What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Kerb24]

58 minutes ago, Axelord FTW said:

When you have issues like that, I think it's perfectly acceptable to 'cheat' your way through whatever nonsensical issue KSP is throwing at you. Ladders is one of the things the game handle very poorly as it is.

I tried to, but I literally couldn't get Jeb back in the lander without everything breaking, so I have to do it without cheats.

[Axelord FTW]

Turning the gravity ridiculously low wasn't enough to just RCS-pack your way to the hatch?

[BuranAce]

After many Pepsis, Pringles and mental breakdowns. I docked my shuttle to a space station me and @Kadermonkey made!

[Space Pie]

I am attempting to recreate the DART mission, complete with a landable Falcon 9.

[Hotel26]

A pleasant morning spent with the URF [Underwater Research Facility], a concept vehicle.  [click + arrows = slideshow]

  

33 krew + 3000LF / 200 OX; undercover parking at each end for submersibles; plus a 30 min parking zone on the conning tower.  Kerbals are able to 'swim' to and from parked vehicles, without zooming for the surface as long as they remain under the "verandah" or closed bay doors.

Edited December 5, 2021 by Hotel26

[Krazy1]

Welcome @Space Pie So will the probe hit an asteroid at 6.6 km/s ??? That would be very difficult but impressive.  I remember Scott Manley made a video where he tried to crash 2 ships together in LKO, going opposite directions. It took many attempts.

[Axelord FTW]

Asteroids can be big enough that physic 'steps' in-game shouldn't let you skip through.

[jimmymcgoochie]

 

9 hours ago, TheSaint said:

Nope. The problem is that one of the stations is corrupted. So the save works great, until I switch to that station, and then the game crashes. And it has apparently been corrupt for some time, because all the quicksaves, the FMRS saves, the KAC saves, they all have it. By the time I get back to one of my backup saves where it isn't corrupt, well, as I said, I might as well be thinking about starting over. Apparently I haven't been as diligent about making backup saves as I should have been. Another lesson learned I can apply when I start over.

Delete the corrupted station, then tweak the save file to resurrect any crew that were previously on board.

[Alien21]

12 hours ago, Krazy1 said:

Nice. You can get a lot of science if you can keep it loaded with experiments. Just some pointers here... I don't see enough batteries and solar panels. It will be night (in Mun shadow) roughly 20 minutes, 1200 s... x 5 EC/s ~= 6000 EC needed to keep processing science. That's a lot in early career. You can stuff a lot of 400 EC batteries in a 2.5 m service bay. For the panels, you'll need roughly 10 EC/s to recharge the batteries and power the lab in the daytime (5 EC for the lab, 5 EC to recharge before night comes). That's at least 6 of the 1x6 panels. And once a month (about 6 days) you could have a Mun night followed by Kerbin eclipse, so that would needed even more EC and panels. 

Just trying to help...  it autosaves to "persistent" every few minutes. So if you mess up and quickly reload before it autosaves again, you should be able to go back and try again. If you use KAC I believe by default it will create a save when you "jump to ship". Those filenames start with a "z".  If the save file's corrupted I'd consider spending some time with KML to fix it. It has a few built in error checks that might help. 

Is something that I had considered. Luckly the target for this mission was another, just send the module. Certainly I will add some batteries, just to be sure. I have already build a "new generation" of rocket, which could send also some cargo components in addition to Kerbalnauts. Probably I will add also some other living area's in the future, which will allow to receive more energy with some batteries integrated.

 

 

Anyway, also if I do this yesterday, I reached Moho for the first time with a complete orbit around the planet!

[Kapitalizing Every Word]

Today i started desigining a new space station to replace my old E.E.S.M. in LKO.
Pictures coming soon

[Kerb24]

15 hours ago, Axelord FTW said:

Turning the gravity ridiculously low wasn't enough to just RCS-pack your way to the hatch?

When I turned gravity back up, the landing legs broke, and the lander fell over.

[Admiral Fluffy]

1 hour ago, Kerb24 said:

When I turned gravity back up, the landing legs broke, and the lander fell over.

Try doing it slowly.

From 0.01 to 1.

[Aerodynamic Kerbal]

Currently, my dad and I are trying to fix the problem. In the meantime though, I successfully designed a spaceplane, inspired by Mike Aben's one (Check him out on YT, his tutorials are 10/10), the boosters are all weird, but they can de-orbit themselves (Matt Lowne style) AND YES! FINALLY! I LANDED AT THE KSC FROM SPACE! (Bill didn't really enjoy the landing with 80m/s, but Jeb sure did!)

 

[Wizard Kerbal]

Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
(Taken after a failed Mountains landing)

2 hours ago, Aerodynamic Kerbal said:

 . . . AND YES! FINALLY! I LANDED AT THE KSC FROM SPACE! (Bill didn't really enjoy the landing with 80m/s, but Jeb sure did!)

80 m/s (180mph/290km/h)? That's soft for my landings!

Edited December 5, 2021 by Wizard Kerbal
Wait I think I found out why I crashed

[TheSaint]

9 hours ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

Delete the corrupted station, then tweak the save file to resurrect any crew that were previously on board.

At which point, I might as well just start over again. Already archived the save and started replanning things.

[Aerodynamic Kerbal]

Ok so here are some shuttle pics:

Everybody: RIP to my old save, my space station and probably all of my crafts

 

Edited December 5, 2021 by Aerodynamic Kerbal

[Aerodynamic Kerbal]

Ok, so another thing I made is launch two space station modules: a core with a beautiful cupola look at Kerbin and a... normal module. In honour of my old space station Eye to the sky, this one is called Eye to the sky 2! (My father thought of the name Eye to the sky)

[eddiew]

Noodling around, wondering exactly how much work is involved in making patch files for MK1, 2 and 3 parts such that a stock spaceplane can survive ascent and re-entry in JNSQ without heating changes.

Started with mk1; the cockpit is the biggie. 2000 skin temp and 1500 (core?) temp limits are just too low for handling mach 12 in any kind of atmosphere. After a little experimentation, bumped those up to 2400 (less than stock mk3) and 1700 (200 more than stock mk3). I thought I was also increasing the skin temps of the mk1 LF tank and rapier... but they don't actually seem to have skin temps by default. Since their max (core?) temp is 2000, this seems completely fine. I'll remove my configured skin temps (2400) and test again. Max temps on landing gear raised from 2700 to 2900 - though I'm not sure this was necessary.

The dry masses of these parts have been increased by 10%, which hasn't helped an SSTO who's delta-v was already struggling, but it is possible to get my previously-posted Hotwings airframe to orbit with about 380m/s remaining. The flight profile changes a bit; stays low off the runway, builds speed to about 200m/s, aims at 5 degrees and basically holds it all the way. The under-wing shrimp SRBs kick in about 20km, shortly followed by the nervas. Kicking off the shrimps, TWR drops to about 0.8, which results in a slight altitude dip around 40km, but eventually the forward velocity starts to carry the ground away faster than Hotwings is falling, and eventually it ends up orbital within the atmosphere. It does get hot, but with the new settings, nothing explodes.

For re-entry, it goes with a solid 30-40 degree AoA, which seems to de-focus the heat from the cockpit and allows it to dump speed really quickly, such that by 30km it's well within its thermal comfort zone. I got the landing coords horribly wrong, but that's another issue and I don't need to address it right now.

But now I'm pondering just how close the stock mk3 I built is to handling the heating of JNSQ... it might only be a couple of hundred degrees short. One to experiment with 

[N_Danger]

 New scanning tech, New contacts to fulfil. This one for Gael.

 

[AtomicTech]

Watched a small space station slowly roll as it orbited Kerbin. 

No visual mods, just the stock visuals.

It was beautiful.

[jimmymcgoochie]

After “finalising” my geostationary rocket designs yesterday, I went back and looked again- and made a few changes. New second stage engine offers better performance at a lower cost, but also has a pretty significant reliability issue that could cause problems for early launches until it gets enough data units and the failure chance decreases.

[munman19]

Kirrim did some sick flips, which is surprisingly fitting for his character. Here he is mid-flip:

 

and you may notice the arch in the background:

 

The two dots are kerbals.

[Axelord FTW]

Waiting for a solution for a problem* I have with Principia, I've been continuing the career without it for now. First, a random vid recommendation on youtube reminded me of the Netherdyne Mass Driver mod, which I thought could pair very nicely with Extraplanetary Launchpads. Some testing in sandbox showed it can be useful (i.e. no need to have SRBs for the initial liftoff to keep the installations from getting charred by atomic and other exotic engines). The specifics of those tests, however, are a reminder that quicksaving is ALWAYS a good idea. 

But, since I'm not there yet technologically speaking, I've been doing contracts and progressing. I also decided to not abuse research labs this time too. Previous career I effectively completed the tech tree (CTT) after only vising four worlds, Kerbin included. Will obviously bring a lab along if I go interstellar, but that's still far off in the future.

Scatterer gave me an orange Mun, which is nice. 

[Cloakedwand72]

I built a BFR 2017 clone.  That actually works!

[eddiew]

Figured I'd give my Hotwings 4-ST SSTO for JNSQ a try at 100% re-entry heating to see what explodes and needs patching.

All parts in use are currently set to stock thermal tolerance. The rapiers are accidentally 10% heavier because I forgot to comment that out when resetting their thermals, so that added about 1.6 tons to the overall mass, but that's only about 1% of launch weight so no biggie.

Same old flight profile on the ascent. With flaps deployed, Hotwings 4-ST will unstick before the end of the runway. Fly flattish up to ~250m/s, at which point drop the flaps and begin a gentle 5-10 degree climb to 6km. At this point the rapiers are hitting their power band and push transonic. Don't worry too much about maxing out on rapiers, 200m/s here or there disappears into the overall delta-v requirements under JNSQ and this vessel usually hits LKO with 700m/s spare. Kick the nervas and vector engines around 18-20km. By this point the nose has probably risen to about 10 degrees above the horizon; let it continue to rise during the rocket burn and by the time the oxidiser runs out the AP should be past 60km and even the tiny LV-N thrust is adequate to go the rest of the way. Altitude is important for both thermals and drag reasons, the nervas can't fight the atmosphere at 40km.

(And yes I do tend to fine control vessel pitch by adjusting the deployment on the canards; it leads to a lot less jumpy behaviour and doesn't get into the control wobble state where you have to wrestle the stick all the way up. Most of the ascent is hands off.)

Deploys a relay satellite in LKO as usual before preparing for a descent approximately 90 degrees around the planet from KSC, setting a point of impact somewhat west of the runway. (I find these much easier to judge than long shallow glides.)

Roughly the same 30 degree AoA as the actual space shuttle feels good. All flaps deployed and a pair of 2.5m SAS units seem capable of holding it as long as you don't manually fiddle the controls. (Seriously don't fiddle the controls. I'm never sure whether this is an oddity of KSP or something I don't understand about aerodynamics, but if you touch that pitch, it's going to drop the nose real hard and you'll be jockeying it the rest of the way down. Leave it alone and it's fine.)

Anyway, let's see where the hot spots are. The quad couplers are currently the scariest red, with some deep orange thermals across other components. Ok, so maybe the previous rapier patch would be good, and a similar touch for the cockpit might be nice.

Wait a moment... 

What do you mean it's cooling down and nothing blew up yet?

Ok, so it does get very, very close to the quad couplers' thermal limits; I guess they're a bit blunt and they stick out into the airstream under the vessel, so they're taking a beating - but they just barely held together. I might patch them just a bit more mass+tolerance, because that wouldn't feel deeply cheaty to me. You can't tell me those are solid blocks of steel and couldn't be made a bit sturdier.

I did whiff the landing a little, but it's on the runway with all crew present and that's good enough. I'm sure we can get back to using the KSC just as soon as the radiation from the exploded nerva clears up. (Side note; I might put some landing gear under the nacelles to prevent this happening. Not sure if it's wing flex or that I'm misjudging how close the rapiers are getting to the tarmac, but it's happened a lot with this airframe.)

But anyway, er... stock mk3 SSTO for JNSQ. An accidental success story.