What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Monty_Droppings]

I build a Manned Interplanetary Ion powered probe with liquid drop tanks to allow me to land on bodies roughly the size of Mun or smaller.

[SRV Ron]

Designed several micro probe landers;

Design one, Simple RCS lander 0.82 tons

Design twp, Simple RCS with six place anywhere. 0.92 tons

Design three, with legs at 0.98 tons

The designs are good for moon landings or on Eve, Laythe, and Duna

The following can land on higher gravity bodies;

Design Four, has toggable outer ant engines; 0.73 tons

And a test landing;

Design Five with a throttled down Rocomax. 1.18 tons

All probes have a comm, dual solar panels, and full scientific instruments. All are equipped with parachutes.

Edited December 24, 2013 by SRV Ron

[ArmchairGravy]

It was not Porcine Avionic's finest day. Yesterday I launched missions to Jool and Duna. Today they arrived at their destinations. Both missions got great insertions and orbited with no issues. It's when they began to perform their missions that the trouble started.

First off, the Duna mission consisted of a one-man lander can on top of a science lab with a 1-man landing craft that contained all of the science gear. I didn't put anyone in the science lab, as it only needs two people to operate, right? I collected all of the science I'd gathered on the way in, put Jeb and Kirlorf in the science module, and went to reset the experiments. No option to do so. I needed someone in the control room or the lab wouldn't operate!

I accelerated time, put Genedas on a courier rocket, and got him to science lab. The rest of the Duna/Ike mission went smooth, and they are waiting on their window home.

Time to switch over to the Jool probe. This is the behemoth I posted above. 5 probes, ready to rumble the Jool system. I get my aerobrake insertion all set, and I enter the system. Time for a gravity scan. I go to transmit the results, and find that I forgot antennas! :cry: Someone is so fired! I'm going to crash the probe into Jool.

[el_coyoto]

During (or despite? ) the holidays, I managed to play a bit more seriously (~10 hours in 2 days) with the 0.23 :

• I started a new career
  
• unlocked a few parts
  
• had fun with tweakable SRBs!
  
• did a spreadsheet to synchronize the burn time said SRBs and guesstimate their TWR
  
• got carried away on the spreadsheet, and messed around trying to estimate atmospheric efficiency during vertical ascent
  
• got back to actually playing and landed Jeb on the Mun
  
• had fun with tweakable parachutes!
  
• ripped a few parachutes in the learning process
  
• crashed a few unmanned R&D airplanes on the Island runway
  
• landed an unmanned R&D airplane on the Pole! \o/
  
• sent Jeb to Minmus to collect sample from two different biomes and landed him in the desert for science
  
• got enough science to unlock the gravioli sensor and I'm left with 500 science to spend on shiny new parts!
  

No Kerbals were harmed in this seemingly erratic process that passes for a space program...

Happy Christmas eve!

[zeppelinmage]

A few of my projects have been put on hold. I have an unmanned Munar lander/rover mission I've had planned for about a week now. But it's just a touch too heavy - I need Mainsails. In order to get those, I need more Science. So, I launched unmanned science probes to explore every primary celestial body in the system. The soonest launch window is 28 days out. Of course it is. So, now I have 6 probes in parking orbits waiting for their windows. In the meantime, I practiced a little docking, and managed to rescue an engine-less capsule from Polar LKO. So, being the science nerd I am, yesterday I decided to put up a constellation of kerbistationary weather satellites. Yesterday was mostly learning - the first three launches were failures; mostly due to my forgetting to extend solar panels and draining the batteries to 0. Today was more successful.

Liftoff:

Main stage separation:

Burning for Hohmann Transfer after separating the orbital stage:

I lined them up to (roughly) 60 degree separation, just like around Earth:

Satellite in kerbistationary orbit:

I modeled it after GOES-R, the latest generation. It's not perfect, partially due to the fact I only have access to Tier 6 technologies so far. (Yes, they have temperature and pressure sensors, despite them both being useless at 2868.75km altitude.)

Being my first geostationary constellation, the orbits are far from perfect. The first three I didn't line up to exactly 0° inclination, and the others don't have perfect 6-hour periods. Kerbistationary orbits are hard. When these start drifting too far I'll definitely launch a second-generation, with better orbital placement.

[Traches]

A few of my projects have been put on hold. I have an unmanned Munar lander/rover mission I've had planned for about a week now. But it's just a touch too heavy - I need Mainsails.

Nice satellite constellation! Those look awesome.

You should be able to go to the mun unmanned without mainsails though. How big is this rover? Life in KSP is a lot easier if you build light!

[el_coyoto]

Welp. Finally made a flying jet bike with a design that I liked.

This is a very smart design, awesome work!

And the pilot expression is simply priceless.

[xub313]

I've been playing this game for well over a year now, but this is the first time I have done a manned Duna landing (although I have done multiple manned Duna flybys and probe landings).

The full mission consisted of five launches from KSC as well as two gravity assists from Mun and Ike.

[Huojin]

I modeled it after GOES-R, the latest generation.

I AM GOZER THE GOZERIAN.

(Kept thinking about that while reading your thing :3)

[Cupojoepro]

My goal is KSP is called to land on every planet and moon and get back with at least 1 Kerbal. I call the challenge "Eeloo or Bust" because Eeloo is the farthest planet out (most of the time). I stream my launches on Twitch every so often at: http://www.twitch.tv/cupojoepro . Today I landed a probe on Dres to test the gravity because my next mission will be to get a Kerbal on the surface and back of Dres (pretty much a Mun mission if the Mun was 100000x farther away.)

[Duke23]

I did my first orbital construction of a ship (Minmus orbiter / lander / probe in one) and sent it off. It might be a bit overkill but it was my first manned mission to Minmus. This ship was actually supposed to go to the Mun to play around but I changed my mind once I put it together since I knew it would have fuel to spare. It went up in 4 pieces and was my first test of the Docking Port Alignment mod by Navyfish which was extremely useful in this build. First I docked the lander core and my out of date "pusher base" to my refueling station (click to expand):

Then I sent up the side engines for landing assist on two separate missions, using the extra fuel in the pushers to refill the main one that will be reused on the final ship. Anyone who can see the future problem here is paying more attention than I was during construction:

Then the Rover:

Sorry this is the best screenshot I have of the ship fully assembled and in Minmus orbit:

I biffed the landing on the first try (first pic is after knocking one of the engines and the command module off -- The rest of it tumbled around for a couple minutes in the air before finally crashing somewhere out of sight) but the second time around I managed to touch down softly on the rover wheels then disconnect the lander and park beside it and go for a ride. The landing is where I first noticed my problem I overlooked earlier: when I docked the side engines to the lander I only had one port for each one, so they were about .1 degree off center so this made flying a bit tricky. Second problem: All my batteries and solar panels were on the rover and not the lander. I never intended to bring the rover back.

I know Minmus has really really low gravity and all, but... Well, I screwed up. Another thing I forgot was any kind of SAS/RCS on the rover. I hit a ridge doing about 18m/s and came down on one wheel at an angle and went tumbling for about another kilometer before Jeb got tossed out of the stupid thing landing on his face. It was like a slow motion trainwreck, nothing I could do. He had to jetpack back the 5km and wasn't very happy.

I ended up jettisoning the top engines and fuel tanks after draining them because I realized the way I had them docked made them useless. They flew up insanely high on Minmus just from decoupling, so that was entertaining. So the return to the pusher was a nail biting experience trying to balance my reaction wheel and RCS usage so as not to run out of either before docking, all the while fighting the slight pitch and spin due to my engines being docked wrong.

I got them "close enough" and then maneuvered with the pusher using my attached probe core to re-dock and then headed for Kerbin, everything went fairly smoothly from there. Dropped the pusher and all lander engines in one go once I was aerobraking around 60km out and had a safe landing. The science I gained from that mission was quite helpful and the lessons I learned about how not to construct a ship in orbit were even more helpful.

Overall success, but a technical nightmare.

Edit to add things I learned:

1) Use multiple docking ports when rotation is critical to the mission.

2) Don't forget batteries on parts that will later be undocked.

3) SAS on rovers is still useful.

4) It's time to retire that stupid pusher base. It's slow, heavy, and ungodly hard to dock with anything due to the RCS thruster positions making it fight SAS to stay stable.

5) Rotational torque is still useful after touching down (landing with slight surface speed in low grav).

I also can't believe just a couple days ago I was dreading orbital rendezvous and crashing ships into the ground trying, and now I'm tossing things together in orbit like it's nothing with or without the alignment mod.

Edited December 25, 2013 by Duke23
spelling etc

[SRV Ron]

After crashing KSP, got a probe ship built with two separate probes attached.

In spite of the staging nightmare of the probes designed for moderate range launching, I got each under separate control into independent orbit. They are designed for landing on Duna.

What is interesting is the radical decoupler still attached to each independent probe.

In order to add a booster to the one probe with the six place anywhere thrusters, I had to use the round lattice girder.

Probe landed ok with the setup. The six place anywhere cut landing speed by 1/2 on Kerban so should work well on Duna or low gravity landing.

Edited December 25, 2013 by SRV Ron

[Liowen]

I finally got to do my station for my youtube series, basically launched it and got it into orbit. For now though this picture will have to do, this is just after I got the first habitation module placed (for the sake of time I only showed the main body of the station getting into orbit). Now though I have my "story line" going for my series to come, this should be interesting.

[zeppelinmage]

Nice satellite constellation! Those look awesome.

You should be able to go to the mun unmanned without mainsails though. How big is this rover? Life in KSP is a lot easier if you build light!

The whole shebang clocks in at just over 7t. It's two pieces - a base station with a Science Jr, and a rover that deploys from underneath. It is attached to the main rocket "upside down", so rover-first. (When I took this screenie, I realized I need to do yet another redesign... the rover's solar panels fell apart when I decoupled it, and it can't get out from under the lander's legs.)

I AM GOZER THE GOZERIAN.

(Kept thinking about that while reading your thing :3)

"When someone asks you if you are a god, you say YES!"

[Duke23]

I got tired of looking at my old refueling station so I built a new one complete with hitchhiker container, twice the fuel, and twice the monopropellant, and docked them to transfer any fuel I needed then sent the old one down into the ocean using the new tanker's already docked prototype version.

Ain't it just purdy when you've got 50+ tons falling out of the sky

[Brotoro]

Today I posted Part 23 of my Long-term Laythe mission.

[Duke23]

I was just piecing together another ship to go to the Mun (probably) and test the general design for interplanetary runs, and I was using the same base as my new tanker to send stuff up since I could connect them and expand. That and it's a surprisingly stable and powerful platform. I thought it would struggle to get the main tanks and hitchhiker capsule up there but it usually docks with about half of the fuel in the final stage and I had originally planned to shut it down with less than 1/4. I used dual docking ports to test the procedure, so it occurs to me at this point that I could just take this entire station somewhere with all the fuel it's carrying. Maybe I'll bring up two more and see how far I can go... As of right now the whole thing including the ship I'm constructing is sitting at 110 tons making it the largest object I've ever had in orbit. Don't laugh, you all started somewhere

Soon enough I'll have better screenshots. I'm using a laptop that really shouldn't be running the game anyway but I'm almost done collecting parts to build my gaming rig.

Edited December 25, 2013 by Duke23

[Aragosnat]

Well yestarday with my new career start. I had fun just getting all my science done just on and within Kerbin's atmosphere. With enough points to build first a rocket powered Rover then soon after a Basic Jet Powered one that can climb steep hills:

Needless to say we will be holding Geofwise Kermans Funeral today as they finally recovered his body as there is enough light to see by.

[Hodo]

I did absolutely nothing, because it's Christmas.

Merry Christmas all and happy holidays.

[SoldierHair]

Today i build a mech.

[LameLefty]

I managed my first probe visit to the Jool system in my 0.23 save. After entering Joolian orbit, I arranged a Tylo encounter;

whipping around the moon's north pole, I ended up in an orbit with a periapsis very close to Lathe's orbit;

a small orbital correction later and I was entering Laythe orbit.

Unfortunately, after entry interface I realized I had a design flaw ...

Fortunately, I was able to arrange a safe splashdown and still obtained all the Science!â„¢ available by transmission.

[Sgt. Cookie]

Managed to put a craft in a stable Minmus orbit without needing to use maneuver nodes. I'm dead chuffed at it. Now to do that for Kerbin.

[Smidge204]

I rescued Jeb (and Bill and Bob) from the edge of Kerbin SOI after they got stranded there on EVA with no fuel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1L4y9aZvC4

AND I rescued ~3600 science!

=Smidge=

[Commissioner Tadpole]

Today I tried to make a rocket similar to the Munbug XI's lower stages.

Needless to say, thanks to the accountants and engineers, this rocket never made it out of the drawing board.

[Belial]

Finally got the Mun Science Lab Back !