What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Scarecrow71]

Over the course of the last 3 days, I started and finished a Caveman Challenge on Normal difficulty.

 

[Fraktal]

Was trying to launch a rover to Gilly, but the left-side wheels kept breaking when I popped the fairing in LKO, even if the rocket hadn't even left the ground yet. Widened the fairing a bit eventually, that seemed to do the trick.

[magnemoe]

Learning that KSP has plastic deformations and then replacing my mobile munbase.

It has to be able to move over ground. 

[Randazzo]

Got started on the next big project!

[RevanX_LSR]

And then there should be an Alhena series!

[Hotel26]

This is Pizzicato Due, cleared for take-off on KSC R9, Group Captain R. Kerman and Flight Lieutenant K. Kerman at the controls.  Kerman will take the lead, acting as combat instructor.

[Click + arrows = slideshow]

 

Kurt's job is to regain and maintain formation once 5km altitude has been attained.

 

Quite hard work really...

 

Pretty close now!  Hands sweating inside the gloves making the controls a little bit slippery.

Kurt made a little discovery during the flight.  Setting his Atmospheric Autopilot to 200 knots, heading 090 and 5km altitude made things a lot easier.  And, si, Atmospheric Autopilot is most happy to run two instances airplanes simultaneously.

(I'd been thinking about aircraft carriers all day and wondered what the point of them is unless you can launch a whole squadron.  Then, of course, you have to know how to fly them in formation to the target.  Which leads to the little puzzle of how to launch multiple planes...)

(And, yeah, I'm sure there's a mod for it...)

(Half an hour later and I'm having some intense feeling of deja vu, like I've done this some time long ago.     Oh well, "twice the enjoyment".)

Edited January 8, 2022 by Hotel26

[Hyperspace Industries]

My dislike of sstos has only increased, the Jool 5 is now cancelled.

I think I'm going to take a break from ksp for a while, I've played enough for now.

[Krazy1]

17 hours ago, Fraktal said:

Was trying to launch a rover to Gilly, but the left-side wheels kept breaking when I popped the fairing in LKO, even if the rocket hadn't even left the ground yet. Widened the fairing a bit eventually, that seemed to do the trick.

Me too, especially with clamshell deploy, the bottom of the fairing gets pushed forward into the payload 

16 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Learning that KSP has plastic deformations

huh how?

[Scarecrow71]

5 hours ago, Hyperspace Industries said:

I think I'm going to take a break from ksp for a while, I've played enough for now.

[Hyperspace Industries]

28 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Emphasis on "think".

[miklkit]

Did my first ever rescue contract.  Learning how to use MechJeb and got close enough to EVA over.

 

Great.  Imgur isn't working so no screenie.

 

 

 

[Randazzo]

12 hours ago, JNSQFan said:

And then there should be an Alhena series!

I'm gonna put that on the list, thanks for the idea!

[N_Danger]

 A complex mission involving 2 rescues and a docking to complete some contracts. First up a rescue mission.

Spoiler

A 2 place capsule with just a pilot.

 

One rescued kerbal. Then they wait for the next part.

 

A second rescue mission is launched.

 

Poody is going to rescue a kerbal then rendezvous with the first rescue vehicle and attempt a docking.

  

Kerbal rescued!

Docking under way (I was without my usual docking alignment mod so a bit of a challenge remembering the manual way. I also went IVA for the screen shot only)

 

And the first docking for this play through and a contact completed. A crew report radioed back completes another.

And the first rescue vehicle comes home.

 Poody and Katley are the last to land.

 

[RevanX_LSR]

Is that GPP and what is the rescale factor?

[Randazzo]

Made some progress on Project Pegasus - performed some boring analysis and some rather tense proof-of-concept testing.

 

And the teaser:

[eberkain]

Getting back into a groove. 

Edited January 9, 2022 by eberkain

[DerkyJerkyWreaksHavoc]

15 hours ago, Hotel26 said:

This is Pizzicato Due, cleared for take-off on KSC R9, Group Captain R. Kerman and Flight Lieutenant K. Kerman at the controls.  Kerman will take the lead, acting as combat instructor.

[Click + arrows = slideshow]

 

Kurt's job is to regain and maintain formation once 5km altitude has been attained.

 

Quite hard work really...

 

Pretty close now!  Hands sweating inside the gloves making the controls a little bit slippery.

 

(Half an hour later and I'm having some intense feeling of deja vu, like I've done this some time long ago.     Oh well, "twice the enjoyment".)

Holy Cow! love the slideshow. and really impressive mods btw. 

[N_Danger]

4 hours ago, JNSQFan said:

Is that GPP and what is the rescale factor?

Yes it is GPP and I'm using no scaling on this one.

[problemecium]

Today, unable to get into a groove for any big missions, I just poked around at a few things such as how I might set up a Jool relay network:

[TheKSPBeginner]

Made a PSM-capable F-4.

[N_Danger]

I had a contact for a Geo stationary satellite, on a retrograde orbit? Well the customer's money is good.

Spoiler

A heading of 155 degrees gets us close to the target orbit inclination.

Fairing separation.

 

Followed by second stage ignition.

Second stage burn at 80 KM AP to raise AP to the  target orbits PE.

 

And on station. 

 

[Randazzo]

Landed the big boy today after delivering a capsule to orbit - the margins were pretty narrow. By narrow, I mean I ran out of fuel about 10 feet up. It's a miracle it didn't tip over. I will definitely need to trim some weight or find a better flight profile on this one, but it -does- work.

Posted more on Project Pegasus too, if anybody is interested:

 

[eberkain]

First mun probe in JSNQ + Skyhawk 

[Axelord FTW]

Alright, few things yesterday and the day before.

Spoiler

Contract for ChemCam scanning Eve's lowlands. EZPZ

First Joolian inter-system crewed mission. Pol had a few contracts for it already so that was the first pick. It included a rover, and all appropriate surface science stuff. The extra dV was used to get about 60% of the seismic data with the lander stage. Landed near the anomaly, and unlocked some free tech by doing it too! All that done, I lifted the lander stage as a whole before letting it go just short of orbit. The 'ascent' stage rdv'd with the Calypso, docked, transferred crew and data to the science lab, before getting undocked, pointed toward Pol, igniting the engines, and letting go of it. That got me the remaining 40% seismic data.

I also redesigned the power-section of the Frisbee engine stack in Minmus orbit. Swapped out the previous module and went for a pure fission-power plant. No good picture of that, though, but the reactor has enough glowy juice in it now to power up the cooling for the cryogenic tanks and AM tanks containment. The refueling shuttle has also been designed, but I'll wait until the utility+crew module is built and installed. I'm seriously thinking about returning the Calypso from Jool to Kerbin with the whole 5-star crew complement. I'm good on science (like, really pretty much done) and Joolian contracts aren't that profitable. There's enough data in the Calypso's science lab to fund me up nicely, and I've already bounced back to nearly 9 million kosh already. I'll probably complete the contracts I have for Bop and Tylo, and that'll be it.

As for today

Spoiler

Produced, launched, and docked the hab module to the Frisbee engine stack. No pictures of that, though.

Then I produced the LH2 tanker-shuttle and made two trips with it so far. Here it is after the first round-trip. In total, I should need to do about 9 of those.

EDIT: 

Spoiler

Repatriated the crews of the OneFartToOrbit, Sandsail, Unfound and Hyperborea (Gilly, Duna, Dres, and Vall) to Kerbin. The Calypso is still in transit but everyone else has landed.
Glassvein has finished (after what, four years?) making  enough AM to top off the Frisbee's capacity. Over 288000 units in all. All that's left now is to fill it with LH2, get it crewed, and attach one or two Factory starters to it. Then it's Bon Voyage! 

Designed a new Lithium-powered craft to bring everyone (except for the Calypso who just got a Kerbin lander for 13 Kerbals attached). The one that started from Duna also started on top of an SRB, but otherwise kif-kif. The crafts each had over 9000m/s of dV, which allowed for some very aggressive transfers to Kerbin.

 

Edited January 10, 2022 by Axelord FTW

[MythicalHeFF]

I finally finished my circumnavigation of Duna. 

Completing it ironically ended up taking me much longer than it did for me to complete my Tylo circumnavigation a couple of months back, mainly because I simply wasn't nearly as invested in this mission as I was with my previous one; the rover I used, the Fortitude 1, was a much more standard design in comparison to the behemoth that was the Odyssey, and while that allowed for me to actually use time warp, I found myself getting bored much more quickly than before. I guess Duna just isn't that interesting to look at aside from the canyons and mountains. Most of the surface is just a featureless red with endless rolling dunes.

In other news, I also perfected a design that I had been working on for some time now: a submarine that I plan to send to Laythe. Here you can see me testing it after using the cheat menu to teleport it to Laythe. I call it the "Thalassomobile".

Building submarines in KSP is much harder than one would expect it to be. For one, you simply need to make your craft heavy enough to sink in water, which is difficult enough on its own if you don't have a full understanding of how KSP handles buoyancy, which I didn't until I built this craft. It turns out that a part's buoyancy will not be calculated if it is within a cargo bay or fairing, meaning that I ended up cramming a bunch of ore tanks into a few MK2 and MK3 cargo bays with some pretty disgusting amounts of part clipping. 

However, you cannot make your craft too heavy, as this will result in you just sinking to the ocean floor like a rock; instead, you have to find the perfect mass where you will sink, but only just. The fact that the submarine will lose mass as it burns fuel further complicates this. In the end, I came up with a solution: add a small cargo bay to the middle of the craft, and open it to increase buoyancy while the sub is almost fully fueled, and later close it when it's burned some of its fuel. With this solution, I was able to make the submarine have just the right amount of buoyancy to function properly. 

It was then that another problem arose: weight distribution. As it turns out, submarines must have a center of mass almost exactly at the center of the craft itself: even a slight deviation will result in it plowing into the ocean floor either bow first or stern first, depending on which way the center of mass was imbalanced. Through lots of trial and error, I was able to get the center of mass just right for both when the Thalassomobile is fully fueled and when it is empty.

Once I'd gotten everything balanced just right, it was time to test another one of the Thalassomobile's systems: refueling on the ocean floor. I want to give my submarine the logest range possible, and in order to do that, I will need to refuel it periodically. As such, I decided to install mining equipment on it to harvest ore from the ocean floor.

After testing all of the Thalassomobile's systems, it was time to come up with a means of actually getting it to Laythe:

Spoiler

First, however, I had to build a skycrane and parachute assembly. It works like any other skycrane, just scaled up a lot to gently splash down the 470-ton submarine in the ocean.

Setting up the parachutes was a bit of a nuisance, however, as deploying too many at once would cause the whole craft to just tear itself apart, something that I remember constantly having to deal with while making Eve landers. Eventually, I settled on just deploying a single chute initially, then working my way up to more and more parachutes once I'd slowed down enough to deploy them without them tearing my craft apart.

I did end up swapping out the Mainsail engines for Twin-Boars, though, as the Mainsails could only achieve a TWR of 0.7, while with the Twin-Boars I could get a TWR of exactly 1 on Laythe at sea level.

With the skycrane ready to go, I could build the launch vehicle, which ended up weighing over 7 kilotons on the launch pad.

And the subsequent launch went pretty smoothly (ignoring the framerate of course).