What did you do in KSP1 today?

[capi3101]

Had a relatively busy night with a lot of rendezvousing and docking going on. The first thing I did was to check the Kerbinport space station's available fuel supply anticipating the return of Jeb and company aboard Bockscar. The station had plenty of fuel; I did do some rearranging of the tanks, which allowed me to cut lose the final booster stage from the station's core and de-orbit it. That oughta save me on the part count once Bockscar arrives; Stratofortress 7a craft like Bockscar aren't exactly light on part count...

The fuel pod I sent to the Munport station arrived successfully; I used the remaining fuel from its transfer stage to refuel the Mun Buggy lander already docked there, and then jettisoned the transfer stage and de-orbited it. Later on, I finally got the Stratofortress craft I had sent to Mun in orbit and docked to the station, picking up Cerxie and crew from Munport (they had delivered the buggy out there but needed a different ride to get home; I missed getting the Stratofortress in orbit on the first attempt due to hardware-related foul-ups on my box). Since it's now crewed, it was time to give the craft a name, and so I named the craft after what's probably the most infamous member of the 393d Bombardment Squadron - Enola Gay. As I had anticipated, she had arrived very low on gas owing to the extra maneuvers needed to get her back to Mun; the fuel pod is now almost empty. I will send Enola Gay and her crew back to Kerbinport tonight, and then it's definitely time to look into getting my Mun ore mining operations set up.

Speaking of mining operations, the Wildcat 7 mining rig on Minmus crossed the 2050 ore threshold needed to fulfill its lucrative contract last night. For some reason, though, I didn't get paid; the ore tanks are completely full - 2400 units worth - but the persistence file says I've only extracted just short of 600 units from Minmus. I'm still trying to figure that one out; if anybody has had a similar experience or ideas about what I can do about it, I'd like to know. I really need the money from that contract at this point.

I was also able to get the Minmus Mun Buggy craft docked to Minmusport, despite its initial orbit being in the opposite direction of the station. While I was fooling around with getting that craft dock, I sent the Project Peacock craft docked an Minmusport on a mission to rescue Theogel from a higher Minmus orbit. The two missions resulted in near-simultaneous rendezvous, but I was able to manage them both successfully; the Mun Buggy is now docked to Minmusport, and Theogel was able to return to Minmusport aboard the Peacock (again, despite the fact that the craft were orbiting in opposite directions). I'll send Theogel back to Kerbin on the next available flight; in the meantime, I've got an extra engineer to help with mining operations over Minmus.

Jeb and company aboard Bockscar return to Kerbin from Minmus tomorrow; getting them docked to Kerbinport and swapping out the ship's passengers for the next run to Minmus will be part of my activities this evening, again assuming that I have sufficient time to play.

[NecroBones]

Posted updates for MRS and MRS Lite with the new RTG. It's meant to be mildly reminiscent of the MMRTG on the Curiosity rover.

The stats changed after the screenshots though. It's now 0.5 tons, for an overall performance of 6.25x times the stock RTG, instead of the 5x it was at the time of the screenshots.

[Nookos]

Posted updates for MRS and MRS Lite with the new RTG. It's meant to be mildly reminiscent of the MMRTG on the Curiosity rover.

The stats changed after the screenshots though. It's now 0.5 tons, for an overall performance of 6.25x times the stock RTG, instead of the 5x it was at the time of the screenshots.

http://ksp.necrobones.com/screenshots/2015-10/KSP%202015-10-07%2015-59-36-42.jpg

http://ksp.necrobones.com/screenshots/2015-10/KSP%202015-10-07%2016-02-18-37.jpg

I just did an expedition far away from the sun and struggled with many stock RTG's. This is great for part count. Well done sir and thank you!

[TheGeekno72]

Sorry, I wrote lander on my post it wasn't really that it was my first rover lol fixed dat

[TheGeekno72]

How do you make these AWSM diaporama with imgur ? with tags in the msg ?

[Val]

How do you make these AWSM diaporama with imgur ? with tags in the msg ?

Take the 5 letters from the imgur album link: [noparse]http://imgur.com/a/[/noparse]nIGgN#0

and put it in a tag like this: [noparse]

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Becomes

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[Slam_Jones]

STORY TIME!

Today (yesterday, rather), I began a new Sandbox, with some different rules than usual. In this case: no revert, no quickload.

The purpose was to begin a new Duna Colony, this time without any room for mistakes. If something breaks, it's broken. If we crash, we crash.

Started by putting the ship in orbit (unmanned to begin with). This is the Proliferater Mk-1, with its airbrake module (that makes it look a little like a pineapple), nuclear tug, and heatshield (and another pic of it in SPH).

Once it was safely in low orbit, we sent up a small shuttle to ferry the crew. There would be 8 kerbals total: the Big Four, plus four additional Engineers to help with construction. As the shuttle approached, Bill hopped out to link it up to the Proliferater. Once the crew was tranferred, he unhooked it and pushed it into a sub-orbital trajectory, away from the station.

With the help of KER and KAC, I was able to get a Duna rendezvous pretty easily. One long burn on the LV-Ns took us out of Kerbin's SOI, and another carefully planned burn put us on a collision course. The Kerbals went into hibernation as the ship made it's year-long journey.

Once in Duna's SOI, they awoke and made preperations to enter a stable orbit. Since they still had a tremendous amount of fuel remaining, they opted to skip the aerobrake and perform a brute force manuever. Nearing the periapsis, Jeb fired up the LV-Ns and blasted retrograde, eventually bringing the apoapsis to about 80km. Another burn brought the periapsis to a similar figure. Soon, it was time to de-orbit.

Jeb fired up the LV-Ns for one last hurrah, burning off as much speed as possible while trying to maintain a good landing zone. The fuel spent, we dropped the booster and let it fall. With no (known) life on Duna yet, we weren't too worried about it breaking apart. We deployed the airbrakes, letting them slow us down. Jeb realized we were falling quicker than he had hoped. The plan was to make the final pass as horizontal as possible, to allow plenty of time to burn off speed.

Unfortunately, that wasn't going to happen. The ship was headed at a 45 degree slope into the ground. Bill scrambled to make sure all the chutes were set to deploy as early as possible. After what seemed like far too long, the Drogue chutes popped out. Soon after, the regular chutes popped as well. We were now only 1km above the surface, but still moving much, much too quick. Jeb wanted to brop the airbrake module to lighten the ship, but Bill argued that the drag induced by it cancels out the extra weight. Jeb didn't know enough about it to argue, so he let it stay in place. The next part to drop would be the heat shield, which was at the very bottom of the craft. They figured that dropping the heat shield might mean that the smelter would hit the surface and get damaged, while keeping the heat shield on would potentially cushion the landing, possibly breaking the shield, but preserving the smelter. Between the two, the smelter was vastly more vital to the mission, so they decided to keep the shield on.

The decision paid off. The Proliferater slammed into the ground at about 20m/s, shattering the heat shield into thousands of pieces. The force of the impact, combined with the slope of the terrain, tilted the Proliferater to the point where it fell. Thankfully, the airbrakes were depolyed, and absorbed the brunt of the impact. One of them shattered; the rest stood solid. It was messy, but they had arrived. When he got out to inspect the vessel, Bill suddenly realized (with a laugh) that the ship looked like a skinny, albino pineapple.

(Not gonna lie, my heart was pounding pretty hard during the landing... very intense )

Despite being on its side, the Proliferater was still ready to rock. First, though, they would need to get it upright. Bill looked through the on-board supplies (included for scenarios quite similar to this) and decided to rig up a winch several few meters uphill, in order to lever the base to it's feet.

He drilled a piling into the ground, then welded a few I-beams on top of it. After adding a few anomolies to allow him to climb it, he attached the winch at the top, along with a contol chair to operate it with.

He grabbed the head of the winch, dragged it to the Proliferater, and attached it about midpoint on the nearest face. He returned to the chair and attempted to pull it upright.

No success! Instead of pulling the base upright, the winch only succeeded in pulling down the makeshift tower. Bill managed to leap off while it was falling, and sustained only a few minor bruises. Discouraged but not quite done yet, he pulled apart the remains of the tower and set about making a more stable version.

He decided to use two seperate concrete blocks (drilled securely to the ground) with a pipe connecting them. He also made the main tower a little shorter, and attached a girder to the Proliferater itself. Lastly, he also unattached the airbrake module, allowing the vessel to be a bit lighter and easier to manuever. He hooked up the winch, began retracting, and successfully got it upright. We were back in business!

Since the base was now upright, Bill dis-assembled the winch tower and stowed it away in the storage compartment. Then, he climbed back into the base to deploy the solar panels.

With this done, they were finally able to deploy the drills and start producing rocket parts. Soon, they had enough to build their first add-on: an extra parts tank. With the addition of the tank, the Kerbals are able to build bigger.

Pleased with the progress, Bill decided to clean up the site a little bit, including removing the spent parachutes from the hull of the vessel. While trying to unstick a particularly sticky chute on the very top, Bill slipped and dropped his wrech, which, despite weighing nearly nothing, managed to rip one of the solar panels to shreds. Dismayed, Bill picked up his wrench, and quietly went back inside.

Realizing the gravity of the situation, the Kerbals had a meeting and decided to launch Bill off the planet. When Bill protested, they decided instead to build a small "solar farm," which would be hooked up to the Proliferater.

With the situation once again stable, they were able to produce yet another, larger, parts tank. Once it was built, they realized they didn't really like where it was sitting, so they asked Bill to rig up another winch tower and drag it into a better position. Eager to re-prove his worth, Bill worked quickly and had the task finished in no time.

Next up, they built another storage container for tools, and then filled it up with important tools and such. After that, Bill went to the top of the tower and set up a girder with a few lights attached to it, allowing for better night-time operations.

With all the (mostly) essential bits in place, the crew moved on to their favorite project yet: personal housing. After spening well over a year cramped into little compartments and modules, they were very excited to have some personal space. Each Kerbal was able to customize their room to a certain extent. Far too late in the building process, they realized the housing complex was (somhow) sitting partially on top of one of the parts containers. After plenty of finger-pointing (and no one figuring out who was really to blame), Bill decided to rig up another winch tower, and dragged the whole complex a few meters off, allowing it some breathing room. After this, he re-arranged the larger parts container so that it would act as something of a windshield for the homes.

And that's as far as I've gotten so far! Thanks for reading

Edited October 8, 2015 by Slam_Jones

[Draconiator]

Special Delivery! First delivery of ore to the refining station. Now how do I use it to make fuel? it'll also be a refueling station for the ship, until I figure out how to get my mobile station there.

[TheGeekno72]

take the 5 letters from the imgur album link: [noparse]http://imgur.com/a/[/noparse]niggn#0

and put it in a tag like this: [noparse]

Javascript is disabled. View full album

becomes

http://imgur.com/a/niggn

awsm you're a genius !

[Mat2ch]

A while back I decided that it's time to stop horsing around and go to Gilly. And since I've got a lot of contracts to fullfil there I needed a big ship. And since this game is about crafting, I decided to do somewith incredible, again.

I'm building the craft in orbit, but not the usual way. First I sent the "station" part of the craft, it has an ISRU to be able to get back. Not sure if needed, but nice too have. Maybe I'll send it to Jool afterwards and then I'll definitely need it. Today I sent the first engine part. The overall craft will have four of those boosters. Each one takes up to 30 minutes to get into orbit and dock. Looks it'll take some more time until I can leave Kerbin...

[eddiew]

The stats changed after the screenshots though. It's now 0.5 tons, for an overall performance of 6.25x times the stock RTG, instead of the 5x it was at the time of the screenshots.

I might be wrong, but I thought the itty bitty stock RTG was only 0.05mT? (I'd be happy to be wrong in this case though )

[NecroBones]

I might be wrong, but I thought the itty bitty stock RTG was only 0.05mT? (I'd be happy to be wrong in this case though )

It's 0.08 tons. So, 0.08 x 6.25 = 0.5.

[Alchemist]

This wasn't today, but I only now got to dealing with this footage.

That's what Kerbals call slight miscalculation.

[cantab]

Succumbed to the inevitable

Not too bad a drive I guess. If I'd just been a bit more cautious...

[eddiew]

It's 0.08 tons. So, 0.08 x 6.25 = 0.5.

Ahh, so it's just a part count reducer That's fair, there's a lot of value in that, I can see a lot of folks using these as part of their probes ^^

[SourMonkey]

Succumbed to the inevitable

https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5798/22029665592_9e028c1f53_h.jpg

Not too bad a drive I guess. If I'd just been a bit more cautious...

Broken wheel or not, that's one nice looking rover.

[GarrisonChisholm]

I discovered that 7300m is too low as an entry orbit of Ike...

[Camaron]

I did nothing. Nothing at all.

[BJ Quest]

I have been working and different types of probes. Shown below are 2 put together intended to map out a planet and a breakaway lander for atmospheric science information as well as science on the surface information. Multiple modes were used in this effort.

[xub313]

I started up a new sandbox save this week. My progress so far has been a few satellites and a space station aroud kerbin.

[Whackjob]

I baked Pandora's Kitten a birthday cake.

[Jovus]

I made a plane that went to space.

In RSS.

[magnemoe]

Docking large ships

9 tourists and 20 kerbals for a qualification run.

Found that asking mechjeb to hold prograde while docking don't work well for very long ships like the starliner.

It will start to wobble as the craft you control comes near.

Now this is weird, an flag got itself changed into an class C asteroid.

Going to the KAS hub from mission controll and tab to flag solved the issue. Kas hub is simply an probe rover with two winches so I can refuel ship landed up to 100 meters from the miner.

[Melonfish]

Not had chance to play last few days, but last night I bought The Martian on my Kindle and i'm already 70% through it. With the successful insert of my orbital probe to Duna i'm now planning a program of un-manned robotic probes followed by a fully manned science team setup. I also want to look into these hab and resource mods.

Barsoom- er, I mean Duna here I come!

[percyPrune]

My Polar exploration mission finally landed in the North Crater. Gusbal hasn't been to the Mun before, so he insisted on planting a flag:

We made him make an EVA report and grab a surface sample, so it can go down on the mission report as 'data gathering'.

Then they set off into the hills:

...narrowly avoiding the occasional sheer drop:

I forgot to put a fuel cell on the RoLander but, while ever the sun shines, we will go on!