What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Frank_G]

On 5/12/2019 at 6:47 PM, CycloneStorm said:

i crashed darn i am terrible at this game!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It was fun, i guess? Crashing and failing was never more satisfying than in KSP. And welcome to the forums! Happy launchings

[Guest]

I will land on Tylo completing my quest to land on every celestial body

YAY?

Oh yeah (EDIT: the failure came out of a struts issue)

[Fraktal]

Did some experimentation with starter parts and managed to cobble up a three-stage rocket capable of reaching 50 km altitude on nothing but Flea SRBs and actually coming back down safely instead of nosediving into the ground like my previous Flea-only designs did.

The key to a safe landing?

Squeeze in another Flea between the last stage with the lowest amount of fuel allowed by the game (enough for a 0.9 second burst at 100% thrust) and pointed in reverse. When activated, it explosively decouples the command pod by burning away the girder attaching the pod to the rest of the rocket, allowing the pod's aerodynamics to safely slow it down to parachute release speed. Highly unconventional use of a Flea, yes, but it works and realizing that it does was fun. 

[Cavscout74]

I managed to finish my retrograde rescue.  By some miracle (and burning the last 300 m/s worth of fuel in the upper atmosphere) both the rescue pod and the debris bolted to the nose survived reentry & made a safe landing:

I also got my career-first Duna probe into a polar orbit.  Two more a close behind it (one for Ike with a relay & lander, the other for Duna also with a relay & lander), followed by a fourth about two weeks out from Duna's SoI with another lander

 

[Guest]

[fulgur]

Got the Rald planet pack thing (I have it orbiting Kerbin in keosynchronous orbit) and I mapped it with ScanSat. it's now ready for PUBLIC consumption...

Because all the anomalies coded in are actually microbiomes like the KSC. Also I did cover up one volcano, which may or may not be labelled 'just a volcano, promise'.

Now I can design a Rald plane. And land it with the help of 'chutes and the Ancient Airport anomaly.

[capi3101]

(1.6.1) Not a whole lot to report to y'all this morning. After the weekend's fun of trying to get all the parts and Equipment in place, the construction of the Alexander L. Kielland outpost on Eve so far has been damn near routine (aside from the fact that the base is floating a few meters off the surface). Yesterday I was focused on base expansion, with pilot Lerod Kerman and scientist Rodemone Kerman manning the fabrication lab while engineer Gilford Kerman put structures into place as they came off the assembly line. All of the main Pathfinder structures are in place at this point and the remaining boxed structures have been printed up; this morning saw the construction of the central Castillo dome as well.

One RL day's worth of progress, closer to three days in-game. Sorry for the night screenie. The Echo 2 rover is on the right if you squint hard enough.

Once I got the Rangeland launch pad deployed, I did go ahead and maneuver the Echo Flyer 7a quadcopter onto it and proceeded to recycle the craft. I can print up a new one in the future (one with more SAFER reactors) if the situation warrants it; in the meantime, I don't necessarily need the extra parts in the area contributing to lag. I'm keeping the Echo 2 rover out of sentiment mainly - out of all the craft I deployed to the surface of Eve for the purposes of establishing ALK, it's the only one that actually worked as intended without having to kludge up a Plan B.

Plan for today is to continue construction at ALK. I've got five walkway modules ready to go ahead and fully deploy and the structures that will go on the end of those modules are ready to attach, so I'll be doing that at the next opportunity. That should be the last bit of EVA work that Gilford has to do for the construction of the base, barring the need to deploy additional SAFERs once the base's mass driver goes online. I'm still not certain that I have the configuration of Pipeline mass driver's tweaked sufficiently to provide enough oomph to get supplies to future Eve-orbiting bases; my calculations puts the maximum payload at 5-8 tonnes, which is still better than what you can generally get off of Eve using a Temstar-style asparagus rocket (best calculation there is 4.8 tonnes maximum). Means I'll need a lot of fast charging reactors to use the mass driver repeatedly. No biggie all things considered.

Other construction is still going apace as well; I did have to take a moment to shoot up a load of Rocket Parts from the Scan Queen outpost on Ike to the Infans Calcitrant Yards in orbit this morning. ICY is continuing the construction of the Christmas Tree 7 nuclear battery, a craft designed to provide the 10,000 EC/s required to charge up an Alcubierre Drive's exotic matter tank without requiring a sundive. That's got about seventeen hours left to finish up. The plan for that craft is to send it over to the Bi-La Kaifa Shipyards over Duna, where it be charging up LSV House Corrino once construction is finished. There are still a few weeks to go on that construction. 

Just about to get back into the saddle on doing other things. A key thing I've got coming up is the launch of the Bento Box 7 from ALK - if all goes according to plan, the craft will be my very first attempt to launch something from the surface of Eve. KER says the craft has the 8,000 m/s it needs to put its payload into orbit. We'll see...

[CycloneStorm]

I tried to go to the mun but over shot it and went past eeloo poor kerbals left to die far from home...

[fulgur]

If you're going so fast you nearly escape the solar system... you're going too fast. If you do some fine manouvering you can have a velocity of only a few hundred m/s from orbit, which means you won't overshoot. Try setting the Mun as your target and creating a 850-900 m/s burn, and fiddle around with it until the target markers line up and you get a periapsis. That should have a much smaller relative velocity.

[Red Stapler]

Tonight I land on my newly textured Laythe.  Planning to take a bio luminescent swim thru the clouds...

I promised myself I would not land until I got the textures (2 cloud and a glow layer) just right.

Edited May 14, 2019 by Red Stapler

[scottadges]

The biggest accomplishment from the past several days was completing my much-planned Minmus Expedition in my current Career game. I'd previously only done flybys (science & tourist contracts) in this one, so I designed the mission around multiple biome landings to maximize science collection.

This lander packs in 1 kerbal scientist with terrestrial & repeatable science and then a separate orbital science pod (docked between the orbiter & lander) which was returned to Kerbin with all the sweet, sweet science!

I was able to get 4 biomes in this mission by landing along a polar orbit. I captured multiple copies of some "in space high" and "in space near" science to off-load into my Kerbin science lab. With the plane changes, it had JUST enough dV to get back and dock with the orbiter.

Then it was back to Kerbin! Once in orbit, the orbiter/science module was docked with my KSS Alpha station to top off the Science Lab with essential data. Then the last step was to dock the orbital science pod with a separate heat shield reentry unit and prepare for descent.

The other big thing I've been designing is an orbital construction platform to allow building ships for my upcoming Duna launch window (using the Simple Construction mod).

After about 6 iterations, I think I've finally gotten it down to a minimum functional level. I'm really trying to avoid "over-building" as I intend to construct this in orbit (using the Konstruction mod ports). I'm planning multiple launches and using a combination of RCS tugs to fit it all together.

Forward section with Command module. Massive power generation and heat control from the main solar array / heat system.

Main construction port in the Aft section. The platform will be able to refine Metal into Rocket parts or process fuel. Metal or Ore will be delivered by Cargo vehicles from either Minmus or Mun mining outposts.

Edited May 15, 2019 by scottadges

[fulgur]

So I decided to write up the first section of what will probably be my last proper mission before I get the DLC.

Next, I am halfway through surveying the Ancient Airport microbiome. Hopefully it will be flat and easy to land on.

[Lapis]

I went to Ike today, in my efforts to build an eve lander(this was a test of the launcher) i made it with 60m/s DV left. I still cannot get enough of watching it orbit duna.

[Ratwerke_Actual]

Started a new save for a new station.

Began asteroid hunting.

[Pipcard]

Jool 5 - Camlorf Kerman became the first Kerbal on Vall (using the Jool Rabbit 1 lander undocked from the Negi Maru)

[cantab]

Well, I've caved in. I'm building a NASA-style shuttle. Took the orbiter for a little hop under OMS power (yesterday actually), she flew OK. I'll probably just slap some whiplashes on for some more thorough flight testing, I don't feel like building a 747 to do it "properly".

[KerikBalm]

19 hours ago, fulgur said:

Next, I am halfway through surveying the Ancient Airport microbiome. Hopefully it will be flat and easy to land on.

The terrain height map is perfectly level (in an area where it was already pretty flat)... on top of that I added a terrain noise function (otherwise at times Rald's surface seems... pixelated from certain view distances in some places). I might be able to re-work the airport as a terrain decal not specified in the heightmap (like the terrain around KSC).

I'm not sure I've uploaded my version with terrain noise added (in which case, you'll find it to be perfectly flat), but even if so, the noise isn't so great, so it is still pretty flat. I wish there was a way I could exclude terrain noise from certain areas.

Example of very pixelated looking terrain:

Spoiler

Pixelatted again, showing an anomaly combination that doesn't exist anymore... the one on the left is now under the ocean, and there's no microbiome for it

Spoiler

Here are some pics of the airport... at least pre-noise function added:

Spoiler

^most noticable here are the 4 "bunkers" at the top left of the image, and the lip of the runway near the left wingtip

^at least before the noise function, the runway used to be perfectly level (not flat, it follow's rald's curvature). At the one end it was most noticeably raised above the ground to stay flat, at the other end, its basically even with the terrain.

I started playing with terrain noise to give the ground some texture, and avoid looking all pixelated, but I tried to find the right amount that wouldn't obscure terrain features.

Spoiler

Some initial attempts had waaayyyyy too much noise, I later came to more reasonable values

I think the amount below was a bit too high, shallow water channels were starting to be obscured:

I think I decided on the amount of noise present in the image below, you can still detect a hint of pixelization if you look for it, but its not obvious:

You can also see that I've played around with the atmosphere color too.

I'm not sure if I uploaded this version, and I was looking at overall topography, and I didn't check what it did to the "easter eggs"... I think the noise is low enough that they should still serve their purpose.

Anyway, since its a global noise function (if its in your version at all), the terrain won't be flatter anywhere else. The airport will be the flattest/most level place on Rald to land, no matter what... unless you want to try a high speed (high speed because it has a thin atmosphere) landing on the water.

Very early in the development of my rald planet, when all I had done is to add an O2 atmosphere to a Martian terrain heightmap:

Spoiler

and then an ocean:

Spoiler

 

Edited May 15, 2019 by KerikBalm

[Loskene]

17 minutes ago, cantab said:

Well, I've caved in. I'm building a NASA-style shuttle. Took the orbiter for a little hop under OMS power (yesterday actually), she flew OK. I'll probably just slap some whiplashes on for some more thorough flight testing, I don't feel like building a 747 to do it "properly".

Designing your orbiter to accept bolt-on jets for aerodynamic handling tests is actually the "proper" way to do it, unpowered carrier drop tests are woefully dangerous and limited, plus it's just neat to see a space shuttle flying around like a jetliner.

 

[capi3101]

(1.6.1) Spent a fair chunk of my day finishing up the construction of the Alexander L. Kielland outpost on Eve. Engineer Gilford Kerman finished positioning the base structures and from there it was simply a matter of producing enough Konkrete to finally deploy them all. 

I'm still concerned about a 300+ tonne base floating a couple of meters over a world with 1.7 gees of surface gravity, but as long as nothing explodes, I can work with it.

The base's mass driver was able to connect with the mass driver aboard LSV House Harkonnen; early tests show a payload limit of 0.5 tonnes to Harkonnen's present orbit, which is about an order of magnitude less than I originally calculated. Still trying to figure that one out. It's not nothing, though. I didn't get a connection with LSV House Atreides also in Eve orbit and I need to see if that's because it's out of range or merely turned off. Guessing the latter.

With the base's construction finally finished up, it was time to get back to business as usual. ALK began the print of the Bento Box 7, an attempt to fulfill the exploration contract that returns a craft to Kerbin from the surface of Eve. Construction is expected to take forty hours to complete and it's yet to be seen whether the outpost will have sufficient fuel reserves to fully fuel the rocket upon completion or if it'll be necessary to keep it on the pad for a while (a concern given the fact that the base is floating because Kraken eggs or something). ALK also completed a contract to drill 500 ore from Eve's surface, and the crew aboard went ahead and planted flags both for the additional experience and to fulfill a contract to plant a flag on the surface of Eve; the three kerbals went ahead and punched their tickets in the base's Habitat module shortly thereafter. A redesign of the Echo Flyer 7 quadcopter took place next - the new design adds a SAS wheel for additional control as well as three more SAFER reactors to avoid the power supply problems the original craft had. A pair of Bill Clinton 7b grabber probes were ordered up at the Dystopia Planitia orbital shipyards above Kerbin and the Non Caseus Yards over Mun; the first of these will fulfill an orbital junk hauling contract, while the latter will be grabbing a Venkmann 7a probe lander that ran out of gas trying to return an experiment to Kerbin from Mun. The Piper Alpha outpost on the surface of Mun began a WBI temperature survey that likely will begin after an ongoing breakthrough technology study completes (eventually). The Scan Queen outpost on Ike began printing up a Hellhound 7 rover with skycrane on a mission to conduct a seismic survey on the far side of Ike; that print will take nine hours to finish. Finally, I went ahead and retired the Echo 1 rover on Eve; the gravity and terrain proved to be too much for the venerable Hellhound design, apparently. Given that the Hellhound was designed mainly for Mun though, that's not that big of a surprise.

So I'm back to the point where most of my contracts are in a holding pattern, either waiting for things to get to where they're going or (in most cases) for construction of the necessary craft to finish up. I do have a rescue mission over Mun that I will be attending to later today, and I hope to be able to attend to some of the other contracts as well. The Ike seismic survey is liable to happen today. Couldn't say about the others.

[Guest]

I did my first base today

[Red Stapler]

Yay.

Laythe can be so pretty, I enjoyed a beer on the way down...

Joolrise...or set, no matter...

Attack of the volumetrics...

Touchdown...now time for the extra science points and maybe a dip in the briny sea.

Cheers!

[RealKerbal3x]

I moved some stuff around on the UKS Deep Purple and then took her for a spin. This culminated in me buzzing the tower, in an airship.

[RizzoTheRat]

Trying to work out what was wrong with my KOS Rendezvous and docking script and causing the lander to crash in to the station rather than head for an offset point before closing on the docking port.  Worked through all the guidance bit and then discovered there was nothing wrong with the guidance...I was turning the RCS off in the wrong place so it couldn't manoeuvre to follow the guidance 

 

So now it all works fine, the lander just about to dock with the station in an Equatorial orbit after an automated landing on the Minmus poles.  Plane change script still needs a bit of a tweak though,, it only got within about 5% of the stations inclination, but around Minmus that still got the rendezvous within about 5km.

 

[Flibble]

I built myself a simple single engine jet to fly around in.

Version 2 will have extra flaps and rockets.

[MisterKerman]

I deorbited most of my space station due to a bug. Even if there's a fix I'm trying to change how my stuff looks and works so I figure now is as good a time as any to make the change and not have it feel like a frivolous expense.

Has anyone ever had craft die on them? (Just become space debris essentially after undocking. Can't even switch to the vessel when it happens.)

EDIT: On a positive note I designed a lander that I hope still looks good to me by time I plan to use it.

Edited May 15, 2019 by MisterKerman