What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Cavscout74]

The Minmus automated sample return mission landed safely, collected samples & launched the return capsule back to Kerbin.

Next, my second manned Mun landing, with Val & Bob, was completed on the far side of the Mun.  They kept the surface mission fairly short to avoid giving Gene a heart attack waiting to reestablish communications. 

It was followed shortly thereafter by Jeb & Kelrik becoming the first kerbals in Minmus orbit.  Seconds after establishing a 25km orbit, Jeb decided they had just enough dV to make a very dangerous landing on the Minmus basins with the GPV's orbital engine.  Jeb figured (correctly) he could keep the GPV steady with RCS while Kelrik jumped out quickly, planted a flag & grabbed soil samples before blasting back into orbit.  The plan worked, but they ended up with just 29 m/s dV after leaving Minmus orbit (and less than half a tank of monoprop).   Since Jeb performed his stunt when they were out of contact with mission control, the only clue was taking a few minutes longer than expected to come back over the horizon & reestablishing contact.  Jeb & Kel decided to wait till they landed and turn in not only soil samples but a Minmus greenstone after recovery. They are currently 5 days out from reentry.

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

I also put a 3 satellite comm relay network around Mun and launched an IR observer to solar orbit

[Rylant]

On 5/10/2021 at 7:53 AM, adsii1970 said:

It only took eight launches to complete my Minmus-orbiting heavy ore refining and refueling platform.

So good. That looks amazing. I would love to be able to do this. I am decent at docking, my problem is that I am just not creative. I can’t come up with designs like this. I may steal some of your ideas and get something like this going. 
 

Let me ask, you move the ore on Minmus and then transport it to the station to refine? It looks truly awesome. 
 

Rylant

[Stewcumber]

I finally went to Duna after practicing a bit on the Mun and Minmus. I ruined my rocket though by putting nuclear engines on it and changing to larger liquid fuel only for the lander and return vehicle, the extra weight (or something else) messed up the ship in general and I had a lot less Dv in total. I limped to orbit.

I got to Duna using half my lander fuel. I had attached a single central LV45 (or whatever it is called) to help me get off Duna if needed but it turned out I didn't need it so I siphoned the liquid fuel from that to the peripheral tanks used by the nuclear engines when I landed for a full tank of fuel each.

I had a nice sunrise

I had a nice drive to the north pole. Duna is lonely.

This rover is much improved, or the increased gravity on Duna helped a lot. Got some sweet air

I like the new lights

Anyway once I had driven around I decided to go home. Yeah, 90L of liquid fuel does not get you very far, not quite the grand trip back to Kerbin I had envisaged.

I let them die because I can't ever see myself rescuing them. Geofwall, Shepton and The Engineery One knew the risks going in!

Back home I made a memorial - really naff with fairy lights like Shepton would have wanted. I also made a lorry to carry it to the Squad monolith. It was a bit of a bother grabbing it and putting it on my lorry as the iteration of the monument pictured bounced around and exploded whenever I tried to pick it up. When I strutted it together and could pick it up without it exploding, I then realised I forgot to turn on 'same ship interaction' or whatever it is called for the lorry bed.

So I drove it to the monolith just dangling from the crane, a lot like a wrecking ball. I eventually managed to jacknife the lorry driving in a straight line (albeit with a pendulum on the back!) and rolled the lorry when I was nearly at the monolith. Ah well, I'll get it there after work today.

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

I had an epiphany of sorts yesterday about solar panels.

Those big solar wings house a total of 44 Gigantors, which weigh almost half a ton each when they’re set to high quality with Kerbalism to make them less failure-prone. Add in the structural girders they’re mounted on and those solar wings weigh at least 20 tons.

Parked in Kerbin orbit, I’m getting nearly a thousand power per second out of them- monstrous overkill when I need less than 20 with everything switched on. The only reason I added so many Gigantors was to produce enough power out at Eeloo, but the sun is so weak there that the same solar arrays that generate 980EC/a at Kerbin manage just 17EC/s at Eeloo, which is less than 1EC per ton of solar panel.

And that got me thinking- why am I lugging around all those big, heavy, breakable solar panels when they’re dead weight almost everywhere I go, when instead I could use RTGs for power far from the sun and let the four Gigantors on the ship’s main body handle everything from Duna down. To get the 20EC/s I need at Eeloo requires about 27 RTGs; with a half-life of 28 years and some intermittent use of power-hungry systems I might as well take 50 to be on the safe side. 50 RTGs will be dramatically lighter than the solar panels, they can’t break or fail and while they emit radiation they can be positioned far away from the crew modules so they aren’t a hazard to the crew.

I should have thought of this much earlier!

[Hotel26]

For fun, I built a small space station for tourists.  (Not a lot of mods & cons.)

 

All the components, including a Lance MP tug and this "Bucky Ball" station hub fit inside Mk3 cargo bays (3 flights to transport and assemble the whole deal).

 

The tug is easily able to detach & transport 1 or more of the HAL passenger components to other locations in orbit.

 

I computed today there's about 12.3 m³ of space inside the Bucky Ball (pi.r².h) and I'm very tempted to clip some MP storage in there...  so that would be, like, 1,500 kallons.

Yeah, let's just call it "Kraken reparations"! 

Edited May 17, 2021 by Hotel26

[ColdJ]

Well I may not be able to change the orientation and position of my Kerbal passenger in my 2 Kerbal mk1 inline stock pod, without a mesh editor.  But after slowly working out how seat prop rotation works(much different from part rotation) I can at least make them comfortable.

[king of nowhere]

in the past days, i landed on laythe at the equator and i flew a small airplane all the way to the green monolith - which in my case spawned somewhere north of crescent bay.

then i returned to my lander. i did not bother with testing it, it had 3100 m/s and one should only need 2900 to orbit laythe.

unfortunately, between high drag and low thrust, the lander turned out to be unfit for the task. it misses orbit by at least 400 m/s. it's not even close enough for the orbiter to come grab it from a suborbital trajectory.

so i had to revert back to a previous save and take care to land on top of a mountain. starting at 4500 m, the lander can reach orbit with a comfortable margin.

of course, i'll have to replay a few days worth of gaming

[krblman]

Smashed Jebediah Kerman into the surface of Duna by accident and forgot to quicksave

[FezCool]

I noticed that I had an Eeloo Transfer window open so I merged an unused mothership design with a simple lander and put it on a giant rocket that is way too big in my opinion. 

I

I flew it out and messed around way too long with Maneuver nodes only to kinda give up and just do a correction burn at our Sun DN.

I also had a bunch of my Joolbound spacecraft correction burns come up but I didn't take pictures of that.

[Sarxis]

I went paramotoring. 

 

[Angelo Kerman]

I wrote a small ModuleManager patch to let me drop the EVA parts that I keep forgetting to remove from the crew:

I'd LOVE to be able to deploy ground parts while splashed down in the water (they would be aquatic parts), but @SQUAD's ModuleInventoryPart doesn't let me override what I need in order to do that, unfortunately.

But still, this is pretty convenient for me. For those interested, here's the patch:

Spoiler

@PART[evaJetpack,evaCylinder,evaRepairKit,evaScienceKit]
{
    %buoyancy = 0

    @MODULE[ModuleCargoPart]
    {
        @name = ModuleGroundPart
    }
}

@PART[evaChute]
{
    @MODULE[ModuleCargoPart]
    {
        @name = ModuleGroundPart
    }
}

@PART[groundLight1,groundLight2]
{
    %buoyancy = 0
}

 

[Mukita12]

Uh this

Long Story Short: I forgot to put enough dV on the landing stage of my lander but still managed to land thanks to my Orbital stage of my lander. However, upon docking with the mothership, i forgot to transfer Jeb to the Mothership... which mean i kill him.

https://imgur.com/gallery/wxwgZ6H

Edited May 18, 2021 by Mukita12

[Caerfinon]

The boring bits

Air travel is fun and glamourous, but it has its mundane bits too.... keeping under the speed limit on the taxiways is one of them.

 

[FezCool]

After spending a while in deep space I decided to take some time off during the 4 year gap until the Jool Expedition arrives and send a rover to the moon for a nice little road trip.

Nelzor has some fun with the Mun's surface features

I also decided to test out the desert runway and noticed something sus...

[king of nowhere]

On 5/17/2021 at 5:13 PM, king of nowhere said:

in the past days, i landed on laythe at the equator and i flew a small airplane all the way to the green monolith - which in my case spawned somewhere north of crescent bay.

then i returned to my lander. i did not bother with testing it, it had 3100 m/s and one should only need 2900 to orbit laythe.

unfortunately, between high drag and low thrust, the lander turned out to be unfit for the task. it misses orbit by at least 400 m/s. it's not even close enough for the orbiter to come grab it from a suborbital trajectory.

so i had to revert back to a previous save and take care to land on top of a mountain. starting at 4500 m, the lander can reach orbit with a comfortable margin.

of course, i'll have to replay a few days worth of gaming

Fwd: I tried to figure out why the lander flew so badly it did not seem to have such a poor aerodinamic, by eye. ok, there was a big clamp-o-tron in the back, but it was just one. so i checked with the aerodinamics menu. and i discovered my lander was actually quite fine, except for a kraken intervention

for you see, all three clamp-o-trons have similar drag value. the one in the back was expected, but the other two are docking each other, they should be covered. they should be no more draggy than the fuel tank. instead, the game glitched and is now thinking they are both exposed to the elements in full.

I can further confirm that this is a glitch because it happened during laythe descent. i tried to go from orbit to surface directly with the alt-f12, and then i could fly just fine, no drag from the two used docking ports.

I checked (after teleporting there a puff engine to enable the command pod to move on its own) whether undocking and redocking the parts would fix it. well, it fixed one of the ports, not both. i decided it was not worth the effort.

there is also this strange case here, when drag has already gone down significantly with the thinner atmosphere, except for one single docking port, which alone accounts for, like, 70% of the total drag of the rocket. No idea there, but drag changes with orientation, and I suspect I happened to hit a reverse equivalent of a magic wing: something that makes a lot more drag than it should.

 

So, my design was actually functional. i could have gone to orbit, even from sea level. i could have gone to orbit with 500 m/s left from the mountain top. instead, i barely made it.

Goddamn kraken.

[Singhnaut]

Almost launched an EXTREMELY simple rocket into orbit but didn't cause I want Jeb to live. It consisted of an mk3 command pod, decoupler, S3-14400 tank, adapters, and a rhino engine. Check it out on the steam workshop. Titled babyboom (srsly its something nasa should use)

Its super durable as well. Survived reentry without heat shield, survived fuel depletion, survived starship-style landing (At least the command pod did), survived the kraken (Which destroyed the shield) and most impressively, survived JEB. 

42 minutes ago, FezCool said:

After spending a while in deep space I decided to take some time off during the 4 year gap until the Jool Expedition arrives and send a rover to the moon for a nice little road trip.

Nelzor has some fun with the Mun's surface features

I also decided to test out the desert runway and noticed something sus...

Luke skywalker be making sandpyramids tho

23 hours ago, Sarxis said:

I went paramotoring. 

 

Mechjeb vs jeb who would win

[swjr-swis]

Jeb finally got annoyed enough by the grand posturing of neighbouring agencies, and told the lab boys it was time we had an aircraft carrier of our own. "And make it BIG!", it echoed through the hallway as he left the research staff flabbergasted on how to accomplish this new commission.

"It's called Praying Mantis?! What kind of diminutive bug of a ship have you boys concocted? I said BIG, and I mea..... oh."

 

Craft file: https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/SWiS-Carrier-I-Praying-Mantis

[FezCool]

34 minutes ago, swjr-swis said:

Cut for posterity

Darn that's pretty cool!

[Kerminator K-100]

22 hours ago, Angel-125 said:

But still, this is pretty convenient for me. For those interested, here's the patch:

 

I've never made a config patch, where would I put it?

[Caerfinon]

11 minutes ago, Kerminator K-100 said:

I've never made a config patch, where would I put it?

in a folder in your GameData.
I use GameData/Caerfinon/Patches for the ones I write

[ColdJ]

44 minutes ago, Kerminator K-100 said:

I've never made a config patch, where would I put it?

 

31 minutes ago, Caerfinon said:

in a folder in your GameData.
I use GameData/Caerfinon/Patches for the ones I write

Module manager automatically looks for the syntax in the config file so as long as it is somewhere in Gamedata in a *.cfg file it will find it and implement it.

2 hours ago, swjr-swis said:

"It's called Praying Mantis?! What kind of diminutive bug of a ship have you boys concocted? I said BIG, and I mea..... oh."

I have downloaded it now, be interesting to see my frame rate. The first attempt I did was seriously over engineered, over 2000 parts and made my game unplayable. So I made sure my latest. was under 300. I recently realised that If I config up 2 new parts I can make a hull the size of the SPH that only uses 3 parts. Using the MK3 cargo bay and ramp meshes. Be sure to pop your's in to @Stormpilots Aircraft Carrier Challenge for your badge.

Edited May 19, 2021 by ColdJ

[Cavscout74]

Jeb & Kelrik got back from Minmus - due to the lack of fuel, it took two passes through the atmosphere before they were able to land

Spoiler

Reentry was very dicey - between the much higher velocity than before and a distressing tendency for the Mk2 pod to dip the nose down, exposing it to reentry heating and risking catastrophic failure.  Even with RCS on, it doesn't stay aligned retrograde without manual help.

After discovering Jeb's unauthorized landing on Minmus, he was immediately grounded until further notice, and Kelrik placed on probation for helping him.

I also tinkered with a new lander design, but I'm probably not going to use it:

Finally, I brought down the crew of the MOL-1, then deorbited the station:

Spoiler

The two pairs of sepratrons were perfect for the deorbit - from a 150km orbit, the first pair dropped Pe to around 95km, then the second pair dropped it to 35km

Even the bare Mk2 pod + heatshield has the same issue with wanting to reenter slightly nose down, risking catastrophic overheating without manual assistance.  I may have to look at hiding an extra weight somewhere to balance the pod

 

Finally, the MOL-1 station was deorbited and burned up over the Western Sea

 

Edited May 19, 2021 by Cavscout74

[Mukita12]

I did a simulation this morning with BDArmory

Warning: The sound in the video is funky and will make you laugh because of the fact that i sped it up to counter the lag that i'm experiencing

 

[Caerfinon]

There and back again

KOAR I  (Kerbin Orbit And Return) achieves orbit.

Suffers a little separation anxiety

"burning out his fuse up here alone"

But it all works out in the end, which is a safe return home.

 

 

[ColdJ]

2 hours ago, Mukita12 said:

Warning: The sound in the video is funky and will make you laugh because of the fact that i sped it up to counter the lag that i'm experiencing

Only 17 individual craft being kept track of by the BD AI and having to be rendered simultaniously by the Unity engine. Why would you be experiencing lag! You are running KSP on "DEEP BLUE" aren't you?