What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Loerelau]

Don't make a lot of airplanes, it actually is pretty good!

[TrooperCooper]

The KSA has finalized the plan for its biggest endeavor yet, the first crewed landings on Duna. Click here to see more.

[Cuky]

Today I had tried my first ever powered landing from orbit to KSC. I have just downloaded Tundra Aerospace mod and in Rodan Test 1 flight Jeb took it with two tourists on suborbital test mission. Then on Rodan Test 2 flight Jeb took 2 more tourists and two new recruits into orbit, tourists for contracts and recruits for experience. After they went around Kerbin 3 times it was time to return and I decided to finally try and land my spacecraft at KSC. I was able to come as close as 6km from launch pad which is my record for orbital crafts. (obviously I managed to land atmospheric planes at runway and I am still to launch orbital space plane).

I cut throttle a bit early so landing legs broke...but everything else survived.

I have nice launcher designed for this, a not so perfect replica of Falcon 9.1, but I still haven't tried to return it back though I am getting ready for that with landing legs and airbrakes already on.

[Findthepin1]

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxtdXNocm9vbTIwMDZzb3RoZXJ0aGluZ3MxfGd4OjM5YTEyNmY1ODAwM2NhNmQ

'Nuff said.

[L3GO]

Nasa's SOFIA Telescope plane i made today!

Super High Graphics

High Graphics

[Aragosnat]

One other "little" side project... 8x LVT-30 and 3x LV-N exploration vessel... it may look familiar...

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/6184913859211763243/954F4568D2F11AF874448D8EB5534F4A0A3CBF12/

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/6184913859211763790/A69306E32B1A64C74AD6DFC11D3905B9243E575D/

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/6184913859211764263/D4E769120EA5B38131BB875EDCF6D7AD8809B729/

Now, would anyone like to throw some suggestions my way as to how to get this thing into orbit other than hyperedit?

Lots and lots of boosters and struts.

[Jart]

Missed the Mun landing target by a long shot, 9k. Mortimer in Finance said "You really need to do this, that five man lander costs loads of snacks and fuel ship money is becoming scarce".

The crew look at each other and blink..."uhhh roger that" a reply comes through the com.

Detha calculates the trajectory. Lazie, the hardest working pilot in the bunch executes beautiful hop to the small target, fulfilled the contract! "Fuel looks very marginal" she states.

and launched... not gonna make it, just not quite gonna make it.

Fortunately an orange suit was along and in the famous Bill manner he calmly directs, screaming "Blazie, FIRE MONOPROP NOW!" Hmm cute nickname do they have a thing going?

Gases explode out of the RV-105s. Bill ponders if his idea of only half filling the tanks was a good idea.

Orbit

[Triop]

Today, I blew up Kerbin:

[Draconiator]

Built some "Microlanders" as well as the robotic carrier ship that delivered them to the DUna system. You'll see two of them are missing; one is ON Duna, the other one went to Ike.

[Mahnarch]

Today, I accidently bumped the cloaking switch on my shuttle.

And, now, since everything is invisible, I can't shut it off!

(is this a know bug?)

[Zucal]

Redid my stock replica of the Copernicus MTV.

[SkyRender]

I finished up a 5-destination mission today that was for a challenge to see how quickly and in how many launches a Kerbal could get to level 5. The answer to that (for me, at least) was "four launches and 1.6 Kerbin years".

[CatastrophicFailure]

A busy yet repetitive week of adding more modules.

Hiyori readies for launch...

This lift brings two cargo modules full of components to setup a power station on Duna, as well as the sample return rocket tested previously.

A non-eventful return near KSC. I'd been planning to use Ikaros for most of the construction so there would be a crew available if anything went wrong, but Hiyori is much easier to land on target and has a higher lift capacity.

Turned around in record time...

But this time the primary load is a new space telescope.

After a quick system check, the telescope and its boost stage decouple, and Hiyori heads for the Duna ship to drop off a couple of ore tanks.

A cheap solid motor boosts the 'cope to a 1000km ApA...

After burnout it separates, and reveals the extremely compact instrument. The debris will fall into a (mostly) harmless orbit while the telescope circularizes on its own.

The Chadvey Kerman Space Telescope is now online (Tarsier Tech parts)!

And the first image it returns is of the distant target: Duna.

Hiyori is quickly turned around again, this time bringing up the hablab module.

One final flight today...

... to deliver the drilling and refinery module, as well as the surface science package.

All of the mission modules are now in place. Next up will be a train of empty fuel tanks to be topped up at Minmus before departure.

[soulsource]

Today I failed my first crewed Eve mission with realistic aerodynamics (FAR). Although I thought my ship would be stable in both directions, it wasn't. At about 65 km altitude it started to turn, and my reaction wheels didn't supply enough torque to counteract, so it was in the end ripped apart by aerodynamics forces. While I would have given the mission a chance of success of about 1/3, I honestly would have expected to loose the ship due to non-level ground, and not due to aero forces... RIP Matrix Kerman...

On the brighter side, my Gilly mission is still running perfectly, with plenty of spare fuel I think I can still do a few "landings" before heading back home to Kerbin, and the non-crewed Eve probe lander, as well as the SCANsat probes are getting tons of science.

[KerbMav]

Lots of brainbreaking for my first own contract with lots of logs posting to nightingale who works fast as always.

Finished up another apolloesque Mun mission - my rover design stinks for the hilly terrain so the girls had to jetpack all over the place - and facerolled bumping down hills a lot, sorry ladies ...

Even with KER my dV planning is lacking these days. As it was late I cheated myself a few hundred more dV for the return flight instead of a hasty refueling mission. I will book it as a reward for a well executed launch to rendesvouz.

Two more level two kerbonauts - the third one had to stay in orbit though, so no new star for him.

Jumped to my long-term training flight of the Exploration Lab in Kerbol orbit to send back 300+ science and refill the data banks.

Inbetween I had to rescue my savefile from a dead NaN ship by replacing the persistent with a quicksave file.

[Jesrad]

I learnt that in KSP asteroids float and double as decent airbrakes:

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Incidentally, captured and landed my first asteroid !

[annallia]

I attempted to colonize Mun. I put every last penny I had into a rocket (or rather a series of rockets) that would deliver habbitat modules, science labs, and storage so they could build their own power plant, rovers, and mining operations.

The final rocket was the crew, 14 of Kerbins finest engineers and scientist, sadly none of them were consulted in the bulding stage of the rocket which lead to somehow the engines in the landing stage firing in the second stage. This lead to a massive explosion in the upper atmosphere and all kerbals are presumed dead.

Deciding to press onward, after all you can always hire a few more test subjects later on the habitat and science modules were meant to be docked in space, and then lowered via sky crane to the surface. First attempt to dock the skycrane to the lander worked, but it did knock one of the habitat modules off, no problem right? Well landing didn't go so smooth either. Not being sure if I had enough fuel for a suicide drop I went for a normal(ish) landing. Unfortunately the vessel with landing legs down and turned sideways as it were to kill momentum made it slightly lower than the peak of the mountain it was passing on its way to the landing zone, as a result it was ripped in 3 pieces which tumbled across the Muns surface.

So now I am broke, 6 of my 7 pilots are dead. All of my engineers are dead. All but 1 scientist is dead. And I have 2 rockets sitting in orbit full of spare parts to build a base that have no way of surviving the return trip to kerbin (I tried with one of them, their engines in the landing stage just aren't strong enough)

[Evanitis]

Incidentally, captured and landed my first asteroid !

IMG 43 made me giggle so much. Enough to get my boss to ask what I'm looking at, so I had to do a complete presentation about what's KSP and why is it deeply fun.

[Enkiel]

Had my 2 minmus station docked together to begin a little train. Was actually fun, but very annoying since i had to go edit my savegame to activate the wheels on the station (for some reason, they wouldnt activate at all).

Didnt get any good picture of day time, but a good idea of the two module to connect ;

The whole station must be close to 250t, with well over 6000 fuel... with 8 puddle, i'm not sure i can lift it off minmus tho...

The good thing about this... monstrosity is that it allowed me to get all kind of mission done, one of them being mining 2550 ore, for 500k...

I did a similar station in sun orbit for a 800k pay. I did send 2 poor scientist that will most likely die in it eventually, but the whole thing should bring me 2000 + science...

[capi3101]

Had a fairly busy weekend fulfilling contracts. Wound up inadvertently launching a flotilla out towards the Mun - two probes for contracts, a space station core for a contract, and an up-and-down tourist lander for when it becomes a necessity. I've got tourists en route - they haven't arrived yet but they will be pretty damn fast at this point. Got the lander docked up to the station in the meantime.

Also was finally able to accomplish a long-standing contract I had to do temperature scans up by Kerbin's north pole. My little surveyor plane worked reasonably well; landing took a few tries but in the end I managed to get it down mostly intact (could've stood to move the rear landing gear back ever so slightly - ripped a spoiler off on touchdown).

Replacement contracts have me now hauling a tourist to Duna and rescuing a Kerbal from orbit of Minmus. Challenges accepted! My program has got about √1.1M at this point; still working towards unlocking the Level 3 R&D. I'm also hoping to get a space station up in orbit of Minmus soon to start reaping science from an orbital lab.

[Jesrad]

IMG 43 made me giggle so much. Enough to get my boss to ask what I'm looking at, so I had to do a complete presentation about what's KSP and why is it deeply fun.

Those asteroids are clearly just movie props made out of painted fiberglass and filled with foam. Who would go to such lengths as put such fakery in orbit around our star ? It boggles the mind...

[Terwin]

After sending my first minmus training mission for a quick Kerbol SOI visit, I launched a couple more minmus training missions funded by various rescue and station missions.

Once everything gets home, I expect to have 30+ level 3 kerbonauts(and 100% of the minums biomes at nearly 100% science complete(forgot to do repeated surface samples and such in one of the biomes)).

Unfortunately a combination mun rescue/station mission was only a partial success. I klawed the pod for the rescue+pod return mission, but when I landed on the Mun my station no longer counted as a 'new' station, so I had to schedule a new Munar mission for the station contract.

Had to adjust my upcoming Duna mission. Looks like the Duna landing will just be a short visit without ISRU, as my engines can't lift the craft if it has more than half fuel, so the refueling stop will need to be on Ike.

(Also, with my ISRU needing to be prone but my launches needing to be upright, my righting-thrusters are not strong enough for Duna as the system was designed for the Mun)

The Duna mission is scheduled for launch as soon as I get 5 level 3 scientists and a level 3 engineer back from their training.(Considering the duration of the mission and number of scientists, I wonder if the lab will provide more science than the experiments...)

Also, my ore-return mission(1100 ore from minmus landed on Kerbin) had just over 1100 ore, but I refined a lot of it because with only 1500 delta-v to return from Minmus I wanted larger buffer for deceleration and potentially cushioning the landing should my parachutes not be sufficient. The current 1700 is a lot better but I am not sure if I will be launching with less than 2Km/s

[justidutch]

Some good and some bad this past weekend. My Gilly mission is a success. Here we are arriving in Eve's SOI…

When first launching I was worried that the whole ship wouldn't have enough DV to get into a stable orbit around Eve. I knew that I could separate the lander which would then do the job, but being able to get the entire ship into orbit fulfilled a contract, so it was important. Anyways, here we are descending towards Gilly…

A calm touchdown at 0.2 m/s, and the base separated from the ship, which equally calmly fell on it's side. THere's hardly any fuel left in it, so I guess the Gilly personnel will use it for scrap metal.

The Gilly base has about 99% of its fuel, so it could probably get to and land on Eve. That option is being left on the table for now.

But in the meantime, there's science to perform and collect!

Then I decided to build a ship that will take me everywhere. I wanted to build a nuclear powered vehicle with the intention of exploring a planet and/or moon, then returning, then setting off again. One ship to handle everything from now on. I built said ship and got it into orbit, but in order to do so I had to send it up without fuel, it would have been too heavy otherwise. Then I experimented with refuelling systems. First I tried a spaceplane but could not get a viable one, and got impatient (after several hours). So I built a SSTO rocket that will bring over 10,000 units of jet fuel, and about 6,000 units of rocket fuel. It cost me about 400,000 kash to launch the bugger, but I was expecting to be able to land the tanker back on the planet and recover everything but the fuel of course. Mated up with the system explorer (SysEx), transferred the fuel, returned to Kerbin where it promptly disintegrated in the heat of the atmosphere. I wasn't expecting that!!! First time one of my ships has ever been subjected to that much heat. Or maybe I hit a goose way up there, who knows. What I do know is that my career is now close to bankrupt, time to hit up a bunch of tourist contracts - if I can afford to launch them!

Here is the refuelling ship…

and mating with SysEx

Edited June 15, 2015 by justidutch

[Goddess Bhavani]

I wanted to build yet another stock or near stock light survey aircraft but reading about the ridiculous combat record of the OV-10 Bronco just made me want to mount demonstration ordnance on the thing just for fun.

[Randazzo]

Commenced littering operations around Sarnus