What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Stamp20]

I built a new crew transport vehicle to bring some kerbals to my space station.

Spoiler

Previously, I brought my station's crew on a mandatory training exercise.

The new vehicle is based around the Starship-looking command pod in Near Future Spacecraft. It holds 18 kerbals, up from the 12 of my previous crew transport. It's powered by a Poodle engine, has 4 solar panels for power, and has an 88-88 antenna inside the hatch on the top of the pod.

As seen in orbit. I sent it to my space station with all 18 seats filled, 5 for the station crew, 1 for the pilot, and the other 12 for tourists.

Once I arrived, I installed a mystery goo container for a MOLE science experiment.

 

[Souptime]

On 10/6/2020 at 2:02 PM, Adstri said:

I remade the Jool System!

ALBUM BELOW (sort of image heavy :P)

  Hide contents

 

Holy kerb thats beautiful! Any plans to remake the kerbol system like that and release it as a mod?

[kerboknaut]

Launched Interplanetary 2 into orbit and ran some tests on it. I screwed up the docking ports for the various little flying rovers it has, so they wouldn't actually detach when decoupled. Glad Jeb ran the tests before it left Kerbin's orbit, but mission planners were frustrated at wasting over 1,000,000 credits on the original launch that won't be used. At least, it might come in handy for running errands around Kerbin and the Mun. 

The docking port issue was fixed and the craft re-launched. I also launched and connected an array of probes that will be carried on its nose, and maybe left in orbit when it goes to refuel. There are 12 probes in total, 4 surface scanners, 4 communications relays, and 4 ion-drive probes that can return to kerbin with science throughout the journey. 

The main craft, the probe array, and a yet to be constructed science module and a permanent surface outpost will compose the whole package. The main craft also includes two micro aerial rovers and one small lander. Everyone is going, mostly accommodated in the spacious Mk-3 passenger cabin. Where are they going? Everywhere, and anywhere. At least, that is the hope. After one near-failed mission to Ike this seems like an appropriate next step.  

 

Edited October 11, 2020 by kerboknaut

[Adstri]

1 hour ago, Souptime said:

Holy kerb thats beautiful! Any plans to remake the kerbol system like that and release it as a mod?

That's the plan

[RP1IsSuperior]

Today, the Saline Program kicked off, with the new Molniya launch vehicle, which can put 4.2 tons into LKO. It's another K-8 based design, but it works.(I usually don't name my rockets after real life stuff, but I had to, Molniya means "lightning"  in russian, and even with max payload, at full thrust it has a liftoff twr of 2.15, blazing! Ironically it's the upper stage that limits the design, which I find odd because now I have the terrier, nearly 3x the thrust of the spacely used on the original K-8  design.) Saline 1 launched a Saline Zalkier v1 into LKO, and Saline 2 was going to rendezvous with it. Guidance issues ended up leading to an abort, and Jeb and Bob experienced 4gs during their ballistic reentry. Due to limited supplies Valentina also came home early, and the spacecraft was also upgraded to actually have a power supply. Saline 3 carried a Saline Zalkier v1.1 into LKO, with Jeb riding shotgun. He also was the only one...

Saline 4 followed shortly afterward, and for some reason brought Bill instead of Bob. despite both spacecrafts running out of monopropellant in the end, they managed to somewhat do station keeping.

Saline 4 parachuting down, with some celestial body shining brightly in the backround

Photo taken by Jeb during entry interface, as plasma begins to lick the side of the spacecraft.

Kerbodyne's (rebuilt) SCOrbiter spacecraft also launched on a K-8A into a polar orbit (after the first one experienced some issues and crashed into a hillside). After establishing a parking orbit, the second stage boosted it into an elliptical kerbin orbit before the satellite's propulsion system started and pushed it to it's final height. 3 days later a burn to correct inclination was made, and soon after the final burn to circularize at the satellite's apoapsis, to take it from an elliptical orbit to a circular one.

Liftoff of the K-8A Carrying Kerbodyne's SCOrbiter, helping to improve design and function in future spacecraft.

Picture taken from the second stage shortly after fairing seperation

second stage preparing to start and SCOrbiter up towards it's final orbit

Image taken shortly after the spacecraft's propulsion system shut down. You can clearly see kerbin's chilly ice caps. Now that I see this picture, there is a giant monopropellant tank, filled with unusable fuel, after reaction control systems were removed from the design and the primary attitude control system was decided to be the probe core's internal reaction wheels.

Spacecraft in it's final orbit, as the sun sets on another orbital day. The combustion chamber on the thruster is still glowing after the burn.

 

 

Full Imgur Album available here.

https://imgur.com/a/YLitjgm

Oh, and Munus 2 got booted out into an orbit around Kerbol. The Mun could have picked it up and thrown it away, or possibly some other celestial body currently unknown. if that is the case, which is currently unlikely, it would have to have quite a high mass.

[Vezbot]

Today I sent a Saurus VI rocket carrying a rover modified for better Eve atmospheric entry, based off of my previous posts, I brought the center of mass right behind the inflatable heat shield. In fact the amount of weight in ore tanks were about 7-8x heavier than the rover itself, but it was worth it in the end. If I completed this mission successfully I would test another type of rover this time without the extra mass, but another heat shield in the back. 

So the mission started mostly smoothly, with the exception of the whole craft shaking back and forth about 5 degrees, then I successfully put the craft into orbit. I realized I don't have enough fuel to make the trip to Eve, (the rover weighed only 4 tons, with the CoM ore tanks attached and various other similarly sized parts, it weighed 30 tons. I sent up a Saurus VI rocket carrying an older version of my nuclear ion powered RADKOR flyer that had about 9k delta V without docking to anything. I sent it up to rendevous with the rocket/eve rover, and it docked. But due to the weight of the whole craft, the delta V for the ion flyer went from 9k to 500 m/s. The burn also was extremely intermittent and slow, so I undocked the flyer and used the rocket fuel to bring the orbit to 2-3 million meters above Kerbin. I sent another Saurus VI rocket with a claw to rendevous with the craft and refilled the fuel tanks, giving the rocket an extra 1500 m/s, and I only needed 1100 m/s to make the burn. 

So I made the manuever and did the burn but the craft wasn't as stable (very wobbly actually) as I thought, I did the burn at 33% thrust instead. I ended up having to correct the orbit because it wasn't the one that was in the manuever and I finished the burn with 75 m/s to spare. I knew it would be infeasible to get the orbit right in Eve's SOI after the craft travels 75% of the distance there so I spent about 30 m/s to lower the orbit to about 62 km right after I left Kerbin's SOI, 28 km below the top of Eve's atmosphere, enough to get a capture with a 450 km apoapsis. 

Before I went through the atmosphere to try and get a capture, I undocked the rover from the rocket in the retrograde direction, speeding up the rocket speed by 2 m/s and slowing the rovers by 2 m/s (every delta V counts!). I had the pilot kerbal climb out of the capsule and sit in one of the rover seats (the whole rover is guarded by the heat shield up to an angle of 40 degrees from the prograde direction, so having the heat shield stay within 40 degrees of prograde in all directions is crucial to keep the rover intact and not exposed to Eve's atmosphere. So the rocket and craft made their descent into the atmosphere, I kept control of the rover by pointing the joystick up, which pilots the heat shield towards prograde as I heard the rocket that was undocked explode in the background. The capture was successful and I prepared to make another descent, not from 4700 m/s but 3200 m/s, so I did a ballistic trajectory around the planet before sinking into the atmosphere again, below 70 km the heat shield was pitching upwards at 10 degrees from prograde (good thing I have the center of mass directly behind the heat shield or it would be flipped over.), soon enough the rover was travelling below 3 km/s and below 60 km but the rover was pitching up to 20 degrees, finally at 48 km and 2000 m/s, I guess it was max Q for the descent, the rover pitched upwards at 33 degrees from prograde, dangerously close to exposing parts of the rover but the craft slowed down enough. At 44 km, the craft was travelling below 500 m/s and I decided to open the drogue chute, so the rover always remains above the extremely heavy heat shield. At 10 km above the surface Im travelling 100 m/s so I decouple the heat shield. The rover falls faster than the heat shield and hits it before going below it, but no parts are damaged luckily. I open the rest of the parachutes at 5 km and the rover is at an upright position and floats gently to the ground. I hear the heat shield explode at about 2 km above the ground, but fortunately it's not directly below me, where I will be landing. The rover is floating down at a speed of 9 m/s, and once it lands, nothing explodes but the front wheels are damaged. There is a nearby craft stuck on the surface with an engineer kerbal and now I'm walking the kerbal 25 km to repair the rover wheels.

Sometimes these missions can be a huge hassle lol.

Eve descent

Floating down!

Virfrod Kerman enjoying the the view.

 

[Grogs]

I rescued a couple more kerbals for the space program today, including Doodmon Kerman. I think at some point I'll have to have a mission with Doodmon, Doodbro, and Billy-Bobmund Kerman just for the laughs.

 

My Atlas XL asteroid catcher latched onto a Class A asteroid. At only 5.7 tons they mined it dry in less than a minute. The husk was put into a highly elliptical orbit around Kerbin to fulfill a contract and then abandoned. I think the crew have been in that cockpit for about 120 days now so I'll send them back to Kerbin for some R&R and counseling.

 

I took the Winterlance up for a flight to return a kerbal to KSC and almost managed to land on the runway.

 

Almost. The plane skidded off the runway and nearly collided with those tanks in the background, but hit a berm first and jumped over them. Except for the loss of the docking port and some cleaning of the seats it was intact.

 

And finally, I launched the Duna Explorer which consists of the lander, a station, and a transfer stage/fuel tanker.

Spoiler

The Duna Explorer refueled at KEO Station and is now awaiting the launch window to depart for Duna in a couple of days.

[Popestar]

I've spent the last couple of days frustrated and not really understanding what I'm doing wrong, so this morning I fired up KSP and took a good look around my career to see what I was doing.  And I realized that I was trying to push to do everything...without having a solid plan of what I should be aiming for.  I therefore started a new career, and I'm going to go slow.  Got the first couple of missions out of the way, and I've got a bunch of science to spend.  I want to get to the Mun, but I want to do it right.  So I'm now aiming for all the unmanned technology to send probes to get things right before I send Valentina up there.

[RP1IsSuperior]

28 minutes ago, Popestar said:

I've spent the last couple of days frustrated and not really understanding what I'm doing wrong, so this morning I fired up KSP and took a good look around my career to see what I was doing.  And I realized that I was trying to push to do everything...without having a solid plan of what I should be aiming for.  I therefore started a new career, and I'm going to go slow.  Got the first couple of missions out of the way, and I've got a bunch of science to spend.  I want to get to the Mun, but I want to do it right.  So I'm now aiming for all the unmanned technology to send probes to get things right before I send Valentina up there.

A fledgling agency's first goal should be the moon, but there are a lot of small steps to take. My personal strategy in career is spend agressively and make science, it is risky and I would recommend you taking it a bit slower. The first building to upgrade is mission control, then you can accept multiple contracts at a time and get a good chunk of money to do things. I recommend getting to know DeltaV maps, they will be your best friend.

[Lewie]

Didn’t do much, just did a couple relay contracts. Such an easy way to make a decent bit of cash. Also sent a small prove to Eve for a world’s first.  After opening the chutes...even on x10 physwarp, it takes a loooong time to descend. Little word of advice-never, NEVER open your chutes on x10 timewarp. I promptly got yeeted put of the kerbol system at a comfortable 8,675 gees and a speedy 857,856,7463 m/s. Yikes...

Thank goodness for f5 and f9!

Edited October 10, 2020 by Lewie

[jimmymcgoochie]

Quite a few part tests for contracts, with a couple of parts actually used on some real crafts first- the Mastodon rocket on a 70 ton launcher (which turned out to be much more expensive than anticipated considering how much of it got recovered) and the Whiplash ramjet on both a flying lab (which crashed on landing due to poor mass balancing- too nose heavy so it didn't pull up) and an SSTO (which also crashed on landing, several times, due to poor mass balancing- this time too tail heavy causing much back-flipping and tail-spinning).

And I fired some small missiles at the Mun and Minmus to get deployed seismic science data from them; impacting at 6km/s really racks up the numbers even when the impact wasn't that close to the sensor and the sensor setup is poor (35% due to low skilled scientist deploying them a while ago).

I also attempted a laughably ambitious aerobraking at Eve, resulting in many parts going boom due to excessive heat or G-forces, however the game then crashed so I can try again for free.

[RealKerbal3x]

I did some work on designing my Jool probe that will launch in around 30 days (ingame time).

The design of the main bus - designed to fly by every Joolian moon and deposit a lander on them - shouldn't be a problem, but the compact landers are proving to be very annoying.

• I plan for the Laythe and Jool entry probes to share a common design, but the Laythe landing is a challenge. The Laythe probe will most likely come down in the ocean, so it needs to be able to float upright - but the designs I've tested either float on their side or sink. Maybe adding an empty Oscar-B tank to them will help.
• The Tylo lander seems to be fine, but it's significantly heavier than all of the other probes, so I'm going to need to figure out how to balance them on the main bus. 
• I'm concerned about power storage and generation on all of the landers. They all have 500 electric charge, but I'm not sure it'll be enough to transmit a experiment result back in one go. They're also using deployable solar panels, which take quite a while to charge the batteries out at Jool. Using RTGs would be ideal, but they're heavy and expensive.

I don't have much time to play KSP each week anymore, but at least ingame time only passes while I'm playing

[N_Danger]

I sent a biome scanning probe to Minmus.

Then it was time for a Minmus orbiter Mission. Val and Bob go zooming off.

Spoiler

We have booster separation. 

And an eventful trans Minmus burn. I fat fingered things and needed a 127 m/s mid course correction.

But we got there and Val gets the high orbit EVA science.

Bob gathers the low orbit EVA Science. (a lot of it in fact. Many biomes to pass over.)

The trans Kerbin burn was more successful than the trans Minmus burn, thankfully, so I had an uneventful return.

And re-entry is nominal. 

 

 

Another mission in the bag. Now I have to think if I want to do an interplanetary prober first or do a Mun landing first.

 

[Servo]

I finally finished my SR-71 + video! Take a ride with the king of speed today

https://kerbalx.com/servo/Lockheed-SR-71-Blackbird

[AlamoVampire]

@Servo awesome! Truly awesome!

 

174710102020

Edited October 10, 2020 by AlamoVampire

[Delta dart]

I took the wings off an f-104 and made it a rover and then drove it up a mountain.

[Delta dart]

3 hours ago, N_Danger said:

And re-entry is nominal. 

*norminal

[Guest]

2 days after releasing the video it has quite a few likes, a mention by Stratzenblitz in a stream, AND I generally liked it. This is officially one of my most favorite videos yet. It was well done and I absolutely love it. My next KSP video will be remaking Polus in KSP so stay tuned for that.

here was the video if you missed it:

Spoiler

 

 

Edited October 11, 2020 by Guest

[Vezbot]

I made a poor kerbal swim 20 km through a sea of Explodium on Eve and then walk 40 km to a rover to fix it's wheels and join the expedition. I put something against the left joystick went to sleep and left the game on overnight, and 2x phys warp was the fastest stable warp when making the kerbal swim.

Swimming in liquid fuel heated to 150 C in an astronaut suit while the only thing keeping it from combusting is the lack of breathable air is something I wouldn't recommend doing. Don't bring your kerbals the suffering I brought mine and make sure to bring an engineer when going on a mission. 

Edited October 11, 2020 by Vezbot
Unfinished typing

[RP1IsSuperior]

3 hours ago, Vezbot said:

I made a poor kerbal swim 20 km through a sea of Explodium on Eve and then walk 40 km to a rover to fix it's wheels and join the expedition. I put something against the left joystick went to sleep and left the game on overnight, and 2x phys warp was the fastest stable warp when making the kerbal swim.

Swimming in liquid fuel heated to 150 C in an astronaut suit while the only thing keeping it from combusting is the lack of breathable air is something I wouldn't recommend doing. Don't bring your kerbals the suffering I brought mine and make sure to bring an engineer when going on a mission. 

and don't forget eve gravity is 1.7g

so its very difficult to walk a few meters

[AlamoVampire]

4 hours ago, Vezbot said:

I made a poor kerbal swim 20 km through a sea of Explodium on Eve and then walk 40 km to a rover to fix it's wheels and join the expedition. I put something against the left joystick went to sleep and left the game on overnight, and 2x phys warp was the fastest stable warp when making the kerbal swim.

Swimming in liquid fuel heated to 150 C in an astronaut suit while the only thing keeping it from combusting is the lack of breathable air is something I wouldn't recommend doing. Don't bring your kerbals the suffering I brought mine and make sure to bring an engineer when going on a mission. 

that has got to be a really built kerbal at this point! Just goes to show how robust our favorite green guys and gals are!

 

232510102020

[kerboknaut]

Some of the Kerbals at Experiential Knowledge are hard at work developing something new and top secret. Let's just say there are some older satellites that are due for replacement, with extreme prejudice.

Val and Bill were brought back from the asteroid mining station and sent back up with a new science module for the upcoming expedition which should now be ready to make its first trip / final test to Minmus. 

[Vezbot]

8 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

that has got to be a really built kerbal at this point! Just goes to show how robust our favorite green guys and gals are!

 

232510102020

Hopefully the suit had good insulation for the kerbal to swim, otherwise it was probably similar to being slow cooked in a crockpot.

[Popestar]

KERBARAGUA SPACE AGENCY MEMORANDUM

In Re:  Mission File 01

Vessel:  Unnamed...Spaceship?  UFO?  Non-planetary, non-orbiting seat on an engine?

Time:  Year 1, Day 1, 1 hour

To:  President Manuel Kerman

Mr. President, I hope that today finds you happy and well.  We have some exciting news to share with you, and we trust that our efforts here at the KSA are bearing the fruit you had in mind when you requested this agency be born.

As you are aware, we had to reboot the entire program.  A few of the hamsters we had generating our electricity got out of their cages, and it took some time to find them all and get them back home.  While the power was out, we lost most of our data and research notes, and we've had to start from scratch.  It's not that the computers lost the data; no, we would have had to actually have the data on the hard drives for that to happen.  No, see, when the hamsters got out and we lost power, we had to light candles to see.  And fire + sticky notes = loss of data.  We told Bob to write things down in triplicate, but he ran out of sticky notes to write things down on.

Anyhow, we were able to satisfy a couple of the contracts you sent us, most notably testing the Hammer at the launch site and having the Mk16 parachute with us in flight.  The details were a bit sketchy, so we made the assumption you wanted us to actually connect the parachute to the Mk1 pod and not just carry it up there with us.  It's a good thing we did that, as we needed it to slow the descent of the pod.  Poor Valentina would have died otherwise!

Also, we were able to get a shot of some lonely Kerbal out on Mun, even though we haven't gotten there yet.  I don't know how he got there, nor do I know how we were able to take this picture.  But what is that thing behind him?

Sincerely,

Herman Kerman

Director, Kerbaragua Space Agency

Edited October 11, 2020 by Popestar

[N_Danger]

I sent out my first interplanetary probe in this play through to Eve.

Spoiler

I got my first good gravity turn in JNSQ. I only needed 20 m/s to circularize.

And then I kind of botched the Eve transfer burn. I had a 500 m/s course correction to make 80 days in.

But I did get to Eve. I'm getting the high orbit science here.

Out of fuel and not in the orbit I wanted but in orbit none the less.