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What did you do in KSP1 today?


Xeldrak

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I started moving ahead on my Big Dumb Jool Mission !

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My monstrously over-designed mothership, RDAS Falcon Star, in construction around Kerbin. At this point it still needs the lander.

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Plus one lander. It has parachutes for Laythe, but I don't know if it'll be able to manage the ascent. Quicksave shall be my friend!

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Transferring to Minmus, to refuel before the final burn for Jool. Always helps to have full tanks on your way out.

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Minus one refueling ship.

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My old kethane base. At some point, I'm gonna have to move it up the hill. It's deposit is starting to run low...

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I was running out of ideas, and 0.24 is still in some unspecified future, so I decided to install FAR and DRE. As the first test vehicle, I chose my standard crew shuttle.

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Its original specifications were something like "Returning interplanetary ships often end up in strange orbits. Rendezvous with the ship and return its crew safely to Kerbin." The only modification I did was replacing the upper decoupler with a heat shield and a DRE decoupler.

I had a vague idea how to reach orbit with FAR: turn 5 degrees when vertical speed is 50-100 m/s, point approximately prograde after that, and try to avoid going too fast in the lower atmosphere. That worked surprisingly well.

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The core and the boosters originally provided about 3700 m/s of delta-v, but now I was able to reach a 130x120 km orbit, and the core still had more than enough fuel for the deorbiting burn. I did my standard steep reentry, burning retrograde at the desert coast, until the rocket was about to hit sea 50-100 km east from KSC, and then detached the core and the service module.

Reentry went mostly fine, with acceleration peaking at 5.6g. The only problem was that I lost the landing struts in a ridiculously slow explosion.

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That was actually a big problem, because the hitchhiker module depends on the landing struts to survive the impact. I altered the staging a bit, using the heat shield to absorb the impact, and landed in one piece.

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Next I'm going to try something bigger.

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I manged to build out my Kethane mining rig on the exact spot I had scouted with my Munar rover. The rig shipped in two pieces, and involved two extremely sketchy landings.

I had to land the first half of the rig with only the tiny Rockomax engines and no RCS - and the CoT was off center with the CoM so the thing kept rolling over on me. I somehow managed to land it without damaging a single tire no less.

The second part of the rig was attached via a small docking port (the only docking tech I have unlocked atm) to a 3-kerbal capsule with attached storage container. RCS ended up being about worthless in that case too, so I had to bring it down gently via the poodle, land it on the poodle, unclamp the port, and get the habitat module out of the way.

Unfortunately that landing took place about 500m from the first part of the rig, and the RCS I had left on the hab module wasn't enough to get it to lift off the surface. I tried hauling it over with my rover, but the rover just didn't have enough pull to drag the thing over. It was a fun exercise, though!

Next is to bring out a new hab module that can actually move around, including the ability to rescue two lonely Kerbals about 22km away from the base, sitting on several hundred kg of liquid fuel with no electrical charge to power their SAS to steer over to the base.

Edit:

Oh yeah, the best part was after landing this beast my kethane drills were upside down, so I had to edit a save file to flip them over. That led to learning about quaternions... Overall an interesting experience.

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Edited by rogu3ish
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Put SRB SSTO plane on hold till I get farther up the tech tree as I was tring to use very very earily tech to see if it can be dune. Anyways. Was able to do so with the standard liquad engine and basic jet engine:

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Looks like I might need the next level of wings as well as air-intakes to cut down on mass even farther.

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I was having mechjeb land my 1st stage back at KSC falcon 9 style. I turned away from the screen for a minute when I was preforming the burn. I wish I could of seen the look on my face when I looked back at the screen and saw this.......

cnIrp04.png

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Since I screwed up my last anomaly hunting mission on Kerbin (is it just me or does terrain get stupidly impossible to drive on around anomalies) I sent another one with a ruggedized rover that's actually harder to control than the last one since the brakes will flip it if Calory blinks too hard. This mission had something the last one lacked: Freaking style. *puts on sunglasses*

I built this minimalist "plane," only so called because it has wings, to cruise along almost 24km in the air and nearly 1600m/s. It could actually go faster but it started to get a little unstable. I landed right at the anomaly's back door with almost half my fuel to spare, although I didn't actually see it when I landed because it was dark.

You see, this is far enough away from home that I didn't want to "fly" there because it was "too slow". Well, that only matters if you are flying a plane that can't go insanely fast then just flip around any direction without any major consequences.

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Mission success! Well sort of. I can see my goal but it's a bit of a challenge to actually get to it, unless I find a way to hop back in the "plane" which conveniently doesn't have a ladder because I figured I wouldn't need it. D'oh. Should have just stayed inside and surveyed my location, but hindsight is 20/20.

Edit: In other news I just separated a plane into its components on the grass. It was like slow motion stupidity... It started to spin on the ground so I cut the engine, it flew up and came down on a wing, bounced with no damage, then pitched down and landed on the cockpit. The cockpit and Kerbal survived, almost nothing actually exploded aside from what you see in this shot. It just kind of bounced, separated, and bounced again.

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Edited by Duke23
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Got up to 800m/s in dense atmosphere before using up all the fuel. It is, at least during this test, a sideways flying rocket. But when I get a cluster I like, I'll just tear it off the arse end and make it a subgroup.

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