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What did you do in KSP1 today?


Xeldrak

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Been working on my Extra Hard career (as I've named it when it asked for a save-name) 30% science 40% everything else Yes to Reverting

Anyways, I made it to the mun with my new patented 'Suspension Bridge' technology! Getting there on a tight budget with only a few science nodes ulocked was a bit of a challenge. It made me think outside the box, but it wasn't an EXTREME challenge, which is what I was going for XD

9k=

This bad boy was wobbling everywhere, but as the Kerbal do, me and Jeb found a way...

Z

The sad news is the my best guess is that there might be enough fuel to get into orbit around the Mun, but regardless that is a task for another day.

PS I'm having a hard time getting these pics I'm posting to not break the character limit... any suggestions? (I've changed them to JPEG and cropped them already... it's still tough)

\\\Sorry, pics were supposed to be here, but apparently I broke the forum with my picture pasting...///

I'll have to do it later :/

Edited by zeldorsteam
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Put a space station in Kerbin orbit. Then decided it would be better orbiting the Mun so refuelled the launcher and sent it on its way. Afterwards sent a 1-man lander and 3-man crew bus to meet up with it. The idea is to use the station as a base for several lander missions- the station will refuel the lander and reset the experiments.

Did pretty much the same, but with Minmus and the Karbonite mod.

Basically, there's three vessels:

One drills the karbonite out of Minmus' soil and converts it to whatever I need, a second vessel stores the fuel converted and lifts it to a massive-but-empty-of-fuel space station orbiting Minmus.

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Althought now that it's finally done, I realized i got it wrong. I should only extract the karbonite and lift it to the station. The station should convert it to LFO, Xenon gas or MonoPropellant when needed.

That way the extractor will be more light (no converters/distillers) and I won't need to attach empty fuel tanks to the station, it will refill the tanks of the passing vessels.

Edit: Oh! And learned the magic ways of gravity assistances.

daRku.jpg

Edited by Eddlm
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Launched the second version of my PJF spaceplane (Please Just Fly), the PJF-1.1

This time, it has swept wings for proper weight/lift balance... and emergency parachutes.

For some reason I thought you wanted the COM BEHIND the COL... I can't remember where I saw it, but the PJF-1 was a PAIN to fly! I still got it to orbit, though. (2 pages ago)

The PJF-1.1 is much better, but still has major flaws.

screenshot29_zpscbb6e8bc.png

Something went screwy, and the new design lost almost all of its pitch authority (probably because of the angle of the control surfaces), so it didn't have enough "up" to get to orbit, had to scrub the attempt and go for landing, which was interesting with an almost full fuel tank

screenshot32_zps6ef7557d.png

I don't think boss-man is going to be too happy with these two.

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Enter the PJF-2

Ditched the swept-wings, and added wing "volume" via some more wings...

I also opted for 4x turbojets, and 1x liquid engine, vs the 3x turbojets and 2x liquid engines on the PJF-1 series.

MUCH more pitch authority! It held a 30* climb to almost 18,000m in NEAR aerodynamics!

screenshot38_zps2731039f.png

It got to orbit! Not without a few bumps, though.

For some reason beyond my knowledge, the liquid engine caused the craft to turn hard right when throttled up... I had to stay below 1/4 throttle, and enable RCS just to hold a heading! I have NO idea what is causing this, but a little suspicion points to the vertical tail fins, which are EVER SO SLIGHTLY clipped into the base ring of the engine... It's really dumb and I cant to fix it really bad! It's such a pain!

screenshot40_zpsa904f97b.png

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It's still a bear on re-entry, and loves to flat-spin. I'm thinking it might be pilot error more than anything.

This landing looks a bit better!

screenshot43_zps58a03646.png

Tomorrow means more iterations!

Edited by User Unrelated
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I pulled out more hair today trying again to assemble my Ion ship in orbit... but this time I worked on the other side of my head so at least it looks 'balanced'. ;)

I got the engine(s) and fuel sections up and joined, lined up nicely. But in bringing up the crew module (which first has to be undocked, turned around (like the LEM), and redocked), trying to get it mated to the rest of the ship was impossible - very frustrating. It kept dancing about, as though it wasn't in docking maneuvering mode, turning and drifting like crazy ... thrusting right had it turning right, thrusting left had it turning left, and so on. I think maybe the heavy end (fuel tank) is the problem. So, I'll modify it yet again (more RCS thrusters on the tank), and try again tomorrow. Yea, I'm determined.

This is try #3. Try #2, I tried putting two fuel modules, but discovered 1100+ (or was it 1200+?) part count brought my system to it's knees. :/ I'm trying to keep it just under 1000 now. I have to recalculate the weight of the ship, but it's somewhere around 80-90 tons... fuel (Xenon & RCS) included.

Fun.

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Been working on my Extra Hard career (as I've named it when it asked for a save-name) 30% science 40% everything else Yes to Reverting

Anyways, I made it to the mun with my new patented 'Suspension Bridge' technology! Getting there on a tight budget with only a few science nodes ulocked was a bit of a challenge. It made me think outside the box, but it wasn't an EXTREME challenge, which is what I was going for XD

Base64 embedded images won't work with the %7Boption%7D tags here, sorry. You need to upload your image to a web or image hosting service and link to the URL from there.

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Well. Finally finished my Mün Rover drive of Mün to gain all science from it except the first few landings (only landed at 2 diffrent biomes) that gave me a boost to get better science stuff. This is the type of angles it can live through:

7D467188A1B25277D9DB3222A5A121D17A6C71AA

This is the road trip I had taken using the second rover that was delivered with the first. Top of East Crater down to the edge of it to gather the polar and polar lowlands then dashed over to Southwest crater then went north to Northwest Crater again for reasons then went to Polar Crater then headed to Farside Crater then West to East Farside crater:

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I would have done all that with my first one if I had not had an accident in Northwet Basin. But, Delivered a crew transfer over to get them back to the second one with all the science they had gathered; yes I could have just returned them to get the science. But, was more fun to keep it and store it on the second for the end total as you can see here:

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And with that I finished off the tech tree again and basicly goofing off while I wait for some crafts to return from a quick in and out of Kerbin SOI and a Correction Burn for a Duna fly-bye. =^.^=

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screenshot5.png

what's this alarmingly phallic object (even by rocketry standards)? has it crawled from your girlfriend's the sock drawer?

screenshot7.png

wait, it's full of science! this 3-part payload is going to eve where it will complete some important Dmagic contracts. it's been a long time since i launched any multi-spacecraft interplanetary missions, and even then that was back in my days of innocence when things like fairing loading, cost overruns and deadly re-entry weren't even complicating factors yet. now when it goes live i must only hope i don't, say, accidentally tap spacebar and strand everything in space; reverting is not an option (really, it isn't).

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My first powered descent onto Kerbin.

I'd always used parachutes before, but today, as my Mun orbit insertion stage returned to Kerbin, I realised that a) I had a *lot* of fuel on board and B) I'd forgotten to pack chutes. I let the atmosphere bleed off most of the velocity and then tried to balance my descent with the engine. First attempt went slightly bad - I went from having 90m/s downwards to about 30m/s up, but after a bit of back and forth, managed to bring it down at 5m/s and didn't kill any parts.

First time that landing without chutes (on Kerbin) didn't involve at least one explosion.

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So, just in case my previous vehicles weren't ridiculous enough, I've decided to sacrifice some functionality for looks and make my first movie spaceship.

I present to you the Endurance, the ring-shaped ship from Interstellar!

1rtyhIy.png

It weighs nearly 550 tons and has 504 parts, but it still manages to have 5-figure delta-V since all those tanks are full of fuel. Of course, it gets terrible framerates on my computer and it only has a TWR of 0.08 in Kerbin gravity, but it makes up for that by being able to dock four awesome landing craft.

ZPl1Tt9.png

The two Rangers on the front are powered by hybrid thermal rocket/turbojet engines which let them fly in most environments. They certainly won't have the lift or thrust to make orbit from Kerbin or Laythe, but they could probably do Duna and certainly would be able to hop all over the smaller airless bodies with ease.

The Landers docked to the sides would be pretty much useless in an atmosphere since they're not aerodynamically stable, but they have lots of fuel and thrust for exploring airless bodies. Both types of landing craft have near-perfect RCS balance as well, and more delta-V than anyone could possibly need.

l0031A8.png

VLd3c45.png

A top-down and side oblique view. Note the glowing radiators in these pictures; Movies often forget those, but KSP Interstellar does not, so I did my best to attach them without borking up the design too much.

YPQFYol.png

Burning the engines to show their location. Like the movie ship, there are four clusters of three engines each arranged around the ring. Note also the staggering acceleration of almost 750 millimeters per second per second, as well as, true to the movie, I'm currently attempting to escape Kerbin by burning along the radial vector. :P

The main drawback of this design is that it's very hard to rotate about any axis. I also didn't put any crew cabins around the ring, so the kerbals can't enjoy rotational artificial gravity, but they probably don't really need it anyway. The framerate my computer gets with it is so low that I probably won't actually make it out to Vall before I go insane, but at least it looks cool. :D

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had a landing mishap with a butt-ugly get-science-quick lander...

screenshot44_zpsa5753c64.png

Only lost the materials bay on top, 1 engine, and 1 parachute... the parachute was the most worrysome.

By disabling the out-of-symmetry engine, I was actually able to make a return to Kerbin with all of my science!

The single parachute made for a hairy 18m/s splash-down. I wasn't sure the crew was going to make it! Everything turned out fine.

And although still requiring tweaks, I now present, the PJF-2n! The nuclear variant of the PJF-2 series light long-distance cargo SSTO.

screenshot49_zpsa78aeda2.png

To orbit with science in-tow, and a totally overkill amount of DV remaining! This thing could go interplanetary!

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Docking to the biological sciences station and unloading the station science module was a breeze!

The RCS tug will stay with the station for future pickups and deliveries.

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I still haven't tried landing... that's the part that scares me now.

It needs some linear RCS modules for correct translation, I actually had to use 1 axis of the RCS tug's thrusters in the payload bay to dock!

It also has messed-up fuel lines... for whatever reason one single pair of fuel lines wasn't placed with dual symmetry in the SPH, and it totally borked fuel flow, draining one wing faster than the other... Easy fix.

Other than that, maybe some more aero tweaks, and it will be fantastic!

It should be able to deliver and retrieve 2 station science modules! I haven't quite figured out how to LOAD the second module back into the cargo bay in-orbit, but I'll get there eventually.

I am thinking about creating a variant for kerbin's SOI that has double cargo bays instead of the LF+O tank up front...

It'd make one heck of a fuel tanker, though!

Edited by User Unrelated
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