What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Axelord FTW]

While launching a craft with anti-matter in the tanks is ridiculously expensive (both in money and science), making your own AM on the ground is not so bad.

I'll have an AM producing plant going on the runway, an AM-tanker truck, and an AM silo not too far from the launchpad. When I'll need to get AM in space from Kerbin, I'll transfer some from the silo to the ship on the launchpad and launch right away. AM is also costly in EC to keep contained. I can launch LH2 easily enough to fuel up the Frisbee engine in orbit, but I'll wait until the last possible moment to make the necessary AM. Most of the time I had was spent designing an autonomous construction facility (Extraplanetary Launchpads &Keridian Dynamics) which I'm looking to put down on Ike. The upcoming Duna mission will probably see a huge redesign, in fact. 

Here's the silo.

While I was checking up on a few crafts in orbit, I chanced to take a pretty damn good screenshot of the Duna Explorer 2.

Edited November 25, 2021 by Axelord FTW

[Guest The Doodling Astronaut]

From the cold Nero, happy thanksgiving 

 

[N_Danger]

I was busy.

A rescue mission was undertaken and Poody the pilot is pumped up for this.

And a kerbal zips over to the ride home.

Then a satellite was launched for a scanning contract with Ceti as the target.

And on station finding all the high and low spots.

 

 

[Admiral Fluffy]

I docked for the first time!

It has taken me 11 months to do this

Kind of forced to do it if i wanted to land on Duna.

Shot of the lander too.

Spoiler

https://imgur.com/a/1dXhEUi

 

[lemon cup]

Still assembling the ISS, one flight at a time! Here's a GIF and a choice screen grab from my latest mission, STS-111. 

Check out the full mission, and all the previous ones, here:

[Hyperspace Industries]

2 hours ago, lemon cup said:

Still assembling the ISS, one flight at a time! Here's a GIF and a choice screen grab from my latest mission, STS-111. 

Check out the full mission, and all the previous ones, here:

Wow! If you showed me that picture alone, I would have thought it was real life! The RO team has done a great job!

 

I've just messed around a bit today: 

Spoiler

Cheated it to the Mun,   again. I need to get out of that habit. Also, kraken killed the Mun base.

Surprisingly little destruction from this bomb.

Quite a bit from these.

Self destruct courtesy of Kaboom!

Completely unrelated: I'm thinking of going interstellar, can Far Future Technologies work for that? What are some good planet packs?

[N_Danger]

I launched a bunch of satellites. One around Gael.

Then I sent one to Iota.

And finally one to Ceti.

[Neebel]

2 hours ago, Hyperspace Industries said:

The RO team has done a great job!

no RO involved, only stockalike mods and KSRSS

[Hyperspace Industries]

5 minutes ago, Neebel said:

no RO involved, only stockalike mods and KSRSS

Sorry for my mistake.

[lemon cup]

8 hours ago, Hyperspace Industries said:

Wow! If you showed me that picture alone, I would have thought it was real life! The RO team has done a great job!

 

5 hours ago, Hyperspace Industries said:

no RO involved, only stockalike mods and KSRSS

Thank you very much! And I believe that KSRSS does incorporate textures from RO/RSS and reformats them, so there is some cross-involvement.

I had a great time with JNSQ and the Grannus Expansion Pack. I would highly recommend it if you are looking to go interstellar with FFT.

[Axelord FTW]

Sad news, everyone! Storing AM at the KSC doesn't 'work' because launching anything from the KSC thereafter if there is a craft within load distance will ask you to pay for that antimatter in funds+science as if you were launching that craft fresh instead. I could build a large rover+storage+AM-producing facility vessel and have it roll out of load distance, but that's sounding like a lot of work just to get around a design flaw. Just wasted a few millions testing everything out in career.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Tried to launch Mars ship, ascent failure, horizontal by 30km, then the game crashed.

Tried to launch Mars ship, fairing separation failure, second stage destroyed, then the game crashed.

Tried to launch Mars ship, booster separation failure, torpedoed second stage with SRBs, then the game crashed.

Tried to launch Mars ship, quicksaved just before MECO, then the game crashed.

Reloaded quick save, first stage engines are now off, ascent guidance fails, manual orbital insertion successful, fairing separated, solar panels and antennae deployed, quicksaved, then the game crashed.

Every game crash requires a ~25 minute reload with a small chance of a total PC crash. It’s almost like KSP doesn’t want me to go to Mars or something… 

[Krazy1]

I guess I love long xenon burns...

[Staticalliam7]

Big day today! I got my first SSTO into orbit!

Not sure what to name it yet, but handles like a dream. Has roughly 4000m/s off the runway, and 700m/s of delta v in orbit, plenty of fuel to deorbit. The next version will have a docking port.

Engine-wise, I completely ditched R.A.P.I.E.Rs and went with a combination of 4 KS-25s and 8 Swivels

I completely missed the ksc and [redacted] the 4 right swivels

 

I also took a rover I'm working on for a joyride and broke a solar panel on the administration building (dammit jeb watch where you're going)

Edited November 27, 2021 by Staticalliam7
Oops said that there was 700 m/s of total dv. Fixed.

[Axelord FTW]

Mun factory is doing well. Completed the 'OG' launchpad, and it's now building a test payload that will directly deliver some material into the recycling maw of the mun orbital shipyard. Why have a rocketpart producing facility in orbit when I can just launch cans of rocketparts on top of shrimp SRBs? Well, to be fair the shipyard can smelt scrap metal back to metal and produce rocketparts, but only very slowly. That's just recycling the delivery craft itself, not its main function.  To be even fairer, this is all just testing stuff out. I don't expect the Mun facilities to really produce all that much. I have a huge training mission in progress too, now. Getting as many engineers up to L3 as fast as possible. Might get them to L4 next, with a quick jaunt to Gilly, but the primary point is to have a good, trained workforce pool to draw from. I am running low on good Kerbals, again!

P.S. Anyone know of a good recruitment-related mod that would spice things up? Everytime I've hit a bottleneck in this career, I've gone and downloaded some new stuff to supplement the experience, and now it's Kerbals that are clogging the hose.

[eddiew]

Went to space in a stock mk3 SSTO with JNSQ. No modded parts. Not even Tweakscale. (Disclaimer: I reduced re-entry heating. I'm not sure this would survive the ascent at 100% thermals. Heat is more your enemy than gravity in JNSQ.)

Hotwings 4 ST has 750m/s left in orbit, while the comms satellite has a further 2k - enough to take it to a local moon.

Refinement pass and full write up tomorrow. It doesn't have any aerobrakes and I haven't tested stability with no fuel, but it is now 1am. Took so many tries to get this bird to orbit at ~2.4x scale 

[EpicSpaceTroll139]

Been working on my shuttle Entry-Descent-and-Landing kOS script.  

Put all the stuff for the entry phase algorithm together in a file and did a couple test flights.

The first entry test encountered some rather bizarre control issues (control surfaces go wiggle wiggle) and the script kind of drove the shuttle deep into the atmosphere rather quickly.  Combined together those resulted in the vehicle eventually developing a violent spin, then disintegrating under aerodynamic and thermal loads.

(I do these in a "sandbox" simulation save, so don't worry about Jeb & Co. )

Digging through my code I found several bugs, one of the more glaring ones being that in a place where I meant to calculate the average descent path slope from the current location to the center of the "handoff sphere" (a location at ~30 km altitude some distance away from the runway where the guidance will change to a different algorithm to set up for landing), I accidentally calculated the *inverse* of this.  So when the shuttle actually needed to follow a very shallow flightpath to get to the target, the script thought it needed to go almost straight down.   Whoops!

 

I fixed that and several other bugs, added even more debug information onto the terminal, then did another reentry test.  This flight test was much more tame, but still showed there are some bugs left to squash in the entry portion of the script

It kept commanding maximum pitch (or very close to it) and very little roll almost all the way down.  This resulted in it doing most of the slowing down in the extreme upper atmosphere and not even getting much of a plasma trail (how disappointing).   It also still came down well short of the desired handoff location, because by maintaining the super high angle of attack, it didn't actually use all the lift available to it,  because it's operating on the "back" of the lift curve.  But it wasn't running into any thermal limits requiring the nose to be that high, so I don't know what's wrong.  Time for even more debug numbers.  Yay! 

Anyways, once it got to about Mach 3 or so the script finally decided to bring the nose down to a reasonable AoA.  After that I decided to try flying it semi-manually, but made the mistake of turning on FAR's roll and yaw assistants, which immediately tried (and succeeded) in murdering the shuttle, by rolling and yawing it so violently that one of the ruddervators was torn off, leading to an irrecoverable spin.

 

Anyways, that's all for today.

[Delay]

7 hours ago, EpicSpaceTroll139 said:

Been working on my shuttle Entry-Descent-and-Landing kOS script.  

Put all the stuff for the entry phase algorithm together in a file and did a couple test flights.

The first entry test encountered some rather bizarre control issues (control surfaces go wiggle wiggle) and the script kind of drove the shuttle deep into the atmosphere rather quickly.  Combined together those resulted in the vehicle eventually developing a violent spin, then disintegrating under aerodynamic and thermal loads.

(I do these in a "sandbox" simulation save, so don't worry about Jeb & Co. )

Digging through my code I found several bugs, one of the more glaring ones being that in a place where I meant to calculate the average descent path slope from the current location to the center of the "handoff sphere" (a location at ~30 km altitude some distance away from the runway where the guidance will change to a different algorithm to set up for landing), I accidentally calculated the *inverse* of this.  So when the shuttle actually needed to follow a very shallow flightpath to get to the target, the script thought it needed to go almost straight down.   Whoops!

 

I fixed that and several other bugs, added even more debug information onto the terminal, then did another reentry test.  This flight test was much more tame, but still showed there are some bugs left to squash in the entry portion of the script

It kept commanding maximum pitch (or very close to it) and very little roll almost all the way down.  This resulted in it doing most of the slowing down in the extreme upper atmosphere and not even getting much of a plasma trail (how disappointing).   It also still came down well short of the desired handoff location, because by maintaining the super high angle of attack, it didn't actually use all the lift available to it,  because it's operating on the "back" of the lift curve.  But it wasn't running into any thermal limits requiring the nose to be that high, so I don't know what's wrong.  Time for even more debug numbers.  Yay! 

Anyways, once it got to about Mach 3 or so the script finally decided to bring the nose down to a reasonable AoA.  After that I decided to try flying it semi-manually, but made the mistake of turning on FAR's roll and yaw assistants, which immediately tried (and succeeded) in murdering the shuttle, by rolling and yawing it so violently that one of the ruddervators was torn off, leading to an irrecoverable spin.

 

Anyways, that's all for today.

You know, as much as I love the Space Shuttle, aerodynamic stability is yet another reason to hate that flying brick.

It's a miracle the roll axis was stable enough to be used for control!

[Cupcake...]

Had bit of fun on Jool

Enjoy!

 

Cupcake...

[Dafni]

38 minutes ago, Cupcake... said:

Had bit of fun on Jool

Enjoy!

 

Cupcake...

Nice one, mate. This one is oddly disturbing, somehow. But as always super neat craft and editing.

[Cupcake...]

13 minutes ago, Dafni said:

Nice one, mate. This one is oddly disturbing, somehow. But as always super neat craft and editing.

Thanks man! Great to see you're still active on the forums.

 

Cupcake...

[Guest The Doodling Astronaut]

2 hours ago, Cupcake... said:

Had bit of fun on Jool

Enjoy!

 

Cupcake...

The king of KSP movie shorts is BACK!

Nice to see the post

[Axelord FTW]

dayum

EDIT: Anyway, here's how it's going. The Mun Factory using vanilla EL parts has done its job of building its own replacement. It took a long time, but it was helped by preemptively building a few Automated Building Modules to speed up the process. No picture at first because I only saw that it would take over a year to complete the factory once started. I paused the build and made the modules first. Only had one engineer on site, and he wasn't in a dedicated ABMs, which didn't help. Once the new factory was built, I ejected the ABMs with SRBs that had been included in their original design. That freed up the launchpad they were on. I spent some time recycling some of the old factory  but many of the parts are just too heavy to lift into the grinder, so I decided to only recycle the easy stuff for now, and delete the old factory.

The new factory comes with two built-in launchpads, a small one on the very top, and a big launchpad. The old factory's launchpad was unhooked from it, and passed over to the new factory. 

We're gonna need a bigger tarp.

Pow! It is done!

Whiirrrrr~

Crunching noises.

There goes the ABMs.

Without change in crew compositions (i.e. one engineer), the building factor went from 2.5 (incl. the two ABMs) to a bit over 5 (without ABMs) The plant still has no exotic fuel production capabilities (other than Li, Xe, and Ar, and EnrUr). I MIGHT build an adjacent antimatter facility next to it next, but fusion power would absolutely be required to power that, and it would be a pain to hand-deliver deuterium.

Edited November 27, 2021 by Axelord FTW

[N_Danger]

A Kerbal was rescued.

"Do not Fling the old capsule at the rescue vehicle Please!"

And I somehow forgot to send science experiments with all my contract satellites to both Iota and Ceti. 

So here we go, dedicated Science satellites to both.

\

In orbit around Iota.

 

[eddiew]

This was not an easy thing to make!

JNSQ is hard on SSTOs; it's very hard on stock SSTOs. This is the fanciest one I've managed to build in many hours, and it only lifts a 2 ton cargo, and it only survives the trip because I reduced the re-entry heating setting to a suspiciously magical 42%.

That said... the Hotwings 4ST gets to orbit. It even gets to orbit with some spare fuel. I suspect it can probably lift 4-5 tons because that would only be a small fraction of the vessel weight, but I'll have to test that. It definitely does not survive the descent at 100% heating, even with the most conservative "periapsis at 35km above KSC" flight profile. It just can't slow down enough without active braking (although I am now suddenly considering retro-rockets in the nacelles - but it would then need a bigger fuel budget to make use of them). I am basically ready to throw in the towel on that because stock parts were just not designed to hit an atmosphere at 4km/s. You can't hit Kerbin's atmosphere in stock at that speed either; not without a heat shield or modded parts. And that's fine, I will just consider this the tweak necessary to get the gravitational challenge of JNSQ without also having to find more thermally tolerant parts  

The ascent follows my standard "point at 10 degrees" profile. There's no real need to wring every last m/s out of the rapiers, and it's very questionable whether doing so even saves fuel. It seems better to keep vertical velocity above 100m/s than it is to push for horizontal; and realistically, +/-200m/s at 20km is only 5% of orbital velocity anyway. Altitude is preferable. Aim for ~1400m/s at 15km, then kick in the nervas, followed by the vector around 20km. While the oxidiser holds, TWR will be above 1, and should get a 50km apoapsis or better at ~3200m/s. The nervas are capable of adding the last 600 to break atmosphere, but it does feel very tight, with vertical velocity nearing zero even under thrust.

Not particularly visible; the Hotwings 4ST has a lot of vertical as well as lateral symmetry. There are two nervas under the wings, and the small tail fins exist on both dorsal and ventral sides. I found this helped with avoiding roll coupling while trying to yaw. It's basically only the landing gear and aerobrakes that are on just the top or bottom. There is a very slight dihedral slant on the wing tips which just helps a little bit to prevent unwanted roll on the ascent. On the way down, it handles just fine.

I brought this one down on a shallow ascent just to see how it went, and it did leave me much closer to KSC than previous harder drops have done, with more control over exactly where I wanted to come down. But I may try a bigger cargo and a steeper descent later, just for curiosity. I would like to know why our space shuttle comes in at 30 degrees AoA, and all kerbal craft seem to be closer to 5-10.

Atmospheric handling is pretty good on low fuel. At takeoff, yaw and roll and made a bit precarious because of the heavy fuel in the nacelles, so those are set to drain first. With the wings dry, she basically floats. The CoM moves about half a metre between empty and dry, and is far enough back that it doesn't flip unless hamfisted into it, and you can give the KSC a good buzzing if you desire. The main-wing elevons are just flaps to provide more lift on take off, and are locked flat once in flight so's they stay out of the way of the nerva exhaust. The clearance is tight, but it works.