 goo observations, 15 materials studies, 5 crew reports, 5 EVA reports, 5 atmospheric surveys, 5 temperature surveys) that immediately allowed R&D to pursue two different avenues of development.

After careful consideration of what was required by the program's plans for the future, the brass decided to develop the HECS core, along with improved solar panels, energy storage and relay antennas, in preparation for the upcoming launch of the RV-2 rover mission to GIlly once the second flight of the Explorer-3B finishes surveying Minmus' surface (which will unlock a third node). There was a great deal of debate whether to go inwards and explore Gilly, or go outwards and explore Ike. In the end, Gilly was chosen due to the wider transmission window available for the RS-2 relay satellite to be sent along with it. In addition, there is also an ongoing debate whether it's worth to extend the RS-2's range to the entirety of Eve's orbit, or to merely settle for maintaining connectivity during the Kerbin transfer window.

[Triop]

Today . . .

 

[Loskene]

On 2/9/2019 at 12:02 AM, Yakuzi said:

Oohoo that's sweet

[Jon Tash]

I made a Mun Station, but now every time I load it, it breaks apart for some reason, I can't figure out what the problem is.

[NHunter]

13 minutes ago, Jon Tash said:

I made a Mun Station, but now every time I load it, it breaks apart for some reason, I can't figure out what the problem is.

Autostruts? They are among the most common cause for RUDs in stations and big ships in space.

[ValleyTwo]

Well, I finally picked the crew to go the Mun.  Bob Kerman and Jebediah Kerman will be going to the Mun.  Jeb won the coin toss against Val.  So the joint Nuke-Tug and Lander was allowed to drift away from the OSS for a time.  I didn't want them hitting each other.

Sadly, once again I failed to check which way was front and which way was back.  So it wasted some fuel going nowhere.

But I soon corrected my mistake and the journey continued.

So in the end I finally got the two to the Mun with less fuel than I should have.  But still enough to get back after the mission.  Not even counting the fuel in the Lander.

At least they both look happy at being in orbit about the Mun.  As far as Kerbals have gone in their history.  At least in this game save.  

 

[Dan Kerman]

Doing some contracts..  killed 3 birds with one stone. Gather science and return from orbit around Minmus. Ferry a VIP.. flyby and orbit of Minmus. And rescue Danford in orbit around Minmus. One ship, one r/t trip to Minmus and back and 3 contracts done. Now back to launching my CommNet.

[Kergarin]

I gave my litte lowtech Duna plane ist own Video:

 

[NHunter]

After stealing some fuel from a transfer stage I (thankfully) forgot to delete, I've directed my Gratian lander to the planet's moon, Geminus. Some loitering in orbit later - so that the mapping sat can build some maps for me - I performed a landing next to one of the local anomalies:

Turns out, space-archs exist not only on Mun...

[MisterKerman]

UPDATE: My new SSTO design has very generous margins. Each of the 12 S-Wings has 84 units of liquid fuel for re-entry and it's perfectly balanced and flies rock steady. Extremely pleased.

Edited February 10, 2019 by MisterKerman

[Spacetraindriver]

I just got back onto KSP after like a year hiatus so I decided to go to the Mun immediately using a impractical design as warmup *

Spoiler

ran way too low on fuel so I aborted the mission 

Reentry wasn't very smooth...

But hey we splashed down safely! 

Im thinking maybe I should replace the lander with more fuel and using the shuttle to land on the Mun plane style idk maybe next week

*mostly because I've already remade Apollo like 7 times over so many versions