What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Pipcard]

The Negi-2 launch vehicle launched various small testing and scientific satellites.

1965-10-12 - Tanryoku (淡緑, light green) was an engineering test satellite developed by students at the University of Miraito (light green being the school's official color)

1966-05-15 - Shinsei (新星, nova) analyzed the ionosphere and cosmic rays.

1966-12-07 - Ume (梅, plum) was another ionospheric analysis satellite.

1967-07-08 - Ajisai (紫陽花, hydrangea) was a geodetic satellite, measuring the shape of the Earth and its gravitational field.

[NHunter]

KSS Voyager has finally arrived to Sarnus:

And immediately went to explore its moons, starting with Eeloo:

[purpleivan]

Sent Hildard out in a Juice Goose to go refuel the K.S.C. boat, which is parked at the northern tip of the big impact crater bay.

But she did find some time on the way for a little sightseeing.

[Barzon]

2 hours ago, NHunter said:

KSS Voyager has finally arrived to Sarnus:

Is it a no return mission?

[RizzoTheRat]

Dawn launch for a double rescue mission

 

A few minor glitches with my KOS script, it didn't autowarp in a few places where it should, and it was supposed to stop 10m away from the target

Think I need to calculate when to start the burn better as it's starting too early and then hitting the minimum throttle stop..

Annoyingly both rescuees turned out to be pilots, the trade I need the least of if I'm trying to do everything with KOS.  I was hoping for a scientists so I can put a lab around the Mun.

 

[NHunter]

1 hour ago, Barzon Kerman said:

Is it a no return mission?

Return is planned. Voyager still has something like 30k dV

[Triop]

Today, R&D got busy.

Spoiler

 

 

[Ultimate Steve]

I reassembled a few bits of the station I aborted into a few days ago.

The historic segment of the station is also intact, but I can't attach it to anything without launching a Jr. sized port or altering the historic section, which I don't want to do.

For the time being, the historic segment will still be referred to as "Arkangel Station" while the rebuilt station will be referred to as "Phoenix Station."

[Adstri]

The Mun is kind of plain. It's too flat and the craters are too uniform.

So I've fixed that problem!

I've revamped the Mun's surface, but I also kept all of the old surface features in place!

I intend to release this sometime in the future, maybe with a full stock planet revamp.

Edited March 23, 2019 by Adstriduum

[MaverickSawyer]

Pretty mundane day, actually...

Lots of manuevers for the Duna flotilla, lining up appropriately low PeA passes, along with launching the last ship: The Ike SLAM-2

I spent hours fiddling with this, trying different cruise stage designs, solar panels, etc. The lander was all of maybe ten minutes to set up, including a test of the docking port for compatibility with the port on the main ship. But, she's on her way now, courtesy of an Atlas V 402.

 

Also got one of the two crew capsules I used to run the crew swap down to Kerbin before the game crashed. I've got to admit, I'm getting pretty good at precision landings...

Not quite a bullseye, but...

[scottadges]

Happened to look at my Transfer Window alarms in KAC (which I plotted when I first started this Career game) and noticed that in 16 days I have a transfer window open for Sarnus. It's 4 years to Sarnus SOI, according to the OPM dV Map, so that's pretty far out. But the science.... is... so tempting...

To take advantage of the window, I thought I'd experiment with a Long Range Science Probe.... using only Monopropellant!

This Mk1 design has 3615 m/s dV which... should be just enough to get me into Sarnus high orbit with some to spare for adjustments?

An LFO Transfer Stage will take care of the ~2000 m/s it takes to leave Kerbin SOI and get an encounter. Then about 4 years later... we'll get to insertion burn.

The probe is a modified version of my previous Orbital Science Package with the same instrumentation, except without the returnable science (Goo & Material Study) since this probe will remain in Sarnus orbit until somebody (someday...) goes and picks it up!

EDIT: After I wrote this, I started to think about how I could design a craft that would take a full science package out there and then bring back the rest of it... but the round trip to Sarnus is around ~20K m/s... we'll see what I can do.

 

Edited March 22, 2019 by scottadges

[Puggonaut]

Built this , it flys , it's silly , hence the advert as I figure it's going to kill a few of them

[capi3101]

Not a great deal to report to y'all today. Yesterday's shenanigans began with the positioning of the Bi-La Kaifa Shipyard in a 100 kilometer equatorial orbit over Duna.

Ya hya chouhada. I think I'm now finally out of ready references to the works of Frank Herbert, so I'm going to have to start reaching for the more obscure ones...

The shipyard is currently unmanned, so I'll have to get an engineer up there at some point if I intend to actually use it. Meanwhile, an attempt was made to land the station's transfer stage at the Enchova Central outpost on the surface for recycling. I messed something up somewhere - though Trajectories was telling me I'd be spot on for the recycling unit, at landing I was a good 1200 m to the west. Since it hadn't cost me any real money though, I just went ahead and terminated the flight rather than make another go at it. Had other things I wanted to do.

One of Mission Control alarms went off shortly afterwards - these are ones I set in KAC when a contract offered is boring or stupid and I want to take care of other things so I'll let it expire rather than just saying 'no' right away. A contract came up to 'Plant a Flag on Eve'; I went ahead and took that contract. I'm now committed to the notion of putting down a base on Eve's surface. Oughta be fun. Still haven't yet calculated the efficacy of a mass driver on Eve at the unit's current settings; probably oughta get around to doing that sooner rather than later.

(For the record, I've said for years that I'd install Mechjeb when/if I ever successfully launched something to orbit from Eve's surface. A mass driver shot isn't in the spirit of that pledge...)

With some time to kill before Strange Cargo returned to Kerbin - at that point the only thing I had going on - i went to the South Base outpost near KSC and inflated a Castillo Factory there. The new facility should greatly improve the base's fuel production capacity for future Kerbin-based missions. I then headed over to the Piper Alpha outpost on Mun and had the staff there construct a Castillo Observatory, Relay, Depot and Factory; over the course of a few days, the staff manufactured enough Equipment and Konkrete to inflate all but the Factory before Strange Cargo hit Kerbin periapsis, at which point my focus shifted to the ferry ship.

Was kinda hoping for a kerbolrise with this screenie...oh well.

Strange Cargo put into the dock at space station Kerbinport successfully last thing yesterday, and this morning I shuffled around kerbals and refueled Strange Cargo. A group of eight tourists bound for Duna, Eve and Ike are now aboard the ship, and five KSC staff heading that same direction have boarded a Minnow 7b touring craft that was also docked at the station. Both Strange Cargo and the Minnow have departed Kerbinport and are on their way to a rendezvous with the warp ship LSV House Harkonnen currently in a resupply orbit over Kerbin. Upon the arrival of the two craft, Harkonnen is scheduled to begin establishing some infrastructure over Eve before heading on to Duna with the tour group. I plan to resupply Harkonnen while at Duna since it's now fully possible for me to do so, at which point I may launch the new Eve base mission from there...

Harkonnen's mission will likely be taking up most of my time in the coming days but I've got a couple of other things going on. I've got a new colonist batch heading to Minmus along with a pair of tourists, and I think I'd be fun to send a spaceplane all that way for the hell of it, so I'll probably be doing that soon. Piper Alpha has that Factory to inflate, and I should look to see if I think the Deepwater Horizon outpost on Minmus would also benefit from some more of the new Castillo structures; probably would. Got a couple of sciency things to take care of too.

[Stormpilot]

I made a large high speed passenger plane and landed on the grasslands about 100 KM north from the KSC.

[Triop]

Today, Jeb is going to ride up Mount Kraken.

Edited March 22, 2019 by Triop

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

Did my 1st asteroid capture! A Class C, in a 100KM Kerbin orbi.

The Asteroid Capture Vehicle Block I about to connect with AST-VQA-530

After many, many aerobraking passes in a 100KM Kerbin orbit

Also launched the core of the Minmus Orbital Gateway, a refinery, fuel station, and docking hub all in one, as well as the power arms and the LiquidFuel tanks. This will be the... well... Gateway... for the construction of Fort Varsing (Mining colony) and Forts Velarine and Tascine (North and South Pole bases) on Minmus surface.

...and the fuel pod and lab modules for the Mun Gateway, a similar station serving the soon-to-come Forts Raven, Medes, and Symeric

Speaking of which, the temporary arrangements at the site of Fort Raven, until the core modules can be launched (temporarily uncrewed, will be crewed when Ft. Raven construction begins)

Also, finished Mun comsat deployment, Mun now has full (aside from the poles - coming soon, stick around!) communications coverage. (Minmus has a similar network and trios of these things will also be headed for Laythe, Tylo, and Vall at the next Jool window, along with a trio of ultra long range ones for Jool-Kerbin communication

Plus some plane development and beginning to construct the Jool probe fleet for the next transfer window (102 days). Plan is :

1) 3 comsat carriers, with 3 satellites each for Laythe, Tylo, and Vall

2) 3 ultra long range comsats for Kerbin-Jool communication

3) Unmanned (one way) Tylo lander with a lander can to house Kerbals on a later manned mission (might do Jool 5 though, so we'll see) and rover.

4) 1x large, ISRU equipped Laythe drone + 2x small, nonrefuelable Laythe drones

5) Polar mapping satellites for Laythe, Tylo, and Vall

6) Exploration landers for Pol and Bop

7) Rover and base station for Vall

8) A Jool atmosphere diver

Possibly, depending on whether or not I decide to do Jool 5 at the next window after this one

9) Emergency fuel cache and return vehicle in Laythe orbit (Just in case it all goes horribly wrong and the mission has to be abandoned

10) Emergency fuel in Tylo orbit

 

All in all, Jool Flotilla 1 will be at least 10, and possibly as many as 17, ships, zero kerbals, all awesome!

Edited March 23, 2019 by OrbitalBuzzsaw

[MaverickSawyer]

It was a busy, and highly productive, day for me today...

• Returned the second of two VA-Plus capsules to the KSC... again, pinpoint accuracy, landing just outside the VAB.
• Tinkered with a compact orbital telescope, only to find out that the zoom on it was... lacking. Cue unimpressed face and a new telescope that, although it turns slower than Bob on a road trip (he always wants to stop for rock samples! ), it's actually pretty precise. Used it to scope out Duna, Eve, and Jool and its moons, as those are worlds I have ongoing missions to. It's up in a supersynchronous orbit, so it has a darn fine view.
• Said goodbye to the Minty Shuttlebug. I haven't been using it much, it's taking up the nadir port of Minmus Station, and I needed to shuffle some pods around in preparation for the expansion module I shipped out. So I sent it back down to Minmus one last time. The crew watched the impact via the telescopic camera on the ventral hull of the station. Many drink bags were raised to that tough little ship, as she will be missed. But, bigger and better things have arrived, including a greenhouse and five (!) new docking ports to support additional modules.
• Ran a bunch of midcourse correction burns for the Duna campaign, with both of the early launches finally getting their MCCBs completed, revealing an arrival timeframe of ~150 days. The lander will arrive a full 10 days before the orbiter, so it's a good thing it was designed to insert into orbit over Duna before attempting the landing! 
• Ran a science return mission out to Solar space, and brought it back with a large amount of science aboard after 26 days, 2 hours, and 55 minutes on the nose:

This also doubled as a stress test for the reentry vehicle design, as several other missions currently use similar or identical RVs for science return to Kerbin...

RV peaked at 11.7Gs of deceleration, courtesy of a steep, high velocity entry.

Oh, hey, another pretty precise landing! I'm getting pretty good at this. 

Well, precise-ish. Close enough for government work, imo. At least it's driving distance. 

 

And finally, a notable first for me...

I made it to Eve.

Solaris 2 inserted into a highly elliptical orbit around Eve, and has since made an inclination change to a polar orbit around the Purple Hellhole at apoapsis. The next step is to enter the mapping orbit and let ScanSat do its thing. After that, time to gather what biome-specific science I can from low orbit (This thing left Kerbin long before I had the gravioli detector), then it's off to Gilly for another mapping campaign... I hope. I've never been to Gilly, so I haven't the foggiest what the SoI is. Going to be a fun learning experience.

Next on the list: Check in on that satellite pulling high-resolution radar maps of the Mun (It's been at it for a long time now... it should be done by now...), prep for a Dres orbiter and possible lander, and then... Not sure, tbh. I've got Eeloo, Duna, and Jool nailed down pretty well right now, and most are currently in cruise mode, with the second wave of MCCBs for Duna in about 70 days or so. Might be time to go poking around the moons in earnest.

 

And one last semi-KSP related bit... I've now added another ribbon to the cabbage patch in my sig to celebrate my arrival at Eve. 

[Pipcard]

Sending the first colonists to Ike on the Tachi Maru

[JadeOfMaar]

I textured an intake model that I had been sitting on for a while... This "OPT Nebula Shock" intake is made especially for the OPT J-92 Nebula engine.

[NHunter]

Today, I did some Ash landings.

The first one, of course, was done with a simple probe:

Then, of course, came the crewed landing:

Obligatory flag planting:

And then the long journey home....

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

The ACV Taimeria had suffered significant damage as a result of thermal damage during aerobraking. As such, the plan to refit the craft as a Dres mothership was abandoned and the Administrative Presidium decided that the optimal solution, given the cost of orbital refitting and refueling, was to deorbit the ship and burn it up in the atmosphere. After recovering the crew on a routine hiBOOST flight, the ship was deorbited remotely and reentered the atmosphere at approximately midnight Evaary Port time, crashing in southwestern Vaakbia.

Debris from the ship was found by local farmers near the town of Bul Tojwir. Reports indicate that it was one of the ship's engine pods, though the engines had been destroyed.

Additionally, a proposal for a Jool mothership from Sarwiha Logistics in accordance with the Request For Proposal 4419 Jool Exploratory Infrastructure, Section XII Mothership and Section XV Transfer Vehicle went before the Presidium. The Presidium voted 4-3 to list the proposal for a vote of the full 41-member Space Commission next month, since it does not have the power to approve proposals for new missions under the Space Commission Act 1439. With ¬7k m/s dV, it is more than capable of reaching Jool and back, even without the planned refueling at Laythe (fueler not shown, but with crew and cargo space replaced w/fuel tanks)

 

[Grogs]

10 hours ago, MaverickSawyer said:

And one last semi-KSP related bit... I've now added another ribbon to the cabbage patch in my sig to celebrate my arrival at Eve. 

I've always wondered what those were. Is this from a challenge?

 

 

 

As for me,

I tried to do the Acapello (Apollo) 15 mission in making history. Tried is the operative word because it ended up as an exercise in frustration.

First task was to build the ship including a Minimus lander with a rover. I really don't have much experience with rovers, but I thought it came out pretty well.

 

Launch went pretty smoothly. The launcher wanted to flip when I jettisoned the first stage booster, but after a couple of reloads and a less aggressive gravity turn I made it into LKO with no trouble.

 

I got an encounter with Minimus at the ascending node right away, and captured with plenty of dV to spare. Since the lander was still attached to the transfer stage, I decided to just use it for the de-orbit burn and then eject it before the suicide burn. Landing target is the center of the little lake down there, but for some reason it didn't show the target outside of map view. That made it hard to make an accurate landing, but I did my best and got close.

 

I ran into the first minor design flaw when separating the rover. Apparently, I had attached the landing legs to the stack separator rather than the fuel tank. When I dropped the rover, the landing legs went flying. It's Minimus though, so no big deal. I just moved the lander and set it down on the engine bells. No problem. I did have an interesting Kraken experience with the rover the first time. The stack separator was still on the rover, and when Bill climbed in the seat it fell off and shot the rover up in the sky at about 50 m/s. Needless to say, I had to reload it after that.

 

Once Bill got in the rover the second time, that's when things really started to fall apart. First problem is obvious - I mounted the seat facing down. I tried and tried to get it facing forward in VAB, but it just wouldn't go at that orientation in any position except on top of the battery (which is where it connected to the lander). I was able to control from the probe core, but it was 90 degrees off. Even worse, it took about 15 minutes to figure out why the wheels wouldn't work. Seems that some were turning forward and some backwards. On Minimus, this was a disaster because at any given time, different wheels would be touching. So when one pair of wheels was touching, the "I" key would move me forward, but when the craft rotated a bit, it would move me backwards. Ugh. I never got it completely sorted out, but after changing the motor direction of some wheels a few times, I at least got to the point I could move the rover.

 

After all the work sorting out the rover, I realized there was a bug in the mission. Although it was showing that the next task was to go to the digging point, it wasn't displaying it on the map. The point you see on the nav ball above is actually the landing site even though "Land on Minimus" is marked complete. And nothing shows up on map view either. There's a lat/long listed, but I don't know how to tell my current lat/long to go find it. After about an hour messing with this, I decided it was a bug and gave up on this mission.

 

[MaverickSawyer]

@Grogs they're from this ribbon generator. There's a few special bits that have a rule attached to them (the challenge wreath) but I can't recall what the rules were.

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

Launched the electrical systems for Fort Raven

And a Mun ore surveyor, also serving 1/3 of the (coming soon(TM) Mun polar relay system

Also, landed the reactor and centrifuge module for Fort Raven - all the other sections need power, so the Presidium ordered that the electrics land first (Apologies for scatterer weirdness)

And the first modules of the Asteroid Onsite Observatory - a scientific station for asteroid research (read no mining) - lab coming tomorrow, hopefully.

 

Edited March 24, 2019 by OrbitalBuzzsaw

[Grogs]

3 hours ago, MaverickSawyer said:

@Grogs they're from this ribbon generator. There's a few special bits that have a rule attached to them (the challenge wreath) but I can't recall what the rules were.

Nice, thanks. I had thought maybe they were a Fight Club type of thing that nobody ever talked about. Those seem like a good thing to motivate me to go visit some few new places in the system. Maybe I'll start a new a career game and work towards checking a few of those off.