What did you do in KSP1 today?

[eddiew]

1 hour ago, Cavscout74 said:

Rescue at less than 5000 meters around Minmus

Impressed you made it! I had some crew reports between 5400 and 5700m, and the darn thing kept hitting terrain after a few orbits... Eventually I developed a suborbital-dive strategy.

(Amusingly, one of the impacts was such a glacing blow that even at orbital speeds, only one antenna broke off and the rest of the vessel pinged away into space.)

[Cavscout74]

14 minutes ago, eddiew said:

Impressed you made it! I had some crew reports between 5400 and 5700m, and the darn thing kept hitting terrain after a few orbits... Eventually I developed a suborbital-dive strategy.

(Amusingly, one of the impacts was such a glacing blow that even at orbital speeds, only one antenna broke off and the rest of the vessel pinged away into space.)

I'm pretty sure the only reason I did was the initial rendezvous was over the flats, and I was just getting into the hills as I was finishing up.  I didn't actually look at the target's orbit altitude other than thinking "wow, that's really close to the surface" until I was matching his velocity and actually saw how low we were.  I'm not certain what my exact altitude was - I had the altimeter set to AGL, and it was running from 5000-something over the flats (probably about what you've had) to under 1000m getting into the hills.  The lowest I saw was between 500 & 600 meters as the rescuee was boarding the rescue pod, and as soon as he was in, I was boosting Ap to something saner. 

[eddiew]

With the success of Mundog IV, the R&D team find themselves in a good position to propose an even larger, bolder vessel, one that will carry not only 3 crew, but a more comprehensive science package.

Seeing as we've received a distress call from one of those cheap knock-off space programs, we decide to head back to Minmus and give it a darn good scienceing.

Between them, Val, Bob and new recruit Yuki manage to tap up five biomes, gathering surface samples and collecting data from the premium materials experiment. While Bob did spot and investigate one of the 'mossy boulders' as reported by Jeb, he too failed to make sense of it with the tools he had at his disposal. Evidently we are going to have to come up with something more advanced if we want to learn about these mysterious structures.

Happily, the team came back with over 1300 data points, which should help a lot with that!

 

[capi3101]

(1.6.1) There was really only one thing I wanted to accomplish yesterday, and that was to get the Rogue 7 base-seeding rover to the Midlands on Mun from its starting point. Didn't happen on account of my box being stupid and Unity garbage collection being utter crap. If anybody's got a suggestion for a good SD card to slip into a Dell Latitude E5470 office laptop (with 8GB RAM) for ReadyBoost purposes, I'd love to hear it. When the game gets up to around 5.5 GB usage for no real reason...well.........

Day began yesterday with some refueling mass driver shots - the South Base outpost near KSC shot monopropellant, liquid fuel and oxidizer to space station Kerbinport (taking the opportunity to do so while there weren't any planes parked there) and to LSV House Corrino recently returned from the initial exploration missions of Dres. South Base also shot up some replacement Rocket Parts to Corrino; the ship had pretty much used up its entire supply in the printing of five probes while still at Dres. Resupplied, Corrino printed up a G-LOC 7a return-to-Kerbin craft for the next phase of exploration; construction time was estimated at 23 minutes and 34 seconds, which decreased to about twenty minutes once engineer Necale Kerman transferred from her seat aboard G. Grant docked to Corrino and resumed her post in one of Corrino's Bigby workshops. When completed, monopropellant was transferred aboard and the G-LOC was released; it promptly maneuvered to dock at one of Corrino's centerline ports. Corrino then began the print of a TBD 7e Mun base-seeding rover/lander, with total construction time estimated at 8.5 hours. This craft will ultimately be responsible for the creation of the upcoming Dres outpost. Speaking of which, I went ahead and put the target coordinates I'd gathered over the Thanksgiving break for the Dres outpost into Waypoint Manager and was able to verify visually that I'd gotten them input correctly this time (avoiding the 850 kilometer debacle I had with the Usumacinta base on Tylo...). With the TBD under construction, I finally got over to SL Shai Hulud in HKO to transfer Alcubierre Drive fuel supplies - Xenon Gas and Exotic Matter - to Corrino via mass driver, and after ordering up a new ScanSat for Mun at the Non Caseus Yards in orbit (the old one - a very old design - had no M4435 narrow-band scanners installed and therefore couldn't give me specific biome readings), I finally made it over to Rogue 7 to do some driving.

"Squishy things". Kind of a vague warning - does it mean that there are squishy things in it, or things that are squishy should stay out of it? Can't imagine it'd work too well with fuel refining if there were squishy things in it...

Made it all of 11.4 kilometers before I had to shut the game down for the day.

This morning I have had some time to play - I went ahead and ordered up a Hellhound 7 rover aboard LSV House Harkonnen currently in HKO; it'll be done in 7.75 hours. The idea is to have the rover available for an initial scouting survey of the target region on Dres - the hope is to put the base there fairly close to a Highlands/Midlands boundary so that going to get Exotic Minerals (absent in Highlands but present in Midlands) won't be too big of a hassle. I also finally got around to printing up and reinstalling a new Rangeland launch pad at Usumacinta; the old pad was destroyed during last week's launch of the Nomina Perplexa Yards. That done, it was back to driving - Rogue 7 did another 7.5 kilometers before I once again had to shut the game off (this time to start doing my paying job of course), but for the hell of it I decided to have scientist Stadous Kerman EVA from the rover and jetpack ahead until he could find the equatorial Midlands. He was able to do so before running out of jetpack fuel and took the opportunity to use Kerbal Konstructs to Plowshare the target site into level-grade goodness. Rogue 7 doesn't have all that much further to go as it turns out.

Just one serious into-a-crater-on-Mun cliff between here and there. No problem, right?

So my priority today is to finish Rogue 7's drive - it's got 6.6 kilometers to go before meeting up with Stadous and there's a nice flat region already set up there. It is at the bottom of a crater (which has the potential to cause headaches of course), but I should be okay as long as I drive carefully. Kinda miffed that I missed the mark by a mere 25 klicks, but on the other hand, that could be a lot worse (850 klicks on Tylo was one thing but 850 on Mun would've been cause for me putting a discount brick through someone else's laptop, methinks). I should also have the new Mun ScanSat ready before too long; it'd be nice to get some better readings for Mun although if I find a more suitable biome for base-building in the process I'm liable to be quite angry about it. Corrino and Harkonnen should be able to finish up their respective prints today as well, and so they should both be heading to Dres in the very near future. Not much else going on at the moment; I have a new tourist expedition to get under way, I have some ore hauling to do at Duna, a seismic survey at Eve and some science to collect from Laythe - all of which I have yet to get started. Still got a probe heading to its target orbit over Dres, still have to replace the one I screwed up out there, still need to get another engineer out to Vall, still tracking asteroids and still got four colonization missions already stewing. Hope to have more to report for y'all tomorrow.

Edited December 3, 2019 by capi3101

[Retro Starship]

(1.8.1) Nothing too extreme last night other than 4 contracts done at once. Jeb did a parachute, a protective shell, launched a flea booster and tested a decoupler.

Hmm Jeb is an OK kerbonaut but it seems Valentina always does more and has better success! What is it about that girl?

Edited December 3, 2019 by Saturn5tony

[NHunter]

I've launched a satellite to collect precious Graviolium from Rhode's orbit:

Also used this craft to test a new engine layout with 4 Thor-tech aerospikes in NFA radial engine pods attached to an upside-down Kerbodyne ADTP-2-3 fuel tank. Actually quite workable design when you need a 3.75m (collector) satellite with engines that don't get in your way when you try to dock with it.

[Ratwerke_Actual]

[JNSQ] Rendesvous and careful approach... 600m diameter Glimmeroid.

[Triop]

Today, we play.

Now on KerbalX:

https://kerbalx.com/Triop/RC-Tamiya-Grasshopper

Edited December 4, 2019 by Triop

[nelso]

On 11/29/2019 at 5:40 AM, putnamto said:

then tried to figure out why it crashes every 10-15 minutes for an hour

I had problems with scatterer crashing in 1.7.3.  Removed it and haven't had any crashes since.

[nelso]

Did a bunch of missions in the Jool system.  I used the nuclear engines and I can't say I'm too fond of them, although they served their purpose and let me be lazy in maneuver planning.  My main vehicle was a modification of one I landed on Tylo, so it had all the bells and whistles.

The launch vehicle & staging.  It's a mammoth engine and 8 kickback SRBs.  My final launch had nosecones on the SRBs which stopped them from colliding with things upon decoupling.

A decoupler on a structural support on the fairing was the attachment method I used.

Bop refeuling after Pol.

Some of a Bop -> Tylo -> Laythe capture maneuvers.

My exit out of Jool SOI using Tylo (this is probably not the best way to gravity assist).

Coming back to kerbin and burned about 5000 delta v slowing down (due to not planning too well - initially I came in at 5700m/s and needed almost a 20 minute burn to slow down), but at least the mission was faster for the kerbals.  I had plenty of delta v, was able to land and got lots of funds, like 2-3 million.

[Okhin]

Had an "interesting" startup of my Minmus base in my carreer with Snacks

 

TL;DR: Planning mission at 2am is bad for my kerbals. Also, I need to give them more breethable air.

[capi3101]

(1.6.1) Fairly good past 24 hours to report to y'all this morning. Screenie-heavy post with relatively little other substance ahead; fair warning.

The day began with the Rogue 7 base-seeding rover on Mun, which had (as reported at the end of my last post) sent out scientist Stadous Kerman to find the boundary between the Munar equatorial Lowlands and the Midlands; Stadous had found it about 6.5 kilometers ahead. Rogue 7 proceeded as carefully as possible to Stadous's position, a drive made more interesting by the fact that it was already known that Stadous was at the bottom of a crater...

This is not the sort of thing you really want to see when you're driving a fifty tonne rover...pretty much anywhere......

Aside from one end-over-end flip which I was able to recover (for a tonne of bonus points in games that are not KSP), no mishaps occurred and soon the rover arrived at Stadous's location. Engineer Linbo Kerman got out of the rover and began unpacking the equipment, beginning the construction of the Boot Hill outpost on Mun.

Attach an upchuckwagon to the side of the rover, move all the garbage over there, grab the Saddle and Pondy, hook it up. Simple as pie - the beginnings of a new base.

Linbo attached and inflated the stowed Casa module along with three Haciendas and three of the four Chuckwagons, and Stadous helped with the installation of four of the six stowed SAFER reactors before boarding the new outpost. Engineer Giller Keman and scientist Roddon Kerman also boarded at that point, after which the remaining Equipment resources were transferred over and Linbo detached the new outpost from rover and stowed all the parts used for the initial base establishment.

Base establishment is fun (at least to me). It's even better when you get paid for it...

Linnbo went ahead and moved the rover's Micro ISRU unit to the base and that point and attached a few exterior lights, another Casa unit and the remaining two SAFER reactors (with Stadous's help once again). Base construction continued throughout the day yesterday and into this morning.

Boot Hill outpost on Mun as it looks as of this morning.

With no Exotic Minerals at the site, the plan is to forego the presence of anything that requires them for structure construction - so no lab modules, ground transmitter or central Castillo hub. I do have the Rangeland launch pad that came with the rover; god willing I either never have to use it as a launch pad or, assuming I do, nothing blows it up. Won't be able to build a new one without an infusion from somewhere else...

While base construction proceeded, I got notice from the Non Caseus Yards in Munar orbit that the print of ScanSat Mun-2 was complete. After fueling, the new probe was released and immediately burned for a polar orbit.

2° to 90°? No problem. Helps that the shipyard is already oriented in the correct direction.

The new ScanSat burned to an initial 100 by 24.6 kilometer orbit at 90.00° inclination, later burning to 101.8 by 100.4 kilometers. I got some confusing readings at first - I thought I'd detected Exotic Minerals in the Lowlands at first and started to get excited for Boot Hill - maybe I could build a normal base after all. Alas, the readings I picked up were for the Midland Craters; the closest of those was fifty kilometers away in either direction (but I could've done it had I'd driven west from Rogue 7's original landing point instead of east).


Breaks my heart...and annoys me that it took me four days to drive 25 kilometers in the first place...

Still, it was enough for me to get Stadous out to go verify the reading.

Plenty of reasons why the base isn't 500 meters further east, boss...

After Stadous returned to the base, it was time for me to conduct an alignment burn for the Boop Boop 7x probe over Dres; the burn put the node over the apoapsis. The probe is still fifteen degrees off the target orbit but at this point I should be able to take care of the rest of it and circularize at the same time. The probe will not reach apoapsis for another 105 hours though, so that's a while off.

I noted that my "midpoint" alarm to check in with LSV House Corrino in high Kerbin orbit had gone off while I was fiddling with the probe, so I went straight to South Base and transferred up a full load of Rocket Parts via mass driver. Going to Corrino to verify delivery of the payload, however, I discovered that rather than having four more hours of construction ahead, the ship's crew had finished the TBD 7e Mun base-seeding rover/lander they were building; I happily mashed the button to finalize the construction.

Gas up and then it's time to head to Dres.

I still need to send up the remaining supplies to Corrino, but once that's done the ship can depart for Dres once more. I'm still waiting for LSV House Harkonnen's crew (i.e. just engineer Beamon Kerman right now) to complete her build of a Hellhound 7 rover to scout the intended target area on Dres - that's still a little under five hours off. Once that's done, though, the process of the first landing on Dres and outpost construction there will commence.

Today I plan to continue building out Boot Hill and, if construction finishes, to send my two warp ships out to Dres. I'll likely wrap things up at Boot Hill before switching gears to Dres. Warps and building a base (possibly two bases) should keep me plenty busy for the foreseeable future; I'll worry about all the other stuff later and let y'all know how everything goes tomorrow.

Edited December 4, 2019 by capi3101
had another screenie to add...

[NHunter]

Today I got my steam install to work and then experimented a bit with KFS:

"Upwards bound"

[Cavscout74]

Just been working on my career - a Duna probe just arrived, and I finished testing the nearly acquired 2.5m launch vehicles.  Full report here

In-flight abort test of 2.5m pod

Flight test of full Girrok launch vehicle with empty pod

[kapteenipirk]

Planning on turning this into a 3D printable model similar to the "Barnstormer" cropduster.

KTP-715 Falcon

(whoops, forgot to remove the RAF stripes from the tail when i changed the roundels to US ones)

 

 

 

Wanted to create something in style of the Super Constellation and the DC-6.

It's part of the same family of protected transport planes as the Raven, and was actually created around a modified version of it's custom cockpit.

This particular aircraft has been outfitted as a navy Airborne Early Warning aircraft.

 

Im putting this here, as i don't know if im gonna be properly releasing this one.

[eddiew]

With a goodly amount of data and samples recovered from Minmus, mission control decides that it might be time to set our sights on other targets.

Or, well... one more. The mossy boulders have been preying on everyone's mind, and even though nobody can be bothered going back to tackle them kermanually, the engineering team was able to put together a micro-probe to do the job. Sadly it turns out that the moss is mineral deposits. A lovely green mineral, but only a mineral. An inedible one at that.

Following on from this tiny lander, we send another tiny lander to another planet entirely; Dunamite enters Dunan orbit. Leaving it's relay stage at high altitude with barely a whiff of fumes left in the tank, the little probe drops to a lower orbit and prepares for descent.

Meanwhile back on kerbin, our engineers have discovered a powerful new way of fitting bulky objects into rocket fairings. They tell us these strange devices are called 'hinges' and they will soon solve all our problems.

(To be honest, the new robotic parts aren't exactly perfect. The arms really didn't want to deploy symmetrically, and a lot of manual toggling of autostruts was required before they finally locked straight. I'd sort of hoped this sort of thing would have been polished out by now, but ok, we'll work with it. It seems like there are workarounds and fiddles to get things to behave properly if you're patient.)

Yet another instalment of the Mundog series is launched, first saying a quick hello to Pielab in LKO because apparently the newspapers thought that would be cool, and then swiftly heading for Mun itself.

The original plan had been to send a fuel delivery to Pielab Station once it reached munar orbit, but since the ascent stage turned out to be a viable transfer stage, a robotic fuel tanker was instead dispatched to refuel it. No sense sending additional fuel cans when there are already some attached.

Once both Pielab and Mundog V were in position, the lander made a brief but fruitful descent into the Mun's Twin Craters biome, setting up a surface experiment package and gathering useful data for return to the station.

(While I have historically tended to tap every biome on every body, I'm not going to be doing that with this career. My tech tree is much simpler, and I just don't need to be maximising my science returns. Current plans are to land in the major craters that fall under Pielab's equatorial orbit.)

Edited December 4, 2019 by eddiew

[Triop]

Today, Jeb found the fireworks we bought for new year....

 

[Jacke]

2 hours ago, Triop said:

Today, Jeb found the fireworks we bought for new year....

AKA @Triop Cubed, more bang for your bucks!

[aagun123]

give up on 181 and back to 173 today

[capi3101]

(1.6.1) I got the shortest log entry I've had in quite some time. Basically, aside from LSV House Harkonnen in HKO finishing up its print of the Hellhound 7 rover and a pair of refueling mass driver shots from the South Base outpost near KSC to Harkonnen and LSV House Corrino (fuel to both, Material Kits to Corrino and Rocket Parts to Harkonnen), I spent the entire day working on the nascent Boot Hill outpost on Mun. I'm happy to report as of this morning that construction of the base is 100% complete after nine in-game days.

Boot Hill outpost on Mun.

Told y'all yesterday that this was liable to keep me plenty busy, and I was right...

So, both Corrino and Harkonnen are ready to head to Dres and that'll be my focus for today. Harkonnen's rover will scout an area I've pre-selected for a base on the surface and if all looks good, Corrino will be supplying the rover/lander. That's liable to take care of things today. I did also manage to finish one of the colonization missions I've got ongoing yesterday so I'll probably be replacing it in the near future, and then I should probably turn my attention back to getting contracts finished up. Lost a fair amount of time there with BH's construction...

I hope to have something more substantial for y'all tomorrow.

Edited December 5, 2019 by capi3101

[Retro Starship]

(1.8.1) Man I love this game. Now I got some real stuff happening!

A bit disappointing but as we know from some real rocket launches things can go wrong. Had 2 career tasks to do. 

1) Get into orbit to test a protective shell.

2) Land into a splashdown area for a minor decoupler test. (very easy)

Got the shell done with a very nice orbit at 330,000m or so (as was needed by the contract) Then...

BANGG!!! Was doing a re-entry maneuver back into a nice place near the ocean for the last test and my engine MALFUNCTIONED! Had at least 20% more of fuel as well to do it.

Fortunately the maneuver just got below the 70km area before it stopped, so I was able to get Val home but only into a land area, not the ocean as I was planning for the last test. I had enuff fuel to pick anywhere really but no... it.... stopped.

Here is the mission.

1st time ever seeing a yellow engine! I knew I was trouble...

 

 

Got Val home, but not near any splashdown area but only on land. No problem, I did it later for the TT38 decoupler but like in real life, parts can go bad, especially rocket related ones. It could have been worse. Val could have been (lost in space)!

[Triop]

Today, we've set a new record on the Kerbal 1 race track.

 

[Mars-Bound Hokie]

I sent 12 different spacecraft to three different places in my career save.

• 6 TO DUNA
  • Small tourist transport destined for Jool
    • Making a refueling stop at Ike
  • Large docking-capable tourist transport
  • Neptune IV
  • Mass ore transport
    • Can hold up to 1500 units of ore.
  • 35-person surface outpost for Ike
  • Module to expand a space station.
    • PURPOSE: to make it easier for large planes to dock with the station.
• 3 to Jool
  • Aerial Probe
  • Mass ore transport for Vall
    • Necessary to refuel Poseidon-class planes since their TWR is too low for that moon.
  • Laythe surface outpost
    • Not pictured since, at the time the picture was taken, the Laythe surface base hadn't made its escape burn yet.
• 3 to Eve
  • Space Station (for contract)
  • Module to expand a space station
    • Same design as the one heading for Duna
  • Standby Gilly lander
    • No way I'm risking a bouncy refueling for that plane.

Edited December 6, 2019 by Mars-Bound Hokie
Forgot to mention that it was in Career Mode

[nelso]

Did a mission to test the Vector engine landed on minmus.  I used this funny looking craft which took off with 2 kickback boosters strapped to it.  Coming back from minmus was where it got interesting, since I had only 200 m/s delta v in orbit of minmus which isn't enough to get back to Kerbin directly, so I used a mun gravity assist to get into a low kerbin orbit, so it took about 110 m/s instead of 300 m/s.  Unfortunately due to bad time warps I had to revert it, but I got screenshots.

Using mun to get to kerbin since I had almost no delta v.

[putnamto]

Set up a mun comnet,  watched it fall apart,  learned up on orbital periods,  set up a kerbal comnet right outside minmus.  

 

Finally got to actually fly to minmus for the first time on this save,  took bill,  Bob and octo.  Set up some ground science,  did a lot of orbital science. 

On the way home I realized 31km was to low for a re-entry and decoupled the pod moments before it all blew up,  thankfully the science was in the pod,  earning me 930sci. 

Tomorrow is going to be like christmas on kerbin,  I'm finally going to get those bigger boosters that jeb's been hinting at all year

 

Oh and I found out goo cans that aren't attached to your ship can still be scienced and collected 

Edited December 6, 2019 by putnamto