What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Kazkar]

[Alchemist]

Well, I recently found myself messing with my good old crew shuttle Hydrargyrum. Originally, it turned out capable of getting to Mun orbit and back to Kerbin. Or with an orbital refueling at either moon go full Kerbin - Mun orbit - Minmus (well, nearly anything can land there) - Sun orbit - Kerbin route. And with over 90% refund due to full reusability.

Even made a cargo version for running recovery contracts. Here are both shuttles and their launcher:

But running tourist contracts around Kerbin gets a bit boring, especially after you unlock everything (and unfortunately it requires almost entire tech tree and couple millions for part unlocks and building the shuttle - even if 49% of launch cost is refunded in less than 10 minutes!)

So I tried refueling it at the Mun orbit and... getting it down there. Even if it never got any special implements for landing anywhere except Kerbin. OMS engine was sufficient...https://imgur.com/ElmVsxMhttps://imgur.com/ElmVsxM

 

But today I went a bit overboard. It was meant as crew training and tourist flight using previous expedition's landers, but a certain lander would require a bit too many trips there and back, so after refueling at Ike...

are we sure this is how you fly a shuttle?

And...

Honestly, I didn't really expect this to work.

[obnox twin]

Last sunday I started my second attempt at a jool 5

[Akagi]

Row row row your boat

[Axelord FTW]

Damn, this give me an idea...

[Kazkar]

Today,    I!    HAVE!    LANDED!!!

Seriously! No explosions, and the number of wheels, wings and kerbals before and after the landing, remained constant.

This was a simulation run of the first aeroplane (and the second vehicle) in my new RO/RP-1 career. I still cannot figure out these MechJebs and all the various autopilots, which have been brought upon me by the automatic CKAN install of RP-1, so I have decided to "just run it slowly and carefully" 

 

Here are the shots of the (now famous) prototype of the first wheeled and mann.. kerballed machine: "Yuppi"!

"Slowly and carefully" meant that hardly a single (kilo)meter of the runway would go to waste:

Spoiler

 

And here it is! Almost perfectly centered, with reasonably large safety margin for braking:

Spoiler

After such a success how could I refuse putting it into serial production? In about 3 months (there is a sounding rocket being assembled right now) I shall be able to see how much of it was just a one-time accident.

[Kebab Kerman]

Transferred crew to my Minmus station, and built yet another SSTO.

[Akagi]

A nuke launcher, to be airdropped onto Laythe

One of the nukes, and the only one that survived intact, with and without the fairing covering the 3 warheads. Look at the engine. Cn you tell me what's wrong?

[Akagi]

WAC Corporal with Tiny Tim!

The nuke designs are piling up...

[obnox twin]

7 minutes ago, Akagi said:

WAC Corporal with Tiny Tim!

The nuke designs are piling up...

Why... why but on the other hand me have done nothing just thinking designs for motherships and plan to hit what moons first of Jool for K.I.V Jool 2 go to first.

[Axelord FTW]

Bit of a gauntlet.
IS3 has arrived. A rover was sent down unto Alva to find a good spot, which ended up being on top of a mountain. The 'Tylo Special' lander then followed next. Some issues with the landing due to max acceleration being capped by MJ at 20m/s. Still managed to land on target, though I had to burn roughly four times the dV I was expecting to expend.
An autofactory was set up, the lander was refueled and then rose up back to orbit to dock again with the NSW-E stage. At this point, I have decided that Alva is unsuitable for long term colonization. Blalo is, thus, my true target. The problem is that Blalo has higher gravity and ASL pressure than Kerbin. Not by much, but enough to matter when you have to build rockets by hand on the ground. Without a KSC and launchpad, it would be very difficult to reach orbit again with any good payload mass.
Decided to make a seabase-colony. Haven't done sea launches in ages, since before the water physics were upgraded I think. I did design a boat to carry kerbals around just for fun. It might come in handy. Not pictured: How I went from 4 engines to 2, and put them on swivels to give it the ability to translate and even reverse.

In any case, the first task was to find a suitable spot with high-enough concentrations of metal ore. The concentrations of Ore on Blalo are pretty typical, but Metal Ore is very rarely found directly by the sea. Usually there's a band of a few hundred meters between high concentrations and water, but not always. The seaplane drone was thus tasked with finding a good spot. Even in places where Metal Ore reached into the water, it was also usually way too steep to do anything there anyway. Took me a few hours flying around to finally hit the jackpot.

Spoiler

 

[Chel]

Finally made my first fully legitimate surface base on another world, only took about 6 years of playing to pull off >< 

Features a science lab, habitat module, science kits + solar panels and all that good stuff. 

[Neptunium_69]

Docked my second space station. There will be more.

Edited May 18, 2022 by Smart Boy

[Whirligig Girl]

On 5/8/2022 at 8:12 PM, Jack Joseph Kerman said:

Began working on the mothership and lander(s) for my Whirligig World grand tour mission.

For those of you who don't know, Whirligig World is a Kopernicus planet pack made by @GregroxMun that starts you on another planet, called Mesbin (combination of the names Kerbin and Mesklin), in a completely new solar system, called the Kaywell System. As the planet pack's name suggests, Mesbin rotates extremely quickly, completing a rotation in less than 30 minutes. This rotation also gives it an oblate shape, and reduces the gravity at its equator to 1.3 gee, down from a crushing 13.2 gee at the poles. There is also basically no atmosphere on Mesbin, which completely changes how one plays the game, especially at the beginning of a career mode.

Here's a link to the mod's forum page. I suggest you read it to get some info on the various celestial bodies in the pack. I've had a lot of fun with it so far, I suggest you give it a try yourself!

 

Here's the mothership that I plan to use, called the Kilonova. Fully-fueled, it has about 8,000 meters per second of delta-V, which should be enough to get to most places in the Kaywell system without the need for any refueling. For the places that are not reachable with this delta-V range, such as 1P/Fophie, Ammenon, and probably 2 Wolda as well, I will send ion-powered landers from the Kilonova to reach them.

Spoiler

(Ion landers with around 12500 m/s delta-V. One in each side cargo bay.)

Of course, any interplanetary cruiser needs a good lander and a means of refueling itself. For these purposes, I have built the Universal Surface Lander (USL), (feel free to suggest an actual name), which will land on every celestial body apart from Imterril, Derbin, and Valyr (and by extension the three other places I described above). The lander has just over 3,500 meters per second of delta-V, and is powered by a single Aerospike engine, which should be enough to land anywhere apart from the aforementioned three places. In addition, the Kilonova also has a cluster of Advanced Grabbing Units mounted on a piston, which will allow it to grab onto asteroids for refueling. In the upper cargo bay (not shown here) there are two ISRU units for converting the ore into fuel.

Of course, we can't always rely on asteroids for fuel, and in these cases I will land the whole ship on a small asteroid/moon in order to refuel it. Instead of using landing legs like I normally would, I've decided to go with large landing gears here instead, as I think they look a bit better when retracted.

Also for the purpose of landing, there are 4 Thud engines placed on opposite ends of the ship, yielding a center of thrust very close to the center of mass.

Finally, there is the secondary lander for the three bodies that the USL cannot land on and return from (Imterrill, Derbin, and Valyr). All three of them have one thing in common that prevents this: they have very dense atmospheres, with Derbin and Valyr having about 7 atmospheres of pressure on the surface, while Imterril has a whopping 15 atmospheres. While I could make a lander that could ascend from Derbin or Valyr, (especially Derbin, since it only has about 1.5-2 atmospheres in the highlands), such a lander would be extremely heavy and greatly reduce the Kilonova's overall delta-V. As for Imterril, such an approach would be next to impossible, especially given that the whole place is one gigantic ocean. Even if it weren't for these atmospheres, both Derbin and Valyr are super-Kerbins, each having an orbital velocity of around 5 kilometers per second, which would be too much for the USL, anyways.

In order to solve this issue, I made a separate lander, called the IDL Lander, which is powered by propellers during its initial ascent. Once it reaches about the 0.5-atmosphere level, the propellers are jettisoned, and the rockets are ignited, propelling a single Kerbal back into orbit. Here you can see me testing it on Derbin, the place with the highest delta-V requirements. It reaches an altitude of about 15 km before the propellers become ineffective and we light the rocket engines.

  Hide contents

Ascent into orbit

Orbit Achieved!

Testing on Imterril

 

This is badS! fantastic report, hope to see more.

[stephensmat]

Today in Kerbal, I built a Lander with a dozen small ore tanks, and mounted a large convertor on top. I flew it from Kerbal to Duna, and docked the converter onto my 'mothership'.

I detatched the lander and flew it down to Ike to start harvesting ore. The problem is, when the storage filled up, I had barely enough Delta-V left to get into Orbit. The fuel I got after redocking was worth about as much fuel as I had just used landing and taking off again in the lander.

I'm still relatively new at this game. I need to reassess how to refuel completely when away from Kerbin.

[obnox twin]

6 minutes ago, stephensmat said:

Today in Kerbal, I built a Lander with a dozen small ore tanks, and mounted a large convertor on top. I flew it from Kerbal to Duna, and docked the converter onto my 'mothership'.

I detatched the lander and flew it down to Ike to start harvesting ore. The problem is, when the storage filled up, I had barely enough Delta-V left to get into Orbit. The fuel I got after redocking was worth about as much fuel as I had just used landing and taking off again in the lander.

I'm still relatively new at this game. I need to reassess how to refuel completely when away from Kerbin.

Refuel at Ike as its gravity is lighted and you don't have to worry about any atmosphere getting in the way

[stephensmat]

5 minutes ago, obnox twin said:

Refuel at Ike as its gravity is lighted and you don't have to worry about any atmosphere getting in the way

I did, but I hadn't unlocked the large ore container yet. I adapted with a dozen small ones around the fuel tank in a ring, but to keep the weight down, I don't have a converted included in the lander itself. I think my lander is just too small and low powered.

How much weight can landing legs support? I've heard people suggest just landing the whole ship. If I want to do that, I need a whole new mothership.

[Alex1234567890]

On 5/18/2022 at 1:38 AM, Akagi said:

A nuke launcher, to be airdropped onto Laythe

One of the nukes, and the only one that survived intact, with and without the fairing covering the 3 warheads. Look at the engine. Cn you tell me what's wrong?

Repositon the probe core.I saw it are under the tank,and you attached the engine under the probe core.Because probe core did not have Crossfeed,so the engine can't ignite because it can't reach fuel rerserves because of the probe core.Position the probe core to under the farings and on the tank.That will fix it.

[Akagi]

6 hours ago, Alex1234567890 said:

Repositon the probe core.I saw it are under the tank,and you attached the engine under the probe core.Because probe core did not have Crossfeed,so the engine can't ignite because it can't reach fuel rerserves because of the probe core.Position the probe core to under the farings and on the tank.That will fix it.

Engines are fully functional- that's how I nuked every Joolian moons. Probe cores still have crossfeed (at least the remote guidance units), so all's operational!

[Autochrome]

Today, I plan to make the return flight of my Sparrow SSTO and fly it to Low Kerbin Orbit with four crew on KM-5. I will show an image of the SSTO later.

[Catto]

I made a Nuclear powered Arwing and shot down the USS Enterprise

[capi3101]

25 minutes ago, Catto said:

I made a Nuclear powered Arwing and shot down the USS Enterprise

But did you do a barrel roll?

Somebody was going to ask eventually...

[Rutabaga22]

I was working on my interplanetary habitat orbital system (IHOS) and then... Oops.
 

IHOS will be a system to bring a space station to another planet then bring the kerbals home.  It is not going well because my srbs are have roll when I begin my gravity turn. These are SpaceY srbs and for some reason roll when I try to Yaw. PLS send help.

[capi3101]

23 minutes ago, Rutabaga22 said:

I was working on my interplanetary habitat orbital system (IHOS) and then... Oops.
 

IHOS will be a system to bring a space station to another planet then bring the kerbals home.  It is not going well because my srbs are have roll when I begin my gravity turn. These are SpaceY srbs and for some reason roll when I try to Yaw. PLS send help.

Let's see it intact - it'll be easier to diagnose issues that way.

(Unless you bought it from IKEA and just unpacked it, in which case you're on your own...).

Edited May 20, 2022 by capi3101

[Rutabaga22]

3 minutes ago, capi3101 said:

Let's see it intact - it'll be easier to diagnose issues that way.

Fixed it, I guess the control point for those SRBs was messed up so I removed and replaced them.