What did you do in KSP1 today?

[JadeOfMaar]

I built this and did some test flights, revisiting my sandbox adventure save with BARIS active.... Which I had ragquit from when my moonbase vanished. This plane had crew in it and a nuke reactor in the cargo bay exploded... Fortunately the sheer horror of such an incident happening irl is of no concern whatsoever to kerbals in my game.  

I also prepared (but haven't posted) the next release to my sunflare packs for GPP. I finally have a standardized file/folder convention. And for GPP (v 1.6+) specifically, these packs support the new star that appears if GPP, GEP and OPM are installed together.

Although not clear in the above screenshot, I repainted the Japier engines...

Spoiler

 

Edited January 22, 2018 by JadeOfMaar

[Hotel26]

14 hours ago, Brikoleur said:

landed the Pelican, lowered it to the ground

Man!  I really like this solution for heavy-duty, "roll-on/roll-off" cargo.  Very clever!

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, Hotel26 said:

Man!  I really like this solution for heavy-duty, "roll-on/roll-off" cargo.  Very clever!

I originally tried to design everything to fit inside a Mk3 cargo bay but it was so narrow I ended up making more compromises than I liked, so I figured I'd try this way instead.

Only major downside is that it's highly un-aerodynamic, i.e. if you want to get into orbit with this you're gonna need a lot of engines.

[Hotel26]

2 minutes ago, Brikoleur said:

highly un-aerodynamic

I don't know a heck of a lot about fairings.  Not on spaceplanes anyway.  Could you get one around it for one-time use to orbit...?

[Guest]

8 minutes ago, Hotel26 said:

I don't know a heck of a lot about fairings.  Not on spaceplanes anyway.  Could you get one around it for one-time use to orbit...?

Possibly, I've thought about it. It's not trivial though, if I just plonked it there in this design, it would intersect with the bed and wouldn't blend nicely with the forward fuselage anyway. I could attach it a bit higher up but that would still end up presenting a big flat surface forward which would be Not Good for slipperiness. And even so I'm not sure it would make orbit without more power, and I'd rather not add that because hauling extra engines all the way to Laythe feels like a bit of a waste.

I think it will be simpler just to loft the payload separately and dock them in orbit. The plane can orbit itself without the payload, I tried, and to get it to Jool I'll need to refuel it anyway so I'll likely be able to do it in a single launch. But we'll see, I'm not that far with it yet.

Edited January 22, 2018 by Guest

[Hotel26]

24 minutes ago, Brikoleur said:

I think it will be simpler just to loft the payload separately and dock them in orbit.

Indubitably correct.

(Best to consider any Jool aero-braking issues before lift-off...  )

Edited January 22, 2018 by Hotel26

[Guest]

9 minutes ago, Hotel26 said:

(Best to consider any Jool aero-braking issues before lift-off...  )

I'm not going to aerobrake off Jool, that's far too dangerous. 

The plan is to gravity brake off Tylo, then go for a reasonably clean encounter with Laythe for aerobraking. I want to do two aerobraking passes off it: once for capture and a second time to bring down the Ap, then circularise in low orbit so I can pick a landing spot once my surveyor has surveyed the body. I should be hitting the Laythe atmosphere at about 3300 m/s which should be manageable; there aren't any highly combustible bits on the underside of the Pelican and as it has gobs of wing surface it ought to slow down quickly, especially as it will be low on fuel. I ought to be able to manage that part with 200-300 m/s total; the Tylo grav brake is virtually free so I'll only need to manoeuvre for the encounter of Laythe and then the circularisation burn. The aerocapture itself can be nicely controlled with plane attitude.

Not sure yet how exactly I'll do all of that as the Pelican doesn't pack all that much dV (and I don't want to pile on more for the same reason I don't want to pile on more engines). I might use a Nerv-powered tug or two, which I will leave in orbit for use in the Jolian system.

I've  practiced these manoeuvres with my assets that are already there and don't foresee any major trouble. You never know though, space has a way of surprising you...

[Hotel26]

11 minutes ago, Brikoleur said:

The plan is to gravity brake off Tylo, then

Well, I just learned a packet off this all, grazie.  I've learned about Jool only the hard way, so far. 

[Guest]

 

8 minutes ago, Hotel26 said:

Well, I just learned a packet off this all, grazie.  I've learned about Jool only the hard way, so far. 

Jool is hard. I've only just started with it -- before this career, all I've done is one flyby and one plane visit to Laythe. It's also really rewarding because there's a ton of stuff relatively close by, most of it is exotic and exciting, and some of it is really hard any way you look at it -- and because of the distance you need to do a lot of planning and design if you want things to work. The gravity pinball in particular -- on the one hand, using Tylo and Laythe for assists can save you a ton of dV in all kinds of ways (plane changes, arrival, leaving, transferring to Bop or Pol orbit, etc.), but on the other hand it can get really, really frustrating and complicated. I honestly don't have the patience to plot optimal or even close to optimal transfers there, but even with kind-of-bad planning it can turn a 1500 m/s transfer into a 500 m/s one. There are these moments I've thought I've been caught with my pants down, without enough dV to do whatever it was I set out to do, then figuring out that if I slingshot around Tylo this way and then use Laythe for a plane change, I suddenly find that hey, I can do it after all.

[Hotel26]

1 minute ago, Brikoleur said:

I've done is one flyby and one plane visit to Laythe.

I've got some screenshots of Laythe as I rushed by at km/s, out of fuel.

I got the Jool aero-brake maneuver right in my last career (abandoned coz all the mining rigs are toast, courtesy 1.2 upgrade) and got into orbit around Vall, which is my target for manufacturing fuel.

I can only dream about Laythe and space-planes.  It's the Holy Grail in the stock KSP world, I guess.

I'm about to start a new career (in 1.3.1) and all effort will go to getting a foothold in that system...

I echo you about micro-tuning maneuvers.  The idea of accurate gravity assists upon entry to the SOI frankly boggles my mind.  I'm gonna have to just set up some easier missions and practice with it.

So good luck in your own endeavors and do post progress!!

[Guest]

Try using Tylo to grav brake on entry. That's not hard -- just do a mid-course adjustment for it, it'll only be 10 m/s or so tops, likely much less. And if you tweak it so your inclination ends up near zero and your Pe ends up near Laythe's orbit it's not that complicated to transfer from there to Laythe either.

I say go for that plane trip on Laythe. It's not all that difficult -- flying a plane on Duna was much harder (no oxygen, challenging aerodynamics because of the thin air and low gravity). Just make a plane that works on Kerbin, get it to Laythe somehow, and it will work. It's totally worth it, place is so pretty!

(We've been monopolising the conversation here a bit, so I'm going to pipe down for now.)

[Guest]

Okay, so what did I do today, you ask?

I beat the game.

I won.

There is nothing left for me to do.

I...

... wait for it ...

I found ...

.

.

.

... a practical off-Kerbin application for ...

.

.

.

... the Juno basic jet engine.

 

Behold the glory, the majesty, the sheer unbridled power of ...

.

.

.

Juno Midge, the Laythe prospector jet drone.

Here, exquisitely balanced on its landing gear, practicing bush landings and take-offs.

Okay, histrionics aside, this is definitely for the "I can't believe that actually worked" file. Not only that, it worked remarkably well. Trick is, steering is entirely with the reaction wheel, the aerodynamic surfaces don't move at all and are just there to provide lift and keep it pointed forward. It starts out with the gear retracted. To taxi, I set SAS to surface/radial out and lower the landing gear. This forces it to stay parallel to the surface, and heaves it up on its sole wheel. When I've built up a few tens of m/s, I switch to regular SAS and pull up. From there on out flying is just as normal, except the roll and yaw controls are reversed (just like on Russian jets, heh). It flies remarkably nicely. 

To land, I do everything as normal except that just a moment before touching down, I set SAS to surface/radial out again. It'll bounce along merrily until it stops. Only thing it can't handle is if it hits an uphill while it's still going too fast; that will cause it to faceplant. I'm still tuning the suspension to make that less likely.

And yes I fully intend to take this to Laythe. Thing has like an hour's worth of fuel on it.

Edit: I just discovered that it can not only ditch, it can take off from water. Half-sunk, I just point it at 45 degrees up, fire up the Juno, and it will extricate itself and be airborne in no time flat. Very handy for Laythe in case it bounces a bit too far on one of those landings!

Edit: HA! I solved the faceplant problem and added a bunch other refinements. A second reaction wheel sorted that out nicely: now it stays in the attitude it's supposed to keep ridiculously well and fairly jumps up when told. I also moved the probe core into the main stack and put a docking port (Jr, of course) where the core is now, and bound "Control from here" to it and the core to 1 and 2 respectively. This means that in normal flight I can hit 2 and the controls and navball work like they should. Also the port gives me the possibility to refuel; I made it so the Pelican can pick it up if needed.

It accelerates like a gnat out of hell, will lift off at 25 m/s if told to, will accelerate straight up, will land gracefully at around 30 m/s, and will happily pull 10 gees without falling apart (yes I have part g limits on) although it won't break the sound barrier. This one is tremendous fun, like a little angry gnat only I'm steering it!

And I think I figured out how to get everything into orbit and Joolward: the Pelican will fly there on its own, I'll loft the ISRU rover docked with two big interplanetary boosters in a separate flight which also carries extra fuel, then I'll refuel the Pelican and dock the ISRU + boosters to it, and the whole shebang will then make its way to Jool. Next up is planning the Vall operation.

Edited January 22, 2018 by Guest

[Puggonaut]

probably the single most frustrating experience in KSP for me , is docking a shuttle .

Today though

I've managed to manually dock a shuttle to a station . Think i'll now retire to the bar an get drunk .

@Pak Thanks to you and your mod , it really helped a lot with this .

Only taken me over 2 years Darn it

[Laie]

Test flight:

This is supposed to be a Go-Anywhere vessel that flies and lands like a plane, but can reasonably VTOL on it's tail when visiting airless bodies. There's a huge fin and another nuke on the back -- just make sure that the fin points downslope, or at least that's the plan. As of yet that part is still untried.

[Piatzin]

"Hey Bob! I think Jeb blew up the VAB again!"

But yeah. Did some test flights with Jeb today.....need I say what happened to the plane? (Jeb's okay)

[RizzoTheRat]

I landed my Mun mining rig, plonked the tanker down next to it, hooked them up with some KAS/KIS pipework, and quicksaved it.

I then buggered about with something else for a bit, before reloading the quicksave...and this happened

 

I guess there's still some sort of landing gear bug then?

Is there any way to recover the quicksave or do I just need to write it off or go back to an earlier save?

[Geonovast]

2 hours ago, RizzoTheRat said:

I guess there's still some sort of landing gear bug then?

Is there any way to recover the quicksave or do I just need to write it off or go back to an earlier save?

There is, the landing gear is a bit buggy in 1.3.1.  Just yesterday I had a lander with a pretty good stance and SAS off just up and tip over on Minmus while I was assembling a SEP base next to it. (pic when I get home)

 

You can try to load the persistent save file.  Hopefully it will have autosaved pretty recently and you won't have lost much.

Edited January 22, 2018 by Geonovast

[Atkara]

I've seen this happening on slopes of any grade. Landing legs are often set a bit under the surface upon loading and as the legs are re-seated on it, the springs acquire a lot of tension and push upwards -often with destructive results, as the force is too high.

At first, I set springs anywhere between 0.05 to 0.3, depending on the gravity of the planet/moon the vessel operates on, except Eve (there I kept it at 1). Lots of save editing there, mind you -but at least I knew what I was editing and for which craft.

When that turned out to be not enough, I also set all dampers to 2 (the maximum allowed value). Haven't visited all my installations to verify, but it should be better than before -I hope  

Edited January 22, 2018 by Atkara

[RizzoTheRat]

I think this might have been related to them being parked on a bit of a slope, the tanker slid a bit when it first landed and stowed the landing gear so it was sitting on it's tanks/engine which stopped it, so thinking about it it's not the landing gear itself but an interaction between other bits of the ship and the ground.  It was the tanker that bounced and dragged and bounced the miner over.

Got a save back from when they were both in orbit so have landed the miner on slightly flatter ground this time.

[Martian Emigrant]

3 hours ago, RizzoTheRat said:

I landed my Mun mining rig, plonked the tanker down next to it, hooked them up with some KAS/KIS pipework, and quicksaved it.

I then buggered about with something else for a bit, before reloading the quicksave...and this happened

 

I guess there's still some sort of landing gear bug then?

Is there any way to recover the quicksave or do I just need to write it off or go back to an earlier save?

Hi.

There is a way. Sorta. Depends on your definition of cheating.

In my book not a cheat cause that shouldn't happen.

 

Start your game. boom. ignore.

Use R-Shift-F12.

Cheats.

Select unbreakable joints .

No Crash Damage.

Load your save.

Still messed? Try hacking gravity before reloading and use SAS to stay upright.

Once landed reset the cheats.

 

Good luck.

 

 

Hey Kerbalikers.

 

Today I continued working on the Caveman Challenge.

Just a few more nodes to buy.

 

Got an overdose of the ebejeebees so Bill built a sub ton jet aircraft for Jeb and I to unwind.

Flies pretty good.

Not ballistic over aerodynamic , reasonably fast but draggy.

You have to give burst of power on final to stay on a reasonable approach profile.

 

 

The landing was successful. Sorry no pic.

Jeb turned it into a touch and go. Plenty of runway.

 

ME

 

 

Edited January 23, 2018 by Martian Emigrant

[JadeOfMaar]

Today I finally finished this.

 

[Starman4308]

First, in my 3.2x GPP save, I imagine a certain Kerbal is very thankful my rescue vehicles are stupidly over-engineered... because I went to the wrong moon, only realizing my mistake as I was refining my Ceti intercept. That Ceti intercept was changed to a trans-lunar slingshot to remain within Gael SOI, followed by some finagling to get a relatively cheap Iota intercept. Unfortunately I didn't take many screenshots of it, but because of it being stupidly overengineered, I still got home with probably ~1500 m/sec of delta-V.

Second, tonight has been mostly RP-0, and I do not regret it. While my initial efforts were less impressive than hoped for (I didn't realize just how terrible the full:empty ratio is on those early SRMs), Shockwave III with an Aerobee sustainer cracked into upper atmosphere:

Shockwave 4 breached the Karman line (if not the 140 km space limit) with a stupidly overbuilt Aerobee/V-4 sounding rocket. It had the delta-V to hit space easily, but I tilted it 5 degrees east on the pad, underestimating how much that would depress the trajectory.

Breaching the 140 km space boundary was supposed to be the job of a second Shockwave IV that was pointed straight up, but that job got sniped by a secondary mission that was supposed to carry a biological sample... to high atmosphere... not into space.

This, of course, required building a second copy of that mission to get the biological sample from high atmosphere research.

The second Shockwave IV very thoroughly breached the Karman line, hitting 1140 km above Earth's surface at apogee

I was very surprised to see the payload (sounding rocket core, parachute, thermometer, barometer, small battery) survived reentry, with deceleration peaking at 59.3G.

After the disastrous attempt to hit an X-plane contract with a conventional, HTHL aircraft (which was never able to take off and hit some severe runway glitches), I think I'll just give up on conventional HTHL aircraft and wait until I can do the Scott Manley thing, launch them on SRBs, and recover them under parachute. This... will have to wait. Despite having 41.1 science, I'm waiting for a 15.5 sci/year R&D lab to finish researching other tech tree nodes just to spend that science.

Past that, the only other major item on my to-do list is to launch the Shockwave V, with a slightly stripped-down payload (even smaller battery, clipped science parts with nosecone instead of payload fairing), and a 3-stage design, where a 3-Aerobee second stage has been placed between the V4 stage and the original upper stage. This will be necessary to hit a 2.2 Mm sounding rocket contract.

[RizzoTheRat]

7 hours ago, Martian Emigrant said:

Hi.

There is a way. Sorta. Depends on your definition of cheating.

In my book not a cheat cause that shouldn't happen.

 

Start your game. boom. ignore.

Use R-Shift-F12.

Cheats.

Select unbreakable joints .

No Crash Damage.

Load your save.

That's a really good way to solve the problem.  I've continued from a previous save as it turned out I'd saved before landing them both, but I'll remember that one for next time, cheers. 

I'm impressed it was only the solar panels and radiators that broke given how far it bounced.  Then again I tipped a lander over a while ago and managed to lever it upright by extending a Gigantor so some of these parts are possibly a little bit too robust

[Jimmidii]

Finally had some time to play, finished my GELO (Geostationary Extremely Low Orbit) network.

A series of cheap low tech ground relay stations around Kerbin's equator with 4 5-G antennas that were flown out and all link together to provide 100% coverage to satellites and out to the Mun (As long as the Mun ship also has 4 5-G). I'm playing with just the KSC ground station active, so the GELO should stay relevant as it'll help stop blind spots for longer range relay satellites around Kerbin in future if they drift out of phase from one another.

It's been a fair bit of ground work, but off the back of that I've been able to get science from the Mun and complete a few satellite missions, which means my career mode is starting to really accelerate.

This is my custom iron man save,  so no quicksaves or reverts. Landing on top of a mountain gets easier once you've practiced on the same one a few times... 

[MaxwellsDemon]

Got the second of two probes away to Jool, and performed a course correction on the probe enroute to Dres, and fulfilled a couple of minor contracts.   Otherwise, mostly designing:

1)  Modules for the Minmus mining base;

2)  Modules for the Minmus orbital refinery (adapted from the Mir-analogue modules already designed);

3)  Polished up my R-7/Sputnik analogue and launched a Kaputnik into a 66-degree somewhat eccentric orbit in honor of the original PS1;

4)  Put together a fairly decent R-7/Vostok analogue and tested it successfully (Jeb appreciated the ride);

5)  Started working on a Soyuz analogue.  (I'm sure this will all be rendered irrelevant by the Making History expansion, but I'm having fun with it anyway.)