What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Delay]

After recently being made aware of the existence of JNSQ, I decided to give that planet pack a go. Oh, and Kerbalism and those kinds of mods that I've never used before.
And I'm aware that I haven't played KSP in a long time and that I'm absolutely not the target audience for these kinds of mods, but I'm always up for a good challenge.

It took over 2 hours and I don't know how many attempts to (admittedly over-)engineer a vehicle that could go to orbit. But it felt incredibly rewarding! It's like my first hours in the game all over again, there's so much I'll have to relearn. It was lots of fun.

Edited June 25, 2023 by Delay

[N_Danger]

I crashed the first probe to try and land on Niven.

 

[Krazy1]

My present mission comprising 6 contracts is underway...

Spoiler

1. Use LJP410 to rescue Kerbal on Mun -Done
2. Then go to high Kerbin orbit to rescue a Kerbal. Get some science "scraps" on the way - Done
3. Launch 10 tourists (2 contracts) in an "LKO bus" with capacity to return 13+ crew and 5+ experiment copies - Done
4. Dock LJP410 with LKO Bus in LKO, pick up tourists, plot course for Minmus  - Done
5. Land on Minmus
   1. rescue a Kerbal on the surface
   2. scan Olivine Formation 
6. Land on Mun
7. Return to LKO, dock again, return 10 tourists, 3 lost Kerbals and bonus science

Jeb: I got this. Hold my beer.

Val: I got this! Your helmet's on backwards fool.

15 hours ago, Delay said:

After recently being made aware of the existence of JNSQ, I decided to give that planet pack a go

I made the jump to JNSQ a few months ago. It's a lot of fun relearning. So... did you bring a heatshield?  

[Delay]

4 hours ago, Krazy1 said:

So... did you bring a heatshield?

I waited with any orbital attempts until after I unlocked them. Very nearly lost Jeb on the one try without one!

Orbiting at almost 4 km/s is a lot less forgiving than at 2.2!

[stephensmat]

Until KSP2 gets a Science Update, I still play KSP1.

Finally made it to Dres for the first time. Had to make half a dozen flight corrections, and my 'Drive Section' has less than 200 DV left, but I'm in a solid, circular Dres orbit. During the deceleration burn, I thought my lander, still topped with fuel, was gonna rip off the docking port, but it held just long enough for me to kill the engines.

I've decided that the ship is now an orbital station. That's fine. I've done it before. I've got every experiment in the game, as well as a Lander with all the science gear, and a Mobile Lab with Two Scientists in it. The 'SS Molly Cobb' is now 'Dres Orbital'.

[kurgut]

Hi,

Today I finished working on this super submission for a discord challenge : send a reusable rocket SSTO without wings, airbreathing engines, or EVA pack to a destination and back.
And Jeb choosed to go to Gilly !

As Jeb was disallowed to use his EVA pack, Kraken drives, or any mass driver in any kinda of form, he resolved using a more traditionnal craft, instead of the tradionnal 3 parts rocket, usually used for such a destination...
With uses of gravity assists, that thing could go anywhere really, Jool, Eeloo...
Cheers !

 

[king of nowhere]

My exploration of the whirligig world planetary pack reached the first interplanetary destination: the superearth Valyr, and its main moon Oshan

Here the mothership Boundless is about to aerocapture on Oshan. Oshan is very similar to Duna on size, gravity and atmosphere. Valyr is the blue planet behind.

I gave Boundless enhanced aerobraking capabilities (nose cargo bays enclosing the engines and solar panels retractable inside cargo bays for thermal resistance, thermal shield used as parachutes for increased drag) because whirligig world has a lot of atmospheric bodies that can be used.

Following this piece of debris gave me the only close pictures of ohsan so far. it's dominated by ice plains (or seas?) with continents emerging from it.

A great sunset as the lander Phoenix (twin of the one I used on Derbin a week ago) is aerobraking on Valyr

Valyr is a superearth, some 25% bigger than Eve. It's kept warm by greenhouse effect, and it's mostly covered by oceans, with scattered islands. A bit like Laythe, but with triple gravity

Phoenix splash-landed, and found evidence of life on the planet.

Apparently, you can play golf underwater

Follows a bunch of images of flying over a few mountain islands, spoilered for brevity

Spoiler

At some point I accidentally ejected Val trying to get an Eva report while flying. Good thing I managed to land both her and the plane safely, I hadn't saved in a while

Oshan in the sky

I am not sure if I mounted the cupola upside down by accident, or intentionally because I wanted a better view of the terrain. But the picture does look a lot better if I put back the ground where it should be, on the bottom of the image. As long as one ignored the upside down writing.

 

 

 

[miklkit]

Moho is tuff.  My first 5 missions there went ok but they barely made it.  So I added more range and had 2 failures.  Added more range and had a successful landing.  Barely.  48 m/s is tight.

[Cytauri]

I've been loading the game up with mods. Most of my time playing KSP 1 is just adding mods to the game. I do have a feeling that this modded install will be the one for me to get to Minmus for the first time even though I have almost 300 hours on KSP 1. 

[ColdJ]

Been stuck at home with a cold, so I have been slowly crafting the parts for a Mk3 compatible B-52 Stratofortress. Even worked out how to make a working extendable spoiler.

[SpacePixel]

If Kraken loved us, would He allow such a thing to take flight?

This magnificently ugly flying boat is one of my more successful attempts at producing a cargo seaplane SSTO with a loading ramp. A seaplane might be easy to build, as long you're willing to get your engines wet and turn off water physics in Scatterer; I was willing to do neither and suffered the consequences. I'd like to direct your attention to the floats and away from the ugly nose; the floats are placed at such an angle so that they make something of a flat floor in the cargo bay, which renders floor plating somewhat redundant, plus this helps integrate them smoothly with the Mk3 fuselage. Note that the floats also house plenty of propellant, which helps with the moving CoM -- the craft is unbalanced, yes, and I hope someday I'll come up with something less unhinged, but note that it's not meant to carry heavy cargo at all, just some rovers and submarines and whatnot -- it's for Laythe really, after all. Also, note that the engine assembly is integrated into the fuselage, slightly mitigating torque while avoiding getting water into the engines.  

[kurgut]

Hi ! 

Today, I finished working on this fun project  : a short KSP film, investigating exactly how "Missing Crew Respawn"...

Hope you'll discover some interesting things  

"So with this knowledge, we see that kerbals die all the time, get resurrected, but by this, loose all their memory about their mission, thus preventing them learning from their mystakes, and keeping kerbals mortality rates absurdly high.
Die, resurrect, forget, die again from same mystake.
Seems a virtuous circle enough."

Cheers !  

[SpacePixel]

It becomes a little more obvious that all my screenshots look very much alike when I post too often... 

Here's another orbit-capable seaplane, this time a small crew shuttle. This one, I'd say, is probably more realistic than not, and has awesome steering. Small crafts like this usually have big trouble getting airborne due the waves and whatnot, but this one can manage to take of from 0.4 Scatterer waves, which is not a lot, but in the ballpark what real seaplanes can do. The center of mass here is again offset from the center of thrust -- something which seems inevitable in case of seaplanes which are not willing to get their engines wet -- so there's a Vernor engine right near the tail to combat this; sure, this may not be terribly efficient, but I am yet to see a seaplane that has CoT aligned with CoM 

[swjr-swis]

4 minutes ago, SpacePixel said:

but I am yet to see a seaplane that has CoT aligned with CoM

Ahem. My Seaplane One coughs mildly.

 

 

[kurgut]

Today, I made a smol plane for Jeb.

He loves it !
Craft file : KerbalX - A smol plane for Jeb

Cheers

Edited June 29, 2023 by kurgut

[Duke MelTdoWn]

Captains log, Year 001 Day 049 cont'd

After many, many prototypes, the 'Valkyrie' crew shuttle now finally has superior performance compared to 'Teardrop'.
It uses an expendable solid booster first stage to be lighter in orbit.
The result is ~4360 m/s at TWR 0.52+ left after insertion into 75x75 km Kerbin orbit.
The biggest challenge was to get it to behave nicely on reentry.

More pics in Workshop:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2996638507

This is another addition to my collection of launchers and shuttles:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2995059664

Edited June 30, 2023 by Duke MelTdoWn
Image links

[Aelfhe1m]

After several iterations of testing and the construction of a suitable booster, the Pterosaur was ready for its maiden flight.

None of The Original Four were willing to give up a seat on this momentous occasion, so with Jeb in the command chair they waited tensely for the countdown to finish and then the engines were lit and they were off:

Spoiler

After inserting into orbit, Jeb claimed the first EVA, but then they each took turns experiencing the thrill of clinging to the outside of the spacecraft in open space

All too soon mission control insisted that they come back down to ground.

But Jeb overestimated the aerobraking effect and ended up overshooting the KSC

Even worse, he then flubbed the transition from re-entry attitude to regular flight, lost too much altitude and ended up ditching in the ocean near a very familiar island.

 

[Lt_Duckweed]

Naughty Kerbals get banished to the Sun

 

[QF9E]

Was planning on doing some test missions for the new Space Shuttle v7 challenge, but I got sidetracked:

This little flying wing turned out to fly surprisingly well, and since its wings double as fuel tanks, it has quite a long range as well. I just finished flying a 3.5 hour Kerbin circumnavigation, which I flew entirely by hand. I think it will be able to fly around Kerbin twice, but I don't have the patience to find out.

Edited July 1, 2023 by QF9E

[Hotel26]

12 hours ago, QF9E said:

fly surprisingly well

I showed ChatGPT your screenshot and it said (among other things), "it flies surprisingly well...  its expected range is 5610.27 km".

So, well done!  ChatGPT also helpfully added that the circumference of Kerbin is 3769.91 km.

Spoiler

OK, apologies.  My nose just grew 12 cm longer... 

I built a replica.  It traveled 110 kms downrange to climb to a cruise altitude of 7.5 km and at that point, it had 1,557 kallons left in the tanks, was consuming 0.08832 units of fuel per second (engine PAW) and was cruising at 312 m/s.

So the calculation is 110 + 0.312 * (1557 / 0.08832) and this method takes less than 10 minutes (time to climb to cruise altitude) to get a max range estimate.

Very nice job @QF9E!

(It can actually climb to cruise in just 3 minutes.)

 

Edited July 1, 2023 by Hotel26

[QF9E]

21 minutes ago, Hotel26 said:

I showed ChatGPT your screenshot and it said (among other things), "it flies surprisingly well...  its expected range is 5610.27 km".

So, well done!  ChatGPT also helpfully added that the circumference of Kerbin is 3769.91 km.

Neat! Although I think my craft can do better than that: after one circumnavigation of Kerbin it had 779 out of 1600 units of fuel left, and it gets more efficient as it gets lighter. It also accelerated a bit, its speed near the end of my flight was about 15 m/s higher than at the start (305 m/s vs. 290 m/s).

Fuel consumption was as follows:

• hour 1: 258 units (this includes takeoff and getting to altitude);
• hour 2: 233 units
• hour 3: 220 units
• hour 3.5: 100 units for the final half hour of flight, so a projected 200 units for the entire hour if I had continued my flight

If the trend that each subsequent hour burns about 10-20 units less fuel continues I would expect fuel consumption to go something like this:

• hour 3.5 - 4: 100 units
• hour 5: 190 units
• hour 6: 180 units
• hour 7: 170 units

At which point it should be able to finish its 2nd circumnavigation, with some 100 - 150 units of fuel left.

Edited July 1, 2023 by QF9E

[Hotel26]

2 minutes ago, QF9E said:

more efficient as it gets lighter

ChatGPT responds: "this is likely to contain some measure of veracity and no doubt makes a worthy point.  Suggest you consider Hotel26's method using half fuel at take-off for a better approximation". 

 

[QF9E]

3 minutes ago, Hotel26 said:

ChatGPT responds: "this is likely to contain some measure of veracity and no doubt makes a worthy point.  Suggest you consider Hotel26's method using half fuel at take-off for a better approximation". 

 

Perhaps ChatGPT can build its own version and perform the experiment by itself? I have little desire to fly this thing for another 3.5 hours.

[Hotel26]

6 hours ago, QF9E said:

build its own version

I'll run a test overnight and report back. 

Spoiler

It's worth pointing out that:

• e.g. AtmosphericAutopilot enables extended, autonomous long-range testing
• for some (most) craft, physics warp (4x) may give stable/accurate performance gauging with shorter production time

 

 

Edited July 1, 2023 by Hotel26

[Nazalassa]

20 hours ago, Lt_Duckweed said:

Naughty Kerbals get banished to the Sun

Wow. You should probably do something in collaboration with @Stratzenblitz75.