What did you do in KSP1 today?

[dprostock]

Despite the BSP, Dres!!!!!

The next jump, it's a Jool 5!
 

[CoreI]

Today I focused my efforts on a mission to nail down exactly where my Munar base (to be names Ceres) will be. Additionally, I wanted to finish an old contract to return a probe from the Mun. Why not do both at once?

Here's the landing platform. Not only does it bring the scout river and return rocket to the surface, but it also acts as a comm relay for both vessels once they separate.

 

The landing platform once the rover is deployed. I was a little worried about something going wrong with the decoupler, but the separation went off without a hitch.

 

The rover found nice, flat spot on the rim of a crater. Bonus points for the view being pretty!

 

Return rocket separation went well too, not only fulfilling a contract, but also delivering some science back to Kerbin.

I've attempted missions of this complexity before, but never had anywhere close to a complete success. Fortunately this time it achieved all the desired objectives, and then some. Hopefully the deployment of Ceres Base to the site I found goes just as well.

[Leopard]

On 2/28/2021 at 7:06 PM, Jacke said:

The logging is built into the game.  The reporting isn't automatic for various reasons, personal privacy among them.  Any change in that is up to Squad.

But Squad details how to go about finding the logs, as the first link in my signature details.  Mod authors can do little to properly track down bugs without good details of how the bugs were encountered and the logs to give them the details around what actually happened inside the program.

You can curse the darkness.  Or take the steps to light a candle.  You have to work with the system as it is.

a game shouldn't be collecting anything to violate personal privacy, it shouldn't need to know enough to do that in order to run, I highly doubt this install of KSP knows for example my real name, because I've never told it that information.

 

its also worth noting my original point was an observation, thats what I was doing on that day, watching mechjeb crash things even I could get to orbit, indeed I only use it to automate things I know works - its currently acting up, so I'm not using it as much.

 

to dat no Kerbals have been lost, due to the craft having suitable abort mechanics, a few payloads get wetter than intended but thats because uncrewed craft don't get the abort options.

 

I'm treating it as an in game system failure and working around it.

 

and no, you don't have to work with things as they are or we would all still be living in caves somewhere thinking this "fire" stuff was far too risky and we had managed without so far.

 

I've worked with systems where humans are responsible for gathering data and making reports, and where they are just responsible for instigating the report, the second category gathers more information but also a lot more consistent information, and more people make the reports - make it easy to get the information and it happens, make it time consuming, especially in a game, and you will get a lot less feedback and it will likely be a lot more variable - e.g. in what people call individual controls and events

[The Destroyer]

I landed on the planet Mercury in RSS/RO/RP1!

 

[dprostock]

On 2/28/2021 at 4:06 PM, Jacke said:

You can curse the darkness.  Or take the steps to light a candle.  You have to work with the system as it is.

Candela?
Fire?
There should be a mod to be able to hang a lemon on the access door of the capsules.

[KaliDitzy]

Just send a new module with a mobile processing lab up to my space station, I feel pretty good about it.

I built and entirely new rocket for the occasion, the Eirene I, and made it specifically for delivering parts up to the space station.



I put one of my previously designed modules that I had planned to launch to the space station (the one I chose being the mobile processing lab module, which I would not regret) in the payload fairing, and got ready for launch.

Milsey Kerman, a scientist, will join in on the journey as well, inside the mobile processing lab.



Later on in the launch for my orbital burn (I'm using a custom galaxy skybox I made):



After another three maneuvers or so, I began my burn to line up with my space station, and began slowly crawling to it (because I'm way too cautious, but I guess caution isn't exactly a bad thing!)



And then I docked after a "few" more pushes from the RCS thrusters, and then.....



I undocked my rocket from the lab module, and before I had a chance to activate my retrograde engines, I accidentally turned up the main engines to full thrust instead of activating the retrograde engines, a total screw-up on my end, I need to stop being so trigger-happy with the Z key and deactivate my engines when docking...

In other news, I saved when I docked, so I was able to recover it.



Look at her, so majestically dumb, look at all of those clumped round RCS tanks (before I realized I had cylindrical RCS tanks unlocked), cockpits for the middle of the station, absolutely brilliant.

Now that I'm moving on to 2.5m parts for my station rather than 1.25m, I wont have a chance to use that 6-sided port, which kind of disappoints me, but it's a necessary change.

This is my average space station mission, pretty average to be honest.

An off-topic note:
VoidSquid, if you're reading this, I didn't get around to doing the relay constellation, obviously will take much more preparation and skill for me to learn, I have no idea how I'm supposed to do triangle formations perfectly spaced apart, Lol. My current janky relay system will have to do for now.

[KaliDitzy]

Oh yes, another thing to add, I made a custom flag, check it out 

Not exactly proud of it, flag-wise, and by that I mean it breaks many principals of flag design (primarily the lack of minimalism and the rule of no text on a flag), but it doesn't matter too much to me.

[StrandedonEarth]

My career has (literally!) hit a fork ,and I can't decide which path to take....

Background:

My whimsically-named Mars Base had just arrived in a low Duna polar orbit. The fully-laden  Duna MinerRefiner soon passed under its orbital plane, just as the base was passing overhead, and launched into an intercept trajectory. With a little tweaking during the coast phase, a 0.0km intercept was created, closing at several hundred m/s. But due to confusion and indecision while setting up the rendezvous burn, um, well.... I was in map mode and suddenly the navball went crazy....

That expanding debris cloud in the background? Yup, that's what's left of both ships. the DMR core at center has shed about 90% of it's mass/parts, as well as two crew, But everyone survived! I now have five kerbals in two separate cabins on suborbital trajectories; I've proven that one can parachute back down and survive. The three base crew are in a decaying orbit (or would be if KSP modelled decay). But as per SOP, the crew quicksaved before lifting, and in a panic they saved again while screaming for rescue....

So now I have a choice: write off a contract or two and try to rescue these wretches, with the unique challenges that will pose (like trying to keep five freefalling kerbals somewhat together, or rendezvousing with wreckage in a decaying orbit). Or load the quicksave  (pretending Disby had a bad dream) and go out my mundane, routine career (launch, plot, burn, land, rinse, repeat) where disasters only happen in nightmares...

I think I may have to accept failure as an option this time and go rescue those poor wretches. I may have some vacant seats on some craft in the area, but not in polar orbit...

(we need a facepalm emoji, but this'll do) 

E: Funny how they can be all smiles when they're 120km above Duna on a suborbital trajectory with no engines.

Edited March 3, 2021 by StrandedonEarth

[Cavscout74]

There is no doubt about it now - my Mun rover mission is cursed.  The 3rd attempt almost made a successful landing - the transfer stage has higher TWR than the skycrane that carries the rover, and it provides a good portion of the landing dV.  But when I separated from the transfer stage, i was too fast & too low to finish braking with the skycrane.  Not by much - landing was at about 9 m/s, which was enough to break one of the 4 wheels, turning the rover into a ground station.

The fourth attempt nearly ended in the atmosphere when a radial decoupler failed on one of the boosters.  Luckily, it failed moments before  booster separation, and while it did strike the core rocket, it wasn't hard enough to rupture the fuel tanks and total dV loss was probably no more than 25 m/s.   Everything else went according to plan, and the MunRover-1d set down just over a kilometer from the intended LZ.  After driving to site Alpha, I stopped for the night - site Beta is in some fairly steep terrain, and, well, luck has not been with me so far and I don't want to rush.

In other news, my Eve-Vorona probe departed for Kerbin's neighbor.   This will be my first visit to Eve in JNSQ and I'm curious to see how the Probes Plus Formalhauf lander (inside the big ball) handles Eve's atmosphere.  Stock scale Eve tends to burn off all the ablator on it, so I edited the part to have twice as much in the hopes that it will protect it.

 

[Lisias]

I spent the last two days trying to fix a problem using a very simple craft on career.

Once I managed to work around the problem, I thought to myself... "Hell, why not?" And launched the thing!

But then I realised that on that early stages of Career (that problem only affected Career), the Kerbonaut was unable to EVA his way into safety....

Boy, this is going to hurt...

Spoiler

ROYALLY!!!!

-- -- -- 

I'm the KSP-Recall maintainer and I wish to ask for help on testing a work around for a problem affecting a lot of Add'Ons (technically, everything that uses the IPartCostModifier). If you know of an Add'On that is having problems on getting back Funds on recovering crafts, please advise on the KSP-Recall's thread!

Edited March 3, 2021 by Lisias
Tyops, tyops, tyops everywehre!!!!

[Kerbals_of_Steel]

Launched my first orbital only spaceship, the Njord:

Njord is intended for long term near-Kerbin operations, capable of hauling 8 Kerbals (9 if one is stashed in the airlock) anywhere in the Kerbin SOI with full life support and plenty of habitation space. It also carries a full set of repair tools and supplies, a built in science lab, communications facilities, a full suite of science instruments and a plethora of docking ports. The modular nature of the center spine allows science, storage and auxiliary fuel tanks to be quickly swapped out in orbit, maximizing the ships versatility. Like any sea or spacefarer, though, it takes plenty of support to send them out and bring them home safely to port. For the Njord, this includes the Skadi supply rocket/tanker:

The Draken orbital taxi:

And the Freya class lander (also note the NERV engineering testbed being hauled to the Mun for a contract experiment, and the device on the bow docking port):

That may look like a grappling and engineering pod for deep space repair work, and indeed it does have a claw, parts storage, accessibility ladders and a potent RCS system for orbital tug duties. What it actually is, however, is a contract satellite for Maxo Construction Toys. See, it has an antenna, can generate power, and is clearly clad in Maxo's distinct livery:

So far Njord has made three journeys to the Mun; one maiden voyage for crew experience and science, one tourist run, and one more that returned a lost Kerbal and her pod to Kerbin.

Njord and its valiant crew have also made the journey to Minmus, completing a full orbital survey of the mini-moon and deploying the Frey miniature lander for surface science and some repair contracts:

 

Bill even snuck in some R&R when it was his turn on the surface:

 

 

[Jacke]

9 hours ago, dprostock said:

There should be a mod to be able to hang a lemon on the access door of the capsules.

Ah...no.  I'm not at all superstitious.  But to replicate what happened long ago, considering what happened after, is to tempt fate.

 

6 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

My whimsically-named Mars Base had just arrived in a low Duna polar orbit. The fully-laden  Duna MinerRefiner soon passed under its orbital plane, just as the base was passing overhead, and launched into an intercept trajectory. With a little tweaking during the coast phase, a 0.0km intercept was created, closing at several hundred m/s. But due to confusion and indecision while setting up the rendezvous burn, um, well.... I was in map mode and suddenly the navball went crazy....

I have somewhat mastered manual rendezvous and docking.  Getting that first close encounter is the initial far rendezvous.  Then you respectively null the relative velocity, then thrust towards, and wait for the next close approach.  If any of those get to under 100m, be certain it's much bigger than the spacecraft or back it off.  You want to be going slower on each leg of close rendezvous so that the actual encounter at a distance similar to the size of the crafts is very slow and controllable.

 

Quote

That expanding debris cloud in the background? Yup, that's what's left of both ships. the DMR core at center has shed about 90% of it's mass/parts, as well as two crew, But everyone survived! I now have five kerbals in two separate cabins on suborbital trajectories; I've proven that one can parachute back down and survive. The three base crew are in a decaying orbit (or would be if KSP modelled decay). But as per SOP, the crew quicksaved before lifting, and in a panic they saved again while screaming for rescue....

So now I have a choice: write off a contract or two and try to rescue these wretches, with the unique challenges that will pose (like trying to keep five freefalling kerbals somewhat together, or rendezvousing with wreckage in a decaying orbit). Or load the quicksave  (pretending Disby had a bad dream) and go out my mundane, routine career (launch, plot, burn, land, rinse, repeat) where disasters only happen in nightmares...

I think I may have to accept failure as an option this time and go rescue those poor wretches. I may have some vacant seats on some craft in the area, but not in polar orbit...

(we need a facepalm emoji, but this'll do) 

E: Funny how they can be all smiles when they're 120km above Duna on a suborbital trajectory with no engines.

I'd say give the rescue a try if you're will to take the challenge.  Or willing to live with the consequences of additional failures.  It will definitely be less mundane than just reloading and avoiding the fateful failure.  And you still have the quicksave if it's just too much.

 

5 hours ago, Cavscout74 said:

There is no doubt about it now - my Mun rover mission is cursed.  The 3rd attempt almost made a successful landing - the transfer stage has higher TWR than the skycrane that carries the rover, and it provides a good portion of the landing dV.  But when I separated from the transfer stage, i was too fast & too low to finish braking with the skycrane.  Not by much - landing was at about 9 m/s, which was enough to break one of the 4 wheels, turning the rover into a ground station.

I find staging close to landing so risky.  You have to be cold and absolutely certain on the landing sequence.  If it's a simple lander and it's dumping a breaking stage, like on the Surveyor Moon landers, that can work as you just avoid the dumped stage.  Note that Surveyor had 2.5 minutes after the burnout of its breaking stage for the rest of its landing (though it's hard to design as tightly as real-world spacecraft),

Mind you, the Surveyor's had a crazy trajectory, partly due to having a Centaur upper stage early in its life and uncertain of on-orbit restart.  So the Atlas-Centaur launched the Surveyor straight into the Trans-Lunar Trajectory, no parking orbit.   Aimed at the future location of the landing location, no Lunar parking orbit either, just a mid-course correction or two.  Then close to the Lunar surface (73 down to 11km), a Star-37 solid-fuel motor fired to kill most of the relative velocity and the Surveyor landed on its 3 hydrazine+oxidizer (likely either IFRNA or N₂O₄) over the next 2.5 minutes.

But as you showed, practice makes perfect, even for landing sequences.

Edited March 3, 2021 by Jacke

[jimmymcgoochie]

I think I just found the single most valuable science experiment ever: the RP-1 digital imaging satellite part. It’s 3 metres wide, weighs 6 tons, and over the course of 20 years it will return...

Ten thousand science.

TEN THOUSAND SCIENCE!!!

Crunch the numbers and that’s a steady supply of one science per day, per satellite with this part active on it. It requires a very precise set of parameters to actually work- orbit above 350km, eccentricity below 0.00 (so it needs to be almost perfectly circular) and has an upper limit on radiation which limits the orbits to being relatively equatorial to avoid the Earth’s radiation belts; it also produces a lot of data per second, almost as much as the fastest communications systems can manage with a direct connection to the three big DSN stations instead of the puny little ground stations, so actually sending it all back down to the surface will be tricky, but ten thousand science...

Ironically enough, I can’t actually use that science right now as I have every available tech tree node already researching, but so what? TEN. THOUSAND. SCIENCE!

[Hotel26]

My very first envoy to Eeloo will be arriving in 1h 50m to top up fuel for departure (in 7d), so KX1 Pole Star has begun preparation...

[Translation from Kerbalese: "all KSC Mission Controllers are instructed to change wallpaper on all mission-critical monitors"]

Edited March 3, 2021 by Hotel26

[Caerfinon]

A little night flying to a remote mountain research facility. Dark and misty... queue zombies! (oops, wrong game)

[BadOaks]

I started a new JNSQ career in 1.11. Some of the gameplay mods I'm playing with this time are Kerbalism, Construction Time, and Principia.

After a few hours the Zeta III was the first rocket I made that was able to orbit *anything*. The first stage was the only one with any kind of attitude control, so trajectory and timing were key and I had a few failed launches from the 3rd stage rotating too much downward before finishing the orbital insertion. But it worked more often than it didn't, and the primitive satellites it carried collected a good amount of science from MITE and SITE experiments.

Zeta IV was much more capable and all 3 stages had attitude control. SRB first stage and a fin-stabilized, long burning upper stage. Still slightly too small for manned vehicles, but it put up some scansat satellites and a pair of materials bays.

The Zeta V replaces the Zeta IV's lower stage with a powerful LFO booster using 5 swivel engines, and can put a manned capsule in orbit with 1600 m/s spare. Val got the honor of being the first Kerbal in orbit.

On the second manned flight, Jeb rendezvoused with a materials bay and spacewalked over to retrieve its science payload. I learned that Principia is VEEERRRRYYY different in how it handles orbital maneuvers and flight planning. It took me awhile to figure things out but I think I'm starting to get the hang of it.

[Caerfinon]

With the right aircraft and pilot, you can collect science from anywhere.

[Cavscout74]

10 hours ago, Jacke said:

Mind you, the Surveyor's had a crazy trajectory, partly due to having a Centaur upper stage early in its life and uncertain of on-orbit restart.  So the Atlas-Centaur launched the Surveyor straight into the Trans-Lunar Trajectory, no parking orbit.   Aimed at the future location of the landing location, no Lunar parking orbit either, just a mid-course correction or two.  Then close to the Lunar surface (73 down to 11km), a Star-37 solid-fuel motor fired to kill most of the relative velocity and the Surveyor landed on its 3 hydrazine+oxidizer (likely either IFRNA or N₂O₄) over the next 2.5 minutes.

Probably my favorite parts of the Probes Plus mod are the Surveyor components.   Works just like the real one - Star-37 does the bulk of the braking, with the 3 little LFO motors for the final landing.  Being KSP, there is usually plenty of dV for a proper parking orbit at both ends though.  Not quite a perfect replica due to 30-part limit for the VAB but still looks pretty good:

I actually was using a pair of the same Surveyor motors for my mini-rover skycrane, which is why the TWR was so low.

Edited March 3, 2021 by Cavscout74

[xendelaar]

I made a cannon that could hurl a Kerbal from the Mun to Minmus with one simple push of a button.
The cannon weighs around 70 tonnes and contains 13 vector engines all clipped into one.
With the hinges and wheels, I'm able to pin point a trajectory fairly accurate. Although it took me a lot of time to find the sweet spot for Minmus.
It launches a Kerbal at 350G into space.
Landing on Minmus costs around 300 m/s delta V. I used Jeb's jetpack for that.

I made a small video displaying its awesome power... please forgive the tasteless "story" ...

 

[Francois424]

Today we didn't get much done... But let's recap the last 2 KSP days !

First, the Duna team.  Apparently from Morning until Dusk is not enough to completely refuel this beast of a rover.
However, getting to 3/4 full load is actually pretty good.  KSC weighted the options, and decided to tell the team to get as much fuel as they can, and proceed again with an all nighter of driving.
Jeb was happy about it... The others?  Not so much, the memory of yesterday's brush with disaster was still too fresh.

Agawise got creative in maximizing the amount of solar influx on the solar pannels.  Can you see what she did?  Yup, tilted the rover 5-10 degrees by retracting the port landing wheels.  It also prolonged the amount of time we could mine until the driving session.

Which just started.  We're about 50 or so kilometers from the northern ice shelf of Duna's poles, and the terrain is becoming quite hilly and dangerous. In fact the Rover bounced around and even did a Barrel roll at some point.  No damage except for foul language to report !

 

Then the engineers at KSC were all busy designing some kind of refueler, they also had to create a vacuum transfer stage with good Delta-V for Kerbin SoI.
We already had the "Explorer" line of those, but they were extremely expensive to get into orbit.  So it launched without much issues (after MANY failed simulations, of course) and headed to the Mün for it's trials.

What has been called "Team 2" (composed of six, mostly KSP cadets and unskilled rescuees) will learn :
 - How to use the quad-drills to get ore on Mün/Minmus and manage load vs Thrust-to-Weight issues
 - Docking procedures to an orbiting  spacecraft
 - Getting into polar orbit and use the Ore Scanner to pinpoint the best mining spots
 - Get familiar in Low-G environments using the personal RCS suit and planting flags without falling on their faces.
 - Take a quick peek outside Kerbin SoI before returning home on Kerbin with the Ares Capsule
 - All of this in tight quarters and without feeling the need to want to get rid of your neighbors during the total length of the mission. 
KSC teachers assures that this will produce 3 star kerbonauts for future missions.

Mun maneuvers performed like a champ, even with the low THR of the engine section.  Please substract points on the cadet scores for forgetting to scan for ore in polar orbit.

Perfect landing approach, proving that Dangas, the 2-star pilot, knows what she is doing.  Please substract points on the engineer's score for building RCS nozzles BELOW the engine bells...  They can't handle the heat.

Very smooth landing in the Münar Midland where the ore concentration is at the highest.  Please add points to the cadets for reading the previous Mün missions logs and picking a great spot.

 

The mining ship which haven't been given a name yet can hold 12k ore into those radial tanks tucked in, and run all four drills and a large convert-o-tron without overheating.
On the Mün's gravity tho, I had to disable 8 of those ore tanks as the quad "Cheetah" engines don't have the power to lift it up.  Not a problem on Minmus tho.
Without Ore, it has nearly 4.5k delta-V, fully loaded while on the Mün, that drops to 2k (or 2.4 with those disabled tanks).  So far the trials are quite promising, if only that I like to haul 25-50k ore usually but that will have to wait for more end-game technologies.

That's all for today, thanks for reading !

 

 

 

 

12 hours ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

Ten thousand science.

TEN THOUSAND SCIENCE!!!

TEN. THOUSAND. SCIENCE!

Edited March 3, 2021 by Francois424

[Dr. Boo]

Jool is broken or it is turning into a black hole in latest version... I don't know if it is a bug or a new feature but you can go deeper in Jool than ever before,  got tired at -200k it is all dark anyway.
Thinking someone might want to explore it more...

[KaliDitzy]

AGHHHH!

I lost my save...
I updated KSP from 1.10 finally and a lot of mods were breaking with the new update, I had to clear out a huge bunch of my mods and reinstall some, so my save is likely incompatible now, but- I'm not entirely mad to be honest, I've actually been wanting to start fresh for a while since I know a lot more now.

I also installed some new mods (being Parallax and Near Future Technologies), and the ones I reinstalled being EVE, SVE, and Scatterer (the visual mods I had to reinstall because the sky and space appeared white because the versions I had were outdated, but Kerbin looks shiny new with these new versions, especially since this time I installed them correctly and followed the instructions.)

Welp, a new save is another window to experiment and have more fun, and since I'm a lot more skilled than when I started my last save, I can get a lot more done much quicker, and in a way that involves much less clutter.

Here is a photo of the flea, the starting rocket, the dawn of anew.

[Caerfinon]

2 hours ago, Sqoosh said:

Welp, a new save is another window to experiment and have more fun, and since I'm a lot more skilled than when I started my last save, I can get a lot more done much quicker, and in a way that involves much less clutter.

This is the way

[Jacke]

9 hours ago, xendelaar said:

It launches a Kerbal at 350G into space.

I think you've discovered how Mystery Goo is made.

[Pipcard]

1965-06-12 - Himawari-3 weather satellite