What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Hotel26]

I have substituted two RA-100 relays for two of the three RA-2s in Kerbin polar orbit.  [click + arrow => slide show]

     

In the first shot, An RA-100 approaches an RA-2 to adopt an identical orbit.  In the second, the two pose together.  (You can see the wounded RA-2 had lost a couple of panels during deployment (5 years ago!) but is still operable.)  In the third shot, the RA-2 returns to its Maker.

                                                                     

This constellation had the standard 3x equatorial and 3x polar but, in addition, 2x 'Meerkat' RA-100s in extremely elliptical orbits to loiter high above (and below) the ecliptic, phased such that one is always online to the rest of the solar system while the other dives through its periapsis.

My plan is that upgrading two of the polar relays (altitude 1,000km) to RA-100s will mean that at least one is clear of the Kerbin 'umbra' in the ecliptic -- and that means that the Meerkats can come down.

In summation, 3x RA-2s in a 1,000km high equatorial orbit and 1x RA-2 and 2x RA-100s in a 1,000km high polar orbit.  6 sats in total, with the 2 polar RA-100s providing the Meerkat function.

It also means, to prove the concept, that I have to pull down all other Kerbin constellations, including e.g. my Quattro and Tetrahedron test constellations.

 

Edited April 30, 2023 by Hotel26

[king of nowhere]

I wanted a ship with close to 100 gigantor solar panels, but also capable of hard aerobraking. For this, I got the idea of putting the panels on extendable trusses inside cargo bays. Spent some time fiddling with it. the result is pretty nice. Too bad they wobble. I could make those trusses shorter - I already did - but I have no heart to. Maybe I'll remove another segment in the final version, who knows

I also covered the engines with those nose cones, they are from near future launch vehicles and can be opened on hinges - didn't think to showcase that in the video too.

[N_Danger]

The Kerbals went to Minmus again with a different crew

 

They landed near the North pole of Minmus.

And it turns out in a shadow so things were cut short due to running out of electricity.

 

Back to the SM for the trip home to the big blue marble.

And who doesn't like explosions?  I mean if they are far enough away of course.

 

[Trann]

I don't usually do longer stories but this bit of mission prep was entertaining to me.

Lifted my nuclear tour drive (with SCAN sat tech) and ore mining rig into orbit to dock them up and give them a shakedown mining mission at Minmus.

    

 

    

 

The trip and descent was a breeze but unfortunately, I forgot how to use radiator panels vs thermal control systems and this rig was useless.

 

So I sent a crewed tour lander up with a few extra parts tucked away, landed within 100m of the rig, and made a few short hops to deliver things.

    

 

After repairs, the rig runs nicely at 100%; adding simultaneous ore conversion drops efficiency to about 70% (but I prefer to mine ore then convert it anyway).

 

The next time the tour drive came up overhead, I launched to intercept.  Everyone launches two ships at once because they're too lazy to wait an orbit, right?

 

Tour lander and fully loaded rig docked, lining up for docking with the tour drive in the background.

 

What happened next was a bit of a blur: moments after docking, I noticed a small oscillation start in the ore mining rig.  I got super lucky: I disabled SAS and immediately undocked and things settled down.  I'm guessing the ore mass in the center of the vessel was an issue because my radial tanks had no struts to the center bodies.

A delivery probe sent up with needed components and, once it arrived, parts were transferred off the probe and onto the tour lander.  I packed eight struts -- four for each ship (I probably could autostrut things but I don't understand the mechanics of that as well) -- and, with so much space left in the delivery probe's storage unit, I also brought drain valves (in case I needed to dump fuel from the lead tour ship to move the center of mass further back), some extra lights (to make the interiors gaps more visible in the dark), and a four pack of chutes (to up the redundancy for the mining rig's descent in atmosphere).  Repairs went well.

 

This iteration of my tour ship is now stable under full burn even with the leading ship fully fuelled.  She'll remain in a parking orbit until an interesting rendezvous presents itself.

Hopefully, I haven't forgot anything.

[miklkit]

I decided to try that parallax 2 mod.  It did not end well.  For some reason everything on Laythe exploded.

Edited April 24, 2023 by miklkit
spelling

[tg626]

WAT IS GOING ON WIT THOSE (not) KERBALS!!?

[Nazalassa]

5 hours ago, Trann said:

Um, doesn't the radiator have a "Activate Radiator" button? The small ones (like this one) are not always active iirc.

1 hour ago, tg626 said:

WAT IS GOING ON WIT THOSE (not) KERBALS!!?

https://spacedock.info/mod/352/Kerbal Space Ponies, probably.

[miklkit]

9 hours ago, tg626 said:

WAT IS GOING ON WIT THOSE (not) KERBALS!!?

Far from sun, big eyes.  Stuff like that.  They get the places far out there.

[Trann]

17 hours ago, Nazalassa said:

Um, doesn't the radiator have a "Activate Radiator" button? The small ones (like this one) are not always active iirc.

Yeah, a bad combo of pics and a wee bit of story embellishment: with all the radiators active, I had about 30% efficiency.

[AtomicTech]

I worked on @Thorenn's The KROMBUS Project; I'm excited to share all of the new descriptions (and perhaps even a new part) with all of y'all soon!

https://spacedock.info/mod/3360/The KROMBUS Project

 

[DunaManiac]

The Cloud Piercer space probe temporarily pauses its Eve study to visit Gilly. I underestimated how much fuel getting into orbit around gilly would take, so to my chagrin, I was forced to make several flybys of Gilly instead of a single orbital mission. Thankfully, I overbuilt my lander, which gave me barely enough fuel to land on the surface of gilly.

Meanwhile, Accipiter V went up, with a rather mundane purpose of expanding my meager communications grid established mostly as a demonstration by Merlin VII.

This mission will be first in a series of two installments expanding my network from two satellites to 6. The aim will be to established 4 satellites in equatorial orbit, and 2 satellites in polar orbit to bring continuous coverage to polar latitudes. These satellites have been upgraded significantly due to the increased cargo capacity of Accipiter.

After a single aerobraking maneuver, Accipiter V returns safely to the KSC, for immediate work to be done to prepare it for its Accipiter VI mission.

Edited April 25, 2023 by DunaManiac

[suicidejunkie]

Not quite happening today, but I just got the pictures uploaded.

 

Bill, escorting the mining rover (auto-driving thanks to remotetech) back to base after installing a gyro so the heavy ore bin behind the rear wheels no longer immobilized it when full.

 

On the other end of the gravity well, Bob sends a post card from his scenic mountain science collection trip.

(Pink radiation from the Mt Whoops wi-fi relay can be seen in the background.  Scientists assure us that the 5g waves do not impact TWR calculations)

[jimmymcgoochie]

Any landing you can walk away from...

[DunaManiac]

Paid a visit to Duna today: a rather fleeting one, as this mission was merely a flyby. Glimpse, third in the First Light program, will be the first space probe to visit Duna, and only the third to visit another planet in this save.

It was launched by Accipiter IV, the first (successful) launch of an interplanetary space probe. It also holds the record as the first probe to visit Duna or Ike.

With some fancy maneuvering, I managed to get both an Ike and a Duna flyby, allowing us to do science on both worlds. Actual science experiments on this mission are rather meager: mostly low quality, low range radar and multispectral scanners. The real magic is in the camera array:

The mission was actually able to perform a Duna sunset, proving for the first time that kerbol does turn blue in Duna's atmosphere!

And after only a precious few hours at Duna, the space craft is once again off in deep space.

 

[N_Danger]

The plan was to launch a Life Support Module. It..... did not start off in a promising manner.

And it did not end well.

The second launch went better.

Spoiler

The LSM heads to the station.

Coasting up to rendezvous. It carries an extra Gigantor for instillation later.

The LSM docks.

And the first of many modules for the new station is ready for business.

 

 

[Zalym]

Started a new career recently.
Today we tested a Panther engine and flew a round-trip to the North Pole for an evening's worth  pressure observations using what counts as a 30-part plane right now.

[suicidejunkie]

Jeb is taking some tourists on a flight test of the newest shuttle design.  Visited the Mun to drop off an MPL module for the local station, and satisfy the demands for Mun orbital selfies.

Next, it is on to Minmus to test the VTOL belly-landing thrusters and visit the surface facilities to "expand the HQ to support 17 Kerbals" temporarily.

 

The flight computer doesn't seem to like the engine configuration after separating from the payload, showing a mere 700m/s instead of the ~3300m/s in the design specs.  The maneuver node seems to be confused as well; we went fairly far off course by overdriving into a Kerbin escape trajectory, but the fuel tank is reporting 630 m/s left after doing a ~600m/s burn.

Easy enough for a pro like Jeb to compensate for now that the problem is known.

For now, he's powered down the engines and will do a correction burn after some popcorn with the tourists watching the telemetry from a Minmus fuel tanker capture burn.

[Nazalassa]

Had some fun

[Royalswissarmyknife]

5 hours ago, Nazalassa said:

Had some fun

Too much fun for my taste

[fulgur]

Today I landed on Kerbin.

Spoiler

Yesterday and several days before, I had landed elsewhere.

[Scarecrow71]

Today I started a new Science career with a pretty lofty goal in mind.  See, Kerbin is dying and can no longer support life.  Or, rather, it will die at some unknown point in the future, and we can't sit around and wait for that to happen.  So we are going to set off to the stars in search of a new home that we hope will last longer than Kerbin, set up a new launchpad and VAB, and then see how much more of the Kerbolar system we can wreck.  You can read all about the career parameters and Phase I here:

 

[Aerodynamic Kerbal]

Yesterday I tried landing my MSS-1000 "Fat Phoenix" shuttle A LOT (from atmospherics flights, with the included jet engines).

"Why does it look so ugly?" I wanted to make it FreeIVA compatible, I did not seem to fail. Managed to make some good and some bad landings.

(that's just a test for an emergency parachute landing, I guess. (it isn't))

And this:

is my only somewhat succesfull landing so far. The JE-90 got detached. The only issue is the "Structural linkage failure between blah blah", leading to the wings and the JE-90's D E T A C H M E N T.  I might think on developing a launch vehicle to lift off the 126 part behemoth to LKO. 

Oh and I decided to make a Jool Relay Probe because why not. In reality, I'm gonna use the same craft for pretty much everywhere, as it had a little more than enough Delta V. This was my first use of the Transfer Window Planner mod.

It may seem like a lot, but in reality the Jool mission was somewhat, ehhh... Easy. But the MSS-1000 is truly going to be a pain for my Acer Aspire V3-574G...

 

[Aerodynamic Kerbal]

Update: I tried making 2 launch vehicles. Both failed. The first followed the Classic Shuttle style, but assymetrical thrust sucks. The second one was a little more succesfull, but when I try a turn, even at around 11km, the rocket just flips. So uhh I might try again tommorow. Sadly, I only made screenshots of the second one. Here it is:

Leave suggestions on how to improve it, I guess...

[N_Danger]

A module was sent to the station.

Then a probe to Jool.

Spoiler

Booster sep

Fairing sep

The staging was tuned have a 36 m/s circularization burn with the core stage dropped after exiting the atmosphere (only 90 m/s left in the tank when ditched.)

Finishing up the transfer burn

And coasting to a course correction 320 days away.

 

[Krazy1]

16 hours ago, Aerodynamic Kerbal said:

Yesterday I tried landing my MSS-1000 "Fat Phoenix" shuttle A LOT

You could add a nosecone... you can use a docking port like a decoupler.

12 hours ago, Aerodynamic Kerbal said:

The second one was a little more succesfull, but when I try a turn, even at around 11km, the rocket just flips.

The airplane wings are bigger than the booster fins... that's not aerodynamically stable. Use the yellow CoM and cyan aerodynamic center marker. The fins need to be about 2-3x bigger or build the booster up around the plane so the wings are lower like this https://imgur.com/a/J83omQa

Imgur is making you disable ad blocker or it hides the login button. 

I launched this weird probe to test a 3.75m fairing and a wheel in sun orbit. There's also a bunch of science stuff inside.

Been flying Vizor 100 a lot. Mostly passenger flights but detouring to anomalies after finding them with a probe in high polar orbit. I actually found the green monolith on Kerbin and got a free tech unlock.

 

Edited April 30, 2023 by Krazy1