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What did you do in KSP1 today?


Xeldrak

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I have decided to spice my career save a bit so I have installed Remote Tech...Now I have something to spend my excess funds on, I need to set up my comm network.

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Sent Val on a multi-contract mission:

1. Rescue Rogan in orbit around Kerbin.

2. Rescue Crisliana on the surface of Mun.

3. Plant flag on Mun. Val also did some science while she was there.

Also did tested the F119 Turbofan engine on Minmus.

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Was a good day today. Had two rescue missions in LKO, and a contract to dock in kerbin orbit (never docked before, always just EVA'd for rescues).

So I built two ships with probe cores and MK1 capsules, flew them up to 100km orbits and docked them. Then separated them and used each one to rescue a Kerbal from orbit. 3 birds with 2 stones, not too bad :)

next contracts are mun-based. an orbiting station around the mun with 5 kerbals and a cupola. Also several mun missions (plant flag, surface sample in specific location, crew reports from other locations). So I'll probably combine those too and experiment with docking and separate landers.

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Val and Bob went to Mün with Munshot 2. First Kerbal landing on Mün for 1.0. Unlocking fuel lines to upgrade Munshot 3. Jeb and Bill wants to go to the Mün too.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Kerbal Engineer says Munshot 3 has ~350dV more than Munshot 2 by just adding some fuel lines and correcting staging, Nice!

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Was testing out some mods in a new save, wanted to fly around some of them in a nice plane so quickly threw this together, sucky name but the plane is real winner, fast, manoeuvrable, orbit capable (It's got some runetakes clipped into the rapiers which means it won't run out of oomph till after 25km. Sort of like a sub orbital air superiority fighter.

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https://www.dropbox.com/s/1eetbmwrreq8hyn/Arrowhead.craft?dl=0

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Possibly the most difficult thing I've ever launched in KSP.

http://i.imgur.com/BcZAQhm.jpg

Impressive!

Yesterday I launched an orbital lab to the Eve system. Through an oversight, it was unmanned. The beancounters probably didn't want to pay the big bucks to hire another kerbonaut, and they didn't need anyone on board to collect on the contract anyways. After it left Kerbin SOI, they realized nobody flicked the switch to deploy the Gigantors. Reluctantly, a scientist was hired (the only one they could afford), to ride the "Jumpstart" ship. A stranded pilot was also spotted in LMO, at a mountain-scraping 10km. Today, the Jumpstart ship was launched. It swung by the moon to pick up Carselle and then managed to rendezvous and Klaw up with Eve station and deploy the Gigantors before the crucial course correction burn to make Eve intercept. The Jumpstart may continue on with the station and make a Gilly landing, I dunno yet. Too bad it didn't pack any drills; there's an ISRU unit on the lab.

Incidentally, The Jumpstart ship had a little problem in the Mun's SOI; it too ran out of power. Again, nobody deployed the solar panels. One engineer on the ground suggested "Switch SCA to Aux," which reconnected the Command Pod's internal battery and allowed deployment of the Solar Panels. The same engineer had disconnected it for just such an emergency.

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Edited by StrandedonEarth
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I successfully deployed one of my Rovers, intended to be used on atmospheric planets only, on the Mun! Fortunately, the decoupler force was enough to clear the Mk. V Auto-Interplanetary Rover from the wreckage of its own heatshield and parachute ring. Yes that is an LV-N it landed on - the transfer stage was always intended to be ditched when suborbital trajectory was achieved, and atmospheric braking would be used to land the rover. It transmitted four nice pieces of data, and we set off on a jaunt to investigate one of the craters!

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Of course nothing can be perfect - so this is the exact time one of the motors decided to burn out. No worries, the wheel can still steer, and we've got three more. We always knew the rover wouldn't last forever.

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One problem, though: By Kerbin weight, this rover weighs less than 1.5t. On the Mun, it's apparently a paper airplane. We actually bounced once - the wheels resisted the impact. When it landed on its back, not so much for the rover body. Oddly, most of the surviving debris is scientific equipment and batteries.

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I've already progressed to the Mk. 6 Interplanetary Auto-Rover (Ditch the parachute ring, attach radial parachutes to rover body via decouplers), but Mk. 7 will incorporate a reaction wheel to control attitude on low-grav exoplanets. This rover might have survived if it could have kept bouncing on its tires. And in the future, when one motor burns out, I will manually disable its counterpart to control steering better. And I will set the brake torque as high as possible in case we need to stop at some point.

All in all, the 323 seconds this rover managed to do its job has been most educational.

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After significant delays, I finally began construction in earnest of a massive ship to deliver a base to Duna.

The core module was delivered to a captured asteroid in LKO some time ago, and now a crew lifts off with the first module in a brand new second-generation Reusable, the significantly up-rated DD-class.

DD-88, Ikaros

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Based on the much smaller A-class, but now able to carry a useful cargo. As with the A-class, the Daedalus II booster lobs the orbiter to an ApA of 100 km before separation, the orbiter circularizing on its own engines...

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...while the uncrewed booster corrects its course and lands under power in Gednalna.

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An earlier test flight successfully orbited and returned a 4.5-tonne test mass, cargo to orbit and returning empty should be much higher. Here is a fairly lightweight hab module for the future outpost.

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Ikaros rendezvouses with the asteroid assembly facility. Initial plans were to mine the asteroid to fuel the ship, but real-world tests revealed that even completely stripping a C-class asteroid could barely refuel the capture tug. Hopefully there will be enough fuel available to send the completed ship to Minmus, where the base on the surface should have no trouble filling the tanks.

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Ikaros approaches, then holds position, while engineer Siry Kerman EVA's out for a major reconfiguration of the core module.

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Thanks to the awesome Kerbal Inventory System mod, large sections of a ship can be rearranged (one part at a time, in reverse order from the root).

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The reconfiguration is successful, however one of the large monoprop tanks and the probe core get away from Siry and drift away. They'll have to be chased down later.

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Ikaros now moves into position, and swings the cargo out on an Infernal Robotics hinge.

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It's a tricky approach to avoid the massive solar arrays of the harvester unit...

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But the module is soon secured.

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After Siry removes some now-unneeded components and stores them in KIS containers for later return, pilot Summer Kerman backs Ikaros away and the crew prepares to return home.

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They manage to return the errant debris, then disaster strikes. The IR hinge is jammed, and won't retract. Siry tries several contingency plans but the bugs only get worse and worse. In the end the crew initiates an emergency abort, and return to Kerbin in the reentry capsule. The rest of Ikaros is, unfortunately, a total loss. More research is needed.

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The mission must go on, however. Shortly after, an unmanned variant of the DD-class is launched. DD-01, Hiyori, borrows the propulsion section from Ikaros, but trades the heavy cargo bay and crew pod for a lightweight fairing and extra monoprop for attitude control.

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The Daedalus II booster is again successfully recovered, and Hiyori proceeds to orbit with the first of two massive nuclear engines.

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Another tricky docking sequence. The ship will borrow on an old "space train" design that once brought 1100 tonnes to Moho orbit... then went very very bad.

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The cargo secure, Hiyori backs away...

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Reentry is right on course towards the Space Center.

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Hiyori is much more stable than her sisters, needing no airbrakes for aerodynamic stability while descending.

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She settles to a perfect evening landing only a couple of kilometers from the Space Center.

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I had the Kraken eat my launchpad.

Or more precisely, it ate the ship that was standing on the launchpad, parts of which then crashed onto the pad, and boom.

I was trying whether some pFairings of my Eve lander design separate clearly. They did not. As the fairings got stuck between some parts (fairing base, landing leg, short rockomax adapter), they conjured up the Kraken, which caused a phantom phorce to tip the lander over...

Apart from that I did the usual stuff I do whenever the first transfer window to another planet opens: unmanned probes. One lander for Eve and a SCANsat and Ore mapping probe for a polar Eve orbit. I'm planning to send a SCANsat probe to Gilly as well, but didn't find the motivation for building it after the launchpad blew up. Also, the Eve lander is not ready, it still needs a proper transfer stage and launcher. I'll probably use NASA parts for that, so it'll still take a while, until I can afford to upgrade the R&D (not that I wouldn't have had the funds - before I blew up the launchpad).

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I tried to assemble a clever surface mun base in orbit before transit, but couldn't get the side pods up. I think the landing legs made them unbalanced, so my rocket kept flipping.

So I went and did some science. MPL at KSC and a minimus biome hop.

Station redesign today!

P

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I took a contract to ferry 2 tourists to the mun & Minimus for not a lot of money, to give me an excuse for designing an 'economy class' ship. Managed it with an estimated profit of about 20,000 funds.

I like to think that normally my tourists travel in relative luxury in spaceplane cabins but these 2 had to endure sharing with the pilot in a Mk2 pod. Maybe next time they will pay for an upgrade!

Unfortunately, when I arrived at Minimus I realised that I had brought along a tourist with a similar name who was only expecting an orbit of Kerbin. The Minimus sightseer was still sitting at KSC twiddling her thumbs and waiting.

I will now have to ferry her out on another trip, so no profit this time :(

*Note to self: Add "Double check passenger load sheet" to pre-launch checklist.

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Launched the same resource scanner satellite model into Mun and Minmus orbit - thought I would need more dV for Mun, but forgot I had no contract for it and ended up taking the next best polar orbit on arrival.

Launching with stock fairings and short upper stages is still tricky and flip happy - larger lower stages seem to help the most for now.

Also note to increase ejection force for the fairings, leftover bits bug out vessels to be landed in midair ...

Enjoyed the easy stock aerodynamics and flew a plane towards the pyramids to fulfill a contract from the Anomaly Surveyor pack - fuel was not nearly enough, although KER told me it was good for 18h of flight?

Hit several biomes in low flight for atmospheric analysis, so no loss here. Some even fulfilled sub-tasks of a contract from the Field Research pack! Tried hitting the north pole with a one man rocket expedition to take some readings for the same contract - second launch got me there, but both times the aero analyzer burned up during reentry ... no way around the bewitched service bay it seems.

Yet: surface scan of polar biome: Check.

Renamed several asteroids in Kerbin orbit that either will come very close or outright impact the planet; included the day of SOI change in the name and am now pondering about some missions.

Build a launch vehicle for my station core, but game crashed when I reverted to VAB to throw a nosy Kerbal out of the probe controlled craft, so no launch this time as it was late enough.

As always: Either forgot to take screenshots or did not give myself time to upload them after my KSP session and before sleepy time.

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Had another evening wheere I only had one hour to play. Spent it getting a new FAR plane design up into orbit and making a rendezvous (on RCS thrust alone) for a rescue contract. Tonight I'll try my hand at re-entry (something I've yet to do with 1.0.x) and landing, hopefully without blowing up Jeb and his damsel-in-distress in the process...

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Today I had my longest crash-free KSP session ever, almost 3h in total. Though once I thought game crashed, but that was just sticky keys because of me abusing shift key on EVA. I sent Valentina and Hudrim (Scientist) to visit Minmus and complete "plant a flag" contract after which they used lots of fuel to jump around different biomes gathering science. I visited 5 biomes totaling in about 2430 science. They also took Bill with them as he was still my only Kerbal on roster that hadn't been to space. This was also my largest manned vessel yet.

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They had a little mishap on their return voyage as once again my decoupler and parachute were on the same stage. Luckily, unlike in Bob's case, I noticed it so I changed the slider in right-click menu to open parachute at 0.5 atmosphere so it didn't open when it was not safe to do so. When it was safe I moved the slider back down and parachute deployed correctly.

After that I started design of satellites. I have to be quick though because in 10 Kerbin days there is a transfer window for Duna. I will put 4 satellites in equatorial orbit, maybe stationary orbits, but not necessary. Here is a pic of WIP version of long range DunaComm of which two will be placed in either Molniya or Tundra orbit. They will communicate all the way to Duna through those satellites in equatorial orbit.

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Though I still may add Infernal Robotics to better pack my satellites, but that remains to be decided.

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