What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Piatzin]

Am I the only one here who thinks the map view after pressing F2 is absolutely stunning?

^And that's with the lowest graphics and zero visual mods

[Delay]

22 minutes ago, Earthlinger said:

the map view after pressing F2 is absolutely stunning?

I can do better than that! Looks at my art(-ful connections)!

[XB-70A]

1 hour ago, Delay said:

I can do better than that! Looks at my art(-ful connections)!

 

I love to take the coms links screenshot too.

Some of my actual Kerbin's network:

The Dwarf constellation and its 16 members.

 

Followed by the 8 members of the 3 tons Jupiter I klan. The constellation needed only one launcher, but hundreds of Kerbals days to position it correctly.

I started to make another "row" along the equator, with even more powerful relays, but it is long... and I'm so lazy.

Edited January 9, 2018 by XB-70A

[Guest]

Brought Jeb back from Duna to a perfect landing on the KSC runway, and sent Val out in a better Dunaplane. I hope she'll find it less of a handful than the one Jeb had to fly. Next up is adding the new space station modules I also sent out to Duna Station, and then attempting a landing.

[astrobond]

Hi All

Today the part two of the Falcon Heavy to Duna ! The Journey and a test drive of the "Tesla" on Duna

 

Fly safe with Valentina

 

[Cavscout74]

Sadly, I had to scrap my current career because something got messed up with the save while placing a remote lander & relay satellite around Vall.  I have no idea what happened & I've spent all my free time today trying to save it - to the point of loading a previous version, deleting the offending vessel & alt-F12'ing a replacement into orbit of Vall.  Everything seems to go fine right up until I try to switch vessels away from the lander - the screen flickers a bit & then remains on the lander.  I've tried switching vessels via Kerbal Alarm Clock & map view.  I've tried switching to different vessels, no luck.  So off we go from scratch again.

[NSEP]

7 hours ago, astrobond said:

Hi All

Today the part two of the Falcon Heavy to Duna ! The Journey and a test drive of the "Tesla" on Duna

 

Fly safe with Valentina

 

Awesome! Oh and thanks for the reminder, i still have to try that challenge. It might take a while, i still have to go to Sarnus and Jool before my Duna window pops up again.

[Hotel26]

I landed my first Telemagic [TM] Aquila Cruise on a non-Kerbin and non-atmospheric body (the Mun), by tricking it up with Reliant engines, instead of Wheelseys.

"...One small step for Kerbals(*), one giant step for Kerbalkind!..."

* wait...  wait a cotton-pickin' second!  You forgot to load the Kerbal!!

Edited January 10, 2018 by Hotel26

[NightshineRecorralis]

I did a thing.

Developed my first mk.3 SSTO since 1.0.5 and flew it up to my latest LKO station.

[Guest]

Valentina landed a plane on Duna. Also took off and got back to the station. 

Dunaplane II is much better than Dunaplane I. Stalled out at around 45 m/s and remained controllable all the way to the end. Landing was still really hairy as it started skidding around immediately after and made a donut at the end, but no pieces fell off so that counts as a win I guess. Aced it on the second try (and third, because on my first attempt at take-off Bad Things happened so I had to do it again, this time with a somewhat detuned control authority). 

On the way down...

...landed...

...and on the way back to base.

[something]

After bringing home my first Duna mission just in time for Christmas 2016, I decided to go to Jool in January 2017 - it seems I spent most of the last year to build the appropriate vessels and test them. I finally launched my carrier and sent it to Minmus in order to refuel...

So well, yesterday, the refueling operation had been completed and I consequently launched the rocket to low Minmus orbit. Was a spectacular sight to see 6MN propelling a rocket to orbit on a non-atmospheric body:

 

 

And today, I realized the vessel is big enough to cast a shadow on the surface of Minmus from 22km up in the sky - at least with scatterer (that small black blob between the vessel and the altimeter)

 

[Fearless Son]

Docked a refueling craft to my Fission Star to add fuel to the drop tanks I installed on it earlier.  Unfortunately the Kracken attacked, shaking the drop tanks with increasing violence the longer I remained docked until ripping them off by their mounting.  I had to revert to save and use time warp while transferring fuel to cancel out the vibrations, which leads me to have worries about how stable this thing will be with attached landers and mission modules.  

I deorbited the SSTO tanker after that, overshot the space center, tried to correct my course over the ocean, realized that I accidentally flew the opposite direction from KSC, lacked the fuel to make another trans-oceanic flight, and tried to set down.  Landing was going okay at first, dip and flare touchdown with rear wheels first, but it bounced, then bounced again, then bounced again, not shedding speed fast enough despite the airbrakes, until it tipped a little on one bounce while trying to stay level with the terrain, flipped over, and broke into dozens of pieces.  Good thing it was a drone, but I wish I had stuck the landing.  I might need to rethink my SSTO design because I had to use way too many tightly clustered engines for my comfort.  

[michal.don]

More 3,2x resized GPP adventures.....

Tellumo. While looking beautiful, this place is probably an equivalent of the stock system Eve. Massive gravity well, 1,9 g of gravity, atmosphere thick as hell.

Just aerocapturing nearly burned my ship. Seven or eight braking passes were needed to slow down to get to low orbit.

On the other hand, Tellumo's moon, Lily is rather a pleasant place. Negligible gravity, but a very fast rotation - if you land on the equator, the surface moves so fast you are already at escape velocity.

[XB-70A]

I just realized a kid's dream, without joking.

Let me introduces the...

Exocet! The flying-fish which cannot land on the sea.

The story of this aircraft is a bit strange, and long, as I drew it the first time at 8. Of course some things had to be changed, like the wings profile, another fuel tank to lengthen the fuselage, and the wing tanks, but otherwise it is the representation of the drawing. What I wanted to draw at the time was an aircraft which would not be depend from controlled terrain and good runways, it should have been able to land anywhere at anytime, for this reason the tailplanes were acting nearly like a true wing (CoL and CoG were not in my minds), the aircraft must had its engines on the main wings, and the landing gear was high enough to evade the rocks projections.

And the surprise? It works! Even better than the other biz-jets-like I made...

 

Taking-off after approx 300 m of roll. Rotate at 49 m/s.

 

The destination, once again was a Pole, but the North one this time. About 50 minutes of cruise flight at an altitude of 11 km and at a speed of around 954 km/h.

 

Da Jeb' and Harmon enjoying an eternal sunset.

 

For sure it changes from the traditional Minmus views that they have normally... but they already had enough and were hungry as they forgot to grab any found before departing. They knew something was missing...

 

Hurry man! We gonna be late for diner now!

 

Finally they could see the abandoned airfield after another hour of flight and a lot of stomach rumbles. Alas, runway 27 was closed at the time and a direct approach impossible!

 

Speedbrakes extended for an imperative descent. Exo-1, the ground emergency services were alerted of the situation and are one the way with food!

 

Despite a slow, soft, and good touch down, Harmon soon became desperate to see that no flashing beacons were waiting for them, and still less the promised food!

 

Anyway, they were entitled to a second official photograph, as required.

[Clockwork13]

just completed a mission i started over 3 years ago in 0.23.5 to land on an asteroid for the first time

i have quicksaving disabled on my career save, so thankfully i succeeded on my first try, with nearly the entire tank full to move it around.

Currently I'm working on getting it into orbit around Kerbin.

Edited January 11, 2018 by Clockwork13

[Havocado]

Finally finished improving my Kerbin SOI Lander (8.5k dV) after modding the game. Twin Boar rise it up sub-orbital, and the Mammoth does the transfer. Complete with all science & scanner (except the big scanner and satellite thing) and lander fully reusable. I wish my PC is powerful enough to make the first stage recoverable... cause' that's where the money is (nearly 200k). Oh, I multiplied science earning to the max. That's why I had been able to built this thing on day 2.

In Action :

Spoiler

1. Mun Orbit

2. Mun Landed

3. Memoir

4. Re-entry

5. Final Descent

6. Landed

The reason for the excessive dV is because I intended the rocket to be fully reusable. Sadly, it's either my RAM blown first or the rocket next. That's why I just kinda get along with it.

Edited January 11, 2018 by Havocado
Adding the thing in action.

[Geschosskopf]

Not a damn thing in KSP despite my intentions otherwise.  Instead, I spent 8 hours on the phone and in chat with Microsoft customer support to solve the problem of why I could not download Windows updates.

[ARS]

I'm building an exotic propulsion space probe. This thing is gigantic, unmanned, and designed to explore kerbol (And meet the requirements of it's power-hungry engines)

Over 72 ion engines, 16 hall effect thrusters and 1 magnetoplasmadynamic engine (And a gigantic magnetic heat shield on the front)... This monster requires a truly ridiculous amount of power to operate

Testing it on near-kerbol space (Borderline minimum safe distance to kerbol)

Those 8 solar panel arrays produce over 1500 Ec/s, each! With a grand total energy output from all solar panel arrays alone (Not counting generators that I attached inside the probe) around 12000 Ec/s. Enough to satisfy the massive energy requirements

The moment when all the engines are running is truly beautiful  And the test is succesfull, the probe is able to sustain a thrust with zero energy drain on the battery. It's thrust is around the level of... Poodle engine (Pushing a mass around stock apollo spacecraft), but with amazing ISP

Suddenly I remembered the movie "Sunshine"

[Geschosskopf]

4 hours ago, ARS said:

Enough to satisfy the massive energy requirements

Truly a thing of beauty.  But back home, I'm sure there are those wondering why such a generating plant wasn't built on Kerbin to finally get electricity to the remaining undeveloped regions of the world  

[Hotel26]

6 hours ago, ARS said:

Those 8 solar panel arrays

How did you get those solar "sails" into position?  Do they lift-off "furled"?  Or do you deploy them once outside of the churlish bonds of Kerbin's atmosphere??

In any case, the dv potential of xenon is a game-changer...

Edited January 11, 2018 by Hotel26

[ARS]

25 minutes ago, Hotel26 said:

How did you get those solar "sails" into position?  Do they lift-off "furled"?  Or do you deploy them once outside of the churlish bonds of Kerbin's atmosphere??

By using Near future solar mod. It provides large scale solar panels and other shapes such as circular panels and blanket array (I wanted to install blanket array, but it's so large it might cause clipping issue when they rotate and hit each other) The one that I'm using is an improved version of gigantor array (Trio type, it extends three times the length of stock solar array) and yes, it's furled initially That 1500 Ec/s is because I'm very close to kerbol (Borderline safe distance)

Edited January 11, 2018 by ARS

[ROXunreal]

First manned rover mission in my 4 single player games that I've played through the years. It was a test for the planned manned mission to Duna.

The three-crew mission landed on the edge of Mun's Polar Crater and gathered science data from the crater itself, from Mun's midlands, highlands, one highland crater and from the edge of Mun's north pole. Total distance traveled was more than 70km (maximum distance from the lander was 30km).

 

The rover was balanced on top of the lander and used RCS to transfer itself to the ground after detaching from the lander

Charging up the batteries with the auxiliary solar panel before a prolonged roving in the shadow of a mountain, the sun is low on the horizon near the pole.

Science officer Samsey Kerman transferring a trove of science data from the rover to the lander before departure, after having broken one solar panel during a clumsy jetpack maneuver.

Using the leftover fuel in the landing stage for liftoff on the return journey.

And the return stage after jettisoning the landing stage

 

The lessons learned will be useful for an upgraded rover design for the eventual manned Duna mission, namely: more battery capacity and only placing wheels in symmetry (due to a VAB issue I had to place them separately which ended up with the rover not going completely straight which would lead to dangerous loss of balance when applying correctional urning at above 12m/s ground speed)

[Guest]

Preparing my most ambitious mission yet (in this career, possibly ever). I want to send an ISRU with survey sat + prospector lander, two high-power relays, a space station, and fuel to Jool. And I want to do it in one launch. My prototype heavy lifter "Rukh" is sitting in the hangar with a preliminarily constructed payload. I've made some test flights with comparable loads, done the numbers, and balanced the vectors and it ought to work.

The launch is going to cost 450,000 and change (most of which is the Rukh, which is 100% reusable), and the payload is about 120 tons. I'm going to test it on Minmus first, then apply any improvements that test came up with to it and send up an improved version in the next launch window.

I came up with something that I'm sure has been done here before many times, but I thought was kinda clever anyway for my "Flea" prospector lander. Since Bop and Pol are low-gravity moons, rovers are a kind of a PITA there, so I want to prospect with a tiny lander that floats along instead. I've done this before with RCS-powered rovers. Trouble is, solar panels don't really work that far out, which means I need to produce power with fuel cells. (I don't have RTGs yet.) That would mean carrying both monoprop and Lf/Ox which would be impossible to optimise: there would always be too much of one or the other. 

After experimenting a bit on Kerbin with vernors, I discovered that it's possible to make a tiny lander that's quite easy to control even on Kerbin with only downward-pointing engines (needs strong enough reaction wheel), as long as they're controlled like RCS -- i.e., hold down a button for thrust. So, I replaced the vernor with a Spark and tied it to the Brakes action. Moreover, I can easily tune the thrust with the throttle. 

The Flea hops around KSC beautifully -- hold B for thrust, steer with WASD as usual. Much easier to handle than if it was using the regular throttle, and if I need to control it normally (e.g. for the first landing) I can just toggle it manually and fly normally. It's fun to fly even on Kerbin and I'm hoping it'll work great on Minmus and eventually Pol.

Pictures will follow once I'm further with the project.

Edited January 11, 2018 by Guest

[Whisky Tango Foxtrot]

Another ship arrived at Duna.

This one contains a few more parts for my Duna and Ike stations, and also includes a new scanner satellite to be placed into polar orbit. I already had a scanner there, but it lacked a narrow-band scanner as well as a gravioli detector. With this new satellite in place I'll finally be able to complete a gravity-scanning contract that's been stuck in my queue for a very long time. The ship also contains a passenger module that will be used to send the current crew of my Duna and Ike installations home, with no plans for replacement.

More importantly, though, my second mission to Eeloo has finally arrived.

This (unmanned) mission consists of a fuel depot station (of the same design that I have orbiting Dres,) a surface mine with attached rover, and a fuel transport ship to bring the fuel manufactured at the latter to the former.

This marks the first time in my career save that one of my craft touched down on Eeloo's surface, and the resources put in place here will play a crucial role in allowing Explorer 2's manned landing mission to complete successfully.

After landing, the base's attached mini-rover was deployed, containing a full suite of repeatable science experiments.

Mining operations commenced immediately. There should be plenty of fuel stored up at the station by the time Explorer 2 arrives.

There was enough Liquid Fuel left over after the mission that my tug was able to immediately turn around and head back to Kerbin. It'll still be a long time before it arrives, but no sense in delaying things.

[Fearless Son]

3 hours ago, ROXunreal said:

The rover was balanced on top of the lander and used RCS to transfer itself to the ground after detaching from the lander

I really like your science rover design!  I never thought of applying the Science Junior unit as a horizontal "drum" like that, but it makes a lot of sense.  

If I might make a recommendation?  The RCS might be insufficient to dismount it on Duna, what with it's higher gravity and air pressure (though still low compared to Kerbin, of course.)  But the idea is sound; it might be wise to swap the RCS thruster packs with Puff monopropellant engines, which give a little more total thrust and are throttleable (at the cost of only thrusting in one direction.)