What did you do in KSP1 today?

[IncompetentSpacer]

Continued my RP-1 Career.

Today the mission was to achieve Molniya orbit. Spent lot of time burning mono-propellant to get final period time demanded by the contract.

 

Point of this orbit (summary totally not taken from wiki) was for SSSR to solve problem of spending lot of dV launching into geostationary orbit from Baikanur. Another issue this orbit solution was solving was the problem with energy demands on a satellite in geostationary orbit would have to spend transmitting to  SSSR's territories (which for most part are on higher latitudes).

 

Edited July 25, 2022 by IncompetentSpacer

[king of nowhere]

Temporarily paused my current challenge (rss+kerbalism+stock parts grand tour) to make a spinoff challenge: manned landing on the moons of saturn.

in kerbalism, saturn has a very strong radiation belt, manned landings on the inner moons are impossible. well, almost impossible; I calculated that if I carry 7500 tons of radiation shields, it will nullify the radiations. So I set out to do just that.

to further complicate matters, I also decided to not use nuclear engines.

The final ship should be between 50 and 100 thousand tons.

I know from previous experience that I can launch at most 1000 tons in orbit in a single launch; any more than that, and the game crashes. So I designed a ship split into 1000-tons modules.

Today I sent the first one into orbit.

Well, almost.

The first part of Ringrazer is sitting on the launchpad. The module I must launch is a bit over 1000 tons, and I need this 50k ton rocket. It beats my previous record of biggest rocket by 25%

The problem with a rocket this big is lag by part size. Half of that ridiculous part count is the vector engines, because they are the most compact engine, giving high thrust per unit area. They are the only engine I can put underneath the biggest fuel tanks.

The other half is struts and launch stabilizers. Really, it took a few hours just to avoid the rocket crashing under its own weight on the launchpad.

Ignition. A few of the vectors engines explode, but that's accounted for. it doesn't really affect anything.

The titanic rocket lifts off.

The rxhaust from 684 vectors + 25 cougars

First stage separation. The smaller boosters could have detached separately, but I saw I'd only gain 10 m/s by dropping the first, and it was more important to get higher thrust during the first phase of ascent. Indeed, I later realized I should also keep the second stage in place longer.

I'm used still to kerbin, and on real earth I tend to make steeper gravity turns. I then have to compensate. Flying sideways like this causes a lot of drag, but still negligible over the gravity drag. Plus, most of that energy spent on drag is returned as lift anyway.

However, when separating the third stage, the tanks hit the rest of the rocket. the ejection works just fine, if the rocket is flying parallel to the airflow.

Ok, try again, with a better trajectory.

This time the third stage gets detached all right. I also got to squeeze some 50 m/s more from it; I don't know if because of the better trajectory or because I kept the spent second stage for extra thrust for a while.

Dropping the fourth stage too

I am at 2.5 km/s, with 5.8 km/s left. Orbital speed is 7.8 km/s, but I'll still lose some to gravity drag, it's going to be a close thing.

Unfortunately, the engines have a limited burn time. At the last of the big boosters are running out, that time is over, and the engines start breaking up. Good thing those that remains are enough, but the rocket wobbles precariously.

Note to self: when I remake this thing, I have to use high quality engines for those last boosters.

Finally, though, even the last boosters are detached without accidents. DeltaV budget, though, is very close

Finally, the Ringrazer segment is left to orbit on its own.

Ok, it's still got the nose cones - which are full of fuel - and the engines, all those will be detached once in orbit to dock the other modules. Some fuel tanks, instead, will stay as part of Ringrazer's backbone.

Ejecting the nose cones.

Here I discover another design problem: those high thrust engines can only be turned on twice. Once at liftoff. Now I had to shut them down to remove the empty nose cones, and I turned the engines on again afterwards. But I'm still in the atmosphere. How do I make circularization? What about orbital manuevers? Yes, I did carry the biggest RCS I had (taken from a bunch of big ships mods), but they are still severely underpowered.

Also, when I shut down the engines I will want to ditch them, but I can't because the RCS are bound to the detachable part.

Eventually, I run out of fuel , just 100 km shy of orbit.

Have to try again.

So here's the new launch. I did solve the engine problem by using a bunch of wolfhounds. The wolfhounds have dozens of ignitions, so they let me do some orbital manuevering. And they are more efficient than RCS.

I also have a bit more deltaV; I don't know if it's because of a different ascent profile, because I launched from Kurou instead of Cape Canaveral, or because I have some higher-efficiency engines; probably a combination of all three.

Either way, even though I do have enough deltaV to orbit, I let my trajectory fall too low near the end. So I plunge down inside the atmosphere, and even a last minute correction burn straight up still make me pass at 80 km. In rss the atmosphere extends to 140 km, and at this speed the airflow is hot enough that it destroied one of the radiation shields I'm carrying.

 

So I will have to try again, but I know the system works.

By the way, I had to mod myself bigger radiation shields, because kerbalism only offers 2.5 ton ones, and I'd have required 3000 of those

 

 

 

[Krazy1]

I launched a new ship in Principia but it's not modifying the Jool system correctly (Bop should be retrograde) so it's crashing and I'm troubleshooting. 

35 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

The rxhaust from 684 vectors + 25 cougars

 I remember a ship I made with 57 vectors to boost an Eve lander. That was a monster but yours is 10x bigger. How many parts does yours have?  FPS?  I went to Tweakscale after that build to keep the part count reasonable. 

[king of nowhere]

8 hours ago, Krazy1 said:

 

 I remember a ship I made with 57 vectors to boost an Eve lander. That was a monster but yours is 10x bigger. How many parts does yours have?  FPS?  I went to Tweakscale after that build to keep the part count reasonable. 

parts was shows in one of the screenshots, about 1350. a good third of them are struts and launch stability enhancers to keep the thing from disintegrating on the launchpad.

as for lag... I took this video from the second largest launch I ever did. this one lagged slightly less, b ecause the payload has less parts, still it's a good comparison. It also used 684 vectors plus a smattering of others

 

Edited July 25, 2022 by king of nowhere

[modus]

12 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

 

 

I only have to look at one picture of a gigantic megasuperlauncher to know who's posting 

Love it!

Edited July 25, 2022 by modus

[Kerb24]

I tried to do a rendezvous in solar orbit. Unfortunately, my orbit was too close to Kerbin and so I have two vessels now on a collision course with Kerbin.

[roblob]

i finally I got a Dres encounter I'm so happy 

[Apelsin]

Messed around with Airplane Plus, made a Eurofighter-inspired build, armed with a fireworks dispenser, 2 dumbfire and 1 controllable rockets:

Here it is on Kerbin & Laythe:

4

Had enough fuel to fly around ~1/4 of Kerbin equator's circumference.

Edited July 26, 2022 by Apelsin

[jimmymcgoochie]

Left Ike orbit to head to Eve’s surface, which despite only being about 6000km lower took HOURS of burn time due to puny ion engines and a massive shortfall in power production. Eve periapsis is still over 300km but the lander can probably manage that on its own; the periapsis is on the dark side of Eve so no way to try and reduce the apoapsis before trying to land.

(And yes, I did say Ike and Eve- in the Snarkiverse Ike orbits Eve, not Duna, while Gilly orbits Moho instead.)

Edited July 26, 2022 by jimmymcgoochie

[IncompetentSpacer]

Continued my RP-1 career with a science gathering mission which entails kerbal orbiting Earth in mercury capsule for 10 hours. This may very well be first Kerbal to die in this career. For some reason RCS does not work and I can't rotate the capsule in order to orient the de-orbiting rockets the right way 

[jimmymcgoochie]

Just now, IncompetentSpacer said:

Continued my RP-1 career with a science gathering mission which entails kerbal orbiting Earth in mercury capsule for 10 hours. This may very well be first Kerbal to die in this career. For some reason RCS does not work and I can't rotate the capsule in order to orient the de-orbiting rockets the right way 

Are your avionics on and sufficient for the craft’s mass? Do you have the correct RCS propellants (HTP and helium I believe)? Are the thrusters actually enabled and with pitch/yaw/roll authority enabled?

If you really have no attitude control but the capsule is spinning, wait until it points vaguely retrograde and fire the retros.

[IncompetentSpacer]

1 minute ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

Are your avionics on and sufficient for the craft’s mass? Do you have the correct RCS propellants (HTP and helium I believe)? Are the thrusters actually enabled and with pitch/yaw/roll authority enabled?

If you really have no attitude control but the capsule is spinning, wait until it points vaguely retrograde and fire the retros.

Yes, yes and yes.   And the last sentence is my current plan.

[ColdJ]

While tidying some things up I got some ideas for more, not perfection but reasonable. Now I might be close to ready. At least I hope so.

 

Spoiler

 

[Caerfinon]

47 minutes ago, ColdJ said:

not perfection but reasonable

Those are nice looking ships! 

[ColdJ]

Just now, Caerfinon said:

Those are nice looking ships! 

Thank you. Hopefully should be out as a mod soon.

Hope you have been well.

[Angelo Kerman]

Today, Bob and Valentina took the prototype Buffalo 2 out for a test drive. First, feeling the munchies, Val stops off at McKermans for a quick bite:

(That post-it note at the bottom of the dashboard is a nod to @JustJim's Saga of Emiko Station)

After that, she drives over to the mini jumpgate parked at KSC's hangar, and dials the gate:

A quick drive up the ramp and they're on Minmus:

And off they go, enjoying the sites:

Valentina notes that in the low gravity, Buffalo 2 pulls wheelies as the rover accelerates. Engineers make a note of that and plan to add software that lets drivers disable pitch on the rover's gyros...

 

 

[Kerb24]

I rendezvoused 2 vessels in Solar orbit. 

[Hyperspace Industries]

Impactor slowing down.

Quickly.

Did not think I could get the flyby to orbit, but I did, with only 165 or so m/s. Sorry for no more detail, it's almost bath time.

[Fraktal]

Did a Duna landing today. Hit the ground harder than I intended (around 5 m/s, using one large parachute, four smaller parachutes, two drogue chutes and minimal engine thrust) but nothing broke and the lander still has about 98% fuel (slightly over 2000 m/s), so it's good enough.

Had to do some hairy inventory juggling to be able to deploy my field science equipment, as all the craft's inventory slots were full and the equipment was too heavy to be carried alongside either parachute or jetpack. In the end I succeeded, but the game glitched out: when my engineer got back inside the command pod, the RCS fuel tank in his inventory vanished into thin air and got replaced with an extra parachute for some reason, so now I have four parachutes for three crew and no RCS fuel tank. Not that it matters all that much because Duna's gravity turned out to be about 0.34 m/s² too much for a jetpack anyway.

So now that I transmitted everything, I'm waiting for the field science to finish. Once it does, I'm packing it back up and will try to hop to the nearest biome (I'm sitting on the western slope of the Western Canyon and flew over the Midland Sea and Midlands before the parachutes deployed). Probably won't push my luck with a second one. Once that's done too, it's time for a year-and-a-half wait for the transfer window back home. I'm about 26 points short of unlocking the Klaw, which will be ready in a few days thanks to all the relayed science from Duna making my lab in orbit of Kerbin chugging along at 3 science per day, so I'll be doing orbital debris cleanup next.

By the time the Duna trio will be back to Kerbin (as in, docked at the orbital station for refueling until the next transfer window back to Duna), they'll be in for quite a treat in the form of a Mk2 shuttle bringing them down.

Edited July 26, 2022 by Fraktal

[stephensmat]

Yesterday, I did something I've never tried before. I landed a craft without a heat shield back on Kerbin. I had a contract to go to Gilly and back. But the contract specified that a craft which did a Gilly fly-by had to be recovered on Kerbin. My 'mothership' was the one that made the flight. The only part of it that could land was the Lander.  When I got back to Kerbin orbit, I started making refuelling flights, so I included some parachutes. My engineer refit them onto my Lander (A craft meant for moons/planets with no atmo) and I began my descent.

Turned out to be a lot easier than I planned. I've never really bothered with SSTO, so controlled reentry is something I've never done before. I maxed out my landing thrusters whenever the air started to glow red, and made it through, scoring a quarter million contract in the process.

Today, I miscalculated. I've got at same mothership into Duna orbit, but the tanks are completely dry. I'm sending my digger/refueller rig from Gilly to Duna. It has a full load of ore, so by the time it gets there for a capture burn, the tanks will be full again, and I can try for a flight to Ike, and star refuelling again.

[Rutabaga22]

I made a gemini with my best recreation of the titan II

[Krazy1]

I started a Jool 5 in Principia. I've never been to the Jool system, even in stock! 

18 hours ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

periapsis is on the dark side of Eve so no way to try and reduce the apoapsis before trying to land.

Well, you know, just wait 1/2 an Eve year. I often use polar orbits with ion engines for this reason. Usually PE is at the poles still in some sunlight then. 

8 hours ago, Fraktal said:

the RCS fuel tank in his inventory vanished into thin air and got replaced with an extra parachute

I always try to remember to unload all parachutes before launching on Kerbin... I never really need them anyway.  The dumb thing is you cannot just discard inventory items. You can drop an experiment on the ground or an EVA construction part, but not a parachute. SMH.

You can try KSP Community Fixes for inventory bugs: 

Spoiler

KerbalInventoryPersistence [KSP 1.12.2 - 1.12.3]
Fix the whole kerbal inventory persistence system being inactive in KSP 1.12.2+. This cause multiple issues, like being able to bypass kerbal inventories mass/volume limits, and various cargo part duplication / disappearance issues when EVAing / boarding.  

[IncompetentSpacer]

Today I completed two contracts at once in my RP-1 career with first rendezvous coupled with manned orbit (not the milestone but generic contract) with nice boost in cash, finally allowing me to afford 3 mil VAB upgrade.

Rendezvous in RP-1 career (without Principia) is similar in principal to the stock except that dV budget requirements are far larger, most engines, definitely in late 50s,  can only be started once (mono propellants are your friend) and Kerbalism life support implementation means that you are on the clock. So actually...it is not alike the stock at all when I think about it...

 

 

The target craft was a science probe that was no longer useful and new S1.5400 engine (engine with large black engine bell at the craft with Mercury capsule) proved indispensable since it actually CAN be relit 5 times.

Return home is always exciting since I never really figured out the re-entry profile for Mercury capsule:

Spoiler

 

Edited July 27, 2022 by IncompetentSpacer

[Fraktal]

11 hours ago, Krazy1 said:

The dumb thing is you cannot just discard inventory items. You can drop an experiment on the ground or an EVA construction part, but not a parachute.

Oh yeah. I nearly ripped my hair out trying to juggle stuff around to find something non-stacking that can go alongside the field science gear without exceeding the kerbal's inventory limit.

[The Destroyer]

I recreated the space shuttle pathfinder and its mission with Sea Dragon 17 from the show For All Mankind!