What did you do in KSP1 today?

[GDJ]

Nothing.

[Blufor878]

7 minutes ago, GDJ said:

Nothing.

That's too bad, your profile picture set such high expectations. For real that is a neat pic though.

[Caerfinon]

The icing on the cake of "The Life Aquatic" parts by @ColdJ

Val and Jeb start from the launch site conveniently hidden in the Outpost Tavern

A little fly by of the Marina to check out the facilities for all these new water crafts

And a precision landing on the Pier. 

This little craft handles very and works with various flight assistance mods. It can be flown in IVA mode and it has  sufficient fuel for extended flight times. A really nice addition to the whole package.

Another fine addition to a growing body of work. 

[GDJ]

2 hours ago, Blufor878 said:

That's too bad, your profile picture set such high expectations. For real that is a neat pic though.

Thanks. Real life gets in the way.

[Caerfinon]

Today it seems it's all about the boats. 

Ran across an old mod and naturally I was intrigued. MOAR BOATS? YES PLEASE! 

After fiddling around with it I came up with this... time for sea trials

 

[ColdJ]

I wonder if anyone can guess the specific ship I am building?

[Blufor878]

On 9/24/2022 at 3:16 AM, BadOaks said:

My habitat module arrived in the Duna system and aerocaptured into a low orbit.

I picked out a landing site in the "Notable Plains" biome, which is also near a number of more mountainous areas. I waited a few orbits and then put the habitat on a landing trajectory.

The flappy bit is a couple of radiators mounted to a hinge which helps to trim the aeroforces on the habitat during atmospheric entry, and reduces the amount of work the thrusters have to do. 

Parachute pre-deployment at 10 km.

Full deployment at 2500 m. The resulting 3 g's of acceleration assists with heat shield separation as the habitat slows to a terminal velocity of 50 m/s.

Engine ignition at 800 m as the parachutes cut.

Touchdown.

Rover deployment.

Habitat deployment complete! Now all it needs is a crew.

This looks fantastic! This has some Znatrix/Hazegrayart energy to it.

[Caerfinon]

53 minutes ago, ColdJ said:

I wonder

Hmmmm,,, I wonder. The model looks great!

[Akagi]

On 9/23/2022 at 4:13 PM, Caerfinon said:

I did this when I played EVE Online. I ran a ore reprocessing business with shipping contracts and had to watch my margins in the Jita Market....  Now I get twitchy if I even have to open a spreadsheet. 

EVE Online: spreadsheets in space (and also me going around being a space pirate)

I pressed F and rediscovered this (I had forgotten KSP). Now I'm building a giant crew and cargo hauler based on a design by @spacegooose on Twitter. Should be coming to KerbalX in the next few days!

[jimmymcgoochie]

Snarkiverse Duna > stock Duna.

[panzer1b]

On 9/22/2022 at 3:06 AM, Rutabaga22 said:

how do you make those? that is super cool!

You mean the tank or the ship?

The ship is rather complicated, since i designed something that was supposed to both fit a certain asthetic (most of my ships these days are designed in the order of core -> exterior -> everything else.  I build for asthetics and the Dimension class cruiser took prolly the 2nd longest amount of time to develop (1st place goes to the ancient SSTO normandy replica, the best and only legit full on replica i made in KSP as it sucked up so much of my time). 

The Dimension's requirements were from the very start: Looks amazing, resistant to all conventional weapons (1.25m or smaller torps), 3K dV when fully loaded and most of all minimal part count (hull itself never exceeded 500 parts, current variant is 430 without any weapons and without the internal bridge, 450 with said bridge).

 

It's actually the one ship i made with the longest history of iterations too, alongside the nebula frigate (although the iterations of the DImension were much bigger changes while the Nebula had purely asthetic edits more or less).

The 1st gen was sorta meh, but it was at that time one of my larger vessels which wasn't crap (armor was top notch, just a bit small).  Unique thing about it was the rear hangar bay with engines actually integrated in the hull and firing out the corners of the hangar (depending on how the fighters were placed you had to disable one or more engines in the hangar or the fighters would be roasted, a flaw that was fixed in later variants).

2nd gen was actually decent sized, and moved the hangar in middle of the primary hull which was a bad idea for 2 reasons.  First of all, the hangar was so bloody small it wasnt particularly useful for anything but the smallest of fighters (which in lore would be HK-1s, a fighter that normally is small enough to just claw itself to the external hull and didnt even need a dedicated hangar).  Secondly, it made the entire front (where 75% of the ship's firepower was located) extremely likely to get shot off when anything hit near the ship's center due to how it was constructed.

3rd gen was heavily inspired by grievious's ship from star wars, although it like most of the earlier models was mostly a stepping stone to the later variants.  Its the smallest of all of them (which is an issue since it just doesnt "feel" like a proper capital ship and more of a huge frigate or destroyer), and while longer then the 1st gen, it was so crammped that like its predecessors wasnt particularly useful.  Still, it was the 1st ship to feature angled engines in the front and center which loose a bit of dV (they dont aim directly backwards), but allow the ship to get smacked in any section without being completely unable to move (you need at least 3 very solid hits to knock out all 7 engines it has, a configuration that i kept for all subsequent models: 2 front, 2 mid, 3 rear).

The 4th redid the hangar bay to make it much larger and finally useable for basically any starfighter that AKS has (and even a single small corvette such as the Nova class).  It got a bit fat though which was actually good for 2 reasons, looks more like a proper capital ship, and makes it much more likely for incoming fire to smack the exterior hull which was always semi-sacrificial.  Only thing i wasnt particularly a fan of with this model (and the others but the 2nd and current gen) was the front layout, which was primarily function over fashion due to needing to hold and somewhat protect the 2 forward engines (the reason its angled that way is so that the engines can have their thrust vector not hit anything and still aim mostly to the rear).

The 5th-8th gen is pretty much identical with entirely internal edits (to improve the armor) or changes to their weaponry locations and types (as tech developed weapomns changed quite a bit, the 5th gen had it's dual SRM launcher on the nose, the 8th had swapped to fireworks in order to cut parts and because they were just so much cooler since you could autofire them and aim with turrets allowing you to actually go broadsiding an enemy ship in full on sci-fi movie fashion (broadside SRMs were a thing but so unreliable with aim i never truly took the concept seriously).

The latest 10th gen redoes the hull bringing it closer to the 2nd gen in appearance (but taller and longer).  I'm finally happy with the front look and shape, and the rest of this ship isnt bad either.  Im a bit torn between whether i like the hull layout of the 5-8th gen or the 9-10th gen more, but one thing is certain, i very much prefer the front of the current one as it actually looks like a integrated weapon and not something ad-hoc slapped on the underside as an afterthought.  I think i'll defenetely try a 5th gen hull coupled with a 10th gen front for the 11th gen, as i think the older hull, while less uniform with other AKS ships, was a bit more unique and different then just a larger version of the frigates and corvettes used by AKS (uniformity isnt bad, but overused makes fleets look a bit bland which is why i occasionally change styles even within the same faction).

Tank is fairly simple, basically a stock turret setup (1 servo for traverse, 1 hinge for elevation), on a hull designed such that the actual weakspots are the core part itself (i used a short ibeam as its got a smaller hitbox then the larger ibeam), the hinge (which is a rotator servo and a hinge), and the weapon itself (which is replaceable since i attached the fireworks cannisters using docking ports). 

The hull is pretty much entirely sacrificial junk, short girders placed in such a way that if any is broken off it just drops out the bottom or falls off the sides while slowing or deflecting whatever kinetic projectile hit it in the 1st place (be it fireworks or ibeams).  Not perfect, but with 3 probes, 6 reaction wheels and 3 power generators its very unlikely that the thing is disabled by anything short of overwhelming fire or extremely bad luck (nothing will 100% guarantee that a firework or ibeam doesnt happen to hit the root part and insta-kill the entire tank...

[Rutabaga22]

15 hours ago, Caerfinon said:

Today it seems it's all about the boats. 

Ran across an old mod and naturally I was intrigued. MOAR BOATS? YES PLEASE! 

After fiddling around with it I came up with this... time for sea trials

 

The maritime pack is one of my favorite mods. 10/10

[Blufor878]

I made videos of my rockets! Basically raw recordings meant for use on KerbalX.

 

[BadOaks]

6 hours ago, Blufor878 said:

This looks fantastic! This has some Znatrix/Hazegrayart energy to it.

Thanks! And wow, those artists have some gorgeous videos.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Arriving at Mercury, I'm about 300m/s short of capturing into orbit- not a nice orbit, just an orbit; a periapsis-scraping-the-ground, apoapsis-scraping-the-SOI-edge kind of orbit.

Unless...

Unless I use the remaining RCS propellants in each stage to fire forwards, adding extra thrust and removing extra weight at the same time. 20 minutes of constant burning later and somehow- somehow!- the probe made it into orbit with nothing but fumes left in the tank, using the RCS because the main engines (using the same propellants) couldn't slurp the dregs and gave up.

[Beamer]

15 hours ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

Arriving at Mercury, I'm about 300m/s short of capturing into orbit- not a nice orbit, just an orbit; a periapsis-scraping-the-ground, apoapsis-scraping-the-SOI-edge kind of orbit.

Unless...

Unless I use the remaining RCS propellants in each stage to fire forwards, adding extra thrust and removing extra weight at the same time. 20 minutes of constant burning later and somehow- somehow!- the probe made it into orbit with nothing but fumes left in the tank, using the RCS because the main engines (using the same propellants) couldn't slurp the dregs and gave up.

I've had to do that once or twice, sweaty fingers, almost pushing that H key straight through the keyboard (somehow in those moments you forget that pushing the key harder doesn't actually generate more thrust). Good thing I always overspec my RCS tanks

 

[BadOaks]

20 hours ago, panzer1b said:

Just want to say I love your ship designs, especially the second gen Dimension. Very utilitarian and menacing.

My Kerbals on Duna saw their first morning. The habitat uses excess power from the solar arrays to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then burns them in hydrogen fuel cells for power during the night.

Around mid-day Tandock and Jaby took the rover out.

They drove south towards an intersection of biomes. Along the way Tandock stopped to look at some weird small rocks.

They also found a weird big rock.

Their first destination was a hillside on the edge of both a mountain and a highlands biome, 17 km away from the landing site. After taking some samples they set up a remote weather station, and then drove several kilometers east towards a midlands biome before heading back.

They returned to the habitat a little over an hour after setting out, carrying a decent haul of science.

[ColdJ]

Got my Belafonte outside done, still got internals and marine engines to do, also probably a Derrick crane.

Many beauty shots in spoiler.

Spoiler

This is what happens If you let the Scientist fly the chopper.

[Caerfinon]

17 minutes ago, ColdJ said:

Many beauty shots in spoiler.

SO MUCH AWESOME.... [drool] 

As always, very well done sir!

[Caerfinon]

Well it happens to us all. Borked my career save. Too many mods in, too many mods out, equals a persistent.sfs where the Kraken has has moved in and set up poor housekeeping.

Dusting off and nuking it from orbit  It's the only way to be sure. 

They're cute when they are small... but they grow with time.

I'll be flying biplanes for a while... 

[Blufor878]

I took one of my heavy lifters, Hrothgar, and gave it boosters.

And more...

More...

And then I gave it new, bigger boosters!

Just for context, the regular hrothgar (picture below) can throw over 70 tons out of  Kerbin's sphere of influence...I haven't tried what the boosted versions do.

Also craft files:
https://kerbalx.com/ManateeAerospace/Hrothgar-Superlifter

Oh, and I uploaded my Saturn Shuttle to KerbalX:

https://kerbalx.com/ManateeAerospace/Saturn-Shuttle

Edited September 28, 2022 by Blufor878

[Beamer]

I've been digging a lot more into the savegame file the past few days trying to get relevant information out of it. I have a script running in a loop now checking for a new savegame every X minutes and processing it if available. It extracts and dumps data to various CSVs, everything neatly linked into an OpenOffice spreadsheet with various pivot tables and such. Saves a lot of manual labour. Knowledge is power!

I'm starting to think I might actually be able to extract asteroid data and calculate their next closest approaches to various planets, I believe there's an R library for orbit calculations out there somewhere...

 

[Rutabaga22]

I began a multi-person ksp project where my friends can submit their spacecraft and launch vehicles!

[SparkyFox]

I finally got engine light and heating to work, along with some gimbal and custom flame particle https://streamable.com/4jxhfg
(it's green because Kethane) 

[Blufor878]

23 minutes ago, SparkyFox said:

I finally got engine light and heating to work, along with some gimbal and custom flame particle https://streamable.com/4jxhfg
(it's green because Kethane) 

Pretty!