What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Guest]

On 8/30/2020 at 9:44 AM, DerekL1963 said:

Four words:

fixed

Going to do Eeloo mission today. I'll be updating this post here:

UPDATE MISSION FINISHED

 

 

Edited August 31, 2020 by Guest

[purpleivan]

More science hunting for me.

A lab was delivered to the Mun for Bob.

Who wasted no time in heading over to his new office.

His crewmate and welcome company, headed out to pick up a surface sample. Bob the bozo forgot to pick one up in his rush to the lab.

Hi... the name's Rolin, pleased to meet you.

Meanwhile a similar vehicle headed for Minmus, dropping of a couple of relay sats on the way.

Before landing at the top of the cliffs overlooking one of the Flats.

Edited August 30, 2020 by purpleivan

[Neil Kermstrong]

Was gonna save my boosters by switching to them and opening the parachutes but couldn't switch back to the main vessel because cant switch vessels while in atmosphere.

rip Jeb, Bob and Bill

[linuxgurugamer]

10 minutes ago, Neil Kermstrong said:

Was gonna save my boosters by switching to them and opening the parachutes but couldn't switch back to the main vessel because cant switch vessels while in atmosphere.

rip Jeb, Bob and Bill

Try using FMRS

[Starhelperdude]

On 6/20/2020 at 11:04 AM, BadOaks said:

[snipped for brevity]

a bit late, sry, but I love the vtol!

Edited August 30, 2020 by Vanamonde

[Neil Kermstrong]

31 minutes ago, linuxgurugamer said:

Try using FMRS

what does that do?

[JorgeCS]

1 hour ago, Neil Kermstrong said:

what does that do?

Summarizing, it allows you to 'mantain the status' of the separated ships' by some sorcery done with savefiles  and come back to the other stage and land it (or crash it). Here is the link to the thread:

 In any case maybe you can search in the meantime in the 'saves\'yoursavename'\backup and get one of the persistentxxxxxxxx.sfs, copy it back to 'saves\yoursavename and rename it as persistent.sfs... unless you play in console of course  

[Kerminator K-100]

Tried a tourist mission but BARIS said "You will not go to space today!" So now I am on my last 25,000 funds and looking for easy ways to make money.

[Kerbals_of_Steel]

A recently discovered 4th rule of physics means that Kerbals will now need to eat, drink, breathe,and stuff... I am giving myself two weeks to wind up all crewed operations before initiating Operation Dunkirk and bringing them all home for the USI-lS upgrade, then it's time to send out the A-team to add life support to all my habitats. Given the house rules/ head canon I play with, I could probably spam out some automated supply ships and make the changes on the fly. It's probably better to just go systematically from station to base to outposts and upgrade them one by one. This will let me cycle them all through the Munar station for max hab time anyway.

[Grogs]

I launched a brand new ship, the Atlas XL asteroid grabber. It's the first kiloton class ship launch in this career.

 

Hayfrey, Algard, and Melming were chosen for the mission because they're expendable highly-trained, elite kerbonauts. I tried the 'launch to target inclination' feature in MechJeb. I'm not sure if I did something wrong because it was only a partial success. The asteroid is inclined 23 degrees, but I ended up with a 10-degree ascending node. Partial success, anyway.

 

I sent to Atlas XL towards the asteroid immediately because the asteroid in only 4 days from its Pe. I got a decent intercept two days before that. Hopefully the crew will be able to mine enough fuel to at least get a Kerbin capture in that time. Once they accomplish that, they can take their time moving it into orbit around Minimus.

 

After the Atlas XL headed out, I landed the 5-m booster that sent it into orbit. It was a bit tricky lining up KSP because of the orbital inclination, but I managed to pull off a very close landing. Landing the booster recovered about 205,000 funds.

 

Over on Minmus, things have been quiet lately, but an empty fuel tanker returned from Kerbin so refuelling ops started. First the ore tanker went down and filled the tanks to take ore back up to Minimus Station, and then a fuel tanker landed and started filling up.

 

While the refueling was underway, I checked for new contracts and found one to extract 450 units of ore from Minmus. You've gotta love getting paid for something you're already doing.

[Sky Vagrant]

Got to 1000 Gamer Score on KSP (it's an Xbox thing):

[DerekL1963]

Night navigation practice...

[Okhin]

So, I got a space base contract, involving a class E asteroid and a solar orbit.

Launching at night. Using two Saturn-5 like stack. I guess. That's 10 mainsail down there, under those 5m engines stackers.

The sun is rising, giving this blood red ominous color to the clouds. My kerbals aren't superstitious so they did not interpreted that as a bid omen, or anything like that.

Coasting to orbit, and to a mun gravity assist. Two rhinos will do most of the heavy pushing for the intercept burn with that class E.

I totally forgot to take pictures passing by Mun. Anyway.

Burning normal to get a close encounter with the asteroid. Yep, that's 14 Nerv engines. A new engineer specially recruited got his second star (and well its first one too I guess) during the burn.

Space potato in sight! Arm the Klaws!

And contact. That is a big ball of dirt. Now, I need to figure out what to do with it. I think I've got under .1 TWR, but I can probably move it's orbit somehow. I'm not sure that it's a really useful space base there, its orbit is kind of close to Kerbin's. Or I should go for lots of eccentricity and/or a polar orbit ? (I'll probably burn all the rock doing it).

Anyway, it's there for now.

 

[RizzoTheRat]

A fairly long winded and complicated mission over the last few days for me, developing the kOS code to do sections of it as I went along.

My main earner at the moment is tourist missions, so Jeb took a group of tourists on an adventure.  The launch is in to the plane of Minmus orbit, and works pretty well with only around 10-15m/s needed to tweak the inclination once in orbit.

4 vectors may seem a bit of overkill for a trip to Minmus, and that's because it is.  The lifter is actually a SSTO capable of lifting a 36 tonne Rockomax Jumbo 64 to an 80km orbit

The transfer stage with  almost 1600 m/s dV also looks like a bit of an overkill, and again that's because it is.  Having put the lander in to a Minmus orbit, it had enough fuel remaining to accelerate straight down all the way to the ground, impacting at 860m/s just 100m away from my deployed seismometer (posted about that the other day, quite proud of it).  This was done with a numerical integration approach to calculate the optimum time to start the burn, and then some lateral steering to eliminate cross range errors.

The lander then put Jeb and his 5 tourists down on Great Flats to run some science experiments.

It then returned to Kerbin, using Trajectories to plot an aerocapture rather than landing.

This allowed it to rendezvous and dock with the launch vehicle, this was actually my first docking in this career, and involved a fairly hefty overhaul of my Hohmann transfer code, which will now need to replace the current code used for Moon rendezvous, and RCS guidance code.

Unfortunately I then realised my landing script is set up for an equatorial orbit, and I don't have the calculations in there to wait until the orbit passes over the KSC, so instead of landing on the runway for 100% fund recovery, it landed a bit further north for only about 95%

The lander had sufficient parachutes to land on it's own if all went wrong, so they were used to reduce the fuel requirement on the landing, but the aim is for fully propulsive landings.  From an equatorial orbit I can reliably land the booster on the runway (I still haven't got the range error small enough to try for the pad) when empty, but this was the first time landing one with a payload.   the Blue Origin style wings and fins give me trade speed to lift and extend the range, while steering to minimise the North/South errors, and then pitch down to a nice steep angle for landing, but I've not quite worked out where to start the pitch down manouvre.  Some further optimisation is required, but it means the entire lander is recoverable without the need for heatshields or worrying about stability in hard aerobraking, it just needs to survive enough aerobraking to get an orbit.

Edited August 31, 2020 by RizzoTheRat

[Guest]

I finished my Eeloo mission today for round 4 of the LLC. Since I updated the post above I am keeping this one in spoilers

Spoiler

 

 

[qromodynmc]

I've worked on one of my recent weird ideas. It's quite simple on paper actually, i made a plane with very balanced col/cog, then added piston to push partition of wing to flip center of lift balance so plane falls on it's behind. It did work well most of the time but im having bit of problems when landing mostly because im a bad pilot.

 

 

[JorgeCS]

2 hours ago, The Doodling Astronaut said:

I finished my Eeloo mission today for round 4 of the LLC. Since I updated the post above I am keeping this one in spoilers

That deorbit burn before landing in Eeloo...phew...  

[Guest]

12 minutes ago, JorgeCS said:

That deorbit burn before landing in Eeloo...phew...  

I know that was so stinkin' close. I was scared I was going to need to redo that part but nope first try!

[JorgeCS]

2 hours ago, The Doodling Astronaut said:

I know that was so stinkin' close. I was scared I was going to need to redo that part but nope first try!

That's why when I decouple I tend to do it either in normal, either in 100% retrograde  hehehe!

[Guest]

1 minute ago, JorgeCS said:

That's why when I decouple I tend to do it either in normal, either in 100% retrograde  hehehe!

It was actually. I just had to orbit a few times to get the right landing spot and it came from behind!

[Astrionix]

@qromodynmc Your design reminds me of the Convair XFY Pogo. Is it what you were going for?

Edited September 3, 2020 by Astrion

[RizzoTheRat]

The higher orbital speed for the Mun magnifies the errors on my Impactor calculation that worked so well on Minmus, so I've tweaked it a bit to fire the engine earlier, and then cut the engine shortly before impact, allowing it to make adjustments in range by when it cuts the engine.

My Minmus impactor weighed 3.9 tonnes (Poodle powered transfer stage), and crashed at 860m/s, giving about 1.4 GJ around 100m from the sensor, and maxed out the data collection with 400 science.

My Mun impactor was 2.7 tonnes Terrier powered missile and hit at 835 m/s for about 0.9GJ around 70m from the target.

I am somewhat underwhelmed with the result!

As this is still a work in progress I'm tempted to revert and have a go with a Reliant rather than a Terrier for some extra mass and a lot more speed.

[Grogs]

1 hour ago, RizzoTheRat said:

The higher orbital speed for the Mun magnifies the errors on my Impactor calculation that worked so well on Minmus, so I've tweaked it a bit to fire the engine earlier, and then cut the engine shortly before impact, allowing it to make adjustments in range by when it cuts the engine.

My Minmus impactor weighed 3.9 tonnes (Poodle powered transfer stage), and crashed at 860m/s, giving about 1.4 GJ around 100m from the sensor, and maxed out the data collection with 400 science.

My Mun impactor was 2.7 tonnes Terrier powered missile and hit at 835 m/s for about 0.9GJ around 70m from the target.

I am somewhat underwhelmed with the result!

As this is still a work in progress I'm tempted to revert and have a go with a Reliant rather than a Terrier for some extra mass and a lot more speed.

Now that's the kind of impact I usually get on the Mun.

I'm getting better at it though. I crashed one of my older Jumbo-64 fuel tankers last night. It had around 2000 m/s dV left. I moved it up a 100x100 km orbit to have more time to accelerate towards the ground, canceled out the orbital speed over the target, and let it free fall for about 10 km to start moving straight down before pointing straight down. Even so, accelerating prograde caused me to miss by a couple hundred meters. That was only a 7% attenuation and managed a respectable 156 science. One more good hit like that should max out my sensor.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Started building a second space station around Kerbin, launching stuff using KSTS to save the faff of rendezvousing them. That was fine, until I included 2 crew on a module only to realise once it was in orbit that the module didn’t have any oxygen supplies- I’m playing with Kerbalism so no oxygen = death in 2 minutes flat! One frantic docking procedure and one mildly crashy docking later (4m/s with the- admittedly tiny- RCS thrusters braking furiously), the module was attached to the station (in the wrong place, but I was in a hurry!) and my two poor Kerbals lived to tell the tale of how they were 92% dead from suffocation. After moving them to the station core, I put the new module in the right place and decided not to send any more Kerbals as only the core itself has life support. Two more crew will go up in a proper spacecraft to complete the complement of 4 and do some long-term science experiments.

Space Lab One, the first LKO station, was disassembled and several of the larger modules deorbited, leaving a couple of utility modules and KIS/KAS stuff which could come in handy over at the new station and which are self-propelled, plus two crew. While the old station had over a decade worth of supplies, it was also held together by the half-size docking ports and the entire design was horribly lopsided; it also had no orbital science experiments aboard and building a new station was more practical than trying to refit or extend the old one.

[jimmymcgoochie]

@RizzoTheRat @Grogs When I was trying to complete the Mun seismic sensor I just launched a 2.5m rocket into LKO, set up a transfer that would put it on a collision course with the Mun then burned surface down inside the Mun’s SOI and accelerated to several KPS before impacting. A little bit wasteful, launching a rocket just to smash it into the Mun, but one massive hit at tremendous speed was enough to max out the sensor even with less than perfect accuracy and a relatively low setup multiplier. Speed matters much more than mass for the seismic sensor.