What did you do in KSP1 today?

[capi3101]

Yesterday was largely spent working on various shenanigans as I prepared for the maiden flight of MSV Fat Man. The day began with the flight of an Auk XII 6-passenger spaceplane to the Kerbinport space station with pilot Tommund Kerman in charge, carrying tourist Triely Kerman and scientists Bobkin, Paley, Stapond and Cordan Kerman. Docking the plane at the station fulfilled a station expansion contract, and once it had arrived the four scientists were transferred over to Next Objective with Didrin in temporary command. Tourists Lable and Roly Kerman, who were already aboard at the station, also boarded the craft, as did the capsule commanders of Necessary Evil and Laggin' Dragon docked at the station, pilots Lazer and Nelny Kerman. Once they had boarded, an attempt was made to undock Next Objective from the station;  I had a kraken strike at that point - the docking ports refused to release the craft - and I ultimately had to download Kerbal Markup Lister in order to correct the issue (a pretty handy and nifty little utility program). Next Objective ultimately was allowed to depart the station for a rendezvous with MSV Fat Man, and in the meantime Tommund and Triely returned the Auk XII safely to KSC 09 despite Tommund forgetting to set the brakes early on in the re-entry procedure. I'd had the thought to go ahead and dock the Exxon Valdez 7a fuel cannister in LKO to Kerbinport, and to that end, I decided to utilize the now-uncrewed Necessary Evil as an ersatz tug to do the job.

Necessary Evil departing Kerbinport and setting up to rendezvous with Exxon Valdez 7a, with Next Objective (left) already departed and Laggin' Dragon (background) still docked to the station.

The mission to dock up the Valdez to the station was a success, hooking up with Docking Port 5 (the nadir port in the screenie above) and though I still have some concerns as to whether or not planes will still be able to dock with the station without issue and frame rate in proximity to the station, I do rest in the knowledge that I probably won't have to send up any big refueling flights to Kerbinport any time soon.

Once Necessary Evil returned to the station, I decided to go ahead and launch a replacement Fireball 7c science lander to replace Yokohama, which was lost en route to Duna because no one bothered to pop open her solar panels. Yokohama II was launched to LKO with scientist Catny Kerman aboard, and ultimately both Next Objective and Yokohama II made their way to a pair of successful rendezvous with MSV Fat Man.

Next Objective at rendezvous with MSV Fat Man, an Alcubierre Drive warp ship.

Fat Man began her flight with a quick warp to the orbit of Minmus to fulfill a space station contract. The game originally didn't want to credit me for the contract; I realized that I needed to cut Next Objective loose, since it was the only one of the craft's components that was launched prior to the acceptance of the contract. A quick undock later, I was about √500k richer; Next Objective did a simple RCS thrust ahead and Fat Man's mission continued.

MSV Fat Man in orbit over Minmus, with Next Objective in the tow spot and Yokohama II docked to one of the pylons. Pilot Phoming Kerman is in command of the craft; Helming and Suus are along for the ride to Duna, and all three went up with the ship herself at launch.

Next up was fulfilling Lable and Roly's itineraries for a Kerbolar orbit; that just required a quick warp out of Kerbin's SOI. Fat Man is currently in a relatively low Kerbolar orbit in order to match the directional component of Duna's velocity, and will continue the process of warping there in a few days. I expect two or three of the craft from the First Duna Expedition to arrive before Fat Man is ready to travel to Duna herself.

All things considered, MSV Fat Man had a successful first day.
 

[SwissSpace93]

4 hours ago, Space Kadet said:

actually i think the word 'krakens' sums up the pictures  

i love how the forum renames my term for bovine testiballs to 'krakens'  

A struct collided with the fairing, then the Payload blows up.

I removed the Fairing, got in LKO and realized that i forgot the RCS-Thrusters 

[Tyko]

On 11/27/2017 at 10:26 AM, The Flying Kerbal said:

Has anyone else had this problem caused by the game aligning things very slightly off centre?  Anyway all's good and hopefully my rolling problems are finally laid to rest.

I've seen this before. A payload might be inducing torque of .004 which would be rounded down to .00 by KER. That slight amount seems to get compounded as you make it taller by adding more stages. I've often had to build the entire rocket, then go up and nudge a single science component a bit to zero out torque.

[Urus28]

 

Since Jeb is away near Minmus my engineer team is working on a new fun rover.

No aim for efficiency, science or something useful, just have fun with a big overbuilt rover. Perhaps I will try the Ker-ball run with it (with no hope of victory, just fun).

[qzgy]

38 minutes ago, Urus28 said:

Thats a really pretty rover. I love that front thing you did with the lights on the Big-S strakes.

[Urus28]

22 minutes ago, qzgy said:

Thats a really pretty rover. I love that front thing you did with the lights on the Big-S strakes.

Thanks, I think the front needs a little bit of fine tuning on the lights position, just little details....

[eddiew]

Been so busy with reality that I literally haven't launched KSP since Sunday  

But I found some screenshots that I forgot about. Just a little crew exchange prior to the jovian expedition that's currently in progress, because I wanted my senior crew (i.e. Nimoy, Kelley and Doohan) available for it. With Stragegia set to maximum Scientist Focus, even the 3-star scientists Lenard and Barrett will function at maximum rank during their tour of duty at the orbital lab.

At 37 tons on the runway, the Cloudspear II is about the heaviest thing we ever lifted and ever want to lift on two rapiers, but that futuristic double-nosecone seems to be surprisingly low drag and the engineering team tells us they put a subtle 2-degree inclination on the wings, which is apparently undetectable to the naked eye. Whether this is true or not, we can't tell, but either way an 8 degree ascent profile pushes over 1400m/s on air+nuke. It gets warm in there, but it's all well within tolerance, and switching the rapiers to closed cycle at 28km kicks the apoapsis up to about 65km. Even with a feeble 0.25 twr, it's possible to get this thing to orbit with patience (and timewarp) and after docking it's able to leave nearly 1000 units of LF on Skywheel for future use.

And for once the engineering team remembered to put the docking port on the bottom of the plane, such that the solar panels and radiator don't all get smashed off if the crew forget to retract them. Progress!

[Fearless Son]

36 minutes ago, eddiew said:

But I found some screenshots that I forgot about. Just a little crew exchange prior to the jovian expedition that's currently in progress, because I wanted my senior crew (i.e. Nimoy, Kelley and Doohan) available for it. With Stragegia set to maximum Scientist Focus, even the 3-star scientists Lenard and Barrett will function at maximum rank during their tour of duty at the orbital lab.

Can I say how much I love your crew names?  

[Colonel Cbplayer]

I finished my build of a YF-19 in a timelapse video

 

Edited December 7, 2017 by Colonel Cbplayer

[LordFerret]

16 hours ago, Urus28 said:

...

That thing looks like something out of Mad Max!

[capi3101]

Not much was accomplished yesterday. I did a quick crew report up at the Kerbinport space station (Zelwin's pretty lonely these days up by herself) and then took on a contract to capture a measly class-A asteroid and put it into orbit around Kerbin. A Tater Catcher 7 Light asteroid grabber was sent once the entry path was aligned with rock VHW-690, and the correction burns put me about 9500 kilometers from an encounter (which I consider a failure, considering the 15 kilometer close pass I got on PSA-354). Tommund flew up an Auk I rescue spaceplane to rescue pilot Hellas Kerman from LKO, the two of them returning safely to KSC 09. The refinery Scan Queen entered Duna's SOI and was put into a mildly disgusting orbit just this morning (by which I mean it ain't circular, but it is equatorial and there are far worse situations it could be in so I shouldn't complain). I'm hoping Scan Queen can still make Ike as intended at this point; I haven't got cause to think otherwise just yet. One of my Heartbreak Hotel 7 outposts also entered Duna's SOI on a trajectory that will result in an Ike encounter in two days, and so at this point I'm racing to get MSV Fat Man into orbit around Duna and back to Kerbin before that encounter occurs. I've already botched up the sequence for the Explore Duna contracts (I botch more contracts by not accepting them than anything else, as what happened with the two-star contract to land and return from Duna) and I'd rather not botch the Encounter Ike contracts before they even occur if I can at all help it. I've maneuvered Fat Man into position for what I call the "quench"* for Duna this morning; I have yet to see if I'll be able to warp straight into orbit or not. I'm confident I can get the job done in the allotted time (knock on wood).

*(quench (n): to have matched the directional component of the target body's velocity and to begin the process of using Kerbol's gravity to slow down to a relative speed sufficiently slow enough to achieve an orbit around the target body on the first try. Sounds more complicated than it is. If you ever try to use the Alcubierre Drive mod, you'll understand.)

[Jett_Quasar]

Posted my Walker Assault video today - I think it's my best one yet!

 Special thanks to MajorJim! for the AT-ST craft.

- Jett

Edited December 7, 2017 by Jett_Quasar

[Whisky Tango Foxtrot]

Explorer 1 is still orbiting Dres, doing science while she waits for a transfer window to return to Kerbin. My original plan was to have the ship drop off her lander on arrival and then refuel, re-crew and get equipped with a new science package before blasting off for Eeloo. I've been re-thinking that lately, though, and while Explorer 1 was certainly a fine ship that performed her missions well, a few design oversights left her without some capabilities that would have been useful in her past missions and would be even more critical for its mission to Eeloo. With that in mind I went back to the VAB and designed Explorer 2.

Like her predecessor she can carry a crew of five, has an onboard MPL for scientific research and is powered by four NERV engines. However, this new design carries 265 more units of liquid fuel, has capacity for 1375 units of oxidizer to better support landers (Explorer 1 didn't carry any oxidizer,) has built-in RCS (Explorer 1 depended on its landers and other docked vessels for RCS capabilities,) a self-lighting to illuminate her docking ports as well as objects in front of the craft, crew quarters that don't require a helmet, increased battery capacity, single-pilot probe control, level 3 SAS capabilities and a fuel cell to supplement her solar panels when far from the sun. Despite all this, her dry weight is still slightly lower than Explorer 1's was.

Plus, this'll mean that I don't have to wait for Explorer 1 to return from Dres before launching my Eeloo mission, which will significantly move up my timetable for having manned landings on every solid body in the system.

Edited December 7, 2017 by Whisky Tango Foxtrot

[Urus28]

3 hours ago, LordFerret said:

That thing looks like something out of Mad Max!

That's a great compliment ! Thank you !

I was not thinking to Mad Max when I made this rover but now I think I should try to make one real Mad Max style big rover.

Thank you for the idea !

[XLjedi]

@Jett_Quasar you get my vote for coolest thing of the month!

[SwissSpace93]

My Moho-2 Lander is doing some Burns, for a Moho Encounter

[L0ck0n]

Again some russian stuff- Mi-24 "Hind"

[SwissSpace93]

1 hour ago, SwissSpace93 said:

My Moho-2 Lander is doing some Burns, for a Moho Encounter

KSC we have a Problem!

"The Lander and Transfer Rockets are in Orbit but not in the same direction, so the Moho-2 Crew request a fueltank. With some Lifesupport"

 

[eddiew]

The Europan landing has... landed!

On a very, very rough patch of terrain. In fact so rough that Rover can't stay still and just slides down the slope (although this later turned out to be due to a broken wheel that nobody noticed). Going with gravity, the crew eventually arrives at a slightly more level patch where they take some samples, measure the concentrations of ore and useful materials in the ground, then leave a marker for future expeditions. Who almost certainly won't land here because it's really not a good spot at all. Although Doohan does have a good time playing about on the low friction surface, enjoying a long slide down each and every hill that requires her to get off and fix a tyre.

Given the terrible landing zone, it's clear that we need to do better. Mission control authorises plan B, and the crew begin an excursion southwards towards the flatter ice plains near the equator. Some jets of the argon engines are needed to clear the worst of the terrain, but indeed, the final destination is much more favourable, although the ore concentration drops a little.

(Truthfully, I dropped the landscape height multiplier in the configs because Europa is seriously, seriously hilly in SSRSS, which doesn't match my knowledge of an ice world with ice boulders. There should probably be many, many more boulders, but I felt that the kharst landscape was worse than the lack of icecubes.)

An optimal return window turns out to be a conveniently close 77 days away, and in almost no time - or in exactly 77 days, depending on your point of view - the Starblaze III makes an ejection burn. Which, Jupiter being Jupiter, means that it leaves the SoI 106 days later.

(There was enough fuel in the tanks to stop off at Ganymede on the way back, but I wanted this to be the scouting mission to the jovian system, rather than a full exploration. We shall return - and in greater numbers.)

The voyage home is rather slow, broken only by sighs of disappointment as the crew realise that the magnetic fishing game they brought kind of needs gravity to make any sense. With a cabin now full of floating plastic fish, they focus on their work, managing to process 99% of the gathered data by the time they reach Earth orbit.

Which probably means we should bring them down to ground, but now that mission control know of the existence of magnetic fishing games, it's getting hard to find anyone actually at their desk... hopefully the thrill will wear off before the Starblaze's snack supplies run out.

[GarrisonChisholm]

I sat down to launch a relay satellite to Minmas, thinking "I'm tired, but I can get this done."  When I woke up the rocket was still on its original 5-degree angle of climb and plummeting from an apoapsis which must have been around 120km.  It took almost all of its remaining fuel to save the launch, and even then the best I could accomplish was a 500km Kerbin equatorial orbit.  ...not really the place you *need* a relay sat.  :|

 

[Cavscout74]

While I had a recovery claw enroute to pick up a stranded kerbal around Minmus, I was offered a SECOND contract to grab another one.  Much to my surprise, only one required recovery of the stranded module also.  Due to not having changed my design since a unique mission a few days ago, I had an extra seat on the recovery vehicle & managed to finish both contracts with a single launch:

Recovery #1:

After grabbing it & transferring the passenger, I gave it a good fling & released the claw to get ready for recovery #2:

After some simple maneuvering, caught the second module & headed back home:

[roboslacker]

The Kristmas tree has landed

After some experimentation, I developed a non-explosive version of the tree. I then sent the tree to the minmus base. The initial landing was 2km away from the base, with a few hundred m/s delta v left. After a series of hops, and sliding around on the ground, I got the tree right up to the base.

[Jeb, The Lonely Kerbonaut]

I continued the preparations to start my new modded carrer save. I'm actually re-balancing the tech tree, to start unmanned, and modify other things. 

Mod list:

Part mod: RLA Stockalike (one of the continued versions).

Planets Mod: OPM

Tech Tree Mod: Community Tech Tree

Contract Mod: SETI contracts

[CatastrophicFailure]

2 hours ago, eddiew said:

Europa is seriously, seriously hilly in SSRSS, which doesn't match my knowledge of an ice world with ice boulders.

I would think that’s actually closer to the truth. You ever seen the surface of a glacier up close? Many of them looks pretty near what you have there, and with all the tidal squishing and squeezing Europa goes thru I’d imagine the surface is a pretty chaotic place. 

[Mr. Peabody]

Worked some more on my Caveman challenge game. Got a few interestingly named applicants.

Madma Kerman? Stelemma Kerman?