What did you do in KSP1 today?

[RizzoTheRat]

1 hour ago, Brikoleur said:

 such as getting the engineer on-site to start with.

And the tools!  In my current game there's a tiny lander sat on the Mun where I had to deliver a spanner to Bill as I'd forgotten to send him off with one

[Guest]

Haha, that's going to be one expensive spanner!

[MaxwellsDemon]

The automatic lander on its side in the Greater Flats proved to be irretrievable by any means I'm patient enough to accomplish presently.   (In other words-- reverted to a saved game.  Not elegant, but practical given the limited time i have for KSP lately...)

The "Tjehnet" module (=Kristall) docked successfully to the "Hotep" (=Mir) station, and the "Geb" module (=Priroda) was placed in orbit for a later rendezvous.  Then the complex will be ready for crewing.  (No, I'm not sticking strictly to a Mir sequence or timetable... for instance, in "my" Mir, I swapped the docking port from 'Kristall' to 'Spektr,' and 'Priroda' is primarily a greenhouse.   But it's an homage to Mir, not a duplicate... at least, that's my excuse.)

[Hotel26]

I have (reluctantly) taken a contract from a Mr... uh, wait...  a Dr... E-vil...  uh, Evil...  to place 3 -- what look like -- 3 "death rays" into geosynchronous orbit stationed above downtown KSC...

... for a sum of...  ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY...  DOLLARS.

(I know it's wrong.  But I need the money and -- frankly -- the geosynchronous rendez-vous practice.)

Edited February 28, 2018 by Hotel26

[XB-70A]

Today's started well with the maiden flight of our most expendable high speed airplane ever built. Valentina being the best of all, she was selected and accepted the honor to realize such a first! Still, the engineers just warned her a bit about the lack of separation between the turbofan nozzles and the surface during the flare...

Pretty confident in herself she didn't listen at them and decided to do it on her own...

 

 

Anyway, she survived to her mistake mischance, and had to offer her services to fly another prototype, for expectation damages.

New craft, new mission! The target now was to achieve a flight as fast as possible and at the lowest altitude, in order to better understand the planet's so particular atmosphere.

The prototype using a pure delta configuration appeared to be efficient enough in its task, I mean 2626 km/h at 13 m! Take that in your teeth Jeb!

 

 

3 meters, even faster!

 

 

1 meter control! I'm currently at 1 meter only over the...

 

 

Aww no... not again!

At least it made me discover even more deeply how incredible the KSP's aerodynamics are. No really, just look at that.

 

 

DON'T SINK!.. DON'T SINK!.. OH S...

 

 

"Well, that escalated quickly." At least I did not lost my dear and loved one.

However I decided to leave her alone a bit; a great occasion for her to philosophize a bit about her own mistakes.

 

HEEEEEEELLLP!!!

 

[Hotel26]

22 minutes ago, XB-70A said:

However I decided to leave her alone a bit;

Good thing she took those swimming lessons while on suspension break, recently!

Edited February 28, 2018 by Hotel26

[Guest]

Cleaned up my installation. Now all my plugins are latest versions and a lot of accumulated cruft is gone. Golly gosh Stock Visual Enhancements have advanced in the meantime. I also installed World Stabiliser because of my brushes with the dreaded Wheel Kraken at it appears to work fine so far. Just had one weird experience which may or may not be related (a tractor and trailer were almost unable to move; had to switch to tracking station and back to clear it). 

I also rearranged Laythe Kosmodrome for a better framerate: now the command module and its associated utility rover, with off-duty crew, is on a hillock a klick or so away. This allows its two pilots to remote-control the entire operation, while making things much smoother around the base proper where the planes are refueled, parked, and eventually take off.

And finally, Senior Engineer Bill Kerman flew the Pelican 2 up with a full fuel load, transferred the fuel and himself to the Jupiter shuttle, and in two days will be off to Vall to sort out a wheel problem and get the fuel production project there started. The Pelican 2 is glorious compared to the Pelican 1 in this mission -- where the P1 had frustratingly dry tanks when it RVed with Jupiter, P2 was still carrying more fuel than almost entirely dry Jupiter could even take on-board. 

---> tangent

It's funny how some designs just feel incredibly right -- they hit some strange sweet spot where all the compromises gel together into something that just works smoothly and quietly and with no fuss. They feel reliable and solid and once you know how they work, you can just work with them without thinking too much about it. In this pretty prolific career I'm on, I think I have about two designs like this. Pelican 2 is one of them. Wangari Maathai is the other. Pelican 2 is the result of a lot of testing, versioning, and iteration. Wangari Maathai happened because I wanted to prove to myself that such a design couldn't possibly work; boy did she prove me wrong.

There are more that are easy and pleasant to operate -- I like the Laytheabout and most of my retro-futuristic design studies and the Zephyr seems very nice too -- but they don't perform any particularly complicated mission; they're just planes.

Edit: Wheel is fixed, Jool Station is fueled up to get the refinery operation on Vall working.

Edited February 28, 2018 by Guest

[CatastrophicFailure]

5 hours ago, Brikoleur said:

Haha, that's going to be one expensive spanner!

 

But seriously, your game takes on a whole new life when you can dynamically reconfigure vessels in-situ. Easier to fit stuff in fairings, too. 

[Angelo Kerman]

I did things right when I designed the Buffalo... I disconnected from the airship and had 4 flat tires. My engineer isn't skilled enough to repair them, so I used KIS to pull spare wheels out of my inventory and replaced them:

This rover lacks the ground stabilizers that I could use to jack up the rover, which would make wheel replacement easier. So I had to use the winch to hoist up the front so I could lift the wheels off the ground. Otherwise the rover would go flying if I tried to replace the wheels.

 

[CatastrophicFailure]

50 minutes ago, Angel-125 said:

My engineer isn't skilled enough to repair them, so I used KIS to pull spare wheels out of my inventory and replaced them:

You see, Ivan, when engineer too dumb to change flat, change whole wheel/motor assembly instead!

[HansonKerman]

12 hours ago, RizzoTheRat said:

Interesting that everyone seems to have different ways of doing it.  Personally I refine on Minmus and  use KAS/KIS to attach the tanker to the mining rig.  The Gravity on Minmus is low enough it's easy to land a decent sized mining rig, and IMO, the advantage of a tanker over an orbital refining/refuelling station is it's mobile.  I haul the fuel to Kerbin orbit, dock with the outgoing interplanetary vessel, lift both to a high Apoapsis, top up the tanks on the interplanetary ship, disconnect from the tanker, and burn for wherever at Periapsis.  This uses more fuel overall, but that fuel's free, and it means my interplanetary ship uses very little dV leaving Kerbin SOI.

Here's my mining rig on the left, and tanker with it's tug sat on top of it on the right.

 

The whole setup went up in as single launch, with the mining rig sat on top of the tug, and only carrying enough fuel to get them to Minmus, but I did have to use Mechjeb for the launch as the framerate was a bit low on my poor laptop   The launch stage was supposed to be an SSTO but I can't remember if I actually managed to recover it or not

 

One of the stretch goals of the kOS stuff mentioned above is to see if I can have the tanker land on a docking collar, but I'm a way off that yet.

Nice, I don't use kOS, but I like KA-and KIS for planetarybases. Thanks, everyone for the suggestions!

Might try a Munbase though. Hmmmm....

[HalcyonSon]

13 hours ago, RizzoTheRat said:

Interesting that everyone seems to have different ways of doing it.  Personally I refine on Minmus and  use KAS/KIS to attach the tanker to the mining rig.  The Gravity on Minmus is low enough it's easy to land a decent sized mining rig, and IMO, the advantage of a tanker over an orbital refining/refuelling station is it's mobile.  I haul the fuel to Kerbin orbit, dock with the outgoing interplanetary vessel, lift both to a high Apoapsis, top up the tanks on the interplanetary ship, disconnect from the tanker, and burn for wherever at Periapsis.  This uses more fuel overall, but that fuel's free, and it means my interplanetary ship uses very little dV leaving Kerbin SOI.

I have yet to make my mining rigs actually useful.  So far, they've only been a means to complete surface station contracts.  Much easier to fill up 6,000 units of fuel after landing an empty tank on Mun rather than trying to launch a full tank.  The crew capsule, refining rig, and fuel storage were launched on top of each other and reconnected side-by-side using docking ports.

I am getting more creative with them though - I pulled an "expand station" contract, so I sent a Science Lab as part of that launch.  I'm about to send a mating adapter so I can dock an existing Science Rover to the newly renamed Minmus Surface Research Base - which was previously called the Minimal Minmus Mining Mission.

[Ace in Space]

16 hours ago, LordFerret said:

She'd only been stranded there for half a year. I consider it fortunate that she was lucky to right it, we'd tried so many times to do so previously. As I said, annoyance that she is, funny things afoot with Chatterer... she starts talking more and more, and of course CAPCOM answers her

Well, I mean, if I were stranded on a distant planet for a year and a half, I'd probably end up babbling constantly too.

12 hours ago, RizzoTheRat said:

I'd forgotten to send him off with one

Does that qualify as... a spanner in the works?

[Whisky Tango Foxtrot]

Explorer 2 arrived at Eeloo.

She executed her capture burn with plenty of fuel to spare and docked with the fuel depot station placed in orbit around the dwarf on a previous (unmanned) mission.

I considered delaying my landing until I was able to load all the data obtained from orbit into the ship's MPL, but I figured that processing that data would probably be faster if the scientists had that fifth star, so I stuck the orbital data into an ESU and sent the lander down with Bill and Jocia aboard.

They landed safely on the surface, planted the customary flag and used the instruments on the lander to perform science experiments, which they then returned to the ship and station in orbit without incident. They've got lots of data to process now, but luckily Eeloo is pretty much always within a transfer window with Kerbin so they don't have to worry about deadlines.

So that's every planet in the Kerbol system with a flag and a set of footprints on its surface now. All I'm missing is a couple of Joolean moons.

[Ace in Space]

Today. ಠ_ಠ

Today was a weird day.

I started off with the long, slow 4.8km drive up the hill to the fuel lifter. Docked as normal, transferred fuel. Saved the game and went to have dinner. When I came back, I went to undock the truck.... and the button didn't do anything. Everything behaved as if I were still docked. I could click on parts of the fuel truck, I could select the undock button (again, doing nothing), the map and vehicle switch didn't recognize the truck... but if I extended my landing legs, the lifter sat up nicely without the fuel truck following, as if it were not docked.

Reload. Same problem. So I tried extending the legs before undocking, so the truck would fall off (I figured it must have been clipping because of the ground). That's when the strangeness began.

This is not an explosion,  though it's hard to tell from the picture. The truck's main body is simply floating off into space, very slowly. The thing in the foreground is the structural fuselage/docking port that sits on the front of the truck, which simply... detached and began floating in the opposite direction. It phased right through the fuel lifter and continued on its merry way. The radial attachment port on top of the truck (where the crane had been attached during transit) simply remained fixed in place. I don't even feel justified calling this a kraken. It didn't feel like being attacked by a monster. More like physics had just gone out to lunch and forgotten to put a sticky note on its door on the way out.

Reload. I tried turning off the brakes and spinning the truck's wheels backwards before undocking.

Kerbin, we have a problem.

Ultimately, I had to reload the previous save from before I docked.... and had to make the long, tedious journey up the hill again. I docked on a different port, just to be safe, and that all worked fine. Then it was yet another tedious drive back down the hill to the base. I arrived to see this.

Ugh. This exact same assembly works fine on Minmus! I'm thinking the problem must be the fact that I haven't got an engineer on base yet. So I shut everything down to let it cool and decided to use the time to do some other maintenance. The lifter actually can carry more fuel than the truck, and was low on monoprop for docking, so I used the new load of fuel to fly it over and land it next to the mining camp. Then I can top off the tanks and fill up the monoprop without having to drive a long distance.

Then I launch the lifter to go rescue some stranded crafts. My first target is the fourth and final base module, with the engineer on board. Well, it's worth noting that all the crafts I brought into Duna orbit happen to be going the opposite direction from Ike. I've now learned my lesson about which direction to enter orbit from, but there's nothing I can do about my current situation. Thankfully, the fuel lifter is efficient enough that it could actually flip its orbit around and intercept the other crafts as normal. So I do that, dock with Serena's module, fill up the tank, and I have so much fuel left I figure I'll intercept a second module and fill that up too before I go back to the base - but that's for tomorrow, not tonight, so it's still in orbit.

Instead I figured I'd wrap things up for the day by landing Serena's module and officially finishing ground construction for the base. She enters orbit of Ike, gets ready to drop onto the landing site, and...

wat.

Getting rather annoyed with the glitches, I decide to proceed with landing anyway. If I'm lucky, when I load the save everything will be fine. I'm going to be very unhappy if that's not the case. But that's for tomorrow.

And just when I think things can't get any weirder...

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS MISSION?!

So much for the view.

I'm not gonna be happy if that's still there when I load my save.

Edited March 1, 2018 by Ace in Space

[Guest]

There's a known bug with docking ports. Funnily enough, it bit me too yesterday: the Massive-Kerguson and the surface tanker couldn't be decoupled anymore. It's only the second or third time it has in fact hit me so it's not all that common. Don't know what the cause is.

There's a way to fix it but you have to dive into the save file:

1. To more easily find the problem ports, set "Disable Crossfeed" on both of them.
2. Back up your save!
3. Open the savegame file.
4. Find your problem craft.
5. Find the problem ports in the craft by looking at the state of the crossfeed disabled flag.
6. Note the state. It probably doesn't say "Docked" like it ought to.
7. Change the state to "Docked (docker)" and "Docked (dockee)" on each of them respectively.
8. Go back to KSP and reload the save. You ought to be able to undock normally now.

Edited March 1, 2018 by Guest

[Delay]

@Ace in Space Are you Danny2462 in disguise or something? That is some serious next-level game breaking!

[Kronus_Aerospace]

Good progress is being made on my 1:2 scale Antonov AN-225 replica, here is the WIP sitting atop my full scale replica.

Edited March 1, 2018 by Kronus_Aerospace

[MaxwellsDemon]

Mostly designed-- redesigned some TKS/FGB-inspired modules for my next station (based on some learns from my current station-building), as well as a PTK/Federatsiya tribute (which I think is simpler and cheaper than the design I had put together as a crew transport-- we'll see after some testing).

Edited March 1, 2018 by MaxwellsDemon

[Hotel26]

I have had rather a pleasant evening, rebuilding my Minotaur Supertanker from scratch.  I have looooong wanted to do this.

Minotaur has been one of my only two lifters until now and its job is simply to haul fuel to orbit.  V1 (which entered service in 2015) routinely arrives in LKO with 33,000 kallons of liquid fuel (165 tons).

Well, I just got a satisfactory launch with my prototype V2 with all systems functioning, achieving a 103 x 103km orbit.  Fuel onboard: LF, 38,407 40,551 kallons (192 203 tons) and 3,558 monoprop.

Hotel26 will now likely open a bottle of champagne, as this has been hot work. 

I'll be posting a couple of videos shortly:

1. a KT2 launch and interception of a KT1 already in a 100km orbit.
2. two Minotaur Supertankers working in tandem to construct an orbital fuel dump comprised of 20 Jumbo-64 tanks by cannibalizing each other in a macabre, mating dance.

Edited March 2, 2018 by Hotel26

[Guest]

What are the Nervs for?

[Hotel26]

10 minutes ago, Brikoleur said:

What are the Nervs for?

They light at 30km on ascent.  The Ox runs out during circularization, so they finish the job.  They are used for de-orbiting.  And for rendez-vous with a space station/orbital fuel dump, which is their usual destination.  They can also be used for going interplanetary which is why it has heavy radiators for long injection burns.  (I took one to Duna once, for example, delivering 30K kallons of LF.)  I once took a part from one to separate two Aquila that had bulky loads that were intended to be resettled onto the payload deck of the first Aquila, but I decided to improvise.  And v2 has a set of 14 Gigantor panels that can be deployed with an Omega ion module; this replaces my old, deployable solar "sails" and should be much simpler.

I have always had a thing for multi-function modular components and try to design and use vehicles that can work together in multiple ways to achieve different ends.  Like any body's obsession, I go to silly excesses with it... 

Edited March 1, 2018 by Hotel26

[kerbinorbiter]

Had a launch of the testing for the first RO station Providing science and research to physics and Human reflexes in space 

[Kebab Kerman]

CHALLENGE: PLAY KERBAL SPACE PROGRAM IN SPACE!

Seriously, do it. You become the Kraken.

Spoiler

Unfortunately, you are tamed by Danny2462. You knew that was coming, admit it.

 

[LordFerret]

7 hours ago, Ace in Space said:

Today. ಠ_ಠ

Today was a weird day.

Very weird! That looks like you've run across some serious seam issues, or some manner of Kraken. Of the docking port and ISRU issues, I've only dealt with the ISRU one; I had the same problem with my asteroid catcher, overheating. Never could get it to work right. Never did think of putting an engineer in charge either, so now I'll have to try that.

Dres is dark. I find nightvision a must!

 

In my game; My rover pilot was able to right her flipped rover. It took some doing, but as you can see, she's a happy gal now.

 

And as I just said, Dres is a very dark place (reminds me of that Riddick movie, Pitch Black)...

 

So, I won't go anywhere on Dres without nightvision!

 

Makes rovering so much easier!