What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Guest]

Designed a 3.75m hydrogen-fuelled lifter to handle much larger payloads than before in my science save. Rated for 17t to LKO and 5t to Mun transfer, it's pretty weak for its size, but I wanted an 'all new' rocket without boosters as a baseline for further development as required. It's mainly about having the structural gauge appropriate for high volume fairings while keeping the craft firmly in the medium weight class. Unfortuntely I don't quite have 3.75m fairing bases yet, so it has a kind of unique profile.

Low FOV shots from high altitude tend to look nice. Here the first stage can be seen, already far below.

Edited October 24, 2019 by Guest

[Kchinger]

Got my first encounter and orbit around Minmus. Just a Scansat to map the biomes for future exploration for now. 

Wasted a ton of dv reversing my orbit by accident. When placing my maneuver for the capture I must have accidentally pulled too far and didn't realize what I had done. I watched as mechjeb executed the burn, my orbit got more and more elliptical, collapsed, and then grew again. Oops. Oh well. It's polar and has the correct ap/PE for scanning, with like 20 dv left over. 

Once that scan finishes I think I'll have just enough science to get the infrared and the atmosphere thing, which will help me get more science, hopefully get to the gravity science thing, and then I'll attempt my first mun landing, followed my a minmus landing and I'm off to the races. 

[Zedwardson]

 

Started to play around with kerbalism, and enjoying the new framework.  

[Cavscout74]

Made two large strides in my career before going back to tinkering with my A-90 Orlyonok

First up, my Moho lander arrived

I cut the fuel a little closer than intended - the landing engines flamed out about 4m off the ground.  But it is a pretty solid lander, so it just plopped down, did a little bounce & stopped.

My Duna-Lynx rover also finally arrived, a month after the rest of my Duna fleet.  Once landed, it was time to start the 250km trek to investigate an anomaly:

Spoiler

One mistake I made before launch was not having any probe control on the rover itself - so once the transfer stage is jettisoned, it would have just smashed into Duna.  Happily, I realized my error while it was still in LKO, so a fix was launched - I already had a clamp-o-tron jr mounted on top just for a control point during descent, so I built a small probe to dock with it, which is the tower on top of the skycrane on top of the rover.

Once landed, it drove the ~3 km to the outpost and Kelrik went out to attach the radial probe core directly to the rover before ditching the skycrane.  Since it didn't need the antenna any more, he swapped that out too.

Kelrik continued getting the rover ready - sensors detected an anomaly nearly 250km NE of the outpost. 

After a few hours rest, it was time to go.  When Jeb was informed, he said "There's 250 km to Cydunia, we've got a full battery, half a pack of snacks, it's dark out and we're wearing helmets"

In just the first half hour of driving, I managed to complete 2 contracts & recovered a Duna stone & Blueberries to eventually complete a third & fourth.   Kelrik standing on top of a Duna meteorite while Ambera prepares to scan it with the rover arm

Ambera recovering a Duna stone to bring home to Kerbin

Kelrik recovering Blueberries to bring back as well

Finally, scanning a Duna sand dune

After that, it was just steady driving, occasionally dodging boulders.  I decided to drive either to sunrise or until a biome change.   Here, the eastern sky is starting to lighten

Nearly daylight, still in the lowlands biome. 

Still in the lowlands, but the sun finally appeared after cresting a steep hill & it was time to stop & give me a rest.

Finally, it was time to try to get my A-90 to be actually usable.  And I'm still having no luck with the time I had remaining.

In the SPH, the nose section is attached to a hinge to open and allow unloading of the cargo bay.  For reasons I don't understand, after launch the hinge will move, but the nose stays in place.  My guess would be autostruts, but then I would expect the hinge shouldn't move either.

I was able to keep the nose up marginally better, but a water landing at ~100 m/s is still not fun.  This IS the best landing I've been able to do in this thing, with just 2 large pieces instead of a dozen or more small pieces

[capi3101]

(1.6.1) Alright, alright, alright...RL has kicked my butt enough this week - I need to do a post here before my log gets truly long...

As I indicated in my last report on Monday, Tuesday began with the return of a Spamcan 7 2-passenger monoprop lander from the surface of Bop with tourist Mitney Kerman aboard. The launch was timed to minimize the flight time up to space station Bopport; the craft rendezvoused with the station a mere four minutes later and docked without incident. Once docked, Mitney transferred over to Roy Hinkley at the station, which then departed and burned for an intercept with LSV House Corrino in higher orbit. Twenty minutes later, Hinkley burned to align the plane of its orbit with Corrino and to set up a rendezvous; flight time to the rendezvous was two hours and 22 minutes. After shooting a supply of Rocket Parts up to Corrino from the Bohai 2 outpost on the surface, I had some time on my hands, which I spent with the Tango 1 rover on the surface on Tylo.

Tango 1 trucking westward across the surface of Tylo, with Jool coming up over the local horizon.

I did three driving sessions in total to end the day on Monday, covering the remaining 197 kilometers of the nearly 850 kilometer journey to the target zone in the equatorial Minor Crater. I'm happy to say that I finally arrived at the target without too many reverted incidents (Tylo ain't a bad place to rove in all honesty), and once at the target point I just had to go two more kilometers to the north to reach the equator.

Tango 1 freshly arrived after one hell of a drive. Thankfully, it was worth it - no exotic minerals, but I can cope pretty easily with that. Plus, it's not too far to the next biome over, and I know there are exotic minerals there...

Upon arrival I attempted to use Kerbal Konstructs to flatten out the landscape a little bit, without luck this time - still not sure what happened there. I haven't really taken the time to fix it either; I need to get around to doing that...

I haven't had a day the rest of this week where I got all of my normal playing time in. On Wednesday, there was a power fault at my workplace and so none of us could do actual work until about 9:45 in the morning; didn't get my morning break as a result. Yesterday and today it was parent-teacher conferences for schools that did the same; didn't get my lunch break yesterday as well. So not a great deal to report individually, but collectively there's some substance...

Wednesday began with the rendezvous of Hinkley with House Corrino; docking occurred without incident. I didn't have much to do at that point besides get the TBD 7e base-seeding rover printed up, which Corrino had been doing for some time. Corrino didn't have enough on-board Rocket Parts to complete the construction on its own and so two additional loads were sent up via Bohai 2's mass driver. Eventually the rover was completed, but then my worst fear was realized...

Crap. The drydock pretty well marks the edge of Corrino's Alcubierre Drive bubble. It's kinda like the post office - if it fits, it ships. If it doesn't fit, it tends to explode...

The combined rover/booster was too long and stuck out of Corrino's drydock; when I attempted to engage the Alcubierre Drive, the ship cut the whole thing loose automatically. After a revert with the same outcome, I reluctantly began Plan B, which first required me to recycle away all that hard work and clear out the drydock. Next up was design work - I went ahead and split the craft into two constructions, with the rover as one half of a composite craft and the booster as the other half. Since it would now be required to rendezvous and dock with the rover, the booster module was given an extra tank of gas and some RCS components to handle docking. Work complete, Corrino began building up the rover proper, with work estimated at six hours and eight minutes, an estimate that was reduced to just under an hour after Bohai 2 shot up yet more Rocket Parts as well as some Enriched Uranium. The only other thing that occurred on Wednesday was a burn of a Boop-Boop 7x probe very high over Duna into a 14,333.6 x 13206.8 kilometer, 149.28° inclined orbit. This was close to the target orbit but not close enough to clear its contract; the next burn was scheduled for just over thirteen hours later.

Yesterday I decided I didn't want to mope around waiting for Corrino to print up the rover; I had other contracts I could do, so I decided to get one of them going. Colonists Dimund, Sherlie, Desbart, Richley, Gembo, Micas, Telie and Kenmon Kerman were all loaded aboard an Auk II 8-passenger spaceplane at KSC, which then took off for space station Kerbinport.

Eight more saps leaving Kerbin, probably never to return. No reason - I'm just lazy about crew rotations...

I went ahead and had the plane close to three kilometers from Kerbinport before bringing its relative velocity to a halt, at which point I had Next Objective depart the station for rendezvous and docking (this to save myself lag due to part count in physics range within close proximity to the station).

Next Objective isn't really designed for docking directly with planes, but it's nice to know she can do it if I feel like it...

Docking occurred without incident, after which the colonists transferred aboard Next Objective. Once all eight were aboard, NO undocked from the plane and burned for Mun; she will arrive at periapsis over Mun in just under 5.5 hours. The plane was deorbited and landed safely at KSC 09, Corrino completed its print of the rover, and Bohai 2 sent up some needed fuel supplies to Bopport via mass driver.

So far today the story has been trying to get the TBD into position for landing on Tylo. Bohai 2 shot up supplies of Materials Kits, Rocket Parts and monopropellant to Corrino as well as 8800 units of Equipment for the rover. Once that was done, Corrino warped directly to Tylo, arriving at about 1,170 m/s, which was slow enough to enter a 891.7 x 150.8 kilometer, 9.94° inclined orbit directly; later warps changed the inclination to 3.09°. Lots were drawn to determine the Tylo crew; pilot Dunfred Kerman will head the expedition, with scientist Thommon Kerman and engineers Geofford and Madorf Kerman supporting construction operations. The four kerbals loaded into the TBD, which was cut loose from Corrino's drydock. The TBD has no thrust capabilities of its own, so Corrino lit up her conventional drives and thrusted ahead to get the rover clear of the drydock.

Don't worry guys, we'll be back before you run out of air. And snacks. And toiletpaper...

In the meantime, the ship's crew has begun the process of printing up the booster/landing module, which will finish in just over four hours. Additional Rocket Parts will be required if they are to finish within the quoted time frame, so to that end I'll be sending the ship on to Laythe at the next opportunity (it's a easier target to attempt to reach than Bop and I have facilities there that can support the construction just as easily).

Long term plans also see LSV House Harkonnen leave Kerbin for Tylo to pick up Roy Hinkley and take her to Gilly, the next port of call for a couple of her tourists (this may not happen depending on how things go with the TBD booster construction; if it goes well I'll save myself the trouble of having a second warp ship deployed). I've moved crew around aboard Corrino to make up for the four departed members of the Tylo crew and at this point I no longer need to keep M. A. Summers docked; I may be dropping her off at space station Laytheport while I still have the opportunity. My Pol-orbiting shipyard is nearing completion as well; the launch should take place within the next few hours. I have no idea how far I'll get over the weekend, but I'm hoping to be able to tell y'all on Monday that I'm at least close to establishing an outpost on Tylo. Keep your fingers crossed....

[septemberWaves]

I completed a docking mission with my Drazana spacecraft. Next plan is a space station.

Yes, I am aware that I made a mess of what I was saying during the landing at the end. As it turns out, recording videos is somewhat distracting.

[PT]

I finished surviving mars, but not all mods are updated to 1.8 so I decided to check out those breaking ground propellers.

I also did fun.

 

Edited October 25, 2019 by PT

[Pipcard]

Y56, D390 - Test flight of the Negi Star Mk2 reusable crew shuttle. It is the successor to the Negi Star spaceplane used for several decades.

[Triop]

Today's visitors:

 

[Lisias]

Got really fed up of coding, I'm doing this the whole week (on KSP and on work). So I took the night for some playing.

This thing below is being made on KSP 1.7.3 + Serenity + TweakScale 2.5.x Beta Snapshot "You Need to Use GIT"  (not released to the public, see the roadmap. You can shove the DLLs from the latest released on this).

I'm slowly, as time permits, toying patches for Serenity (Breaking Ground). Things are way from perfect, I had to use unbreakable joints on my machine to prevent Kraken Attacks, besides sometimes this is not needed. Probably something related to the poor performance of my dev rig. [It's directly related to autostruts on the blade, as well trying to shove a EAS strut on it!]

Who can tell where TweakScale was applied?

Edited October 26, 2019 by Lisias
tyops as usulla… and new links (I broke the earlier ones!)

[ezaroo]

9 hours ago, Cavscout74 said:

 

  Hide contents

I was able to keep the nose up marginally better, but a water landing at ~100 m/s is still not fun.  This IS the best landing I've been able to do in this thing, with just 2 large pieces instead of a dozen or more small pieces

The landing gear is auto strutted for heaviest part and that’s why it won’t move  your front landing gear can’t be ahead of the hinge if you want that to be reliable.

Edited October 26, 2019 by ezaroo

[Kchinger]

Sent a manned mission to just orbit Minmus and do science. May have wasted my biome scanner. It finished, but it's out of electricity when I switch to it so I can't view the results to get the science or anything, and I can't turn off the scanner to let it charge. Electricity seems to be my constant weakness. Did a resource scan though and doing a low resolution scan I think with my manned one before dropping into a lower orbit to do biome science. 

[Fizwalker]

8 hours ago, Triop said:

Today's visitors:

 

Love the Fishbed and Freedom Fighter!

[Triop]

42 minutes ago, Fizwalker said:

Love the Fishbed and Freedom Fighter!

Thank you. You know your planes, it's indeed a Freedom Fighter and not a Tigershark.

 

Edited October 26, 2019 by Triop

[Hotel26]

Busy with Mad Science, as usual.  My original Snowflake didn't pan out.  My intention was to land heavy miners on it.  Bad idea.

So this is Snowflake Gen 2...  (The Sparrow in the center brought it down from orbit.)  Sparrow hops off, or goes back to orbit.   (8 Hitchhikers, so it is Mun HQ for my ops!)

  

 

I didn't want to mess with all the paraphernalia on the periphery of Orb (the refinery unit) to get clearance for the exhaust of Sparrow, so I made an engineering trade-off and built a sky-crane: Spider.

 

That hurt because building one-off, "key-hole" solutions is anathema for my design team (me).  It was fun, though.

For context, I found a location on the Munar equator with 14% ore grade.  Shazbat!!  That's hard to ignore.  That's what got me started today, building a super-refinery.  It'll be fine-tuned for the Mun and one or two sites with premium-grade ore.

(I'm likely to move the right number of radiators to the Hitchhikers so that I can use just 4 slots (2x drills and 2x fuel cell arrays) on each Orb...  Will all depend on what the optimal ratios turn out to be.)

Spider deposits Orb directly onto one of the 8 Snowflake rim docks and then dismounts:

  

 

The plan is that my "blimp", known as Zippo, will be able to dock to this super-refinery and fill up toute de suite.  And can put as many super-refineries on the equator as I like and run N+1 Zippos to a Pole Star station to keep it fueled.

Everywhere else, Gremlin is my portable solution.  Goblin is almost certainly superseded.

Next task is to start tuning radiators, fuel cell arrays, ISRUs and drills for the optimum ratio -- in this location.

This is Zippo (with Goblin):

:

[Click any screenshot and use arrows to slide the show.]

 

Edited October 26, 2019 by Hotel26

[RealKerbal3x]

I had a rather amusing incident involving a Clydesdale booster when I was testing my stock space shuttle today...

Structural failure during liftoff is fun...this booster actually got into space

[kedrednael]

I recreated thunderbird 1
It can do both vertical and horizontal take-off and landing like in the show.

 

Edited October 26, 2019 by kedrednael
Trying to get images to work

[IkranMakto]

 

Spoiler

These blades are worst parts in the game. 

 

[Zeiss Ikon]

(1.6.1, RSS/RO/RP-1)

Working through my second career attempt in the 1.6.1 RSS/RO install.  Things are going a bit better; it's only 1956, and I've got Tank III upgrade in hand, as well as the same engines I had last attempt as of 1959.  I won't make orbit in 1957, but likely will before 1959, which I find acceptable (we still apparently can't change the start date -- WAC Corporal was ready to fly in 1944 and Project Bumper ran from 1948 to 1951, which would have all the starting parts available in 1948).

With an RD-103 and Tank III, you can do some good stuff.

Javelin Mk. 4 is the RD-103 upgrade of the original RD-100 Javelin.  Ethanol 90 has replaced Ethanol 75 (so more energy per mass of fuel), and Tank II, followed by Tank III upgrades have lightened the tank that forms the main fuselage.  Lightening the vessel allowed slightly reducing the size and mass of the avionics package, as well, which added another small increment to dV, now above 5000 m/s vac dV on the pad with a payload about 2/3 maximum.  The original Javelin could launch a mid-range payload plus a bus of science experiments to around 200 km; this one can launch the exact same payload and instruments above 800 km, or about 1200 km downrange.

I'll put the rest of the pictures from this mission in a spoiler.

Spoiler

This is near the end of the development of alcohol engines.  The Redstone missile (essentially an American A-4 without the slave labor component) and suborbital launcher used ethanol in the early and crewed versions, with a switch to a hydrazine/alcohol mixture called "Hydyne" for better performance in between, and there was one more alcohol burner in the RD-100 family, but it had been known for some time that alcohol was a dead end.  First, it's partially oxidized, which limits the energy available in combustion, and hence the Isp; second, even at its purest, it's about 10% dead weight (water that doesn't participate in the reaction, though it does become part of the reaction mass).

Still, alcohol is cheap (it's an industrial solvent, as far as this market is concerned) and readily available in large quantities.  Neither of those is true of the hypergolics (hydrazine derivatives came from organic chemistry, but there they're generally sold by the liter, not the rail tanker; same for nitric acid, though that at least is an industrial catalyst and is more readily available in quantity).  Further, hypergolics are toxic, full stop.

Still, even jet engines didn't run on kerosene yet when the A-4 was designed, and both the RD-100 series and the Redstone were based heavily on the A-4's engine -- which used alcohol, instead of the gasoline Robert Goddard had used, both for cooling of the engine and because gasoline was a shortage item where/when the A-4 was created.

Here, the fairings are jettisoned, well before MECO, once they're no longer needed to protect the payload or reduce drag.  By 65 km, their mass is more important; dropping them as early as is practical adds kilometers to the apogee.

With a near-vertical launch and the mass savings of Tank III, MECO is above the sensible atmosphere (actually about 145 km).  The payload picks up a few tens of m/s from the separation motors, as well as a roll that prevents tumbling -- which with this configuration and launch angle, adds almost 50 km additional height to apogee.  This launch carried 420 liters of sounding payload (in the lower tank), plus an Early Film Camera, thermometer, barometer, bio-sample capsule, and ion mass spectrometer -- and collected zero science, because I already had all I could get with these instruments in Shores, Water, Forest, and Space Near those biomes.

Apogee on this flight was about 839 km.  This version of RP-1 has eliminated no-payload altitude contracts (you still get paid for setting FAI records, however), so the next "Sounding Rocket Altitude (difficult)" will likely ask  me to toss 600 or so liters of payload above 900 km.

The same launcher can send the same bus with a similar payload horizontally, too, of course.  With what I believe was a non-optimal trajectory, this payload made over 1200 km, coming up just short of Brownsville, Texas (I was hoping to get some Grasslands science while getting paid for a contract -- I'd have needed to either launch a little more north, or add some dV, to make it to Texas with this vehicle).

 

 

[Triop]

Wanna race ?

[Maravone]

After several RP-0 and RP-1 careers, I finally stuck around long enough and avoided doing any serious career ending mismanagement to actually, finally land on the Moon!

[ClintKenway]

I have no idea why I did this, other than it was fun to build...

[Hotel26]

I enjoy the system-tuning stage.  You can taste the result.

The basic configuration of 1x ISRU, 2x medium radiators, 4x drills, 8x fuel cell arrays and 1 5-star engineer seems to do it, even with premium-grade 14% ore.  For production of LF/OX alone,  anyway.

I'm going to need more clearance between the Hitchhikers to get all 8 Orb refinery modules in place.  At which time, we will see whether the Kraken cometh...

So I imagine the deployment being packaged with Snowflake on a Zephyr launcher and the Spider sky-crane and the 8 Orb modules on an Aquila VIII.  The Spider can serve double-duty and take the Snowflake down.  Then return to orbit 8 times for the Orbs.

Aquila VIII loaded with 8 Orbs and a Spider...

 

Edited October 27, 2019 by Hotel26

[Delay]

Yay!

Finished patching all parts for TU in a manner I'm happy with!
...in the "Command" section.

Time to work on some engines.

[DoubleAACE]

Successfully crash landed the shutle I forgot to put chutes and wheels on. Only lost a docking port and a wing