What did you do in KSP1 today?

[PT]

Continuing from last time...

A dozen boring ejection/correction/capture burns, and some station stuff.

Watchtower hotel module was lightly modified to serve as a passenger shuttle for gathering some easy funding.

In meantime I skribbled up a simple mod to help me manage complex crafts.

Annoyingly context menu is caching part name first tie its being shown, so for name tag to show on orange bar it needs some kind of craft reload (eg. scene change, quickload), but for naming stuff during build its satisfactory.

[Scarecrow71]

Most of the time, this game gives me general enjoyment and a sense of "Hey, I like doing this".  Some times, this game leaves me in absolute shock and awe at what can be done with even a bit of determination.  Today, I was left so blown away I'm not sure how to appropriately put it into words.

I'm in the midst of doing a Caveman run on HARD.  Why?  Why not, not why.  Seriously, though, I like to push myself and try new things.  Can I do this?  Can I make the lessened science points work?  You know, all of that good stuff.  Combine that with the fact that someone needs to take over administering the Caveman Challenge (neither of the previous administrators of it have been logged onto the forums in months), and I thought "Yeah, I'll take up that mantle".  So here I am, working on my Caveman challenge on HARD.  At the start of today, I had 4 nodes on Tier V to go.  360 more science and I'm done.  And I'm running out of ideas, so I think to myself "You know, I can get to the Mun.  And Minmus.  And I have a satellite in Kerbolar orbit.  But can I go interplanetary?".  So I fired up KSP and got into my save game, and time-warped until I got a decent enough angle for Eve.  I wanted Duna, but the Eve transfer window was closer:

With this transfer window, I decided I could give it a shot.  I've got a craft that I used to get that satellite into Kerbolar orbit, but with a few tweaks I was able to get this:

So I launch into LKO, and then do a Kerbin-retrograde burn to transfer to Eve.  Note:  due to the Caveman parameters, I cannot see orbit lines outside of my current SOI (which, in this case, was Kerbin).  So I burned long enough to get into Kerbolar orbit, then once I got there had to do 2 correction burns:  one to get an Eve intercept, and one to match (mostly) inclination.

Lo and behold, an Eve fly-by.  I did another burn to cash out all the fuel I had, and ended up with a Pe at ~135km.  135km!  That got me close enough to get science in both high and low Eve orbit.  I brought 2 goo cannisters, but only 1 science jr.  Still, I did it.

This craft is out of fuel, and it is not in orbit of Eve, so it will, eventually, leave Eve's SOI and become yet another satellite in Kerbolar orbit.  But 18 tons, 30 parts, and I got an interplanetary fly-by with it.  I'm going to warp to a Duna transfer window next.  I did Eve, so I know I can do Duna.  I wonder if I can get out any farther than that, though.  Moho?  Dres?  Could I potentially get to Jool?  Either way, I went interplanetary - with no landing, of course - in Caveman.  On HARD.  Which I did not do in my NORMAL run.  Dang!

[Kimera Industries]

5 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

18 tons, 30 parts, and I got an interplanetary fly-by with it. 

I once designed a shockingly small rocket to deliver satellites to orbit of other planets. It has different variants for different amounts of transfer dv required. Maddeningly, I consistently forget which save I made it on so whenever I need it I have to hunt it down.

Edited October 8 by Kimera Industries

[Puggonaut]

Built and tested a new recovery craft

 

[PT]

Continuing from last time...

While trying to lower FPS I have accidentally recreated drone from Matrix.

Then I tested my simple part reductor mod, because Hangars have too many features and "features".

 

With a single click of a button it took it from 20fps ...

... to 60fps

And then back to 20 again ';..;'

 

[Internet_Man]

Today I landed a surface base (using planetary base systems) on Sera (modded planet from the Kcalbeloh pack) and I'm going to be sending a 3D Printer to print up rockets/base modules and such (sandcastle + extraplanetary launchpads my beloved). I don't really know what to do with the surface base now that it's there (i wasn't expecting to get this far) so if anyone has any suggestions, tell me!

[N_Danger]

After many game years the Jool probe arrives

We only have enough d/v to fly by Lathe

Two years after that the Lindor probe preforms a capture burn.

And the tour starts with Talos,

then Huygen,

Then to Riga

Leaving Riga we get a transfer to Kiel

Aden is where the last bit of science collected by the spacecraft

And finally a pass by Huygen to raise the AP prior to parking the space craft in an orbit to act as a second relay.

[NHunter]

Not much really happened in my game; merely moved the crewed exploration ship from Eterna's orbit to that of Talon. Will commence landing sometime later. Preferably after I make sure in sandbox mode that my lander can actually land safely on this future-Tylo and then get back into space. At least, I have a surface base on Drozhe with EL, so sending a new lander will not require an interstellar mission...

[TheKspEngineer]

I launched my Laythe Clipper on an Aphrodite-5b. (It is named after Europa clipper and it will clip into laythes atmosphere)

 

 

[capi3101]

Finished building the latest iteration of the Deepwater Horizon base:

This was intended as a glamour shot of the base's mass driver, but it is unfortunately rather horribly backlit.

Also spent the weekend with trying to get KWV Ender Wiggin in orbit over Minmus to start receiving supplies from DH and to land staff for training purposes. I forgot how touchy the Alcubierre Drive controls could be though; Ender is currently below the drive threshhold at at 45-degree inclined orbit. Going to have to work that out before I start sending folks down, especially if I want to get them back up again...

[Kimera Industries]

5 hours ago, capi3101 said:

Finished building the latest iteration of the Deepwater Horizon base:

This was intended as a glamour shot of the base's mass driver, but it is unfortunately rather horribly backlit.

Also spent the weekend with trying to get KWV Ender Wiggin in orbit over Minmus to start receiving supplies from DH and to land staff for training purposes. I forgot how touchy the Alcubierre Drive controls could be though; Ender is currently below the drive threshhold at at 45-degree inclined orbit. Going to have to work that out before I start sending folks down, especially if I want to get them back up again...

How does that mass driver work?

[Qwotty]

Hi there. Been a while since our last post indeed. 

This cis-trans duo over here known as @Qwotty (that shares a brain (thus body) like Kerbals do a dual-pod command module) had been busy working on jettisoning useless thoughts and other things like that. On the day that this was written, we decided to spontaneously create and then take on what we call the "10/14 Challenge", which is named after the day it was started, which is to see how nuanced we can get with these designs. We launched a colossal, disk-shaped satellite loaded with an impressive number of dishes, all aimed at establishing help for communication networks for future interplanetary missions. And, no, it was not in an attempt to play some sort of game of cosmic ultimate frisbee with Jeb, although that is tempting. 

As far as KSP1 builds go, this one looks like it's trying to contact every unknown alien species and their UFOs outside of the Kerbol system at once.
This thing, created as a result of thinking outside of the box, is so huge that you’d think we were trying to send signals to another galaxy, or at least just to flex on the entire KSC.
The payload launched, that being the giant satellite disk, after being decoupled from what launched, read as weighing 66.57 tons.
That and a part count of 47 including a decoupler that shall be removed later by a Kerbal during a mission dedicated to that.
It sort of looks like a "space pizza". You could say that the dishes are the "pepperoni slices". 
It spun out of control twice during launch due to SAS switching between orbit and surface mode, things had still gone smoothly otherwise.
Knowing KSP, true to the calculations made about the delta-v in the VAB, it had just enough delta-v to jump out of Kerbin's SOI by a hair's breadth.
As it should have, though... seeing as the point of the mission was to get the big dish out into a Kerbin escape trajectory, not to go farther!!!!
The rocket used to launch the payload uses a large cluster of Rhino engines, as well as jettisonable liquid fuel boosters.

Why liquid fuel boosters instead of solid fuel boosters? Because the SRBs would overheat! You can see so below in the first half of this GIF, where we were recording testing them in the hopes they'd work, and that we would get to show you that. The other half is trying the more successful liquid fuel booster idea solution, but falling over as the thrust of the rockets burning rocket fuel assists that descent towards the ground.

We present to you the "Disk-net Array"...
...a truly magnificent frisbee-ish satellite array relay disk so big that several Kerbals can play around on it like a roundabout playground toy. This is not recommended, though, as the Disk-net Array's OKEB-100 'Gateway' Blanket Photovoltaic Array and RFL-2000 Dish Reflector Array parts were not designed with playful Kerbal roughhousing on the gigantic satellite array relay dish probe in mind. What is, however, recommended, is using this beautiful thing to bounce signals such as memes about snacks to your Kerbonauts far out in the deeper parts of outer space.

And, knowing that as strong as the strength of that array is, it was still out only so far, we two built an efficient an efficient 176.811-ton rocket with a much smaller payload designed to bounce the signals from the Disk-net Array out farther. It worked quite well, and resembled launches done with similar launch vehicle designs, and thusly shows that this type of rocketry design is a tried-and-true type of thing inded quite verily.

The smaller relay ship probe for comms made it all the way to Duna without a problem, and with more than enough delta-v for operations — to the point where there was enough fuel left over.
Therefore, thusly, the payload was left attached to the rocket that brought it to Duna, so that the little bit of liquid fuel left can be utilized by a ship at a later time during a rendezvous for refueling.
And then, ultimately, the destruction of that part of the spaceship, after it has been deemed no longer anything more than space junk.

That cute little dish-equipped spaceship was put in a high polar orbit around Duna, as to not ever get its signal blocked by the planet itself. The polar orbit sits right around escape trajectory territory, as to be as high above Duna as possible whilst still staying within its sphere of influence. It’s like the ultimate Duna Wi-Fi router, keeping our space missions, rovers, and Kerbals in touch (especially when they need to send a frantic “I’m stuck in the sand, help” message). 
So yeah, we’re back, and we’ve got more wild ideas in the pipeline. Especially as far as modding goes. We found useful information about how use KSP1's Part Tools plugin utility for the Unity Engine before writing this that looks like it should be able to assist us with finally be able to create rocket part mods to publish and whatnot. Getting .mu models to show up in the VAB in KSP1 turned out to be far more of a challenge than we had thought it would be, but here we two still are, not giving up on it, because it is quite evident that others have been able to do it over the years, and we are trying to be able to become a part of that club and thusly be able to do things like take requests. Stay tuned as we continue our quest to dominate adorably while making sure Mira doesn’t go feral from lack of snacks and Gabe doesn’t accidentally turn one of these launches into a meme-worthy disaster. Maybe sooner than later we two shall have some mods to share with all of you. "Until then", you know?


 

[RoninFrog]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx7suGlOr3s

Well I put an emoji in the video title so the forums dont display it and I don't care enough to reupload.

[capi3101]

17 hours ago, Kimera Industries said:

How does that mass driver work?

Handwavium...

(It's from the Pathfinder mod, one of the Wild Blue Industries set of mods by Angelo Kerman. You use sliders to pick which resource(s) you want to send to another mass driver within the same SOI, and whether or not you can send the intended payload depends on a number of factors such as available guidance data, available delta-V for the transfer package vehicle, available energy for the shot, and so forth. The default setting limits the payload to something like ten tonnes to Mun orbit, but I always tweak that up quite a bit when I begin a new save. It's real handy when you don't want to have to deal with the tedium of resupply missions between a ground base and an orbital space station or shipyard).

Edited October 15 by capi3101
actually answered the question.

[GarrisonChisholm]

Are we back?!?

[Ultimate Steve]

During the outage, I got curious as to what the least used part in KSP was, so I started a project to download every single craft file on KerbalX and count every part. However, that was fairly daunting, so I scaled it back (for now) to just the craft on my computer.

It took a day's effort but I do have the results. Well, at home. I am on a road trip right now, when I get home (maybe tonight but probably tomorrow) I will post the results in their own thread. Unsurprisingly, if I remember right, my most used part was the strut, and there were a handful of parts I had never used.

I might even clean up the code and put it on github if anyone else wants to have a go at it.

Edited October 28 by Ultimate Steve

[MythicalHeFF]

4 hours ago, GarrisonChisholm said:

Are we back?!?

We are SO back

[Royale37]

Now that the forums are up, I can say that I finally got Blackrack's volumetric clouds. Definetely recommend it.

[Lisias]

Well... I saw some dude on Reddit asking for directions on a Booster powered airplane and thought to myself... What the heck, why not?

Kerbal X; https://kerbalx.com/Lisias/BoosterPlane

Note: You can nerf the booster even more, I managed to downgrade it to 25% and the thing still took off nicely.

So I spent my lunch flying this thing:

And, of course, a perfect landing!

 

[RoninFrog]

Similar to @Lisias I also made a potential solution plane for the reddit guy making SRB planes, although I scrapped his design completely.

I made what is basically an early-career C-172.  It only costs 65 total science to unlock the required nodes.  It is also marvelously easy to fly.  I haven't crashed (this version) once, and its descent profile allows for pretty significant course corrections for precise landings.  I tried to make the aerodynamics and "flight feel" match as closely to an IRL Cessna as I could, although the switch from a prop to a jet definitely increased the cruising speed.  I've flown Cessna's in real life so that's what I based it off of.

• 30m/s takeoff/landing speed
• 90m/s cruising speed
• 30° ascent angle
• 5°-15° descent angle
• ~900 km range (?)

One important difference is the lack of throttle input during the descent.  The Juno engine has a much  slower throttle response time than a Cessna propellor, so I decided to just eliminate throttle and control angle of descent with flaps only.

Here's a video of me flying to the Island Airfield.  Landed perfectly first try, didn't even make a quicksave that's how well this plane flies.  Descent begins around 5:50, landing at 9:40.

 

[Tecorian]

Testing new ship designs for Jool and beyond.

This one with the Kerbstein engine.

 

Next one with the Daedalus engine

 

I have to "adjust" some parameters at the Daedalus Engine, looks like, it is too weak, comparing the Kerbstein drive.

Realstic than?

I dont know...

 

[OrdinaryKerman]

Installed Deferred, Parallax, and OPT, and did some flying around Dessert SC

Quote

pro: The game looks absolutely stunning
con: It runs at 15 fps on my laptop (still playable)
just noticed the tail code still said Cape Kermandy instead of Yellow Sands

[NHunter]

Couldn't post this earlier since the forum has been having issues...

Anyway, landed on Talon.

The moon's surface seems to be bugged on my install as the lander sank into the terrain by about half a meter for no good reason (as you can see on one of the pictures). Thankfully it didn't explode because of that, not while landed nor during the take off. The flag wasn't as lucky and I got a notification that it got destroyed in collision with the moon during ascent.

Also, I think I've managed my most precise rendezvous yet while returning to the mothership. I was scared I would actually crash into it for a moment. NB: never actually do 0.0km closest approach rendezvous.

Anyway, now that I've visited Talon, Lond is the next stop. Then I'll be finally done with Janus' system.

Edited October 30 by NHunter

[N_Danger]

Went to Dres

Very close flyby.

And now just 32 years until an encounter with Edna. 

 

[RoninFrog]

Tank in Stock KSP. (+breaking ground)

It is incredibly accurate, destroying targets while moving up to 600 meters away.  In theory it can hit targets even further away but I didn't really care to test it.  The main issue I run into is the fact that the bullets move too fast for the collision detection to sometimes register, although on bigger targets it's not really a problem.  The iron sights also work decently well for targets where target tracking isn't available.  I could consistently snipe the R&D dome right in the middle from the runway.    The setup should also in theory be able to hold a perfect target lock even if the rover itself is bouncing around on rough terrain.

While I'm driving the rover in the video I'm making minuscule adjustments to the command chair angle based on where the bullet goes, so that they are all almost perfectly dead in the middle of the target.