What did you do in KSP1 today?

[QF9E]

Today I planted a flag on Eve, using a fully recoverable lander and without using ISRU. This flight was part of my "Leave Nothing but Bootprints" campaign, that aims to plant a flag everywhere in the stock Kerbol system while recovering all craft and not using ISRU. After landing on, and lifting off from, Eve, I then landed my lander back at the KSC.

In support of this mission I also sent a tanker to Eve to refuel my lander, which only carried just enough fuel to go from low Eve orbit to Eve's surface and back to low Eve orbit. Due to a design error I've yet to land my tanker: it carries an excess of oxidizer in a tank that shifts the center of gravity so far forward that the craft is unflyable inside Kerbin's atmosphere. The tanker is equipped with fuel drains, the idea being to use them to drain the oxidizer, but I put these drains in the wrong place. For the moment, the tanker has been parked in Low Kerbin Orbit, waiting for a repair mission to install the missing fuel drains.

Spoiler

Launch of the lander using a Buran-style flyback booster.

Launch of the tanker with a second flyback booster of the same design.

Landing one of the flyback boosters. Considering their size - they are the largest craft I've ever landed on a runway in KSP - they handle pretty well.

Eve entry of the lander. This was much more difficult than I had anticipated, and I was forced to use MechJeb's SmartASS assistance to fly a very precise entry profile. The Angle of Attack needs to be exactly 88 degrees - less than that and the nose burns up, more than that and the Mammoth engine at the back overheats - and the roll angle must be exactly 0 degrees. Any deviation in roll attitude and the craft entered an uncontrollable spin.

Searching for a landing spot once entry is complete. The nearby shore looks too steep to land but the lake in the distance looks promising.

Surface operations complete, the craft ascends under prop power.

Using rockets the rest of the way. Above about 13 km, Eve's atmosphere is too thin to be able to use props, at least with a craft as heavy as this.

Back in Eve orbit, with a comfortable delta-v margin

Lander re-entering Kerbin's atmosphere. Since this craft is able to enter Eve's atmosphere fully fueled, Kerbin re-entry while empty was a walk in the park by comparison.

Lander landing on the grass next to the KSC runway. I overestimated this craft's landing speed so I overshot the runway and was forced to land on the grass.

More pictures here: https://imgur.com/a/1AD3u40.

Edited June 11, 2022 by QF9E

[Ben J. Kerman]

I started work on a Mercedes-Benz Econic (Kercedes-Kenz Ekonik). I haven't given up on the KAN, I'm just taking a break from it.

https://u.cubeupload.com/Bjh223/screenshot342.png

Edited June 12, 2022 by Ben J. Kerman

[Guest]

48 minutes ago, QF9E said:

Today I planted a flag on Eve, using a fully recoverable lander and without using ISRU. This flight was part of my "Leave Nothing but Bootprints" campaign, that aims to plant a flag everywhere in the stock Kerbol system while recovering all craft and not using ISRU. After landing on, and lifting off from, Eve, I then landed my lander back at the KSC.

In support of this mission I also sent a tanker to Eve to refuel my lander, which only carried just enough fuel to go from low Eve orbit to Eve's surface and back to low Eve orbit. Due to a design error I've yet to land my tanker: it carries an excess of oxidizer in a tank that shifts the center of gravity so far forward that the craft is unflyable inside Kerbin's atmosphere. The tanker is equipped with fuel drains, the idea being to use them to drain the oxidizer, but I put these drains in the wrong place. For the moment, the tanker has been parked in Low Kerbin Orbit, waiting for a repair mission to install the missing fuel drains.

  Reveal hidden contents

Launch of the lander using a Buran-style flyback booster.

Launch of the tanker with a second flyback booster of the same design.

Landing one of the flyback boosters. Considering their size - they are the largest craft I've ever landed on a runway in KSP - they handle pretty well.

Eve entry of the lander. This was much more difficult than I had anticipated, and I was forced to use MechJeb's SmartASS assistance to fly a very precise entry profile. The Angle of Attack needs to be exactly 88 degrees - less than that and the nose burns up, more than that and the Mammoth engine at the back overheats - and the roll angle must be exactly 0 degrees. Any deviation in roll attitude and the craft entered an uncontrollable spin.

Searching for a landing spot once entry is complete. The nearby shore looks too steep to land but the lake in the distance looks promising.

Surface operations complete, the craft ascends under prop power.

Using rockets the rest of the way. Above about 13 km, Eve's atmosphere is too thin to be able to use props, at least with a craft as heavy as this.

Back in Eve orbit, with a comfortable delta-v margin

Lander re-entering Kerbin's atmosphere. Since this craft is able to enter Eve's atmosphere fully fueled, Kerbin re-entry while empty was a walk in the park by comparison.

Lander landing on the grass next to the KSC runway. I overestimated this craft's landing speed so I overshot the runway and was forced to land on the grass.

More pictures here: https://imgur.com/a/1AD3u40.

Holy smokes, that is amazing!  

[Souper]

I'm playing with a bunch of aesthetic mods, BDarmory, Strategia and Kiwi Tech Tree. Currently I've landed my first unmanned Mun probes. I must say, the visuals from ReStock and HullcamVDS are amazing. Finally, I can build spaceships that look complex - like they were actually engineered instead of just drawn up in a cartoon!

[BadOaks]

After finally getting my new family of Apollo-analogue crafts finished I went ahead and did a Mun landing with Val, Bob, and Bill. The Driver IV is the mission's heavy lift vehicle, capable of slinging up to 27 tons onto a Mun transfer orbit.

Transposition and docking in LKO.

SEV separation from the orbiter at 20 km altitude.

Bill and Bob posing for a picture. Bob seems to be very excited about his hands for some reason.

SEV returning to orbit.

I also did some contract work with the unmanned portion of my space program. Farlander 3 was intended to do a group of orbital surveys around Duna but managed to get itself into a resonant orbit where it kept flying over the same bits of ground, so I had to lower the orbit slightly such that Duna's day length was no longer a close multiple of the probe's orbital period.

I launched Garnet 12 to fulfill a resource scanning contract around Minmus, and also clean up some orbital science I hadn't gotten to yet. It made a nice excuse to bust out one my smaller but fun-to-fly launch vehicles, the Zephyr V.

I slapped a gravioli detector onto the probe since I'd just unlocked them, but apparently it generates MASSIVE data volumes such that Garnet's tiny TTC reflector antenna isn't gonna cut it. Ah well, lessons learned. Everything else about the mission went well, and it brought in some much-needed funds to support the manned program.

 

 

 

[septemberWaves]

5.

4.

3.

2.

1.

The full mission report can be found here. There are about 50 screenshots and a good amount of commentary, so I don't want to clog up this thread with that.

[GDJ]

And another "experiment".

When the Procedral parts work, it's a religious moment really.

Single Juno powered, low weight (4 tonnes).

 

 

Not a bad speed for a single Juno. Its supersonic.

[Pipcard]

[JAXA+] 2033-04-10 - The Kagutsuchi Mars Transport Vehicle (1725 tonnes) assembled in Earth orbit

[Cavscout74]

Back before I had quit KSP for a while, I was playing a JNSQ career and ran into an issue with my Duna lander going crazy when the drogue chutes deployed.  Since I've been back playing some, I decided to build a completely new lander in a JNSQ sandbox save, put it in Duna orbit and try to land.  And got this - which doesn't do justice to the 3-axis spinning at high rpm.  I actually tried twice - first time trying to use the chutes to get some deceleration (so I was going 600+ m/s when deployed), second time I used mostly a propulsive descent, deploying chutes at <200 m/s and the results were identical, so apparently something in that entire install is glitched.

Back in my 1.8 career, lots of stuff has been going on:

Expanded the fuel station with monoprop, snacks, fertilizer & water, plus a small LFO tank.  I also used the engineer I flew up to remove the cluster of monoprop tanks around the living area (after this pic)

Almost every one of my launches the last few days was very large - using 5m cores, often with Clydesdale boosters.  Sometimes using 8 vectors and a mainsail on the 5m core, just to maintain >1g acceleration after dropping the Clydesdales

Of course, I was also launching things like a floating Laythe base:

And a new, larger Duna base:

There was also time to make & test an amphibious Buffalo rover for use on Laythe.  I was able to get about 17 m/s in the water.

Had a combined flight of bringing the next Duna crew up to the EV-1 Avalon and getting a Lightning II spaceplane launched to Laythe. 

Spoiler

Docking with the orbital fuel station - both to transfer the Duna crew, and get the spaceplane topped off for the trip to Laythe

After getting the crew transferred, refueling & getting the spaceplane to a safe parking orbit to wait for transfer, the pilot boarded his "pilot reentry pod" and headed for the surface

More launches followed - this was one of the smaller ones, with a survey satellite for Laythe or Val.

Built an octajet VTOL and attempted to land on the VAB

"Attempted" being the key word

Also "attempted" to send a crew to orbit and found an uncorrected staging mistake on one of my workhouse designs from earlier in this career.  The LES worked, but revealed another fault - the abort function doesn't shut off the main engine on this one, either.  The rocket only splashed down well after the chutes were deployed on the capsule

Finally, one last launch and I think one of the prettiest launch screenshots I've ever gotten:

[Krazy1]

Today I got annoyed by 3 different bugs. I sent a Sun science ship to low Sun biome (under 1 Gm) after refueling in Mun orbit.  Took about 5 km/s burn to get that low.  Going 10 times faster than the Mun:

There's a return orbit that intersects Kerbin in just over 1 year... only 227 m/s at Sun PE

I wanted to plot the Kerbin capture maneuver but it put the maneuver node on the future intercept position of Kerbin although I was focusing on Kerbin at it's present location. When I put node at Kerbin PE, the orbit line through the Kerbin SOI I was looking at just disappeared too. Weird. 

I took a contract to push a C asteroid to Eve. There happened to be one in Kerbin SOI on an escaping trajectory so I raced to catch it. I launched an idle ship from the Mun and slingshot off Kerbin. Then bug #2 which I've seen before... it does not plot the targeting arrows when you and the target are escaping. Actually it did start to work when I was about 50 km away and I didn't need them anymore. So catching an escaping asteroid is not easy. I had to just guess where the intercept would be based on their time to escape Kerbin SOI and when I got a few hours away I did a few burns to push retrograde to target.

When I klawed the asteroid, I couldn't place a maneuver node... because I had no connection to Kerbin...

"blocked by aero shielding" whaaaa??? 

On 6/9/2022 at 12:55 AM, TKMK said:

where do you find this??

It's in Kerbal Engineer Redux> Landing tab> Impact Marker

[Fenris]

I went to Duna. Of course I had to complicate the mission by wanting 3 Kerbals and all of the science equipment I could carry with me, as well as some ground science in storage. In the past I'd just make a massive launch vehicle, as well as a somewhat large transfer vehicle, then top it off with a lander that was large enough to land on Duna then return back to Kerbin. But now that I'm doing more docking I decided to do more of an Apollo style mission.

So here is the launch vehicle. It is much taller than I'd like, but at that point I hadn't unlocked the largest tanks yet.

[SPOILER="Some Pic Spam"]

Turns out it flew better than I expected. That's a Twin Boar and 2 Vectors pushing it.

Gaining the last bit of height and speed thanks to the Mastodon.

Fairings deployed, solar panels out, and just waiting circularize the orbit.

So long Mastodon. I try to leave no trash in space.

On the way to Duna.

Gathered some science on the way and am heading for a 55k x 55k orbit.

Time to do this.

Well that's not right. Not sure what happened here as everything was built in symmetry. My guess and it's only a guess at this point is that I didn't distribute the load evenly when I loaded on all the ground science. I'll check that out later.

Luckily the capsules SAS was enough to level the lander. I also had the first near disaster of the mission. I was messing about in the capsule menu trying to get a crew report before touch down when I noticed I was falling too fast and less than 30 meters from impact. I had just enough time to slow the lander by going full throttle at that point, but it was a bit of a panicked move . The Kerbals probably would have survived the impact (it was slow enough), but I'd noticed on the way down that I had the landing gear too far up and the Spark engines were nearly level with the extended landing gear, so prone to getting destroyed if I landed a bit too fast.

And here they are after landing and setting up the science equipment. By this time I'd switched to the transfer craft (using its drone core) and pushed the obit up to 75k x 75k to make rendezvous easier. Not sure if that helps, but I felt like it would so that was the plan.

Time to leave. Man those sparks are weak lol. In the VAB I was showing around 1.3 TWR on Duna. Turns out it was more like 1.1 TWR. Glad I didn't pack on anymore weight.

I'd love to claim that I masterfully planned to have exactly the amount of delta V required for the ascent and rendezvous procedure, but that would be a lie . I was sweating a bit, even the Kerbals look concerned. I have never cut dv this close before, I've run out dropping into Kerbin before, but I don't count those as I was already captured.

Used the remaining fuel and about a quarter of my monoprop to slow down and am on final approach to the transfer vehicle.

So after docking I I transferred  the crew and all the science to the transfer vehicle. I'm getting ready to undock the lander and have it deorbit, and then I'm going to drop the orbit on the far side of the planet to 45k, detach the outer fuel tanks and engines which are nearly empty, and finally raise my obit back up before plotting a maneuver node home. So here I am doing one final check when I noticed I forgot the parachutes ....... again! Luckily I insisted on having 3 Kerbals on this mission, otherwise I wouldn't have brought an engineer along.

So, after Bill saved the day (I really did not want to have to do a rescue mission lol), the lander was successfully deorbited using the remaining monoprop, and the nearly empty fuel tanks dumped, it was time to head home. BTW, those Communotron DTS M1s I brought along for the probe cores when I wasn't directly controlling the craft ..... 2% connection to Kerbin lol. That nearly changed how I did the whole mission once I got to Duna.

So here I am coming into Kerbin. A bit before this I noticed my trajectories mod wasn't working (forgot to download the dependency). So I'm coming in hot and need to do an aerocapture since there is no way a single Nerv is going to do the job. I'm trying to quickly guess how low I need to be in Kerbin's atmosphere to do one, it's been 2 years I don't remember this stuff. I settled on 35k, it seemed too low but something told me to go for it so I did.

I didn't get any pics of the areocapture, I was too busy being nervous, watching the readouts, and trying to figure out which explosions I needed to worry about and which ones were no problem (you could only say that last bit in KSP). I was still pretty high up when reentry heat started up, I'd decided to leave the Nerv and tanks on as a temporary heat shield to help save the ablator. The retracted solar panels and antenna went almost immediately. The Nerve seemed to only last seconds at this speed before blowing up. The remaining fuel tanks followed in quick secession one after the other. Then the large reaction wheel and decoupler went up. But I was captured, and nothing I hadn't planned on ditching was damaged (I pretty much figured the antenna was going to go). So on the second orbit.

In the end I came away with 2.1k science, all the Kerbals survived, and unlocking so many world firsts payed for the trip.

[/SPOILER]

Uhh, sorry for the pic spam. I seem to have forgotten how to use spoilers. Could someone refresh my memory. Thanks

Edited June 17, 2022 by Fenris
forgot how to use spoilers

[BadOaks]

I was fiddling around with the design of my Driver launch vehicle, going through several iterations until I arrived at something I was happy with. It's now shorter, cheaper, more performant and arguably looks cooler.

Spoiler

I also redesigned the moon-landing stack with a new 4-man orbiter and a deployable rover for the lander. Carson, Jovey, Bill, and Stelzer piled in with a slate full of Minmus contracts. 

One of the upper stage engines failed on ignition, but fortunately I was able to recover since the new hydrolox lower stage gets almost all of the way to orbit on its own. I'd also angled the engines slightly inward in order to fit two of them, which unintentionally made it perfectly controllable in the event of exactly this kind of failure. All I had to do was aim slightly left of the maneuver indicator during the trans-Minmus injection, so the mission continued unaffected.

Lander extraction following the injection burn. I had to stop here today, but I'm excited to see how rover performs. One of the contracts on Minmus is also to repair another rover, which I'm planning to do by cannibalizing mine after it's done its job.

 

Edited June 13, 2022 by BadOaks

[Ben J. Kerman]

I threw some trucks off of a ramp. I took a ton of screenshots, so I need to sort through them and find the good ones to upload.

Just call them... crash tests. Yeah, tests.

Edited June 14, 2022 by Ben J. Kerman

[king of nowhere]

Had to dump some water and ore before leaving Phobos, I realized I could use the drain valves to get into orbit, the local gravity is so low.

In fact, I even used them to get in an escape trajectory. So now I can claim I went from surface to escape velocity on a celestial body on drain valve propulsion alone!

 

[ColdJ]

My Mod RND has now been updated and is avalable on Spacedock.

https://spacedock.info/mod/3005/R.N.D

 

Edited June 14, 2022 by ColdJ

[Kerb24]

I finally played KSP again. I made a plane that flew better backwards. I have no idea how. 

 

Edited June 14, 2022 by Kerb24
Added the screenshot

[ColdJ]

12 minutes ago, Kerb24 said:

I finally played KSP again. I made a plane that flew better backwards. I have no idea how.

How were you flying backwards to start with?

[Kerb24]

43 minutes ago, ColdJ said:

How were you flying backwards to start with?

Basically, the craft tumbled out of control, ran out of fuel, and then as the aircraft fell it ended up tail first, and was able to glide in that orrientation, and safely landed.

[splashboom]

Finally found my favorite mining spot on Gilly:

[Misguided Kerbal]

Continuing my JNSQ playthrough, I've finally launched the first Kerbal into orbit. Since it's an important mission, that means...

Cue the dramatic angle screenshot spam! (for sanity's sake, I'll stuff it into a spoiler.)

Spoiler

 

[BadOaks]

My Minmus mission arrived in a polar orbit and Bill and Stelzer took the lander down to the surface. The landing site was a small flat area 1.3 km away from a contract-spawned rover which needed to be repaired.

After touch down I activated the lander's rover deployment sequence.

And the rover itself handled pretty well. After doing their reports, taking samples and setting up science equipment, Bill and Stelzer hopped on and drove over to the contract waypoint.

Bill cannibalized the rover I brought, attaching two wheel, some solar panels and the batteries. The Kraken gave a few love taps while Bill was working but thankfully nothing exploded or got hurled into space. Then it was a 4 km trip over some hills to reach the contract waypoint.

The journey was eventful.

It probably didn't help that I was listening to this during the drive.  Eventually they made it though, and both kerbals flew back to the lander with their jetpacks. After making a few additional landings (the lander was sized for the Mun, after all), they headed back to orbit and rendezvoused with the Endurance spacecraft.

[jimmymcgoochie]

How to make a Mars rover in three easy steps:

1. Take an existing design for a Moon rover;
2. Add a parachute;
3. Uh… moar solar panels I guess?

Getting to Mars isn’t that much more difficult than getting to the Moon, with the added bonus of having an atmosphere to aerobrake in once you get there (even if it’s a really puny one) and a parachute-assisted powered landing is easier than a purely propulsive one.

[QF9E]

Today I touched the Sun! Well, almost, I got to within about 100 thousand kilometers. Much closer and my craft would have burned up.

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

18 hours ago, Kerb24 said:

Basically, the craft tumbled out of control, ran out of fuel, and then as the aircraft fell it ended up tail first, and was able to glide in that orrientation, and safely landed.

Sounds like a centre of mass/lift imbalance, those rocket engines right at the back will make it tail-heavy and with the tanks empty it would be prone to flipping tail-first, not helped by the tailless design. Move the main wings back and give them a slight upwards incidence (tilt a few degrees up so the leading edge is above the trailing edge) and add some sort of tail fin and you might find it a lot more flyable, or add some ballast in the nose to prevent the CoM shifting too far back.

[Guest]

Around a year ago, I built the entire ISS in JNSQ. Over the past week or so, I've been rebuilding the ISS now in KSRSS. Screenshots of what I did yesterday:

First off: Returning STS-96.

Spoiler

 

Next: The launch, rendezvous and docking of STS-97.

Spoiler

 

Next: The launch, rendezvous and docking of Progress 1.

Spoiler

 

Finally: The launch, rendezvous and docking is this getting old yet  of Expedition 1.

Spoiler