What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Slam_Jones]

I did a thing.  I call it Outlander Station.

Also sent up some Lithium for the MPDTs (Magnetoplasmadynamic Thrusters)

Nearly 8k m/s of dv, and nearly ready to head off somewhere (Sarvin, probably).  It turns out I need more radiators for the 4 Nuclear Generators on board (producing 10,000 ec/s at full trot so it can feed the MPDTs), so there will be another launch with a reprocessor for re-enriching depleted uranium and a bunch of radiators.

Edited January 29, 2017 by Slam_Jones

[Zeiss Ikon]

Today, Jeb finished his trip to Munar orbit to rescue Elyris.  Elyris had become the first Kerbal to land on and walk on the surface of Mun, but wasted too much lander fuel getting down to be able to get back up (must consider two-stage landers as a hedge against getting down with too little dV left to get back up -- if the descent stage runs dry, quickly stage off the ascent stage and return to orbit).  It wasn't certain she'd be short on dV, however, so she chose to launch -- went too vertical, instead of boosting east as soon as she was clear of terrain, though the only way that might have made the difference is by leaving her close enough for her nearly-dry RCS thrusters to finish the job.  As it happened, she bailed in her space suit and used its maneuver unit to circularize -- leaving her in orbit, alone, with about 80% EVA fuel, but no way for Jeb to help her, as he was in the single-seat pusher module.

The best way Jeb could help, then, was to light out for home and come back ASAP with an empty module in his stack.  The KSC crew stepped up, readying a duplicate of the Mun ship, Selene 1 Mod. 2, in record time, and as soon as he stepped off the recovery transport Jeb was climbing into the command pod.  Up he went, another nominal launch that left the second stage in stable orbit with about 80% fuel remaining.  The burn for Mun was made in the first window, followed by the unavoidable wait for the Munar capture burn.  Jeb waited to finish the capture to uncouple his command pod and dock it nose to nose with the lander pod, remembering the way the stack had flexed under full thrust once the launch struts were released.  That maneuver was carried out about as quickly as the pusher's engine shroud could clear the lander, and then Jeb made a plane correction burn, ditched the transfer stage to the Munar surface, and circularized to wait in a slightly lower orbit to catch up with Elyris.  Once he had an intersection of 2.5 km, he started closing the distance by flying the ball.  First try, he used the Reliant at low throttle to close, and got caught by the limited ability of the stack to slow under only RCS, but even though Elyris went by his window at close to 20 m/s, he got the lander/pusher stack turned and was closing again before she could get more than 500 meters away.  Second time, he didn't rush, and parked the vessel at a dead stop a mere fifteen meters away from Elyris, holding it steady as she crept in with her EVA pack until she was able to reach the hatch in the duplicate lander.

As a precaution, Jeb jettisoned the lander's engine and RCS tank before Elyris could even get strapped in (to make sure she didn't try to make a better landing on the second try), then burned for Kerbin in the first window.  He set up Elyris, with fully charged batteries and full command pod RCS, for a 37 km periapsis, then decoupled and corrected his own orbit to clear atmosphere (to avoid reentering simultaneously -- previously found to be extremely hazardous).  The two craft flew in formation from Mun back to Kerbin, still within radar range to the point where Jeb made a burn to lower his apoapsis so it wouldn't be a week before he could reenter.  That deceleration gave him a fine view forward as Elyris slammed into the atmosphere at above 3 km/s, starting to burn above 50 km.  Busy watching overheat warnings from all over the tiny vessel, she was startled by an explosion as one of the RCS quads melted down, but the remainder of the craft (including, crucially, the parachutes) was undamaged, and she landed safely in the ocean a few hundred kilometers east of KSC.

One orbit later (an hour or so, due to the high apoapsis he'd settled for to ensure he left enough fuel to deorbit), Jeb returned to Kerbin on a nearly identical trajectory -- but because Kerbin had turned under him, he landed on the desert continent far to the west of the Space Center.  Still, all's well that ends well; if Elyris got the privilege of being the first Kerbal to walk on the Mun, Jeb had the distinction of being the first to rescue a stranded Kerbonaut from space.  The ticker tape had hardly been swept up before the design team were at work upgrading the lander and designing the next version of the Selene Mun ship -- now to be repurposed to take Kerbals to Minmus, and eventually, perhaps, to Duna.

[septemberWaves]

I tested out a new lander for the Captor program.

[Angelo Kerman]

I made progress on the D2 Centrifuge:

It's getting there.

[Servo]

I had a lot of free time, so I made a lot of planes. I'll be uploading them to KerbalX once I put the finishing touches on each of them later in the week.

F-86 Sabre

F-91 Thunderceptor

B-2 Spirit

B-45 Tornado

U-2 Dragon Lady

[Guest]

1 hour ago, NISSKEPCSIM said:

Today I rendezvoused with a pod in orbit, and rescued the kerbal stranded inside it. I am not going to post pictures, however, as, once again, this XP Trait glitch bugged me out, and I couldn't put anyone into a craft except the first kerbal in the list, and I couldn't remove him. So I had to revert back to the rescue craft's launch, and cancel the mission.

Again, if anyone knows how to fix this, please help. I tried a new sandbox to see if it was only affecting my career save, and, sure enough,it was fine. So I think it has something to do with this pesky Johngard, and I think deleting him from my save file is the best option. Problem: I don't know how to delete him from my save file.

The persistent.sfs file in the saves folder can be opened with Notepad or the like; entries for individual Kerbal statuses are near the end iirc. I think there's a dedicated editor program someone made for it once but I don't know if that's up to date. The cause of the problem would (in my experience) be from removing a mod that adds new specialties, like UKS does. I didn't fix it though, started a new save instead.

[SaturnianBlue]

Continuing some more WW2 aircraft project; I don't know what i'll do with them exactly, if i'll release them. 

First off, a carrier-based fighter (For now the carrier is basically a flat board with a undetailed hull that lists over in 5 minutes). 

Second, I built a carrier naval bomber that borrows heavily from the B6N and can definitely carry more than the real thing. 

Last is a ship based off the Blackburn Firebrand and performs quite well, again capable of carrier landing (although my piloting skills generally give the plane a 1 in 5 chance of landing on the runway—most of my failures tend to come from landing short, but as long as that board gets touched it'll land safely).

Edited January 30, 2017 by SaturnianBlue

[Martian Emigrant]

Hey Kerbinites.

Today Jeb is still grounded. So having time off he decided to take Magrigh on a date in his own plane....He can't used the KSC's until his case is reviewed by the director.

I didn't see the film yet but jeb said:

"That was the best date ever. She wants to fly with me again"

On another note I have been practising landing manually close to the Neil Armstrong Memorial.

This one is better lucky than good.

I had to open the crossfeed and borrow from Peter to pay Paul.

 

Not enough to go back up. I have since doubled the fuel in the lower stage. There was enough if I land just anywhere but the hover time kills me.  My normal best seems to be slightly over 1 km. My normal worst is of course much worse than that.

 

Here is Trachelle doing some trial simulation with the Science-Rover.

 

I am as good as I will get. Next time I play I am trying to complete the "Doing it Apollo style - Redux" Challenge.

 

 

ME

 

[regex]

Today I launched the mighty Cascadia, somewhere around 310 tons of fuel and nuclear fire what will transport us to Moho and beyond. It is fitted with droptanks for its maiden voyage but has over 7km/s of delta-V without them, making it a ship that will serve Kerbin for years to come.

Now all I have to do is edit some tank profiles so I can get the rocket parts needed to inflate the centrifuge up to it.

[Enceos]

@Cupcake... There's an offset limit disabler in stock KSP as well if you hold down Shift while dragging the arrows.

If you didn't have a fresh install of KSP 1.2.2 then your settings.cfg is running some old values:

Find and change the value of VAB_FINE_OFFSET_THRESHOLD to 20

And to make sure Shift is the fine tweak key, compare that section of settings.cfg to this:

Editor_fineTweak
{
    primary = LeftShift
    secondary = None
    group = 0
    modeMask = -1
    modeMaskSec = -1
}

Edited January 31, 2017 by Enceos

[Jett_Quasar]

The SSTO version of my X-wing... pretty sweet.

-Jett

[capi3101]

(1.1.3) After spending the day on Thursday sending the 20-craft Duna/Ike expedition to their destination, I picked up the day on Friday at the Minmusport space station, where a tourist expedition had arrived aboard the ferry craft Next Objective just prior. Pilot Jenwin Kerman and tourists Glema, Elcott and Loul Kerman were loaded aboard the station's Spamcan 7a lander and sent down to the Lesser Flats, where Jenwin conducted advanced flag-planting techniques before the expedition returned to Minmusport. Crew and passengers were reloaded aboard Next Objective and the craft was refueled, then departed to return to Kerbin. 

Next I busied myself with a contract to conduct seismic readings in the vicinity of the rover Lunkhead on Minmus, which itself was parked in close proximity to the Deepwater Horizon refinery. As a Hellhound 7 rover, Lunkhead had a seismic sensor installed all ready, so it was capable of doing the job itself; it hit four waypoints relatively easily before fulfilling the contract and returning to Deepwater Horizon. The replacement contract was to extract 500 units of ore from Mün, which I then did readily with the Piper Alpha refinery. An LKO junk retrieval mission came up next; a Bill Clinton 7a grabber probe was sent up to perform the mission, and the module involved turned out to be a Poodle engine, which was successfully retrieved.

The replacement contract was a satellite contract - which didn't interest me - so I set an alarm to go back to Mission Control when the contract expired but made plans to add a Faux News 7 module to the Kerbinport space station so I could see if, when such contracts came up in the future, any in situ constructed Faux News probe could be used to fulfilled them. I warped ahead two days, to when the Duna/Ike mission began leaving the Kerbin sphere of influence. Sequence of departure was as follows:

Spoiler

• Hojo Zeta - surface outpost
• Bleepity-Bleep 7h - probe
• Dunaport - space station
• Apathy - rover-in-a-can
• Jiffy Lube 7 - rover parts delivery system
• Malaise - Hellhound 7 rover
• Jiffy Lube 7 - rover parts delivery system
• Yokohama - science lander
• Scan Queen - refinery
• Spamcan 7b - multi-passenger lander
• Prometheus - ore hauler
• Bellerophon - ore hauler
• Ikeport - space station
• Bleepity-Bleep 7i - probe
• Kyoto - science olander
• Spamcan 7b - multi-passenger lander
• Enchova Central - refinery
• Laggin' Dragon - passenger ferry
• Faux News 7 - probe parts delivery system

I'm sure the Bleepity-Bleep 7j probe left somewhere in that mix. Couldn't say when though - apparently I didn't log it. Anyway, the list of SOI departures differs from the list of transfer burn order, for those who don't want to go back and check. In each case, when the craft left Kerbin's SOI, I set KAS alarms for the descending node and arrival at Duna's SOI in order to plan timing of correction burns. Craft will reach their node points in 49-292 days, and will arrive at Duna in 206-303 says on their current trajectories. It looks like at the present time there will be a wide enough spread in the timing of arrivals that I shouldn't have to worry about two craft coming in at once. That could all change of course, but I won't know for a while...

While all that was going on, a Jiffy Lube 7 rover parts delivery system (the second one launched) arrived at Minmus and I put it into orbit. While waiting to get it lined up for a landing near Deepwater Horizon, I went ahead and launched the Faux News module to Kerbinport. The timer went off on the Mission Control alarm and to my delight the satellite contract was replaced with a different satellite contract. Unfortunately, while engineer Danuna Kerman aboard Kerbinport was able to assemble the probe without difficulty, the contract called for a retrograde orbit and the one thing those Faux News probes do not have is excessive delta-V. I'll probably be conducting a standard Beep-Beep or Bleepity-Bleep mission soon to fulfill the contract. In the meantime, my experiment there will have to be put on hold.

Finally, the Jiffy Lube landed near Deepwater Horizon, and refinery engineer Barna Kerman boarded Lunkhead to refit the rover into a fuel delivery and electromagnet-equipped crane module, with an immediate job to upright the ore hauler Lewis and Clark, which had tipped over during a previous landing attempt. Refitting the rover was actually a lot of fun; I wound up making a lot of back-and-forth trips between Jiffy Lube and Lewis and Clark, which I shouldn't have had to do if I'd just done a full refit from the get-go. Ultimately I was able to get Lewis and Clark uprighted but I hadn't noticed that it had broken off one of its lander legs during its accident, so I decided to take one off of Jiffy Lube (the craft is essentially there to be cannibalized, after all). Of course, Lewis and Clark used the type 1 lander legs and Jiffy Lube used type 2 (government projects for you), so I had to make sure and stick it higher up along the external tanks. Then to ensure that I could extend the legs without anything bad happening, I decided that I should try to extend them above the surface - for that, Lewis and Clark needed fuel, and that's when I did the fuel hauler refit (should've done it first thing, see, and I hadn't). Took fuel from Deepwater Horizon into the new tanks on Lunkhead, then delivered that fuel to Lewis and Clark; the craft launched, extended its lander legs, and then touched back down - I had gotten the replacement leg in the correct place. 

And then I promptly tipped Jiffy Lube over trying to put all the tools away...oh well. It wasn't going anywhere else...

That was all I did for the entire weekend; haven't touched KSP since Friday. I still have a few things to do with Lunkhead; now that Jiffy Lube is on its side, it oughta be easier for Barna to reach all the parts inside the KIS container...

[Gaarst]

Launched a small telescope in Lunar orbit to mess with planetary alignments and angular sizes.

Original image:

After having fun with the contrast slider in GIMP: 

(Sun is a troll confirmed)

[The Budgey Admiral]

16 hours ago, Servo said:

I had a lot of free time, so I made a lot of planes. I'll be uploading them to KerbalX once I put the finishing touches on each of them later in the week.

F-86 Sabre

F-91 Thunderceptor

B-2 Spirit

B-45 Tornado

U-2 Dragon Lady

You know of the F-91 Thunderceptor?

One of my favourite American planes, really a unusual approach on fighter design. Nice recreation aswell, though I would maybe adjust the wing sweep a bit further back.

Otherwise, great work, on the other planes too!

[Whisky Tango Foxtrot]

I discovered that the relay probe that I had en-route to Moho for years in-game didn't have enough fuel for its capture burn. It did make one important scientific discovery during its mission, though: It confirmed that ion engines are crap. The thing was tiny and it still needed half-hour burns. I think I'll hold off on attempting another Moho mission until I have my refuelling station on Gilly set up.

Edited January 30, 2017 by Whisky Tango Foxtrot

[Puggonaut]

On 27/01/2017 at 4:19 PM, Odonian said:

Today I landed this Ophiura class refinery on Minmus. It makes pretty much everything except food and rocket fuel.

Can you tell me which mod pack creates this ship please ?

[Tyko]

On 1/29/2017 at 10:01 AM, Stratzenblitz75 said:

Today, I built a monorail... To finally connect the KSC and Island Strip:

 

That is really amazing! I'd love to hear / see more about how you designed it.

[septemberWaves]

I did another Mun mission with mimic Gemini technology.

[Guest]

Carrier ship Arkadia. Unladen delta-v is 26km/s. Sun atmosphere return mission, anyone?

 

Based on concept by Dr. R C Parkinson:

http://william-black.deviantart.com/art/Dr-R-C-Parkinson-Interplanetary-Spacecraft-496148394

http://william-black.deviantart.com/art/Out-From-the-Shadows-of-Giants-496150009

Edited January 30, 2017 by Guest

[NISSKEPCSIM]

18 hours ago, String Witch said:

The persistent.sfs file in the saves folder can be opened with Notepad or the like; entries for individual Kerbal statuses are near the end iirc. I think there's a dedicated editor program someone made for it once but I don't know if that's up to date. The cause of the problem would (in my experience) be from removing a mod that adds new specialties, like UKS does. I didn't fix it though, started a new save instead.

Yep, I deleted UKS recently because I was using an outdated version. Thanks for the help, I'll take your advice.

I took a look at the .sfs file and saw that Johngard was supposed to be a Quartermaster. I'm going to try a different approach - redownloading USI core.

Edited January 30, 2017 by NISSKEPCSIM

[NISSKEPCSIM]

Guess what! Everything's fixed, all my kerbals in the Astronaut complex are back, and all the KSC brass have gone out for beer and some godawful chips in the local pub. Sadly, Val and Bob can't go, as they're conducting research in the manned orbiting laboratory, but mission control have sent them a picture of the entire team partying hard in the pub. :-)

[McFarnsworth]

Contract: Land a 20 Kerbal base on Minmus.

Massively overdo it for no reason?

Massively overdo it.

[Slam_Jones]

Working on a prototype for a new Deep Space Relay to assist my Kerbals in reaching far-flung planets, and helping get their precious, precious science back to Kerbin.  I only have two launchers in this career save, though I will often modify the chosen launcher to best suit the payload.  In this case, I was able to remove the excess engines from the Upper Stage, and as a result I get approx 3k m/s of dv with the Upper Stage alone!  Add to that the 7k m/s of dv that the Relay itself carries, and you can tell that its gonna be able to get pretty darn far.  I just hope the relays are powerful enough to function when it gets there!  This new line of Relays has about 20x the transmitting power of the old ones. The generation thereafter, if I get that far, is 50x more powerful than what you see here. 

(On Launchpad with Launcher)

(Showing off the panels and making sure everything is able to deploy smoothly)

 

I also took a few pictures of my Joolian Research Station as it made its transfer burn.  Despite having significantly better TWR than Ion engines, the MPDTs have a great ISP as well, making them ideal for pushing large ships a long distance.  The drawbacks being that, on large ships, the TWR is still relatively low (for example, this was a 40 minute burn), and they require TONS of Electricity, which means you basically have to put a nuclear generator on board (which means radiators as well!)

Regardless, the MPDTs allow me to complete missions that either would be too tedious or boring to otherwise embark upon.

(Mod for MPDTs: Near Future Propulsion. 

Mod for massive solar panels and Nuclear Generators: Near Future Electrical and KSP Interstellar

Mod for relay dishes: KSP Interstellar)

Edited January 30, 2017 by Slam_Jones

[McFarnsworth]

... And we've landed.

[Guest]

MY BODY IS READY

Also doubles as a submersible.