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What did you do in KSP1 today?


Xeldrak

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First time I've done something like this.  I setup a KIS mobile seismic experiment since in Kerbalism it takes 14 days.  Also shown is my version of the reusable Artemis lander that will be returning to the Munar Gateway to refuel, transfer science and prepare for the next mission.

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Today I spent about two hours practicing propulsive landings, first with the sample vehicle from the built-in Scenario and then with this thing in my Sandbox testing save:

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The new silver fairings make for a very nice looking ITS/BFR/Starship replica, but hoo boy is the launch stage a butt to try to land. I added some legs after making this image, and even still it's very sensitive to touchdown velocity, which makes things hard in Kerbin's unforgiving gravity and while trying to keep to a reasonable delta-V consumption. I was tempted to dig up the old Landertron mod or reinstall Kerbal Engineer, but eventually I did manage to land it two times, after crashing it about 98 times and crashing the game itself at least twice. Hooray...?

The more substantial good news is that inserting the starship into orbit went very smoothly and at least nominally it'll have plenty of delta-V to get itself to Duna. Here's hoping it can be landed a little more easily given the lower gravity and much higher local TWR. I expect to find out next time I open up the game and get around to testing that part of the mission. For now I'm worn out and going to bed xP

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So, I'm getting interplanetary contract. And, instead of parking ships in LKO and wait for a transfer window to open, I decided to get a gateway / mooring point / space bar up and running at the edge of Kerbin SOI, to park ships there while wating for the planetary bodies to align. It's been a bit hellish to do, I've got a lot of kraken destroying various version of the station, but managed to do it anyway (and it seems that sticking reaction wheel on servo and using them as nodes for the remaining parts of a spaceship is a good kraken bait). Also I wanted rotating rings.
 

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Speaking of rings, here they are. Flied by an HECS module, with a lot of juice to reach the orbits. There's a big dual ring for the outside (on which are attached solar panels and nukes engine), a smaller counter rotating one with rooms for kerbals and another one with some fuel (on orangey tanks on this version).

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To space ! I've tried something on this version, believed to add moar rigidity, which is to triple the clamp'o'tron for sticking parts together. Turns out it does not seems to keep the kraken at bay (and perfectly aligning all the docking ports is almost impossible with the craft built).

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And orbit. Deploying the solar panels, activating the lights, everything seems fine. For now. The kraken stays asleep.

On to the next part, the Kubpola. A cube of cupolas, stitched together on a structural tube filled with batteries and reaction wheel (which won't help later on either). But before that, we need some ace pilot to move stuff around. And Valentina is longing to test a new version, with moar engines, of her cargo pusher.

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It fits in a wide fairing. But it fits. Also Val took Bill with her. Because there might be a need for engineering stuff up there. And since the command pod is now a mk1-3, there's a lot moar room for stuff in it. Including kerbals.

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And docked to the rings. The new cargo pusher do looks a bit like those aliens in this TV Show that's trending at KSC, about someone traveling in a blue box.

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Next launch is the Kubpola. WIth Jeb riding this thing. The first tries did not end well, the Kubpola was to high on the rocket and it kept flipping around. So this time, the center of mass is way down the line, and it should fly better.

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It, indeed, do fly better. Aiming for rendezvous with the rings.

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Rendezvous is reached, and Valentina is now trying to dock all three ports at the same time. It involved a lot of swearing, and ended with a good enough for me when 2 out of three docking ports where less than 5° off, but refusing to dock anyway.

Now, we just need the utility spar, with the antenna and docking port for fuel tanks and stuff.

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I's a big fairing. But the craft is kinda light, so it was almost OK. If you skip the part where getting anymore than 10° of AoA sent the rocket tumbling, and it ended up in a direct ascent. Again, lots of rotation wheel in there.

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Going to a rendezvous with the Gateway. Engineers strapped extra batteries on docking port, because those reaction wheel eats EC as if it were candy. And there's no solar panel for now on this part.

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Valentina has now docked her ship to this spar, and tries to figure out of is she supposed to dock it to the station, while clinging on its side. Descativating her own whee authority will help a lot. As well as cursing it seems.

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And, eventually, everything is docked. The kraken did not awoke and everything was fine.

Except that after undocking and switching vessels, the whole station exploded. Autostruts did not really helped either (with or without them, the results were the same : KABOOM). So, I decided to look at it from the VAB, and tries to found the culprit. After removing some struts, enforcing rigid attachment and the like, I could cheat a non explosive version in a rendezvous point. Except it was wobbly as hell, and now maneuvering whatsoever was manageable. Took me a bit to get it, but the reaction wheels in the Kubpola and the tail (while the rotating rings had none) were wreaking havoc in the balance of everything.

Rebuilt the station, removing the 3 clamp docking port that were useless (I never managed to dock more than one at a time), removed the reaction wheels from the kubpola and the tail, inserted some reaction wheel inside the heart of the double ring. I also upgrade the four servos for the counter rotating rings. they were 1.25m version, I changed them to a 2.5m version, to avoid section reduction. I just added on reaction wheel to the kubpola, for stability of this part. The tail didn't like having one, and it was rotating a bit like a clock's needle. Fun and entertaining to watch, but absolutely unusable. I also redid the small fuel ring, which led me to this version of the station :

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It is now extremely stable and maneuverable. I can even fire up the engine while the ring rotate and everything will go fine.

What's left now, is moving it to its final destination. I have 1865 m.s dV, but a TWR of 0.25. So, let's max oberth and do 1min burn until Apoapsis reach the edge of Kerbin SOI.

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One of the seven one minute prograde burn done.

 

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And finally the Gateway Plexe is setup, sitting on a normal axis, as far away form kerbin as it is possible, while remaining in its SOI (I might have a little bit of margin, but I didn't feel comfortable about pushing it that close to the edge).

So, learned a lot of things, especially about reaction wheels, struts and stability.

I did cheat to orbit the final design, but I was to lazy to to the four flights I did already. So, I used that. But in the end I'm happy with this station. Now, let's build that Eve encounter / orbit mission.

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I bought the game and dlcs on my laptop so today and yesterday I had a big exploration of VTOL Fighter jets in breaking ground. After a couple of failures with F35 style VTOL systems I decided to go with a different design.

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I call it "The Beetle" since it is rather small and compact and flies.

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Due to the engines being placed directly on the center of mass it handles pretty well in vtol flight and can take off pretty quickly in stovl.

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It also is pretty fast in conventional flight, with supercruise capabilities and a really high acceleration rate. It does lack a little in turning though.

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I tried landing it on the aircraft carrier I have around. What is not pictured is me hitting the tower and falling off the ship.

Full Album https://imgur.com/a/a9qSMEf

Edited by FezCool
Photos didn't show at first lol
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KDSS Sunbeam returned home from a two year mission in which Mundon and Thompsey Kerman became the first kerbals to land on Eve. An orbital shuttle carried the mission's six crew, headed by Commander Valentina Kerman, down to the surface. 

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Financing the mission has left my space program a bit short on funds, so I'll be sending up a fresh crew to depart for Moho in a month for some contract work. As the most capable ship in my fleet, I'm going to be keeping the Sunbeam pretty busy for the foreseeable future. It was expensive to build, and its sister ship will be even more so.

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Today I released version 1 of RSVP, a kOS library that finds orbital launch windows then creates maneuver nodes to make the transfer.

This enables players to make automated low delta-v transfers between two planets or vessels in-game, either directly from their own kOS scripts or from the kOS console.

There are still some rough edges and not everything works perfectly, however I'd really like for people try it out and give feedback on the main release thread.

See these features in action:

The main release thread has more details:

Edited by ManEatingApe
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So, for the first time since I've started playing KSP, I've been interplanetary and orbited Eve !

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The Eve Cruiser on the launchpad. Valentina will pilot this mission, and she's taking Bill and Bob with her.

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Crossing path with Mun while going to the Spacebar.

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And now everyone is docked to the spacebar, having some R&R while waiting for the transfer window to open (in lots of days).

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Almost a year later, and after long burn on the single Nerv engine, Valentina can finally spacewalk in  another planetary body SOI. She chose to light her helmet in purple, to match Eve atmosphere. And Bob is doing a lot of science.

After getting into high orbit, it's time to wait for a Kerbin transfer window. A bit more boring, since there's not yet a spacebar for Eve. But in the end, the return back home was nice.

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A little hot maybe. But that's just how Val likes her reentry.

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Almost exploded the heat shield (which would probably have destroyed the thousand science bucks stored in the utility bay). 160 units of ablator is not enough when coming back from Eve it seems.

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And touch down, after two years and fourteen days of being stuck in this small capsule, the first interplanetary kerbonauts are back on the ground.

In the meantime, I had some seismic data to recover from Mun, and craters to scan. So I sent this little gal up there:

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She's running away from the massive fuel tank which started rolling her way.

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Hugging craters is the only way to stop moving and being able to scan them without climbing the hill while the parking break is on (sorry forgot to switch off the features finder)

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And after doing some crater hopping on her four ants, gathering all the seismic data, she stays there, contemplating the meaning of the life of a small rover, alone on Mun.

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Today I went to the moon for the first time in my new save.

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Everything went right except for when I accidentally timewarped through the return trajectory. Luckily nothing was harmed so the Kerbals just had to wait another day or so to get back home.

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The gang debating whether fuel or oxidizer taste better.

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3 hours ago, kspbandit said:

Could be useful to you, if someone doesn't beat me to it, I'll try and make a claw machine.

I may try something similar. Instead of all the structure made of truss, I may use structural hollow tubes. They may also be useful to attach the biggest wheels (well, huge loads may need resilient wheels) :D 

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38 minutes ago, JorgeCS said:

I may try something similar. Instead of all the structure made of truss, I may use structural hollow tubes. They may also be useful to attach the biggest wheels (well, huge loads may need resilient wheels) :D 

Normally when it didn't randomly shake, wheels were never the problem, it would be the vertical claw then horizontal pistons.

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36 minutes ago, Goaty1208 said:

I was sick of Ksp console edition, so I bought minutes ago Ksp on steam!

  Hide contents

:rolleyes:

How do I load flags?

 

I think you need to create a png of 256x160 pixels, give it a name, put it in the (your KSP folder)\Gamedata\Squad\Flags folder.... but I never did that before, it's just a guess :huh:

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19 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Something boring an hand off with probes. 
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Half done. 

Quoting myself here for obvious reasons.
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double the time and a bit over 4x the distance. 
Small probe core, small reaction wheel, 24 seperatronsm, RTG, an small strut for holding the radiators, the large antenna who is long out of range. 26 days is misleading, first KSP has 6 hour days, I also run at 4x physical warp and getting around 2 km/s^2 

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20 minutes ago, JorgeCS said:

put it in the (your KSP folder)\Gamedata\Squad\Flags folder.... but I never did that before, it's just a guess :huh:

ok, thanks

meanwhile

first sub-orbital launch succesfull! 

done, but.. how do I install mods?

sorry if I bother you guys..

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