What did you do in KSP1 today?

[ColdJ]

After several days so sick I could barely move I have started building a Chinook parts kit to include with Huey one I have made, plenty left to adjust and build,(doesn't have it's own rotors or landing gear yet but I was able to sort of re-create this pic I saw online.

Edited August 6, 2022 by ColdJ

[LHACK4142]

I tried to fly a stock "recommended" space shuttle (with only the parts that seem especially made by Squad for shuttles) to see whether it'd actually work, especially with FAR. However, it just keeps falling apart on the pad!!! The launch clamps seem detached, and all the decouplers seem detached as well. The flight log, however, doesn't say the usual "Structural linkage between __ and __ failed"!!!

I HATE YOU KRAKEN!!

[king of nowhere]

I finally launched Ringrazer. though it's still going to need a refueling before leaving the Earth SoI. and probably a couple more on saturn.

the ship is not imploding as the engines are ignited. that's already progress

Bad ship design, the drop tanks are hitting the engines. the silver lining is that the ship accelerates so slowly, even with the equivalent of 25 mammoths behind, that the spent tanks just bounce harmlessly and slide away.

For the ones further on, though, I had to throttle down the engines

Speaking of engines, a major nuisance is that under kerbalism i have to repair them after two ignitions. And I'll need at least 10 apoapsis raising manuevers before I can leave Earth. here bill is looking at the forest of engines, in disbelief that he really has to go through all of them

And here you can barely see bill in the middle of the image, again for some sense of scale

I even found a secret passage. those 7.5 meter parts are big enough that a full kerbal can pass through. Looks like the entrance to some ancient temple...

 

for today i managed 1000 m/s of manuever. this ship lags, though somewhat less than my usual motherships, and it had a lot of freak accidents forcing me to reload.

Edited August 6, 2022 by king of nowhere

[IncompetentSpacer]

Finished my daily Kerbal RP-1 session with two contracts.

First geostationary satellite :

And second moon orbiter contract:

Both were delivered by my R-7 derivative rocket which I kinda use for everything (MEO, crewed missions, moon contract) beside small payload deliveries (communication, weather and navigation contracts) to LEO.

[Caerfinon]

A new bunch of recruits arriving at the Astronaut complex wearing their nice new uniforms. 

I sort of got interested in making suits for KSP using the Suit Picker instructions and I always wanted the USI Kolonization suits to be available there as well instead of just in Texture Replacer.  The result being that I did some fiddling and adapted all the USI suits to now appear in the Suit Picker as default class suits.  Both normal and veteran textures are available. 

If you want to use them I posted them here: https://github.com/caerfinon/Caerfinon-Suits/releases/tag/v0.0.1  

• Original suits and configuration files: MIT License Copyright (c) 2022 Caerfinon
• Artwork from USI Kolonization Class Suits Redux: CC-BY-SA-4.0 License Copyright (c) 2019 overkill13

Transportation curtesy of @ColdJ's excellent MiniMoke mod . 

[Caerfinon]

More retro plane construction hijinks

 

The Stratocruiser. Built from old bomber parts left lying around after the war. Has quite the range. Available on KerbalX: Stratocruiser

[jimmymcgoochie]

Whoops!

[Kerb24]

Continued the 4L1P Mission. 

Spoiler

This communication session starts with the spacecraft leaving the Mun, lowering its orbit around Kerbin. 

Once at periapsis, another burn is preformed, raising its orbit. 

And then another course correction to get a Minmus encounter. 

Once at Minmus, the spacecraft enters orbit. 

And preforms lots of small burns to adjust inclination and altitude.

The lander undocks. 

And de-orbits.

PDI. 

Contact. The lander lands on a slope.

Doing some mining. 

Re-extending the landing gear causes the lander to hop.

Of course, I didn't take any pictures of the ascent, so here it is back in orbit.

And re-docked. 

The spacecraft will now wait in orbit till the next Eve transfer window.

 

[IncompetentSpacer]

30 minutes ago, Kerb24 said:

Continued the 4L1P Mission. 

  Reveal hidden contents

This communication session starts with the spacecraft leaving the Mun, lowering its orbit around Kerbin. 

Once at periapsis, another burn is preformed, raising its orbit. 

And then another course correction to get a Minmus encounter. 

Once at Minmus, the spacecraft enters orbit. 

And preforms lots of small burns to adjust inclination and altitude.

The lander undocks. 

And de-orbits.

PDI. 

Contact. The lander lands on a slope.

Doing some mining. 

Re-extending the landing gear causes the lander to hop.

Of course, I didn't take any pictures of the ascent, so here it is back in orbit.

And re-docked. 

The spacecraft will now wait in orbit till the next Eve transfer window.

 

More elegant than my brute force rocket in stock with 158 meter rocket which was at 700t (I think, not sure 100% regarding mass) with 28 engines in the first stage. I parachuted into the atmosphere and used ISRU to refuel (took ages).

And then thanks to EVE buggy surface, my entire monster rocket started sliding towards water (or whatever chemical soup the eve has for ocean) after a game restart.  I took off immediately and I think it was Gilly I finished refueling on - not sure though, since this was some years ago but I knew I did not have enough dV in return section to go right home (besides having to wait for transfer window).

-----------

Anyway earlier today I was tired of KSP so I just did one launch, starting on my comsat contract in RP-1 career. On the image is the light rocket (I have one heavy and one light design) I use for missions limited to 500 kg payload and LEO orbit.

Edited August 7, 2022 by IncompetentSpacer

[N_Danger]

Chores were done and the supply module was undocked for disposal

Deorbit burn

Then 3 more kerbals were sent up with a new Hab Module

The second stage is dropped

 

Station approach

 

And we attach the Hab Module.

We also pause during Rover testing for a moment of silence and remembrance.

  

 

[Krazy1]

Working on a Jool 5 with Principia. I made it to Tylo from Vall... that takes some dV management. I'll post pics when I'm done but here's a video of the Tylo landing.

Actually it was the second attempt. First time I was over-confident in the Mammoths ability to stop it when I thought it would crash but before I knew it would crash. Without air on Tylo, debris can easily fly 10 km.

Edited August 8, 2022 by Krazy1

[Caerfinon]

Flying a squadron of helicopters... if only there was some appropriate theme music for such an endeavour 

 

[Kerb24]

Continued 4L1P 

Spoiler

After waiting most of a year, the vehicle preforms a maneuver to escape Minmus.

Then another burn to lower its orbit. 

And then it's time to escape the gravity of Kerbin. 

And continue the mission at Eve. 

The next landing will be on Gilly. 

But then I had to resupply my LKO space station. 

Done! 

The Gilly landing will be next communication session.

[panzer1b]

So yeah, over the last few weeks...

Made a new variant of BCorp's Victory class cruiser, since i seem to always have some complaint about most of their ships ive made in one regard or another (except the boradsword which im 100% happy with look and function wise).

Can take a beating although it does tend to get its fuel tanks shot out (an issue with ANY ship that doesnt use mk2/3 tanks, and even then its still an issue)...

Made a tanker variant of an old APC i had laying around that can actually claw onto 95% of my other vehicles.

Not entirely sure why i made this or even what im gonna arm it with (its currently a hull only), but its prolly gonna be a StarLeague warship since its asthetics at least vaguely resemble the infinity class battleship they have.

And for the 11th time, i redid my favorite ship i ever made for KSP, the Nebula class frigate.  I added ~20 extra parts and a minor amount of weight (its around 330 parts, and dV went down to 3K), but the hull actually looks much closer to the way i envisioned this thing in concept art, its tankier (not even a 10t heavy torpedo will 1 shot this thing), has all its secondary weapons mounted internally, only the heavy torps have tubes stuck onto the sides.  I also added a cover for the forward cannon since it looks way better with that then having a giant hole in the front, the hole is only present when mounting alternative loadouts then the firework cannon.

Only thing i didnt do that my concept had was the the tri shaped engine arrays, just didnt feel like adding another 18-24 parts to make it look right, and the semi exposed NTRs dont actually look bad to be honest gives it a more industrial look and not full blown alien tech everywhere.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And finally, prolly the coolest thing ive made in a long time thats actually not a lagfest (i stopped making "relicas" a long time ago as they take way too much time (which i dont have anymore), eat so many parts that they are useless for anything but taking screenshots, and well i actually prefer my own designs most of the time anyway, just stick to "heavily inspired by x" but not a replica...

Should be somewhat obvious what this is at least partially inspired by.  Ofc unlike what its based on, there are no vent shafts for the alien to go through (not like i could afford the parts to do vents).  Its actually ONLY ~500 parts since i really worked hard on being as efficient as possible with the only parts of this station that eat more parts then they should being the upper catwalks and observation deck (the bottom sections are actually ~200, more then half is the upper 10% of the station).  Everything is fully traversible as a kerbal and the station (while a bit WIP still), has a fully decked out interior with plenty of stock windows abusing the girders (honestly the best thing about the stock girder, you can see thru it).  Hangar as well which believe it or not fits most corvettes fully inside it as its a double mk3 bay.  Still, im gonna try and cut down some more parts as i really would like to keep it below 400 (since a station by defenition gets docked to by ships and even just adding some fuel tank clusters is gonna take its toll).

[ColdJ]

Pretty close to finished on the Huey and Chinook parts pack. Some last tidy up and writing up a "read me" and it should be ready to release.

[IncompetentSpacer]

After two successful moon orbiter missions in my RP-1 career, finally the time has arrived for landing a probe on the moon. Instead of opting for light payload which would make everything so much easier, as training for moon boots and in need of science points, I opted for 500 kg probe filled with science gear.

Game bugged out plenty of times for some reason so I had to restart KSP several times.

I used mechjeb landing autopilot for first time and I kinda regretted that. Mechjeb turned on and off probe's engines all the time, eventually triggering failure in 2 of 4 engines (thankfully symmetrically so I had control). I did not land perfectly but had to struggle looong time before managing to right the probe.

After the probe was righted, science gathering was initiated and after the first report came in, the contract was fulfilled.

[stephensmat]

Today's Achievement: Juggling acts. I have a rover heading to Eve, a Space Station heading to Ike, another Space Station heading to Duna, as well as a NURV-Powered spacecraft heading to Jool, and a Duna Mission wrapping up and returning to Kerbin.

The Alarm Clock Mod is surprisingly useful when you have more than one mission in play.

Highlights from the Duna Mission: I've never seen Blueberries before.

 

Welcome home, SS Watney. Your crew will be debriefed, and you'll be refuelled to take them on their next mission soon! Maybe Moho. I've never been there before.

 

[Kerbalsaurus]

On 8/6/2022 at 3:48 PM, king of nowhere said:

I finally launched Ringrazer. though it's still going to need a refueling before leaving the Earth SoI. and probably a couple more on saturn.

the ship is not imploding as the engines are ignited. that's already progress

Bad ship design, the drop tanks are hitting the engines. the silver lining is that the ship accelerates so slowly, even with the equivalent of 25 mammoths behind, that the spent tanks just bounce harmlessly and slide away.

For the ones further on, though, I had to throttle down the engines

Speaking of engines, a major nuisance is that under kerbalism i have to repair them after two ignitions. And I'll need at least 10 apoapsis raising manuevers before I can leave Earth. here bill is looking at the forest of engines, in disbelief that he really has to go through all of them

And here you can barely see bill in the middle of the image, again for some sense of scale

I even found a secret passage. those 7.5 meter parts are big enough that a full kerbal can pass through. Looks like the entrance to some ancient temple...

 

for today i managed 1000 m/s of manuever. this ship lags, though somewhat less than my usual motherships, and it had a lot of freak accidents forcing me to reload.

It's, it's... Beautiful.

[ColdJ]

Released my Huey and Chinook parts pack on to Spacedock today. Added a second Chinook tail at the last minute to allow my Jeep to be driven on as the original tail doesn't allow it and It was annoying me.

https://spacedock.info/mod/3072/Huey and Chinook Helicopter parts pack.

[Kerb24]

FINISHED 4L1P 

Spoiler

Several Maneuvers are preformed to get the spacecraft on a Gilly encounter. 

Once at Gilly, the spacecraft inserts into orbit. 

The lander undocks. 

De-orbits. 

And Lands. 

Ascent. 

It's decided not to dock back to the transfer stage. 

And so, the lander heads straight to Eve.

'

The lower stage disintegrates. 

Parachutes deploy. 

And landed. 

Mission complete. 

 

[IncompetentSpacer]

Used for first time a Gemini capsule today, mounted on a R-7 style rocket.

The contract was to preform EVA and report the findings from low orbit. For our Kerbals it was chance to test the new EVA pack which would be useful for the intended homemade solution for landing on the moon, using the Gemini capsule and garage made lander.

The image from above reminds me of certain smiling man meme. Maybe our astronaut is thinking that the capsule was never tested. Or for that matter the EVE pack she is using. Or that the capsule is nearing the Allen belts.

Luckily everything went well and the new Gemini capsule is proving much more safer than the Mercury which already has claimed two Kerbal lives.

[king of nowhere]

alas, i put my saturn mission in indefinite hiatus for the moment.

it was too much of a slog. And if I say that, after spending many monthsrunning grand tours with superlaggy ships, after spending days in interplanetary trips doing nothing but harvesting crops and fix aging hardware, it means something.

I already spent close to a month in that mission. It looked good, I finally got to launch the ship. several days ago. I spent all those days raising apoapsis.

engine maintenance was a bother, with 50 huge engines that could not be toured with an easy trajectory.

I managed to fix that by editing the file. I was hoping to find a "number of ignitions still allowed" number, or something like that, but I discovered that it was in the engine config file. I didn't want to change that, as it would impact my - more serious - main mission. so, no way to increase the number of uses of an engine.

however, the engine in the save file did have a number of times it was ignited. I wondered, will the game actually accept a negative value? Bingo!

Now I have 1000 ignitions, and I can run the engines for more than a day nonstop. One problem solved.

So I spent several afternoons rasing apoapsis. slowly. very slowly.

leavng behind a mess of discarded drop tanks. Once I even hit one of them by accident. given the size of the ship, and the size of the tanks, and all of them passing in the same spot, and the number of tanks, it's not so unlikely anymore.

I have a 3800 m/s burn I needed to reach Mars. From Mars, a couple resonant gravity assists would send me to Jupiter, from where I'd go to Saturn.

I made close to 3000 m/s, and I spent most of my drop tanks

Yeah, I still have a bunch left, but 12 of those are filled with only liquid fuel, because I plan on landing and getting new oxidizer in the moons of saturn.

well, I may have enough to arrive to Mars, and I may even manage to reach Saturn only with gravity assists, but once there - even in the most efficient scenario of using aerogravity assists from Titan - I still need at least 2 km/s before I can land on any of the moons.

So, I must get new drop tanks. Lots of them, because Ringrazer goes through 2300-tons drop tanks like a truck driver guzzles beer cans. So I prepared new drop tanks

this time I made them longer trying to save time! four 1000-ton tanks instead of 2. I also doubled the reaction wheel per weight, so that now the tank can turn around in a few minutes instead of several minutes. And I cheated this stuff in orbit, because this mission started with the caveat "assuming I don't have limitations of mass"

Now only thing to do was docking.

Yes, docking.

first despite 30ish vernor rcs, this ensemble was still sluggish as a brontosaur. you ever tried to get a brontosaur to move? good luck with that, they're all dead.

second, after half an hour of trying to carefully align the docking port, and bouncing fruitlessly against each other - and I must point out that I am an old experienced player with a passion for titanic ships, I'm not new to challenging dockings - at some point the drop tank broke in half.

I made some math. It took me half an hour, and still I haven't managed a docking. Then those are 7 tanks, and they total 36000 tons; I need to add like 200000 thousand tons, so I need to make such a docking over 40 times. then I have more sluggish apoapsis raising. then some orbital manuevers that are not trivial, but nothing special compared to other stuff that I've done. and some landings on very low gravity moons, which would be easy except I'm trying to land a 100000 tons ship. still, I tested the landings, and they are easy; but with an abysmally low twr, they take hours anyway. oh, did I mention that this ship lags plenty?

yeah, I just lost the will to do it. it's not any more tolsome than my grand tours, but it lacks the challenge. the challenge was building a ship of this size, showing that it could be launched, could be assembled, could be landed, and I've done that. there isn't any special challenge there to give me the motivation to continue.

I'll go back to my regular grand tour. who knows, maybe in time I will want to resume this mission.

[Caerfinon]

A high flying rendezvous

 

and some cybernetic horticulture

[Kerb24]

Launched a Minmus base for a contract. 

Spoiler

The Mighty Ant B on the launchpad. Today it's flying with 4 boosters instead of 2. 

 

Nominal liftoff. 

Boosters detached 

And splashed down. 

Core stage continues burning. 

And inserts the vehicle into orbit. 

And upon fairing deployment, it's found that the antenna was damaged during ascent. 

It wasn't expected that the core stage would reach orbit, so the vehicle needs to de-orbit, detach the core stage, and re-insert into orbit. 

The core stage re-entering. 

And Splashdown. 

The upper stage re-inserts into orbit. 

And then preforms TMI. 

Inserting into Minmus orbit. 

De-orbiting 

Most of the descent is done using the upper stage. 

Base detached. 

Landed.

 

[ColdJ]

Finally started modeling Thunderbird 1.