What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Pipcard]

[JAXA+] 2033-04-13 - The Earth Departure Stages of the Kagutsuchi Mars Transport Vehicle ignite their engines

Edited June 15, 2022 by Pipcard

[MythicalHeFF]

Made a pretty decent Eve lander, "Waluigi", one that can (or, rather, will, because the design shown here was literally 20 m/s short of orbit, probably just need to fine tune ascent profile) return to orbit from sea level for my as-of-now ongoing circumnavigation mission. I thought about using rotors to make the ascent easier, but I decided that'd be a little cheap. In total, it has a mass of about 220 tons fully-fueled, and just over 8,000 m/s of delta-V.

The reason I like this lander so much is that it has a custom ladder design: instead of having the kerbals climb on the outside of the ship all the way up to the service bay cockpit, they instead climb to an "airlock" in a tube. Once a kerbal reaches the top, they can board one of the three command seats in the service bay. To get into the tube, they exit from a lander can at the bottom, which can be transferred to from one of the exterior command pods.

Getting it to Eve was.. laggy, as the lauch vehicle had several hundred parts, with the lander itself having well over 300.

Edited June 16, 2022 by Jack Joseph Kerman

[Cavscout74]

Started experimenting with a reusable booster in my 1.8 career.  Long ago, I had a  pretty nice one that became the workhorse of my space program till one day I had 10 boosters in orbit waiting to land after getting ready for a Jool mission.  After landing all 10 (including 4 or 5 that made a nice row on the runway), I was over it.   This was an attempt to rebuild that old booster and see if it still worked.

Launch went nicely, with just a Mk 1-3 pod, orbital stage, a drone core and a load of ore for extra mass.  No kerbals were used in the testing of this rocket.

After attaining a 125km orbit, the pod was staged away and brought in for it's own landing.  Then it was time to land the booster.  Unfortunately, partway through reentry I thought I was going to badly overshoot KSC and made an extra burn to prevent that.  I was actually looking at the wrong landmass, and ended up severely undershooting KSC & landing in the ocean.  Four or five pieces of debris were recovered, not including the expensive Vectors or the drone core.

 

 

[Pipcard]

[JAXA+] 2033-10-26 - The Kagutsuchi Mars Transport Vehicle enters Mars orbit

[Fenris]

I really feel like this shouldn't have worked. I was thinking of putting an unmanned rover that could later be manned on the Mun. Just clowning around in the VAB and came up with this. I was like "there is no way this will work", but gave it a shot anyway, fully expecting it to go wildly out of control in the atmosphere and be a mission write off. But it was unmanned so I went for it.

Selfie time

Landing stuff. Turns out that I waited for the landing spot to be facing the sun but forgot to take into account Kerbin's shadow, so the pics are a bit dark.

The plan, if it worked, was to take the landing vehicle back up into near orbit then crash it down into the Mun (or perhaps deorbit it into Kebin, it had a lot of left over delta v), but someone forgot to put any batteries or solar panels on that part .... so I guess it stays as a monument to stupidity.

And off to do some science.

Edited June 17, 2022 by Fenris

[MythicalHeFF]

I went base jumping on Eve, and it went about as well as you would expect.

 

 

[Cavscout74]

My Dres mission got underway in my 1.8 career.  A small orbital station, two surface bases, a rover, a lander and the EV-2 Babylon.  The only pics worthwhile were bringing the crew up in a Lightning spaceplane:

Landing the spaceplane back at KSC might have been the absolute best reentry and landing I've ever done.  Once I did the deorbit burn with the NERV, I never touched the engines, and required no extreme maneuvers to shed altitude or airspeed.  Ended up on a 090 heading <1km north of the runway once I was in visual range, so I had to do a little S-turn to line up, and was just a little high, so I popped my drag chutes early and came to a stop just past the SPH turn-off.

I also realized there was an old contract to scan a tree on Kerbin with the large scan arm, so I sent a pair of experienced Kerbals out with the old prototype of the Duna rover to find one to scan.  Started just before dawn

And found one just 11km away

[Phildan Kerman]

i tested my thrust exploit missile

 

it failed miserably.

[adsii1970]

1 hour ago, Phildan Kerman said:

i tested my thrust exploit missile

it failed miserably.

Ha, this is the story of how many of my KSP missions go!

[Kerbal Productions]

Today (okay, I lied, yesterday, but I'm busy today so lemme show what I did), I made a weird rocket to test a "secret device" by the Kerbal Association

Introducing "Absurd Craft!"

I'm telling you, it works just how it should!

The secret device creates a shield around its vicinity... trapping the SRBs. Or maybe stubborn kerbals trying to escape

 

[Mister_Spaceman]

Today, I realized that my HDD is failing. So I’ve taken the first steps in upgrading my PC by buying a new HDD as well as an SSD. Once they arrive, I’ll hopefully be able to migrate my OS to a smaller SSD I have lying around, and keep KSP on the big one for faster load times and maybe better performance.

I did manage to finish a Minmar flyby mission, as well as a survey flight while that was en route. A Minmus orbital mission was launched soon after, and inspection flights performed to open up commercial flights to the island airfield. All but 2 of the 90  and 4 of the 160 nodes have been researched. 

[SingABrightSong]

Today I've been preparing a new installation of KSP after having had to reformat my SSD due to unrecoverable encryption. I was about to install my preferred tech tree mod, sunnypunny's TechTreeAddons, only to find they had, while I was busy reinstalling everything(addendum: i.e. within the past six hours), zeroed it out from SpaceDock and GitHub entirely. If you're so eager to prevent people from using your mods, so be it, but now I'm in a dour mood and am in need of a new stocklike tech tree.

Edited June 18, 2022 by SingABrightSong
Addendum

[Hotel26]

Drosophila or Fruit Fly.

Very annoying.  [I detest solo-kerbal airplanes, unless perhaps they're hypersonic.]

M 0.95 @ 8.8km, so far.

Edited June 18, 2022 by Hotel26

[SingABrightSong]

55 minutes ago, Hotel26 said:

Drosophila or Fruit Fly.

Very annoying.  [I detest solo-kerbal airplanes, unless perhaps they're hypersonic.]

M 0.95 @ 8.8km, so far.

I do like how you put the engine on the NCS Adapter, very smol. Reminds me of my own "Tesladyne" 1-aerospike SSTO

[Hotel26]

34 minutes ago, SingABrightSong said:

very smol

Well, thank you.

The big problem with this little insect is that the only fuel it has is way aft in that NCS Adapter.

I did just fly it to Gilligans, changed course to the Cape (42W) and from there back to KSC, though, and that is not a bad effort.

[ColdJ]

11 hours ago, Mister_Spaceman said:

Today, I realized that my HDD is failing. So I’ve taken the first steps in upgrading my PC by buying a new HDD as well as an SSD. Once they arrive, I’ll hopefully be able to migrate my OS to a smaller SSD I have lying around, and keep KSP on the big one for faster load times and maybe better performance.

I did manage to finish a Minmar flyby mission, as well as a survey flight while that was en route. A Minmus orbital mission was launched soon after, and inspection flights performed to open up commercial flights to the island airfield. All but 2 of the 90  and 4 of the 160 nodes have been researched. 

Make sure your power supply isn't failing too as it can cause the damage that makes your HDD seem to be failing.

[swjr-swis]

Lampirydae, a.k.a. Firefly.

Spoiler

Very enlightening. (I love small one-seater jets, especially when supersonic.)

Cruise mach 1.65 @ 13 km, with more than enough fuel to land anywhere on Kerbin and return.

 

Edited June 18, 2022 by swjr-swis
craft link

[N_Danger]

I shifted my Duna Probe over to Ike after finishing the biome mapping.

Arrival at Ike

And on station mapping Ike's biomes.

[Kerb24]

Today I learned that a vessel that is targeting a docking port will continue targeting the docking port even if the docking port is moved using EVA construction.

[BadOaks]

Today's exploits consist of a tale of two rovers. My first round of Mun probes was before I'd unlocked seismometers and gravioli detectors, so I launched a small robotic rover to the Mun to clean up those science points. The Zephyr VII launch vehicle used for the mission was vaguely inspired by the Atlas V 500 series.

Skycrane touchdown.

Mun Rover 1 on the surface.

Unfortunately the scanning arm requires 500 points of electricity to run, and since the rover uses a hydrogen fuel cell to supplement the solar panels I hadn't given it more than 320 electrical storage in batteries. The good news is that I had a Mun landing stack built and ready to go, and hadn't yet done a manned landing in the biome where the rover was. So: rescue mission!

Endurance 3 approaching the Mun.

Endurance 3 braked into an elliptical polar orbit, and Bob and Jovey took the lander down to the surface. Jovey then took the lander's MRV out to the distressed Mun Rover 1. 

Jovey's Moonside Assistance and Auto Repair. She took a couple of batteries off the MRV and attached them to Mun Rover 1 with a healthy amount of space tape. It's like duck tape, but there aren't a lot of ducks in space. Sometimes you see ducts which have their own kind of tape, but they're rare, so space tape is what you want to use.

Anyways, the extra batteries worked great and Mun Rover 1 was back to doing science.

Jovey overlooking the landing site from a nearby mountain with Kerbin and Minmus overhead. I had her make the 7 km detour to collect Highlands science before heading back.

[Pipcard]

[JAXA+] 2033-10-29 - The Kagutsuchi Mars Ascent Vehicle lands 10 km from the Habitation Module and Mars Cruiser rover that landed two years earlier. Takeyoshi Homura, Makoto Watanuki, and Akane Furukawa (right to left) become the first Japanese astronauts on Mars.

 

 

Edited June 19, 2022 by Pipcard

[Krazy1]

I played with some small xenon probes today. First was to recover a probe from Moho. It entered Kerbin's atmosphere at 6500 m/s. Toasty...

Second attempt didn't work either... I tried a 4+ km/s burn at PE of 200 km but it was too close to finish the last 30%... it curved around into Kerbin's shadow... no EC.  Third try worked^TM the initial PE was at 400 km and I still couldn't circularize... PE dropped too far below the surface. But by total luck I got a Mun encounter at AP that pushed PE out of the atmosphere for free but at 60 deg inclination. Then did a small PE burn to get the right final orbit time to land near KSC (using Trajectories mod). Recovered 2154 science from gravity scans only, which I'm converting 100% to reputation: 44.6 points BUT that's on an exponential curve, so I actually went from 957.779 rep to... 958.108 rep. Wow. Scientists get no respect! 

Then I did another long xenon burn to finish a contract to put a probe in a specific 165 deg inclined orbit of the sun. That's backwards from the planets. I still had 7.5 km/s dV left... so what to do? Put it into a reverse orbit of Dres and smash into it at 10+ km/s. Jeb approves. He'll be waiting on Dres with the popcorn. 

 

Edited June 19, 2022 by Krazy1

[Hotel26]

Building a new military airbase on Canary Island (21/125 SW) but the environmental impact study required our engineering team to limit the base footprint ("some kind of blasted civilian penguin...").

The design team is pioneering a computer-generated decal technique to auto-map decals of the specified size, aligned in the appropriate direction and spacing to sit flush with a 1,700m runway.

Hand-generated at the moment (4 decals shown with 5 required in total), but will be Config file edited numerically at close of design.  [click + arrow = slideshow]

       

Autonomous earthmovers, yea.

Edited June 19, 2022 by Hotel26

[N_Danger]

A probe was launched to Eve.

And into orbit.

The mission was a partial success. I was cavalier about the transfer window and ended up running out of delta vee before getting into a good scanning orbit. I should get most of the surface scanned.

[GDJ]