What did you do in KSP1 today?

[numerobis]

KER seems to get confused with my spaceplanes. I'm not sure how to tell it that I'm working off rockets alone from now on.

To suck your plane down as fast as possible, the main trick is to maximize drag. Maintain a 90 degree angle of attack. Open all your intakes.

Secondarily, manage your lift vector. The lift vector is perpendicular to your flight path, in the 'up' direction to your plane. When you're before periapsis, falling, fly inverted so that the parasitic drag points retrograde, otherwise the lifting surfaces are speeding you up, raising apoapsis (perversely). When you're rising after periapsis, flip around to be right-side-up so that parasitic drag is, again, retrograde -- do this by a 180-degree roll when you reach periapsis; nose still down. The up/down component of lift that we usually care about isn't as significant: that part is basically just doing a radial burn, not a retrograde/prograde burn.

Thirdly, you might be able to light one of your jets while pointing straight down, with all intakes open, if you have a stupid number of intakes. That's a radial burn, but hey, a couple meters lower down means a tiny bit more drag.

It will take *many* orbits to get down from the edge of the atmosphere.

[Rayge]

I managed to accidently orbit the sun..i dont mind it to much, I just don't know what to do.

[MarvinKitFox]

Playing BTSM career, I send Jeb to the Mun for some soil samples.

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His lander tipped over.

No problem, thinks I, I have plenty of power and lifesupport left. Let's rescue him!

.

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One rescue launch later, I make a pinpoint landing only 247m from Jeb.

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The rescue lander tips over.

.

.

Ok, another. This time with *moar* rcs. This lander will be able to upright itself if it need to!

So I head in on rescue ship #3.

I use beacon on the intact-but-tipped rescue ship#2 for landing guidance.

I pinpoint the landing! Exactly *ON* #2. *boom*.

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Transfer Jeb from #1 to the intact but unflyable remains of #3, as the air in the first lander is getting stale.

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Currently assembling a rescue craft to rescue Jeb from the rescue craft's rescue craft.

* S I G H S *

[KerbMav]

Planned on finishing my .23.5 save last friday, but it aint as easy it seems.

My Explorer III at Bop was to pick up the Duna Return crew - the guys used up all their fuel before finishing their three planned landings.

Explorer III left Jool after lots of waiting time and fiddling with maneuver nodes - only to miss the encounter, because I forgot to leave the ship on rails instead of watching it fly through space during 100000x time warp ... corrected the KSP sketchiness during high time warps by activating unlimited fuel and an enormous burn right next (astronomically speaking) to Duna - not to proud, but sometimes you just want to get something done.

The ship also left its own crew lander and a Kethane converter module behind - it brought the mining lander (with a smaller converter) along though, but that is what is causing me new headaches: The miner was designed to be able to get up fully loaded from Bop and Pol - Ikes gravity is a couple times higher and I am not sure I will be able to land safely and later bring any useful amount of fuel back to Duna's orbit.

In an effort to make my life easier, I left the miner during my burn into an orbit around Duna while the AP was still on Ikes orbit - but the little bugger chose to not meet me on the first pass, so much for easy once more.

Meanwhile the Duna crew ferried over with the Duna lander (or by EVA) to the Explorer III

Having no fuel, crew or AI onboard, the only way to move the Duna Return ship out of Duna's orbit would be to use the Explorer III's automated mining lander to refuel and steer the ship - should I feel inclined to ever do so.

An old ion probe used to map parts of the Jool system and now on a journey to the stars will have a maneuver alarm in about 2 years - if I only new what the maneuver was supposed to do ...

In other news: Thinking about starting a sandbox game in the current or the next version of KSP and trying for an Eve return mission without any game changing mods, most notably no FAR to get the old feeling of concrete atmosphere on Eve.

[Esme]

My first ever Jool probe, Magellan-1, consisting of a large core probe surrounded by 4 small probes to drop off at targets of opportunity, has had the darndest problems. First of all, having escaped Kerbin's SOI, it was cruising along nicely towards its manouvre node three weeks hence to insert it into its transfer orbit. About a week later, I went to check on it, only to discover it was in a highly elliptical orbit about Kerbin again, what the heck?! So I set up a burn to kick it back into circum-kerbol orbit when it hit perigee, and that went fine. Then sort out a new manouvre node to get it to Jool, once it was out of Kerbin's SOI for the second time. Oooh... delta-V situation looking very marginal. Hmmnn.

Ok, so lets use up some of the monopropellant in the secondary probes, to reduce mass. Yep, looks like that might just be enough to rescue the mission, but I'll probably need to ditch two of the sub-probes. Select the two to be sacrificed, and decouple them. Click-bang! The decouplers went spinning off into the void,leaving the probes in place. Darn, they must've just been clipping something. Sooo.. I decided to burn nearly all the monoprop, which both helped push the apogee up a bit and reduced the mass, meaning I got a few hundred more m/s dV from the nuclear main drive. Came time to burn, I ended up with a Jool enounter, about 350m/s dV left in the main engine, and maybe 10-20m/s left in the monoprop tanks. Kraken willing, I at least get a distant flyby of the system (about a gigametre out from Jool at closest approach) - will 350m/s dV be enough to do anything else? I'll find out in about 2 years...

[Jovus]

Launched my Apollo-esque overbuilt Mun mission. Hopped around to three different biomes with the lander, and ended up with about 400m/s left while on the surface. Oops...

So I launched, went suborbital, got to orbit on RCS (with all the science), then picked Jeb up with the orbiter.

[NecroBones]

Released the first beta-test of the SpaceY heavy-lifters parts pack (5m parts, large SRBs, big decouplers with built-in sepratrons)

Thread: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/100408

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Edited November 17, 2014 by NecroBones

[AengorKerbow]

So in this post I was proud of how my design worked perfectly. My lander/science lab/rover landed, dropped the rover onto the surface, lowered the landing gear, blew the radial decouplers to get rid of the engines/tanks, and settle the science lab directly onto the surface, with the lander module on top ready to take off when done, and a docking port on the side of the science lab so the rover could dock and get its science experiments processed and cleaned.

It was perfect. Except for one fatal flaw. My rover sucks. I tested it quite a bit on Kerbin, driving around collecting science from the biomes near the space center. But the differences in gravity and terrain on the Mun kicked my rover's butt. My final resting place was in a smaller crater near the Far East crater and the Canyons. I had landed in the Far East, got science, landed in the Canyon, got science, and then moved into another small crater which had some Highland Crater science. So then I drop the rover and get going.

It is then that I realize having torque enabled causes really bad things. Any time I tried an significant turn, my rover would topple over. And I couldn't access the probe body to change it because it wasn't exposed. Eventually I figured out the trick of moving the view inside the vehicle and clicking on the probe to shut off torque. That helped out quite a bit with stability. But my rover still was not powerful enough, or stable enough, to even get out of the crater I was landed in. It couldn't get over the sides. I tried for hours, trying to climb up multiple sides, and it always resulted in tumbling down the side at high velocity until explosion and reload from quick save.

I was very bummed, until I realized (using the jetpack and spam EVA report technique) that there were tons of biomes in the crater I had serendipitously landed in. There was Canyons, Highland Craters, Highland, Midlands, and NW Crater (?) biomes. All in that one crater I was stuck in. And I sapped every bit of science I could out of there.

My entire mission, I end up gathering over 3k science. That is about six times more science than I'd ever collected on a single mission. So I'd call it a pretty major success for me.

[Frank_G]

Yesterday (oh god... wrong thread) i developed the Science Minion Mk. III... a small low-cost science gathering probe including launcher and transfer stage for under 30k of funds. In this configuration it can reach Duna, Eve or of course anything within Kerbins SOI. The ideal solution to get your "gather science from space around..." missions done cheap and fast. The small and compact design is also ideal to be fitted on larger craft to have some probes at hand, whenever needed.

[maccollo]

Spent another 8 months slingshoting around the Jovian system. Managed to lower my Ap enough to use Ganymede to raise my Pe. Things are changing much quicker now. Soon I will be at Europa =D

3 passes around Ganymede to raise the Pe to Io

One more swing around Ganymede, and then two around Io to lower my Ap to Ganymede.

Edited November 17, 2014 by maccollo

[Slam_Jones]

No pics yet, but I've started working on a Keth-Ion-Nuke Infini-Explorer Probe. In theory, it should be able to land on any moon, drill up kethane, convert it to LFO (for the nuke engine) and Xenon, and keep on cruising.

The first prototype worked (did a successful landing, fueling, re-orbiting on Mun) like a charm, but I am far too impatient to sit through a 40-minute Ion-engine burn, so I took it back to the drawing board. Ideally, it will have at least 2,000 m/s dV for both Nuke and Ion stages alike, and hopefully a much quicker burn time.

[Norpo]

I did quite a bit, actually..

I completed my Jool-Flyby-5 mission (Basically, flyby all the planets without actually landing. This happened because I accidentally crashed the lander on Bop. >.>

I returned the ship, thus bringing my old career save to it's planned close.

And I just started 6.4x Kerbol. boy oh boy is it ever hard, but it's SO FUN! I managed to get into orbit after I forgot parachutes vaporize because of DRE (sorry, Jeb, Bill, and Bob), my second attempt was the right ship, I just piloted it... wrong (Yay, FAR! Aerodynamic failures!)

But the last attempt worked.

Now, to try to bring him back down... (Haven't done that yet, going to do that now.)

EDIT: Capsule exploded on reentry, going to try again

EDIT2: For those curious, I managed to get a Kerbal back down from orbit. I'm now playing a Science Mode game, and I haven't had so much luck there... I tried to get the "High Over Kerbin" science, not only did I not get it, but Jebediah Kerman died of G-forces (i'm guessing it's DRE that adds that).

Edited November 18, 2014 by Norpo
For those reading in the future. Is it 2015 yet when you're reading this?

[FlyingPete]

I finally got around to rescuing Jeb from Minmus. He abandoned his original craft (out of fuel and fallen onto its side on a steep slope) and trekked a few km over to the probe-controlled rescue ship, which was sent with more fuel this time. He's been passing the time by hiking around the local area to grab surface samples from a few biomes.

In my old science-mode save, I completed an asteroid-redirect mission. When I originally brought it into a Kerbin-intercept orbit, it turned out that very little dV was needed to bring it to Minmus. I used the asteroid tug to bring it down to the surface of Minmus for futher study. This meant hovering above the surface, decoupling the claw and sliding the tug out from underneath. The gravity is low enough that the asteroid landed safely and rolled gently to a stop. The mobile base crew then drove over to have a look.

[sndrtj]

I decommissioned my Munar station, and hauled its power unit down to Kerbinstationary orbit. Then build a skeleton around it, and attached two of my Generic Habitation Modules. It's not wobbly, but it seems my computer is kinda hitting a limit here on the part count :/ (I should really buy a new one)

The power beam down to kerbinstationary orbit

Building the skeleton

First habitation module approaching (no mechjeb!)

The complete thing (and some space junk in the background which was later deorbited)

[Eddlm]

Today I flew (and landed) my first complex plane! I flew it to the Island runaway. I did also forget to put some ladders on it.

So I came up with an idea to get the kerbal inside the plane again.

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More interesting was what I did a few days ago. I was going to try and recover all the rovers I had scattered around the Kerbol system, starting with the one on the Mün. To do so, I designed a craft capable of towing other crafts around (AKA I strapped a KAS grappling hook on a random craft)

It didn't work. And I ended with a rover and a new craft stranded on the Mun, waiting to be recovered.

The second "Towcraft" did work... for the first hundred kilometers. When I tried to stabilish an orbit with the other craft wobbling behind me, it simply disengaged and crashed on the surface.

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I guess I'll try the stock claw!

Edited November 17, 2014 by Eddlm
accidental post

[Redmanjbj]

Put an asteroid in orbit around Kerbin and transformed into an orbital outpost. Then made the mistake of checking Steam to see how many hours I've spent playing this game...

[capi3101]

Flew four Kerbals to Kerbin's South Pole.

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I need to investigate whether I can stick an FL-T100 and a pair of 48-77s on the back without screwing up the balance too much. Plane's got more thrust than it needs - picked up orbital velocity and sufficient altitude on the jets during testing...

[Marshmallow_Man]

Inadvertently killed 4 Kerbals and flattened my VAB.

;~;

[Aragosnat]

Lost one Kerbal looking for a certain thing. Then was able to fly this over it even though I over shot it without realizing it. Had to back track to find it as well as cheated a bit and used the wiki to find it again. Which still had enough fuel left over to do a landing back at the KSP runway. Here is the picture with a way to spot what I was lookig for:

Those are just weatherballons. Ignore them.

[Orion1500]

I've been working on my colonization effort towards Duna. I'm using a design of interplanetary tugs to "haul" all the modules of the colonization effort. I'm now down to 57 days till a transfer window and I haven't even completed a 1/4 of what I need to do. This is gonna be fun.

[LordFjord]

After a short KSP break, I resumed my career mode "almost hardmode" save. Almost hardmode cause I allow reverts and saves to reduce frustration. But still hardmode From the original 3, only Bill is left, Jeb and Bob, well, they died heroic deaths for ... for what again? Ah, for SCIENCE! ( Curse you DRE! )

Bill made a visit to Minmus, did 4 hops, returned to Kerbin.

Added some mods to spice up the game, procedural fairings look really nice. Remotetech is giving me a headache but I will take that as a challenge to design and set up a sat network. Trajectories makes atmospheric landings sooo easy

Meanwhile, the 1st Duna transfer window is in sight, time to prepare a mid-tech Duna/Ike vessel.

Anyway, I am flashed (again) by KSP and by the mods. Good times ahead!

Junior loves it as well, I let him build some planes, drop some bombs on KSC while singing the "Bumdiadaaaaa song"

[zhollett]

Built a trebuchet

[Belphegor]

Built a trebuchet

that's impressive.. how were there no explosions?

[zhollett]

Shocking, I know

[Kamuchi]

Broke my station

but got my new upgrade