What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Guest]

34 minutes ago, FahmiRBLXian said:

Fold it then. 

In case you're curious, I brute-forced atmospheric entry on this test mission. I just strapped on a couple of boosters, magicked myself into low Eve orbit, then burned retrograde until I'm going at a survivable speed. I also had to strap a heat shield under the Klaw on the nose, because that burned off even with the retrograde burn. It looked rather endearingly cobbled-together but it worked.

If I was doing this as a proper mission starting from Kerbin I would have to put in more work as the brute-force approach would be really difficult to get to Kerbin orbit and from there to Eve. I'd probably strap on a bunch of RAPIERs, a pair of NERVs with Lf strapped to those, a tank of LfOx in the empty part of the cargo bay, and an inflatable heat shield on the nose. Fly to orbit on the RAPIERs, fly to Eve on the NERVs, brake to a survivable speed on the closed-cycle RAPIERs, pop the heat shield, and arrive. Then drag the tank out of the bay with the crane. Something like that anyway. I've done similar things before.

With Eve, getting stuff down is generally pretty manageable, you just need heat shields, retro rockets, or a really light and draggy craft, or some combination of the three. Getting stuff up from there is the hard part.

 

Edited September 10, 2019 by Guest

[Maravone]

Last time I posted here in this thread, like a month ago, I was doing a whole different RP-1 career. One new career later, I'm launching my first geostationary satellite in 1964. A bit late, probably could've launched it earlier, but was busy with manned flight.

Spoiler

Launch Vehicle: Nestor-Pegasus I, boosted with 6xcastor SRB's for an extra oomph. The payload was right in the maximum limit for GTO insertion.

Ascent!

Pegasus Second Stage burning a few minutes into flight

Applying spin-stabilization in GTO orbit apogee to prepare for circularization burn with Vega SRB kick stage

After some rcs corrections, a perfect final Geosynchronous orbit for the first of several comm sats!

 

[Guest]

I did another test mission to Eve on my mothership. This time I packaged it for launch from Kerbin, and tested that it makes orbit. I decided to go with a conventional rocket launch because the props are really draggy and I would need way too many RAPIERs to do an airbreather SSTO. 

I didn't actually do the transfer to Eve, but I then verified that it survives entry with the fuel it has left after it. Then I failed to test my crane (again), I had a packaging problem that blew up the wheels, then it turns out that same-vessel interactions don't work quite right when time-warping, so my crane dropped through the floor and then blew up the plane when attempting that. 

Also, ladders. I forgot ladders again.

I switched to 8-blade props and now they can make use of the full power of the motors. She cruises on Eve at well over 150 m/s which isn't bad, on Kerbin ASL cruise speed is over 200 m/s. I'll probably do a bit of aero tuning to see if I can improve that a bit more without harming the really lovely low-speed handling -- take-off/touchdown speed on Eve is about 30 m/s and I really like it that way.

So I have a few more kinks to work out, then I'll try again. I might actually be able to pull off an Eve round trip with refueling one of these days, just to prove to myself I can do it...

Edited September 10, 2019 by Guest

[Cavscout74]

I landed a crew at the third Mun arch last night, did a quick flag planting, picked up science & then flew through it on the way back to orbit - for some reason, I have never actually flown through a Mun arch before except with an EVA kerbal

The sunflare is a bit too much, but this was my arch fly-through

Then I tried to launch an outpost to Minmus.  Kerbal Launch Failure struck and caused one of the radial decouplers attaching the landing engines to the outpost to fail.  The landing engine fell back & struck the first stage fuel tank with explosive results.  There goes 20 days of build time down the drain, along with almost 72000

[SwissSpace93]

Hello

Today i made a Special Tutorial about how you can get into LKO with MechJeb,

the reason I did this isn't actually to show you how to deal with MechJeb.

Tip:
pay attention to the upper left corner, and to the music

 

 

 

[NMWXCO]

Did a few things this morning. I built a supersonic fighter aircraft for a observation contract using B9 procedural wings and control surfaces... and the MK2 expansion afterburning engine and cockpit. The plane topped off at about 770 m/s velocity and capable of cruising right around the edge of the upper atmosphere. Landing went very smooth and in only 1 piece....still learning to use the MJ autopilot but its a real lifesaver and allows much smoother flight.

 

Spoiler

 

Afterwards i built a supply station destined for minmus orbit in preparation of a skycrane lander being sent towards minmus. The station has a little octagonal docking hub, some minor utilities and a generous snack cupboard.

Spoiler

 

 

 

Finally i set out to bring the 13 crewmembers on board the KSS horizon home for a crew rotation contract with a MK2.5 spaceplane. After some twiddling i settled for a spaceplane powered by a Skipper engine with about 2800 m/s and soyuz style strap-on boosters with crossfeeding. the total package has about 4000 m/s dV off the launchpad. The shuttle can make it to orbit with a generous supply of fuel left (+1000m/s dV) so rendevouz with the KSS horizon proceeded very smoothly. the vessel was a bit sluggish on reaction wheels only but it was quite manouverable when using the LFO RCS thrusters. ..... after succesfully docking with the KSS horizon and quicksaving i attempted the reentry and survived first go and landed just outside the kerbal space center.

 

Spoiler

 

 

Edited September 10, 2019 by NMWXCO
adding the images. will add them 1st go once i get the hang of it

[Guest]

Wooh, this is hard work.

My crane does work on Eve, eventually. I managed to prove the concept of everything. There remains a ton of kinks to work out however.

• I need to be able to lower the craft on its belly for easy loading and unloading, but that means it rests on the prop blades and the engines really don't like that. --> will need to add hydraulic parking legs to hold the attitude
• The control scheme is a complete mess. I'll need to redesign that from scratch so that each system has its own action group set: I need at least four: plane, krane, ISRU, and space stages.
• The krane needs some tweaks: the ballast was too high up and tends to hit the ground and explode. Could also add a command seat and maybe a solar panel.
• There are kinks with the specific controls as well, for example brakes should really work in every control set.
• I need to add a couple of presets for the props -- take-off/landing and cruise at least.

But fundamentally it's fine. Flies great, the crane works, I can load and unload the orbiter and clamp the crane back on for travel. Occasionally some wheels will break but the crew needs an engineer anyway for the ISRU so that's not a showstopper. This is obviously a late-career operation so I will certainly have a sufficiently experienced engineer available at that point.

(It's irritating that you can't disable staging on those service modules, I accidentally blew them when meaning to un-stage the Klaw on the krane...)

[capi3101]

(1.6.1) Fairly minimal day to report to y'all today; no screenies either, unfortunately. Day began at the Bi-La Kaifa Shipyards over Duna, where the mass driver prow of the warp tanker SL Shai Hulud had finished printing and the ship herself was moving to dock up with it. The docking maneuver was slow going - the ninety tonne ship only had four RCS thruster blocks to maneuver into the dock (i.e. TWR of 0.03 there, at least according to KER). The ship eventually docked with its bow, after which it burned hard to clear the drydock. Once clear, the mass driver was brought on line and supplies of bipropellant and Enriched Uranium were shot up to it from the Enchova Central outpost on the Dunan surface. The plan originally called for Xenon Gas to be sent up to Shai Hulud as well, but Enchova Central had apparently long since stopped production. The craft can't go to warp without it, so production resumed at the surface. The hope is to send up at least a thousand units before Shai Hulud breaks orbit. I know there's a good Xenon reserve currently built up at the Piper Alpha outpost on Mun, so Mun will likely be Shai Hulud's first destination.

LSV House Harkonnen, which had been in orbit of Jool, reached the optimal position for a warp to Bop. It was necessary for the ship to warp to a position where it bled off the additional speed, and while it was doing that the G-LOC 7a return-to-Kerbin craft reached its redendezvous with LSV House Corrino over Laythe, docking without incident. Harkonnen arrived at Bop at 743.3 m/s, too fast to enter orbit; it was necessary for her to burn her conventional engines to slow down sufficiently to enter an orbit, in this case a 1059 x 25.1 kilometer, 68.88° inclined one. I'll be making an attempt to get the ship into a better orbit when it gets close to periapsis, which will happen roughly fourteen hours from now. Meanwhile, I'm having the ship print up a Lab module for the benefit of ship's engineer Beamon Kerman, who at this point has accumulated enough experiences to gain 5-star status. Pretty sure she's the only non-tourist Kerbal aboard who doesn't actually have the 5-star rating already... 

Last thing that happened today was Strange Cargo's arrival at Eve from Gilly. The ship conducted a burn to align the plane of its orbit with LSV House Atreides also in Eve orbit for the return journey back to Kerbin. An initial course to take it to rendezvous was set but the resultant rendezvous delta-V at the rendezvous point would have been more than what she had available, so at this point I'm working towards matching the ship's orbit with Atreides. I'll be dispatching Andrea Doria from space station Eveport to rendezvous with Strange Cargo and deliver fuel at the next opportunity. Makes me awful glad I decided to build the thing...

So short term, that's what I've got going on - get Harkonnen to better orbit over Bop, refuel Strange Cargo and fill Shai Hulud up with Xenon Gas. I'm also ready for House Corrino to head back to Kerbin at this point; the G-LOC will fulfill the current exploration contract and I plan to use it to deliver a rescuee pilot to the surface as well. I've pick up a new colonization mission for Duna, so that will likely be getting under way as well. Space station Laytheport is currently under construction at the C. P. Baker outpost on the surface of Laythe, and I plan to build one or two more things there before everything's said and done. All in all, things are pretty busy right now. Hoping to get a bit more accomplished tomorrow.

[coyotesfrontier]

I don't have any pictures, but I tried to send the first module of Rust Spear I (A Hermes-like Duna ship) into LKO, but ran into an entire afternoon of trouble.

As I haven't unlocked nuclear or electric engines yet, the most practical propulsion type is cryogenics, which for the 4000 or so delta V to get to duna and back, requires utterly massive tanks.

And so was born the Rust Spear Propulsion Segment (RSPM), a huge module consisting of six 2.5m asparagus-staged drop tanks around a core.

Despite ironically having the same mass as a half-length rockomax tank when unfueled, the fact that this mass is spread out across a massive volume makes putting the stage on top of a rocket highly unstable.

I mistakenly believed that this instability was due to aerodynamics (I didn't have fairings big enough for the stage), because why else would something with as little mass as a fueled rockomax tank be unstable?

My failure to take the more spread-out mass of the stage into account cost me my afternoon, unfortunately.

I finally solved the instability by creating a skycrane-like (you know the type) rocket, with the payload inside the boosters instead of being on top. Still, I wasn't able to get it into orbit tonight, due to unexpected nullref spam tanking my framerate.

[Vakarian]

Still trying to land an asteroid haha

[catloverjerrygarcia]

I did a thing.

 

[Flying dutchman]

A caveman mun mission. Everything went perfect until jeb realised he had forgotten the parachute...

[Chris Hopkins]

Long time no post, so I'll break this one up into multiple per theme. I've been experimenting a lot with my spaceplanes. First of all I finally got my Minmus one back. Trying to land closer to KSC:

Got my refueler back, a little closer to KSC:

And having fun with my sattelite launcher:

However I am determined to make my Pegasus style launcher work, where I have 2 space planes, one that is mostly for getting to the upper atmosphere, and is mostly fuel tanks and jet engines; and one that decouples and goes into orbit and is mostly payload bay and rockets. However I cannot get them to couple in the VAB for love nor money. I have a workaround planned where I have one plane *behind* the other, but if anyone can get the *on top of* to work, I'd love to know how you did it.

 

[Guest]

15 hours ago, Brikoleur said:

(It's irritating that you can't disable staging on those service modules, I accidentally blew them when meaning to un-stage the Klaw on the krane...)

It should be possible to make the staging optional if you can point an MM patch to the module. Here's an attempt, bearing in mind I don't have Making History so I cannot verify the part names nor that they actually use ModuleJettison, but this can serve as a template for edits.

@PART[Size1to0ServiceModule|SM18|SM25]:FINAL
{
	@MODULE[ModuleJettison]
	{
		stagingEnableText = Service Module: Enable Staging
		stagingDisableText = Service Module: Disable Staging
		stagingToggleEnabledEditor = true
	}
}

 

 

49 minutes ago, Chris Hopkins said:

However I am determined to make my Pegasus style launcher work, where I have 2 space planes, one that is mostly for getting to the upper atmosphere, and is mostly fuel tanks and jet engines; and one that decouples and goes into orbit and is mostly payload bay and rockets. However I cannot get them to couple in the VAB for love nor money. I have a workaround planned where I have one plane *behind* the other, but if anyone can get the *on top of* to work, I'd love to know how you did it.

Merged craft are always attached to the parent craft via their root part, so this needs to be configured beforehand.

1: Load [plane you want to attach], change root part to something that can surface attach to another part (in this case a fuselage part instead of cockpit or cargo bay), save.

2: Load [plane you want to attach other plane to]. Merge [plane you want to attach] and stick it on the decoupler.

Edited September 11, 2019 by Guest

[Chris Hopkins]

13 minutes ago, Rocket Witch said:

Load [plane you want to attach], change root part to something that can surface attach to another part (ie. fuselage instead of cockpit), save.

Load [plane you want to attach other plane to]. Merge [plane you want to attach] and stick it on the decoupler.

Thanks, I'm 75% certain I tried that, but I'll try again. Won't be the first time I thought I'd done some steps and hadn't. :-)

 

[Guest]

25 minutes ago, Chris Hopkins said:

Thanks, I'm 75% certain I tried that, but I'll try again. Won't be the first time I thought I'd done some steps and hadn't. :-)

 

Remember, fuselage part actually named fuselage, not cargo bay. Cargo bays don't have surfaceattach attach rule (unless you want to go into the cfgs and add it or MM patch it). Looking at the picture more closely it appears you are trying to attach via a cargo bay.

Edited September 11, 2019 by Guest

[Dafni]

1 hour ago, Flying dutchman said:

A caveman mun mission. Everything went perfect until jeb realised he had forgotten the parachute...

A KSP classic.

[Chris Hopkins]

1 minute ago, Rocket Witch said:

Rmemeber, fuselage part actually named fuselage, not cargo bay. Cargo bays don't have surfaceattach attach rule (unless you want to go into the cfgs and add it or MM patch it). Looking at the picture more closely it appears you are trrying to attach via a cargo bay.

{insert swear words here}

You are 100% correct. That'd explain it. Obvious when someone says it. I'll have a rethink how to redesign for that.

Thanks!

[Delay]

1 minute ago, Dafni said:

A KSP classic

Don't know how many times I've forgotten my chutes. Certainly more than once.

But I do know the frustration!

[Chris Hopkins]

I've also been having fun running with the experiment "How stupidly large can I possibly build my space tugs?"

Behold, my latest insane spacetug!

16 nervs for when you are not in a rush for your dV, 4 skippers for when you sort of are in a rush. (I was really tempted to use the mainsail for this purpose instead, however experiments have shown that for most requirements the skippers do the job, and the ISP lost through the larger engine is not gained though burning for a shorter time).

I've yet to test the aero-braking part of the design, but the ISRU works well if you leave it long enough. (I have a separate rover that's currently on the way to Minmus to supplement the power requirements of this beast while it is in ISRU mode, I didn't want to hamper it with too many solar panels.)

[magnemoe]

Landed an base on Laythe, 

Last of four moons of Jool to put an base on, Tylo has to wait for the next window. 

[Chris Hopkins]

Finally I set myself the challenge of could I build a rover that used the XL3 wheels? And if I could, could I design it such that a rover like that made sense beyond "it's a big rover". Well here's my submission:

Retractable heat shields thanks to robotics, ISRU capabilities, full robotics and carrying capabilities for all your Breaking Ground requirements. Science lab, hover mode and in theory enough thrust to make it to orbit from almost anywhere you'd want to land and refuel it.

On the downside, launching it required quite a large rocket.

I then used my shiny new uber-tug to get it to Minmus where I could refuel the launch boosters, to get it pretty much anywhere!

This is why I needed an uber-tug that could land and refuel itself. Refuelling this monstrosity would otherwise have taken *forever*.

When I have finished this mission I think I'll start a new science game. I think I have had enough of building these huge ships just to see if I can.

[Guest]

Next mission after this (Expedition Moho)

https://kerbalanders.wordpress.com/2019/09/11/the-little-mun-lander-screenshots-behind-the-scenes/

Get the behind the scenes of this mission here

 

[Guest]

I completed work on Elvira, the support plane for Raphael. All systems and critical mission phases have been tested. She's ready to go.

In case someone else wants to try the BAK Eve Service System, the craft are on KerbalX: 

• Raphael
• Elvira

Both will make it to Eve from KSC but will need a refuel in LKO for the transfer. 

I'm really happy with how these turned out, both functionally and in how they look. Even boxy Elvira has a certain utilitarian charm I think...

Edited September 11, 2019 by Guest

[Cavscout74]

I finished the longest drive I've taken on Kerbin - four hundred and sixty-some kilometers from the Woomerang launch site to an certain anomaly near the north pole.  Jeb is currently one cold kerbal, waiting in the small passenger cabin, for another mission to set up a base camp near the anomaly.

I recently unlocked the light scanning arm in this career, and Jeb spotted a baobab tree just a few km's into his trip.

Edge of the ice

Cruising on top of the world.   I didn't actually take any shots around the anomaly, but the Arctic Venture rover is currently parked on a flat patch of ground a few dozen meters from it, with Jeb sleeping in the cabin between the two seats.  He has a few weeks worth of snacks and with the roof solar panels, the generator fuel should far outlast the snack supply now that he's not driving any more.

While taking breaks from that trek, I built a new jet airliner.  Val took it up for the first flight, and it flew reasonably well.  It needs some tweaking, but it was flyable as-is

It eventually got to the upper 200's, maybe could have broken 300 m/s.  The elevators need some more downward angle of incidence put in

I very nearly lost control trying to get this screenshot, but recovered & made a great landing (ie one that the plane was still usable after)

Finally, the second Minmus outpost launched successfully and is on it's way, no unplanned explosions this time