Jump to content

What did you do in KSP1 today?


Xeldrak

Recommended Posts

I have been in career mode (v.1.02) and came up with a variety of designs with less science levels then usual. The shot below is of a station heading for Ike using low cost parts and able to refuel with the large automated refuel-er once using the same booster. That booster works quite well time and time again with out breaking apart although 2 of the first 4 orange dropped destroys them self but does not damage the rest of the craft/booster. :-)

The last shot is of a similar station that is headed out for Duna. Same process - One refill and it will reach the burn point to Duna 3 Kerbal day's before the other station going to Ike (about 116 Kerbal days).

WZ3zlEB.jpg

ZvfYgsT.jpg

AfHjwzk.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I installed BD armory and played around with it a bit...

Made a sentry tower type thing for me to attack (only armed it with vulcan turrets) made a fighter that seemed to have no trouble taking it out. Then I attempted a oh lets call it a revision of a AC-130. Had a ton of fun trying to hit the tower (blew up everything around it but not the tower itself) before the tower finally managed to bring me down... The AI for guard mode is most cruel I discovered, once my plane was disabled and falling harmlessly to Kerbin it never stopped firing until there was nothing left.

Started working on a dreadnought, fat, slow, armed to the teeth. Initial test seemed to be going well, it was standing up to my gun emplacements I put around to test its armor then suddenly I lost control. Reverted, drove back to the firing range, tried again, saw again it seemed to be well armored and suddenly lost control again. This time I used the event viewer to see what was wrong, the cockpit had been destroyed. Moved the cockpit further back and played around some more, found yet another fatal flaw, apparently the weapon controllers while well defended from surface fire were vulnerable to missile/bomb strikes from above. When all the weaponry was disabled I left it there and spawned another dreadnought to test the armor against the main guns, took an extremely long time to penetrate the armor which makes me happy, went to solve the controller issue and game crashed...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Tested a new design idea I had for large-scale, very heavy SSTO planes yesterday evening. Concept testing was a smashing success: the plane took off on first try, was stable and easy to handle all the way up to 15k despite being a wobbly mess. The current build uses too many small parts on the wings, making it structurally unsound and causing the aforementioned wobble. Today will be improvements to the design and an attempt at a new version of my Runway-Duna-Runway without refuel mission.

The new design might even be able to get me to Laythe and back. I've never even been to the Jool system...

A man can dream.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Waiting for some interesting contracts to appear, so taking a break from space exploration to go exploring for ore. After some test drillings with the mobile rig I built a modular rig (for future planetary missions) and deployed it on the plain at KSC. Unfortunately, at 380 parts+ it caused massive frame lag if I flew anywhere near it.

Sooo... The next version was this integrated production facility. 180 parts as one oversize load. It's now I wish I had unlocked large wheels.

Bill Keeps an eye on the tail end as Jeb and the crew ease it off the runway:

Ef0kDboh.png

Managed to carry it to the deposit site safely and removed the transporter. Once in place and with the storage tanks added, I christened the site 'George 1' (because it's an Ore-well - Geddit? Oh, please yourself ;) ).

Bill and Bob inspect the drill setup before starting their shift as plant engineers:

6fG4lCUh.png

There are 8 drills +2 ISRU processors in tandem. One, on part load, produces LF+ Oxidiser to keep the plant generators (fuel cells) running day and night, while the other, on full load, produces monprop. Total cost around 190,000 funds but I am selling 16,000-20,000 funds of monoprop and surplus LF & Ox to KSC per day, so it should have a short payback time.

Also, it keeps my engineers occupied between missions. Even spare pilots double up as tanker drivers. I don't pay them to sit on their little green *geeps* all day!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Messing around with those fun little Light Sport engines from KAX

This design is really pointless, but has incredible STOL performance from having four engines. Two big radial engines or jets will provide far greater top speed. Two full sized jet engines on this thing would be completely and unrealistically overpowered, though, as it only weighs 8,000kg, while stock basic jets produce more than 15-20k lbs of static thrust.

Javascript is disabled. View full album
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Messing around with those fun little Light Sport engines from KAX

This design is really pointless, but has incredible STOL performance from having four engines. Two big radial engines or jets will provide far greater top speed. Two full sized jet engines on this thing would be completely and unrealistically overpowered, though, as it only weighs 8,000kg, while stock basic jets produce more than 15-20k lbs of static thrust.

http://imgur.com/a/Y53V3

Heh, I have a really similar design myself, although a little smaller (Shorter fuselage, no in-line cockpit, very similar wings except narrower) The jets are indeed too OP for the design, so I tweakscaled the basic engines into a smaller size. I agree about this sort of thing making great survey aircraft :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Heh, I have a really similar design myself, although a little smaller (Shorter fuselage, no in-line cockpit, very similar wings except narrower) The jets are indeed too OP for the design, so I tweakscaled the basic engines into a smaller size. I agree about this sort of thing making great survey aircraft :)

Tweakscaling the jets is a good idea, thanks, I'll try that and end up with something like a crude BAe Hawk replica if I use the stock swept wings.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, lemme see. Well I finally got around installing 1.0.2 on my 'puter and then installed a crap-ton-a-mods 'til it crashed. Went in, removed some mods, added a few more, until I had a working install, which almost looked as nice as my previous 0.90 install with KSPRC and the likes. Then restarted my science career.

<mental note> Post something about my career game... </mental note>

Anyway, found out why everybody else hate's them new fairings, so for tonight I got to add in the KW Legacy Fairings... Also need to prune a number of unneeded parts like stock fuel tanks, engines and the likes...

Sorry, nothing worthy of screenshots...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've tuned the Minmus-Kerbin aerocapture process, bringing the 7 rookies back from their visit of the Fuel Mines of Minmus and the L2 Depot:

Javascript is disabled. View full album

I still need to revise my SSTO design before picking them up. The current one has annoying shortcomings (battery, solar panels and RCS are way too small, and it's a bit short on deltaV).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Stuck at VBS last night; took the time to crunch some numbers on a new FAR spaceplane design while I was there doing nothing. Design goal was a 27-tonne plane with 2000 delta-V of rocket included. Came up with a close solution for my current tech level - 28 tonnes and just shy of the 2000 mark. Built said plane - the Raven 7 - after I got home and launched it. Tail struck twice, then FAR had an annoying habit of tearing off the elevators when I tried to pitch up. Ultimately overcame this problem by ski-jumping off the end of the Runway, throttling back to 2/3, pitching up to 35 degrees and then throttling back up. Made it to orbit with about 500 m/s of delta-V to spare. Still going to ask about what I could do with those elevators and I'm somewhat concerned about the return flight. For good measure I may try to drop off my tourist passengers at the orbiting New Horizons station before attempting re-entry. That way if something goes wrong, I can still fulfill their contracts later.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's something most other people have done repeatedly, I have no doubt . . but today, I managed my first Munar rescue!!!

Valentina had gone to the Mun, attempting to one-up Jeb, who happened to be first on the rotation for landings.

Well, the only way she could do that was to attempt a landing in the highlands (rather than in the equatorial crater region). Her attempt was successful, mostly . . in the old "Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing" kind of a way.

However, in a landing that had Jeb screaming "GO FOR IT, KID!" from his console and everyone else squirming with embarrassment, Valentina's spacecraft toppled over and wound up nose-downwards in a valley.

The Capcom was ordered to occasionally make encouraging remarks or give nonsensical orders for exploration, and Gene Kerman convened a tiger team.

"Okay people, let's work the problem," he said. "What options do we have?"

Bill piped up "Normally we simply declare the stranded spacecraft to be a permanent MunBase. I don't suppose we can do that?"

Gene thought for a moment. "Not really," he said after a long pause. "She's carrying 420 Science, and she doesn't have a high-gain antenna. Much as it'd serve her right after that embarrassment of a landing ["It was AWESOME!" protested Jeb, but quietly], we can't leave that there. No, we have to rescue her."

"What about using RCS to right the spacecraft?" Bob asked.

"An excellent suggestion," said Gene, "Let down by two basic problems. Firstly, RCS isn't fitted to her spacecraft. And secondly, perhaps more importantly, WE HAVEN'T INVENTED RCS YET, BOB! No, we're going to need to rescue her. A precision landing will be needed, no more than half a kilometre from Valentina's current location."

The VAB crew hurriedly cobbled together a rescue vehicle from spare parts. It had the lowest centre of gravity anyone had ever seen. It was duly sent to the Mun, and after a few false starts (involving staging problems, which fortunately turned out to be only in the simulator [*cough**revert**cough*]), the landing was attempted.

Success! Only 300m from Moonraker 1A!

Valentina jetpacked over, and despite slamming into the side of the rescue vehicle and flopping about another 200m, managed to board without further incident.

Cutting a long story short, Valentina landed in the rescue vehicle less than 5km from the Launch Site. The science was unloaded, and Valentina was treated to a hero's welcome (from Jeb) and a dressing down (from Gene).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Landed in the southern part of the Farside crater on Mun only to discover that I had apparently already collected data there(without leaving a flag as I usually do to mark an area as collected).

Had some extra fuel so I took a ballistic trajectory to go land in the northern part of the attached Canyon(the wider part where I hoped to find some flat ground).

After several attempts I managed to get down in one piece, do science and then get onto a return trajectory to Kerbin.

(made sure the Kerbal I rescued from Munar orbit in his in-line cockpit planted a flag for XP, after all his rescue paid for the mission)

Then I spent a couple hours failing to design a massive LF-only space plane.

(in the lunches where the nuke engines did not fall off when the landing gear hit the runway, I was unable to take off because the medium landing gear would not let me steer to stay on the runway until I reached take-off speed)

In retrospect, if my launch weight is high enough that a dozen wiplash engines have a TWR of less than 1, I might want to start with a smaller design for my first attempt...

(KER said my twr was 0.94 with a mass of ~218 tons)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Landed in the southern part of the Farside crater on Mun only to discover that I had apparently already collected data there(without leaving a flag as I usually do to mark an area as collected).

Had some extra fuel so I took a ballistic trajectory to go land in the northern part of the attached Canyon(the wider part where I hoped to find some flat ground).

I landed and hopped the same way the other day in the sane location and had the good fortune of landing in a miniature Northwest Crater biome before I entered the Canyon biome. :D

I spent yesterday working on a big ship for a trip to Jool and it's moons. Planning on bringing all kinds of probes, satellites and landers. I have a few in the cargo hold now, but it'll be repacked several times as more goodies are created and crammed in there. Some KAS snack storage as well. Puller-design, so the nuclear engines are at the front.

Still developing it, but its coming out great!

Javascript is disabled. View full album
Edited by klesh
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I spent my whole evening trying to figure out how to get my SSTO to Laythe and maybe even back. I managed to get it to a 75km LKO with around 3600 dV (based on burning my nuke engine), carrying a whopping 26.7% payload fraction in fuel. Using my RAPIER engines on air at Kerbin, that would be 27000 dV, not sure how the ISP translates to the thin air on Laythe. I also have a couple hundred units of oxidizer, which I think (well, hope) is just enough to push me back into Laythe orbit when I top out in atmospheric flight on the return trip. If all I wanted to do was touch down on Laythe empty, I could easily make it to the Jool system by a direct Hohman transfer, with plenty of maneuvering fuel left to manage my Laythe approach, but if I want to get there with enough fuel to seriously think about getting back, I'll need to get fancy with the gravity assists. I spent several hours trying to figure out how to do the Kerbin-Eve-Kerbin-Jool slingshot to no avail. I'm not quite ready to just go look it up, but I am wondering if trying to go Mun-Duna-Jool would help me any. I think if I can shave something like 600dV off of my Jool transfer, getting back would not be out of the question. Once I'm in Laythe orbit, I could probably manage a Tylo transfer for another 900-100dV, which I believe can get you ejected from the Jool system entirely if you set up the gravity assist right. I imagine that boosting prograde at an 8km Tylo periapsis will also get me some serious Oberth, maybe enough for me to eject from Jool straight to a Kerbin encounter with my remaining fuel. With all the possibilities for gravity assists and aerobraking, it's tough to say just how far I could get. It would be great to have some kind of tool for calculating how much dV you can get out of various assist maneuvers, but I have not seen one around. Anyway, I guess I'll keep trying tonight....

Edited by herbal space program
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Started with finishing some routine tourist missions involving minmus as well as landing a space station on minmus which will never be used again. As I'm going through the reentry process some friends came by. "Fly a plane!!" They exclaimed. ***, I'm terrible at planes so I used one of the stock planes and started flying around. Then I figured I'd try landing on the runway for the umpteenth time and alas I finally got it. Flew around a bit more until I got bored And crashed the plane as fast as I could make it. (In sandbox with respawns so no sweat)

Went back to my career and noticed joolz window was upcoming , so I set out to build a science mission to go there and back. Built my ultimate science payload with 8 of all science exiprements since its unmanned and decided that I'd like at least 10k dv for my transfer/ return vehicle but ended up with 20k dv( a supped up version of the lv-n from atomic age mod, 20t, 800 ISP, lf only). Its a 2 stage using onion staging with a twr of 1.1-~2 for the first stage And .9-1.3 for the second.

After half an hour of building my payload and transfer/return vehicle I set up building my colossal lifter for another half hour, and then taking two more hours testing accent paths, trying not to spin out of control, tweaking my rocket, and repeating. Finally I was able to get to a 100km orbit, but not without loosing my center lifter stage and just saying screw it and finishing my accent with my transfer/return/lifter? Stage.

Proceeded with kicking up my apoapsis for about 5 orbits until I did my transfer burn off to jool. Realized another duna window was coming up( sent out a much more modest manned mission to duna) so I sent another copy of my jool mission to duna, and also to eloo, and also to Moho, and also to dres. Eve is coming up so I'll probably send imone to eve as well.

The better part of a kerbal year was spent today sending out interplanetary missions, and it was more than double the in game time than I have spent in this career so far. I will have to acquired more funds since I went from 6million down to less than 2million

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I picked up a contract to rescue Milbur from Gilly orbit. I already had a JumpStart ship in-system after the earlier debacle with the Interplanetary Lab, and the rescue would pay back the JumpStart launch. Rendezvous went smoothly, and Milbur bailed out of his stricken command pod (he refused to comment on how he ended up in Gilly orbit in just a command pod, aside from "Jeb would be proud") and EVA'd over to the rescue ship. As he approached, some numbskull thought they'd make it easier for him and rotated the ship so the hatch was facing Milbur. This was done at the last second, with the result that Milbur was lightly swatted away by the 1x6 solar panels, breaking all 4 of them in the process. :facepalm: Milbur still made it back to the ship, but now he was in a rescue ship with plenty of battery power but no way of recharging them aside from the Poodle. Luckily he spotted the Gilly Scannersat whipping by at a 90deg inclination, and was able to give chase and catch it with the Klaw. So now he happily has power again, and is waiting for the Eve-Kerbin window to open up, hoping he'll have the dV for it. The plan is to release the sat and make his burn, then shut down the batteries until they're needed for course corrections and re-entry. He'll be a little cold, but he'll live.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...