What did you do in KSP1 today?

[imcute]

my list of missions:

1. make a refueling station on planet surface or orbit
2. asteroid rendesvous
3. improve ssta

[Krazy1]

I got science in space low over the sun (under 1 Gm). My scientist enjoyed staring at the sun... he is a badass. Let's see if he can get back to Kerbin blind. It's extreme here... getting 290 EC/s from a 1x6 panel, going over 41 km/s.

If you'd like to stare at the sun too...

Spoiler

I loaded up a new install with Principia. Wow, there are more awesome ways to crash...

I want to do a Jool 5 with Principia some day. 

[Echo__3]

My recent project was creating some of the United Kingdom's first jet aircraft.

 

[dci]

After few months with sandbox I returned to my career save to move things further. Saturated seismometer placed at Duna with one fast projectile to fullfill one contract, two other rescue contracts are in progress. Also returned some crew home.

Spoiler

One of those two kerbals to rescue

This is my default Duna transfer system called Duna Bullet with transfer stage still attached. After decoupling it will serve as fuel reserve for descent vehicle or others.

Finally arrived to Eeloo with set of three landers. Not for contract, just for fun or science.

With help of SCANSat, three were able to get science from all biomes, except Craters biome.

Returned back to Kerbin trio of theese ships. This design is heavily derived from my Tristar9 ship, which is designed to visit Mun, Minmus and touch SOI edge for three stars for rookies.

Returned from Dres surface too. This ship was not designed for returning back, but due to failure in past, it was necessary to return it back.

so after connecting necessary things, I landed safely on surface.

Out of contracts and crew XP hunting I refuelled spent transfer stages of my Duna Bullets and went back to Ike ISRU site.

Back on Ike ISRUing again. Duna Bullet is capable from Ike surface land anywhere on Duna and go back to ISRU site, but does not allow too much mistakes, when using polar orbits, it has barely tens of m/s reserve.

After landing, I realized, there is dual transit over Kerbol's dics. Upper one is Moho, lower is Eve.

 

[Wizard Kerbal]

Not in KSP but related
 

I stumbled across an old notebook of mine that just helped me organize a bit, and remember a couple things. Oh 11 year old me . . . 
If it wasn’t a headache I would put some pictures here.

On the first page, it has the KSP rocket except with rainbow colored exhaust, “It’s not like it’s rocket science!” -Every KSP player and then below it the formulas for DeltaV and aircraft range, and then a hand-drawn DeltaV map-planet’s colors and all. It even has a Dres doesn’t exist joke; there’s just a poof where Dres should be, and ???? where I would write it’s name!

(After that it just looks like a space-traffic controller’s notebook)

Edited July 7, 2022 by Wizard Kerbal

[Krazy1]

16 hours ago, dci said:

Saturated seismometer placed at Duna with one fast projectile to fullfill one contract

This is not trivial...  The atmosphere is thin but still makes it much harder than a vacuum world. It's hard to get much energy left at impact. I had a small 1.25m probe and could only get about 15%.  Aiming for the mountains  straight downward at the optimal distance from the seismometer helped. Next window, I'll push a small asteroid out there. That should do it. Laythe will be a real challenge... Eve might require pushing Gilly into it.

[dci]

Just now, Krazy1 said:

This is not trivial...  The atmosphere is thin but still makes it much harder than a vacuum world. It's hard to get much energy left at impact. I had a small 1.25m probe and could only get about 15%.  Aiming for the mountains  straight downward at the optimal distance from the seismometer helped. Next window, I'll push a small asteroid out there. That should do it. Laythe will be a real challenge... Eve might require pushing Gilly into it.

I agree, it is a bit challenging. Fortunatelly I sent two impactors. First one I decoupled from transfer stage and let hit Duna surface, but heat destroyed it and just few remains fell down with very low energy. Second one I didnt decouple and main parts survived atmosphere heating.

[imcute]

2 hours ago, Krazy1 said:

It's hard to get much energy left at impact

kal drive+trying to land ur thing saftly but prograde instead of retrograde

[Akagi]

12 hours ago, Wizard Kerbal said:

Not in KSP but related
 

I stumbled across an old notebook of mine that just helped me organize a bit, and remember a couple things. Oh 11 year old me . . . 
If it wasn’t a headache I would put some pictures here.

On the first page, it has the KSP rocket except with rainbow colored exhaust, “It’s not like it’s rocket science!” -Every KSP player and then below it the formulas for DeltaV and aircraft range, and then a hand-drawn DeltaV map-planet’s colors and all. It even has a Dres doesn’t exist joke; there’s just a poof where Dres should be, and ???? where I would write it’s name!

(After that it just looks like a space-traffic controller’s notebook)

I wanna be a space-traffic controller. 

Me: "Apollo 11, turn sharply right and head for Mars"

A11: "Are you sure-"

Me: "YES I'M SURE!"

[Akagi]

Built a cool little ship

Spoiler

Shameless Plug™

 

[obnox twin]

On 7/5/2022 at 6:19 PM, Krazy1 said:

I got science in space low over the sun (under 1 Gm). My scientist enjoyed staring at the sun... he is a badass. Let's see if he can get back to Kerbin blind. It's extreme here... getting 290 EC/s from a 1x6 panel, going over 41 km/s.

If you'd like to stare at the sun too...

  Reveal hidden contents

I loaded up a new install with Principia. Wow, there are more awesome ways to crash...

I want to do a Jool 5 with Principia some day. 

I really want to try Principia but it would kill my laptop as it only has 8gb of ram

[BadOaks]

This is what happens when you let tourists fly the lander.

[Akagi]

Emergency abort vehicle testing-should be on KerbalX soon. Note to self: more batteries and RTGs are necessary and putting the parachute off-center is not a good idea.

[jimmymcgoochie]

You'd think that 23km/s of delta-V (that's 23,000m/s) would be enough to go anywhere in Sol system, but it's only just enough to get from low Earth orbit directly to Mercury and capture into something vaguely resembling an orbit. Assuming all the fuel doesn't boil off that close to the Sun, and that none of the engines fail, and that there's a signal back home, and that the inevitable course correction burn from having a nearly 10 minute long escape burn doesn't eat too much of the delta-V that's needed to capture into orbit...

[18Watt]

I updated the leaderboard for the challenge I'm currently the caretaker of, the Elcano Challenge.  Until a few days ago, only 3 players had completed the challenge on every celestial body (CB).  There are TWO new additions to the list, congratulations to @Jack Joseph Kerman and @Pouicpouic, who brought the list of Grand Master Circumnavigators up to 5!  

 

[Apelsin]

Dusted off KSP for the first time in a while, made some screenshots with visual mods & engines from my mod:

Spoiler

\

 

[Angelo Kerman]

Today, while working on Buffalo 2, I made a handy fuel pump. It's part of WildBlueCore. Here's a look:

WildBlueCore isn't done yet but there's a pre-release available.

[18Watt]

30 minutes ago, Angel-125 said:

I made a handy fuel pump.

Oh, that is really cool!  

[soyuz 33]

3 hours ago, Angel-125 said:

Today, while working on Buffalo 2, I made a handy fuel pump. It's part of WildBlueCore. Here's a look:

WildBlueCore isn't done yet but there's a pre-release available.

Fuel Pump Just one of the major things i needed for my Space Program Thank you!

[Hotel26]

Going through the dusty, old junk, hidden under the tarpaulins at the back of the SPH, I found an old "drone" prototype.

I'm working on a v2 that will extend its speed/range AND...

it will be deployed on the runway as a "wing of three", departing in formation, capable of mid-flight detachment, providing a training platform for remote controllers in 1. formation flying and 2. aerial combat.  It sports variable-incidence wings. 

v2 prototype just hit M2 climbing through 11.7 km...  looking forward to seeing the final numbers, including range.

Edited July 9, 2022 by Hotel26

[RizzoTheRat]

Started a new career after nearly 2 years away from KSP.  Building a new mission planner for my kOs scripts, but had forgotten that my circularisation script needs the tracking station to be updated to access the patched conics.  So I figured it's time to do a few tourist missions to earn the cash for the upgrade.

Then I found this rocket design doesn't quite have enough dV to make orbit...I got the Pe up to -35km!  Probably could have had jeb make orbit from there just his backpack!  Sadly the capsule didn't have RCS.   

 

In true KSP tradition though, I feel the answer is MOAR BOOSTERS!

[BadOaks]

I've been launching a lot of interplanetary probes recently. The first two were Duna-1 and Duna-2 (I wasn't feeling very imaginative) and launched on Zephyr VII's.

Duna-1 carries a SAR antenna and multispectral biome imager, and Duna-2 has a high resolution telescope and resource imager. Both spacecraft are mounted onto a spherical transfer upper stage for inserting into their target orbits around Duna. In-game the upper stage uses LFO, but in my head it's some type of storable biprop like MMH + NTO with a common bulkhead tank.

After that an Eve window opened up and I launched, wait for it... Eve-1 and Eve-2. This time I also designed the Zephyr VIII, the next generation of the Zephyr family, with improved performance and more importantly a 3.75m fairing. It uses 2 hydrolox stages and is only a little more expensive than its predecessor. 

Eve-1 is a Scansat workhorse. It carries a visual telescope, resource imager, and SAR antenna as well as some miscellaneous experiments. It's also the first probe that I've given Hall Effect thrusters since I'd like it to map both Eve and Gilly.

Eve-2 carries a pair of aero-shelled landers which I'm going to try to put down on land and in the ocean respectively to fulfill a contract. The two pairs of engines on the bus are spaced such that after one of the landers detaches I can shut down the corresponding pair of engines and the remaining pair will provide balanced thrust. It's a bit heavy so the transfer stage got stretched for additional delta V.

And finally, I saw that I had a transfer window to Edna open up (Edna is outside the orbit of Dres in JNSQ) so I threw together an RTG probe to look around. The Edna Explorer carries two RTG's on extendable booms, a visual telescope, multispectral imager, magnetometer, and 7 other minor experiments.

[RizzoTheRat]

43 minutes ago, BadOaks said:

 

What graphics mods are you using?  that looks stunning.

[jimmymcgoochie]

A simple transfer from Dres to Eve, around 950m/s or so, nothing too difficult.

40 minute burn time plus painfully slow FPS due to a very high part count minus 3x physics warp (as high as I dared) meant that it took the better part of an hour, with no option to split the burn since Dres' escape velocity isn't very high and its SOI is pretty small.

On the plus side, the burn put the ship on a trajectory that'll go straight into Eve, with a tiny 2m/s course correction half way there to get into a more sensible position to capture. With a bit more effort the orbit can be aligned with the plane of Ike. (Yes, Ike- it orbits Eve in the Snarkiverse, while Gilly is down with Moho).

[bigyihsuan]

Snarkiverse Dres landing using BDB parts (and CryoEngines methalox engines)