What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Admiral Fluffy]

7 hours ago, ColdJ said:

Finally got everything I wanted to work with the X-wing finished. Half way through this I started to think I should have built a GronK Droid first.

Impressive! You should make a Gonk droid too.

[yodahut2912]

I made a silver bullet included in an overbuilt orbital package.

[Krazy1]

"What we have here is failure to communicate." 

I thought a 2G receiver was enough for a rescue probe inside Kerbin orbit... nope. I have 100G relays at Moho, Eve and others and still managed to find a hole. So I'm going to wizz by at 5 km/s only 15 km away.  

Edit: Oops... Kerbin is 250 Gm not 350.

 

Edited March 14, 2022 by Krazy1

[king of nowhere]

I eventually decided how to make an even more convoluted grand tour than my previous OPM kerbalism grand tour. I've long considered using RSS, but I didn't want to deal with some of RO quirks - depowered reaction wheels would be a major bother during manuevers, if nothing else for the need to bring six redundant rcs systems everywhere, and I don't even know what happens with cryogenic fuel boiloff or if i run out of ullage gas.

Well, i decided to do RSS with stock parts.

Problem with RSS is that it requires a lot more deltaV than stock. Orbiting earth requires 11 km/s, landing on the moon from orbit requires 1800 m/s... basically, take what you need in stock, triple it, and you're roughly there. My old A'Tuin was an extremely good design, and I was hoping I could keep using it with minimal modifications. But 6 km/s is enough to get around in stock, not in RSS.

The main problem is the mining equipment. Between the huge convert-o-trons, the dozens of drills, and the nuclear reactors to power them, it's over 700 tons. And I have to carry that to the target planet and back every time.

So I figured, I must split the ship in a way that allows me to leave the mining equipment behind. This way, if I commit to returning to the same planet for refueling, I can leave behind 700 tons of mining equipment, 180 tons of high thrust engines that are needed only for landing, and several hundred tons of fuel that are only saved for landing. It halves the dry mass of the ship.

I still need to have an external shell of fuel tanks to protect the ship from radiations from all sides while it's refueling. And this time I must put inside also the mining equipment, because I don't see other ways to dock the two subunits otherwise. So I started with this

I actually started smaller, but every time I had to add new stuff and I had to increase the size to fit all inside.... why do I keep making my ships bigger?

On the bottom I still have to work on the landing gear, but i tried to put the engines to see how it would look

Here the subunits are shown better. The lower subunits, with the chemical plants and nuclear plants. It will keep a crew of 3, it includes the greenhouses for them

The upper portion; once it detaches from the mining equipment, it's basically all fuel tanks. it can get to 14 km/s, which is more than enough to do everything even in RSS. I even left plenty of oxidizer just to supply the landers.

Of course, the number will go down, as the ship is still missing the landers - and I have to figure out how to stick them around - and a lot of other stuff.

And here is how it looks normally when the subunits are docked. It's really cramped.

 

What I have committed to? The previous grand tour required six months of real life time, lasting 340 kerbal years. RSS is bigger and slower, and I'll use a bigger ship with more parts. Will this finally be the time I give up?

 

[N_Danger]

 I sent another expedition off to Niven. Starting with the empty lander on autopilot.

The lander passed by Ceti on the way out.

Six days later the crew is sent off.

Coast phase until a course correction.

The lander arrives first.

followed by the crew.

Landing was of course, interesting.

Spoiler

The lander stays stable all the way down this time.

A prefect landing!

And we slide downhill at 0.1 m/s in-spite of retracting the gear. Finally coming to rest in a local low spot.

Bobert finishes setting up the science instruments. (No really , Look at the rock at landing and now in this shot. That is a long slide. 

We get it done though and pose for a picture before take off.

And onward to orbit.

 After arriving from the surface, the crew are now ready to return to Gael when the transfer window comes up. The d/v is looking a little sketchy even with getting the fumes off the lander and topping off the mono prop. Do we wait for a refueling mission or go for it? Hmm..

 

 

[ColdJ]

9 hours ago, Admiral Fluffy said:

Impressive! You should make a Gonk droid too.

It is on the list, but I am not sure how to make it walk.

[Krazy1]

45 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

Well, i decided to do RSS with stock parts.

Well, good luck man! I've never tried RSS (only stock system) but I could not imagine doing this without TweakScale or bigger parts somehow. Part count would drop the framerate pretty bad I suppose. In the editor, Hanger Extender and Editor Extension Redux seem like uncompromising QoL improvements IMO. I also use Fill It Up to help optimize the LF/ OX balance for chemical/ NERV engines. 

[spacejet]

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Edited April 4, 2022 by spacejet

[capi3101]

9 hours ago, spacejet said:

 I wanted it to roll down the runway like a big bowling ball. I haven't given up.

I might suggest a dozen or so large ASAS wheels in the interior along with the batteries to utilize them. Putting your thrusters so that it'd roll down the runway (pointed downward up front, upward in the back) would also help, methinks.

[Akagi]

On 3/13/2022 at 4:07 AM, ColdJ said:

GronK Droid

 

[septemberWaves]

Started an RP-1 career. This rocket became the first to pass the Karman line, after the upper stage of a previous identical design failed to ignite.

[ColdJ]

One is Jeb and one is Crash Jeb, but which is which? 

[king of nowhere]

My previous project for a successor for mighty A'Tuin, capable of performing a kerbalism rss grand tour, failed the first testing for lack of structural stability. The docking port keeping the two parts together was too weak

This shown here is not a botched docking attempt, the two parts are docked, it's just wobbling because the docking port is too weak to hold in place two subunits of several kilotons each.

Not only that, but the ship was too frail. I tested by simulating a moon landing at 5 m/s, the external fuel tanks got detached. The landing gear is on the inner subship, and the weight is distributed through a narrow column up to the ceiling, and the whole courtain fall down from there, it doesn't hold the force.

Lag also was horrible, despite the ship still missing a lot of components.

I had a moment of despair when I almost scrapped the idea of rss kerbalism grand tour. then I started thinking how I could actually fix the structural stability.

I was already looking at near future launch vehicles for bigger fuel tanks to reduce part count, but it also had something else that was necessary for this project: a bigger, stronger docking port (5 m).

So I started again, this time with more concern for stability. I made a 5 m column at the center of the ship to hold the weight, culminating in the 5 m docking port. I also swapped out the expansive "ceiling" of 3.75 m parts (55 of them) with a lower number of 7.5 m parts. I made the whole ensemble a bit lighter, in the 6.5-7 kton range.

The new design passed the stability test (holding under its own weight on the runway, being dropped on the moon at 5 m/s), and it passed the docking test, that entails just docking the two parts.

The test is not trivial; there is a tight fit between the two. at the first attempt, the lander subunit got slightly turned and it touched the "courtain", failing the docking. But besides that, the docking is not difficult, it can be reproduced easily. In particular, while the first model had plenty of stuff stuck hapazardly that required a very specific angle to dock to avoid modules on the lander subunit touching modules on the cruise subunit, this time I made a point to not have anything higher than the docking port, so that orientation would not matter in docking.

Also, I had to fit the two gravity rings inside 5 m cargo bays. There's some clipping involved, but I can justify it by claiming it's a solid load-bearing column and the rotating part is only on the exterior. Those gravity rings are too big and cumbersome to put them anywhere else.

The docking port is still not completely stable; I'm thinking I will pack some manual struts and place them with an eva construction after docking. However, now it's manageable. Here shown in docked mode, this is how much it wobbles. This is still acceptable. At least, it didn't seem to be causing problems.

A major problem is fitting everything in the lander subunit. it's the one with less available space, and by far the one that has to carry more stuff; 12 custom size 3 convert-o-trons, 12 size 2 nuclear reactors, and all the high thrust engines, 6 greenhouses. I barely managed to fit the dolphin escape pod. For lack of space, I moved away from a purely wolfhound-based propulsion and used some near future engine that's a slightly improved version of the rhino; TWR is currently about 0.45, which will be fine to land on the moon. The original A'Tuin could land on Duna and even on Wal, but with rss landing on mars is out of the table. Even if I could, it would be way too expensive to be worth it. Even landing on the moon requires enough deltaV that I wonder if it's really useful, or if I should just stick with the moonlets of mars, the asteroids, and the smaller outer moons.

I still need to place all the smaller chemical plants, some gas tanks, all the drills on the landing legs, and some spare engines, but I have a good idea where to place them.

 

[darthgently]

On 3/13/2022 at 7:21 PM, Krazy1 said:

"What we have here is failure to communicate." 

I thought a 2G receiver was enough for a rescue probe inside Kerbin orbit... nope. I have 100G relays at Moho, Eve and others and still managed to find a hole. So I'm going to wizz by at 5 km/s only 15 km away.  

Edit: Oops... Kerbin is 250 Gm not 350.

 

Looks like you have plenty of delta-v.  Maybe keep the rendezvous node and burn it the moment you get control back if it should be soon-ish and see where you stand.  You may be close enough to brute force your way to the target.  The idea being to get close to target velocity vector and position as soon as feasible so you don't have to wait an entire orbit (at minimum).  I've recovered bad rendezvous using the "burn toward target, cancel relative velocity, repeat" method before, but you might, after getting on a close orbit be able to tweak a node to a 2nd chance clean rendezvous if you get control back soon enough

[darthgently]

On 3/13/2022 at 11:57 AM, jimmymcgoochie said:

Created a stupidly overbuilt lunar orbiter to do some mapping for a contract, then realised it was so overbuilt that I could use it to put landers on the surface too- and it was still overbuilt.

Add a crew cabin and take some paying tourists with you?

[j-tk]

Let the game run for about 2 hours at time warp 1 forward to continue my "Cassini' probe from US probe packs, launched on a Blue Dog Design rocket, on its way to Jool, and thanks to an unplanned Mun gravity assist that just happened by accident, enough fuel to explore one of its moons as well. 27 more days to go at this rate!

[spacejet]

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Edited April 4, 2022 by spacejet

[jimmymcgoochie]

6 hours ago, darthgently said:

Add a crew cabin and take some paying tourists with you?

This isn’t stock Kerbal, this is RO/RP-1. I can barely get my own astronauts into low Earth orbit; a crewed Moon flight is some way off yet.

I might take the opportunity to launch some relays/science probes to the Moon with the scanning sat though.

[Kebab Kerman]

Made a few more fighter jets, an Ace Combat inspired one and a quick F-22 replica. Both carry 24 missiles and a single cannon. The first one uses positron-powered thermal turbojets and is unfortunately not capable of supersonic flight for some reason, but is great at low-speed dogfighting, while the F-22 uses conventional turbofans, is capable of supersonic flight, and is capable of pulling maneuvers capable of mangling the poor pilot chosen to fly it. Perhaps thermal turbojets aren't as good as I thought they were?

EDIT: You can download the first aircraft here.

Edited March 17, 2022 by Kebab Kerman

[spacejet]

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Edited April 4, 2022 by spacejet

[BekfastDerp13]

1 hour ago, spacejet said:

Nice looking aircraft and what is the missle mod please. That's so cool. Do you like how they fly? These are great for a server conflict because of the parts count.

Missiles are likely from BD Armory.

[septemberWaves]

Yi Qi, a semi-successful subsonic scientific aircraft. Currently undergoing redesign to correct some early issues that resulted in severe damage to the fuselage upon landing.

Sigil 2, a new sounding rocket powered by an RD-100. 1.5 meter diameter and capable of launching film cameras to take the first photographs of Earth from space.

And finally, with a garish colour scheme inspired by tropical birds, the first supersonic prototype plane, AX-1 Archaeopteryx.

Engineers [me] were unable to finalize the aerodynamics within the time parameters of the supersonic contract, so it requires parachutes to land (originally included just in case of a critical failure). That aside though, the first flight was a success.

[taupe-rail]

On 1/29/2022 at 11:45 AM, Cupcake... said:

Had some fun with some teeny weeny little craft.

Enjoy!

 

Cupcake...

Amazing cinematography, music, just *chef's kiss*!
The vehicle at 5:37 gives me Thargoid vibes.

[taupe-rail]

9 hours ago, Kebab Kerman said:

Made a few more fighter jets, an Ace Combat inspired one and a quick F-22 replica. Both carry 24 missiles and a single cannon. The first one uses positron-powered thermal turbojets and is unfortunately not capable of supersonic flight for some reason, but is great at low-speed dogfighting, while the F-22 uses conventional turbofans, is capable of supersonic flight, and is capable of pulling maneuvers capable of mangling the poor pilot chosen to fly it. Perhaps thermal turbojets aren't as good as I thought they were?

Inspired by the Wyvern, perhaps?  Looks very slick

[ColdJ]

14 hours ago, Kebab Kerman said:

Made a few more fighter jets, an Ace Combat inspired one and a quick F-22 replica. Both carry 24 missiles and a single cannon. The first one uses positron-powered thermal turbojets and is unfortunately not capable of supersonic flight for some reason, but is great at low-speed dogfighting, while the F-22 uses conventional turbofans, is capable of supersonic flight, and is capable of pulling maneuvers capable of mangling the poor pilot chosen to fly it. Perhaps thermal turbojets aren't as good as I thought they were?

Very nice. Back in version 1.9.1 I made a rather nice f 22 thanks to NMB and Airplane plus. If you haven't already got those mods you should check them out.

https://spacedock.info/mod/1644/Nice MKseries Body

https://spacedock.info/mod/716/Airplane Plus

 

Spoiler

 

 

Edited March 17, 2022 by ColdJ