What did you do in KSP1 today?

[kspbandit]

Started playing career mode again, Got 7500 science points in one mission to minmus.

 

[problemecium]

I'm just about finished with the design for my next Jool mothership. Teaser time!

Here it is, in silhouette at least, to scale next to two of my previous large motherships. It's kind of dummy thicc but I tried my best to keep each section a manageable size and mass. I still have yet to do shakedown tests, though, so it's entirely likely I'll have to make some tweaks.

[Lisias]

Oukey, I got fed up of doing testing and decided to play a bit before bed time.

So, what I could do in half an hour that would be stupidly fun without being (too much) stupid? A airplane on a SRB, of course!

(Full sized slideshow by clicking on the images)

I almost managed to get into the Airstrip Island. I think this will something fun to try, make the contraption to touch down on the airstrip... I will give it a try on the week.

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

I’ve been playing with Kerbalism in a pretty stock career save (well, stock plus lots of visual stuff and some helpful tools, but minimal extra parts) and had to edit save files many times over the last few days as autostruts keep destroying my space station by making parts collide with themselves; maybe having all the heavy stuff (engines and fuel tanks) on the outside ends and docking it together with the junior docking port wasn’t a great idea, but that was all I had. I’ve decided to try KIS to see if I can reconfigure the station with proper docking ports.

 

At some point I’ll go back to my JNSQ career and get those Kerbals off Tylo again, but it’s a lot harder to play when the game runs at 3FPS.

[dci]

Yesterday I visited all Mun biomes and did all possible science, which gave me (I use DMagic Orbital Science mod parts) about 4000 science points in two runs. Gemini-like ship, lander and tanker sent to polar Mun orbit. Now I need about 6000 sci points to complete tech tree. For sake of great success of the mission, I plan the same setup for Minmus science harvest. Still didnt visit it in 1.10 . My old save (1.7 - 1.9, 30 MB SFS) is now backed up and will be slowly forgotten.

Also did some probe contracts grind.

[Puggonaut]

 

 

[NHunter]

@Puggonaut, which mod adds this glorious Gateway Foundation Von Braun Station ?

[Puggonaut]

1 hour ago, NHunter said:

@Puggonaut, which mod adds this glorious Gateway Foundation Von Braun Station ?

Its a one off , done for me by a friend , sorry .

[Selective Genius]

I finished the 'Gateway Station' and completed the second Mun surface sortie, visiting an collecting data from 3 biomes. This sortie, along with a previous one netted me 4500 science.

The Surface Sortie Vehicle is at the top, followed by the fuel depot/docking hub/batterypack section. Then we have the Hab and Lab section, followed by the docked Crew Transfer Vehicle.

The surface sortie vehicle in action. It is nothing too impressive. Just a bare bone vehicle to collect science and level up the crew. Has 3000 m/s of delta V just about enough to land, hop on three nearby biomes and get back to orbit to the station, so that's pretty neat, I guess.

I had planned to extract every last drop of science by using the Mobile Processing Lab, but the first Duna transfer window of this career is in 110 days, and I wanted all the science ASAP to unlock the parts that I would need to fully explore Duna and Ike (ISRU equipments, resource survey stuff, Better comms, Rover wheels, etc..) So the crew was instructed to return back to Kerbin with the science. There's still some tech nodes to research, so I plan to send a couple surface sortie missions to Minmus to mine the science that I don't have.

[Puggonaut]

[Delay]

Got one crew back from Ike...

...and landed another one on Duna!

[Okhin]

Did a lot of things today.

I first flied a scientific outpost on Minmus using too much boosters™

The thing going up from Kerbin at half thrust.

Since the last outpost landing, engineers packed a bit more dV. Which mean that I've got all of those tanks full and I'm on a stable LKO.

The outpost is now landed. I'll keep the tank and engines for now, since they're mostly full which gives me 1400 ms dV. So I'll probably hop the outpost around if I want. Or refill stuff.

The contract is not fulfilled however, it requires to have two scentists aboard for completion. So, let's get those kerbals in there. I also have a freshly rescued pilot that could use the level up.

The lander is en route to Minmus.

And landed, with plenty dV (enough to get back, and a bit more). Within 10 meters of the outpost, which is a personal record (I usually land in the kilometer around the target). And I'm kind of happy with it :). Crew did go back and forth between the lander and the outpost before going back to kerbin.

Meantime, Mission control decided that a second orbital base for Mun was a good thing.

A Big Payload Delivery System 22 will send the station in one go. Once again, it requires some scientists in the lab, but I'd usually transfer the crew on a second trip.

Flying at night make for some nice screenshot. Sometime. But makes seeing the actual station a bit harder.

So here it is, with the crew transfer spaceship (which is, again, over engineered with 800 m.s dV in excess). Crew of 8 a cupola, and a lab. The lab was not required, but I think it makes sense since the contract required scientists.

And this was my day, with some rescue and satellite repositionning.

 

[BadOaks]

I've been trying to improve the centrifuge designs I use for artificial gravity on long missions. My old designs have two motorized rotors - one connected to the habitat arm and a counter-rotor with fuel tanks mounted on pistons. Because both rotors were exerting a torque on the space craft, I had to fiddle with the pistons and tanks to try to get the moment of inertia of the counter rotor to be calibrated to that of the habitat arm according to the relative rpm's of each rotor and ensure both rotors reached their maximum rpm in the same amount of time. If the system is off by a little bit, there would be net torque on the vessel every time it came out of time warp. Even with extensive tweaking and balancing, there's still a small twitch. The KDSS Morning (IPCV 320) used this system:

The new design that I'm working on uses one motorized rotor between the habitat arm and the counter rotor, and an *un*motorized rotor connecting the assembly to the rest of the ship. The benefit is that the free rotor never transmits any torque to the rest of the vessel. I built the IPCV 330 design around this type of centrifuge, which seems to work pretty well:

Today I was trying to improve on it by making the counter rotating mass an internal flywheel rather than using external tanks which would have to be docked. The flywheel would have a smaller moment of inertia and so would have to rotate faster, but this wouldn't be as much of a problem (that is, alarming) because it would be contained within the structure of the ship.

Weirdly, I noticed that the habitat arm of the new design would slowly speed up its rotation. In the above picture, the rpm of the rotor on the left was a steady 39.9 and the rotor on the right increased by 0.1 rpm every few seconds (I reverted after it reached 6 rpm, but it wasn't slowing down). Since no torque was being applied to the rest of the vessel, this was violating conservation of momentum. The major difference between this one and the IPCV 330's centrifuge is that the attachment order goes Ship -> Habitat Arm -> Counter Rotor, whereas for the IPCV 330 the order is Ship -> Counter Rotor -> Habitat Arm.

WHAT I FOUND: After some testing, the best predictor of stable RPM seems to be that the two rotors should have similar RPM values when running - that is, the attachment order should be Ship -> small inertial moment -> big inertial moment. If the sections are reversed, you'd see the RPM of the rotor connecting the ship to the habitat arm slowly increase indefinitely while the RPM of the other rotor remains steady. 

 

 

Edited July 20, 2020 by BadOaks

[problemecium]

EDIT: PLEASE STOP SUGGESTING MODS. I thought it was clear enough already that I was trying to solve an issue outside of the game specifically without using mods, which operate inside the game.

Today as of this post I have yet to actually open KSP itself, but I've spent a solid chunk of time pondering transfer windows.

Yeeeeaaaars ago, a few people made nifty transfer window calendars listing out all the major transfer windows for the first few years from the default start time of a game. These would have come in handy, as Kerbal Alarm Clock doesn't seem (unless I'm being dumb) to allow me to schedule transfer window alarms beyond the next one and thus I don't have this information at hand for deciding whether to postpone a mission. Unfortunately, they're so old that they predate KSP's in-game time readout and are thus written using Earth time, not to mention there's a fair chance at least one tweak to the planets' orbits has occurred in the meantime. Attempting to find a new one led me to several threads whose OPs asked for a new calendar only to be told to use AlexMoon's webpage or a mod such as KAC... which one can see puts me in a bit of a loop!

Thus I dug up the CSV file KAC uses as its transfer window "model," imported it into a spreadsheet, and uhhhhh... the planets are numbers. "Aha!" I thought, "the numbers available here must represent objects between which transfers are straightforward to calculate, i.e. who share a parent body, thus I can eliminate the missing numbers to reveal the structure of the system and thus which planet is which number!" ...but this led me nowhere. I have no clue what's going on in there. I even looked up a bunch of phase angles and compared them to the ones in the spreadsheet to see which transfers corresponded to the phase angles that should match them, still with no luck. My dreams of using my genius intellect to forge a shiny new transfer calendar for the community appear untenable.

So I gave up and resorted to dabbling about at https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp and seeing roughly vaguely how often Jool windows occur and, of more immediate importance, when the "second" one is. For those curious, it's on Year 2, Day 256 at 3:36 and windows appear to recur roughly every one year and 31 days.

In conclusion: Should I postpone my Jool-5 Challenge mission until the next transfer window, allowing me to explore other destinations first and build up to it, but restricting me from doing any exploration of Jool in the meantime in the interest of maximizing Science yield when I do the challenge later on? A few opinions requested but please don't flood the thread because I'm not out to commandeer it here ^^;

Edited August 2, 2020 by problemecium
PLEASE STOP SUGGESTING MODS.

[The Flying Kerbal]

These last few days (Earth time) have buzzed with activity over at Rusty Star Rockets.  You may recall that wealthy Kerbals had appeared at the base of RSR with Sergei Kerman's love of money overruling his loathing of tourists, and him agreeing to take them where they wanted to go.  After several successful launches, he'd managed to weed them down from nine to two, but then another five popped up, again with bulging wallets, and again Sergei's greed securing them flights into space.

These tourist flights have now came to a successful conclusion, and as the last of their unwelcome guests waved goodbye, things returned to a more normal routine at RSR.

"Project Geonikis", the project which aims to see Kerbals standing on the surface of Duna, got of the ground with the launch of Geonikis I, a small lander and orbiter being placed into a polar orbit of Kerbin.  One of the new Gene's Heartbreak launch vehicles was used, which was way too big for this particular mission, but it's thought this was a test flight to see if the work RSR engineers had put into sorting out the stability problems experienced when this booster was first used, had been ironed out.  Unfortunately the problem hasn't gone away with even RSR admitting "Stability continues to be an issue".  Nevertheless, the launch was successful, the lander detached and landed by parachute on the North Pole.

Spoiler

The Geonikis I Lander During Reentry.

Geonikis I Drifting Down On Parachutes.  Will this be repeated over Duna one day?

On The Surface.

Although RSR hasn't released any information as to what the goals of this mission were, observers in the space industry concluded it was some sort of communications test, a suggestion which is supported by the fact the orbiter went into a highly elliptical polar orbit, with the Ap. at the same altitude as the height of Duna's SOI.

Unfortunately after pulling off a successful mission related to landing on Duna, Rusty Star Rockets then reverted back to form, pulling off what can only be considered a heist!

RSR is always looking for ways, either by fair means or foul, to find out what secrets and technological breakthroughs bitter rivals the Kerbal Space Agency have hidden away from the public gaze.  A three Kerballed command pod fell into their hands some time back when a KSA flight had a major malfunction, leaving one of their Kerbanauts stranded in LKO.  RSR launched an immediate rescue attempt; but instead of doing it in the conventional way, they used a vehicle called the Turkey Buzzard, which not only rescued the Kerbal, but brought the capsule back to the RSR base too!

This time Sergei discovered that a KSA C7 Brand Adaptor had been left in a highly inclined orbit around Minmus.  RSR always has a recover package ready for launch for just such an occurrence, and sure enough within one day a mission to stea to salvage the piece of equipment was underway!

Spoiler

The Heist Begins!

Stage Sep & Fairing Deployment.

The Swag's In The Bag!

The Getaway!

No Skulking Off In The Shadows For An RSR Heist!

I Wonder How Much It's Worth On The Black Market?

Ill Gotten Gains With A Few RSR Bits Added.

Understandably, James Kerman, CEO of the KSA, went off the deep end when he heard yet another piece of equipment had fallen into the hands of "those ruffians and rogues" over at RSR.  He ordered an immediate investigation into how this could happen, demanding heads roll when those responsible are found out.  His red hot temper probably wasn't soothed a great deal when Sergei Kerman said if KSA keeps giving them stuff like this, RSR will be able to launch a mission to Duna for free!

[LittleBitMore]

Started a OPM career mission report, my first ever mission report!

[djr5899]

Built a new rover and had the Kerbalbots deliver to Minmus surface for a later mission.  Had a weird glitch where the small scan arm on the rover (which was attached to the top of the rocket) was "supposedly" blocking the sunlight from the solar panels on the rocket.  I could see one panel had a shadow on it, but the other panel was completely fine and still claiming to be blocked and unable to draw power.  This led to a few extra orbits around Kerbal before the light of Kerbol finally recharged some batteries, and I was able to land the craft on Minmus.

Jeb came up with the swell idea to design the rocket to land upright, and then "tip itself" over and release the rover from the docking port.  And by tip itself over, Jeb really meant use enough power to send the rover into full orbit if wanted.  6 Separtron SRBs were used to tip over the rocket.  Quite frankly, that was a weeeee bit too much force for Minmus gravity.  Quite surprised I didn't break off every single usable piece of the rover or dig it 20 feet into the ground.  But alas, neither of those things happened, so I call this a success.

Rover delivered!!!!

 

[Mars-Bound Hokie]

I sent a small two-stage rocket in orbit of Kerbin, only for the final stage to crash into the VAB.

• AFTER completing orbit.

 

• I'll end up less than a km away from the launch pad, but I've got my sights set on the VAB.

 

• Say your prayers, VAB engineers.

 

• DIRECT HIT.
  • Otherwise, the camera wouldn't focus on that part of the building.
• No damage to the building, but it was a small rocket anyway. At least I hit it after full orbit.

 

 

 

 

Reason (skip if you just came for the action)

Spoiler

 

I was chatting with my girlfriend on the phone when I decided to build a cheap rocket that can hit a point 700 km away. Why that far, you ask? It's the distance between Baikerbanur and Woomerang. My mini-rocket didn't go any farther than ~350 km from the start, so I had to add a second stage to it. 

• Why even do it? I was thinking about what exactly Bill would use for this project.
  • More details below

Spoiler

In my KSP Fanwork, "A Mystery Beyond Science," Bill, Val, and Jeb talk about a rocket that was supposed to land a spy probe on Woomerang's football team - only for it to break apart in re-entry and (allegedly) set someone's house on fire. Though that idea failed, I wanted a glimpse of what the rocket used would look like.

• If he wanted to reach Woomerang from Baikerbanur, he would need an extra stage instead of the final probe delivery stage.
• Eventually, Bill decided to drop the spy probe from a plane.

 

After this fanwork is over, I plan to write the prequel - "Baikerbanur Days" - to show Bill, Val, and Jeb in their high school days. Bob was younger than them, and in another city at the time.

 

This rocket met my expectations when it hit the VAB after completing orbit. If it can do that, then you can send it anywhere.

 

 

[Astrionix]

23 hours ago, Puggonaut said:

What's the diameter of that station?

[Kerbalwerks]

A lifter for an electric mini-sub:

 

 

 

[MikeZDB]

Today we had launched the first manned Apolok OBK (Orbital Kerbal) style Apollo 7 mission.

 

As always the MISSION REPORT HERE, and THE PHOTOLOG HERE (Spanish Language).

Also we had informed in THE KSA OFFICIAL WEBSITE. "You can subscribe!"

 

Edited July 21, 2020 by MikeZDB

[capi3101]

Came to the determination yesterday that if I wanted until the end of the heinekenphage crisis to come to an end before I played KSP again, I might not play again this century. Fired up a new career save in 1.8.1 just for the thrill of rolling around the space center for SCIENCE.

...okay, not really. But I did do a couple of early career launches with Jeb to get to better parts. Haven't even gotten Mun-visiting clearance yet and I probably won't continue that particular save. Mainly was just farting around. I'll probably go ahead and make the jump to 1.10 before I play again, and I think that with 1.10 I'll bring my 1.4-1.8 career save to a conclusion. Can't really do much better than permanent manned outposts on every world in the system. Looking forward to doing it all over again.

In other news, I acquired a copy of High Frontier (3^rd Edition; didn't feel like waiting for the 4^th) this past week via eBay. For those of you who've never heard of it, it's the board game version of KSP with the RSS mod, without green people...

Edited July 21, 2020 by capi3101

[DunaManiac]

Today I decided to come back from a 2 or 3 week long hiatus from KSP, so I launched a probe to Eeloo, which I don't do often just to prove I could still do it.

The probe, which contains an orbiter and a lander.

The course correction burn far away from Eeloo.

Approaching Eeloo at the edge of it's SOI, it's just barely visible above the plane of the Milky Way, or whatever the kerbals call it.

Eeloo even closer.

The probe did the insertion burn. Unfortanately, I underestimated how much fuel you would need to get into orbit around Eeloo, I mean, I still had enough to land on Eeloo, but I had to ditch the orbiter, it didn't have enough fuel to get into orbit.

Anyway, the overpowered lander landed!

I blew the engine, but who cares, this probe will be here for a long time. Well, at least I can still do it, at least I don't totally have to relearn KSP.

Edited July 21, 2020 by DunaManiac

[purpleivan]

Ups and downs in my first ever Science game.

Ups.

1. Placed a probe on the Mun that was only intended to sit in orbit.

2. Val returned safely from a Mun orbit mission.

 

Downs

1. Val's vehicle (the Muno Uno) had no antenna, so significantly less science goodies resulted from the mission than expected.

2. Jeb dropped his first car (a science grabbing runabout) in the Astronaut Complex swimming pool.

3. He then totalled his first plane after it got away from him while on EVA on the Runway Island.

"Hey come back here".

"I mean it, I will not be kind, no 1000 hour service for you".

"Just... can't... keep... up".

"Uh oh".

"Awwww... rats".

Edited July 21, 2020 by purpleivan

[TaranisElsu]

14 hours ago, problemecium said:

Today as of this post I have yet to actually open KSP itself, but I've spent a solid chunk of time pondering transfer windows.

Yeeeeaaaars ago, a few people made nifty transfer window calendars listing out all the major transfer windows for the first few years from the default start time of a game. These would have come in handy, as Kerbal Alarm Clock doesn't seem (unless I'm being dumb) to allow me to schedule transfer window alarms beyond the next one and thus I don't have this information at hand for deciding whether to postpone a mission. Unfortunately, they're so old that they predate KSP's in-game time readout and are thus written using Earth time, not to mention there's a fair chance at least one tweak to the planets' orbits has occurred in the meantime. Attempting to find a new one led me to several threads whose OPs asked for a new calendar only to be told to use AlexMoon's webpage or a mod such as KAC... which one can see puts me in a bit of a loop!

Thus I dug up the CSV file KAC uses as its transfer window "model," imported it into a spreadsheet, and uhhhhh... the planets are numbers. "Aha!" I thought, "the numbers available here must represent objects between which transfers are straightforward to calculate, i.e. who share a parent body, thus I can eliminate the missing numbers to reveal the structure of the system and thus which planet is which number!" ...but this led me nowhere. I have no clue what's going on in there. I even looked up a bunch of phase angles and compared them to the ones in the spreadsheet to see which transfers corresponded to the phase angles that should match them, still with no luck. My dreams of using my genius intellect to forge a shiny new transfer calendar for the community appear untenable.

So I gave up and resorted to dabbling about at https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp and seeing roughly vaguely how often Jool windows occur and, of more immediate importance, when the "second" one is. For those curious, it's on Year 2, Day 256 at 3:36 and windows appear to recur roughly every one year and 31 days.

In conclusion: Should I postpone my Jool-5 Challenge mission until the next transfer window, allowing me to explore other destinations first and build up to it, but restricting me from doing any exploration of Jool in the meantime in the interest of maximizing Science yield when I do the challenge later on? A few opinions requested but please don't flood the thread because I'm not out to commandeer it here ^^;

Do you know about the Transfer Window Planner mod? From TriggerAu (who also created KAC).

It shows a Porkchop like Alex Moon's website (it is based on it) but pulls the data from the game and so is guaranteed to be up to date (and works with mod planets). You can also put in earliest and latest departure dates to find a transfer window during a particular time frame.

Does that answer your question or were you looking for something else?