What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Triop]

1 minute ago, RizzoTheRat said:

Clearly I've been away to long if Triop's now making aircraft not race cars

Aircraft have wheels too...

I might even go into space Soon™....

[Dirkidirk]

I landed jeb, bill, bob and val on minmus with an over equipped, oversized and overpowered lander, planted a flag and brought them home safely in an Mk1 command pod attached to the top of an Mk3 command pod. but not before flipping the rover over and crashing into the kerbals with that same rover. I then went on to test a new ssto spaceplane and made an emergency crash landing in the ocean which luckily only destroyed the wings.

[Fraktal]

More organization today.

Question to you folks: is it worth it to sacrifice efficiency for safety? I'm asking because I took a look at one of my munar lander designs for improvement purposes and I think I may have overkilled it a bit. It used to have one FL-T400 tank which was fine for a suicide burn landing and return, but the narrow tank meant the legs couldn't extend far enough out to keep the lander from tipping over if landing on a >10° slope. So I decided to do some fuel rearrangement to lower the center of mass and spread out the landing gear and in the end, I ended up with a single T200 tank and three T100 drop tanks, the extra fuel being required to offset the dV loss from the drop tanks' nosecones. Good news is that the lander casually landed on an 18° slope without even trying to tip over, which the old design couldn't have managed. Bad news is that the extra weight meant I had to add more fuel and a second Terrier to the transfer stage (which is now heavy enough to turn like a sloth with reaction wheeling only), which meant I had to add even more fuel and thrust to the launcher stage. It still flies with minimal trouble and gets back to Kerbin with 400 m/s to spare after a non-ideal equatorial landing and retrograde takeoff, but I feel I sacrificed too much in the way of efficiency just to not have to worry about tipping over. Frankly, an early-game low-tech single-person lander shouldn't require three SRBs, three Reliants and a Swivel on the first stage alone (the previous designed needed one less SRB and one less Reliant).

[Hotel26]

3 hours ago, RizzoTheRat said:

making aircraft

An SSTO, no less!?  He'd better keep his foot off the Go pedal or he'll need a spacesuit.

(Welcome back, Triop!)

2 hours ago, Fraktal said:

worry about tipping over

I would suggest exploring how much extra drag you induce by extending the landing struts out on beams.  Or something like this (on a smaller scale):

[capi3101]

(1.6.1) Log's pretty paltry today. Of course, that might've had something to do with a bit of a setback I suffered early on in the day - after sending up fuel supplies from the South Base outpost near KSC to LSV House Corrino in orbit, I inadvertently pushed the button to recover the craft instead of the one that would take me to the space center. Game didn't question it, and suddenly I was minus one outpost. Made two attempts to begin reconstruction yesterday; the first one had to be reverted and I lost a good 45 minutes of work in the process. The second attempt has gone well so far - right now the base consists of the central Pathfinder Pondarosa fab lab, a Casa Geology Lab, two Chuckwagon storage units and two Haciendas including one drill and one foundry, and a quad of SAFER reactors. The twenty kerbals I had stationed out at South Base are all out there and aboard the new outpost with the exception of engineer Mathat Kerman and scientists Lenfal and Frovan Kerman, who are camping out in the heavily modified TBD 7d base-seeding rover I sent to the same spot three klicks south of KSC until I can get up enough base structures up to house everybody. Suffered a second (but more minor) setback here - having calibrated the rover for the upcoming base on Vall, it only shipped out with a half-load of equipment (to save on mass). Only have the one drill up and running; usually things don't really get to cooking with base construction until the second drill is deployed...

In other news, the Crater Maker Heavy 7 16-passenger lander I sent down to the Enchova Central outpost on Duna finally made its way to space station Dunaport, docking without too much incident other than a couple of overshooting burns of the main engine.

Been calling this thing a spider, but from this angle it looks more like a squid. Squids have more tentacles, though. Maybe an octopus? I dunno...

Also was able to get both LSV House Harkonnen and LSV House Corrino into orbit over Jool, with Harkonnen heading out to Bop and Corrino heading towards Vall. Harkonnen made her final warp out to Bop this morning but arrived way too fast and had to burn to get her speed down low enough to finish warping into a 156.7 x 78.2 kilometer, 112.99° inclined orbit (i.e. seriously inclined and retrograde to boot). I'll be working to get her into a more civilized orbit as the day progresses today; right now I'm just happy she's got an orbit at all. Harkonnen is delivering colonists to the Bohai 2 base at Bop, while Corrino will be landing a Hellhound 7 rover and skycrane on Vall for base-site scouting purposes and to move along the current exploration contract.

I also spent a lot of time searching the Kerbal Konstructs thread and finally found the instructions on how to flatten terrain out. Pretty simple really. Tried it out on Pol in the vicinity of the Papa 1 rover, and boy did it ever work... 

...I think we might've overdone it a bit. On the other hand, I bet the drive from here to the skycrane has become a lot more interesting...

With Operation Plowshare (apparently) finished in the area, I'm certain that the TBD 7dG base-seeding lander currently waiting in orbit to land on Pol to begin base construction will have absolutely no trouble finding an area that's suitably flat.

That's all I've got to report for yesterday. Today I'll be getting Corrino to Vall, getting my colonists down to Bop, and rebuilding South Base. Time permitting, I'll land the rover on Vall and maybe get my base-building crew down to Pol. Hopefully I'll have more for y'all tomorrow (probably won't be quite as entertaining of a read though).

[AHHans]

Jebediah got a bit peeved that Bill and Bob wanted Valentina as their pilot for the big Eve-Return mission. So he vanished in his workshop. Some hours later he asked KSC control for takeoff clearance for "a quick test flight". A few minutes later it looked like this:

Jeb claims that the test was a full success, and that his ... plane I guess ... flew perfectly fine. He just forgot to set up the control settings before the start, and forgot to watch the battery charge while flying manually.

He now asked for a standard mark 1 orbital lifter and permission for a launch tomorrow morning. When asked what this is all about he just said: "You'll see tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, depending on low long it takes me in orbit."

[Triop]

Today, we bought a cold war era jet fighter.

I wish KSP would come with a DLC called "History of flight".

With propeller engines and new wings and canopy's.

That would be awesome.

Edited September 25, 2019 by Triop

[RealKerbal3x]

50 minutes ago, Triop said:

propeller engines

Well, the Breaking Ground DLC has turboshaft engines and propeller/helicopter blades, so you're in luck there

[Cavscout74]

I had mostly successes in my career except for my brief foray back into the world of helicopters.  I should've just copied the one I knew worked over from a different career instead of building from scratch.

First up, the Heavy Minmus Lander arrived and made the first crewed landed in Minmus' north polar region.  It is currently on its way home with a quick fly-by of Mun on the way to satisfy one of the tourists

Then there was an LKO rescue contract that I completed with the first operational flight of the new Dawngrazer Recovery Klaw.  It went well despite forgetting to install the lower set of RCS thrusters and not having any emergency snacks for the rescued Kerbal.  The probe core was in control anyway, it didn't matter too much if he passed out from starvation. 

Coasting towards rendezvous

After capture & reentry burn.  The rescuee is still being interrogated to find out how his vintage airplane cockpit ended up in LKO.  He claims he saw a bright light while his squadron was lost on a training flight then woke up in orbit

Then Val performed successful test flights of the CSP-02 Mallard seaplane, completing the "Build a seaplane" contract I've had floating around for a while.

Approach to landing on the water.  The large wings allow for a very low stall speed, somewhere under 40 m/s, and a nice smooth water landing

Val floating on the water, watching the sun rise before taking back off

Safely landed back at KSC, completing the contract

Encouraged with the success of the seaplane, Val took up an experimental helicopter.  One drawback to the "Giving Aircraft a Purpose" contract pack is if you crash a plane (or anything with a pilot & lifting surfaces) you tend to fail any contracts that are active even if you aren't attempting them.  In this case, I "failed" the contract to fly a spaceplane to the edge of space because the experimental helicopter smashed the runway.  Val did appreciate the nearly indestructible crew seat

 

[RizzoTheRat]

First use of Nukes in my KOS powered game and my staging's gone haywire.  For some reason it thinks there's no liquid fuel in the stage so it stages again...and dumps the payload

 

[NHunter]

My Nero mission began arriving:

[Triop]

Rebels vs the Empire . . .

DO IT !
 

The force is female, Hahahahaha.

Your overconfidence is your weakness, kathleen kennedy, DIE !

Hold on, I'm getting a message... Our pilot did what ???

VADEEEEEEEEEEEEEER ! ! 1 !  ! 11

 

Edited September 26, 2019 by Triop

[Cavscout74]

Had a little extra time tonight & knocked out a few other things - my Heavy Minmus Lander returned home, then I tinkered some more with helicopters, tested a science drone for possible use on Laythe and finally had Jeb buzz the island airfield hangars.

Heavy Lander during reentry - it should have enough dV to complete Mun & Minmus landings. Just going to Minmus & back didn't even drain the drop tanks, so I just staged everything at once during reentry rather than risk the radial tanks slamming into anything vital

Val next to another crashed helicopter.  I'm really not sure what is going on - this basic design has flown reasonably well in the past.  I've tried it with helo blades & the old version with elevons as blades, neither ones flies worth a darn in this save

Since I don't quite have the tech needed for my old Laythe science drone, I tried designing a new one.  It flew "ok" at best, but it needs some work before it's worth trying to send to Laythe.  Unfortunately, the Jool window is too close to build a rocket to get it there before the transfer window.   In its place, I'm building a Jooldiver (based on my Eve lander can), and even that is going to catch the end of the transfer window.

I did have one milestone - my crew on board Kerbinport station came home after 180 days in orbit

After getting used to gravity again, Jeb set out to defy it.  No pics of the actual buzzing - I had my hands full - and the contract didn't register buzzing the hangars either. 

 

 

[Lukun7Rocket]

 

 

Edited September 26, 2019 by Lukun7Rocket

[Guest]

Man, with the new Eve revamp I gotta go there soon!

[capi3101]

(1.6.1) Well, for a while there yesterday I thought I had a real risk of not having anything to report to y'all today; let's just say my late afternoon and evening went a lot better than the morning/early afternoon. The day began at the C. P. Baker outpost on Laythe, which had completed the construction of the second iteration of space station Laytheport.

Alright - now that's what a booster should look like. Asparagus, sauted in butter and lightly salted...

Despite the revamped booster I still got hit by the same phenomenon that was affected - and ultimately made me abort - the first attempt, namely that I was only getting credit for about two-thirds of the fuel upon release from the pad despite having used TAC to fill the tanks completely. It wasn't being delivered evenly either, so the first three or four launch attempts involved the rocket immediately flipping over and crashing due to the weight imbalance, and then the remaining launch attempts involved figuring out how to balance things with only two-thirds the normal amount of fuel (with surplus fuel over oxidizer to boot). 

All that said, after many, many attempts, I finally got Laytheport up to a stable very low orbit around the moon. Between my early afternoon and late afternoon sessions - and I have absolutely no compunction admitting this to y'all - I used KML to refill the last booster stage (give me all my effin' gas, dammit) and finished putting the station into a 76.2 x 74.9 kilometer, 0.5° inclined orbit over Laythe. The launch did destroy the pad at Baker, so after clearing away the launch clamps I had the staff there print up a replacement, which outpost engineer Janbles Kerman installed. Baker then began printing up the spaceplane piers, a job that's expected to take thirty hours to complete.

That job done, I next decided to land the TBD 7dB rover I'd put into orbit over Pol a few days ago.

Operation Plowshare knocked a big chunk out of Pol. Didn't exactly realize just how big of one until I was deorbiting...I mean, you can see the edges of the area pretty clearly in this screenie...

After setting down next to the Papa 1 rover at the area designated Urely's Vision in the Lowlands, the lander proceeded north 1.5 kilometers to the Midlands (which was still in the area affected by Operation Plowshare, a.k.a. my use of Kerbal Konstructs to flatten out the terrain). 

Yep. Definitely overdid it. But I guarantee you these three aren't complaining...

Nothing else to report from Pol for now; I would like to see if I'll get an exploration contract to walk on the surface before I do anything else there. If not, I can always begin base building whenever I want. If so, I'll be happy I waited. Long-range plan is to acquire some Minerals on the current spot before heading back to Papa 1 for base construction.

Speaking of base construction, the re-building of the sixth iteration of the South Base outpost near KSC is proceeding apace. I was able to inflate a second drill unit yesterday as well as two Doc science labs, and I was able to get an OPAL unit up and "running" as well (I don't think the OPALs have ever well and truly ran at all for me). The remaining drill units have been printed up and attached to the base at this point and I'm currently waiting for enough Equipment to be printed for those to get up and running as well. Still have plans to print up two more Pathfinder Casa modules, 8 more Haciendas and 11-12 Chuckwagons - you know, finish out the tent city portion of the base - before moving on to the permanent Castillo structures. I'll be continuing work out there in between other things.

One of the aforementioned "other things" that happened yesterday was the arrival of the Bill Clinton 7b probe I'd dispatched from the Non Caseus Yards over Mun last weekend at its rendezvous point with Anzor's Scrap - the probe had traveled all the way down to Kerbin before I realized the distressed ship it was meant to haul back to Kerbin was in fact in such a high orbit that it might as well have been at Mun.

Anzor's sitting there going "took you guys long enough to get out here...I really gotta pee......"

After successfully grabbing Anzor's Scrap, the probe performed a burn that put it into a 9557.6 x 47.7 kilometer, 2.75° inclined orbit; it will reach periapsis in five hours and 25 minutes. I will be making the usual attempt to land the payload at KSC when the time finally comes.

Final thing that happened yesterday was the delivery of a Hellhound 7 rover to the surface of Vall. LSV House Corrino broke orbit over Jool at the optimal point and maneuvered to slow down enough for direct orbital entry at Vall (actually got going a little too slow), then warped to Vall. She entered a retrograde orbit, but with a few more quick warps the ship settled into a 419.5 x 346.4 kilometer, 3.79° inclined orbit.

Still not tired of taking screenshots of Jool somewhat obscured by mid-ground objects. Not yet anyway...

Upon attaining orbit, Corrino released the Hellhound 7 rover and skycrane it had carried from Kerbin in its drydock and the skycrane conducted burns to take it to a designated landing spot in the Northeast Basin, fulfilling that portion of the current exploration contract. The skycrane released the rover designated Victor 1, which then drove about three kilometers to one of the potential base sites that ScanSat Vall identified a few weeks ago. Upon arrival at the site, Kerbal Konstructs was once again used to flatten out the terrain (though with a much smaller radius this time) and Corrino's crew began the construction of a TBD 7d base-seeding rover. With a productivity rating of 63 at the present time, the rover won't take long - construction is expected to take just seven hours and 45 minutes. That's assuming I can keep the ship supplied with Rocket Parts: I'm going to have to fill it up twice to keep Corrino adequately supplied for the job, and with no outpost on Vall yet, the plan is to get the ship to Laythe as quickly as possible - C. P. Baker will be supporting the construction. Getting the rover down to the surface is going to be another matter; the 7d deorbit-and-landing stage is going to be barely adequate to get the craft down, and that's assuming I won't have to do a big plane change burn first. I could conceivably have a long drive over Vall's surface before everything is finally said and done... 

On the agenda for today - get Corrino to Laythe, continue rebuilding South Base, and try to get LSV House Harkonnen into a better orbit over Bop so I can deliver some colonists to the Bohai 2 base on the surface (wound up doing absolutely nothing with Harkonnen yesterday but it is an important ongoing job). The build of the Zima 7 at the Alexander L. Kielland outpost on Eve is getting close to completion as well, so I may be sending tourist Subart Kerman up from the surface later today, and if things go quickly I may be attempting to land Anzor's Scrap as well. I'll let y'all know how everything goes tomorrow.

[Xurkitree]

I guess I should post all the pictures I have from my current career through beyond gnome

https://imgur.com/siHZwiy 

My Second Lua landing, right next to a broken terraformer!

https://imgur.com/bORD4i9 

Armstrong mission.

https://imgur.com/egFYeet 

The Ash mission got stranded in orbit.

https://imgur.com/hpy7YYD 

A rover mission on Lua. The Lua Script visited a bunch of biomes and explored the KSC.

https://imgur.com/XDcJ7R4 

Hydrus landing! I'm totally going to send a base there.

https://imgur.com/RxkOgLX 

Biome hopping on Hydron.

https://imgur.com/ehnqAIC 

The Launch of CamScanner 1.

https://imgur.com/n8vvrGH 

Just a really cool shot.

https://imgur.com/2Oj66wq 

The Hydrus mission ends by landing on Rhode, mothership, lander and all!

 

[AHHans]

After yesterday's slight mishap during a test-flight Jebediah launched a fairly standard rocket, and subsequently spent a few hours in orbit.

Spoiler

Scott Kerman from the tracking center just commented that "Jeb seems to assemble something in LKO", but refused to tell more. We all knew something was up: he was snickering too much!

Spoiler

When Jeb finally returned from orbit, he did it in (well, more precisely "on") a rather peculiar craft: his very own flying asteroid:

Spoiler

Mortimer was not amused: "You can park your asteroid there!" "What, that's the KSC parking space, isn't it?" "Yes, but not for asteroids!" "What? is it my fault that we haven't designed a parking space for asteroid - plane conversions?"

Closing remarks: We all know that flying asteroids is a dangerous business. Accidents can and do happen. But that freezing to death is one of the dangers? Standing still on the runway of the KSC? In bright sunshine? That's a bit unexpected:

P.S. Big shoutout to @5thHorseman who had the original idea!

Spoiler

And, yes, it can take off again under its own power. It does handle like - well - a sack of bricks. I needed to lower the friction control of the wheels to the minimum, and needed to steer it off the runway to get it to pitch up, but it does fly!

[Triop]

Naskar

" boogity, boogity, boogity ! "

 

 

[Superfluous J]

1 hour ago, AHHans said:

When Jeb finally returned from orbit, he did it in (well, more precisely "on") a rather peculiar craft: his very own flying asteroid

Impressive! After multiple tries I deemed it all but impossible in the non-beta atmosphere. you have shown me to be incorrect.

[AHHans]

8 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

After multiple tries I deemed it all but impossible in the non-beta atmosphere.

What was your problem? Burning up during re-entry?

I did use a mined-out class A asteroid, that only weights 0.3339t, but getting that de-orbited and transitioned to flying in the atmosphere was no problem. I just gave it a test: only lowering the periapsis to 50km (with apoapsis a 100km) and no further use of propulsive braking (the rocket that brought the parts up still had plenty of fuel left). Still no problem.

The hardest part for me was getting the *bleep* Klaws to stick in a way that the wings and tailplane are reasonably straight. (Which is why the tailplane is so much offset.)

[Superfluous J]

4 minutes ago, AHHans said:

What was your problem? Burning up during re-entry?

No. Well, yes, but I got around that problem. My main problem was I could never get it stable enough to fly. The closest I got remained upright as it nosedived into the ground at hundreds of m/s.

I never mined the asteroid out. It felt impure The original glider was untouched by drill so I wanted to recreate it with the same constraints.

And yes, attaching things remotely close to where you thought they'd go can be ridiculously difficult. Another problem was each test had to be done pretty much from scratch.

Edited September 27, 2019 by 5thHorseman

[AHHans]

2 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

No. Well, yes, but I got around that problem. My main problem was I could never get it stable enough to fly. The closest I got remained upright as it nosedived into the ground at hundreds of m/s.

I guess the propeller design has helped there quite a bit. The electric rotors are the heaviest parts of the craft at 2.25t each. So they add quite a bit of mass in front of the center-of-lift. And I think that the spinning propellers also help to stabilize the craft. They may (or may not) have some gyroscope effect, but more importantly by setting the blade pitch one can pretty much just set the airspeed of the craft. At low-ish speeds (below 80 - 100 m/s depending on the craft) they generate quite large amounts of thrust both for speeding up and for slowing down (when you are going fast enough that the angle of attack on the blades becomes negative). I don't think I could successfully land that craft - without it falling over in one direction or another - if I couldn't slow it down by setting the prop pitch to zero. (And, well, just having power available to get yourself out of an unstable situation is also helpful.)

2 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

I never mined the asteroid out. It felt impure

I'm not much of an asteroid-purist.

Edit: P.S. I put my asteroid upgrade kit onto KerbalX: https://kerbalx.com/AHHans/Flying-Rock-Kit

Edited September 27, 2019 by AHHans
Added P.S.

[jost]

Continuing with the Laythe mission of my Jool5. Yesterday I needed several tries, otherwise I would have wasted way to much fuel. During one attempt I shot following picture in low Jool orbit:

https://imgur.com/UM9ypNY

[capi3101]

(1.6.1) Yesterday turned out to be fairly eventful. With construction having commenced on a TBD 7d base-seeding rover and without sufficient Rocket Parts to complete the job aboard, my day began with LSV House Corrino breaking orbit over Vall and warping over to Laythe.

I don't have that many screenshots today. At least this one's got Laythe and Tylo in it.

After some maneuvering over Jool to bleed off excess speed, the ship settled into a 645.4 x 518.2 kilometer, 3.77° inclined orbit. Upon attaining orbit the ship's mass driver was activated and the C. P. Baker outpost on Laythe's surface shot up a full supply of Rocket Parts, Corrino having already expended the supply available. 

After taking a moment to send up fuel supplies via mass driver from the Enchova Central outpost on Duna to space station Dunaport in orbit, my next task was to oversee the arrival and de-orbiting of the Bill Clinton 7b probe hauling Anzor's Scrap down from very high orbit. The craft didn't bleed off as much speed as I'd hoped it would during the initial aerobraking pass and as a result it was going a tad fast when I finally did de-orbit it. Nothing unfortunate happened as a result aside from the probe coming down short of the space center by nearly 250 klicks. The probe's successful retrieval brought its junk-and-kerbal mission to a close and brought up a tourist run to Bop and Vall as a replacement.

Next up it was time for more Rocket Parts to head up to Corrino from Baker - when confirming the delivery of the load, Corrino's engineers revised their completion time for the rover to a mere 45 minutes (this down from nearly 5.5 hours at the time; either they were working really hard or they were multiplying their estimates to keep up their reputations as miracle workers again). That done, I got a signal from the Alexander L. Kielland outpost on Laythe: the ongoing print of a Zima 7 Eve Ascent Vehicle was complete. The base fueled the craft while tourist Subart Kerman, who had spent a few lovely days in the sweltering heat and high gravity of Eve, was loaded aboard for return to Kerbin. That done, it was time to remember how to launch one of these damn things without it breaking up...

TWR at launch is too high...I'll have to remedy that before I try another Zima launch. Should be 1.05 - 1.1 at Eve if you don't want to break things.

It took me three attempts but eventually I got the craft into a 204.2 x 200.1 kilometer, 0.12° orbit - well overshooting space station Eveport's 125-kilometer altitude. With the craft safely in orbit, St. Simeon Salus was dispatched from Eveport to rendezvous with the Zima; total flight time from departure to rendezvous was 62 minutes and the rendezvous/docking/de-orbiting of the Zima's final ascent stage didn't occur until early this morning. St. Simeon Salus is on its way back to Eveport at this point, with an estimated seventeen minutes to its intercept point.

Only other thing I did yesterday was adjust LSV House Harkonnen's orbit over Bop via careful use of the ship's warp drive to 180.1 x 96.6 kilometers at 12.72° inclination, which, bad as that may be, is still far better than the one it was in originally. It was acceptable enough for me to dispatch Next Objective and Roy Hinkley from the warp ship for space station Bopport, with about 72 minutes to their respective intercept points. Hinkley was unable to complete its alignment burn with the station owing to St. Simeon Salus's rendezvous with the Zima, but I hope to finish attending to that later.

House Corrino also finished printing up the TBD.

House Corrino over Laythe with a TBD 7d rover in its drydock and the rover's final destination visible in the background.

Supplies of fuel, Materials Kits, Rocket Parts and Equipment were shot up from Baker to Corrino this morning, and at this point all is set for the return flight to Vall. Just have to have a window of opportunity in which to conduct the warp. 

So today, the plan is to get Next Objective and Roy Hinkley to Bopport, unload their passengers and get them heading back to House Harkonnen, then land said passengers at the Bohai 2 base on the surface. I also hope to get the Zima over to Eveport and get Subart loaded aboard Gilligan docked there, which will then head for rendezvous with LSV House Atreides in high Eve orbit for transport back to Kerbin. And time permitting I hope to get House Corrino over to Vall and get its consist to the ground. Still haven't selected the Vall outpost crew yet; I probably ought do that in the near future. The ongoing reconstruction of the South Base outpost near KSC is also on the agenda - the base now has all four drilling units up and running and at this point the printing of the remaining base structures is high on the to-do list there, time permitting. I anticipate another busy weekend to report to y'all on Monday.