What did you do in KSP1 today?

[XB-70A]

3 hours ago, Slam_Jones said:

Well... the first launch, I forgot to put a drone core or reaction wheels on the launcher.  The second lanch I remembered that, but realized I never put reaction wheels on my relay sats.

The same horrible thing happened to me with the Pegasus-like launcher I'm working on (and not for the first time). The first launch was a complete failure 'cause once the first stage released with its control surfaces and out of the dense enough atmosphere I just re-discover that the Probodobodyne OKTO2 module simply have no reaction wheels... so a second flight with a small reaction wheel was made. Launcher released, accelerated correctly then smoothly put to a 60 degrees positive angle and I just got a "SAS disconnect" message. I was like "what the?! Why? How is it possible?!". That probably not happened to me since the really first tries on KSP about 2 years ago.

I probably made like FIVE different flies always ending with the same problem, even looked online for a solution if it was a bug. Then I remembered that the OKTO2 module need some power to work... and that all the stage need control with a source of energy to ensure their works... and that there was strictly no batteries on the probe used for this flight () What a shame!

Sc..w you test probe!

[Slam_Jones]

11 minutes ago, XB-70A said:

The same horrible thing happened to me with the Pegasus-like launcher I'm working on (and not for the first time). The first launch was a complete failure 'cause once the first stage released with its control surfaces and out of the dense enough atmosphere I just re-discover that the Probodobodyne OKTO2 module simply have no reaction wheels... so a second flight with a small reaction wheel was made. Launcher released, accelerated correctly then smoothly put to a 60 degrees positive angle and I just got a "SAS disconnect" message. I was like "what the?! Why? How is it possible?!". That probably not happened to me since the really first tries on KSP about 2 years ago.

I probably made like FIVE different flies always ending with the same problem, even looked online for a solution if it was a bug. Then I remembered that the OKTO2 module need some power to work... and that all the stage need control with a source of energy to ensure their works... and that there was strictly no batteries on the probe used for this flight () What a shame!

-pic snip'd-

Sc..w you test probe!

Hehehe yeahh this is the usual order of events for me   Get excited that it made it to orbit, then realize I forgot X and launch it again, to realize I forgot Y as well.  Oh well, it's all a learning process, even after 1,000+ hours

[CatastrophicFailure]

23 minutes ago, RoboRay said:

I got tired of the huge LEO communication gaps in RSS, so I put up four omni relays in 2.5 hour orbits (about 2900 km up)...  just high enough that they can see each other over the horizon.  This provides good coverage to ground-level up to about latitude 45.  So, I can launch unmanned stuff now without having to deal with ground comm sites going under the horizon.

 

Just gotta say that's a beautiful Earth you've got there. I was thinking of starting a fresh save with @Galileo's planets at 6.4 scale, but your reports are really making me want to head to RSS/RO.

[Slam_Jones]

4 hours ago, Slam_Jones said:

Did a couple things last night.  Having been on another break, I decided to start off easy and build a mini-shuttle.  It launches like a regular rocket, but still has some small wings and such.  Regardless, the Mini Shuttle had the glide properties of a half-burnt paper airplane, and splashed down on chutes alone (at 15m/s).

After that, I decided to try out the new Relay Sat thing, and built 3 basic satellites, each for progressively further locations.  I decided that launching just one on a rocket seemed like a waste, so I stuck four onto a launcher and sent them up.  I intended for the launcher to work SpaceX style - be able to de-orbit itself and land upright for refurbishing.  Well... the first launch, I forgot to put a drone core or reaction wheels on the launcher.  The second lanch I remembered that, but realized I never put reaction wheels on my relay sats.   So after cleaning up 8 satellites and 2 launchers, I set out yet again and managed to accomplish everything smoothly.  The launcher, during de-orbit, didn't quite make it to KSC and splashed down in the ocean on chutes alone.  The engine came disconnected from the fuel tank, but no other damage was observed.  (Oh, forgot to mention... the launcher ran out of battery power at about 15,000m altitude.  I was able to deploy the drogues in time, but there wasn't enough juice to hit the main chutes.  Still surprised the damage wasn't worse!!)

The four relay sats were equipped with Ion engines (and nearly 4k dv) so I sent one to a higher Kerbin orbit, one to Low Munar Orbit, and one to High Munar Orbit.  The fourth I left at its 72km x 72km orbit.

Lastly I built a quadcopter for Jeb to play around in.  Not super easy to fly, but rather fun regardless.    Took a short video, but forgot to upload it.  (Since my current version of KAX, I believe, is out of date, the propellers do not animate, but still function in providing thrust).

Aaaand now I've uploaded the video!

As you can see, I'm not the best pilot, but hey, I had fun   (Especially doing flips!)

(And if you're wondering why the propellors don't spin, I think it's because I'm using an old version of the mod... KAX being the mod, I believe)

 

Edited December 15, 2016 by Slam_Jones

[RoboRay]

21 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Just gotta say that's a beautiful Earth you've got there. I was thinking of starting a fresh save with @Galileo's planets at 6.4 scale, but your reports are really making me want to head to RSS/RO.

It's the 8K textures for RSS, with RVE for atmospheric effects.

RO isn't available for KSP 1.2.2 yet...  I'm using SMURFF with stock parts, along with Procedural Parts, SXT and RLA, mainly.  I'll probably try a RO game next Career.

Edited December 15, 2016 by RoboRay

[Galileo]

22 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Just gotta say that's a beautiful Earth you've got there. I was thinking of starting a fresh save with @Galileo's planets at 6.4 scale, but your reports are really making me want to head to RSS/RO.

I won't be offended if you move on to RSS. It's also a very cool mod. An update for GPP is right around the corner though so I would wait for that if you choose to play GPP 

[Fearless Son]

2 hours ago, Firemetal said:

Wait which one? The Pillar Of Autumn in Halo? How?!

Fire

We worked at the same company.  She still works there, but I work elsewhere now.  She also did the cover art for Halo 2.  Before that she was an artist for comics like Elfquest and used to do release cover art for ADV anime titles.

[Firemetal]

Just now, Fearless Son said:

We worked at the same company.  She still works there, but I work elsewhere now.  She also did the cover art for Halo 2.  Before that she was an artist for comics like Elfquest and used to do release cover art for ADV anime titles.

 No way! That's awesome! (Big halo fan here. )

Fire

[The Aziz]

I got back Bob from the Mun and took this picture

Put here an inspirational quote about home or something.

[Wjolcz]

4 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

I got back Bob from the Mun and took this picture

Put here an inspirational quote about home or something.

"Nice pic of home you got there fam"

[justidutch]

DON'T PANIC!

There's some long faces haunting the corridors of KSC at the moment.  The admin types are very angry and have demanded their secretaries get a large stack of pink slips ready.  The first of three ships on their way to Duna has finally arrived, the others soon to follow.  This primary ship is manned and was tasked to fulfill three contracts, the first explore Duna contract and to place two satellites.  Here is an artist's rendering of what the ship would look like entering the system:

 

 

Since the first satellite was to go into polar orbit, the crew decided to send it on it's way as soon as they entered the Duna SOI.  Separation went fine, but right then is when things went awry.  Well, not so much awry as much as, well, nothing happened at all.  The satellite couldn't fire up its engine, use SAS, do any experiments, nothing.  It is dead!  It took a couple moments, but then it dawned on both the crew and KSC staff alike that the communication devices are simply not capable of transmitting at such a great distance.  The working theory was that since there was a manned ship in the area, any remote vehicles nearby would be able to be controlled by that crew.  Such, obviously, is not the case, and is the focal point behind the ire of the admin types.  No one has yet to step up and admit responsibility for cooking up this disastrously lame scheme.  The crew of the inaugural Duna-bound ship did their other job though, burning at periapsis to create an orbit around the red planet and gather some science both close by and far out.

So, now, the hallways of KSC are filled with staff of all type running amok, dreaming of hair-brained schemes in an attempt to salvage the other two Duna missions underway.  One is simply going to be lost, it is purely another satellite mission, nothing can be done about that one, it will pass the planet by and go on it's merry ballistic way.  The third ship, however, might yet be saved. While it is unmanned,  it has docking ports and quite a decent amount of fuel aboard.  It was a ship that fulfilled a contract to place a station in solar orbit, and as soon as that was done (it took all of ten seconds?!), it was quickly re-tasked to enter the Duna system, the theory being that it might come in useful there.  So, the plan right now is for the first ship to rendezvous with the third as it passes by Duna, and at that point a decision will be made as to which of the two ships would return home to Kerbin.  They won't both be able to, the crew will have to pick one.  But, this event is about 80 days away, so there is time to concoct other crazy ideas, perhaps a better option will present itself...

 

[TheSealBrigade]

SkyEye 1 was a very old telescope. It could barely take a decent picture and all it was really good for was media coverage. So today was it's last day...

...And then came SkyEye 2 carried up by a Pegasus-Wyvern Rocket.

And It took some rad photos! (After a spaceplane came up and replaced the central camera processor.)

 

[UnusualAttitude]

42 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Just gotta say that's a beautiful Earth you've got there. I was thinking of starting a fresh save with @Galileo's planets at 6.4 scale, but your reports are really making me want to head to RSS/RO.

Consider me biased, but I couldn't recommend RSS/RO more. Beyond all considerations of difficulty (and I understand that you have been playing 64k for a while, so the gap won't be too hard to cross), there is the inestimable wonder of exploring a system that actually exists out there, even if it is a rough approximation. For those of us who play with their imagination but are also inspired by reality, it is a source of endless fascination. 

[CatastrophicFailure]

27 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

I got back Bob from the Mun and took this picture

Put here an inspirational quote about home or something.

Hey, I can see my house from here!

er, no that's just a bug on the windshield. 

[RoboRay]

10 minutes ago, UnusualAttitude said:

For those of us who play with their imagination but are also inspired by reality, it is a source of endless fascination. 

I'm finding that one of the most compelling aspects is simply knowing the actual names of the features I'm looking at.

In my sandbox testing, I dropped a probe on Mars to check RVE cloud height settings and saw they default mostly below ground, with clouds mainly visible down in Valles Marineris...

But it was freaking Valles Marineris!  I was like, "Oh, that's Pavonis Mons I'm passing over, and OH that's Noctis Labyrinthus, AND THERE'S CANDOR CHASMA!"

Edited December 16, 2016 by RoboRay

[UnusualAttitude]

3 minutes ago, RoboRay said:

But it was freaking Valles Marineris!  I was like, "Oh, that's Pavonis Mons I'm passing over, and OH that's Noctis Labyrinthus, AND THERE'S CANDOR CHASMA!"

Exactly. It's an awesome feeling, and that's precisely what motivated me to accomplish a 10,000 km rover trip across the surface of Mars. 

Candor Chasma.

The caldera of Pavonis Mons.

[aramil]

1 hour ago, Fearless Son said:

We worked at the same company.  She still works there, but I work elsewhere now.  She also did the cover art for Halo 2.  Before that she was an artist for comics like Elfquest and used to do release cover art for ADV anime titles.

Awesome, there is just something about it's, simple clean lines, without being bland and generic. (was an absolute pig to get into orbit....)

But now it's there, flies like a dream!

[Clipperride]

The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy may have the words "Don't Panic" written in large, friendly letters on its cover, but this rocket designer is ignoring that advice and panicking like billy-oh!

Had I known the Minmus 'Hut Base" would require expansion, I might not have skimped so much on its design.  I built an expansion module that increases the berth's from 6 to 22 (or is it 28, I forget at the moment), added mining capabilities and even tested it's docking maneuvere on the runway. But (and it's a great big fanged "but", hence the bold) the thing is nigh on impossible to launch!

The CoM is soooo off centre that 2 hours of tweaking the connection betwixt module and launcher still resulted in an oversized Catherine wheel.  I even tried a large fairing (adding 10t to the weight) to no avail.  Using the largest wheels, which is needed to line up the docking ports, really causes CoM problems.  I'm considering going for a Klaw attachment and seeing if I can retract the legs of the original base to bring things into range of the more reasonably sized wheels.  The ugly solution would be to mirror the larger wheels adding a useless set pointing skywards.  A total redesign is planned after some sleep!

Edited December 16, 2016 by Clipperride
Correcting the autocorrect

[LaytheDragon]

Look very closely at Laythe. You will see what I did in KSP today _{(hint: It rotates)}.

 

_{Edit: I really need a Laythe probe or at least ship on Vall, so I can showcase this at a reasonable distance. Maybe I should launch one of my Z. veliferum spaceplanes off of Minmus, and drop off another PocketSub MkII in the process. Even better would be a HexaHauler...}

Edited December 16, 2016 by LaytheDragon

[RoboRay]

1 hour ago, UnusualAttitude said:

Fantastic. That reads like something swiped from Red Mars.   

I actually started reading through your mission stuff a couple of days ago. 

 

Edited December 16, 2016 by RoboRay

[Ultimate Steve]

I saw a video of a massive space station being deorbited earlier today. So I decided it was time to build another space station.

Space Station Epic I was my first station ever.

SSE2 and SSE3 were slightly better, and at least one of those was in career mode.

SSE4 was my biggest space station ever. Emphasis on "was."

I began building Space Station Epic V.

Maybe about half finished. Need to add a bigger ring, a huge hab, a docking array, a space dock, an observation tower, and LOTS of escape pods. Yes, I'm planning to de-orbit it eventually and make a video of it.

[Brownhair2]

Well, I'm finally doing it. I'm going to Eve. And landing.

Why? Because I recently discovered that Titanus has an ASL pressure of nine atm. I mean, obviously the map view was lying when it said it was 0.6 atm. But I thought it was maybe two or three atm. Not nine.

So I built a lander:

And I'm testing it on Eve. If it can't land there, it can't land on Titanus.

(notice how I snuck in the two-giant-boosters strategy)

The plan is to attach two fuel tanks, use them to fly to Eve, land, return to orbit, and use a separate recovery vehicle to return.

[Triop]

I got stuck...IN THE SHADE !, no more power, sun is going down behind the mountain, guess I'll have to spend the night here...

[N_Danger]

Val goes back to the Mun. This time she is rendezvousing with a Muner lander Mk 1 orbiting there and performing a landing.

 

Here we come Mun!

And tomorrow, after a rest, Val will attempt a landing(or 2)

 

 

[AccidentsHappen]

Today I made fiddled with my B-4 Valkery bomber. I also satisfied my other obsession with a few games of Rocket League. I messed around a bit on Elite: Dangerous and then came back to Kerbal. I tried making a bike, a nuke out of BD Armory's small warheads, and then nuclear bike. The latter (kind of) worked and I was able to drop Jeb out of my B-4's bomb bay. Using accidental precise timing of KAS/KIS's C-4 strapped to the bomb, I was able to get Jeb to parachute to the ground on his motorcycle and zoom away before the VAB exploded and fell on him. I forgot about my Valkery and switched back as it hit the water. I figured having it VTOL would be cool, so worked on that. Added a crud ton of weight to the plane and only got about <30 seconds of hover before I had to hit abort and eject Val and Ronald from the cockpit.

I've now scrapped the VTOL idea and am working on my new interplanetary spaceplane. Mind you, its not a SSTO. It's quite maneuverable considering its size and I tested it out at Jool. I let it Orbit just above the atmosphere and dropped three items from the drop bay. One was a probe that was there to finalise Jools atmospheric structure, the second was a gliding probe designed to fly in the atmosphere under its own power and collect science, and the third was a mock-up test of Jool AtmoLab II. It's effectively a Manned science platform that uses air envelopes to float in the upper atmosphere, just above the clouds. It has a small area at the back where atmospheric drop probes can be constructed by an on-board engineer and released into the abyss. I'm considering mounting a small manned glider to the bottom of the gondola but I'm not sure how I'd redock after release...

Other than that, I had a problem with my Laythe Ascent Vehicle prototype, which uses a large balloon to haul it up a fair way into the atmosphere, and had to get Luna Kerman to parachute from the upper atmosphere. She landed in the sea, 2 kilometres from my Base on an island and I deployed a seaplane to pull her ashore immediately.

Sadly, my test Rover on Bop crashed after only two days of roving, and I lost contact with my Eve probe. After taking a screenshot on my Mac, I didn't realise I'd hit the throttle and ended up sending it into the atmosphere.