What did you do in KSP1 today?

[GuessingEveryDay]

59 minutes ago, Misguided_Kerbal said:

Today... I officially ended KASA. See the last 2 posts:

 

And today, I officially started MASA! A continuation of KASA, you'll have to wait a bit for the first post though... I'm still setting things up.

[Kerbals_of_Steel]

I made, flew, and landed (ok, ditched) my first space plane, the Kerbal Reusable Vehicle:

I need something capable of moving larger groups of Kerbals than my Aeronought 2 lander, and while my previous space bus had served yeoman's duty when I evacuated everyone back to Kerbin, it was obviously showing it's age and it was just not cost effective to add life support to something so obviously thrown together in a hurry in Jebs backyard:

The new KRV seats 6, carries sufficient life support for a round trip to the Mun, and is VASTLY more maneuverable than it's predecessor, which frankly, flew like a bus. The cargo bay has reaction wheels, batteries, RCS, solar panels and a Universal Storage core for mounting life support, fuel cells and an optional probe core when a pilot is unavailable.

I straight up stole most of the cargo bay arrangement from one of the spaceplane tutorials here, but now I can't find the original thread for credit, so thank you, whomever you were.

By loading only oxidizer into the forward MK2/1.5m adapter, and putting the liquid fuel in the wings, it stays well balanced whatever amount of fuel is in the tanks, and I don't feel too bad about the crew crawling through a fuel tank for docking.

The prototype (with a controversial butterfly tail) was chucked up on an absurdly oversized booster and taken for a test flight.

With a slingshot around the Mun and a burn towards the planet, Trarey achieve some stupendously stupid amounts of velocity for the worst-case reentry, but with some judicious skipping into the upper atmosphere, he managed to bring it down in one piece, achieving a parachute recovery a few hundred KM away from KSP.

The production version, with a conventional tail and a much more affordable booster:

It's still got enough Dv to achieve Munar orbit and refuel at the station there, and the per-seat cost is cheaper than even the Aeronought capsule, which is ~10K Kerbucks per seat. This version had a demo flight and achieved my first non-parachute recovery. Well, it was more of an aquatic crashlanding, but everyone survived and we now know what NOT to do.

All in all, a successful program, and perhaps a stepping stone towards a more traditional spaceplane in the future.

[qromodynmc]

I had a kerbal&pod rescue mission yesterday, i thought i could make a robotic arm to grab pod and rescue that way but for some reason claw didnt grab the pod, am i missing something? i managed to put it inside cargo bay using rcs thrusters but my next contract is about rescuing pod from mun surface, i donno how i can do it if claw wont grab pods.

[Kerbals_of_Steel]

17 minutes ago, qromodynmc said:

I had a kerbal&pod rescue mission yesterday, i thought i could make a robotic arm to grab pod and rescue that way but for some reason claw didnt grab the pod, am i missing something? i managed to put it inside cargo bay using rcs thrusters but my next contract is about rescuing pod from mun surface, i donno how i can do it if claw wont grab pods.

The claw is actually kind of finicky about how it grabs. Something has to hit the center just about dead on and straight before it locks.

[Grogs]

Yesterday was more design than anything. I spent some time playing around with a small lander. I have no idea what I would need it for, but it seems like it would make a cheap lander for small worlds or maybe an emergency ascender if a crew got stuck somewhere. It was mostly just fun to fly around. The A-team decided to take it up for a spin.

 

I didn't put parachutes on it, but I thought I could just open a kerbal's EVA parachute and land with that. It ended up putting the lander into a violent and uncontrollable spin.

 

Despite hitting the ground at 30 m/s in a hard spin, all the kerbals walked away. So, successful design?

 

I did some work on more practical designs as well. I completely revamped my Duna Station design based on some of the things I've learned building the Minimus and KEO stations.

 

And I did a redesign of the Duna lander. The biggest changes were the legs and moving the engines to outboard fuel tanks so I can put a Sr. docking port on the rear.

 

I did a test re-rentry on Duna and everything seemed to work well.

 

Landing was good and stable. I did a few drop tests at 12 m/s and nothing broke.

 

I packaged the lander and station on top of the lifter/transport stage that will launch for Duna in a few weeks. The transfer stage will use a Rhino engine, which seems like a good compromise between fuel efficiency and TWR at this size range.

 

Outside of the design work, the only thing that really happened in game was that a Giant MOFO tanker arrived at KEO station with a huge load of fuel freshly mined from Minmus.

 

The Icarus was fueled up and then set out for the Mun. It will do some test landings to see how it performs over the course of several biome hops and surface refuelings.

[Martian Emigrant]

Today I landed munned alighted touched down landed in the Mun Canyon for the first time.

 

I just happened to takeoff on my way to orbit and was low in the canyon. So I stopped all ground speed and stopped for a look see.

Of course I wasted my return fuel but the crew took great pictures.

 

They now orbit at 12km with no fuel but that is what rescue missions are for......Right?

 

ME

 

Edited September 10, 2020 by Martian Emigrant

[Astrionix]

@Kerbals_of_Steel I really like that spaceplane design. Looks kind of like Dream Chaser.

[Elro2k]

On 9/7/2020 at 12:11 AM, Angel-125 said:

I flew several missions to Starlab to deliver the components needed for permanent occupation:

Beautiful pictures! What visual mods are you using? What configs?

[Angelo Kerman]

1 hour ago, Elro2k said:

Beautiful pictures! What visual mods are you using? What configs?

That is JNSQ with scatterer, TUFX, and all the visual mods recommended by JNSQ

[RealKerbal3x]

I came back from a mini KSP hiatus today (first week of school after COVID-19 lockdown, so it was a bit too hectic to get any time to play) and got quite a lot done involving my various interplanetary probes. A long post ahead!

I had nothing to do in-game until the arrival of my Moho probe, which I launched a few IRL weeks back, so I decided to timewarp the 100 days forward. Here it is arriving in Moho's SOI and grabbing its first load of science.

The first insertion burn begins. In order to maximise the Oberth effect, I performed a large 1800m/s burn to capture into an elliptical orbit, before doing a second to circularise.

As the probe was coming in only a few kilometres over the north pole of Moho, I got this cool shot. Sadly I missed the Mohole as I was in map view at the time.

After capturing into orbit, I set up the circularisation burn, before realising that my Duna return probe was due to head off to Kerbin soon.

So...liftoff!

I launched this probe several months ago, before I realised that I could essentially ignore Probes Before Crew's requirement to return uncrewed planetary probes to Kerbin. But I decided that this vehicle may as well complete its originally intended mission.

Before long it reached orbit, and headed off to its secondary target, Ike.  I took a lot of screenshots here but I figured I could just condense it down to a few.

But wait! The Moho Explorer is circularising around, uh, Moho!

After that brief interlude, we return to the Duna system.

A nice pic of Duna setting as Triton I brakes into orbit around Ike. 

Ike may be a jerk if you're trying to simply enter the Duna system, but it's downright pleasant to land on.

After a while on the surface of Ike, it was time to return this probe to Kerbin! After leaving Ike's surface behind, I did several uneventful aerobrakes in Duna's atmosphere to circularise for my escape burn.

And speaking of an escape burn, here it is! I had a lot more dV left on board than the pre-launch simulations had suggested, so I was able to spend a little more fuel than I had expected.

Triton I is now on its way back to Kerbin, with a course correction burn in about 84 days and arrival in about 300. 

Between Moho Explorer (which will soon land a rover on Moho's surface) and Triton I visiting Ike, I collected over 1000 science points today. 

Those points will most likely go towards ISRU parts for my upcoming Mun and Minmus bases. Stay tuned for that

Edited September 11, 2020 by RealKerbal3x
Accidentally posted way too soon! Here's the entire post.

[RizzoTheRat]

Finally got my kOS aerocapture script working properly

 

Which means I can now land my returning ship

 

Still needs some work on the guidance to get it landing in the right place, but it'll do for now.

 

(Apologies for the length, my video editing software seems to be having issues)

Edited September 11, 2020 by RizzoTheRat

[Grogs]

The Icarus arrived at Mun Station where five kerbals loaded up and prepped for a Mun landing.

 

The destination was an anomaly located near the Mun's north pole. None of my other Mun landers had the dV to get there and back to the station safely. Descent is tail first just like any other lander.

 

The landing was in the highlands, so it was super hilly with slopes of 30 degrees or more. The wide landing legs kept the Icarus form rolling over even in this terrain.

 

Unfortunately, I didn't do a good job placing the scanner arm and it got smashed when I brought the nose down for landing. My only 'repair' option would be to return the ship to Kerbin and launch a new ship with the arm in a better location.

 

It also handled like a beast. Some tweaks of the traction control helped, but it still took 30 minutes to navigate the 1 km from the landing site to the anomaly. Apparently it isn't possible for the Claw to hook into a monolith, which makes sense given the 2001 lore.

 

Landing the Icarus completed a contract to build a new outpost. It just had to have power, an antenna, and space for 5 kerbals.

 

A view of the monolith (with a kerbal on top) and the Icarus for scale.

 

The only other item of note is that my relay satellite carrier made its transfer burn towards Duna. It's leaving well before the optimal transfer window so that the relay networks will be in place around Ike and Duna before the other ships start arriving.

[Guest]

Getting computer upgrades!!! 16 GB finally will be replacing my 8 GB! and finally a new cooling system! My current one is failing and sometimes powers off my computer sometimes

[Grogs]

When I opened my game and switched over to Gerbas Kermin, she was no longer standing on top of the monolith where I left her (see previous post). In fact, the monolith seemed to have disappeared along with the Icarus. Gerbas looks as confused as I was.

 

When I zoomed out, things became a little clearer. Umm, KSC, we have a bit of a problem here.

 

Switching over to the Icarus, it was now below the terrain and heading towards the center of the Mun. Maybe those drills work a little too well?

 

There was no easy fix I could see, so I had to ALT-F12 the ship and Gerbas back into orbit.

 

The ship still needed to take on fuel to get home, so I landed it in the Farside Crater next to my deployed science and started drilling again. Hopefully the problem with the terrain won't recur when I switch back to the Icarus again.

 

[Hotel26]

 

4 minutes ago, Grogs said:

Umm, KSC, we have a bit of a problem here

Are we not using WorldStabilizer?  Also: I note your drills were extended and operating...?  Do check that extending your drills does not lift your craft even partially off the ground.  (Shift them higher on your craft as necessary.)

[All of the above is folklore and superstition.  Your mileage may vary.]

Edited September 12, 2020 by Hotel26

[Grogs]

36 minutes ago, Hotel26 said:

 

Are we not using WorldStabilizer?  Also: I note your drills were extended and operating...?  Do check that extending your drills does not lift your craft even partially off the ground.  (Shift them higher on your craft as necessary.)

[All of the above is folklore and superstition.  Your mileage may vary.]

I've never needed anything like WorldStabilizer because the worst problem I've had before has been some bouncing landing legs. No gameplay mods at all - the most invasive thing I use in Mechjeb. And the drill placement is good - they're all the way in the Mk3 cargo bay and don't raise the ship.

My working hypothesis is that the game got confused because Gerbas was 30m above the ground (on top of the monolith) so it "fixed" the problem by bringing the ground up to where she was. .

Or maybe the monolith opened a portal and the crew were in the process of getting transported to another star system. I kind of like that idea.

[swjr-swis]

54 minutes ago, Grogs said:

Umm, KSC, we have a bit of a problem here.

This looks like an old problem from several KSP version ago resurfacing again, which makes sections of the surface randomly start floating away. Not sure if they ever found what the cause was, but I seem to remember it was much more likely to happen if you used the Scatterer mod.

[Kerbals_of_Steel]

On 9/10/2020 at 10:55 AM, Astrion said:

@Kerbals_of_Steel I really like that spaceplane design. Looks kind of like Dream Chaser.

Thank you. I'm quite proud of it myself. I can't say I had any real inspiration with that one, except that I always try to keep the A-4 Skyhawk in mind. Not so much visually, but in how the designer managed to achieve a negative growth loop. A smaller engine meant less fuel, so less weight. That led to needing a smaller wing, which meant no heavy wing folding mechanisms, which meant less weight still, which (ect, ect, ect). I realize I might be committing some form of sacrilege against the Kerbin gods and their need for booster sacrifices, but I quite enjoy making very compact, very capable, craft. 

I made Jeb a rocket car capable of de-and re-orbiting on the Mun and Minmus:

A small earth sciences/survey jet for Kerbin:

And of course, the water heater rocket from up thread a few days:

I think that one is really cool just for the weight vs. payload aspect. Yes, a one way landing on the Mun is probably the single simplest thing you can build a rocket for, but for a total weight of ~1.5 tons, a full ton of that was payload. Pretty nice mass fraction, even if I do say it myself.

All that brings me back to what I actually did do in KSP today. While I've got outposts and rovers all over portions of the Mun, none of them are really optimized for prospecting and the ruthless exploitation peaceful colonization of the Mun. I needed something that specialized in surface science and mining surveillance that was small and inexpensive enough to carpet bomb likely sites with them. Enter the Miniature Surface Explorer, 6th Edition (MSE-6):

 

Equipped with a Surface Scanner Module and a light scanning arm, it has room for further experiments inside the rear space frame, or even an RTG. This version is capable of landing itself from Munar orbit, and four of them fit comfortably in a 3.7m profile:

A 5m engine plate could host between 6 and 8 of them if needed. It also fits nicely into the short MK 2 cargo bay:

Operations hasn't said what they will do with this capability, but the last time anyone saw Gene, he was rummaging through his desk looking for a calendar and muttering to himself about "transferring hoomans". Nobody seems to know what that's about...

[purpleivan]

It was time once more for some scientific skullduggery in A Sciencing We Will Go.

Heroes were revealed.

Rovers were launched.

Rovers were landed.

Rovers were happy.

Rovers were really happy.

Then rovers were sad.

[purpleivan]

More antics with rovers today, as a redesigned version was sent to science base on the Mun.

With the rock that flummoxed the Mk1 rover having been was scanned, Shellwise (the pilot of the new rover) and scientist Miltop, went in search of bigger game.

Shellwise was curious to see what the scanning arm does... apparently it makes things orange.

With their bounty of science points in the bag, the pair headed back to base.

Next up it was the turn of the unkerballed program to do its part, with the Yay Magnets sent off to the Mun (and now heading to Minmus) to take magnetometer readings.

[Grogs]

I launched the second package for the Duna expedition.

 

The cargo is two survey satellites and two unkerbed rovers. One set will go to Duna and the other to Ike.

 

The ship made a brief stop at Kerbin Station in LKO to get just enough fuel to make it up to KEO station.

 

Then it moved up to KEO Station where the fuel tanks were completely filled from the large reserves there.

 

Over at Minmus, the ISRU rover finished fueling up a Giant MOFO XL tanker ...

 

... which then headed to orbit. It was topped off in Minmus orbit and then set off for KEO Station.

 

And a smaller S3 tanker took its place and started fueling up.

 

And I'm happy to report that Absolutely Nothing Happened Today in Sector 83 by 9 by 12 on the Mun. When I checked on it, the Icarus was sitting on the surface of the Mun drilling away.

[Okhin]

I had some contract about building a Mun base with ISRU and getting ore from Mun to Kerbin orbit. So I designed a rolling base for Mun.

It fits nicely under the bridge, and almost no wheels were broken. Valentina said it doesn't matter, because there's twelve wheel, so one or two or three can broke and still it's OK.

Since I do not have a lot of Kerbonauts, I recruited a pilot and an engineer to get this baby to the Mun.

Those wheels make for a big fairing. i tried to put some robotics in there, but they just exploded under the weight of everything. I'll try a different approach next time (I have to send things at Gilly soon).

Circularisation burn on a Rhino. You can now see the machine in a better way. The ISRU and drills are in the cargo bay, and that's 8 aerospikes for landing and flight. I did think about balancing the CoM on this craft, contrary to my previous one (currently docked at Minmus), and went for two belts of rocket fuel to attach them to the side, giving me a lot of dV.

Heading for the Mun Orbital Lab, for the level up. And waiting for the survey mission to actually exist. I totally forgot that I did not send a survey satellite around Mun.

So, let's repurpose one of those ion relay into a survey probe and send it to Mun, quick.

Solar panel deployed, coms OK, let's get this trans munar injection burn started, shall we ?

Circularisation down. Polarisation down too. The Cheetah is perfect for this kind of job. I'm also trying to get more efficient at jumping from SOI to SOI, so I'm working on aiming for low Periapsis (20km this time), which makes for way shorter burn for circularisation on high elliptic orbits. Which in turns makes those getting polar burns quite cheap. Next step is getting under 1000km and above 65km to survey the Mun.

Cheetah stage is gone, we can transmit data. And ... battery capacity is too small, so let's activate partial transfer on the antenna and just wait a long time for the data to be sent bit by bit, EC by EC. I need moar batteries on those survey probe, I always forgot how huge those reports are and all the EC they need.

So, with the survey data now online, we can land the Rolling Base[temporary name] to Mun. Right now, displaying the niceness of those brand newly unlocked aerospikes engines. For a TWR of 10 when empty, which surely should be enough.

Given the anemic torque of those twelve wheels (I tried with the bigger one, but I did not really liked the total lack of maneuverability they provide), and even if we can probably jump over, let's look for a not too cratery surface to land, with a good enough quantity of extractible ore.

And landed. On almost flat ground. It did not take a lot of time to slow this down (or even to accelerate). At this point i should probably add that this whole rolling thing, if I'm gonna dock everything in orbit each time, is not really working. I could probably do with static landing gear. But I think it looks kinda cool (and well, if I ever need to dock on the ground, I can do it).

While ore is being extracted and processed, our mustache crew is planting flags and stretching their legs a little bit.

And once their tank are filled with LfOx and ore, they took off, got an orbit of the Mun, and found a nice escape trajectory which will bring them back to an intercept of the Mun after one orbit around Kerbin, without any burn needed, allowing to complete the contract and get back to a docked position around Mun.

And now, they wait for their next assignment.

Which will probably be to transfer to Minmus to make some crew rotation with Bill, who's still over there in an unbalanced ore extractor which will probably be trashed. I do have some infrastructure to deploy there too, and a mission to Gilly to prepare which will probably be a huge train of hardware for Eve SOI, including a lander to get the girls landed there back up into orbit, as well as some fuel processing capability. I'll have to send it in two craft (to get the docking around Gilly contract). Should be fun.

I also have to catch a new moon for Mun (a class E asteroid to put into orbit of Mun), and to rescue some stranded kerboauts in low sun orbit. How did they strand themselves there is a question for another day (and for another kind of kerbals).

[Tonka Crash]

Engineers had to fix communication issues at the Mun Astronomical Observatory.

MInus construction site got a supply drop and the work crew finally arrived.  The big rover at the left is built around a Extraplanetary Launchpads Workshop full of engineers.

[Tonka Crash]

Supply run bringing ore up from the Mun to the Orbitial Shipyard.

[Kerbals_of_Steel]

Bill and Jeb had an awesome adventure today. They landed with Bob at the North Rim outpost and quickly brought the new life support systems online, then  jumped in the Watney MK I rover and started the 15km trek down to the main base in the East Crater:

Crawling down one of the more accessible portions of the North Rim:

They first stopped by the refinery site and added life support to the Mobile Mining Command module, here Jeb is using the rover's winch to pull an nearby drop ship a little closer to the worksite for Bill:

And doing the same thing over at the main base, dragging parts closer to the Science Lab:

That used up much of the available daylight, but Bill had time for one more rover ride, taking his flatbed rover on a salvage mission to the crash site of one errant dropship:

 

As he and Jeb were settling in for an all-night pinochle tournament,  bad news struck. Bob reported an unprovoked Kraken attack on the North Rim outpost. Details are still coming in...

Edited September 13, 2020 by Kerbals_of_Steel