What did you do in KSP1 today?

[kapteenipirk]

On 3/29/2018 at 4:16 AM, Azimech said:

All right, you primitive greenheads, listen up! You will now bow down before the magnificence of your new overlords!

New overlords you say, well...they ain't invading my planet, at-least not when i got this thing orbiting it.

Say hello to the K.S.S Kerbin, the latest and greatest in space-battleship technology.

(to get a better idea of scale, i can tell you that the ship is around 190 m long. I was supposed to make it 1:1, but then the secondary-batteries and AA-guns would have looked a little small. So let's say it's more Kerbal scaled)

 

She still needs some tweaking as the turn rate is pretty horrible, the engines make it spin harder than the vernor thruster's can compensate, and the turrets are broken as they jam on the RCS when i try to turn them (bad button bindings in my part) and they are apparently strutted to something their not supposed to, causing them to bend and buckle if turn them enough.

It also for now has no radar as the latest BD-armory version had none of them in it (probably due to the major changes they where talking about).

 

I built her mostly just for the looks and not for function, so cheats are required to get it to orbit. It also carries no fuel.

I used tweackscale heavily in the construction aswell as Infernal robotics and BD-armory for the guns and ammo. But bonus good news, i didn't use any DLC part's on it.

It's built pretty much the same as all of my surface ships, except for the full-hull that this one has. So, construction went smoothly for the most part, tough as ever, the nose of the ship was a pain to build. Especially this time as the nose is a little different shaped than usual.

 

This ship is for the most parts a replica of a ship that was recently introduced in the new World of Warship April Fools event, that this time is a space battle themed one.

The event introduced 9 space ships that where all basically just re-skins of tier-X ships. The one i replicated is the Paris, a space-battleship that is based on the tier-X French BB Republique.

I pretty much instantly fell in love with the design of the ship and wanted to make one in KSP.

I originally wanted to just do a straight up replica of it, then i wanted to do a Space-battleship Yamato'ish version with a more rounded hull and added fins and stuff, but instead went for the more straight up replica approach as i really just wanted it to look as much like the original as possible while still having a few of my own touches.

 

All of this actually makes me want to do the Space-battleship Yamato in KSP.

 

I'll be giving more details and picks on release. (feels like this belongs more in the WIP section, but oh-well).

[DerekL1963]

16 minutes ago, kapteenipirk said:

All of this actually makes me want to do the Space-battleship Yamato in KSP.

Yamato hasshin!

[Frank5872]

I did my first ever mission to duna and luckily everyone made it back. I also started work on the first space station.

Edited March 30, 2018 by Frank5872

[Kebab Kerman]

Can I have some help? Unity won't log in because it keeps losing connection for some reason, and I'm trying to model an engine.

[Geonovast]

3 hours ago, Kebab Kerman said:

EDIT: This thing can go mach 4.61!

What mod's doing the run-up lights?

[Kebab Kerman]

Just now, Geonovast said:

What mod's doing the run-up lights?

KSC++

[Weltenbrand]

Bolted some batteries onto Mun Ground 01

Imgur album

Edited March 30, 2018 by Weltenbrand

[Azimech]

This ... is my newest engine.

Huge isn't?

Someone needs an engine for a tilt-rotor. A big cargo plane. So I decided to build one. As you can see, 28t for just an engine is a lot.

But look at this:

The engine has 6 blowers, putting out 111kN each.
Now take a look at the lift of that single propeller blade. Multiply by 5.

Yes. By far the strongest engine I've ever built, 1720kN!

But ... it has to fly as well. And so I've made this weird thing.

That top speed isn't terrific, but not bad either. Are there problems? Yes. For the first time ever I need to balance an engine. And that's not easy.

 

Seconds from disaster?

 

I think not.

Edit: did someone just mention a helicarrier?

Edited March 30, 2018 by Azimech

[Azimech]

I think we have something.

[jack gamer]

I found a glitch

I finally landed on minmus , even though I failed a couple times on getting to minmus, its the fuel that im struggling with  

Edited March 30, 2018 by jack gamer
I forgot the image

[Zeiss Ikon]

Well, this wasn't today.  Wasn't even yesterday; but I did get to play some since last weekend.

Tridin and Monie were picked for the first Minmus landing mission (in this career); both are rescuees, both pilots (working on promoting pilots to two stars along with everything else).  They took along Kenton, a rescued scientist, in hopes his presence would boost science recovery.  Launch and transfer to Minmus were routine; the Explorer VI direct launch craft is now a well-proven design, recently upgraded with the lighter Mk. 1-3 command pod and the addition of a set of drop tanks (four 6-stacks of Oscar B tanks without engines) which also held the landing legs to provide ground clearance for the Poodle engine.  They carried three each of Goo canisters, thermometers, and barometers, plus a Science Jr.

Landing wasn't a big deal, and Tridin (who had gained experience enough on orbiting Minmus to be able to hold radial in/out and normal/antinormal as well as prograde and retrograde) set the lander down without any more than a slight bounce, despite a sloped landing site (the trajectory to the "flats" landing site chosen was apparently low enough that a "midlands" location got in the way).  All three Kerbals left the lander; the two pilots planted flags, the scientist collected a surface sample, EVA reports were made, and then everyone went back inside the lander and, with a puff from the Poodle, lift high enough to decouple the drop tanks and landing legs before setting up and eastward course to boost into orbit once more.  It wasn't until after the return burn, about an hour from Minmus escape, that anyone remembered all that science gear mounted on the outside of the command pod.

Even so, the recovered science ("low above" crew reports for two biomes, plus the landing EVA science and the command pod that had landed on Minmus), added to that from the previous Minmus orbit mission, gave enough data to finish researching the rest of the 90-point tech tier.  Including the Klaw, which is important because:

Tridin and Monie were sent right back up.  Their orders?  Rescue Billybobbert from Munar orbit, as well as capture and deorbit at least one piece of debris with the newly installed Klaw on the Rescue 1g craft.  And try not to forget Billybobbert?!

[jack gamer]

I landed with a different base, sorry about the parts, there under the base 

[Gargamel]

MinMus Orbital Station: Animus.

 

 

[Drakenex]

A Dragon V2 Cargo docks with the nascent Cislunar Gateway.

 

 

[qzgy]

Dipped my toes into heavily modded games again with RSS and RO. Oh my god its hard to learn. But procedural tanks are amazing!

Sounding rocket for an early career.

[kerbinorbiter]

 Finaly

update:

 Improvements:

Fully automated landing no user input

acurate to within 10 meters at most

Edited March 31, 2018 by kerbinorbiter

[Azimech]

The helicarrier is online guys & gals!

Specs:
Engines: Vapula version 1; 6x Wheesley blowers, rotor output 1720kN.
Max gross weight: 588t, fuel tanks full, 58830 units of fuel - not recommended.
Standard weight: 484t, 38010 units of fuel.
Fuel tanks empty: 294t.
Top speed: ~100m/s with 9000 units of fuel remaining.
Endurance: 1-1.5 hours.
Ceiling: 5500m.
Mods: none.
Part count: 688.

craft file here

Edited March 31, 2018 by Azimech

[Zeiss Ikon]

43 minutes ago, Azimech said:

Specs:
Engines: Vapula version 1; 6x Wheesley blowers, rotor output 1720kN.
Max gross weight: 588t, fuel tanks full, 58830 units of fuel - not recommended.
Standard weight: 484t, 38010 units of fuel.
Fuel tanks empty: 294t.
Top speed: ~100m/s with 9000 units of fuel remaining.
Endurance: 1-1.5 hours.
Ceiling: 5500m.
Mods: none.
Part count: 688.

craft file here

Wow.  Now, where's that guy in the powered suit?

[InterplanetJanet]

18 hours ago, kapteenipirk said:

New overlords you say, well...they ain't invading my planet, at-least not when i got this thing orbiting it.

Say hello to the K.S.S Kerbin, the latest and greatest in space-battleship technology.

(to get a better idea of scale, i can tell you that the ship is around 190 m long. I was supposed to make it 1:1, but then the secondary-batteries and AA-guns would have looked a little small. So let's say it's more Kerbal scaled)

[...]

All of this actually makes me want to do the Space-battleship Yamato in KSP.

"We're off

to outer space.

We're leaving

Mother Earth

to save

the human race

Our Star Blazers!"

Or at least the English version of the theme song thereof.

Well, great, I'll have that d___ed song running through my head all day.  Well, @kapteenipirk you owe me a Space Battleship Yamato now!

OnTopic: decided to actually try testing some designs I've built; one works alright, one, erm, needs a bit of care if landing on the Mun. (forgot to take screenshots during the crashing and bouncing excitement) Then I spent all yesterday working on a mining craft which didn't get finished, and maybe I should rethink it...

And for anyone who has somehow deleted the entire contents of an NTFS-formatted disk (or whatever the hell I did), I heartily recommend Puran File Recovery (linky), which

Spoiler

was the only candidate out of about a dozen attempts to actually do what it f___ing claimed without lying or not being suitable at all. Half of them - Easus and DiskInternals especially IIRC - claimed to be "fully-functional freeware" but then would spend three to five hours working and then demand payment if I actually wanted to, y'know, restore anything. Which is called "crippleware" in the real world. Actually, half of them required three to five hours to get to the point where I could find out if they would work or not. DMDE got all the way to recovering files, but then said, "Oh, only the paid version will actually do anything with the file tree; otherwise, recover one subdirectory at a time [requiring several mouseclicks from my carpal-tunnelized-going-numb hand per subdir]" which was going to take months on a full 1 terabyte drive. Puran IIRC took longer than average but actually recovered the filetree as well as the files. Also at least three of them did not remove their files when "uninstalled".

 And now I have a choice - play on KSP, or work on getting a virtualized Windows 7 going under Debian Linux.   Decisions decisions...

[Kaskel2000]

Honestly after about 6 weeks playing non stop I started to get a bit jaded. Especially after finally managing to bring my Duna orbitor crew back. So yesterday I just thought I’d kerbalise stuff. Made a heavy launcher with 5 mammoth engines. It has zero aero dynamics but I thought what the hell. Turned out it worked pretty well with asparagus staging and so I thought I’d launch a science lander to the Mun as I still need to unlock some stuff. 

So i designed a two stage mission. Two launches on my experimental heavy lifter. The first would be the science processing vehicle which I got into a nice circuler orbit around the Mun. The second launch of my heavy lifter had the landing module attached. The idea being it lands. Gets the science then takes off again. Rendezvous with the science processing module to exchange the data and then returns home.....

it didn’t even get to Mun orbit...I totally misjudged the amount of fuel I needed.

So I launched a third heavy lifter with a lander that had more fuel aboard. Amazingly I managed to land it about 1km from my stranded lander so my kerbals didn’t have far to go. Using RCS to travel across the Mun was surprisingly fun!  And thankfully I remembered to take all my science data with me. Once I’d managed to get into orbit around the Mun with my rescued kerbals and science data I then had to return to the original plan and rendezvous/dock with my science module. 

I’ll admit I used Mechjeb for the rendezvous. I still suck at that. But docking was all manual. It was such an amazing moment when the two modules finally connected. After a quick exchange of staff between the science module and lander module I then thought about how much fuel I had to return the lander. I probably had enough but my science module has a liquid engine surrounded by 4 nuclear engines so I knew I could afford to lose some of the fuel from my centre engine. Fully refuelled by lander returned to kerban. 

This completely re energised me and now I’m thinking of a minining rognon the Mun, science and refuelling station in orbit. I’ve already sent another lander to Minmus which will shortly be trying to rendezvous with the Mun and my science module to pass on the extra data.  

[Delay]

What a strange Falcon landing this time, after launching a satellite meant for Gilly into LKO...

At least I landed at the correct longitude. The latitude, however...

In other news: Two spacecraft arrived at Duna today! The first one being a lander. I took 3 attempts to nail the landing as something broke on the other two, but it became my first landing on another planet in KSP.

I was slightly worried that I wouldn't make it back into orbit, so after I did my experiments and surface samples I immediately took off again and got into a stable orbit. With 1195m/s dV remaining, my worries proved groundless. The next mission will spend a lot more time on the surface of Duna, now that I know this vehicle can get back safely.

 

The second craft was a simple rover, just because I wanted to have one there. But already in LKO it became apparent that I made some mistakes...

Firstly, there are no reaction wheels. The probe core doesn't have any, so the vehicle was essentially uncontrollable. Luckily the Poodle has thrust vectoring, so there was a workaround. So I still managed to get to Duna. Then I realized that the parachutes are slowing the vehicle down a little too much. On Duna!

The entire upper structure is decoupled after touchdown and then crashes back into the ground (turns out that the amount of fuel I had was enough for a suborbital trajectory. Oops.)

Here's the rover with extended antenna. I was going for the biggest one available, once again because I was worried. About connection this time. It looks very weird, but it works!

Another problem I realized is that the antenna is pointing forward and steering is reversed. One extra battery in combination with the one the core provides also turned out to be insufficient for both atmospheric scans as well as seismic scans. But goo, pressure and temperature work fine, so at least 60% is working properly.

So, improvements to be made for a second rover:

-Add reaction wheels.

-Add more Batt men to insure that there is enough EC for the bigger experiments.

-Put the antenna on the other side so that it isnt facing forward.

-Reverse steering, somehow? I don't know how that can be done, perhaps it be done on the fly?

-Go for a smaller antenna. Really, this one's to big. The first communotrons in the game are sufficient already, and they don't even run the risk of breaking!

All in all I'm quite happy with today's accomplishments.

Edited April 2, 2018 by Delay
Corrected my terrible mathematics & typos

[RizzoTheRat]

Started a new career in 1.4.2, with USI Life support and Kolonisation. 

Tying to do as much as I can with kOS, so have just sent up 3 tourists with only a Stayputnik and no pilot for an orbit, completely automated 2 stage rocket, parachuted them back down safely about 30km from the KSC.  Despite having a lot less drag than my test craft, the tourist ship is a lot lighter so I'll need to alter the re-entry burn location next time.

 

1 hour ago, Delay said:

-Reverse steering, somehow? I don't know how that can be done, perhaps it be done on the fly?

Should be an option if you right click on the wheel

 

 

[Weltenbrand]

Delivered the solar power module to Mun Ground 01.

Imgur album

[Space_probe]

Today i did nothing much i made a sort of Falcon heavy replica. Didn't land/recover the boosters (i was too lazy). my Falcon Heavy lifter could get about 200-300 tons of payload to LKO.

[Ace in Space]

13 hours ago, Kaskel2000 said:

This completely re energised me

I totally know what you mean. My first few weeks of KSP were spent trying to bring Jeb back from orbit. I was getting more and more frustrated and hopeless... and then I managed to get within a few hundred meters for the first time. "Maybe I can do this after all" is a great feeling.

 

The Dres Scouter probe finally paid off today. I've identified several asteroids around Dres that should make for suitable potential bases - two class C, two class D, and two class E.

Shortly after, the scouter crashed into the surface of Dres. I intended to also get a shot of it exploding on impact but it hit the back side of a hill and it wasn't very impressive.

Spoiler

Rest In Peace Pieces, Dres Scouter; you performed your job admirably.

With the green light for the Dres mission, plans changed as the launch window for it opened up before the launch window to Eve (and therefore Gilly). So I'll just have to put up with notification spam a while longer. I built a new habitation module for the station (since my old blueprint got deleted), but I was wary of launching. Since most of the parts are exactly the same as the ones that went to Ike, and that mission ended in near-catastrophe from running out of fuel, their ability to get to Dres seemed dubious. What's worse is that because Quartz Station would have no associated ground base (mining directly from an asteroid), it would have no fuel lifter. In a pinch, the science rover could theoretically act as an emergency refuel vehicle, but for obvious reasons it doesn't have the same fuel-carrying capabilities as a lifter. I decided it would be wise to crunch some numbers and see if I could boost the delta-v of each module. So I tweaked the rocket parts for the station modules until my calculations came out decently, and while I haven't actually tested them yet, if I've been doing my math correctly there was one particular change that I noticed granted an instant increase in delta-v.

Dear Poodle,

We've made some very happy memories in our short time together and I will never forget how important you've been to me. But there's a new engine in my life. There is no easy way to say this, so I won't sugar-coat it: I'm leaving you for Wolfhound. I'm sorry. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors.

- Ace

The numbers are still a bit short of what my research recommended, but I'm cautiously optimistic about most of them because I only calculated the final stage, and some of the modules may well have a little fuel left over from earlier stages when they achieve kerbin orbit. There's also the fact that each module has plenty of monoprop, so if push comes to shove, that may grant me some wiggle room. I hope.

But most of today was spent tweaking and re-tweaking the Drill/Hub module, the very core of the station. This one is the most critical, not only because it's the central part, but because it cannot be refueled - its docking ports are not accessible until it sheds its engines. It also doesn't have any monoprop. The version I tested previously worked just fine but it certainly didn't have the fuel to reach Dres (it was, after all, only intended as a proof of concept), and I was having the hardest time all day getting the real deal into orbit without tapping into its final stage. This module is inherently an awkward structure that requires a ring of rockets attached to its branches rather than under it, because of a radiator that blocks conventional rocket placement. So after many redesigns, this was the monstrosity I ended the night with:

Not only is it a total mess, it's insanely difficult to fly - especially when you've got a dog curled up on your lap!  Even this design, the most efficient one yet (as hard as that may be to believe) had to use a small amount of fuel from its last stage to achieve LKO, which is questionable given that its last stage delta-v is already dangerously low to begin with. Tomorrow I will make my decision about whether the current situation is acceptable. I imagine my verdict will probably be "no" but it's a choice better made when it's not midnight.