What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Nazalassa]

On 11/20/2021 at 6:11 PM, dudnees said:

I built a steerable antenna array on the Mun Farside, possibly to do some radio astronomy. It was a lot harder than I expected!

I made a Minmus base with 12 Ground Anchors, and I had a lot of problems with these...

Also, it has an antenna, like the tracking station's ones.

Edited December 29, 2021 by Nazalassa
typing error

[Kerbals_of_Steel]

Launched my first missions to an OPM planet, Neidon. First up, and most important, a truly massive communications satellite, because Neidon is WAY out there (5x Jool distance, more or less) and I'm not playing with the upgraded level 4 tracking station mod. Even with this dish I'm not 100% certain I'll be able to control it directly when it makes a capture burn in 25 years, but I've got some time to build up a relay net behind it.

The speck behind the dish is a 2.5m -32 fuel tank for scale... It's powered by some early-generation nuclear reactors because you can barely see the sun if you squint from Neidon. Besides the radio science and relay dish it also includes a number of other radio and orbital science experiments

8 Dawn engines burning at a frightening 1m/s² acceleration:

It was immediately followed by an orbital surveyor and science sat that uses the same basic spacecraft bus as the relay sat, but loaded down with SCAN sat equipment and a couple of micro probes that will (hopefully) make it to the surface of the planet intact:

Now, with something over half a million Kerbucks worth of equipment leaving the area at a high rate of speed, I'm going to have to extort transport a whole bunch of hapless victims tourists around the system to pay the bills...

 

KoS

 

 

[Guest The Doodling Astronaut]

YT short to describe the pain of having no better time warp 

 

[Watermel00n]

I made dres exist.

[Guest The Doodling Astronaut]

4 hours ago, Watermel00n said:

I made dres exist.

Reminds me of Salus

[Watermel00n]

Soon i will make an atmosphere for dres, then no one will ever say dres doesnt exist!

[TheFlyingKerman]

Finally sent my tilt rotor to Duna and spent an hour flying it around. I must have spent 100 hours building it and it still looks dumb . At least it flies.

Spoiler

Launch

Arrive at Duna orbit

Flight

Landed

 

 

Edited December 17, 2021 by TheFlyingKerman

[Hyperspace Industries]

I played around with far future, flew a plane, and, I have a confession to make:

Playing around/plane:

Spoiler

Thor 2: non stop nuke.

the second Thor test mission. NSWR

Uncrewed, Jeb was grounded for stealing from the vending machine.

relay.

plane at sunrise.

Jeb was only grounded for the day.

Confession:

Spoiler

I'm just gonna say it, I've never been beyond Duna without using the debug menu.  I'd just finished my Mun landing, I thought it was going to be too hard, and I used a kraken drive to get to Duna.  After that (still a bit hard mission) I found the debug menu, and I teleported to Eeloo.  I didn't stop, I went to Jool and Eve and Moho and everywhere else, I had fun, but not as much as I would if I had the challenge. 

I've decided to right those wrongs, in a program I have named: Hercules: (mission report coming soon.)

Hercules 1 and 2 were docking attemps, which failed, and I cheated them to the surface (2 launches and switching between them means no revert) after discovering I forgot the parachutes, this doesn't count as cheating since it was essentially revert to launch. (Hey, my program my rules.)

Here are their pics:

Hercules 1: Jeb and Phogan, 2 Val and Natalya

I plead guilty too attempted Minimus mission.

Cause of failure: Fell into atmo during circularization burn.

That's not gone well.

 

Edited December 17, 2021 by Hyperspace Industries
The mission report is up and running.

[Randazzo]

Holy Funds Batman!

Total funds for this contract including the advance and individual contract parameter bonuses: 77,874,749

I'll never have to take another temperature reading at 15km while moving between 100-150 m/s ever again. So, without further ado...

The Titanic seats 11 kerbals! What could possibly go wrong? (Nothing did)

Spoiler

 

I'm not sure why they were all willing to pay so much to visit a fuel tank attached to a lander, but hey, whatever floats the rich kerbals boat I guess.

And the payoff after some time warp..

Prior to this I did some real space science stuff too

[Axelord FTW]

Is that a mod that gives a new type of contracts or did I just never come across 'tour' contracts?

[Randazzo]

8 hours ago, Axelord FTW said:

Is that a mod that gives a new type of contracts or did I just never come across 'tour' contracts?

I think the agent is from a mod, but I was under the impression that tourism contracts were from one of the DLC.

I have never seen one so lucrative before though.

[Kerb24]

Tourism contracts are in the base game, no DLC needed.

[Scarecrow71]

I started a new career this morning as I'm stuck in a couple of challenges right now; I generally solve problems when I'm not actively focused on them, so a new career will keep me playing KSP while allowing my mind to slowly work out why I am stuck in other careers.

Anyhow, the fine folks at the Las Kerbas Space Center have given us the go-ahead to start the ORACLE program (Our Really Awesome Crewed Landing Expeditions) to stretch our legs and explore Kerbin's SOI.  The first three flights (without any images, unfortunately):

1. ORACLE I got off the ground and into LKO with no issues.  And with only Tier II unlocked.
2. ORACLE II, building on the science gains from the first flight, went into Mun orbit, with Valentina staring hopefully at the stars.  And because Werner Von Kerman over-engineers things, there was enough dV to escape the Mun and go to Minmus.  After orbiting Minmus, Valentina made the decision to LAND on the tasty green sphere, go EVA to collect some science, and then return to Kerbin.
3. After unlocking nearly all of Tier V, ORACLE III took off and went back to the Mun, this time landing at the northern edge of the Far Eastside Crater.  Jeb and the capsule are currently sitting on the Mun's surface waiting to come home*.

And that is where I sit in the new career.  More to come!

* Jeb is sitting in the capsule waiting because my wife wanted to go out for breakfast, and she refused to let me bring him home first.

Edited December 18, 2021 by Scarecrow71

[Hyperspace Industries]

Hercules 4 and 5: To Gilly! Slowly!

Early lander design. Yeah, I'm landin' that thing on Gilly with one ion engine! (the twr is for Gilly)

Sorry about the antenna.

And the brother sister duo of Vyacheslav and Inessa Kerolev blast off to orbit.

Circularized fine.

An interplanetary correction burn went haywire because I could only steer with thrust vectoring, this, right here, is when I realized ion engines have no steering. 

Yay for quicksaves!

Because I don't want to do the whole mission over because I forgot reaction wheels, I cheated the new Hercules 5 into medium Eve orbit, used the maneuver planner to get a Gilly "encounter" executed the burn, found that I did cross Gilly's path, but the maneuver planner hadn't given me the right maneuver!  Now still missing my Gilly rendezvous, but having expended a fair bit of delta v, I cheated to around Gilly. (I know, I know, this is supposed to be without cheating, but still, my program, my rules, I choose when breaking the rules counts.)

I'm meaning to start reading Known Space, anyone know where I should start?

Gravity is out to lunch.

If I remember right, Hercules 5 had 4900 or something delta v left, anyways, it was getting late, and I had more than enough delta v, so I cheated to Kerbin and de-orbited.

Inessa was awarded a orange suit for that mission, her brother already had one.

[N_Danger]

I had 3 contracts to rescue kerbals stranded in orbit around Iota. It is probably time to go get them.

The fairing separation reveal's the new Rocket Rescue 3 person autonomous capsule.

 

The ship is finishes up the trans Iota burn.

 

I go for the one kerbal, whose orbit is retrograde to the other 2, first. 

I then changed my orbital direction and collected the other 2 kerbals. One was picked up during an eclipse. 

And the rescued kerbals will be happy to home very soon. 

[Axelord FTW]

9 hours ago, Randazzo said:

I think the agent is from a mod, but I was under the impression that tourism contracts were from one of the DLC.

I have never seen one so lucrative before though.

Tourism contracts, yes, but I've never seen TOURS for X numbers of days. Only stuff like fly-bys, orbits, or landing on this or that world. They can be really lucrative, but whatever that was that allowed for tourists to want to visit that 'station' I want some of it.

[SSTO Crasher]

I downloaded waterfall and it is AMAZING

i was planning on sending docking adapters to my Duna station but spent the entire time looking at those amazing engine plumes 

[Randazzo]

Today the contract generator wanted a new station in orbit of the Mun with a science lab on it, and living space for 11 kerbals. With my new, nearly inexhaustible supply of funds I decided I would build on that core. Proudly presenting....

Armstrong Research Station

Album Link: https://imgur.com/a/IxXPj5g

Spoiler

 

Maximum Crew Capacity: 22
Standard Complement: 14

While the station has enough living space for 22 kerbals, there are only enough tasks to assign to 14. Additionally, it seemed a bit rude to strand the crew in orbit of the Mun in the event of an emergency so there is a Lifeboat (the bit with the Mk2 cockpit) specifically designed to carry the crew of 14 from Munar orbit back to Nimoy Station in LKO for retrieval back to the surface. The Poseidon vehicle docked in the picture brought engineers in advance of the science crew to deploy the habitat ring.

Edited December 19, 2021 by Randazzo

[Axelord FTW]

The Minmus ISRU/Factory (with the big dumb white sausage) has been replaced with a more streamlined, less-prone to weird kraken hijinks, successor. For some reason, the BDWS fell off its launchclamps upon loading the scene at one point and I decided I could do better anyway. Moved south-south-east by about 4km and tried again. This time everything came together much more easily and nicely. I gotta say, the end-result was much more virile and girthsome than what I initially set out to make. It just so happen that the biggest fuel tanks I have on hand stacked up together so easily like.

I haven't found a good name for the base yet, so for now it only bears the one that original mini-factory lander originally had, Skipjack. 

Close-up of the base's core. Two nuclear fission reactor can generate up to 4000ec/s, not that the base can really use even half of that (if I turned everything on, it would take up a lot of charge, but there's no enough radiators on-hand to support that sort of thing anyway). One chemical reactor, one furnace, two RP printers, one mini-VAB, one whirligig converter, and one regular converter. At this point, I can't outpace the factory with RP production, but it's close. Even if I only have 10k RP on hand, I could still make something using 100k RP as the printers would replenish the tanks almost as fast as they drained.

[SBKerman]

11 hours ago, Axelord FTW said:

Tourism contracts, yes, but I've never seen TOURS for X numbers of days. Only stuff like fly-bys, orbits, or landing on this or that world. They can be really lucrative, but whatever that was that allowed for tourists to want to visit that 'station' I want some of it.

I'm guessing it's the Tourism Plus pack for Contract Configurator that are generating those contracts.

 

[RevanX_LSR]

Gave kerbin a stellar companion

[N_Danger]

More Rescue missions and crew training for an engineer. This time 2 kerbals in orbit around Ceti.

The first one goes routinely.

 

The second one ... "Why so close to the ground?"

"Never mind that just let me get on board!"

After a long and weary trip the kerbals make it back

[king of nowhere]

In the past month, I went to Plock and back with life support.

During the outbound trip (32 years) there were some accidents that seriously shortened my water supply, leaving me without enough to come back safely. I then devised a high energy trajectory that would spend most of my remaining fuel to get back fast, taking a first jool gravity assist, then reaching kerbin (23 years). On kerbin I was way too fast to stop, but I could place 8 crew members on escape pods and send them on the ground to save food. the remaining crew member remained with the ship, piloted it using kerbin for a gravity assist, to get into a resonant orbit for another kerbin assist 3 years later, to get into a trajectory to reach duna 4 years later (i could have gone there faster, but i'd have had a too high intercept speed). On duna I was coming in slow enough to aerobrake, then land on Ike with the very last drops of my fuel, where I could mine new water and fuel to return to kerbin.

I run out of water and food 80 days from Duna. After over 60 years of travel, I missed the mark for 80 days.

 

I could reload and do better on the Plock approach, but I'm not going to replay 60 years of gameplay like this. Plock was the last planet I had to visit, so I just reloaded back to my latest kerbin flyby, placed the remaining crew member on an escape pod too, and called it a day.

[Kerb24]

I got Jeb from Eve surface to Eve orbit without cheats in the stock game.

[Krazy1]

I'd like to share pics of my ion probe in clockwise orbit of the sun but Imgur is all messed up now.

UPDATE - I managed to get Imgur to work... 

I did an almost continuous burn from LKO to outside Kerbin SOI.

Here's the post with captions.

Edited December 19, 2021 by Krazy1