What did you do in KSP1 today?

[KingPhantom]

I rescued Bob, who had been stranded on Duna for a decade or so, and then made this thing:

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

I launched it in this:

http://i.imgur.com/ATejl2g.png

http://i.imgur.com/De11MmT.png

how was it mounted on the top of the rocket? on your screen of the satellite i can see that there are 2 "one-side-mound" parts only (on front and end)

i did this yesterday:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/128708-Unmanned-Rover-to-Eve-*Picture-heavy*

[Bishop149]

I installed hot rockets.

How the hell I overlooked this mod for so long is beyond me it's brilliant, memory light and makes things SO much prettier.

In other news I transferred my mapping sats / eve science mission from Eve to Gilly.

One of the ion sats couldn't burn off the required 800 odd m/s of dV in the less than 4 minutes of Gilly flyby time. . . . but managed to rearrange a slower intercept for later, made orbit on second attempt. Lander is hopping around mopping up science.

[capi3101]

Needed things to do while I awaited the arrival of a Mun Buggy lander at Minmusport. After checking my personnel logs, I determined that three of the remaining four ground crew at KSC needed to practice flag planting on Minmus. All four personnel - Berris, Ludine, Pepe and Valberta - were loaded into the newly redesigned Raven 7a design and sent up to the New Horizons space station, where Straight Flush was still berthed. Ludine was given formal command of Straight Flush for the journey to Minmusport accompanied by Valberta and Pepe, with Berris (the craft's former commander) having already earned her two-star designation joining Bill at New Horizons for training for their upcoming journey into Kerbolar orbit. The flight of the Raven was completely uneventful; the replacement of the landing gear for larger gears did eliminate the threat of tail strike, a problem that the earlier design exhibited on several occasions.

In anticipation of the return journeys of Straight Flush and Free Bird (Jeb's craft already at Minmusport), I also launched a fully loaded fuel module en route to Minmusport. Due to differences in trajectories, the fuel module should arrive a full two days ahead of Straight Flush. Meantime, all these shenanigans have killed the time I needed to fill in - the Mun Buggy is now eleven hours from its Minmus encounter. Plan is to dock the module at Minmusport, transfer most of the remaining fuel from the transfer stage to Free Bird, then send the Buggy down with a full crew of six (Jeb, Miglas, Burlong, Kacella, Malfurt and Diissa) to Minmus's surface, leaving Lagercie (a tourist - whose itinerary did not include a landing on Minmus) on the station for the duration of the excursion. Upon its return, an evaluation of Free Bird's fuel status will be made; if the craft can make it back to Kerbin, it'll depart at that point. If not, it'll await the arrival of the fuel module. Jeb will be returning with Miglas, Burlong, Lagercie, Kacella and Malfurt; Diissa will remain to assist Bob in Minmusport's research lab until after Straight Flush arrives and carries out its surface excursion. At that point, all remaining personnel at Minmus will be returned to Kerbin - and all of them should have their two-star certifications at that point.

Going to be fun trying to load - what, fifteen Kerbals or so? - into a single craft for a short trip into Kerbolar orbit. I don't have Mk3 parts yet. That's probably something I should try to rectify with the upcoming Mun Buggy excursions...

[eddiew]

I fixed a NaN bugged out space station (that would crash the game if I jumped to it) with HyperEdit. It was shockingly easy. All that was wrong was the orbit data was janky, so I just used HyperEdit's orbit mode, selected the ship in that GUI window (so I never actually was on the ship), and put its orbit back to about where it was before. Bam, no more game crashes and I can use the station again.

I <3 HyperEdit. No, I <4 it.

Interesting - I'd been resolving NaNs by tweaking the save file and setting stuff to the same orbit as the nearest other vessel, minus a few micro-whatevers on one of the orbital params, but HyperEdit sounds like a much better option

[klesh]

I decided to experiment with gravity assists. I have no idea if they helped, but it was super fun and felt realistic. Fortune smiled upon me as I was able to fling myself around the Kerbol system pretty well. It was supposed to be a New Horizons inspired mission, but it ended up being more Voyager-like.

I took a probe on a gravity assist around Eve. I went as close as I could without getting inside the atmosphere. In front of the planet in its orbit around the Sun is supposed to slow you down, and behind it is supposed to speed you up. I swung in behind Eve and realized it was kicking me out in the direction of Jool. Sweet! Some laborious ion-thrusting and power management got me an encounter with the Jool system where this happened by chance (luck):

Its hard to make out what that is depicting, but I came in a little high and behind Vall passing to the left of it, high. In the meantime Laythe moves around between Jool and the probe and off to the right. I miss it's SOI. I then come in close on Jool and wrap behind it which should pick up more speed, get flung out away from the Sun and right at Tylo. Fly super close behind Tylo on my way out of the system and that got me out to a Sun escape trajectory.

I did that right, right? It's hard to tell if it is effective or not, whether I am gaining speed when your speed keeps changing on the navball depending on what SOI you're in.

Here is a glamour shot mid-encounter with Vall. Unfortunately, Tylo was hiding behind Jool for most of this, so you don't get to see it in the frame.

[DDay2021]

Introduced my nephew to KSP, and watched him build a massive craft out of a Mk 3 cockpit, four 5m fuel tanks with engines, and 12 SRBs. The thing hit Mach 5 in atmosphere and went into orbit around the sun. After it ran out of fuel I asked him how he was going to get Jeb, Bill and Bob home again. He's still working on it.

[RocketPilot573]

My space station was attacked by the Kraken.

[MartGonzo]

Only peripherally connected to KSP but today I went on Amazon.co.uk while they are having a sale and while I was still half asleep, that was a really bad idea

I spent £400 on a new chip and motherboard that it's going to be several weeks before I can even test, I couldn't afford to get the necessary memory and decent CPU cooler at the same time.

I grant myself impulsive mug of the day award.

[Jouni]

I launched a fuel tanker to recover the transfer stage that had ended up in an inconvenient orbit after the Dres mission. Economically it made no sense at all, but rockets are so cheap that it doesn't matter.

After Tylo and Dres, the transfer stage is probably going to Moho next.

[micr0wave]

some pics from my duna holidays

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[smjjames]

Repeatedly getting attacked by the kraken while trying to do something with the IR model rework joint (and then was screwing around for much of the album).

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[TranceaddicT]

I came to a realization. When you can view the KSP sky and call out the celestial objects WITHOUT hovering the mouse over it, you've probably played far to much KSP.

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[Celestial Objects in KSP]

(http://i.imgur.com/AyKm72X.png)

[Kagame]

https://youtu.be/NE1-dKc6R_II have done nothing but practice manual docking all day. Part of it was due to me needing to build a 5-Kerbal station with Soviet-era parts. The other part was that once I figured out how to dock manually, I realized it's fun, and actually not that hard! Sure, it gets silly at long distances, but the closer you get, the easier it is.

[maccollo]

Been playing career mode with 6.4k. After arrogantly accepting a contract to explore Dres I've come to the realization that I probably wont advance very quickly until I get the ion engine. So now I'm grinding the 3,3 million funds required to do the final research facility upgrade.

Kind of wish I could disable those silly tourist contracts. For the 100th time: No, I'm not going to haul 6 kerbals across the solar system and back

Edited July 16, 2015 by maccollo

[JetJaguar]

I decided to try my hand at planet-making with Kopernicus. For my first planet, I thought to make a hot Jupiter. I came up with this:

It's a Kepler 7b analogue. For scale, I keyed off of Jool (as Jupiter) and Moho (for Mercury's orbit). It's a little less than half the mass of Jool, but because of the heat of the Sun, it's puffed up to a 50% larger diameter. The texture is something I came up with by playing around with noise in Gimp. The black clouds are because hot Jupiters are expected to be as black as coal from sodium vapor in their atmospheres. The big yellow spot is because Kepler 7b has been found to have a reflective surface tidally locked to it's star, likely due to clouds made of vaporized iron and silicates (i.e. rocks). I didn't know what color that would be, so I guessed. I imagined it to be a huge cyclone like Jupiter's Great Red Spot, but because the planet is tidally locked, it's been driven to a hemisphere-spanning size. The red bands are because I thought they looked cool. In reality, hot Jupiters are believed to not have much banding at all. I'm no artist, but I'm happy with how it came out. It looks like a demonic eyeball, always staring at the Sun.

I've run into a couple of problems. First, the orbital plane of most hot Jupiters have a very large tilt when compared to the rotation of their star, and half of those are actually retrograde orbits. But, they are also tidally locked. It seems that planets in KSP always rotate in the same direction, so when I give it a retrograde orbit, it rotates regardless of whether the tidal locking flag is true. I decided that it was more important to be tidally locked than have a retrograde orbit (which doesn't really make sense anyway), so it has a conventional orbit. Anyone know how, in Kopernicus, to reverse the direction of spin?

The other problem is that the moment a spacecraft touches the atmosphere, this happens:

Everything instantly overheats and explodes! I think the answer lies in the temperature and pressure curves, but I don't understand how those work and I haven't found any decent documentation for that yet (suggestions?). Then again, it's so close to the Sun that vehicles in orbit are already a toasty 900+ K.

[Duke23]

Played around some today and last night with a few missions I've been planning. I flew low res ScanSat probes over Kerbin and Mun for the practice, landing the Mun one in a crater that I wanted to explore manned. Sent in the manned mission which went pretty smoothly but I decided I was wasting valuable time by not trying to explore more. Here's a nice shot of the original lander before it left Kerbin orbit. Yes it's overkill for a Mun lander, but I play science sandbox so I can design my own missions and build whatever I want.

So I cobbled together a crappy rocket rover (looked very similar to the one I posted a few pages back, unfortunately for me) and sent it off in a funkified looking custom rocket with an inverted fairing (courtesy of Procedural Fairings). It was a case of the right tool for the job and a little bat-crap craziness. The idea was to land it upright on its three engines, then use the RCS to slowly tip it over on its side so the rover could drop straight down a few feet onto its wheels. It worked beautifully but I don't have a shot of this particular rover being released:

I don't seem to have a pic of the rover itself either because it was short lived, I took it for a spin outside of the crater I was hanging around in and crashed it. Actually, I crashed it several times if you count the quicksaves but the first few times were because I was trying to fly it to my destination and land on the wheels, which I've done successfully with other designs like my second one. I let the last crash stand because it was pure chance / destiny and I'm trying to cut back on the quickloads to roleplay through the disasters.

So I sent a second one, to get myself back to my ship since I was somewhere around 60km away when I crashed! This one was based off my old designs that actually did pretty darn well for the tech level involved during the first few Mun landings of a new save. But I crashed the lifter that brought it there due to a screw up on my part... I had the navigation assist set to hold retrograde but I burned too long and started going back up so it started flipping slowly end over end, I panicked and by the time I had something resembling control over it I was too close to the surface. Luck was on my side; not only had I had left the fairing on until landing, but it crashed on the correct side for release. The fairing and the rover survived unharmed so I just shrugged it off since cautiously tipping over the whole thing was one less step I had to do at that point.

Edited to add: I almost forgot -- my luck continued because oddly enough, the landing site for the second rover was close to... without going into detail, a certain point of interest on the surface that I was planning to send a more advanced ScanSat to find later. I was able to spot it on the descent and visit it in the new rover to plant a flag.

After getting back to my ship I decided I had enough fuel to hop over to another crater and do some surveying. Only problem is I was low on fuel in the main landing stage (it was only designed to land once, and carried extra fuel for any precision maneuvering I wanted to do afterwards). So I took off and dropped the three outer tanks, and managed to land in close enough to a flat spot for the SAS to hold still sitting on the engine while I hopped out and grabbed a soil sample. Then it was time to blast off again, I managed to burn up the rest of the fuel in that tank somehow by the time I was on an escape trajectory from Mun. So I was left with the final stage and only a little maneuvering to do to get back home.

It actually went better than planned since I was able to make the third biome stop before heading home. I was really nervous about coming back home because this design was largely untested in the first place and I was counting on doing a few passes of aerobraking to burn off my excess speed and not become a giant ball of melted steel on the ground. I had wanted to put a heat shield below this last engine that "could" be jettisoned if the need arose, because I never planned on actually using the final stage anyway, but I didn't for some reason. I also decided to not decouple the last tank and expose the heat shield I did have, because I thought I might try to change my trajectory after the first couple passes. But not being sure of the atmosphere in 1.0+, I dipped lower than I probably should have and everything miraculously turned out okay. There was no other pass, my apo lowered and lowered until finally I was hitting dirt one way or the other. I seemed to be red hot in the 15-30km range for ages biting my nails. Some of my external components got close to overheating and the solar panels didn't make it since apparently you can't retract that type anymore. After I finally threw my chute I breathed a sigh of relief and decoupled the last tank, touching down softly in the grasslands. The pilot got a stern slap on the wrist for crashing the first rover and holding up the mission, but it was soon forgotten once the new science data started to pour in.

Edited July 16, 2015 by Duke23

[Elowiny]

I decided to try my hand at planet-making with Kopernicus. For my first planet, I thought to make a hot Jupiter. I came up with this:

https://farm1.staticflickr.com/480/19111769553_44ffa7e30a_z.jpg

https://farm1.staticflickr.com/443/19732695325_a6a7418278_z.jpg

https://farm1.staticflickr.com/447/19111799343_4bf3bf89f1_z.jpg

It's a Kepler 7b analogue. For scale, I keyed off of Jool (as Jupiter) and Moho (for Mercury's orbit). It's a little less than half the mass of Jool, but because of the heat of the Sun, it's puffed up to a 50% larger diameter. The texture is something I came up with by playing around with noise in Gimp. The black clouds are because hot Jupiters are expected to be as black as coal from sodium vapor in their atmospheres. The big yellow spot is because Kepler 7b has been found to have a reflective surface tidally locked to it's star, likely due to clouds made of vaporized iron and silicates (i.e. rocks). I didn't know what color that would be, so I guessed. I imagined it to be a huge cyclone like Jupiter's Great Red Spot, but because the planet is tidally locked, it's been driven to a hemisphere-spanning size. The red bands are because I thought they looked cool. In reality, hot Jupiters are believed to not have much banding at all. I'm no artist, but I'm happy with how it came out. It looks like a demonic eyeball, always staring at the Sun.

I've run into a couple of problems. First, the orbital plane of most hot Jupiters have a very large tilt when compared to the rotation of their star, and half of those are actually retrograde orbits. But, they are also tidally locked. It seems that planets in KSP always rotate in the same direction, so when I give it a retrograde orbit, it rotates regardless of whether the tidal locking flag is true. I decided that it was more important to be tidally locked than have a retrograde orbit (which doesn't really make sense anyway), so it has a conventional orbit. Anyone know how, in Kopernicus, to reverse the direction of spin?

The other problem is that the moment a spacecraft touches the atmosphere, this happens:

https://farm1.staticflickr.com/424/19544655668_dfd9804f8b_z.jpg

Everything instantly overheats and explodes! I think the answer lies in the temperature and pressure curves, but I don't understand how those work and I haven't found any decent documentation for that yet (suggestions?). Then again, it's so close to the Sun that vehicles in orbit are already a toasty 900+ K.

You should ask this question on the official kopernicus thread. You will probably get an answer.

[Yuriznikov]

It was yesterday evening actually.

I had launched a solo-manned mission to Duna, the launch went exceptionally well and my transfer window was near perfect.

Upon arrival to Duna i noticed burning down to actual orbit was pretty fuel consuming, and took some of my landers fuel that was meant for takeoff and the trip back home.

I decided to make the best of the situation and to play it smart this time, not to land but to get all the science i could just orbiting. My periapsis was a low pass at 60km which allowed for some extra science too.

The trip hope didn't go too well either. i burned way more fuel than i had hoped to get a good intercept back on kerbin (i think i did something wrong with the Duna escape that made it horribly inefficient)

All in all i ended up on a 25000 km by 2000km orbit around Kerbin without any form of fuel in the lander. I had quite a bit of science onboard and one of my most experienced engineers.

I decided i HAD to get him home, so i EVA'd the little guy and did ~20 pushes against the spacecraft to get it down to 50km periapsis.

He's alive, got a bunch of science and made some profit. Mission succes

[Goddess Bhavani]

Made a replica of a mythical plane that never flew, the incredible PZL-230F "Skorpion".

A little writeup of the craft and download link here (Stock, 30 parts, Level 1 Tech)

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/128854-From-Poland-with-Love-PZL-230F-Skorpion-Attack-Fighter

Also, I discovered the joys of 5-way RCS thrusters. Just 4 of these babies and I have full RCS rotational and linear control over small craft. Less unsightly acne on the ships!

[Enkiel]

Did my first landing on Eve since... 1.02 i think.... was ALOT harder than i remembered...

first lander attempt was without heatshield... that didnt last long at all.

second lander attempt was with heatshield... that didnt help much on the first 2-3 attempt. I had to really just touch the atmosphere to hope have any electricity left... in the end, my 4 solar giga panel died... thanks god it was just a station without anyone, or anything worth mentionning on it....

The the second part of the craft landed on Gilly. Once at 50k from landing, i realized i had zero mono left... that was quite a challenge to land, but in the end it was alot easier than i expected... Now i need to get back, and i think i'm very, very short on fuel (only 2800 Delta V+1500 ore)... That and the fact that i completely forgot to bring any battery on that stage, living with only the 100 electric charge from the crew compartment........ KERBAL STYLE!

[Yukon0009]

First manned voyage to Moho was sucess! I feel proud because it was a single launch, no refuelling, and only the third anything I've sent to Moho and first manned attempt.

[NecroBones]

I've been spending the last week overhauling Fuel Tanks Plus, to consolidate tanks into tweakables to choose the colors, instead of them being separate parts in the menu. It's going to be all-around more efficient, and nicer on your VAB/SPH menus.

This is letting me add a lot more color options too, without spamming those menus.

I'll have to do some updated screenshots later, but all of the previous designs still exist. The new release is coming soon.

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[Goddess Bhavani]

Help I'm sinking!

[MrWolf83]

Began my rescue mission of the lander that ran out of fuel some how on Mun. Gonna see about setting this grabber down on top of the lander and such, now just realizing didn't put the "thuds" around big tank to get this thing off mun. crap need to go back and fix her up.

[smjjames]

I decided to try my hand at planet-making with Kopernicus. For my first planet, I thought to make a hot Jupiter. I came up with this:

https://farm1.staticflickr.com/480/19111769553_44ffa7e30a_z.jpg

https://farm1.staticflickr.com/443/19732695325_a6a7418278_z.jpg

https://farm1.staticflickr.com/447/19111799343_4bf3bf89f1_z.jpg

It's a Kepler 7b analogue. For scale, I keyed off of Jool (as Jupiter) and Moho (for Mercury's orbit). It's a little less than half the mass of Jool, but because of the heat of the Sun, it's puffed up to a 50% larger diameter. The texture is something I came up with by playing around with noise in Gimp. The black clouds are because hot Jupiters are expected to be as black as coal from sodium vapor in their atmospheres. The big yellow spot is because Kepler 7b has been found to have a reflective surface tidally locked to it's star, likely due to clouds made of vaporized iron and silicates (i.e. rocks). I didn't know what color that would be, so I guessed. I imagined it to be a huge cyclone like Jupiter's Great Red Spot, but because the planet is tidally locked, it's been driven to a hemisphere-spanning size. The red bands are because I thought they looked cool. In reality, hot Jupiters are believed to not have much banding at all. I'm no artist, but I'm happy with how it came out. It looks like a demonic eyeball, always staring at the Sun.

I've run into a couple of problems. First, the orbital plane of most hot Jupiters have a very large tilt when compared to the rotation of their star, and half of those are actually retrograde orbits. But, they are also tidally locked. It seems that planets in KSP always rotate in the same direction, so when I give it a retrograde orbit, it rotates regardless of whether the tidal locking flag is true. I decided that it was more important to be tidally locked than have a retrograde orbit (which doesn't really make sense anyway), so it has a conventional orbit. Anyone know how, in Kopernicus, to reverse the direction of spin?

The other problem is that the moment a spacecraft touches the atmosphere, this happens:

https://farm1.staticflickr.com/424/19544655668_dfd9804f8b_z.jpg

Everything instantly overheats and explodes! I think the answer lies in the temperature and pressure curves, but I don't understand how those work and I haven't found any decent documentation for that yet (suggestions?). Then again, it's so close to the Sun that vehicles in orbit are already a toasty 900+ K.

Probably an easy way to have it be tidally locked if the 'tidallock=true' isn't cooperating is to have the rotation speed be the same as it's orbit.