What did you do in KSP1 today?

[electronicfox]

Continuing on my extraplanetary launchpad quest, I discovered that Gilly is not an ideal place to set up shop at all. Perhaps an orbital station with a karbonite/ore miner that hops from the surface would be better.

[capi3101]

Did a couple of challenge entries. Not much more than that. Probably the first time I've ever crashed into the Mun deliberately...

[Felsmak]

Pumped some fuel into my interplanetary spaceship.

[Coga19000]

Installed a Life Support Module to my Orbital Research station. Phew, I got it in time. Silly me for installing TAC Life Support while I still ha dKerbals up there

[T3rran]

Prepare for story time!

Yesterday, I was doing some tweaks to my Spaceplane. Basic designs, getting to orbit, seeing what it was capable of, etc. After about an hour of adjusting TWR, staging, adding structures, control surfaces, etc. I finally got into orbit, and went to go and test reentry.

Upon reentering, I realized I had no landing gear. So, back to the drawing board. I add some landing gear, get into orbit, and repeat the experiment of reentry. Turns out, without a control winglets, you just sorta plummit upon reentry. I also realized my entry is very fast, far too fast to really land with safely. So I also added parachutes to slow reentry, and then be detached after slowing my entry and getting me low enough in the atmosphere. At this point in time, it was 2 in the morning. I had class in 9 hours. "One last launch," I said, "Let's just test and see if this can get to the Mun.

I made it to the moon, but there was catastrophe. I didn't have enough fuel to circularize, and I was going to pass by the inside orbit (I.E. pass on the side closer to Kerbin.) This gave my Kerbals a chance. They would reenter the atmosphere, and I did have parachutes. However, the parachutes were as far from the cockpit as they could be, on the engine. Former experience led me to believe they parachutes would fully deploy, and rip the part they were attached to away from the cockpit, killing the Kerbals anyway. However, I had no other option.

They reentered, and chutes deployed to slow them. Fingers crossed, I was going to land over water. That would assist me... and the chutes fully deployed. These Kerbals survived from the parachutes that weren't meant for the task they were used for. Felt like a real Apollo 13 rescue.

[Belphegor]

nice t3rran, trail and error. i just made some error of my own..

i designed a skycrane for work on minmus first. afterwards i made a rover that was supposed to be compact and light but with room for science equipment for at least 2 biomes at a time. offcourse i over engineered it again and it turned out a tad bit bigger than expected

also got the recovery of the lifting stage working

so i left the rover in orbit to be landed by the skycrane later. after another uneventful launch i docked the skycrane to the rover and trutted it with KAS, unfortunatly the skycrane was no longer up to scale with the rover because i'm stupid like that. the engines are thrusting into the damn rover making the docking port all wobbely and it's blowing the entire thing BACKWARDS by redirecting the force towards the top. i'm amazed. so now i have to make a bigger lander

Edited November 21, 2014 by Belphegor

[GloriousWater]

Took a brand-new SSTO to Minmus. Shame the RAPIER is so thirsty in closed-cycle though.

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[Piper]

Today I finished up the design of my 2-Kerbal Eve lander. I've been testing it around Kerbin, including launching it into orbit as one single stage, refueling it in orbit, and landing it at the KSC nearly fully fuelled in a combination parachute/powered landing. Big thing I wanted to make sure of was that Jeb and Ribkin would be safely able to climb down. I didn't want to get all the way to Eve and discover I couldn't climb down the ladder, or worse, not clomb back up it. The next step, is to build the 7-Kerbal crewed reusable spaceship called the KSS Discovery. My plan is to launch the lander and the Discovery towards Eve seperately, aerobrake, dock in orbit (if necessary for the lander to refuel) and then have the Discovery go and explore Gilly. Later, the Discovery would pick up the return vehicle in LEO before returning home. I may very well launch an additional refueller to Eve as well just as a safety measure. I also plan to do a similar style mission (possibly with the Discovery itself or a sister ship) out to Jool and it's moons, including Tylo. This mission I think also represents the most planning and testing I've ever done for a mission.

[LABHOUSE]

I did my first mission without any glitches, but I forgot parachutes on my rover that only had enough fuel to get out of orbit so... boom.

[Spatzimaus]

Today was the inaugural flight of the Chunky Weasel, my heavy-lift spaceplane. (Not to be confused with the Sleazy Weasel, Dinky Weasel, Stinky Weasel, Grumpy Weasel, or Rabid Weasel, my other spaceplane designs.) While Jebediah does most of my flight testing, the honor this time went to Lenemy Kerman as he was going to accompany the payload to its destination.

Here it is, in all of its 300-ton glory:

Yep, that's an SSTO spaceplane, even if it looks more like a rocket. The engines are CLAYMOREs (a custom 2.5m version of the RAPIER, basically each equivalent to 4 rapiers), and it includes a lot of B9 parts, but amazingly enough it still flies and can get up to about 1500m/s at 30km before running out of intake air. It's designed to carry any 2.5m payload up to about 50 tons, although I'm pretty sure it can handle 3.75m parts if need be. On this inaugural flight, it was delivering one of my Iguana 1c-class rovers into orbit:

The Iguana is a 30-ton mobile Kethane miner/refinery, intended to refuel vessels landed on moderate-gravity bodies (the first one's going to Mun). Since it's manned, it'll also let me do all those Plant Flag missions. It's got its own onboard engines (ions, and VTOL rockets), so getting it to orbit was more than enough, and once it's at Mun it'll refill its own tanks. I used to carry these to orbit on top of a fully recoverable SSTO rocket stack, but this way's even cheaper; it cost me just under 15k in fuel costs to lift a 30-ton rover valued at 151k.

The best part is that as a fully functional plane, it's capable of precision landing back at KSC:

Yes, I actually landed it that close. Well, I landed a bit before the base and coasted the rest of the way, but still. I didn't aim for the runway because I honestly wasn't sure if that design could survive the stresses of landing, and if it cratered then I didn't want to pay for runway repairs.

Now I'm flying the Iguana to Mun. It's in the middle of a 20-minute ion deceleration burn into Mun orbit, but from here on out it should be pretty routine. Now that the lifter's been tested, I'll send more of these to Duna, Eve, and one or two of Jool's moons; I've got orbital depots for the lighter-gravity moons, so I don't need many of these.

[zekes]

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Decoupling the side stages of the CIRA V. This $2.5 million monster is designed to put 700 tonnes of cargo into orbit, probably more with an upper fourth stage.

[Lunaran]

^ WHAO ^

Decided to finally get going on the plant-a-flag-on-every-body thing I started this save for.

First one (technically a few days ago) was a wash since I forgot that Procedural Fairings bases do not double as decouplers. I fixed that and some action group bugs, and the second attempt was going great until it became apparent that the lander could really use rather a lot more TWR, because a crazy early slowdown ignition gradually turned out to be a not-early-enough suicide burn by a margin of 18m/s. Dilfrod and Munrick "Munrock" Kerman (who has yet to collect any munrocks) managed to put the lander can down safely-ish, after smashing it along the surface in such a way that it was utterly denuded of all fuel tanks, engines, batteries, landing gear, lights, RemoteTech antennae, the Clamp-o-tron ... literally everything but three RCS quads:

So, flag planted, under rather ignoble circumstances.

Besides RT I'm also playing with Snacks, so while my two green heroes are not going to freeze to death in any mechanically enforced way, they've got ten days worth of goldfish crackers and no way to radio back to Hadfry in the command pod that they're even alive. Night is going to fall in about a Kerbin day, however, so I decided I had to get some kind of aid to them (we'll say Hadfry saw their helmet lights as he passed low overhead) before then or soon after.

I didn't start this save with Construction Time installed, but I decided to set a limit of a week before a rocket launch - a full munar orbit. Hadfry hadn't anywhere near the d/V for an ill-informed landing on the engine bell, which left only ... that station I thought was going to be pointless in this save.

It still had the unmanned supply craft I sent up, which I was finished with and just hadn't gotten around to deorbiting yet, and thank god I didn't as once empty of its 2-ton snack delivery it actually had the potential dV to land on the Mun. The crew of the newly expanded station got to work, pumping every ounce of monopropellant into it that they could find (enough to fill it thankfully), stripping the batteries and solar panels off the Albion crew shuttle and sticking them on inside the 6S compartment, and rooting around the KAS boxen for whatever else might be useful. I hadn't shipped up any RTGs, unfortunately, but I did have some cubic octagonals, which I stuck on the bottom as impromptu landing gear (just in case) and two pipe ends, which would be used to bridge the supply craft's inline batteries to the surviving lander can, (since by the time it landed, local sunset would have happened and the included solar panels were going to be initially useless). And a month's worth of snacks, just in case. The supply craft, newly christened the Care Package, left with a surprising 2300dV.

Frank Kerman set out in the now rather stripped-down Albion, to dock with the supply craft and use an LFO burn to lower it's periapsis from 250km down to 72km, which shaved a good 120dV off the injection burn. (there was a whole bunch of spare LFO on the station, but the Albion didn't have big enough tanks for a mun visit.) At periapsis, which was precisely timed, he then burned another 105dV worth of the injection burn on LFO also (timed to put himself on a high arc to rendezvous perfectly with the station again as soon as possible, since all the extra batteries and solar panels on his craft had been moved to the Care Package), and the supply craft finished the burn on its own, with 1800dV of monopropellant with which to attempt an emergency supply drop, by remote control. I'm now glad I put a trio of satellites around the mun to provide omni-antenna coverage ...

Frank's return didn't go as planned - his batteries went dry during his docking approach, leaving the modicum of monopropellant he'd sipped from the Care Package for maneuvering, which also went dry, leaving him in a dead spinning craft headed right for the station (which, yes, I should have brought in the first place. mistakes were made.) I gave him a squirt of the throttle when the ship was pointed off-axis to deflect it a bit, then another when he was pointed roughly target-retrograde to at least stop him nearby, and sent Burlong on EVA with another monopropellant tank, bearing the last of the thruster fuel on the station, which he installed on the Albion to allow it to finally dock, despite the incessant spray of errors RemoteTech was giving me because of the dead battery:

Now I've got two Kerbals stranded on the Mun, six Kerbals on a station with one crew shuttle that doesn't have any power and another that doesn't even have a service module (I accidentally staged it off who-knows-when a while ago and it just floated away). The Duna launch window is in 200 days, so these guys better get it together. I wonder if I shouldn't start a Mission Report thread for all their shenanigans.

[zekes]

Such an awesome read. I want to know what happens next

[Bigbootie]

While playing my third or so career mode my save files became corrupted or something and it got to where I couldn't access several missions I had going on. So I just said screw it and started anew in sandbox mode. I don't really care for the current iteration of career mode anyhow, but that's for another thread, so here is some of what I did.

Built a new heavy lift rocket that toted the first module of my new Mun base as well as an orbiting lab/scan sat.

Here is Jeb piloting the base into position. Bill is in the scan sat already providing images.

Successful landing. Time for the dramatic pose.

And after Jeb soaked up all the initial accolades for himself. He let the rest of the crew out to await further modules.

[Aragosnat]

Well had this rover deployer finally deployed to a kertain area on Kerbin. This be the second one that made be brokeish. 355 k (rover is around 90 k) just to put it into a suborbit is costly and also need to balance it better could have made my life easy by doing it in pairs:

As you can see here it made it safely and had to drive it 20 km to the area I wanted Which was to transpot Kerbals to a certain area. Fell short and thank goodness no deadly re-entry:

Then I had some fun at the site with the ladder system I had on the rover (not linking image just to keep people sane):

http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/540758958779045700/E69E9F7A936396B4295C0357710B9B0AC5745741/

http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/540758958746903866/FB38CEA882F56BD57674A8F746CC230D28240F3D/

Then had a nice group photo op at their new base and at the new science area (not really) where they will live and study and have my jet plane transfer in new crew and the old out. Think I will also need a smaller crew transporter that can move crew about without needing to move the lab too:

[Felsmak]

Landed in some mountains and found this cool view.

[coreross]

Built myself a state of the art shuttle. Im pretty proud of ship building advances.

[Belphegor]

got a wider skycrane up to minmus and sucessfully landed my oversized rover. also got a design ready for a supply platform with fuel, KAS parts and a science module. it might be a pain to get it up there but it will surely be easier than assembling it on site from individual modules

Edited November 22, 2014 by Belphegor

[Frank_G]

Today i did something i wanted to do for such a long time now... a colony on Laythe. First things first, so i designed a mission batch and then got into the SPH to fiddle on the landers and rover etc. I also built an efficient transfer stage to bring the landers to Laythe. The whole mission will be executed as a constellation variant, but with the crew already inside the landing vehicles. On the to-do-list is an SSTO space-plane, small enough to fit inside lander no. 3 and probably a jetboat to explore Laythes oceans. When finished the mission will cost around 5 million funds, so hopefully, the new biomes we get in KSP .90 beta will bring some nice profitable missions...

As usual, i will make an album when the mission is finished, featuring more details and different shots. Here are first impressions:

Designing the first 2 landers:

First transfer stage goes to orbit:

[Belphegor]

^ nice landers!

launching a supply platform to minmus turns out to be pretty hard with only half of the tech tree unlocked, but after a failed attempt and some redesigning it got there anyways. a few transfer stages ended up in minmus orbit with a bit of fuel left so i landed them as well

rover docks to the platform nicely

[zekes]

I built and launched my new Cira VI - which will be released very soon. It can put 830 tonnes to LKO.

Edited November 23, 2014 by zekes

[Woopert]

I built and launched my new Cira VI - which will be released very soon. It can put 830 tonnes to LKO.

http://imgur.com/a/pDXLC

Did you use an 1.25 meter SRB for the separation motor there? Neat idea

[TrooperCooper]

Working on a new cargo lifter SSTO. Not sure about capacity yet. But should be at least 50+ tons...

Re-entry...

High aerodyn pressure...

[zekes]

Did you use an 1.25 meter SRB for the separation motor there? Neat idea

correct as i recall they are set at 47% power and 37% fuel - which was the perfect speed to push them off and stage without problems, despite the decouplers being clipped INSIDE the outer stages....

[cantab]

Tried out the warp drive mod. Got my 130 ton ship into orbit, filled up the exotic matter, and took her for a spin

It did not end well. I ramped up the throttle steadily to the max, but the g-forces caused by the drive combined with DRE to kill Jeb. Then thanks to AntennaRange I had no control over the ship. Then I realised that all along I had been flying not towards Dres as planned but exactly away from it. Then the conventional engines and the battery banks exploded for some reason.

In the end the warp bubble inevitably collapsed.