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What did you do in KSP1 today?


Xeldrak

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Until yesterday it had been a few weeks since I played…

*gasp* I know, I know, I'm sorry!

… but I got back into the swing of things. I've got seven contracts accepted which is the limit at the moment, so I 'cheated' and timewarped about 170 days to a launch window for Jool, the first of the contracts being Explore Jool. This did allow my base on Ike to process enough science to get a few 300-science nodes done including the nuc engines. So, on my third attempt I decided to go for a minimalist approach for a Jool station, and came up with the following. It is three days into its mission and will take about 2.5 years to get to Jool, but during that time my other missions will come into play. In about a year and a half I go to Duna for three contracts, and 99 days after that to Eve and Gilly for three more. The timing may get interesting!

Screen-Shot-2015-07-26-at-11.33.09-PM.png

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Playing KSP makes my head hurt (gif)

http://i.imgur.com/EXpyUmq.gifv

ahahahahaha

As to what I did... I attempted to rebuild my space station after the whole break dancing thing (few pages back) and there was more weirdness going on. I had launched the first part of the station, got it into orbit, then I accidentally staged instead of undodcking which would be fine, just means that the faring base was still connected to the station via docking port but that is fixable of course. However... when I did that I saw the ADTP adapter go sliding down the rest of the tug going free... My first thought was I screwed up on construction (which I already knew I did because of where I put the fairing) but all seemed well. Fired up the RCS on the tug to move it away from the station just fine but then couldn't turn it to retrograde easily (started tumbling really fast) so I hit time warp to freeze it. Second it went into warp that adapter that floated through the ship suddenly popped back onto the nose. When I turned off time warp it floated away again and the ship started spinning again. Timewarp again and it happened again! Fired up the poodle engine to move it away and that is when things got really weird... I lost focus on the ship itself and instead was on the adapter which was spinning faster and faster and faster but staying in place over orbit.

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Built a reasonable replica of Pioneer 10 and 11 and a massive launch vehicle.

screenshot28_2.png

She's heavy (probe weighed in at just over 5 tonnes, but to get it up to Jool trajectories I have to lift 568 tonnes off Kerbin.

Heaviest thing I've launched, and it worked!

screenshot25_1.png

It will spend around 45 days in the Jool system, then it's off to interstellar space.

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Today, I discovered what happens when re-entry heating is a major troll to your ship. I don't have a picture, but a part blew up after I raised my periapsis to 100km and my lifter stage detached from my satellite. Then, my satellite started overheating in the fairings and it took a bit to cool down after I separated them. Nothing survived.

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Today I found out you can use elevons as flaps in stock to reduce airspeed velocity (regardless of whether or not one is piloting a swallow of any variety or state of laden-ness).

Yep. Just found that out.

Feelin' pretty awesome today.

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Actual Science :D

19879120658_4923100895_o.png

Wrote down the figures from the barometer by hand during the descent, and they graphed up pretty nicely. Looks like about a 9 km scale height, which is information the game doesn't give me.

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Probably the hardest thing I've ever done in KSP: Use an unguided, solid TLI burn to get a lunar impact. I'm rather proud.

RSS/RO of course.

The rocket was a 2x LR79 first stage, Agena A second stage. Parking orbit of about 230x220km. The probe was a 20in X-Ray core plus 4x Comm16 and a couple 1kg science experiments in addition. The TLI stages were 1x Baby Sergeant and then 6x Baby Sergeant. I had to create a maneuver node of precisely the correct m/s delta V from the kicks (it took some doing to figure out how much kick the decoupler gave too...) The whole Agena+kick+payload was spun up by onboard RCS about a minute prior to TLI, then separated at T-10 (i.e. no more yaw/pitch/roll, just ability to stage), first stage fired at T-7, second at T+1. The result is the second picture.

qZ2RKp8l.jpg

SR53MgIl.jpg

EDIT: ignore the "dV expended", there's an MJ bug.

Edited by NathanKell
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Well, I launched an orange tank to dock with my space station. All went well until I fired up the RCS thrusters and my ship behaved odd......id only put 4 thrusters at one end so it didnt do what I wanted....I know, I know.....complete schoolboy error :(

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Well, I launched an orange tank to dock with my space station. All went well until I fired up the RCS thrusters and my ship behaved odd......id only put 4 thrusters at one end so it didnt do what I wanted....I know, I know.....complete schoolboy error :(

I tried to dock a micro-shuttle to my station with a partially fuelled ascent stage still stuck to it, with no RCS on that rocket stage.

This is somewhat easy to rectify, just stabilize the ship near the station, switch to the station, and fly the station over to the incoming craft :D Basically have your orange tank be the "passive" target in the docking maneuver.

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I finally finished sending probes to orbit every moon and planet and measure everything's gravitational parameters. Only took me 1,988 hours.

Right, now to send some landers.

I've just been reminded I've been playing since 2012 and have never left Kerbin SOI :D

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Switched rovers and resumed driving across the Mohonian surface, aiming to collect all the science there is. Parked here at the SW lowlands, looking towards the crater inside of it

http://i448.photobucket.com/albums/qq203/Richy_yvl/screenshot266_zpshss06wa2.png

Next stop, the South Pole and any moholes there are there.

Not to be a buzzkill, but there's only a Mohole at the North Pole.
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Well, after a failure with Mun rover... really nice looking one, but completely useless, and I was crazy enough to drive it for 47,7 km... just to prove something to Collin McRae ;-)... I decided to create some form of "hovering device" or something... the thing has to be cheap, light, expandable, easy to fly, and have a great range... just to mention, career stock playing, (still no Ion engines) only few stock fixes, and one mod i.e. part utility "proximity warning" or something, used for landing... behaves like laser alt meter... but nevermind. Well prototyping for Mun is bloody difficult and expensive... especially if you have demands like these I already mentioned... after a few failures and a bruised wallet... lots of cursing and hair pulling, I realized a classical hovercraft, with landing legs, smallest rocket engines etc. etc. simply won't do... so I need WHAT... Mun Jetpack (bigger version of a Kerbonaut EVA controls)... so recipe is this: box control node (small one), two round RSC tanks on top and bottom(small yellow one both of them together give, I think 150 units of mono-fuel), three four-direction RCS nozzles on three sides, on "front" side one external seat, and a few of solar panels on top fuel tank... two are probably enough... but I placed four just in case... Jetpack weights 1.1 tonnes and approximate range is about 60 km (120 in one direction), don't take these figures for a fact... this is from first test flight (I crashed it) but it flies like a charm... damn fast...before I realized I was going 42 m/s (about 160 km/h) straight to a hill :-o))... approximation of a range comes from few short glimpses on fuel consumption who never got above 0.33 units... correct me if I'm wrong... I know this is nothing new... but I'm damn proud of this one...

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I've just been reminded I've been playing since 2012 and have never left Kerbin SOI :D

I only started playing 2014 and I did leave Kerbin's SOI ..4 times? Two of them only for about 5min to get high above the sun science. And twice to send probes to Duna/Eve, whihc never got there :D

Today I found out you can use elevons as flaps in stock to reduce airspeed velocity (regardless of whether or not one is piloting a swallow of any variety or state of laden-ness).[...]

I know, it is an amazing little feature for both Keuropean and Afrikan swallows.

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Today was a sad day for my space program.

I finally got fed up with the recurring docking bugs plaguing my LKO ring station (see http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/124103-PartJoint-None-of-the-provided-nodes-was-valid%21) after they struck today for the zillionth time, so I hacked my persistence file and "recovered" it (the plan being to launch a duplicate). Thus I bid farewell to my awesome ring station :C

I think I'll try building a new ring station with the same basic layout, and if I get those docking bugs all over again I'll conclude that they're probably the result of KSP getting confused about loops in the part tree. Alas, if only I were a dev and had the KSP source project I bet I could cure this :\

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Today? Today I killed Jeb, Bill and Bob in my RSS/RO Test save. I've been in a bit of a funk and didn't feel much like building anything, so I just loaded up the default RSS-ified FASA Saturn 5 and hurled the big three at the Moon. They might have had the chance to land had I not been ~400m/s short on the ascent and TLI (I blame Jeb). Given their severe lack of ability to complete the Lunar capture burn (to an altitude that would result in a safe landing) I decided to instead skip the Moon and return to Earth... but only after grazing the surface of the Moon at an altitude of 17km. (Only 2.4km from the surface at closest approach! Eeek!!)

20150727_kspr0009_apollo.jpg

Happy ending, right? Nope. (Pretty sure I gave that away in the first sentence.) Capsule overheated to 100% immediately at atmospheric interface and then exploded somewhere around 90km. And then my game crashed, but only after it had autosaved. Yay. No worries though - plenty more JB&B Clones to go around. We think.

20150727_kspr0016_apollo.jpg

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