What did you do in KSP1 today?

[maccollo]

Went to Mún and back in under 9 minutes as an entry for Scott Manley's cheat challenge. (Get a Kerbal to Mún, place a flag and return safely to Kirbin, using Stock parts and the infinite fuel cheat)

http://youtu.be/4VV2sD0ZDr8

Took quite a few tries to get it right, timing was ridiculously sensitive XD

[StevoP80]

Today (this weekend really) I registered on the KSP website. Hello Folks! First Post! I've been a lurker and a player since May 2013 but just now registered. Also, today (this weekend) I finally got to see my weeks worth of planning come to fruition when I launched my first colony mission since updating to 0.21.1.

First a little background. The mission was originally going to go to Duna, but upon doing some entry and landing tests I discovered that some of the equipment just didn't have what it takes to successfully land on a planet with too much gravity for having very little atmosphere. Everrything worked like a charm however for low gravity locations, or places with proper atmospheres and decent amounts of gravity (Minmus, Eve). So I decided to set up the colony on Minmus. At least if something went wrong a rescue mission would be relatively short.

So I set about this last week designing several "ships" or modules that would be part of this colony mission. These modules would be launched to orbit around Kerbin individually, then docked together to form a couple of "super ships" that would then travel to Minmus, where it would separate and modules would then be landed on the surface one at a time. I would have the capability to mine Kethane, and convert it to various fuels. I would have 3 Kerbalnauts, who would take turns driving the mining rover while the other 2 would do science-y things or goof off on the hovercrafts(!!!!). I planned (in my opinion) some cool stuff, and finally got to launch it all. And now here I am to share it with you. I hope you enjoy.

Lengthy imgur album follows. Many images have better descriptions of the equipment and its purpose in the mission. Feedback is welcome and appreciated.

Some mission statistics

Part estimation: ~2,000 (the lag was terrible)

Number of Crafts: 15

Approximate total hours spent: 30

Craft List

2 X hover craft

2 X small refinery pods

1 rover

1 habitat (with 4 escape pods)

1 large refinery hub

2 X interplanetary engines

1 satellite

1 skycrane

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[TheAndrewTaco]

Today, I added several modules to my Munar research facility. Rendezvous was slightly more tedious because the station is on a retrograde 550km orbit. Which was intentional. I think.

[capi3101]

Built a Mir replica over the weekend. Needed a break from the Apollo mission - the booster design on that one is really starting to hack me off. Occurs to me that I still don't know if the LEM redesign is going to work or not.

Had a Hellrider 7 rover 20 kilometers from Tranquility, so I decided I'd go ahead and try to get it the rest of the way there. The new Mun has definitely got some pretty hairy grade nowadays...popped both back tires a mere four kilometers away. Maybe that'll be a side-trip when/if I get the Apollo mission up and running.

[Ivan Ivanovich]

Mostly I found out that too many addons can easily fill up your ram. I have to dump a few, 4 gig allocated is enough for any game...

[Deadweasel]

Discovered a (pretty hack-y) means of turning this

...into this!

[Deadweasel]

Today (this weekend really) I registered on the KSP website. Hello Folks! First Post! I've been a lurker and a player since May 2013 but just now registered. Also, today (this weekend) I finally got to see my weeks worth of planning come to fruition when I launched my first colony mission since updating to 0.21.1.

Hello, welcome, and WOW!

THIS​, folks, is how one makes an entrance!

[Tw1]

Exploring. They were impressed.

Edited August 12, 2013 by Tw1

[Spartwo]

Spent a few hours getting a powered bearing to work

Spins at about 90 revolutions per minute.Still have to figure out how to redock.

Edited August 12, 2013 by Spartwo

[regex]

The last week has been a lot of prototyping and experimenting with Kethane and KAS. I sent my Jool and Duna missions on their way, and redesigned my Moho and Eeloo craft to have kethane scanners and procedural fairings (somehow the Eeloo satellite lost its in-flight fairing).

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[regex]

Spent a few hours getting a powered bearing to work

That's a very tight design compared to some of the others I've seen.

[Kerbart]

As a newbie in KSP I'm doing all those things that are probably boring for others. But I'm having a good time with it!

Here's my home-brewn deep space probe. I have them now in orbit of Mun and Minmus, scouting landing locations for a Kerballed landing mission!

Initially I thought I'd be cool to build an Apollo styled lander. Thank goodness for a rigorous testing program; initial testing revealed that the landing gear was not long enough to fit the Poodle engine. After learning this (when testing things in orbit) the crew returned safely to Kerbin...

My first thought was to use a set of beams to lower the landing gear. That worked in the sense of yes, it gets you below the Poodle exhaust. Then I noticed that some people were using beefier landing struts. Could that icon that looks like a stack of building blocks be those hydraulic struds? By golly, yes! Of course I made the mistake of continuing to use those heavy beams, putting the center of gravity waaaay to high for a lander. Here you can see both implementations, during a docking exercise.

For me, docking was a nerve-wrecking experience. It helps (on the nerve-wrecking part) that I didn't know that you had to designate the docking port as the target, all I did was setting the other craft as my (rendezvous) target. Anyway, after about an hour the magic happened. Then, "never again" I used MechJeb only to learn that it takes even longer! So next time I'll rendezvous myself (it's not that hard), line the ships roughly up for docking (that wasn't that hard either) and then let MechJeb do the final part (which is does excellent and quickly. It's the RDV and lining up that is horribly inefficient)

Putting a three man lander on the mun is a bit daunting as the pod tends to behave like a hog. So I'm now going for a design with a seperate lander (that's why we have the lander can in the first place). And given the Frankenrocket design that is needed to launch capsule and lander in one vehicle I'm launching them seperately and docking them above Kerbin. But that's for next week...

[regex]

For me, docking was a nerve-wrecking experience. It helps (on the nerve-wrecking part) that I didn't know that you had to designate the docking port as the target, all I did was setting the other craft as my (rendezvous) target. Anyway, after about an hour the magic happened. Then, "never again" I used MechJeb only to learn that it takes even longer! So next time I'll rendezvous myself (it's not that hard), line the ships roughly up for docking (that wasn't that hard either) and then let MechJeb do the final part (which is does excellent and quickly. It's the RDV and lining up that is horribly inefficient)

I don't even bother setting the target, finding it much easier to simply eyeball the approach.

Anyway, congrats and welcome aboard!

[Tw1]

As a newbie in KSP I'm doing all those things that are probably boring for others. But I'm having a good time with it!

Always cool to see a new guy learning the ropes! Give it a while, and you'll pull all kinds of stunts.

Just be ready for many of these:

And these:

Along the way.

P.S. Those medium lander legs are very untrustworthy. Stick to hydraulics.

Medium ones misbehave on anything larger than a one man lander.

Edited August 12, 2013 by Tw1
Afterthought.

[Kerbart]

Always cool to see a new guy learning the ropes! Give it a while, and you'll pull all kinds of stunts.

Just be ready for many of these:

[...]

Along the way.

P.S. Those medium lander legs are very untrustworthy. Stick to hydraulics.

Thanks for the tip! My current lander is pretty small so I'm going to find out the hard way why not avoid the medium lander legs

And I have a feeling there will be rescue missions, and rescue the rescuers.. and rescue those! In fact, I might opt for sending an unmanned lander in first, and then try to crash land as close as possible to that one.

[BJ Quest]

Bob Kerman went from Duna to Dres. Landing on Dres for refueling. Ready for the next stage of the trip.

BJ Quest

[HeadHunter67]

I've been playing for just about a month now, and I'm finally taking on the challenge of manual rendezvous. Docking is easy for me; it's the getting there that's tough:

I did run out of fuel on the Apollo CSM but I was close enough that I decided to keep on with it. Probably could have made it on RCS alone from that point. Regardless, no robots were used in the making of this historic docking.

[Cooly568]

Discovered a (pretty hack-y) means of turning this

-snip-

...into this!

-snip-

Hang on what?

[jwenting]

finally got the 4 launches complete and docked for the rescue mission to Duna to get the crashed Kerbonauts back. Except they're no longer there as that was in 0.20 and the save didn't convert

So going to use them instead as a return exploration mission for a new campaign.

And this time the lander was tested extensively, the one going out is actually the 4th launched, the first 3 having made landings on Kerbin, each leading to small improvements in the design.

[annallia]

As a newbie in KSP I'm doing all those things that are probably boring for others. But I'm having a good time with it!

Here's my home-brewn deep space probe. I have them now in orbit of Mun and Minmus, scouting landing locations for a Kerballed landing mission!

*snip*

Not at all boring, some of us like to see other peoples designs for new ideas on old projects.

Welcome to KSP.

[Whackjob]

Tried to get the Arkingthaad lander up with a crew this time. Did 12 separate ascents. Each failed. Big structures means resonant stress waves, which leads to sudden unplanned dis-assembly. Did not succeed before it was time for work.

There's always tomorrow.

[Deadweasel]

Hang on what?

I discovered the shady realm of model "ripping".

Initially I did it in an attempt to get a hold of a kerbal model I could start messing around with to teach myself "proper" modeling and rigging in 3D Studio Max. The idea was that I could produce a heavily modified derivative that could be used to create imagery for the story I've been working on.

Then it dawned on me that while I'm having a hard time with organic modeling in that program, I already have some pretty solid experience with Sketchup, which is really sweet for mechanical/architectural stuff. Since 3DS Max can import the ripped meshes, and Sketchup can import Max's .3DS format, I realized I had a conversion path that would allow me to pull assembled ship models over to a program I know how to work with very well. Sadly Sketchup can't deal with the .dds textures that are produced with the rip, but that's okay because I don't want the final product to be an exact reproduction of the game model. If I did that, I couldn't (easily) produce the neat shine effects on some of those parts (the RollKage, wings etc).

The initial model after cleanup (the ripping process results in two versions of the mesh, intersecting each other at an angle, so the "extra" parts have to be removed and the remaining final model aligned with the primary axes)

After initial cleanup, the model is then further refined to remove extra lines and faces. When it's all ready, I can begin texturing the model using Indigo's (a third-party renderer) materials editor, which lets me bring in materials that have surface texture and reflectivity like the wings and RollKage "paint". Other parts get simple colors because they aren't expected to have special visual qualities to make them stand out. They can be considered to have been simply painted with a flat matte paint. From there, the model is copied into another model of an appropriate-looking hangar facility, complete with customized textures on the lights that Indigo understands to be actual light emitters. A little experimentation results in lights that are dialed in to the appropriate intensity and color for the scene I'm looking for.

Indigo does the rest of the really slick work in producing the final render, providing the actual lights and reflections in the final image. Each render takes about three or four hours (with this particular complex model) to get to a point where I can consider it done. Since Indigo is what's called an "unbiased renderer", technically it would keep crunching almost forever, tracing light rays again and again, refining the image further with each pass that gets successively longer. As it proceeds, it fills in missing pixels which are called "fireflies", resulting from surfaces that are lit primarily from third-hand or greater light reflections. You can see them in the driving lights on top of the cage.

And here's the result of allowing Indigo to have its way with the model overnight instead of just a few hours

All in all, I'm pretty excited to have figured this out, as I can then start bringing in kerbals that have been dressed and posed the way I want them for specific scenes in the story, instead of doing simple crop-n-chop Photoshop images like these

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Edited August 12, 2013 by Deadweasel

[XkaOnslaught]

been looking at NASA missions and trying to recreate the sats and probes in KSP lol.

[Stochasty]

Went canyon surfing on Dres!

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[Bilfr3d]

I accidentally made a ring of debris around kerbin.

I sent up a ship to go to the mun, and just as I got into orbit around the mun, it blew up into a thousand pieces.

Whups!