What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Kronus_Aerospace]

Gosh these raked wing tips were hard to do! Fun fact I actually had the chance to briefly talk to the man whom lead the design team that first came up with the raked wingtip design for use on a modified version of the 767-300, which would become the 767-400, Professor Kenneth Visser. He currently works at Clarkson University. He talked about how, despite what Boeing advertising may tell you, the raked wingtips are used for purely aesthetic reasons!

[Zeiss Ikon]

Well, a couple days ago, in my career game, there was a problem while Val was landing (with three tourists and a rescue) on the Mun.  I got into a situation where I had to reload a save, but (due to my failure to develop a habit of quicksaving) the only save available was a persistent save just a few seconds above the Munar surface, already in free fall after burning to a stop and letting the lander build up some vertical fall again.  Reloading from this autosave required opening the Tracking Station, selecting Val's lander (the very bottom of the list), and switching to it, hopefully in time to try to save the landing.

Nope.

With Val and all four passengers dead (apparently the game made an autosave just after I crashed for the fourth time), I tried loading an older quicksave to see how far back it was (the date display doesn't mean much, with Minmus trips taking 20+ days in total).  Okay, that was pretty far back, before all the Minmus trips except the first flyby.  Better just load the persistent and accept that Val and the four tourists are gone (at least until Val respawns).

Wait.  What do you mean, I can't load the persistent from Year 1, Day 223, after loading a quicksave from Year 1, day 173?

So, the last couple player days, I've been more or less recreating the fifty game days (most of which time was a Minmus orbit mission, and in the next batch of contracts, a Minmus landing).  A few things are different, since there's a random factor in contracts -- I had a rescue from Minmus orbit, instead of one from Mun orbit; a scientist had gotten stuck in a crew cabin in a steeply inclined two day orbit of Minmus (okay, that's only twelve hours, but still).  Took three days to rendezvous, but it got me three World's Firsts -- First Rendezvous in Minmus Orbit, First Crew Transfer in Minmus Orbit, and First Suborbital Flight over Minmus (had a big plane change to do before the return burn, and it apparently took my periapsis below the surface for about three or four seconds).

This time, Val's trip to the Mun carried only two tourists, so she didn't have to try to land the monstrosity I cobbled together to carry four passengers and have a seat in a module with a hatch for the rescuee to board (Mk. 1-3, with a Mk. 1 airplane cockpit on the nose, then a Mk. 1 Command Pod for Val); she could use my standard lander instead (nothing on top of the Mk. 1-3 except a Science Jr. and some parachutes).  Much easier to keep upright and turned enough faster to handle the switches between surface retrograde and surface radial out more successfully.  Plant Flag contract fulfilled, 400 science returned, happy tourists, and now it's time for the Minmus landing, which (if I remember to take the science data this time) should once more bring enough science to unlock the rest of the 160 tier and get me the Klaw that I can use to start cleaning up LKO (and Mun and Minmus orbit).

[Mr. Peabody]

33 minutes ago, Kronus_Aerospace said:

Gosh these raked wing tips were hard to do! Fun fact I actually had the chance to briefly talk to the man whom lead the design team that first came up with the raked wingtip design for use on a modified version of the 767-300, which would become the 767-400, Professor Kenneth Visser. He currently works at Clarkson University. He talked about how, despite what Boeing advertising may tell you, the raked wingtips are used for purely aesthetic reasons!

Looks great! As they say in the aviation business, it doesn't matter how expensive a part is as long as it looks good.

[jack gamer]

I manage to break the game

[jack gamer]

I made an eve base, it took me 6 hours to make this, due to a couple failures.

[Ace in Space]

Didn't play much KSP today; was too busy baking cupcakes. But when I did get around to it, it was time to re-launch Anger's rover and the replacement satellite. Turns out, rather unsurprisingly, that the weight of all the fuel that was missing from the rover the first time around rendered the old ascent stage inadequate and the thing had to be redesigned once more. Even after redesigning it, it ended up needing to tap into the travel stage to raise the periapsis up the last few kilometers. I'm hoping this does not turn out to be a problem.

Spoiler

The crafts are a ways behind the others, but not too far. They were getting close to their Munar encounters at around the time that all the other crafts were escaping from the Mun's SOI. Continuing yesterday's table, here are the numbers for the replacement crafts. Incidentally, this time I was able to measure how much delta-v was left over from the ascent stage on the comm sat, and it turns out it was a good 540m/s. I probably won't adjust the numbers in future reports for this, but it's good to know.

	Rover	Com1
Initial Delta-V	5161-	5224+
Spent This Phase	858	884
Current Delta-V	4303-	4340+

With all crafts on their way out into Kerbolar orbit, I finally had the time to deal with the failed fuel tank. I've decided to just leave it attached to the end of the Kerbin Space Station. It doesn't look that bad, and it'll be useful to have more room for fuel.

[Cupcake...]

Taking care of logistics.

Enjoy!  

 

Cupcake...

[Azimech]

Made a variant with a "normal" cargo bay. Tuned the engines and made other, numerous improvements to the airframe. Even without reaction wheels it has fabulous control in both helicopter and airplane mode. Can take off and land in taildragger mode and normal mode. Taildragger is for loading/unloading cargo.

 

 

 

Some figures, helicopter mode.
Empty mass: 156t.
Fuel mass: 57t.
Max payload: 177t.
Max gross mass: 390t.

Airplane mode top speed (no payload, tanks full): 116m/s.

 

[maceemiller]

Havnt played KSP today as at an event in the NEC Arena in Birmingham UK however everytime I look around I think im in the SPH!!

[Aaodon]

Leaving from Sweet Home

Final Burning

We did it!

[Azimech]

 

[Delay]

After a failed attempt to make a custom landing leg using @hazard-ish's hinges I decided to start a contract to launch a space station to Gilly. In hindsight it's unnecessary work; even a Kerbal would count as a space station if in orbit around Gilly. Anyway's here's they 160t vehicle with the 30 ton payload (transfer stage included) on the pad:

I've focused the cam on the front clamp, which enabled me to take this shot a few seconds after launch (TWR 1.17)...

...as well as this one:

The entire vehicle is 42.4m tall. This makes it the biggest vessel I've ever launched, by the way.

I've decided (accidentally, as many things I "decide" on) to go for a steep trajectory. Get out of the atmosphere as quickly as possible, the last thing I want is loose control:

If you look very carefully you can see two struts. I added them to some structural struts things (you know, the small ones you immediately have upon starting a new game) to make sure the vehicle is absolutely stable.

And here's the station in LKO, with extended solar panels and antennas:

The service bay at the bottom contains two antennas, a probe core and batteries. I want to let the stage burn up in Eve's atmosphere after putting the station into orbit.

Edited April 8, 2018 by Delay
"launch after the launch" makes no sense.

[Azimech]

@Delay ... "hazard-ish's hinges"? Can you give me an example?

[Delay]

@AzimechAt least I assume he came up with them, otherwise I'll correct it.

Hazardish came up with a hinge design for his tilt-wing craft. The craft, as he later admitted (remember the scandal around him? Yeah, that) doesn't work, but the hinges actually work very well.

It's just that the design is too big to be used as a landing gear.

[EpicSpaceTroll139]

18 hours ago, Avera9eJoe said:

I've been worried about gyroscopic effect of the blades on my own tilt-rotor. I don't see a pretty solution, other than clipping 30 large SAS wheels in the engines. Perhaps adding a spinning counterweight to balance out the precession... Wait that's a terrible idea Still though you have the problem of it behaving like a Frisbee when you land, mrocking back and forth as the blades even out. There's gotta be a better way!

Edit: The more I think about this the more the Osprey impresses me.

Edit edit: This might be interesting to you guys... Apparently the osprey used gyroscopic precession for torque and extra maneuverability while hovering at low speeds and landing. Neat.

I think as long as your rotors are contrarotating and you move them at the same rate, you should be fine as far as gyroscopic forces go. As for acting a bit like a frisbee when landing, that's kind of why all our helicopters have so many reaction wheels lol.

Anyways, I took a break from my Saturn V to work on some other things, such as this thing that might be useful in a range-extended and reinforced form for a tiltrotor.

I've kind of edged away from my constant velocity claw joint idea as I realized that such would limit the rpm of the rotors, which would be a major problem in forward flight.

Also made this weird balance wheel escapement thingy. Could theoretically be used in a clock. Maybe even a triple-tourbillon clock.

 

 

Btw @Delay It's possible to make hinges sturdy enough for landing legs with bearings much smaller than the one found in Hazardish's tilt wing.

If you need some ideas you can take a look at this sort of falcon-9-workalike I made using thermometer cage / rcs ball hinges.  I believe @klond was the first person I saw using this type of hinge, but it may or may not have been someone else that first made them.  I forget.  It's very sturdy but also compact.

https://kerbalx.com/EpicSpaceTroll139/Failcan-1

I actually got the idea for this from some other people's Falcon 9 builds, but I think I made the hinge mechanism on mine more compact by using the thermo-rcs hinges.

Might try to get a better picture of the bearings for you in a minute

Edited April 8, 2018 by EpicSpaceTroll139

[qzgy]

1 minute ago, EpicSpaceTroll139 said:

 I believe @klond was the first person I saw using this type of hinge

I believe you are correct in that klond was the first to use this hinge.

 

2 minutes ago, EpicSpaceTroll139 said:

I think as long as your rotors are contrarotating and you move them at the same rate, you should be fine as far as gyroscopic forces go.

In my own experience, even with contrarotating props the issue isn't really gyroscopic effects trying to twist the rotor, its more that it is hard to change the axis of a spinning thing. So actually tilting the entire rotor assembly forward. Kinda like spin stabilization if that makes any sense...

[EpicSpaceTroll139]

2 minutes ago, qzgy said:

In my own experience, even with contrarotating props the issue isn't really gyroscopic effects trying to twist the rotor, its more that it is hard to change the axis of a spinning thing. So actually tilting the entire rotor assembly forward. Kinda like spin stabilization if that makes any sense...

Well I presume one wouldn't be trying to tilt them forward very fast, maybe a few degrees per second? The aircraft needs time to speed up and slow down during transition after all, and you're probably going to need to adjust prop pitch at the same time.

There may however be the asymmetric lift problem causing the tiltrotor to want to nose up once it's gained significant forward speed, but I think good elevator authority and temporary power reduction should be able to deal with it

[Numerlor]

Made this plane for the "Biggest Plane with a Juno" challenge.

 

Edited April 8, 2018 by Numerlor

[qzgy]

52 minutes ago, EpicSpaceTroll139 said:

Well I presume one wouldn't be trying to tilt them forward very fast, maybe a few degrees per second? The aircraft needs time to speed up and slow down during transition after all, and you're probably going to need to adjust prop pitch at the same time.

There may however be the asymmetric lift problem causing the tiltrotor to want to nose up once it's gained significant forward speed, but I think good elevator authority and temporary power reduction should be able to deal with it

Oh I might be doing it wrong then....

You're probably right though.

[TeslaPenguin1]

Completely destroyed the KSC with my asteroid grabber rocket. Luckily Valentina made it out safely. I have to find a working version soon or else it'll be slung out of orbit by mimmus! note: the asteroid is the one that was slung into a very elliptical orbit by mimmus. kind of like...

On 4/3/2018 at 6:39 PM, Just Jim said:

... a sort of upside down Molniya orbit

 

[Cavscout74]

I've been busy the last few days.  Got a fleet going to Jool - spent ~5 million of my 7 million total budget, and don't even have landers or relays for all the moons.  But I will have a land base, rover, sea base & boat on Laythe, along with an orbital station, Kerbin-return vehicle & not one but TWO spaceplanes for transfers to the surface.  After I got all them going, I realized there was a Duna window just a few days out, so I had to quickly get a few more launches in to get a few Kerbonauts heading back to Duna, plus there is a contract rescue mission to pick up a lost Kerbal around Ike.

Pushing the Xerosere Laythe seaplane (by RuBisCo on KerbalX) backwards to Laythe with a nuclear tug.

My new spaceplane dumping the ferry fuel tanks after it's burn to Laythe.  The engineer stuck some C-4 on it to dispose of it once clear.

Another view just because I like this SSTO

After all the excitement of over a dozen departure burns for Jool & Duna, I thought I'd take up a regular jet I've been messing with for a quick spin by one of the few pilots still at KSC:

Any landing you walk away from is a good one, right?   I didn't have any escape system in this one as I've flown it multiple times before with no major problems - and didn't this time till Letrey bounced the landing, took out the engines, then right wing, then left wing.  All three gear are intact though.  Guess she needs to get some more landing practice. 

Edited April 8, 2018 by Cavscout74
Add credit for Xerosere

[Geonovast]

This yesterday:

 

This today:

Managed to land an MK1 pod with nothing but a handful of sepratrons.   Not the smoothest, still have some tweaking to do (and it would help if the 1.4.2 landing legs didn't just up and disappear when you tried to use the), but the pod's intact.

 

[DeltaDizzy]

Just now, Geonovast said:

 

the heck is this?

I assume it is scatterer's fault.

[Geonovast]

3 minutes ago, DeltaDizzy said:

the heck is this?

I assume it is scatterer's fault.

Underwater view at the right angle looked like this.  I also assume it's scatter's fault.

[CatastrophicFailure]

12 hours ago, Ace in Space said:

Check the engine bells for vagrants, if you find any... probably Seattle. 

 

3 hours ago, Azimech said:

 

Great flarping flarp it's even got working rotating beacons! *ragequits*