What did you do in KSP1 today?

[capi3101]

4 hours ago, JorgeCS said:

Will try then with some fly by wire... any recommendation?

and thank you for the comment... it took my sweet time to have something ‘looking alike’ more or less. Probably will keep improving the look and feel this afternoon. And upload the result to kerbalx  

 

3 hours ago, Hotel26 said:

I can recommend Atmospheric Autopilot

Seconding the recommendation for Atmosphere Autopilot. I've used it myself for a number of versions now; I credit this single mod for making aerocraft flying in KSP......well, joyful, for lack of a better term. Took out the need to (over)correct every little SAS oscillation the game threw in there. And I seem to recall once while using it where I managed to stick the landing on a plane that had lost its vertical stabilizer.... 

Only issue I can think of with AA may arise if this is a functional replica. BD Armory and AA don't play along with one another. But then, IIRC, BD Armory also has a fly-by-wire or something of that nature; I don't use that mod myself, so somebody feel free to correct me here.

[JorgeCS]

@Hotel26 @capi3101, yes, I've tried, thank you very much to both of you. You guys managed to make my B2 fly and land with no much of a problem. In any case, this plane suffers from loads of sideslip and even with AA active, if I use too much of yaw (just testing) it will go down no matter what I do to try to correct it.

And, no, I don't use BDA, not functional replica. Well it can drop a small payload, but I would say that it is merely decorative  

Cheers!

J

[capi3101]

25 minutes ago, JorgeCS said:

@Hotel26 @capi3101, yes, I've tried, thank you very much to both of you. You guys managed to make my B2 fly and land with no much of a problem. In any case, this plane suffers from loads of sideslip and even with AA active, if I use too much of yaw (just testing) it will go down no matter what I do to try to correct it.

Are you also using FAR? Just asking.

Directional instability (yaw) is inherent in any flying wing design; it's the price paid for having no tail. The real B-2 uses a combination of split brake-rudders and differential thrust to compensate. Differential thrust wouldn't be easy to emulate in KSP given how thrust is setup in general in the game, but you might still be able to set up some kind of 'split aileron' to help matters. 

You could also just not yaw, though I doubt that's a very practical piece of advice......

[JorgeCS]

42 minutes ago, capi3101 said:

Are you also using FAR? Just asking.

Directional instability (yaw) is inherent in any flying wing design; it's the price paid for having no tail. The real B-2 uses a combination of split brake-rudders and differential thrust to compensate. Differential thrust wouldn't be easy to emulate in KSP given how thrust is setup in general in the game, but you might still be able to set up some kind of 'split aileron' to help matters. 

You could also just not yaw, though I doubt that's a very practical piece of advice......

No, no FAR in this setup. Actually I'm almost certain that it would be a disaster  but I may try.

About the yaw controls, I set small elevons (vertical) inside the engines' compartiments, so that's something. In any case, you are right about the directional thrust. Unsure about the possibilities of doing that using mechjeb, worth trying anyway. Thank you again!

J

[Puggonaut]

6 hours ago, JorgeCS said:

Well, that's another very (and better) good looking B2 

Not mine , found it on KerbalX and used DCS to recolour it . 

[JorgeCS]

2 hours ago, Puggonaut said:

Not mine , found it on KerbalX and used DCS to recolour it . 

I think I found it, the one from SpaceTrashCan if I'm not mistaken  Actually he is using some ideas I also had in order to reduce partcount and add more fuel, but still thinking on the possibilities of implementation... hectic day  

[Misguided Kerbal]

Today I made a Soyuz-Inspired vehicle. It's called Komrade, the lifter's called Korolev. I know, so creative of me.

 

 

 

[Maravone]

This week I finally finished my real-life Skylab equivalent in my RP-1 career: Starlab!
Its 1971, and after the launch of the first Starlab standalone module in late 1970, and after the first crewed mission with Starlab II, I launched the LTSME (Long Term Service Module Extension) which allows a crew of 5 to stay in orbit for months.

First crewed vehicle I've sent after the LTMSE was Starlab V with only 3 astronauts, but starting with Starlab VII I'll be launching the new Apollo Block-II which can carry a few more astronauts, and I'll be done with the oversized Block-I service module which isnt really designed for Low Earth Orbit operations.

Edited August 21, 2020 by Maravone

[capi3101]

4 hours ago, Misguided_Kerbal said:

Today I made a Soyuz-Inspired vehicle. It's called Komrade, the lifter's called Korolev. I know, so creative of me.

Eh...if you wanted, you could call the Block II model Tovarishch, the term the Soviets actually used among themselves. You could even add a seven to the end (i.e. Tovarishch 7) for even more bad karma. If you don't want to use that name yourself, I call dibs.......

[Kerbals_of_Steel]

It was a productive day on the surface of the Mun. I had spent the previous night period stacking an entire Munar colony into a series of parking orbits over the East crater, and at dawn the drop ships started coming down in waves. First down was an Aeronaught crew lander with Jedford, Thedford, and Edselford Kerman, who quickly flagged out locations for the next major landings. Next came the new bunkhouse for the mining colony consisting of three MK3 passenger modules, a workshop  with two MK3 KIS containers and a MK3 passenger module for working space, and a science lab with two lab modules and a Hitchhiker communication pod. Each of those large landers utilized Kerbodyne's patented Paul Bunyan landing technology, landing vertically before being intentionally toppled with a combination of independent landing gear and overpowered RCS. The minor landings included a two man Mun scooter rover for commuting between the new site and the existing automated ISRU site a km away, and a pair of Ore-Bot transfer ships to haul excess ore to the new orbital conversion site on the Munar station. Next up is the Munar Mining Command center, so Thedford can directly supervise ISRU operations, but right now he is too busy driving around the new colony with a huge sack of K4, blowing up the surplus fuel tanks and landing engines. In the span of just a couple hours, we have gone from an isolated robotic mining site to a fully functioning crewed colony. It looks exactly like a trailer park full of little green men, but everyone starts somewhere...

[Hotel26]

Been fooling with planes most recently.  I built a bizjet:

 

Entered into a collaboration with @swjr-swis and he improved wings & tail and various:

Very pleased how this has turned out and my thanks to swjr-swis!

 

Edited August 22, 2020 by Hotel26

[Grogs]

I took a mission to scan a Giant Quartz formation with a large scanning arm.

 

I don't have a plane with a scanner arm, and wouldn't fancy trying to land it in the mountains if I did. Hoping to avoid a really long drive, I just attached a rover to the front of a rocket and launched it ballistic towards the mountains.

 

I figured 2000 m/s should be plenty to get it there, but nope. Even with the skycrane fuel I didn't even get close.

 

I decided to just go with it. About an hour of driving later, I arrived and got the scan. It was fairly steep, and the hardest part was getting the rover situated cross-hill where it wouldn't start rolling even with the parking brake locked.

[Goaty1208]

After two hours of painfull mission and docking I completed the solar arrays of my "Von Braun" Minmus Space Station

Now just two modules miss, but I think I'll go in a different way than planned (station mock-up down here)

Spoiler

Meanwhile, the vehicle which should bring Kerbals up there is kinda ready

 It is a Soyuz K-7-ish replica. I think at least.

1 minute ago, Goaty1208 said:

 It is a Soyuz K-7-ish replica. I think at least.

Should I upload the craft?

Edited August 22, 2020 by Goaty1208
mispelling

[Okhin]

So, now that I have fuel production up and running, I needed to transfer a lot of fuel to my Space Bar + Eve Mission in order to have enough dV to reach the purple planet.

Enter a MK3 tanker, with 5000 unit of LF of capacity, plus enough to maneuver the 6 nukes.

The HPDS is ready to send this stack of fuel into space.

Approaching the Space Bar. I've launched the tanker full, so no noeed to stop by the Minmus fuel depot first.

Stock Fuel transfer is such a mess of an UI (if I just pick the tank I want, I have issue with the fuel transfer not even starting sometimes). So, dumping 5000 unit of LF in this baby. It took forever. And then it needed another 5000 more.

So, let's go to the Fuel Depot

And here we are, double docked. Filling those empty tanks. The good thing is that between the Space Bar and the Minmus Fuel Depot I barely need 100m.s dV back and forth (but it take days).

The second rotation was uneventfull, Except for the fact that I forgot to refill monoprop tanks, and ended up docking n the Minmus Fuel Depot with 0.1 unit of monoprop left.

I "just" need to refuel the Fuel Depot now. Including monoprop. And the Tanker. That would be about 4 or 5 rotation with the ground.

Back at space center I realize that I have undertook some deployed science contract for Eve, and I have a planting flag one. So I'll probably add a small ground lab + electric drones + impacting probes to the original Eve mission. I'll design and send an escape Eve vehicle sometime later.

[JorgeCS]

A few days ago noticed that using alligator hinges is... well... too wobbly for me. That happened after adding a new Gigantor array module to my Minmustation1, very much needed after adding the Nom-o-matic 25000... no comments, I forgot to check the EC requirements for such a big expansion. So, I was keen to design the module with the alligator hinges. Did that. Launched, waited for it to reach Minmus, did some other things in the meantime... and the time came. Docked it with no problem. Deployed the arms for the panels. Locked the hinges. Deployed the panels. All okay... until I need to adjust the position of the station. Then, the arms become wobbly even in locked position. So I decided that those were not for me.

Then, I remembered that mod from RoverDude, Konstruction!, with the weldable docking ports. And DockRotate from Peteletroll of course. Mmm... Bulb!

So this is the result (album https://imgur.com/gallery/7OCL0kU):

Yes, some parts have a tiny amount of clipping.

What I did before launching was setting up the first set of docking ports to rotate in 90º snap, while the other 2 sets were set to rotate in 180º snap. Then mapped the rotation clockwise to the hotkey 1.

So, the deployment itself is automatic.

Fire and forget...

Done. Now, I compressed (welded) the docking ports. Unfortunately, it has to be done manually, and the process is not affected by symmetry, so 6 manual weldings.

The result is good enough, a new panel module without wobbling (and the arms stay perfectly aligned after the compression).

If you want to try, the craft is here: https://kerbalx.com/myrddin/DockRotate-and-Konstruction-deployable-arms-proof-of-concept. I redid it removing the Making History part... but forgot that the struts belong to NearFutureConstruction  same as the top extensible docking port (which I replaced anyway). And I'm too lazy now as to redo it again changing the cubit struts...  

Cheers!

J

Edited August 22, 2020 by JorgeCS

[RizzoTheRat]

My usual career path is to  do a couple of landings on the Mun so I can research some bigger engines and docking ports, and then send a bigger mission to the mun with a lander, orbital fuel dump and return vehicle to gather science from multiple biomes, then I send another big expedition to Minmus to do the same.

This time around, after 2 missions to the Mun and one to Minmus, I realised that rather than saving money by doing multiple landing in one mission, I can make money by doing multiple trips to Mun and Minmus carrying paying tourists.  The first iteration uses a Mk2 pod to carry 1 tourist, but that's just netted me enough science to get the Mk1-3 pod and take 2 tourists per trip.  Of course this means lots of repetitive trips to the Mun and Minmus, but that was kOS is for.

Glebree certainly looks she thinks the trip was worth the money.

[Hotel26]

21 hours ago, capi3101 said:

Differential thrust wouldn't be easy to emulate in KSP

I've heard of this being done by simply raising an airbrake out into the exhaust path to obstruct the thrust...  If you connected those to the yaw controls (A, D), I have a feeling that AA would find it and learn to use it.  It knows how to use airbrakes, when Speed Control is engaged, in order to slow to a target speed, for example.

Anyway, I gleaned this from someone else's flying wing, so I guess that's proof of concept?  Good luck!

Edited August 22, 2020 by Hotel26

[Misguided Kerbal]

12 hours ago, capi3101 said:

Eh...if you wanted, you could call the Block II model Tovarishch, the term the Soviets actually used among themselves. You could even add a seven to the end (i.e. Tovarishch 7) for even more bad karma. If you don't want to use that name yourself, I call dibs.......

No! I call dibs.

Spoiler

 

[Bigbootie]

Wow. So many great posts. It's been awhile but I am playing again. Today I made my first attempt ever at catching an asteroid and returning it to Kerbin. I may restart from my save point after this reentry but it was fun.

Something seems odd here...

Splashdown

Sinking feeling.

 

 

 

[DStaal]

22 hours ago, capi3101 said:

Directional instability (yaw) is inherent in any flying wing design; it's the price paid for having no tail. The real B-2 uses a combination of split brake-rudders and differential thrust to compensate. Differential thrust wouldn't be easy to emulate in KSP given how thrust is setup in general in the game, but you might still be able to set up some kind of 'split aileron' to help matters. 

TCA does it all the time.  Thrust limiters and throttle control.  You could probably set something up with action groups and robotics controllers if you want something manual.

[N_Danger]

Just odds and ends today. I had a tourist contract.

I have a satellite on an escape trajectory that is the furthest kerbal made object ever in this play through.

I requisitioned Jooldiver 2 around Tylo for a contract.

And I started diversifying the product line beyond rockets, capsules and satellites.

Marketing sees a big opportunity in road side signs.

 

 

[Bigbootie]

Better landing this time, kind of. I hit the ground at 180ms +/- after the chutes wouldn't deploy. Then bounced into the air and broke the claw off. The asteroid with claw still attached and ship flung into the air and miraculously the chutes deployed. Crazy.

[Commodore_32]

Today, I finally launched the final module for Gateway!

I did it with the Shuttle because an SLS would be too much and the Ariane 5 would be a massive expense, I dont regret it.

Its weird that the whole Shuttle is bigger than the station, lol.

What I did here is to dock the module to Gateway with the Shuttle instead of relesing it from the shuttle, then I separete the shuttle, and the module is in!

Time to go!

Coming in for reentry...

High AoA

Wait, this isnt the KSC...

Darn it, the de-orbit was very late...

But we landed safely!

And Gateway is complete!

Next mission: dock boosters to take it to the Mun!

[JakGamingKSP]

https://imgur.com/gallery/WqYov9C

I did this!

Edited August 23, 2020 by JakGamingKSP

[Guest]

Tomorrow is the last day in a really long time to do something. So I am probably doing Comet Camp. It will be a fun adventure to close my parade of videos.