What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Kenobi McCormick]

[Leopard]

Mun lander nine launched, larger design using the thud engines radially for a flatter and hopefully much more stable design, larger booster using a triplet of skippers for the initial boost.

Well it landed, with dregs of fuel left, so its not moving again, Thud is far too fuel hungry and over powered, may try a triplet of terriers at some point.

So nine-R was launched, conventional design, science stuff removed, probe core, panels and batteries added for a robot rescue flight to bring the pilot of #9 home, with the valuable science data.

Touch down 2.8Km away, which for me is high precision, was lucky to hit the mun, for $reasons the ability to use manoeuvre nodes vanished once I was in orbit of kerbin, can't set targets or anything, it does this sometimes...

Anyway touched down, fell over, legs damaged, but pointing up a slope.

Pilot was wandering over when she exploded about half way, not totally sure why but there you go.

Tried to get the sideways lander back into space, which worked, but used too much fuel again..

 

Headed for a re-start to use some of what I've learnt to avoid a few basic mistakes next time round.

[MaxwellsDemon]

The Isis 23 lander took off from the Minmus Flats and rendezvoused with Horus 23, which then headed for home.  Rather than go directly for splashdown, Horus 23 will dock at the KSS space station and give its experiment results to the station laboratory to chew over.

At the KSS, a spacewalk was made to add reinforcing struts to some of the newly-arrived modules and to the main solar truss.

I also spent some time fiddling with a shuttle design and downloaded another mod to play around with.

[MiniMatt]

Today, in an effort to combat the crippling funding crisis which coincided entirely coincidentally with the mysterious, ahem, "disappearance" of a huge space station and all hands (its replacement deployed on page 1032), I ventured into space tourism - deploying an orbital tourist attraction around the Mun and the first in a fleet of shuttle bus system taxis:

 

[Corona688]

You already have lander cans, now see the Canned Lander:

It's a re-deployable rover which fits inside an accessory can.  There's a mini docking port in the ceiling which it -- successfully! -- latches onto on return.  (Only in low-grav, mind.  In Kerbal grav, it needs a split-second kick of rocket engines to settle it.)  It can land most places on mun, visit multiple nearby sites, and refuel itself to biome-hop to another indefinitely as long as I stick the landing.

This is the third revision...  V1 digested its own wheels enroute, somehow -- all just gone, not even broken stubs left.  V2 was unwilling to leave its can due to 'wheel blocked'.

Problems to fix in V4:

1. Landing lights.  I always forget those and always curse myself for it.
2. Cooling issues.  The drill slowly overheats.
3. Thrust balance problem.  It looked perfect in the VAB, but I obviously forgot something.
4. Engines.  The thuds are too strong, heavy as all get out, and monstrously inefficient.  If I can somehow attach a pair of terriers that'd be better.
5. The rover could use more power and better antenna placement.
6. Clipping issues with the gigantor arrays.

Edited August 18, 2016 by Corona688

[MaxwellsDemon]

Shamelessly stealing  er... doing a tribute to this idea...  !

[eddiew]

Made a near-catastrophic error of judgement. The 3900m/s in the lander should easily have been enough to land and re-orbit twice, but I didn't account for my Ellie Kerman's awful piloting and the losses incurred in dropping down into the massive polar hole. 300+ vertical metres makes quite a difference to the ascent! 

I may also have nearly smashed into the wall and lost some delta-v to mad flailing while trying to miss the ground, but I'm sure Ellie is the main problem here.

Fortunately, kerbal jetpacks are OP and she was able to circularise on her own while the Munolithobreaker performed what appears to have been a fated dive back to the surface. From there, it was easy enough to have her ship come to get her. And this is why you always put a probe core on your 1-kerbal landers!

35,000 roots for the ship and a crate of beer, yielding ten times that much in contract rewards. Mission control is pleased  

Edited August 18, 2016 by eddiew

[Sharpy]

1 hour ago, Corona688 said:

You already have lander cans, now see the Canned Lander:

 

So tiny! Stock or Tweakscale?

[Galileo]

1 hour ago, eddiew said:

Made a near-catastrophic error of judgement. The 3900m/s in the lander should easily have been enough to land and re-orbit twice, but I didn't account for my Ellie Kerman's awful piloting and the losses incurred in dropping down into the massive polar hole. 300+ vertical metres makes quite a difference to the ascent! 

I may also have nearly smashed into the wall and lost some delta-v to mad flailing while trying to miss the ground, but I'm sure Ellie is the main problem here.

Fortunately, kerbal jetpacks are OP and she was able to circularise on her own while the Munolithobreaker performed what appears to have been a fated dive back to the surface. From there, it was easy enough to have her ship come to get her. And this is why you always put a probe core on your 1-kerbal landers!

35,000 roots for the ship and a crate of beer, yielding ten times that much in contract rewards. Mission control is pleased  

Love your pics...  Looks like I may have to turn the Mun dust just a pinch next update. 

[Corona688]

3 hours ago, Sharpy said:

So tiny! Stock or Tweakscale?

Stock.  The picture might be a bit deceiving -- that's a full size drill in the foreground, not the mini, on a 2.5m stack.  Even so, it took a bunch of fiddling with the Rotate and Move tools to make a rover which fits in a 2.5m can and still work.  The wheels are splayed a bit for clearance.

Edited August 18, 2016 by Corona688

[eddiew]

Anomaly Surveyor demanded I go see the flying saucer. Naturally this meant making an entirely new plane!

To my surprise, it behaved perfectly! No Runway donuts, no skids on landing. Well, except that it never actually stopped after landing. No matter what I did, it ambled slowly down hill, hence there aren't any shots of it near the actual flying saucer. Yes, that's a good explanation. It's not that the photos have been seized by the authorities. No. Definitely not that.

Extra shininess by Stock Visual Enhancements and Stock Visual Terrain.

Edited August 18, 2016 by eddiew

[Corona688]

3 minutes ago, eddiew said:

To my surprise, it behaved perfectly! No Runway donuts, no skids on landing. Well, except that it never actually stopped after landing. No matter what I did, it ambled slowly down hill

It could be a balance thing.  I gradually noticed that, to my SAS-balanced rover, minmus has almost no hills...  Everything except the most extreme peaks are completely downhill all the way there and back.

[Leafbaron]

A few days back my transfer window to Dres was coming up so I built a probe and put it in a stable parking orbit at 100km, ready to burn at a moments notice. I had roughly 30 days left until the transfer window, and realized that the solar panels I fixed to the probe may not suffice that far out in the solar system. Lacking the science to push any breakthroughs in technology, it was a mad dash around mission control to conduct a science mission and unlock fuel cell technology since the boys in the lab insisted they were close. A mission to Minmus was hastily slapped together and set to visit 3 biomes, the north pole being one location. It was a successful mission, netting around 1600 science. I unlocked fuel cell technology and hastily sent a repair crew to rendezvous with the Dres probe to install 2 oscar b LFO tanks and two fuel cells (KAS is the best!). I was barely able to get it all done in time. It was a very fun sequence of missions. 

[Andem]

I flew a faux Mig aircraft from one side of the planet to the other.

[septemberWaves]

I began to plan a new Jool 5 mission after several saves got corrupted in unforseen circumstances. Today I created the Athos lander for Tylo, and I also planned out my time more effectively so that I'll finally be able to complete the Jool 5 mission, and ideally do it within a week or so. And I'm completing it in a unique style too, with all vessels designed entirely for aesthetics and taking 3 different kerbals to land on each moon (which hasn't been done before as far as I'm aware).

[Guest]

I sent Jebediah on his way towards Ike, sitting in a tin can on top of an atomic rocket. He seems to be enjoying it so far.

Then I did a double rescue mission, from LKO and Minmus orbit. Played with gravity assists both ways -- used the Mun to align my orbit with Minmus's and get a boost on the way up, then brake on the way down. Even so it was down to the wire: my tanks were almost completely dry when initiating the re-entry burn, to the point that I was wondering if I have to send up a rescue mission for the rescue mission. But it worked and I now have two more kerbals working for my program.

So a good day, all in all.

Tomorrow's the big day: my three Duna missions should be arriving, and with any luck I'll bring back my Eve probe.

[Fearless Son]

10 hours ago, Corona688 said:

You already have lander cans, now see the Canned Lander:

Excellent!  I have done something similar, but it was always as a one-way trip kind of thing, intended as a deployment system for probe rovers to protect them from atmospheric compression in places like Duna or Eve.  Never thought of making a reusable system like that...

Oh, as far as your wanted to replace the thuds with terriers, I would recommend a couple of angled aerodynamic nosecones flush with the can body and put the terriers below them.  Works great!  And if you you do not have one already, a large reaction wheel should help offset the issue of a slightly unbalanced center of mass, or at least compensate for it when you are thrusting.  

Edited August 18, 2016 by Fearless Son

[Sharpy]

So, over the past few days, I've been getting around to sending a mission to Moho, in place of the one eaten by Kraken (the craft just went MIA without any trace. One day I leave it in Moho orbit, next day I play for a couple hours with other stuff, then go to tracking station and my Mohicans are missing...)

Well, first I restored a craft from an old save. The Claymore, an asteroid tug. A bit of upgrades - docking drones to be used with KAS to reinforce the attachment to the surface, some better lights, that kind of stuff. Oh, and instead of that one weak point where it used to snap, on 2.5 to 1m converter, I tweakscaled the Klaw to 2.5m

Claymore reached the orbit just fine, then quickly hauled a passing class E into LKO.

The KAS drones appeared to be a mistake. I anchored the craft, and when the asteroid entered some wild oscillation, Claymore broke in half. Load, never repeat. Also, the action groups didn't carry over from the old version. I was really sick of switching the ISRUs on and off. But I got my class E, a place to refuel future missions.

So, my mission would need a good engineer - and I suffer a shortage of these. The only one at hand is currently in the Claymore... so... container of EVA propellant into backpack, and going orbiting to the dropship carrier. The engineer picked a dropship, and flew it back to KSC.

Meanwhile, I've been tweaking the new Moho craft, I nicknamed it Temple.

6 nukes, 2 vectors, cooling, ISRU, over 6000m/s...

But before launching Temple, I decided to fix Claymore. Except I really didn't want to dig through its entry in the savefile - so I just launched an "upgrade". Another Claymore, with a monoprop tank in place of the anchoring drones, some blinkenlichten, and finally fixed action groups! And it took a payload of four 'parachute caps' - drones built on top of docking ports, carrying a lot of parachutes.

There were some problems docking. First, the old tug had to undock, because it would make center of mass of the asteroid unreliable. Then the asteroid decided to place its CoM outside its body. But at last everything went back to norm, I docked the other Claymore, and began transferring the caps.

After transferring most of the resources, I had some 3500m/s left in tanks of the old Claymore (the one with action groups broken) before attempting reentry.

 

It wasn't the most gentle and graceful landing, still, I recovered most of the funds.

And I could finally kerb and refuel the Temple.

Coming up next: Moho!

[The Optimist]

More propeller plane foolishness and a few tests of cluster bombs.

[MaverickSawyer]

Went out hunting for Monoliths...

Jeb has decided that the Jet Ranger II (inspired by the stock Aeris) is a decent long range aircraft as he performs a "dawn patrol" pass far from home.

 

... of COURSE it's atop a mountain far above sea level...

 

Welp. Let's go home. Can't bag this one yet.

[The Optimist]

I have accomplished my goal of breaking the 160 m/s threshold with a electric prop. Emulating a typical turboprop, I turned down drag to 0.100, making my plane travel almost twice as fast easily.

 

[N_Danger]

 Engineering Test Bed 1 before launch.

And the second stage looks promising too. Well expensive anyway.

First launch of the production run went well. The Jool Moon Mapper mission settles into a parking orbit.

[MaxwellsDemon]

18 hours ago, Corona688 said:

Stock.  The picture might be a bit deceiving -- that's a full size drill in the foreground, not the mini, on a 2.5m stack.  Even so, it took a bunch of fiddling with the Rotate and Move tools to make a rover which fits in a 2.5m can and still work.  The wheels are splayed a bit for clearance.

i see what you mean about wheel blocking from the 2.5m can... I keep ending up with a rover that steers like a shopping cart.  It's the same two of the six wheels each time, though, so I'm wondering if some additional adjustments can clear it.   (Still a great idea!)

 

Apart from experimenting with my rendition of the "canned rover," I also made several attempts at launching a shuttle-type vehicle, but I haven't gotten the balance down right yet... it keeps flipping soon after launch.  Assymetric is hard!

Horus 23 rendezvoused with the KSS and delivered its batch of Minmus science for the station's Khert-Ib (Kibo-type) lab to work with-- just about filled it to data capacity, in fact.  Today, they'll make the last leg of the journey back to Kerbin.

[capi3101]

Spent about ninety minutes in KSP last night, give or take. Sent Jeb and Bob up along with a tourist into a polar orbit to finishing cleaning up Kerbin's upper atmo of available science for my current tech level; cleared up two contracts in the process and netted a fair amount of coin. Afterwards I built a low-tech sci-mobile and sent Bob around KSC to collect Goo, Materials and Thermometer readings from the low-level local biomes, and also took crew and EVA reports. Gained enough science to unlock three 90-point tier nodes, gaining (among other things) barometers, fuel ducts and the OKTO probe core in the process.

Plans are now in the works to shoot Bob off to Minmus. The lander for the job has something close to 5,000 m/s of delta-V by itself and the hope is to hop biomes, hitting every last one in a single mission. The transfer stage to get the lander there has also been designed, but in my extended sabbatical I forgot how exactly to build a booster capable of launching the mass involved with the low-tech level I got. Naturally I remembered what was involved after I'd shut the computer off and gone to bed (the fine art of building engine clusters), but I've done the calculations and will construct the booster this evening. Hopefully when everything's said and done I'll have sufficient funding to actually launch the thing...

I also need to do a Munar flyby. Should be cake compared to what Bob's doing (though oftentimes the cake is a lie).

Edited August 19, 2016 by capi3101

[Corona688]

16 hours ago, Fearless Son said:

Oh, as far as your wanted to replace the thuds with terriers, I would recommend a couple of angled aerodynamic nosecones flush with the can body and put the terriers below them.  Works great!  And if you you do not have one already, a large reaction wheel should help offset the issue of a slightly unbalanced center of mass, or at least compensate for it when you are thrusting.  

Didn't know you could radially attach nosecones   I brute forced it with girders.  Didn't even think of that...

The rover fortunately had a fairly macho reaction wheel clipped in its underside.  (My opinion on clipping is variable and complicated...  The rover core is so pointlessly big for a probe core I consider it a 'structural part' and hence clippable.)  That was a vestigal feature actually, from v0 where the rover had no can and flew itself, but the only reason the can could land at all.

The balance should be perfect this time.  The effect of the minor offset was magnified because the center of thrust was really close to the center of mass.  *crosses fingers*.

Come to think of it, I should probably turn off gimbaling.  SAS doesn't like it when the engines aren't below the CoM.  (Ever seen 30 tons spinning end-over-end at 600RPM?  Try two thuds at the top of a rocket.)

Edited August 19, 2016 by Corona688