What did you do in KSP1 today?

[aagun123]

 

[capi3101]

(1.6.1) Was a tad busy in RL yesterday, hence no time for a report of this past weekend's activities. I'll see what I can do to make up for that today. Not all that many screenies for the weekend, unfortunately. The TL, DR version is that I did a lot of roving. A lot.

Kicked off my fay on Friday with the arrival of Edmund Fitzgerald at space station Laytheport.

At night. Of course.

Fitzgerald was assigned a specific port at Laytheport - the one abaft to be precise - and the craft docked to the station. Later on in the day, Fitzgerald's mass driver was utilized to receive a refueling shot of fuel supplies and Ore from the C. P. Baker outpost on the surface. The rescue craft's arrival at Laytheport finishes getting up all the permanent infrastructure at Laythe, which leaves Tylo as the last of Jool's moons without a permanent kerbal presence (and I'm working on that).

After maneuvering a Spamcan 7 2-passenger monoprop lander with engineer Kabert Kerman aboard into a 31.6 x 10 kilometer equatorial orbit over Pol, I set up a rendezvous between Roy Hinkley and space station Bopport; rendezvous was two hours and 34 minutes later. Next up after that was the arrival of the Spamcan 7c lander at the newly launched Non Est Hic Yards over Vall with engineer Genery Kerman aboard. After docking, Genery immediately transferred over to the station's Bigby Orbital Workshop at construction of a Boop-Boop 7x probe commenced, with construction time expected to take a mere 92 minutes. Next, I went over to the Deepwater Horizon outpost on Minmus, where my crew there had finished building a Hellhound 7 rover and was awaiting my arrival so I could push the button to finalize the build. I have no idea how many roving/landing craft I have had on Minmus since establishing DH (I've been at this career save for quite some time), so I guessed and dubbed the rover November 4 as it rolled off of DH's launch pad.

Got this one in daylight - imagine that. Probably wouldn't have had to roll so far off the ground if I'd let off the base's airbrakes for a bit...

Pilot Gildock Kerman left DH and boarded the new rover, which then drove to the first of what turned out to be five waypoints on a mission to conduct EVA reports. I left Gildock sitting in his seat after the first waypoint while I attended to other things, namely the Tango 1 rover on Tylo and its mad drive to cover the eighty-or-so kilometers between its landing site and the targeted zone.

Tylo's actually not too terrible of a place to rove in all honesty. I mean, 180 mph on Mun would be suicidal, but here there isn't a crater waiting to dump you on a 45° every fifty meters...

After covering 46 kilometers of the drive, I had to stop - the Spamcan 7 lander over Pol had reached its periapsis and it was time to decide whether to send the craft on to space station Polport or to go ahead and land it at the Petrobas 36 outpost on the surface. Evaluating the craft's remaining delta-V, I opted to go for landing; the craft touched down safely at Petrobas and Kabert joined the crew in the outpost in their ongoing construction of the Pol-orbiting shipyard. That job done I returned to Tango 1 to finish the drive, covering the remaining distance without any issues until I got to the target point. I discovered that the target zone wasn't in a Minor Crater like I wanted, and flipping on the biome view with alt-F12, I discovered that the point I really wanted to land at was to the west - much further to the west. Specifically, it was 760 kilometers away...which is what I get for not having biome views up when I entered the target coordinates in the first place, I get. Mad as I was about this revelation, I came to the decision that I had put too much effort into landing the damn rover on Tylo in the first place to just dump it and have to do it all over again, so I steered the rover to course 270 and started driving. Covered another 69 kilometers before ending the day on Friday. I also had ScanSat Tylo finish the remaining biome readings for the Galileo Crater and confirm the readings for the Grissom Crater. Assuming I can trust the readings, the Minor Craters are still going to be the best bet. I won't know until Tango 1 reaches its destination...

Saturday largely got undone due to an untimely crash of Tango 1 on Sunday (got going too fast), but what events stuck were the completion, fueling and launch of the Boop-Boop 7x probe over Vall and its burn to a 827.9 x 0 kilometer, 52.3° inclined orbit. Tango 1 covered a hundred kilometers and I redesigned the TBD 7e base-seeding rover's landing stage. I decided I wanted more thrust there, so I redesigned the thing so it could be used to launch a TBD into Kerbin orbit...

Sunday saw Tango 1 covering a total of 39 kilometers distance net over Tylo's surface; it went further of course but much of the distance had to be reverted when the rover crashed - at the time of the crash it had gotten up to 102 m/s, which I think is a land-speed record for the Hellhound 7 design (I got it up to 80 or so during the Dakar a few years back, which didn't count since I like to revert); for reference that's 228 mph, or a somewhat decent speed for a NASCAR race. House Corrino began printing up a TBD 7e, with the crew estimating completion in 21 hours assuming I could keep the ship supplied with Rocket Parts during that period. Roy Hinkley arrived and docked safely at Bopport, while the G-LOC 7a return-to-Kerbin craft scheduled for a Tylo flyby departed the Imo Pyramis Shipyards over Bop and began its flight to House Corrino, with total flight time estimate at just over three hours. The Boop-Boop over Vall conducted its final burn to put it into position for contract, and the crew at Petrobas 36 conducted an operation to connect the Spamcan to the outpost long enough to refuel it and get it up to Polport; the lander docked with the space station a little over ten minutes after launching back up from the surface. My day on Sunday wrapped up on Minmus and November 4, in which Gildock had been sitting while night fell. November 4 proceeded to hit the remaining waypoints of its mission.

Night vision cameras are awesome, BTW.

No replacement contract was offered for completing up the run on Minmus. Final distance from DH was only about ten kilometers.

Yesterday I went ahead and drove November 4 to about three kilometers distance from DH, then had Gildock leave the rover behind and jetpack the remaining distance back to DH where he boarded the outpost safely. Didn't want the rover and its fifty-some-odd parts to slow down outpost operations and such; it's still nearby should I need it again. The Bohai 2 base on Bop shot up the first resupply of Rocket Parts to House Corrino along with some replacement Enriched Uranium for the ship's SAFER reactors (some of which was needed in the TBD's construction). The G-LOC arrived and docked at Corrino, and the Spamcan 7 at Bopport departed with tourist Mitney Kerman aboard, landing safely in Bop's Peaks to fulfill that portion of Mitney's itinerary. And Tango 1 drove and drove and drove and drove - I covered 363 kilometers (nearly half) of the trek to the new target zone yesterday, largely after getting home from work. Day was insane but the evening wasn't so bad...

Today will kick off with the return of the Spamcan from Bop's surface; once back at Bopport, I'll have Mitney re-board Roy Hinkley and begin the process of getting Hinkley back to House Corrino. When Hinkley arrives at Corrino, all business over Bop will be concluded with the exception of the completion and fueling of the TBD; I won't leave until that's happened. I'm still a little concerned that the redesigned TBD won't fit inside Corrino's warp bubble, but I won't know if that's the case or not until I activate the Alcubierre Drive with it in Corrino's drydock. If it won't fit, I'll have to come up with a contingency plan for the design - I'll need to know specifically which parts won't fit, which again means waiting until construction is complete. Assuming it does fit, Corrino will head to Tylo, select a crew for the outpost mission and release the rover before departing for Eve and Gilly to finish up the remaining tourist contracts aboard Hinkley. At that point, Tango 1 is going to have to get where it's going. The rover only has a little under 200 kilometers to go at this point and if i can put in a decent day of driving today I oughta be able to finish things up tomorrow (knock on wood). I'll let y'all know how it goes with tomorrow's report.

[Kebab Kerman]

BDArmory's AI pilot managed to land an F-15e on the wing of an Arsenal Bird... I'm not even sure how he did it. I can't get him off. It's like he's glued there.

If you want the Arsenal Bird, it's on KerbalX (Not mine, it was made by Colonel Cbplayer.)

[septemberWaves]

I tried to record a video of what I'm doing now. I think I might make this into a series. This launch didn't go amazingly well, but I'll fix all the issues by next time.

 

[Cavscout74]

I had a few more of my Duna fleet arrive & enter orbit.  Still waiting on the last few before I start on landing the crew anywhere.  I'll be picking landing sites next now that both Ike & Duna survey sats are in place and most of the arrivals are complete.

The most important arrival was the Duna Quad Lander.  Pictured here docked with Duna Station.  Kelrik had to perform an EVA to relocate a parachute due to a symmetry error during construction - one of the chutes ended up inside the main fuel tank instead of outside of the radial fuel tanks.

I also had my Eve heavy remote rover arrive & land safely among Eve's peaks.

I found a pancake dome within 200m of my landing site.  Of course I don't have the contract to scan one, so the rover is parked till that contract pops up

Finally, in my largest launch of this career, I sent up a new station around the Mun in a single launch.  This was also the first flight of a 5m Arcterra launch vehicle in this career, and it needed to be refitted with Mainsail engines in place of the Mastodons and 8 SRB's to get off the pad.

First stage separation went smoothly

Safely in low Mun orbit

[RizzoTheRat]

On 10/21/2019 at 8:38 PM, Cavscout74 said:

I don't remember exactly, probably somewhere around 200 m/s.  The grid fins can get a little hotter than stock airbrakes - this time around, I've gotten a temp bar to appear on them but it didn't get very high.  I used to launch most of my payloads on older versions of the Nexus (in 1.3.1 & 1.4.x), but got tired of spending as much time landing boosters as doing anything else - especially when I'd launch 10+ craft for an interplanetary mission, and would have to land all those boosters.  It was a good design though, and it handled well going both directions, so I thought I'd recreate it.  I may play with a Mastodon version as well - the compact variant should be able to fit 4 as well.  I thought about trying a Mainsail version - Restock gives it a compact variant as well - but anything needing that much thrust to launch won't be able to make orbit on the Nexus launcher alone unless I add more tanks, which will just snowball into a big headache.

Cheers.   Think I need to do a bit more work on the concept.   I'm automating everything with KOS so not to worried about effort bringing stuff back.   When I tried the idea before I used them to bring crew return modules back down to Kevin as well.

[Zeiss Ikon]

19 hours ago, Zedwardson said:

the spin was something that took a long time to work on, I am going to start a new save tonight and put the spin fins on the WAC portion and I bet I won't have the issues I had with the original design.  the main differnece of the 130km and 170km lauch was I timed the spin better.

The "Tutorial" is on the RP-1 webpage on "How to get a working sounding rocket"  and mostly goes over the various tricks you can do so you get used to the very different structure of the game from stock.

Hmm.  I still think you're going to have trouble with engine failures from overburning; I've never gotten a WAC/Tiny Tim above 120 km, as I recall, and that was building to the 305 mm diameter of the WAC sounding rocket controller -- most recent save (1.6.1) I built to the 375 mm diameter of the Aerobee controller; that way, I don't wind up with a rocket ten meters long including nose cone, payload tank, and fuel tanks, by the time I get the AJ10-27 upgrade.  The "Fat WAC" (internally "Dart" -- sounding rockets are named after primitive missiles, with the RD-100 series named "Javelin") is good for about 90 km with a modest overburn.  it doesn't, however, have the very long, slender nose cone and it's almost double the frontal area...

I don't even spin this one -- completely unnecessary.  Even upgraded versions that can get into true space are so steady by the time the fins quit working that they just keep pointing up until the fins start turning them over at around 70 km altitude on the way down.

[Zedwardson]

1 hour ago, Zeiss Ikon said:

Hmm.  I still think you're going to have trouble with engine failures from overburning; I've never gotten a WAC/Tiny Tim above 120 km, as I recall, and that was building to the 305 mm diameter of the WAC sounding rocket controller -- most recent save (1.6.1) I built to the 375 mm diameter of the Aerobee controller; that way, I don't wind up with a rocket ten meters long including nose cone, payload tank, and fuel tanks, by the time I get the AJ10-27 upgrade.  The "Fat WAC" (internally "Dart" -- sounding rockets are named after primitive missiles, with the RD-100 series named "Javelin") is good for about 90 km with a modest overburn.  it doesn't, however, have the very long, slender nose cone and it's almost double the frontal area...

I don't even spin this one -- completely unnecessary.  Even upgraded versions that can get into true space are so steady by the time the fins quit working that they just keep pointing up until the fins start turning them over at around 70 km altitude on the way down.

My Fin-less one in three shots went 130 km, 170 km, and 30 km (engine failure)

The finned ones went 120 (and had a lot less issues of timing, the finless ones had to be timed just right or I would have vapor lock) and were much more consistent on height.  (did have a WAC engine failure.)  I am building the WACs with a 300mm tankage and placing the sensors in the hollow of the controller. 

I am now working on doing a Bumper but I might do a day or two of normal KSP first.  

Edited October 23, 2019 by Zedwardson

[Zedwardson]

Goofing off in a science game to relax, and one of my rockets just did not go as planned. 

[Kebab Kerman]

Update:

I managed to get 10 F-15e's into formation... kinda. Two of them got stuck on the wing, and that kind of sucks. It's like they're glued there, they just... Don't come off.

EDIT: Note: Do not set the lag value to anything other than max in wing command. Your escorts will drift into the propellers.

Edited October 23, 2019 by Kebab Kerman

[Lisias]

While giving feedback about the current state of TweakScale, I realized that TweakScale jumped through the Second most popular Add'On on CurseForge.

I'm proud and thankful. It has been a honor to serve well the fellow Kerbonauts.  

Mostly….

Edited October 23, 2019 by Lisias

[MiscelanousItem]

Today I've started testing the balance of the first level nodes of my tech tree mod

Coming Soon™

[Cavscout74]

20 hours ago, RizzoTheRat said:

I'm automating everything with KOS so not to worried about effort bringing stuff back.

I've thought about trying out KOS a few times but haven't yet.  I seen a few posts of folks on here able to get it to land back on the pad or runway reliably with KOS, which would definitely make it worthwhile as doing it freehand requires more time & attention than getting it to orbit.

With almost everything in place (the Duna Rover is still weeks out - apparently I caught Duna's SoI after going past its Apoapsis), it was time to land the Duna Lancer outpost followed by the career-first manned Duna landing.

Landing the outpost went reasonably well, and it turned out to be just over a 13% ore concentration in the area - and only about a 200km drive to a certain anomaly to the northeast once the rover shows up.

Then it was time for the crew to come down

Just to be clear, this was not a precision landing, more like a "somewhat close and the base had wheels so it could drive over" landing. 

Once safely landed & the refueling hose hooked up, Ambera & Kelrik set up the surface experiments - which triggered an absolute flood of messages from my Mun seismic experiment for a transmission that didn't go through several (real world) days ago.  By flood, I mean several hundred messages within seconds (no time warp).  I had to exit the game and come back in, to find just 3 messages - one each from the weather & goo experiments on Duna sending a routine science transmission and a single message about the Mun seismic experiment not able to transmit.  I haven't seen this particular glitch before, has anybody else?

I also managed to land my Ike mining base & fuel rover.  The Ike lander is in orbit, waiting on the crew to depart Duna & come visit Ike

Something is not quite right here....

[NHunter]

I got ready to land on Hadrian:

And a beauty-shot of the moon:

[Cavscout74]

This is all the fault of @Capital_Asterisk and his Ground Effect mod.  I did a quick test flight in one of my Lightning spaceplanes - its just about my most flown spaceplane design, so I figured it would be the best choice to test how the mod worked.  The answer was it worked nicely, so it was time to let loose my inner mad scientist...

...and begin work on an Ekranoplan. 

It needs improvement in pretty much every area - lift, CoM/CoL location, control in all 3 axis (especially roll), control on the water, thrust, looks (it's ugly as sin), etc.  But.....  IT FLIES!!!!  And it actually did it the first time.  And it definitely needs the nose lift engines for take off.  In fact, without them, it will only fly around 85-90 m/s a few meters above the water and maybe 115-120 with them.  That isn't too terribly far from the real A-90 - cruise speed is listed as 400 km/h, which is 111.11 m/s. 

With such short wings, the ailerons have very little authority, so most of my turning was done with the rudder.  Messy, but it mostly worked in the air.

Water landing went smoothly, but actually maneuvering in the water was, well, even messier than in the air.  The ailerons had no effect due to the low speed, and the rudder barely had any and there was no engine gimbal to help or (my biggest mistake) no water rudder

Getting it on the beach - easy(ish).  Getting it off the beach - even full thrust with both the turboprop & nose jets wouldn't pull it up the slope with the gear down.  I had to cut throttle & let is roll back into the water, then basically do a 3-point turn (pull up & turn, stop, roll back & turn) to get pointed back away from shore

Finally - ready for takeoff

Jeb always says, any landing he walks away from is a good one.  Or in this case, swims away from.  Actually, nothing on the plane broke, it just couldn't right itself.

Edited October 24, 2019 by Cavscout74

[Fizwalker]

Today I restarted my career...... I did a lot of engine testing.... More Engine testing.... Followed by a successful sub-orbital flight and a run about in a small rover.  Last flight ended up having to use the abort system due to the controls going haywire. Valentina had a splash down that was a little early, but she is none the worse for wear.   She's off for the next 7 Kerbin days to recuperate.

[Guest]

Sadly nothing this week as I am busy with finishing work... BUT THE NEXT WEEK OH I HAVE PLANS!!!!

[Matthias77]

I lost my first Eve probe because somehow the atmo of Eve is quite different too 2015 Eve 

Also I lost my first Kerbal - on Minmus of all moons - due to me being stupid and forgetting that 4 Ants need at least a modicum of planning to land. Even on Minmus. Stupid (micro)gravity 

 

Today I'm gonna build a Nuke Lander for Mun/Minmus and will further my career tech tree...

[purpleivan]

5 hours ago, Cavscout74 said:

Can't help thinking this looks like a pic of the "catch of the day"... it was this long I tell ya, with fins the size of barn doors.

[Zeiss Ikon]

(1.6.1 RSS/RO/RP-1)

No new photos, I'm afraid.  I started a new career last weekend after concluding that a) I wasn't going to get to orbit with the engines available, short of building a 1940s-style monstrosity with a cluster of RD-103 that I'd never get to all ignite, and b) useful kerosene engines were still years out, as were the other enabling technologies.  The new career had a change in settings, returning to the old style "upgrade points from tech tree" (instead of getting an upgrade point every 20 science -- which makes it much, much harder to get upgrades early on, with few instruments and rockets that can't reach many biomes).

I understand the perceived need to rebalance RP-1 for advanced players, as it was "too easy" to significantly beat the historical timelines (i.e. players able to complete crewed orbit missions as early as 1956 with "Hard" settings), hence the change in  upgrade earning and current recommendation that newer players start off playing on "easy".  Worth remembering however, that some of us, despite a desire to play with real performance and actual Earth parameters, aren't experts in managing the game.  I can build an orbital rocket with RD-100 series alcohol burning engines, if I have the other tech needed (RCS with at least HTP propellant, appropriate avionics, adequate tracking center capability), but when I look at the Tech build list and add up the times and get a figure exceeding ten years to get to the equivalent of Mercury program tech, and it's already 1959, and I still can't reach biomes I haven't already exhausted with the instruments available, it loses a lot of "fun" factor.

"Upgrades from Tech Tree" adds a bunch of upgrades to the early game, as those first dozen or so tech nodes cost less than 5 science each, and each brings an upgrade point.  The relative abundance of upgrades then makes it "easier" to put some of those into R&D which helps get the tech sooner (otherwise, build times get so long that by the time you need a 60T launch pad you're looking at six months to get a rocket from order to launch, which makes it a hard decision to put the few upgrades you gain or can afford into anything other than VAB).

[Retro Starship]

14 hours ago, Cavscout74 said:

and begin work on an Ekranoplan.  

 

Wow I did not know there were aircraft propellers in this game! Cool!! Also very cool design here.

[MiscelanousItem]

Well today I continued developing the Rocketry Branch of my Tech Tree mod, however I ran into a problem: the stock tech tree is to cramped for my tech tree. So I thought I might use CTT but it is just some more loading time for just one node, so I decided to take the unused "Nanolathing" node and move it to the position I wanted it to be in...

EDIT:

Does this actually count as doing something in KSP?¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edited October 24, 2019 by MiscelanousItem

[Cavscout74]

2 hours ago, Saturn5tony said:

Wow I did not know there were aircraft propellers in this game! Cool!! Also very cool design here

That one is from a mod (Airplane Plus), but the Breaking Ground DLC does have propellers now as well.

Instead of trying to fine-tune my creation from last night, I took some time trying to make a more visually accurate A-90 Orlyonok.  It was partially successful on the looks but failed in the actual flying part.  It does fly (on the second attempt), but needs much more speed than my first experiment, and hitting the water going 120 m/s isn't the healthiest way to land.  And turning off the lift engines is basically suicide.  The really disappointing part is I didn't get any shots of the nose opening - doesn't work well on the landing gear since the nose gear gets raised too.  The (inactive) decoupler slightly behind the cockpit is the root part, and the entire front portion is attached via a BG hinge.  When open, it allows rapid loading/unloading of the cargo bay

In work in the SPH:

2nd version, low over the water:

3rd version, just after takeoff.  As I got over the water, I tried turning off the lift jets.  Before I could take any more screenshots, it was ripped to pieces on impact with the water.   I need to go back to the all-moving B9 tail plane like my first prototype instead of a fixed horizontal stab & elevators, because poor pitch authority is part of my problem. 

[eddiew]

On 10/22/2019 at 2:56 PM, capi3101 said:

Specifically, it was 760 kilometers away...

As much as I love roving... I feel like what you needed here was the Bon Voyage mod

[capi3101]

28 minutes ago, eddiew said:

As much as I love roving... I feel like what you needed here was the Bon Voyage mod

Probably so. Job's done at this point though, so...

I haven't posted about that yet. RL's been kicking my butt all this week. Might get something in tomorrow if I'm lucky.