What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Retro Starship]

Well last night I built this simple little, well grounded, round about car. I heard there's quite allot of science you can get around KSC itself. So I made this vehicle with some instrumentation and also did some eva’s with sample gathering just around the base as well. I did this for career mode. Got over 120 science and quite allot of Kerb bucks too! I was able to start tier 4 because of that! Wooot!

[capi3101]

55 minutes ago, Saturn5tony said:

Well last night I built this simple little, well grounded, round about car. I heard there's quite allot of science you can get around KSC itself. So I made this vehicle with some instrumentation and also did some eva’s with sample gathering just around the base as well. I did this for career mode. Got over 120 science and quite allot of Kerb bucks too! I was able to start tier 4 because of that! Wooot!

Scimobiles are awesome, aren't they? And they're about the only use you ever really see for those shopping-cart landing gear parts...

[Angelo Kerman]

On 11/4/2019 at 6:52 PM, capi3101 said:

El nombre del mod es Pathfinder: aquí está el enlace. No sé si hay una configuración de localización en Español o no.

Usando Google Translate, espero que esta respuesta tenga sentido.

Desafortunadamente, no ay una configuracion de localizacion en Espanol ahora mismo.  Lo siento.

Unfortunately, there are no localizations for Spanish. Sorry.

Edited November 6, 2019 by Angel-125

[RizzoTheRat]

Ever reach the point where what you've got works fine, but it's not quite perfect?  And you know it's going to take a chunk of work to make it perfect, and probably break what you've already got in the process, but you're so close you really want it to be perfect?

Well that's where I am this evening.  So close, yet that last little bit eludes me.  Currently I have to set the target location 35m east of where I want to land for it to work as my cos landing script over cooks the pitch down and doubles back on it's self a bit.

ETA:

Fixed it for that approach, but try a lower dV retro burn for further back changes the flight profile enough to make it land short again.

Needs about 500dV from an 80km orbit to landed.  I can land it within the hexagon around the pad every time, which claims to be 98% fund recovery, but in practice seems to be giving me 100%.  This test vehicle put an 18 tonne payload in to a 80km orbit for a total cost of 14844 Kredits which should make my space programme a bit cheaper.

Edited November 6, 2019 by RizzoTheRat

[SlinkyMcman]

What I did this week: Assembled an interplanetary space ship. Maiden voyage, Gilly!

Jeb couldn't make it in the picture, but he doesn't mind.

 

Will get a full photo once everyone is on the ground, moving around gilly can be painfully slow. Also I learned that docking ports can be used as krakken drives since a docking port's attraction force works on it's own vessels. 

Edited November 6, 2019 by SlinkyMcman

[Retro Starship]

54 minutes ago, RizzoTheRat said:

Well that's where I am this evening.  So close, yet that last little bit eludes me.  Currently I have to set thew target location 35m east of where I want to land for it to work as my cos landing script over cooks the pitch down and doubles back on it's self a bit.

OK, I new SpaceX is cool doing this............. awesome Rizzo!

[Zeiss Ikon]

(1.6.1 RSS/RO/RP-1)

Now, that's what I call success.

Of course, it helps that kerosene burning engines are so much more efficient and powerful than alcohol burners.  I showed Achilles Mk. 1, an actual ICBM, recently.  Here's what came of beating that particular sword into a plowshare:

Diana Mk. 2 is an Achilles Mk. 1 carrying a new AJ10-38 upper stage, well provisioned RCS section, and that fairing (2.5 m diameter, so around twice the volume of the Javelin family fairing).

This launch is to the north, aimed at a sun-synchronous orbit (note the ring of solar panels around the RCS tank).

This is the step that always astonished me about Atlas, back in the day (when I was just about old enough to make sense of the layout and staging process, and Atlas still had three engines at launch).  We're going to drop the booster engines, and their thrust structure and fairing, around the center engine, at Mach 3!  And yet, somehow, I'm not aware of NASA having any failures attributable to the booster section striking the sustainer engine, even though they probably launched thirty or forty of these before the redesign that took away the stage-and-a-half feature.

Well, as the guy in the XKCD cartoon says, "It works in Kerbal Space Program!"

After staging, the TWR drops from around 5 just before the event, to just about 1.  Higher acceleration isn't needed now; the apogee is above 200 km and the game now is all about horizontal velocity.  Not pictured here, but MechJeb pitches up pretty hard for a while just after staging, then levels off near the end of the burn.  This is about controlling vertical velocity in order to arrive at the right height (programmed orbit perigee) at the right time (just as the new apogee comes up to its programmed height).

Once the upper stage is ignited, MechJeb pitches down in order to push the apogee around to the other side of the Earth and build up orbital speed while maintaining control of the orbit's shape (in this case, the contract was to have perigee above 300 km and eccentricity .02 to .04 -- vs. the actual 0 MechJeb can produce if asked to circularize.

The booster core tumbles engine-forward as soon as control is removed.  The big empty tank acts like the shaft and feathers of an arrow, while the engine is the heavy head.  Even at 70+ km, there's enough air to turn an uncontrolled object moving at 5000 m/s to point the heavy end forward.

And Solar 1 is stable, parameters 330x700 km, 97 degrees inclination -- and we have 98%  RCS propellant remaining.  Telemetry shows power flowing from solar panels -- currently approximately 11 W total.  Contract payment is confirmed.

[Ruedii]

14 hours ago, TheKSPBeginner said:

Very interesting

"Interesting"  Yeah. 
Note to self: Don't adjust intercepts to be within millimeters of each other.

[Cavscout74]

I was doing some tinkering in 1.8.1 now that most of my favorite mods are updated.  I also added the Near Future mods instead of my usual mods to tinker with.  This was in sandbox, just playing around with the NF parts.  No life support added yet, and not all the NF mods either, but I built a hydrogen fueled nuclear powered ship to Laythe.  Kinda by accident - initially I was just testing to see if I had enough radiators for a long burn.  Pretty much everything was wrong - timing, phase angle, etc - but I managed to get an intercept with Jool by starting prograde & just having SAS on hold.  Of course, it was wouldn't be for another 8 (yes that is an eight) years and change.  I eyeballed a course correction a few weeks after leaving Kerbin's SoI that would bring me really close to Tylo, then set Kerbal Alarm Clock to pause the game at SoI change & went to do something else for a while.  When I came back, I unpaused, entered Jool's SoI, adjusted to get a Tylo fly-by that led me straight into a Laythe fly-by.  I managed to make orbit around Laythe, then reverted the whole thing.  Of course, I used something close to 7000 m/s dV out of the 9000-something I had to do the horrible Jool transfer.  But nothing blew up due to overheating, so the basic design is ok for now.

Leaving Kerbin - the four large TCS panels on the hydrogen tanks plus 4 large radiators on the engine itself were just enough to keep the engine cool during the transfer - which took just over 4000 m/s.  All the panels were maxed out on cooling, but the engine never started overheating so I guess its just enough.  I wasn't using any reactors for power (just 4 tweakscaled RTG's), so a working design might need some extra.

Course correction

Fly-by of Tylo - Pe was around 25km

Initial burn to capture around Laythe

Approaching Laythe Pe

After reverting that flight, I exited & switched over to my existing 1.7.3 career.  I finished up a mission to Mun, then tinkered with some aircraft designs that were gathering dust in the hangar.  My CF-02A & B models were supposed to be upgrades to my earlier Mig-15/-17-ish jet designs, but were somewhat disappointing.  They were my first use of B9 wings & controls.  The -02A was a conventional wing & tail, while the -02B was a test of a V-tail configuration.  The original -02B was an epic failure - at high speeds, it tended to go into a flat spin if you thought about turning.  First I made some tweaks to improve the -02A, and once happy with it, I tried the V-tail configuration again & overwrote the old -02B.  I did add a pair of small fixed fins under the tail so it's more of an "X" than a "V" now - which kinda defeats the purpose of making a V-tail (1 less part) - but it seems to fly ok at low altitudes.  Even stalls & spins were no problem - it would spin with rudder input, but as soon as I released that, it would recover on its own.  Stalls just lost elevator control & dropped the nose, with no tendency to roll or yaw.  On original design at least two pilots got to test out their personal parachutes during stall/spin testing.

Old pic of the CF-02A - the wings & controls have been tweaked, the single airbrake was changed to two 50% scale airbrakes on the sides between rudder & elevators (for the -02A, the -02B keeps the single top-mounted brake)

 

[Triop]

Today, we finaly got the car ready for the Kerbal Dakar 2020.

A lot of work went into this, tuning the wheels configfile for torque, tuning the springs and other settings.

It drives better then in the video, but my recording program slows the game down on my $#$@% PC.

 

Edited November 7, 2019 by Triop

[capi3101]

(1.6.1) I've only got time for a fast post this morning. Not much to talk about really - I designed a space station expansion module for space station Ikeport that'll be ready at the Infans Calcitrant Yards over Ike in 26 hours, I finished printing up a Bill Clinton 7c probe at the Caue Serpente Yards over Eve and launched it after it was fueled, the Samwell Tarly Yards over Gilly finished printing the Boop-Boop 7w probe and launched it after fueling; it made it to its final target position over Gilly before the day was out, and I refueled LSV House Harkonnen after its recent return to Kerbin from Jool/Laythe/Eve/Gilly. RL was rough yesterday - didn't have more than ninety minutes of game time, all told...

Screenies:

 
The Moneybux 7 expansion module for Ikeport.

Bill Clinton launch from CSY.

I also finished up a colonization contract at Enchova Central on Duna as the 7w came into position, so I'll need to head out there first thing next session to get paid for that contract. I also hope to get Module L-H30 mounted to the Echo 3 quadcopter on Eve for transport over to the Alexander L. Kielland outpost for launch to orbit, and I'm still working at Tylo to get space stations built. Next exploration contract has me returning something from the surface of Tylo to the surface of Kerbin, so the sooner space station construction is finished, the better. Got three contract offers right now that I'm allowing to expire and I'll have two new ones to consider as the day progresses.

Report done typing inside of ten minutes...I think that's a record......

[Retro Starship]

Still a newbie here but so loving the game. Had to do some distant "below 16km" tasks for my career mode tier 3 recently. Some so far away for some tasks with a jet, so I decided to slap a rocket on to it, put a dummy jet on the other side for balance and it got me most of the way there with Jeb on the good side!

Yea it’s a hack but it did get me a good distance, and did I say, this is so much fun.... I just had to do it.

After a course re-entry, I was able to glide in nicely, start the jet, complete a contract and exit. The other jet attached to the rocket was just a dummy with no one inside. So funny to see a jet engine at 70km+, and waiting for it to start up way down below that! lol

[MechBFP]

Made a working quadcopter that uses real physics for controls via using 6 KAL controllers to modify the rotor RPMs in order to pitch, yaw, and roll.

Unfortunately had to use 2,3,4,5,6,7 as keys to control it because of limitations with binding keys to robotics. 

If someone knows of a way to play a KAL controller on loop when “W” is pressed and to stop playing it altogether when it is released, that would make life easier. 

[Neil Kermstrong]

Today I've landed on Minmus using only 2 legs

Edited November 7, 2019 by Neil Kermstrong

[Cavscout74]

6 hours ago, Saturn5tony said:

Still a newbie here but so loving the game. Had to do some distant "below 16km" tasks for my career mode tier 3 recently. Some so far away for some tasks with a jet, so I decided to slap a rocket on to it, put a dummy jet on the other side for balance and it got me most of the way there with Jeb on the good side!

Yea it’s a hack but it did get me a good distance, and did I say, this is so much fun.... I just had to do it.

After a course re-entry, I was able to glide in nicely, start the jet, complete a contract and exit. The other jet attached to the rocket was just a dummy with no one inside. So funny to see a jet engine at 70km+, and waiting for it to start up way down below that!

I've done something similar before, it was fun & the plane I had cobbled together was (at the time) one of the best flying planes I'd made!! 

Also, when you start sending stuff to Jool, you can make a small drone jet to explore Laythe with - works pretty good for gathering science & finding a nice place to land Kerbals and/or a base.

 

 

 

Edited November 7, 2019 by Cavscout74

[Bubbadevlin]

Today in KSP i finally finished my massive kerbal colony ship.

With a possible crew count of 2864 and an overall length of 200m she is a big one.  (Stock w/ DLCs btw)

Edited November 8, 2019 by Bubbadevlin

[Cavscout74]

I did some more flight testing today, first of the CF-02B Viper V-tail, then of a 0.625m Juno-powered science drone.  I have a 1.25m Wheesley powered drone that I've sent to Laythe in previous careers, but I wanted to see if I could make a smaller version.

Today, I took the CF-02B up to 10 km for a high speed test.  It got up to mach 2.6 easily and was staying stable in cruise flight.  I cut the afterburner & while slowing down hit right rudder and at first it seemed to be righting itself then snapped around into some violent maneuvers, nearly blacking out Theodred Kerman, but he is an experienced test pilot & held it together, quickly regaining control after only losing about 3000m altitude.  I thought.  While pulling out of the dive, the nose snapped around again and for a few seconds, I thought Theodred was going to go for another swim, but he finally got it under control after losing another 4 km.  At that point, it was time to bring it home.  While improved B model is much more controllable than the initial design, it still is weak in yaw stability.  With no real advantages over the conventional tail A model, it's going back to gathering dust in the back of the hangar.

Coming in to land at the island runway.  Didn't work - I floated the entire length of the runway, so I just continued on to KSC and landed there.

Next up was a completely new 0.625m science drone for possible use on Laythe.  The drone is a delta wing and canard design, essentially the same as its larger brother.  In addition to the alternator on the Juno engine, it has a pair of small RTGs (0.1 ec/s output).   It only has a pair of small 500k antennas, so an orbital relay will be a must.  I added leading edge slats mostly to see how they would work in KSP.  Before the first flight, I never even bothered checking CoM & CoL, just eyeballed placing the parts & took off.  I did two test flights - the first ended with an intentional water landing, so see if that would be feasible on Laythe, the second ended with flipping on landing next to the runway.  Other than the flip, it flew remarkably well.  Still needs a few more tweaks, but definitely a workable design.

KSC fly-by.  Even with the big atmospheric science thingy hanging out in the wind, it still managed to get to mach 0.9 at 400m altitude.

First water landing - it's a teeny tiny bit nose heavy

After some adjustments - and actually looking at the CoM & CoL markers - I tried another test flight.  While still slightly nose heavy, I had burned just enough fuel to move a few units of LF out of the nose, lightening it enough to take off again

Passing over the runway to land in the grass

Maybe spring/damper values need some adjustment, as the touchdown was fine, but then it started to bounce while rolling.

Edited November 8, 2019 by Cavscout74

[Castille7]

On 11/2/2019 at 6:08 PM, Triop said:

I'm still tuning my Viper muscle car, I just love working on this thing.

@Castille7 & @klond I would be honored if my car could be in your next video, let me know what you think.

If it's complete send me a link via however you want

[Hotel26]

Happy to announce the new KW Jetta 2020 model has arrived!

(It's an update of my Kerballenwagen und KW Rabbit...)

 

Edited November 8, 2019 by Hotel26

[Retro Starship]

Not much last night other than me and Val doing some touring contracts for kerbbucks!

 

And missing the runway as well that Jeb says was my fault! Well, like Chuck Yeager says.... 

"If you can walk away from a landing, it's a good landing"

[Guest]

Hello again fellow spacebeings.

I'm back to KSP after a bit of a hiatus, I played this wonderful cRPG called Disco Elysium in the meantime. Also 1.8 came out so I had to roll back to a checkpoint I made before installing KIS/KAS, and I'm now back to a pure stock (other than KER) limited-reloads, no-reverts career.

I just sent off my interplanetary missions: the Robert E. Howard spaceplane is headed to Duna with a comfy and roomy booster/crew module attached to it, and a sole pilot; Duna Station is overstaffed as it is and I want to bring a few of them home or, perhaps, send them onwards.

The Jool mission consisting of the station Eden Prime and the spaceplane Chausiku Kibowen are both also on their way. 

I did one new (to me) thing with these launches. I refueled them in Munar orbit, which also gave me a chance to test-drive everything. Then I sent them along with a dive trajectory to just north of 70k Kerbin periapsis. Since they started out fully fueled from Munar orbit this did save a quite a lot -- the Duna intercept only cost me about 500 m/s and the Jool ones, about 1250. 

Also, since the question has come up a few times, here's what a gravity brake off Tylo for a Jool capture looks like. Note that I'm not doing any burns here, this is purely the interplanetary intercept -- it did cost me a bit north of 100 m/s midcourse correction to get that, but my intercept was far from optimal to start with:

Basically, I get a tangential encounter of Tylo; this requires adjusting all three axes of the burn planner. I pass in front of if. By tuning it I'll simultaneously get into an almost exactly equatorial orbit of Jool, and get captured. I am going to plan further adjustments once this is more or less correct; my final destination is Vall so I'm going to have to tune it to get a better orbit relative to it. With any luck it'll only cost me a couple of hundred m/s to get into a stable Vall orbit. The plan is to refuel there, then send the Kibowen to Laythe for a surface excursion.

I haven't decided yet what I want to do after that. I might start building surface bases somewhere, or perhaps go on a tour with the Eden Prime -- it has a vacuum lander that ought to be able to touch base anywhere except Tylo, so I should be able to plant flags everywhere in the Jolian system anyway. Then maybe go to Eeloo and Dres. 

I've made some rather pretty, fun to fly, and useful spaceplanes in this career. I call them Minnow class because they're quite small. I'm currently operating three variants: a VTOL craft built for Duna, a classic SSTO for Kerbin and Laythe, and a long-range model that could make it to Duna in a single stage from the runway. The VTOL and the SSTO carry a pilot and four passengers plus a full science pack; the long range version doesn't have the science pack so it's for crew transfers only. I'll get some better screenshots at some point and put them up on KerbalX. 

Here's the long-range version just taking off for a crew rotation mission to Munar orbit. The module behind the crew compartment is a Mk 2 shielded docking port.

I want to make one more using the ducted jets from 1.8, to see if they're efficient enough in thin air to make an electric VTOL feasible on Duna. 

[Triop]

7 hours ago, Castille7 said:

If it's complete send me a link via however you want

Ok, I will.

[Okhin]

Finally got nuke engines in this carreer. So I went asteroid whaling and was a bit short on fuel. The rescue mission landed a bit late with the fuel on this class D, so I was going to launch a rescue party for he rescue party when I noticed that it will took years of mission to hope hat I'll have enough DV to capture the asteroid (who have since then moved ahead of Kerbin). So, loaded my last save which was back before putting my Minmus base in orbit of Minmus. I guess I'm learning that I need to save (not quicksave) more often.

Anyway. I did change the configuration of the Minmus orbital base that I should put in orbit again, with four more tanks and nuke engines (I really needed to have 6000 units of LF there), and launched it again, orbited, landed, scienced, and all of that.

This is how the station looks like during the long burn to Minmus. I need to slighty updates the rocket fuel tanks (I'll put probably only one engine on them, and they're lacking antenna and solar panel), but they're quite ok right now (if a bit tedious to dock, some of them don't lock the second dock o tron. But it just adds a bit of wobliness so, I guess it's ok).

And I'm thinking as using it as my main gate outward Kerbal SOI. It would make more sense when I'll be able to get some fuel out of minmus. Or asteroids.

And now, I'm back at trying to catch that asteroid.

 

[Guest]

All right! Everybody made it to their destinations safely and without incident.

The R.E.Howard arriving at Duna and, later, docked to the station (now renamed Salusa Secundus):

Here's Kibowen just arrived in orbit of Laythe. Total dV cost from Munar orbit to stable Laythe orbit was around 1650 m/s. Not bad -- just the ejection burn from LKO is usually around 2000 m/s!

And here's Eden Prime in orbit of Vall. That cost about the same as getting Kibowen to Laythe. 

I'll have to consider my options a bit next. Kibowen will need more fuel to do a surface trip to Laythe and her crew is only one pilot + one scientist, so I think I'll take the tug module to Vall to pick up more fuel and another pilot, then return to Laythe to do the surface trip. Other things on the agenda in no particular order:

• Surface trip to Duna with R.E.Howard
• Docking manoeuvre in Ike orbit to fulfil a contract -- I think I'll use R.E.Howard's tug and Tantor 
• Survey Vall with Eden Prime, then do a surface trip to mine for ore
• See if I can build a Duna-capable electric craft using ducted fans

I've also maxed out the tech tree at this point, except the probe-related nodes that I'm not using in this career.

Edited November 8, 2019 by Guest

[RizzoTheRat]

2 hours ago, Okhin said:

So, loaded my last save which was back before putting my Minmus base in orbit of Minmus. I guess I'm learning that I need to save (not quicksave) more often.

I always do a time stamped save (yymmdd_hhmm) at the start of every ksp session.   It's saved my bacon more than once