What did you do in KSP1 today?

[RyanRising]

I’m ashamed to admit I’d not actually dared to send Kerbals to another planet before this point. I finally did that. Not knowing exactly what I was in for, I sent three vessels into the SOI:

1. A resource mapping probe to find suitable landing spots for 

2: the ascent vehicle, which was equipped with ISRU in order to fill the upper stage before the arrival of 

3. the mothership. This included a propulsion module featuring the large nuclear engine from Restock+ and a long Mk3 liquid fuselage to fuel it, a habitation module with a science lab and plenty of seats for the four Kerbals onboard to shuffle around in, a Kerballed rover for finding interesting stuff on the surface, a descent vehicle with plenty of science to be done in the atmosphere and the Breaking Ground surface stuff, and the delivery capsule I had sent the kerboanuts to the ship in after completing orbital assembly. 
 

It started off a bit rocky - I actually forgot to send the ore mapper first and so had to repurpose an existing probe for less precise resource scans. Lucky I had one, otherwise I’d be taking a shot in the dark finding out where to land. This kind of forgetfulness is not exactly confidence-inspiring, but it didn’t end the mission. 
 

However, the other two ships performed their operations without a hitch. The ascent vehicle was first, of course, and after a few quicksaves simulations I was able to land it on a gentle slope and start mining. A few days later, the mothership came in. I detached the rover and landed it about one and a half kilometres from the ascent vehicle, and I was able to get the crew down even closer. Science was done, experiments were deployed, rover excursions were made, flags were planted, and everyone generally had a grand time.

 

When it came time to leave, I wasn’t particularly concerned. Everything in this mission had far too much delta-V and the ascent vehicle was no exception. An upper stage detached from the ISRU equipment, carried the four Kerbals back to their mothership, and that mothership soon began burning for home. 
 

It was not until I’d circularised the mothership around Kerbin and done the deorbit burn to bring the Kerbals home that I realised I hadn’t put parachutes on their return capsule. 

 

The crew didn’t die, thanks to the EVA parachutes added some time ago, but had I done this mission as early in my KSP career as I should have they darn well would’ve! I’m still kicking myself for this. 
 

I also don’t have the pictures at the moment, whoops. 

[denyasis]

Playing Probes before Crew mod. Just unlocked the capsules and sent Jeb on a 5h orbit of Kerbin and Val on a 36h orbit of the Mun and back.

Almost crashed her into the Mun while plotting the return burn to Kerbin. A quick normal burn saved the day. I made  to Kerbin with 26Dv left! That was close!

[Hotel26]

5 hours ago, JorgeCS said:

maybe I shouldn't even publish this, but I'm quite hyped

Very glad you've published it.  C'est magnifique!  (I saw it first on KerbalX, actually, and upvoted it there.)

About the nose-wheel, you will probably fly it in your home save with your mod's steerable gear and be perfectly happy.

In the past, in pure stock, I've used a hack copied from others in which you can position a smaller, steerable nose-wheel before or after the big one.  You can use it for taxiing (control it independently on a different key) and then stow it for the take-off and landing rolls.  Except while taxiing, it can be made completely invisible.  Same parked on the ramp: stow it with the "normal" large gear extended, for looks.

[Selective Genius]

I booted up the game, and after it finished loading, I somehow lost the will to play KSP. This has been happening for a month now..

Please help.

[xendelaar]

Made a bike and an UFO yesterday

 

Edited June 6, 2020 by xendelaar

[jimmymcgoochie]

After putting a 750 ton payload into orbit using a Black Hole rocket (so called because it sucks in funds never to be seen again!) I figured that a few tweaks and a slightly lower orbit would make it launch a kiloton. (Why would I need to launch a thousand ton payload in one go? I have no idea, but it was a nice round number to aim for.)

The Supermassive variant was created with more fuel, inflatable heat shields deployed by robotic hinges and pistons to recover the whole of the second stage (previously only the engines and probe core would be recovered after dumping the fuel tanks) and some tweaks to the payload fairing to fit the larger stack of ore tanks used as payload mass. 100 meganewtons of thrust from 43 engines on the launch pad but the TWR was only 1.45 as the rocket weighed almost 7000 tons.

I got a 200x200km orbit with about 100m/s of delta-V to spare but after dropping the payload that went up to 1400m/s. Total costs after recovering the dropped stages and re-entering and recovering the second stage was about 550,000 funds; not bad considering it cost 2.3 million to launch it and quite a bit cheaper than the first iteration of the design which only managed 250 tons to a similar orbit but cost over a million funds overall.

And only three four unplanned disassemblies during testing  I call that a resounding success!

(edit- this was in JNSQ where the planets are 2.7x larger so the delta-V required was around 5200 to get to that orbit)

Edited June 6, 2020 by jimmymcgoochie

[N_Danger]

 Started a new career game.

A sub orbital test of the Terrier.

 

And my first kerbal in orbit.

[Cavscout74]

15 hours ago, RyanRising said:

It was not until I’d circularised the mothership around Kerbin and done the deorbit burn to bring the Kerbals home that I realised I hadn’t put parachutes on their return capsule.

Well this sounds familiar.  Been there, done that.  That is where KAS comes in handy - launch up a small probe with a bunch of parachutes, use an engineer with a wrench to remove the chutes from the probe and attach them to the return capsule.  It works well.   Alternately, if you have a docking port on the capsule you can just dock the probe with parachutes to the return capsule - although I would make sure to use auto-struts to strengthen the connection.

[Puggonaut]

 

[king of nowhere]

had to recover two kerbonauts stranded in Mun orbit. no worry, i made a space station in mun orbit equipped for just such an event. it has automated crafts to refuel other rockets and a specialized one to recover lost kerbonauts. it is positively covered in ladders to make it easier to grab, and it has floodlights to be easier to spot in the darkness. it has extreme manueverability. it is a wonderful ship built exactly for this kind of need.

too bad i didn't think to add a crew module. i recovered a kerbonaut, then left it grabbing the ladder while going to recover the second. i am now manuevering to reach back to the station. all with the two poor kerbonauts grabbing the ladder all this time.

it wouldn't even be bad, except that i cannot speed up time or change ship or save game while i have those guys there. i have to deattach them, save the game, then grab the ladder again.

i dream of the day i will stop forgetting such minor components like crew cabins or parachutes when designing a ship

[Puggonaut]

 

[Hoozemans]

On 6/6/2020 at 12:09 AM, king of nowhere said:

how did you make the rotating ring?

Put a rotor on top of an engine mount plate. The engine mount allows you to have the top and bottom part of the ship non-rotating while the parts attached to the rotor spin (you need a fair number of SAS modules to keep the rest of the ship from spinning - either that, or build two counter-rotating rings). Attach spokes with three way symmetry, then attach Mk2 cabins to the spokes, rotating each of them until they form a ring (takes a bit of doing).

The spokes are attached to the rotor by two Jr. docking ports per spoke, so that you can't get the angle wrong when you connect them up. There's also Jr. docking ports between the segments. The cargo bays in each segment have a docking port for RCS-tugs to attach to. 

I launched each segment separately, then attached them to the main body by RCS-tugs - and as difficult as that was, that was only the beginning, because at this point framerates started dropping seriously, and I still had to dock with the spine and the engine section....

Edited June 7, 2020 by Hoozemans
clarification

[DStaal]

Decided to play around with Electric-powered engines recently - first probe is designed to help clean up Kerbin SOI:

It's got about 10 seconds of battery power - almost always it needs to discharge a capacitor for each burn.  However, it's got the thrust to deorbit any of my launch stacks fairly quickly, and has managed to do two missions so far, with fuel remaining.

Based on that success, I decided to go Xenon for the new ScanSat scanners:

This is just tricky to fly - the burn to Minmus emptied all 7 of the attached capacitors (some more than once...) and all the batteries, and EC flow management is half of flying it.  However I'm having no other issues and it's something to do during the several-minute long burns.     I'm considering sending one to Duna - it has the dV, but working out how to best split up the burn may be interesting.  (Maybe do a gravity assist off the Mun into a high-Kerbin orbit, before waiting for the transfer window?)

[Hotel26]

Chalet:  [click & arrows]

  

Modern apartment-living with 3 units featuring 2-storey living quarters.

Edited June 7, 2020 by Hotel26

[RoninFrog]

I sent Jeb to Tylo while on EVA.  You may think, "But his EVA pack doesn't have the TWR or the dV!"  Yes, but the Claw does.  Here is the Claw in action:

Going in for the Jeb grab.

Got a good hold on his head:

Executing the landing burn (different Claw probe):

The landing was a smashing success!

[Plane Crazy]

I made another propeller plane using rotors. Next up is to make a VTOL to take to Eve.

[N_Danger]

I had  a contract going a different direction

But I did get a Mun encounter at no charge because of the requested orbit.

[Mars-Bound Hokie]

I made a pure stock replica of the Valkyrie from "Captain America: the First Avenger."

 

• Flying over the ocean after leaving the KSC. Unfortunately, it was not the high-flying supersonic beauty I was going for - not by a long shot
  • This was taken 3,500 m above the surface, going at 303 m/s.

 

• Nice sunrise shot. I'd better land fast, since I'm almost out of fuel.

 

• Perfect landing
  • 753.7 km away from the KSC in ~50 minutes.

 

If you want to try it out for yourself, here's the craft file: https://kerbalx.com/Mars-Bound_Hokie/Valkyrie

 

HAIL HYDRA

[KerikBalm]

Working more on my Rald world with an unoffical kopernicus recompile... for some reason the recompile doesn't work in combination with sigma dimensions:

1x, the ground is where the ground appears

Spoiler

3x, the ground is not where it appears, and often does not properly update the level of detail, making water the only safe landing place:

Spoiler

 

But once kopernicus is officially out, I think things will be looking pretty nice:

 

But I'm not super happy with the "sand dunes" texture appearing so high up, especially at 3x, one doesn't really get the appropriate sense of scale.

 

[AlamoVampire]

I sent up a module to my Dachshund Station filling out its capabilities. At least in my head canon, as I am in sandbox lol. I also did some EVA work with Bill removing some RCS blocks and otherwise tidying up the outside of the station. I think in all my years since 0.21 <when I joined> today marks my longest EVA that I can recall! Coming in at a whopping 17 minutes 49 seconds of pure EVA work. I know it doesn't sound like a lot of time, but, it was enough to nearly deplete poor Bill's EVA fuel, and when you are moving bits and pieces around a station with dismal illumination in orbital night, it those nearly 18 minutes felt like an eternity. I also sent up a crew. Have 2 scientists and like 3 engineers and a pilot sitting around up there. I forget honestly how to make the astronaut center produce more applicants... I need a few more scientists rather than engineers lol. All I have in my astronaut center right now is a bunch of eager pilots hoping to be hired. Anyway, here is the station:

 

I must say, I am rather proud of this station!

062406082020

Oh another question: anyway to get those blasted truss sections to stop trying to close into the station? They are attached to the core of the station by the G-11 Hinges from the robotics addition from breaking ground. I disable the motor on them and yet they keep turning back on. I plan on sending up a mission later tonight to just put some grip pads up and affix some KIS/KAS TJ-1 or TJ-2 or the TB-60 items <how those transfer fuel through the connector ports is beyond me lol> and see if I cant lock it down that way. Tried once before but they unhooked after having them set to docked... Sorry to ramble in the edit..

063306082020

Edited June 8, 2020 by AlamoVampire

[Hotel26]

This evening's pastime: Pegasus 5:

 

TWR > 1 (fully laden) is always fun.

Its cargo bay carries an Invader, 8-kerb patrol rover.  The rover can be air-launched or deployed on the ground.  Peg 5 has a tail claw to keep the rover's generator fueled.

And, look at that (lower right): you can use the claw to transport the Invader elsewhere if/when required...
 

   

Edited June 8, 2020 by Hotel26

[Guest]

Sent TMK-1 to Duna. 

The lander and probe are a bit different than in the development version. They're somewhat closer visual matches for the real thing. The probe is inspired by the Mars-3 mission; it folds out and carries a tiny little rover. If it happens to land on its side -- quite likely because it has no reaction wheels and needs a puff of retro rockets to break the last bit of the descent, and that will give it a bit of a tumble -- unfolding it will flip it right-side up. Didn't happen this time though.

Edited June 8, 2020 by Guest

[Puggonaut]

 

[kspbandit]

On 5/21/2020 at 8:47 AM, Goaty1208 said:

I don't have a lot of time, so I'll be fast, and I'll give details another day. I watched @kspbandit's Duna tutorial, and... I've made it! I reached Duna and I returned back!!! Thanks kspbandit.

Thanks, hope you sticked the landing and made it back.

On 6/6/2020 at 6:24 AM, Selective Genius said:

I booted up the game, and after it finished loading, I somehow lost the will to play KSP. This has been happening for a month now..

Please help.

watch the KSP 2 trailer on youtube, it always inspires me.

[Cavscout74]

2 hours ago, Brikoleur said:

The lander and probe are a bit different than in the development version. They're somewhat closer visual matches for the real thing. The probe is inspired by the Mars-3 mission; it folds out and carries a tiny little rover. If it happens to land on its side -- quite likely because it has no reaction wheels and needs a puff of retro rockets to break the last bit of the descent, and that will give it a bit of a tumble -- unfolding it will flip it right-side up. Didn't happen this time though

Nice design!!!