What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Agate]

Haven't played the game for about a year; I'm back for 1.0 career mode. Currently I'm farming the Mun and Minmus for science, so I can start building bigger things.

Sat down last night for a quick Munshot. Highlight of the evening: after screwing up a Mun insertion burn, scientist Tormund lands without enough fuel to get back home again. But maybe it's enough to get into orbit where he can be rescued? Let's go for it. Nope! Suborbital death now guaranteed. But maybe not! Tormund grabs the Mun rocks, bails out of the capsule, and starts firing his suit thrusters to slow down. Eventually crashes into a crater wall going probably 40 m/s ... and lives to tell the tale! What now? Well, first order of business, Tormund's gotta plant a flag and grab some Mun rocks, because that's what they pay him for.

Now for rescue. Throw a probe body inside the service bay of a new lander, clear the Kerbal sandwich crumbs off the driver's seat, and fire that puppy into space. Land next to Tormund. Well, 1 km away but who's counting? Get walking, buddy! Tormund climbs aboard, time to go home! Rescue lander definitely has enough fuel to get into Munar orbit... but not enough to leave it.

Time to send a rescue vehicle to rescue the rescue vehicle. In the end, Tormund went through three space ships, two landing sites (one of them a faceplant) and an orbital docking, but he made it home alive, and he brought some Mun rocks with him.

- - - Updated - - -

And day before yesterday, I built a launch vehicle with no rockets: it's just stacked decouplers with a probe body on top. By firing them off rapidly in sequence, I was able to get up to 400 m altitude. I tried building ridiculous staging with decouplers firing in parallel for more thrust, but it didn't help much.

This seems like an obvious thing to do: has anybody else tried it? KSP fans being KSP fans, I'm sure somebody will reply with a decoupler-powered Mun rocket.

[Randox]

It took some doing, but I have a new resource miner for my space program, which will hopefully work well. I also have what will serve as my new Atlas Launcher heavy lifting rocket, I think the largest rocket I've ever built. Here she is, sitting pretty with the new miner, ready for her first manned flight.

After some serious trimming down, it now has 5200 dV available to the lifting stages while carrying a 52 tonne payload (the miner isn't that small), while the miner has available a meager 1200 dV (going to be a lot less than that with the ore tanks full, but it should be good enough for my purposes). Sitting on the launch pad the rocket stands at 111m tall. She flies like a dream too. You have to be really aggressive with the gravity turn at the start, and dial the throttle back to at least 66% (lest you end up in a cartoonishly high orbit), but it handles quite well. Might have something to do with using 8 full delta wings (with matching ailerons) as the tail fins. I also tested the miner, and it can survive re-entry and water landings (11.7 m/s is probably excessive for a ground landing). It can be seen (sort of) testing this capability here:

That...might not be plan A.

Edited May 4, 2015 by Randox

[problemecium]

Haven't posted here in a while because I was taking a break from KSP and then the stuff I was doing wasn't really anything notable.

But today I realized I may have become too good at rendezvousing. It's not uncommon for me to get within 100m five or six orbits out (I use Kerbal Alarm Clock), but a few minutes ago, this happened:

FOUR meters. Ten orbits out. o_O

And by the way, "Rescue Ship" was built and installed in orbit (its job is to retrieve stranded Kerbals and bring them to my station so I can shuttle them down in batches) before I had RCS unlocked, so this was done solely using the engine.

P.S. Don't jump on me for that HyperEdit button up there. I only use it for "tests" and to fight back against the Kraken, honest.

[Xacktar]

I finished a video and then filed a bug report!

Now I get to actually play!

[nsgallup]

Made a mach 4 capable cargo jet for dropping science probes from 20000m over the arctic.

Can go all the way to the pole and back with fuel to spare.

Edited May 5, 2015 by nsgallup

[BDelacroix]

Added to my employee list by rescuing some guys. Sent one with Jeb to minmus to pick up more science. Built my first orbiting space lab. I may need to grind some more as I forsee needing to hire more kerbals for a duna mission.

[Fizwalker]

I'm wasting my hard-earned money from satellite contracts to chase that nasty demon out there at Mach 1. Maybe I should earn a few more science points to get rid of those wheels...

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/26237701579617058/B3EB8739335DE68E895A97F729BF24E2E95E7215/

Besides, I tried it with a RT-10, too. Plane flies, doesn't flip, doesn't desintegrate when the booster is started, doesn't get over 330m/s... Maybe I should really invest more science into more aerodynamic parts. Or more boosters.

I like to fool around with planes with 1.0.2 now. So much more fun than in 0.90.

Youu're chasing that too, huh?

[Zucal]

An Ares 1 replica and the Star Trek Enterprise.

[Znath]

This is my current Mach4 capable jet

The wing-tanks are range extenders. With those I can get about half way around the world through atmospheric flight. But not at full speed of course thanks to the lovely heat-bars. It survives remarkably long at full speed though. And for some reason, the way it's designed, the top fins always stay intact. So upon breakup, it can glide with its tail fins for an incredible distance using the 40 fuel the main body stores as emergency reserves.

. . .

The annoying thing is it seems any flight past 1000m/s is highly unstable. To get that picture, I loaded the game and decided to fly west to Sandoland. Got within sight of the shores and decided to ramp it up to 1000 since my parts were all doing ok. Crash.

Edited May 5, 2015 by Znath

[Randox]

Got my Refinery and Miner all set up around Minmus. Early results are encouraging as to the usefulness of this project with the new stock resource system. Really miss my docking camera, but still pretty good at docking anyway. The NMS Anubis (miner) and NRS Hephaestus (refinery station).

I think the dV might be a bit worse, but it's much easier to fly and land than my old kethane miners, and it has enough fuel for it's purpose. It's a purpose built ship now, not a modular craft, so that works just fine for me.

I'm also really liking my heavy lifter design. I think with a little work doing a better job securing payloads and giving the lifter stage some RCS thrusters, I could probably insert up to 50, maybe 55 tonnes right into a Minmus orbit.

[KerbMav]

Relearned to land on Mun after months of KSP-abstinence.

Relearned to launch rockets with 1.0.2 - especially light payloads seem to get the best of me, but it seems easier without the stock fairings ... ?

Starting to regain my (KER-assisted) feeling for what a good fuel reserve should be.

Seven of my eight kerbonauts made a trip to Mun with Jeb as pilot - Valentina did the solo scouting mission with a smaller lander before, they did it the other way around with Minmus before.

The same seven also made a trip outside the SOI of Kerbin an in-game week earlier, so Valentina is lagging behind in rank for now, but she was promised a trip to Duna/Ike soonish.

Started placing a few satelllites for use with the AntennaRange mod - did not want the full blown difficulty of RemoteTech this time.

Launched a Duna/Ike probe, waiting for transfer window.

All the while doing orbital trips for some tips from tourists.

Next I will transfer the three-star white-suits to Kylab One - which should see some expansion/rework soon too.

[Luskhen]

Playing mostly stock while waiting patiently for all the mods I use to update

I made a pretty little science base on Minmus :

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Edited May 5, 2015 by Luskhen
Still need to learn how to post -_-

[percyPrune]

Hoping to put my sandbox experience to good use by starting my first ever career in KSP (about time! mumble,mumble)

Not built an orbiter yet but accepted a contract to take Arsie Kerman to the Mun, just to see if he lives up to his name

[Candlelight]

I tried to get as much stuff into orbit with this new FAR-like aerodynamic model.I basically got used to the old pre-1.0 aerodynamics.

[loch.ness]

After working at it a whole day managed to put my first STS replica in orbit (~224x224). To the best of my knowledge there are no mod parts (have to double check, my early models had USI life support cans on them.

This was with an empty payload, but I ditched the booster before circularizing and there was half+ tank left in maneuvering thrusters. I have not landed this from orbit yet - but I have landed it on the runway after an emergency abort while trying to get my launch profile right.

My design was based heavily on the STS challenge shuttle (or those rather images from the thread which decided to load).

The tri-mounted swivles are not tilted like the real STS. I tried many times to launch like that and kept loosing control higher up. Instead I used an action group to lock their gimble during the early turn.

Tomorrow I find out of I can land it and bring all 4 of my orange suits home.

[Deustodo]

Yesterday I set a mission to go to Dress, the forgotten Dwarn Planet of the Kerbol System, I launched about 5 rockets into to orbit, setting them up until the transfer window appears. but I ended up sending only two, the asteroid miner and a rocket with 6 kerbals.

Here we have the miner attached to to a Class D Asteroid, that thing weights 511 tons, and 85% of the mass is ore. So real source of fuel right there.

This is the ship with 6 kerbals that were up to this mission, including Bob, Valentina, Lagarette, Macfen, Marcy and Aldmal Kerman. 3 males and females on board. Now you might ask to yourself: "What were the other 3 ships that didn't arrive in Dres?"

Well, one was the lander, a small rocket with 6 external ships with enough delta v to land on dress and go back, and 2 probes to scan Dres itself for fuel. I made a mistake on relying on ion thrusters to make the ejection burn, and about the lander... well I simply forgot about it.

I still plan to land on Dress, but using the same ship the kerbals are in as the lander.

[Cuky]

I tried to send Jeb to the Mun to complete "plant a flag" contract using this craft, but once boosters separate TWR is just too low and I loose huge amount of dV fighting Kerbin's gravity even before I get into orbit. I managed to achieve orbit around Mun, but with about 650m/s of dV left I didn't want to risk stranding him up there, so he came back home.

Sorry for bad pic quality, this is my first time using KVV to take pic of my rocket.

[linuxgurugamer]

I tried to send Jeb to the Mun to complete "plant a flag" contract using this craft, but once boosters separate TWR is just too low and I loose huge amount of dV fighting Kerbin's gravity even before I get into orbit. I managed to achieve orbit around Mun, but with about 650m/s of dV left I didn't want to risk stranding him up there, so he came back home.

http://i.imgur.com/dN2pc1s.png

Sorry for bad pic quality, this is my first time using KVV to take pic of my rocket.

So make some liquid fueled boosters instead of the SRBs.

[Redhotita1]

Apparently i broke kerbal once again! I though it was Interstellar... not Intergalactic gah...

[TimePeriod]

I'll just leave this here..

Yeah, it weights around 1800 t.

Higher quality images found in my Photobucket, see my Sig

Edited May 5, 2015 by TimePeriod

[CDRW]

Holy hell! Now I must do the same... as soon as I unlock more parts. I want to put an entire munbase up in one launch and you've inspired me to think bigger.

[TimePeriod]

Holy hell! Now I must do the same... as soon as I unlock more parts. I want to put an entire munbase up in one launch and you've inspired me to think bigger.

This is just the plain Model A, the Model C version will have twice the payload, if my computer don't crash.

[spaceBrezel]

finished my minmus ore base with orbital station:

and discovered 1337 m/s orbit:

[Valley]

Today I spent some time figuring out how heat shields work.

[Jouni]

The skies are full of stranded kerbals in my career mode game, so I decided to treat it as a recruitment opportunity. I launched Val into space with a few spare pods.

I underestimated the amount of fuel needed, so the kerbal at a low Munar orbit has to wait for the next slave ship.