One thing I really like about this game is that I actually learn stuff by playing it. I've read a bit about geostationary orbits today on wikipedia. Then I tried calculating the height of a 'Kerbin-stationary' orbit and actually got the same numbers as on the wiki.
And now Komsat 1 is orbiting Kerbin and it seems to stay over the same spot. It's pretty damn amazing.
Well, I got my fuel vehicle to the stranded spaceplane,
I'm afraid any further information about this rendezvous has been coded as classified. But you're more than welcome to imagine that it was a total success, and that flash you saw in the night sky was just another comet.
There have been so many comets as of late, afterall.
In the process of building my space station, I completed Operation Crush the Mun...
Here's the final station, the ASAO Sagan. Engine module/tugboat on the left, can detach and assemble other things. Fuel module in the middle. (2/6 tanks full.) Habitat/coms/power module on the right. Room for eight Kerbals, plus an observation dome.
Bonus image! Apparently there are cacti.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Jeb encountered cacti for the first time at the conclusion of a recent orbital test flight of the new Sita lander, intended for landings on Duna and Laythe. Of course, he just had to go out and have a closer look...
(He didn't get his suit punctured - though that would have just been uncomfortable, rather than potentially deadly - but it was a near thing.)
So, was playing with Dunashot 1 last night (which is just my hilariously overbuilt mun booster with a NERVA engine on the CSM and a larger lander) and accidentally got into an orbit around duna with 45 degrees of inclination. First successful orbiting of another planet, and I would have sworn up and down I was dead on with duna, but apparently not.
Ah well, should still be fine for landing tonight, I just hope the lander has enough deltav to get off the surface again.
Knight_ on
0
0Replace4DisplaceThe best girls are ships and guns.Registered Userregular
Duna does have a very slight inclination, but very small errors made at the very beginning of your burn can fuck you over pretty hard if you don't correct quickly enough.
Burn one degree off at Kerbin and it's going to be substantial a few million kilometers out.
Duna does have a very slight inclination, but very small errors made at the very beginning of your burn can fuck you over pretty hard if you don't correct quickly enough.
Burn one degree off at Kerbin and it's going to be substantial a few million kilometers out.
Nod, I use mechjeb for my maneuver control because I'm terrible at controlling my ship. I did match the inclination of Duna though. I probably just accidentally had a tiny bit of radial velocity and screwed everything the hell up. Wish it was easier to view how you're coming into a system for midcourse corrections.
Duna does have a very slight inclination, but very small errors made at the very beginning of your burn can fuck you over pretty hard if you don't correct quickly enough.
Burn one degree off at Kerbin and it's going to be substantial a few million kilometers out.
Nod, I use mechjeb for my maneuver control because I'm terrible at controlling my ship. I did match the inclination of Duna though. I probably just accidentally had a tiny bit of radial velocity and screwed everything the hell up. Wish it was easier to view how you're coming into a system for midcourse corrections.
I find it's a LOT easier to correct inclination after your main burn into the target's Ap/Pe. Once you leave Kerbin, just wait for the solar orbit's AN/DN. Its less efficient, but it means you don't have to wrestle with fine-tuning until you're away from the perpetual junk cloud of the Kerbin system.
The new MechJeb has a function to switch to different conical patch modes (how map view draws your orbits) - one of them shows your orbit directly on top of where the planet currently sits, as opposed to the default projected position. This means you can switch to that conical mode, center focus on your target planet, and tweak the maneuver node with a zoomed view of your destination. You could do this before with cfg edits, but now it's done on-the-fly.
Here's an explanation of the conical patch modes, stolen from an old KSP forum thread:
Mode 0 (Relative to each body\'s current position). Here, the Mun\'s orbit looks all kinds of messed up. It\'s not, though. As the Mun moves through its orbit as time progresses, this projected orbit will become closer and closer to our Kerbin escape and re-encounter.
Mode 1, the default (Draws orbits relative to their position at SOI entry). Here, the exit point looks severed from the ship\'s path due to the entry point being the point of reference now. When we get into the orbit of the Mun, the exit point will obviously make its way over to the correct point.
Mode 2 (draws orbits relative to their position at SOI exit). This one is a bit weird to look at at first, but it gets clearer as you think about it. Here, the Mun orbit is where it will be when I leave the SOI to go back to Kerbin. This causes the entry point to seemingly be disconnected, but it\'s not.
Here is mode 3 (draws relative to the body you are orbiting). As you can see, it looks like you would expect: No sudden breaks or turns in the lines. I find this to be a very useful tool for maneuvers such as the free-return.
And finally, here is mode 4 (Lerped mode). It\'s... odd. I think that, as my ship closes in on the SOI switch, these orbits will move and match up more. But when you\'re first doing your burn, it\'s a bit confusing.
The giant rocket I made for the Apollo 11 anniversary had so much spare lifting capacity it seemed prudent to give it a shot for a duna rocket. And thus, Dunashot 1 was born.
The Jool V-N booster begins Dunashot 1's long journey.
Trans-Dunar Injection is a go
Jeb! Jeb! Look out the window! We made it!
Capture burn around Duna (suddenly 45 degree inclination, whoops!)
Parachutes out, but didn't think they were enough, so burned a bit to slow me down a hundred or two m/s
Landing. I will admit I cheated here, had to turn on the unbreakable joints because I realized I never put the landing legs back on in the VAB after messing with parachutes, and my engines snapped off on my first landing attempt even at .5 m/s down. 2nd one at .5 m/s down went much better
Flag! Jeb and Bob committed the cardinal sin of flag planting, too close to the lander and it got blown over (which is code for I accidentally terminated the flag when I was trying to get rid of the booster in the tracking center)
Surface operations complete, back to space
Home spotted!
And splashdown.
Gonna have to go back to duna to replant a flag, but @vedicintent 's tip about using the Mode 0 conics in maneuver editor really helped planning my return trajectory, so hopefully I won't end up under duna by a couple million meters. All things considered, I'm happy with how this mission went, first successful interplanetary mission + return.
So my goal tonight was to build a rover and land it on Duna. I fist made a tiny rover landed it then quickly flipped it while driving.
So I decided to leave that one there and build a new rover.
The game has these big giant wheels, I just had to use them.
The rover ended up being big and heavy. So multiple asparagus stages worked out well.
Made it to orbit.
Made it to Duna but I didn't have enough fuel to get in a nice orbit. I had to jettison the rover at the peak of a very elliptical orbit and rely on the atmosphere to take care of the rest.
I hit thicker atmosphere at a very shallow angle which allowed the rover to shed a lot of speed without burning up or snapping the parachutes off.
Finally landed in a large crater near the edge of the northern ice cap.
It took me many iterations of my lift vehicle to be able to make it to Duna but 4 stages (lift, orbit, escape and approach) worked out pretty well.
The giant rocket I made for the Apollo 11 anniversary had so much spare lifting capacity it seemed prudent to give it a shot for a duna rocket. And thus, Dunashot 1 was born.
The Jool V-N booster begins Dunashot 1's long journey.
Trans-Dunar Injection is a go
Jeb! Jeb! Look out the window! We made it!
Capture burn around Duna (suddenly 45 degree inclination, whoops!)
Parachutes out, but didn't think they were enough, so burned a bit to slow me down a hundred or two m/s
Landing. I will admit I cheated here, had to turn on the unbreakable joints because I realized I never put the landing legs back on in the VAB after messing with parachutes, and my engines snapped off on my first landing attempt even at .5 m/s down. 2nd one at .5 m/s down went much better
Flag! Jeb and Bob committed the cardinal sin of flag planting, too close to the lander and it got blown over (which is code for I accidentally terminated the flag when I was trying to get rid of the booster in the tracking center)
Surface operations complete, back to space
Home spotted!
And splashdown.
Gonna have to go back to duna to replant a flag, but @vedicintent 's tip about using the Mode 0 conics in maneuver editor really helped planning my return trajectory, so hopefully I won't end up under duna by a couple million meters. All things considered, I'm happy with how this mission went, first successful interplanetary mission + return.
Okay, that's a badass shot.
I never get tired of how people build their rockets so differently. Arrrgh I want to make my Duna lander so bad, but I need RemoteTech 2 to come out first, since the current version doesn't work in 0.21.
+3
0Replace4DisplaceThe best girls are ships and guns.Registered Userregular
That's one of my favorite things about KSP. A million different designs and approaches to one mission, and they all work (or fail) in different ways.
Are some of those asparagus rockets in your lift stage hanging off the wings?
No It's center orange tank then 8 tank around then another 8 hanging off of those radially outward then another 8 next to those to the side. The last set is already detached in the picture.
You guys ever do the reddit challenges? This week's was to send 25 kerbals to the mun/another planet. Here's my successful run
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
0
0Replace4DisplaceThe best girls are ships and guns.Registered Userregular
edited August 2013
After establishing the Mun base and getting the Kethane refinery and delivery system there up and running, the next step was for a space station. And I figured why not go as big as possible with as few launches as possible?
Enter the 24th ship in .21's catalog - the XLSS-024 Conqueror.
The core is simple enough.
But to get that core into space, you have to have a bit of force behind it. So our launch vehicle is substantial.
...very substantial.
...it doesn't fit in one image.
On the pad.
And in the air. Surprisingly agile for something as tall as the VAB. 13,900kN of thrust propels the monolith skyward, right up until the engines overheat and explode. It needs to be dialed back juuuust a tad to avoid obliteration of the entire space center.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Really? Romfarer's default camera works fine (when update anyway), and I haven't encountered any issues with the laser system--but I know as much about it as I know about pre-20th century English literature.
Really? Romfarer's default camera works fine (when update anyway), and I haven't encountered any issues with the laser system--but I know as much about it as I know about pre-20th century English literature.
No, I mean subassembly and romfarer's don't play nice together. It was happening to some people on the KSP forums, anyway.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
0
Olivawgood name, isn't it?the foot of mt fujiRegistered Userregular
So I got this game
And I read the wiki
And it scared me
But I still managed to put kerbals into space and bring them home without dying, so
Baby steps I guess
Current goal: getting to the mun without any mods (return trip optional)
So, I was making a buttoneering button for pax, and wanted to use a NASA meatball style logo except with KSA. So I says to myself I said, "Of course someone else will have made a nice vector/large size Kerbal version of that logo."
Whelp, 30 minutes of searching, and then a few hours of fighting to death with inkscape, I made a thing. I figured someone might have a use for it, so I am here to share!. It's an .svg on my machine if anyone needs it in an absurd size for any reason.
It's not the best, but the actual NASA font isn't a font, it's hand lettered and that design ethos really really doesn't work with the letter K. Not even a little. So I had to fight and basically redraw a different font to get it in the ballpark with the NASA font.
Just landed on the moon at a gentle 160 m/s [≈ Top speed of an internal-combustion-powered NHRA Top Fuel Dragster.]. Well, more like made a new crater on the mun. Either way, those Kerbals were the first on the mun!
Dictionary of numbers makes this post much better
EDIT: I'm trying my most ambitious mission yet, finally fiddling with fairings and stuff from mods. I'm sending a satellite probe and rover to Laythe on the same craft. I'm sending the satellite in case my Rover winds up in the drink.
I've sort of encountered an issue, maybe Bug Report worthy. KSP.exe is currently using 3GB of memory. Not sure if its due to the mods, or the 174 piece rocket I'm building. The game takes longer to load, which I assume is the mods fault. I only have 3 installed, two for stations, MechJeb, and a couple for rocket parts.
Just landed on the moon at a gentle 160 m/s [≈ Top speed of an internal-combustion-powered NHRA Top Fuel Dragster.]. Well, more like made a new crater on the mun. Either way, those Kerbals were the first on the mun!
Dictionary of numbers makes this post much better
EDIT: I'm trying my most ambitious mission yet, finally fiddling with fairings and stuff from mods. I'm sending a satellite probe and rover to Laythe on the same craft. I'm sending the satellite in case my Rover winds up in the drink.
I've sort of encountered an issue, maybe Bug Report worthy. KSP.exe is currently using 3GB of memory. Not sure if its due to the mods, or the 174 piece rocket I'm building. The game takes longer to load, which I assume is the mods fault. I only have 3 installed, two for stations, MechJeb, and a couple for rocket parts.
Which mods? That's a bit high for just three. Parts mods are the worst culprits for hogging memory; some use PNGs for textures while others use TGAs, and each one has been the source of a "memory usage inflation bug" at one time or another. For instance, B9 went from using 350MB to 90MB of RAM by switching formats a while back, along with other optimizations.
Go to your settings and switch to "half res" textures to cut down on RAM usage if KSP is getting close to 3.7GB and/or you're experiencing random crashes to desktop; this lets me run 1.6GB of mods without problems. KSP.exe is still 32-bit and can hit the RAM ceiling with full res textures on.
Gonna have to go back to duna to replant a flag, but @vedicintent 's tip about using the Mode 0 conics in maneuver editor really helped planning my return trajectory, so hopefully I won't end up under duna by a couple million meters. All things considered, I'm happy with how this mission went, first successful interplanetary mission + return.
I didn't register the fact that you used the conical modes until just now - I'm glad that it works! I haven't had a chance to use the 0.21 MechJeb myself since my savegame "tech level" isn't quite there yet, and just read about the feature on their update page.
And can I say, what's the deal with Kerbals planting flags at the exact wrong angle for my group photos? Jeb seems to know exactly how to face the flag so it's perpendicular to a good camera angle, or *backward* (which matters because my flag has letters).
/Seinfeld
Has anyone figured out the trick to make them plant in the direction you want?
So I kind of want to keep playing this game vanilla for a while. Am I going to be pounding nails into my dick to try to do a space station/ get to other planets?
Posts
I'm terrible with design, so if the station looks really good, it's by accident, I assure you.
And now Komsat 1 is orbiting Kerbin and it seems to stay over the same spot. It's pretty damn amazing.
I have a vehicle in an unstable, uh... well, we'll call it an 'orbit', that I think I can save with a refueller.
But do I have to try and rush the design process or can I take my time?
Steam, Warframe: Megajoule
I'm afraid any further information about this rendezvous has been coded as classified. But you're more than welcome to imagine that it was a total success, and that flash you saw in the night sky was just another comet.
There have been so many comets as of late, afterall.
Here's the final station, the ASAO Sagan. Engine module/tugboat on the left, can detach and assemble other things. Fuel module in the middle. (2/6 tanks full.) Habitat/coms/power module on the right. Room for eight Kerbals, plus an observation dome.
Bonus image! Apparently there are cacti.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
(He didn't get his suit punctured - though that would have just been uncomfortable, rather than potentially deadly - but it was a near thing.)
Steam, Warframe: Megajoule
You have a space station. That's more than I've managed. The closest I got was to get a part of it on orbit, then crash the second part into it.
Ah well, should still be fine for landing tonight, I just hope the lander has enough deltav to get off the surface again.
Burn one degree off at Kerbin and it's going to be substantial a few million kilometers out.
Nod, I use mechjeb for my maneuver control because I'm terrible at controlling my ship. I did match the inclination of Duna though. I probably just accidentally had a tiny bit of radial velocity and screwed everything the hell up. Wish it was easier to view how you're coming into a system for midcourse corrections.
I find it's a LOT easier to correct inclination after your main burn into the target's Ap/Pe. Once you leave Kerbin, just wait for the solar orbit's AN/DN. Its less efficient, but it means you don't have to wrestle with fine-tuning until you're away from the perpetual junk cloud of the Kerbin system.
The new MechJeb has a function to switch to different conical patch modes (how map view draws your orbits) - one of them shows your orbit directly on top of where the planet currently sits, as opposed to the default projected position. This means you can switch to that conical mode, center focus on your target planet, and tweak the maneuver node with a zoomed view of your destination. You could do this before with cfg edits, but now it's done on-the-fly.
Here's an explanation of the conical patch modes, stolen from an old KSP forum thread:
Mode 0 (Relative to each body\'s current position). Here, the Mun\'s orbit looks all kinds of messed up. It\'s not, though. As the Mun moves through its orbit as time progresses, this projected orbit will become closer and closer to our Kerbin escape and re-encounter.
Mode 1, the default (Draws orbits relative to their position at SOI entry). Here, the exit point looks severed from the ship\'s path due to the entry point being the point of reference now. When we get into the orbit of the Mun, the exit point will obviously make its way over to the correct point.
Mode 2 (draws orbits relative to their position at SOI exit). This one is a bit weird to look at at first, but it gets clearer as you think about it. Here, the Mun orbit is where it will be when I leave the SOI to go back to Kerbin. This causes the entry point to seemingly be disconnected, but it\'s not.
Here is mode 3 (draws relative to the body you are orbiting). As you can see, it looks like you would expect: No sudden breaks or turns in the lines. I find this to be a very useful tool for maneuvers such as the free-return.
And finally, here is mode 4 (Lerped mode). It\'s... odd. I think that, as my ship closes in on the SOI switch, these orbits will move and match up more. But when you\'re first doing your burn, it\'s a bit confusing.
I am so proud of this little fucker.
The giant rocket I made for the Apollo 11 anniversary had so much spare lifting capacity it seemed prudent to give it a shot for a duna rocket. And thus, Dunashot 1 was born.
The Jool V-N booster begins Dunashot 1's long journey.
Trans-Dunar Injection is a go
Jeb! Jeb! Look out the window! We made it!
Capture burn around Duna (suddenly 45 degree inclination, whoops!)
Parachutes out, but didn't think they were enough, so burned a bit to slow me down a hundred or two m/s
Landing. I will admit I cheated here, had to turn on the unbreakable joints because I realized I never put the landing legs back on in the VAB after messing with parachutes, and my engines snapped off on my first landing attempt even at .5 m/s down. 2nd one at .5 m/s down went much better
Flag! Jeb and Bob committed the cardinal sin of flag planting, too close to the lander and it got blown over (which is code for I accidentally terminated the flag when I was trying to get rid of the booster in the tracking center)
Surface operations complete, back to space
Home spotted!
And splashdown.
Gonna have to go back to duna to replant a flag, but @vedicintent 's tip about using the Mode 0 conics in maneuver editor really helped planning my return trajectory, so hopefully I won't end up under duna by a couple million meters. All things considered, I'm happy with how this mission went, first successful interplanetary mission + return.
So I decided to leave that one there and build a new rover.
The game has these big giant wheels, I just had to use them.
Made it to orbit.
Made it to Duna but I didn't have enough fuel to get in a nice orbit. I had to jettison the rover at the peak of a very elliptical orbit and rely on the atmosphere to take care of the rest.
I hit thicker atmosphere at a very shallow angle which allowed the rover to shed a lot of speed without burning up or snapping the parachutes off.
Finally landed in a large crater near the edge of the northern ice cap.
It took me many iterations of my lift vehicle to be able to make it to Duna but 4 stages (lift, orbit, escape and approach) worked out pretty well.
Steam: Handkor
Okay, that's a badass shot.
I never get tired of how people build their rockets so differently. Arrrgh I want to make my Duna lander so bad, but I need RemoteTech 2 to come out first, since the current version doesn't work in 0.21.
No It's center orange tank then 8 tank around then another 8 hanging off of those radially outward then another 8 next to those to the side. The last set is already detached in the picture.
Steam: Handkor
Mission 1: Get off the pad
Not as easy as it looks.
Future mission: Refuel Mün Station 1!
Here's my successful run
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Enter the 24th ship in .21's catalog - the XLSS-024 Conqueror.
The core is simple enough.
But to get that core into space, you have to have a bit of force behind it. So our launch vehicle is substantial.
...very substantial.
...it doesn't fit in one image.
On the pad.
And in the air. Surprisingly agile for something as tall as the VAB. 13,900kN of thrust propels the monolith skyward, right up until the engines overheat and explode. It needs to be dialed back juuuust a tad to avoid obliteration of the entire space center.
Unfortunately I'd stuck so many lights on it performance fell through the floor
What's the status of the subassembly mod?
It works in .21. http://kerbalspaceport.com/subassembly-manager/
I think it has some issues with the lazor system stuff, though.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Really? Romfarer's default camera works fine (when update anyway), and I haven't encountered any issues with the laser system--but I know as much about it as I know about pre-20th century English literature.
No, I mean subassembly and romfarer's don't play nice together. It was happening to some people on the KSP forums, anyway.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
And I read the wiki
And it scared me
But I still managed to put kerbals into space and bring them home without dying, so
Baby steps I guess
Current goal: getting to the mun without any mods (return trip optional)
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
Whelp, 30 minutes of searching, and then a few hours of fighting to death with inkscape, I made a thing. I figured someone might have a use for it, so I am here to share!. It's an .svg on my machine if anyone needs it in an absurd size for any reason.
It's not the best, but the actual NASA font isn't a font, it's hand lettered and that design ethos really really doesn't work with the letter K. Not even a little. So I had to fight and basically redraw a different font to get it in the ballpark with the NASA font.
Dictionary of numbers makes this post much better
EDIT: I'm trying my most ambitious mission yet, finally fiddling with fairings and stuff from mods. I'm sending a satellite probe and rover to Laythe on the same craft. I'm sending the satellite in case my Rover winds up in the drink.
I've sort of encountered an issue, maybe Bug Report worthy. KSP.exe is currently using 3GB of memory. Not sure if its due to the mods, or the 174 piece rocket I'm building. The game takes longer to load, which I assume is the mods fault. I only have 3 installed, two for stations, MechJeb, and a couple for rocket parts.
STEAM!
Which mods? That's a bit high for just three. Parts mods are the worst culprits for hogging memory; some use PNGs for textures while others use TGAs, and each one has been the source of a "memory usage inflation bug" at one time or another. For instance, B9 went from using 350MB to 90MB of RAM by switching formats a while back, along with other optimizations.
Go to your settings and switch to "half res" textures to cut down on RAM usage if KSP is getting close to 3.7GB and/or you're experiencing random crashes to desktop; this lets me run 1.6GB of mods without problems. KSP.exe is still 32-bit and can hit the RAM ceiling with full res textures on.
I didn't register the fact that you used the conical modes until just now - I'm glad that it works! I haven't had a chance to use the 0.21 MechJeb myself since my savegame "tech level" isn't quite there yet, and just read about the feature on their update page.
And can I say, what's the deal with Kerbals planting flags at the exact wrong angle for my group photos? Jeb seems to know exactly how to face the flag so it's perpendicular to a good camera angle, or *backward* (which matters because my flag has letters).
/Seinfeld
Has anyone figured out the trick to make them plant in the direction you want?