What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Krazy1]

On 2/5/2025 at 12:53 PM, Kimera Industries said:

I love it when they ask me to take tourists to one place, but to carrying degrees of tourism (i.e. Lisa wants a flyby, but Calzo wants a landing) because then I just do all of it at once. The sad part is that I don't get payed extra for going above and beyond what they asked me to. 

I know, like this:

Spoiler

Yesterday, a flying rover returned from Ike, via nuclear tug. Due to bugs I could not pick up the part it was supposed to return, so I had to cheat it complete after returning to Kerbin. Launching the reentry probe.

Mission Control...

Kerman #1: Cool V-tail design.

Kerman #2: Nope.

Kerman #1: But...

Kerman #2: You know...

Kerman #1: Oh! Again? How's Gene?

Kerman #2: Don't ask.

With EVA laser gun, many parts on the rover were transferred to the tug or rearranged for reentry. 
Rendezvous and reentry:

Spoiler

Peak shield temp was a chilly 2000 K and peak force 4G. Good for JNSQ.

Landed in the water just east of KSC. Always at night.

[Eclipse 32]

MJ is docking the fourth SSTO to my Interplanetary Explorer, then it'll fire up it's engines and off we go!

also, if you want it, here's the link to my gaming soundtrack.

 

Stream Eclipse | Listen to gaming vibes playlist online for free on SoundCloud

 

if i'm doing multiple flights of the same SSTO, i do it once by hand, to prove i can do it, then alt+F12 menu the next.

[Cavscout74]

This is a few days worth of stuff from my career save

Got my Lightning spaceplane into service finally

Then my Eve crew arrived in orbit, and carried out a few missions

Spoiler

Docking with Eve Science Station

The pilot & scientist transferred to the Eve Skimmer to duck into Eve's upper atmosphere for more science

After docking back at the station, the Skimmer was sent back for a one-way journey to the surface sans crew.  Despite losing signal, it glided to a mostly intact splashdown

Finally, sent the crew over to Gilly for the first landing on that rock

 

And the last two events were a deep space rendezvous between a relay & an interceptor probe (for a contract) and the arrival of a relay into Eeloo orbit

[Misguided Kerbal]

Here's something which I suppose counts most certainly as much more 'mundane' than my usual fare, whatever that is supposed to be - although, really, I'm not necessarily sure I can say that in complete good faith, as, to yours truly, a self-professed dweller of the editor, I do believe trials and tribulations such as these do quite definitely compose of the meat and potatoes of my personal KSP experience.

*whew*, try reading all of that in one breath 

Anyway, what I was trying to say was - although I may have professed a supposed return to KSP and all, which I do most certainly believe is the case, it appears that my most copious amounts of time just seem to be entirely consumed by the various eldritch machinations of [real life] - that, and I've also been picking back up on my hobby of absolutely scouring through the KSP forums, which I do consider most certainly quite enjoyable - I've been able to read some absolutely amazing stuff recently. But not only does that run my ailing balance of rep completely dry every day, I am also most definitely not putting off much any sort of resumed effort on my personal writing in lieu of gathering 'inspiration' whatsoever, no, not in the slightest...

Maybe someone should start appending some sort of extraneous word limiter to my posts or something haha - all that aside, what I was trying to say through all of that was: me no have time, so not get to do too much really, per se. 

Spoiler

I must confess, I believe I have in many a sense engineered myself into an absolute corner - albeit, with a couple of clear options out that I, of course, in my all-infinite wisdom refuse to consider. The prevailing problem is this: I want to design a decent, performant 2.5m lifter that also maintains a clear aesthetic appeal. Cost certainly isn't a leading concern, given my continued preference for Sandbox mode above all else, but technological level I would definitely say is - given my self-imposed technological restrictions and all, I want to maintain at least some veneer of 'realism' - so no nuclear saltwater spewing back onto the pad and all, as gorgeous as those Waterfall plumes may look...

Anyway, one might suggest, such isn't necessarily very much of a problem - almost a trivial task, really - especially when having in one's possession all of the beautiful parts both ReStock and the Near Future suite have to offer, how could one even begin to be at a loss? And there I'd wholeheartedly agree (here comes the caveat) - except for the fact that I already do, in fact, possess a 2.5m lifter that is decent, performant, and maintains a clear aesthetic appeal. If anyone has ever read Starbound (I swear, this is the only time I'll plug it this time around), you'll know her - meet the Vanguard:

I feel like on at least a partial level I do have a mixed relationship with the Vanguard. On one hand, I most certainly consider it my workhorse launcher as of current, and also, the fact does remain that I do believe the Vanguard was, at least in this save, one of my first major design successes. On the other hand, however - well, a couple of reasons: for some reason, I can't help but shake the feeling of the Vanguard being just a tad dated in appearance, at least in contrast with my current 'evolved' building technique (which amounts to, really - clipping random extraneous parts everywhere to break up perfectly normal shapes perceived as boring, and slapping Conformal Decals everywhere. Have I mentioned Conformal Decals? Thank SQUAD (in this case, I suppose, not literally) for Conformal Decals). My other reason is this:

Mild spoilers for those couple of you interested, but behold: bathe in the absolute glory of 'Spacelab 2 mockup alt' (I swear everything in the actual Starbound save is nicely named and organized, but in this testing save, I cannot neither confirm or deny that I have crafts named 'chungus', 'mungus', 'balls', and 'fsain'). Anyway, this whole debacle stemmed not only for those above reasons, which are most definitely just a tad superficial, but from this all. For whatever reason, I had the perception that a single Vanguard would be unable to lift the core module of Spacelab 2. However, I realized this only much later down the line (we'll get there) - but, there on the leftmost side is basically an identical copy of Spacelab proper, which was lifted perfectly on a singular Vanguard lifter without issue - to its immediate right, with the trisolar arrangement, is the core module. Clearly I was too blinded by my genius to notice much further.

So I created this design, which dates back to over a year ago now. I thought it most certainly looked nice at the time, and I still do - especially those boosters, which I definitely plan on reusing in a future design. I thought this would be enough to solve all my problems - indeed, for whatever reason I either didn't test this thing or had some sort of fluke in flight testing, and didn't bother to further verify - thus, I went as far as to build this prototype a proper launch stand and all (funnily enough, not pictured here) which I only typically do for my completed designs. 

But let me introduce to you now, the problem. If you compare this to the previous pictured Vanguard, you may notice that there's been a slightly stretched upper stage - indeed, that fairing here is hiding not just a stretched upper stage, but a dual-engine setup as well, among other things.

(I was, here, going to attempt to showcase a side-by-side gallery of launcher CoMs, but then after looking at such realized it was rather undemonstrative, so I'll just proceed with a textual explanation).

The issue with this setup is mostly this, which some of you may have already been able to guess - that is, that after booster staging, the core assembly then quite enjoys doing the ol' flippity-doo (the center of mass migrates upwards, and flips the whole assembly over, every. single. time. without fail). That, partially, was what really pushed me to finally consider a design alternative beyond strapping boosters onto a tried-and-true Vanguard.

I swear, this all looks so much better in flight - or maybe some of you enjoy the lankier look, you freaks. Personally I still don't believe I can count myself very much used to such, but then again I ended up realizing that the Vanguard is actually an outlier, and its stubby look contrasts with the profile of 'real' rockets (well, besides the ETS Saturn 1C my beloved), so - perhaps my eyes just need some time to adjust.

Anyway, I digress - I believe it is quite apparent here the extent of modifications made, to the point that I'd say it's really an entirely novel design in its own right, borrowing perhaps only the name, general styling cues, the engine... well, okay, it does still exhibit quite a bit of that Vanguard lineage, although I don't certainly think it revolutionary much to notice the swathe of differences between it and its predecessor. 

I think that description there underscores to quite a degree just the amount of perspiration I ultimately did end up dumping into this design. I feel like I was ultimately pushed out of my comfort zone a good amount, actually, which is most certainly a good thing - I had to incorporate what are to me at least some rather 'radical' design decisions, such as the perhaps excessive amount of tank clipping, for instance, all in an attempt to differentiate itself from the Vanguard. I think the prevailing problem does stand rather abundantly clear - ultimately, I took great pains to avoid recreating simply a Rockomax Jumbo-64 with an engine stuck on the bottom, as I've perhaps done in the past. I know in this instance I most certainly could have benefitted from resorting to, say, the beautiful variety and selection of parts that BDB, Tantares, Knes, and co. have to offer, and I very much did almost consider such. But here we are now, out on the other side with manually-added greebling to boot - I'm sure this thought process is at least partially what builders much more skilled than I go through when deciding to commit to just stock, or the like - when people recreate complex things out of Legos or Minecraft blocks instead of, say, just 3D printing/modeling something in its stead, it is the limited palette which adds to part of the challenge.

Okay, that was a lot more philosophical espousing than engineering description. I believe I did in many an aspect engineer myself into a corner with the Vanguard, primarily in its pure simplicity, but especially in terms of the engine. I wasn't necessarily paying attention at the time when I selected the Porpoise from NFLV as the Vanguard's primary lifter engine. Of course, such an engine has served as an absolutely excellent lifter engine, but in terms of progression... I didn't nearly put as much thought into such back then, or well, I did, but not with the right approach: the Porpoise is an absolutely excellent engine, and that is the problem. Any other sort of engine - the Boar, the Mastodon, the Mainsail offer at best an inconceivably minor boost with other drawbacks (Mainsail), or, more likely, are just worse across the board overall. That selection is discounting the entire selection of Cryogenic engines within the Near Future (plus post-patched onto stock) suite, but I had an additional self-imposed limitation in the fact that I really didn't want to deal with such just yet. Thus, we resulted in a continuing such pickle.

I wanted greater performance across the board, however marginal, for a successor to the Vanguard. So, for greater TWR, the only solution I could really think of was to double up on the Porpoises (Porpii?). However, a dual-engined setup of course features a greater fuel draw across the board, which actually seemed to lower the projected Delta-V - but all of those clipped tanks did do quite a bit to compensate. Ultimately though, by the time we achieved energy parity with the Vanguard, we were left with only a minor increase in TWR over its predecessor. Tsiokovsky and his rocket equation, man...

I don't even want to get started regarding the upper stage - suffice to say, I encountered much of the same thing, if perhaps with even greater difficulty. Anyway, that I'm sure was quite a significant volume of words - TL;DR, I experienced an amount of self-initiated engineering design struggles, so now I'm going to proceed with trialing three separate variants all with the same payload of the Spacelab 2 core module - Vanguard II with the original upper stage, Vanguard II with an uprated upper stage (this above pictured long boi), and, after emerging out of my hubris quite a bit, the stock standard Vanguard.

(Apropos to anyone who actually managed to get through such - truly I am utilizing the WDYDIKSPT thread in the most appropriate fashion).

And so we at first set forth with the Vanguard II with the original Vanguard upper stage (I'm sure that also confused absolutely nobody):

That certainly wasn't a most excessive amount of screenies of candlestick going boom boom in the slightest, of course not. Anyway, as much as this was a maiden test flight of a new launcher, I really didn't experience much anything novel at all - in fact, it flew astonishingly similar to a normal Vanguard launch, which, I suppose with all of that prior explanation is really quite expected. The first stage performed almost exactly the same, just with a greater amount of initial thrust (so we did indeed manage to get out of the soup quicker, and that most certainly did contribute increased performance afterwards), and the second stage was literally the exact same, so the same lofting-esque low TWR orbital insertion was performed as usual.

I am realizing just now that I apparently accidentally launched Spacelab on this first flight instead of its aforementioned successor. I will proceed now to wallow in utter embarassment - and proceed as if nothing of the sort happened. Anyway, we proceed now with the uprated upper stage atop a Vanguard II, with an actual Spacelab II core module this time.

I swear, this thing does look just leaps and bounds better in flight, does it not..?

You know all of those YouTube videos with faux VHS effects? Well, here's where I'd jam down the pause button - adding to the existing string of embarrassments, it was here where I realized that I actually staged everything else with the fairing, instead of being able to discard such separately as usual - so, of course, left on a suborbital trajectory and all, we proceeded to impact back into the ocean. Truly an immaculate success.

So, I went back and fixed the staging - take two (haha, Take Two Interactive, haha, Private Division something something, although to be fair considering the circumstances and what they did is it funny really, I dunno, hahahaa?)

behold, those dual poodles burning in their full unadultered glory! I'm also really quite proud of what I managed to accomplish with that adapter there, however much mass was added to the overall design...

Are you feeling it yet?

Anyway, this UI screenshot is most definitely presented in chronological order, because I am just a master of timelines or something like that. Infinity stones or something, I dunno. Excuse the brief throttle-up there - for whatever reason, after I enabled super-sampling the UI seems to want to hide every time I take a screenshot, so I've been taking screenshots, UI included, separately via MacOS's Cmd + shift + 3. Of course, shift also nudges the throttle, so we get the following effect.

I mentioned before how, after running all of these successful tests, I fell out of my previous hubris (I'd say more accurately that my curiosity got the better of me) - so I decided ultimately to stick this payload onto a bog-standard Vanguard and measure the mileage.

I believe that above craft description more than summarizes my then thought process, although I most certainly don't regret any of this in retrospect, as:

You can see here some of that typical 'lofting' occurring, which was also the case in the first launch with this same upper stage. Here a part of Snark's BetterBurnTime (I believe) has become absolutely indispensable - my personal rule of thumb is to burn like this until time to reentry is estimated at 4 minutes, at which case I find it safe to proceed with creating a normal maneuver node at apoapsis and completing a nominal circularization. I've also of course just done a continuous burn from upper stage ignition before, but such is quite a bit more tedious in my opinion, so I find this method the preferred option when flying the Vanguard and all.

And, of course, what else can I say...

On top of a normal Vanguard, we made it to a perfectly nominal orbit, requiring only a bit of additional boosting that could easily be accomplished with a Leo and all. I don't know where to begin, so I'll just attempt to take consolation in the fact that, yippee, no matter the mixed feelings I may have regarding such - I have a new launcher regardless.

(It stings, truly, it stings, just a tad wee bit. But on the other hand, truly, I can proclaim myself an engineer.)

 

Edited 23 hours ago by Misguided Kerbal

[Eclipse 32]

i'm having fun roving across Duna rn

[AlamoVampire]

On 2/8/2025 at 7:55 AM, Cavscout74 said:

You haven't lived till you launch a new space station for contract with everything it asks for - all in a single launch - and burn 2 (yes TWO) units of liquid fuel more than you should have establishing orbit and fail to meet the contract parameter of having "x" amount of liquid fuel on the station.

never had that kinda failure. But, then again, I do not do career mode as its exceedingly poorly executed and lacks anything compelling for me as a player. The satellite I was referring to in the post you quoted me on was a resource scanner deployment and I was satisfying its operational requirements hehe. But, you got me thinking of years gone by in KSP, and well, made me remember this nightmare. This thing WAS CURSED!!!!!

There it sits on the pad. I forget what it was beyond what the imgur thing in my imgur account says, but, it says this was a station of some sort. The parts you see are from Nova Punch Parts Pack <maintained back then by tiberion>

On orbit, that cloud of shrapnel? Explosive bolts used to dump the struts.

the complex on orbit, just a closer look. I honestly forget when this monstrosity was launched. Not even imgur is telling me, and the original images are not on this computer. They may be on my older rig thats sitting dormant about 30 feet away from me. This thing refused to even behave when I was deorbiting it some time later. It got so bad that no matter what I did I could not make this thing go away. I had to have someone edit my save file to make this thing die. 034102102025

[Kimera Industries]

I flew a probe to Eve with the Bumblebee mod, which is meant to replicate the Dragonfly mission. It actually helped me overcome my anxiety about the real-life mission working, namely the part where the drone drops out of the aeroshell and starts flying under its own power. I'm now confident that the mission will succeed spectacularly, barring a launch vehicle failure.

Oh, and the launch vehicle I made for it was quite small, too. It turns out that if you're not returning from your destination you can get away with only a small amount of fuel. Plus, cryogenic fuels are very efficient.

Edited 5 hours ago by Kimera Industries