What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Blufor878]

1 hour ago, Rutabaga22 said:

Just use the upper RCS ports

Aww man…

[Seadragon420]

i modded ksp

 

 

 

 

thats all

[Axelord FTW]

Completed a Moho surface scan contract (again went for reusability lifter, again fudged he landing), and proceeded to eject the Kerbol Express out of Kerbin's SOI, toward Sarnus.

 

[BadOaks]

I started tonight's session by launching the habitat module for my Duna mission.

Weighing in at little over 65 tons, it's a bit heavy for the Driver V upper stage to inject directly to Duna, so I also launched an injection assist stage. 

The injection assist stage is basically just a Driver V upper stage with an extra propellant tank and translation thrusters. It rendezvoused and docked with the habitat in low orbit.

After that, the upper stage underneath the habitat burned its remaining propellant, raising apogee to 1100 km before being ejected.

I caught some great views of Kerbin during coast to the perigee.

At perigee, the assist stage finished the remaining 1400 m/s of the injection burn.

Next up was the launch of the lander/ascent vehicle.

Unlike the habitat, the DLAV is light enough that the upper stage under it was able to finish the injection burn by itself. The DLAV will aerobrake into a polar parking orbit around Duna until the crew arrive to begin the surface mission.

And finally, my crew vehicle Benevolent Encounter burned for Duna as well.

[ColdJ]

11 hours ago, Admiral Fluffy said:

So, I made a pirate ship, naturally.

That is cool.

[Beamer]

It's been a while since my last post, several months have passed that were, at least on the Kerbin side, devoid of any planetary transfer windows. I suppose that's only to be expected after a few months ago we had a double transfer window within 10 minutes time to Moho and Eve, which saw the launch of a caravan of rockets worthy of a Kuinness Book of Kerbin Records mention.

There was one late addition to this caravan, the Gilly 6 Expedition which will land on The Mun, Minmus, Gilly, Moho, Duna and Ike. After its Mun and Minmus landings this small craft was parked in a wide orbit, outside the orbit of Minmus, until it was time to send it to Eve. Due to its wide orbit it was scheduled to leave 2 weeks after the majority of the caravan. Nine days before its departure though, during a routine systems check, it was realized that some (unnamed) engineer had forgotten to move the long range antenna out of a fairing that was added to protect sensitive equipments from the Duna atmospheric entry. As it was directly opposite of Minmus in its orbit around Kerbin, the Minmus crews could not reach the craft in time to perform maintenance. To the rescue came Pafry, the sole occupant of the AsteroidKatcher Mk-2 who was able to reach the small landing craft just 2 hours before its scheduled departure and move the long range antenna outside of the fairing.

By a small cosmic coincidence the Kerbin MultiSkan observatory with its powerful optical telescope was exactly behind theAsteroidKatcher Mk-2 as it boosted its orbit to reach the Gilly 6 Expedition probe, resulting in this pretty picture of the AsteroidKatcher's nine nuclear engines firing at full blast.

It is worth mentioning that this Pafry is possibly the single person who has contributed the most to the advancement of our space program, as she is the one who is tasked with capturing the asteroids used for fueling all interplanetary missions and wrestling them into neat circular Kerbin orbits. She really seemed to be going for employee of the month this time as immediately after repairing the Gilly 6 Expedition probe, she went on into interplanetary space to meet an E class asteroid a full month before it reached Kerbin orbit to guide it on a more optimal entry vector.

This particular asteroid came in at 2007 tons of mass with an estimated ore content of 1605 tons, fairly average for an E class asteroid but still a huge amount of mass to tie to a ship of barely 100 tons (when fully loaded with fuel). Wrestling these asteroids into equatorial Kerbin orbits involves multiple passes through the Kerbin atmosphere as well as multiple plane change burns.

In order to facilitate this the craft has the ability to mine ore from the asteroid and synthesize fuel. Although this particular asteroid came in at a very sub-optimal angle, thanks to her skill and experience she was able to force it into an equatorial orbit at 350 km with 1230 tons of ore to spare, which will generate enough chemicals to fuel another three or four interplanetary missions.

In the meantime, the NuKerBus Economy 16K+4 piloted by our beloved Jebediah Kerman arrived in the Duna system. Confusingly, the pilots refer to this craft as "The 16-ought-4", the scientists call it simply "The Twenty" and the engineers typically name it "The 4-square 2-square". On this trip the craft was carrying a full complement of 4 crew and 16 tourists. Interestingly, with the arrival of this craft, for a short period of time there are now more active space program participants in the Duna system than in our own Kerbin system (if we include tourists), which I'm sure is another world first.

Then there was the arrival of the Kerman Kerbolar Station back in the Kerbin system, after orbiting our sun Kerbol for a full 4 years. It made a close pass by the moon for a small gravity assisted burn to an optimal periapsis at Kerbin and was then parked at a 1000 km circular orbit around Kerbin.

The reasons for its return are refueling, crew rotation and restocking the snacks. According to the crew on the station "even the Kwinkies have gone stale". As unbelievable as that may sound, they added it probably has something to do with the large amount of radiation Kerbol is putting out. Once in a stable orbit, first a Xenon Tanker was sent up to meet them, the powers that be decided it was best to let this be handled by the experienced crew already on the station rather than by their replacements.

The tanker successfully intercepted and docked with the station to transfer its costly load (I was told by someone in the know the total price of this craft was around 530 thousand, and that a full 480 thousand of that was the cost of the large amount of Xenon it was carrying).

Once the fuel transfer was completed the crew sent out a Kweet with a thank you note, complimenting the ground crews with their accurate calculations (you must forgive them, they have not had access to their social media accounts for a long time).

After refueling, a SSTO Crew Mk-2rev was sent up to meet them with the new crew and a large delivery of lead-wrapped Kwinkie cakes and assorted snacks.

The mighty space plane docked with Kerbin Station, from where the cargo (both the living and consumable payload) was further transported to Kerman Kerbolar Station by a KerBus Mk-1, seen here arriving at its destination.

After all the transfers were completed the off-boarding crew was taken back to Kerbin Station by the KerBus where they transferred to the Space Plane still docked there for their return to Kerbin. I'm sure you will agree these Kerbonauts have deserved a nice vacation time as this mission has broken all endurance records for manned missions by a large margin.

And finally, as proven by this image, Sean's BottleCan Base has arrived at Moho. According to reports the base could make its way to Moho Station for refueling before its landing on its own power. The accompanying miners were met by an orbital tug for refueling as the Moho insertion burn had left them with nothing but fumes in the tank. Both crafts will stay in orbit for a while allowing the Moho MultiSkan Observatory which also arrived at its destination to do a full scan of the planet and identify ideal locations to put down the BottleCan.

It will still be a while before I have something grand to report, which will likely happen around the time of the Duna transfer window in about half a year. However as the above report shows our heroes at the Kerbin Space Program manage to break plenty of records and perform amazing space feats even when the calendar of launch windows seems to predict a drought in news!

 

[smushanoob]

Today, I made this forest biome utilizing Parallax for a pack I'm making.

[Admiral Fluffy]

I put a station in orbit of Eve

I did this for reasons that will be revealed later

[MythicalHeFF]

Finished setting up the preparations to start a mission that I've been wanting to do for quite some time now: a Whirligig World grand tour. I originally meant to do it a number of months ago, but ended up just getting sidetracked and doing a bunch of other things over the summer. 

Another thing I've been wanting to do for a while is write another full mission report, which I've started doing here:

My craft of choice, the Kilonova III, in Mesbin orbit during a "simulation test". Its part count, stripped to the bare essentials without any of the landers and other nonsense, is around 450. The full launch-vehicle configuration has a part count of over 1,100, which is sure to make my laptop reconsider its existence. Fully loaded up, it has over 7 km/s of delta-V, which should be enough to reach most of the destinations in this planet pack. For those that are not reachable within said delta-V budget, I have two special ion landers, called the DV-30000 "Hermes", named that for their delta-V of 30,000 meters per second. 

The main lander, Workhorse, is nothing too special, really. It's quite similar to the old Talon lander that I used during my stock+OPM grand tour a couple years ago.

The Other Landers:

Spoiler

Tartarus Imterril Lander:

SSTO

"Bruiser"

 

[vossiewulf]

18 hours ago, BadOaks said:

I started tonight's session by launching the habitat module for my Duna mission.

If you don't mind, what parts mods are you using there? I've been away for a while and don't recognize much of what you're using.

[Scarecrow71]

Today, as part of working on the Safety First challenge, I went to and landed on Gilly to collect all the sciency pieces.  What makes this remarkable is in the following screenshot:

I ended up with a return dV from Eve to Kerbin, with a Pe of -80 km, of 179 m/s.  It was real, and it was spectacular.  My orbital speed at the beginning of the burn was 4.5 km/s, which I'm sure helped.  But damn was that CHEAP.

Edited September 21, 2022 by Scarecrow71

[BadOaks]

3 hours ago, vossiewulf said:

If you don't mind, what parts mods are you using there? I've been away for a while and don't recognize much of what you're using.

Don't mind at all, around 95% of the parts are either from Restock or Nertea's suite of mods (Near Future, Cryo Engines, etc). There's also pretty liberal use of Decoupler Shroud and Internal RCS pictured. If you're curious about anything specific then I'm happy to talk about it.

[SparkyFox]

I remodelled and retextured the kethane's 2m extra large tank and added a custom tab for kethane parts.
I also made a new texture variant for the kethane jet engine that I remodelled. 

[ColdJ]

Just finished a crawler crane as part of a larger project I am making. It uses the robotic parts system, 2 hinges, 2 pistons and a large servo.

[capi3101]

Welp, it didn't take me very long to get back into the old habit of posting intermittently after a week's worth of log entries, didn't it? Ugh.

(Image heavy post ahead, y'all. Trimmed it as best I could, but it's been an eventful week.)

Last Wednesday began with the launch of Trash Can 4 on a mission to put a satellite with the usual accoutrements in orbit of Mün. 

The Sombrero, a Pathfinder/Buffalo part, is cool-looking. Not exactly intended for satellites, but I'm not going to complain too much. Does the job for sure.

The satellite eventually hit its target orbit of 248.95 by 172.3 kilometers at 122.05° for contract on the 15th. With a contract to conduct a Temperature Study (a MOLE science experiment) on Kerbin's surface, I next set up a mobile lab rover using Buffalo parts, and drove scientist Delwig Kerman over to the R&D facility to conduct the experiment. That finished up on the 15th as well. The Trash Can 3 satellite finished its burn into a high retrograde equatorial orbit over Kerbin for contract next, after which the Kerbal Tour Bus 7 craft returned from its recent Münar flyby tourist mission.

Twelve kerbals with just a large hunk of ceramics and metal keeping them from incineration. Kept this screenie because of the SM in the background though; it's a nice photogenic shot...

The craft landed about 1200 kilometers west of KSC and killed off two tourist contracts in the process. Finally, the last thing that happened last Wednesday was the historic landing of the Crossroads Able 7 craft with Val and Bob aboard, their craft first setting down in the Münar Midlands at 1°40’40”N x 68°45'12". 

Val taking the time to plant a flag and taunt Jeb in the process.

Didn't take Val long to find a Mün rock. Took me a while to figure out how to pick it up, though.

Crossroads Able also visited the Highlands, East Crater, Midland Craters and Lowlands before needing to return to Kerbin. She picked off science for Kerbin's Highlands on return, landing 1200 kilometers east of KSC to close out the mission. Between the missions last Wednesday and Thursday, I got most of the space center upgraded to at least Level 2, with the VAB and SPH up to full. The mission brought back nearly 3000 units of science as well.

Friday and Saturday were spent with picking off smaller contracts. I had contracts for three rescue missions over Mün along with a parts test of a 3.75m heat shield and a part test of medium landing gear on a Münar escape trajectory and decided to hit all five contracts at once with the Triple Gurney 7 rescue craft.

Mainly just giving you an idea of what mission bloat looks like. Craft looked pretty cool if I say so myself, though.

Triple Gurney had some issues with one of my mods early on in the mission with the result of the need to revert at one point on Saturday (it made the game send both it and its first target crashing into the surface); the mission in fact didn't make it back to Kerbin until yesterday, but I am pleased to report that the craft did manage to hit all of its intended goals, bringing another pilot and two scientists into my space program. Probably the most harrowing portion of the mission was the retreival of scientist Hadwin Kerman - on arrival, the Triple Gurney had no probe control to make the rendezvous burn (I have yet to set up communications over Mün), so Hadwin had to jump out and do the rendezvous on suit thrust only.

Scientist Hadwin Kerman had a nearly two-kilometer EVA to do. At least he kept a positive attitude while he was doing it...

I also had a contract to put a satellite into geosynchronous orbit over a point on Kerbin. To that end I designed the Biscuit 7 satellite and launched it into orbit. That mission also only finished up yesterday. Getting it up into geosynch wasn't the hard part - the tough bit was putting it over the exact spot it needed to be in, and it took me several tries to get it right but eventually I managed it. Between the Triple Gurney and Biscuit missions, I made enough scratch to finish leveling up all facilities at the KSC, shifting my focus to getting more science.

The next exploration mission I received required me to dock two craft over Kerbin. To that end I designed the Agena 7 craft, first putting Val and Bob into LKO aboard Agena 1 and later pilot Jedus Kerman and scientist Deswig Kerman aboard Agena 2. Rendezvous and docking was a success, happening on Saturday.

Shot from Bob's seat in Agena 1. Look closely and you can see the docking port light of Agena 2 outside window #2.

Exploration now takes me to Minmus with a flyby scheduled. That mission has yet to get underway.

Had two other missions get underway on Saturday. The first was the Guppy 7 mission, with the mundane task of testing a decoupler while splashed down.

Caught this solar eclipse while I was trying to get the first iteration of the Guppy 7 out to the water. Subsequent attempts to get this craft in the water resulted in multiple game crashes, alas...

The Buffalo sub didn't work as intended, but I hope to get back to revisiting the design eventually. Final thing was a mission to land four tourists on Mün, which wound up getting coupled with a rescue mission. To that end, I designed and launced a craft I decided to call the Turdbiscuit 7.

♫ This is the launching of another asparagus ♫ / ♫ another asparagus..... ♫ / ♫ ASPARAGUS!!! ♫

The craft successfully rendezvoused and rescued scientist Sheroly Kerman from LKO and eventually went on to a successful landing in the Farside Crater. After Sheroly planted a flag for the XP, the craft launched and returned to Kerbin successfully yesterday.

The last noteworthy thing that has happened was the launch of Crossroads Baker 7, a second Mün mission for science gathering. After uprating the capabilities of the Crossroads Able craft a little bit, Val and Bob launched to return to Mün, the craft entering a polar orbit. Val and Bob cleared four biomes - Polar Lowlands, Poles, Polar Crater, and Highland Craters - before their fuel situation necessitated an attempt to return to Kerbin. The craft was able to break from Mün's SOI, but ran out of gas attempting to finish de-orbiting over Kerbin and thus necessitating that Bob get out and push.

There are three ways to increase delta-V. If you can't add fuel or get a better engine, you have to stage...

Bob was able to EVA and use his suit thrusters to slow sufficiently after ten burns, and eventually Crossroads Baker safely landed 709 miles west of KSC in the Desert (which the craft also cleaned out of science after landing). The extra 2500 science points went towards getting the gravioli detector unlocked (something I was waiting for prior to the Minmus mission) along with many of the other parts needed to bring my old spaceplane fleet out of mothballs (why fix things that aren't broke? I mean, I still have a working rover from v0.18...). 

Aside from the Minmus mission, I have a pair of MOLE science experiment contracts to do at Kerbin, three tourist missions to land thirteen Kerbals on Mun (a job for another redesign of the Kerbal Tour Bus), missions to hit a large Mün crater and a baobob tree with a scanning arm, a couple of high-altitude hauling missions, and my first Pathfinder colonization contract. This last is to send six kerbals up to Hadwin's Shipwreck for 48 days. It's a ridiculous contract but it pays fifteen million spesos, well enough to keep my program in the black for a while. I have grabbers unlocked, so why not...
 

TL, DR: Did stuff. Landed on Mun. Heading to Minmus. KSC's upgraded. Satellites with funny names.

Edited September 21, 2022 by capi3101
Just fixing typos now...

[vossiewulf]

13 hours ago, BadOaks said:

Don't mind at all, around 95% of the parts are either from Restock or Nertea's suite of mods (Near Future, Cryo Engines, etc). There's also pretty liberal use of Decoupler Shroud and Internal RCS pictured. If you're curious about anything specific then I'm happy to talk about it.

Thanks, much appreciated. I thought I had most of Nertea's stuff but I will go check again and also check out decoupler shroud and internal RCS.

[panarchist]

On 8/31/2022 at 7:34 AM, Caerfinon said:

Turned my hand towards some Kerbin Cartography...  All the airports, airstrips and harbours from my contract packs.   

[Open image in new tab to see full size]

I wish I'd found this before I created my own. I don't suppose you've done one with the locations of the emergency air fields from KSR GAP Extras?

[Caerfinon]

18 minutes ago, panarchist said:

with the locations of the emergency air fields from KSR GAP Extras?

Look closely... the Remote Airstrips are all on this map.

 

Playing some harbour games with the various stuff needed for oceanography.

Put all the stuff on the ship!  

Needs MOAR railing!

[Rutabaga22]

43 minutes ago, Caerfinon said:

Look closely... the Remote Airstrips are all on this map.

 

Playing some harbour games with the various stuff needed for oceanography.

Put all the stuff on the ship!  

Needs MOAR railing!

WHat mod for that boat n stuff and the harbor?

I worked on my sls block 2 (Block 1 on the right)

[Caerfinon]

1 minute ago, Rutabaga22 said:

WHat mod for that boat n stuff and the harbor?

its a WIP effort right now from the firm of ColdJ, ColdJ, and @ColdJ 

[panzer1b]

As usual, more derpin around with various things...

New 1.875m supertorpedo testing, targeting the strongest warship ive ever made thusfar in the armor dept.  1st shot obliterates the rear section and removes half the engines and fuel tanks.

2nd shot makes the whole ship go poof (and it does so beautifully with lots of secondary detonations as the remaining sections keep exploding for a bit).  So yeah, when you add 1.875 supertorpedoes to your ship there is literally NOTHING that can survive a hit to the core.

Made a new tank, the AKS GSD-850T Panther.  Its pretty much a cross of the old T-850, the Type-3, with the external appearance sorta inspired by the WW2 panther tank (namely the 2 rear exhaust stacks and the overall shape and layout of the hull), and the turret inspired by the M10 wolverine's turret (my all time fav turret design, and in KSP the open top doesnt really seem to be a weakness on any level).

So pretty, shootout in the tall grass with parallax's updated version...

Keeps getting slammed and loosing parts, but it keeps on going...

After over 100 shots (around half of them actually hit the target), the thing just refuses to bloody die (i know its luck, but really unless the firework gets a direct hit on the turret bearing or on the root ibeam, both are very small targets, its unlucky to deal critical damage).  I mean its got almost no mobility (all batteries shot off, and most of the RTGs are gone too), armor is gone, it looks like a utter wreck, but its technically still combat viable.  Full control, turret works as expected despite missing armor, drives if barely, fires rounds out of the cannon (manually due to loosing the KAL but it can still be used).  The hull is so effective that im going to redo the T-930 in much the same way (basically a T-850 with 2 more cannons in the hull fixed to fire forward, a relic of the age where tanks carried at best 4 sepatron powered ibeam rockets in the turret which sorta forced me to add more ammo in the hulls to make them able to deal with more then 1 enemy target). 

[Rutabaga22]

2 hours ago, panzer1b said:

As usual, more derpin around with various things...

New 1.875m supertorpedo testing, targeting the strongest warship ive ever made thusfar in the armor dept.  1st shot obliterates the rear section and removes half the engines and fuel tanks.

2nd shot makes the whole ship go poof (and it does so beautifully with lots of secondary detonations as the remaining sections keep exploding for a bit).  So yeah, when you add 1.875 supertorpedoes to your ship there is literally NOTHING that can survive a hit to the core.

Made a new tank, the AKS GSD-850T Panther.  Its pretty much a cross of the old T-850, the Type-3, with the external appearance sorta inspired by the WW2 panther tank (namely the 2 rear exhaust stacks and the overall shape and layout of the hull), and the turret inspired by the M10 wolverine's turret (my all time fav turret design, and in KSP the open top doesnt really seem to be a weakness on any level).

So pretty, shootout in the tall grass with parallax's updated version...

Keeps getting slammed and loosing parts, but it keeps on going...

After over 100 shots (around half of them actually hit the target), the thing just refuses to bloody die (i know its luck, but really unless the firework gets a direct hit on the turret bearing or on the root ibeam, both are very small targets, its unlucky to deal critical damage).  I mean its got almost no mobility (all batteries shot off, and most of the RTGs are gone too), armor is gone, it looks like a utter wreck, but its technically still combat viable.  Full control, turret works as expected despite missing armor, drives if barely, fires rounds out of the cannon (manually due to loosing the KAL but it can still be used).  The hull is so effective that im going to redo the T-930 in much the same way (basically a T-850 with 2 more cannons in the hull fixed to fire forward, a relic of the age where tanks carried at best 4 sepatron powered ibeam rockets in the turret which sorta forced me to add more ammo in the hulls to make them able to deal with more then 1 enemy target). 

how do you make those? that is super cool!

[Rutabaga22]

Launched a duna mission for my friend, accidentally launch at a transfer window! This mission was a climate orbiter and an impactor named the DICS, Duna Impactor and Climate System.

Takeoff

Mun assist out of kerbin SOI

kerbolar orbit

Very low Dv encounter

doing that burn

reaching duna

Nice circular orbit with 2000+ meters per second left!

undocking Impactor

Didn't realize I was in a retrograde orbit, oops 

At least the orbiter is good. It also has some extra Dv so I can do an ike expedition!

 

 

 

[Caerfinon]

MOAR sea trials. 

Hey we can actually land on this thing!

The fit is a little snug

Back to the KSC for the next batch of crew transfers!

 

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

An alarm popped up for an old Mercury flyby probe launched years ago; turns out past me managed to set up a burn to get a second Mercury flyby, which will occur after my first Mercury orbiter gets there. Whether said orbiter will actually be able to orbit or not remains to be seen…