Completed Vikings in Space! (Kerbal Space Programme)

[Ulminati]

Possibly. I wanted to keep the design "simple" as a proof of concept.

[edit]

Attention Burning Bridges, Hellraiser

That is no moon...

Spoiler

 

[Hellraiser]

I see SV is building his DOOM LAZOR vaguely resembling a tie fighter in orbit, his reputation demands no less.

 

[Azira]

 

[Ulminati]

I see SV is building his DOOM LAZOR vaguely resembling a tie fighter in orbit, his reputation demands no less.

Oh, that wasn't built in orbit. I launched hundreds of tonnes of star destroyer in a single stage.
16 mainsail engines at ~50% throttle (more than 50% throttle made the entire vehicle shake violently and explode). If I had been running mechjeb for the ascent, I could probably have gotten it into orbit without using the nuclear engines.

You can grab the persistence file if you want to try out Stereotypical Villain and his Killkruiser yourself. I kind of damaged it during separation (2 of 10 nuclear engines lost) and spent a lot of fuel trying to get it into something resembling an orbit after it became unbalanced. It's all stock parts. Framerate gets a bit sluggish on my computer when it moves inside an atmosphere. I think it's close to the upper limit of what KSP can comfortably sustain.

 

[Stereotypical Villain]

That pose on the wing. Ulm, I have vastly underestimated you.

PS. I'm betting that the doom laser isn't ready yet. Remember: I always put off doing things for three to five years; It's not SV if it's not delayed.

 

[Ulminati]

PS. I'm betting that the doom laser isn't ready yet. Remember: I always put off doing things for three to five years; It's not SV if it's not delayed.

The original plan was to have a pair of launchable missiles attached via docking ports inside the wings (so they could be re-armed). In the end I had to sacrifice them as I was unable to maintain structural integrity during ascent. There are plenty of docking ports around the Killkruiser however - most prominently featured along the side of each wing. If a doom laser mod becomes available, orbital attachment of armaments is trivial.

 

[TOME]

I hope Stereotypical Villain is better at pillaging than he is at raping and chasing Münmaidens. Otherwise it is just .

 

[Hellraiser]

Good Evening, in tonight's episode of "Mysteries of Communist Polant" we uncover even more previously unseen images of secret Munar missions.

It appears that the SAP has in secret landed a 4-Kerbal Munar outpost near the mysterious arch previously discovered by the Kilesia-1 Munar probe.

It is currently unknown who studied the arch inside the base or what did they uncover. However it is safe to assume that whatever it was, it would not have been the most classified secret of communist Polant if it was not extremely important.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Tbh, this shit will be one of the first things I mod out of KSP. I would rather want to find something interesting like space probes, asteroid impacts, volcanic soil, water ice deposits etc, not this nonsense.

Your hardware is much more interesting. I like the way how you extend the landing legs so that they have a really a large base. Is there any reason you are using the humongous RCS container? And why the vector engines? Do they help with keeping the ship under control?

The way you place the illuminators is also cool.

I built large landers for the Koviet Union They had a really large leg base and flew like a dream. That's a picture of an earlier version, which actually flew to the Mun. On the picture it does not appear that wide, but keep in mind the parts on top are 1m diameter, so the legs are 5m wide.

 

[Hellraiser]

RCS helps when you pick a landing site, I probably stuck too many radial tanks on it though, that was the only tank on the whole vessel so I was also using it before the descent. I was afraid I may use up too much of it. I also needed the large one to fit some of the stuff like proper double 8-RCS thruster rings without them coming in the way of landing gear, fuel pipes and girders for the vector engine nacelles. Also I wanted 4 illuminators on the main body, badly.

Those legs are by far the only ones to use for heavy landers. I used the other "standard" old legs on my previous attempt of a munar landing (but with a different and somewhat light but still heavy vessel, not the "KeGieEr Cosmo-Habitat and Collective Potato Farm" munbase you see in the picture) and they broke apart. They work normally most of the time, but they're not good for slopes. These ones are more stable I think, I had to connect them to girders so they wouldn't block other things though.

The reason for the vector engines was simple, thrust vectoring allows for more accurate deceleration. Also the whole thing was rather heavy and I wanted a large power margin if I had to thrust at the last second before impact. Those two engines could lift the thing even on Kerbin. The alternatives were NERVAs (more ISP but heavier and less thrust) and aerospikes (less thrust, no vectoring). The only problem is I needed more fuel, so there was also a rockomax-32 tank attached to a decoupler below it. The problem was I fucked up the fuel line connection (ended up connecting a girder) and had to manually pump from the rockomax-32 to the rockomax-8 tank a few times. Ditched the tank when I was below 1 km away from the surface, it nicely crashed and exploded below leaving me with just enough fuel to land it and 30% more even.

The descent was from about 20 km, maybe more. It was quite frantic but surprisingly it worked on my first attempt. Even despite having to pump fuel manually between tanks, crazy. Best no-atmo landing I ever did.

I don't mind the easter eggs, as long as it's not something very retarded along the lines of a giant dick statue or one of master chief/notch/prosper. An oddly shaped rock or even an obelisk or pyramid aren't all that bad. They're working on adding actual resources/deposits and on a drill so we'll probably have more reasons to land in different places in the future.

I do agree that stuff like volcanic soil, ice deposits and the like would be nice. For now though the oddly shaped giant rock works if you like hunting things like that.

 

[Ulminati]

KRAFTWORLD KODEXIA WANTS YOU!

Lenmark launches International "Kraftworld" space station. All nations of Kerbin invited aboard.

persistent.sfs file if you want to dock stuff with the Kraftworld: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/18263459/KSP/persistent.sfs

The Kraftworld Kore Komponent is essentially a storage hub. There's a giant liquid fuel tank, a lot of RCS propellant storage, a decently sized battery and a connection hub to attach components to. Everything is crossfeed capable, so refueling tugs can be sent up to replenish supplies.

The component was launched using a brute force "overkill" launch system. It's not optimal, but it was a one-time thing.

On the bright side, the brute force system got the main Kraftworld into orbit with a full main tank.

A beautiful sight. The battery stack will last a while, but the station is still lacking a power plant and communications array before Kerbanauts can begin inhabiting it.

Behold! The Kraftworld Kraftwerk. 12 giant solar panels and 2 satellite antennae to ensure a stable internet connection. With this in place the Kraftworld will be ready to receive habitation modules.

The kraftwerk was launched with a simple 3-stage system. SRB penii to bring it off the ground, a cluster of 4 vectored thrust engines on a single fuel tank to bring it into orbit and a small tug to complete the rendezvous and docking.

The Kraftwerk en-route to rendezvous

It took a couple of maneuvers, but a 400m intersect trajectory was eventually established. This was a hypothetical best-case scenario.

In reality however, minute variances in the burn led to a 2.5km window. Anything below 3km was deemed acceptable.

Visual contact established. Initial adjustment burns were made to bring the Kraftworld within 1km for docking approach.

The mood was exceedingly tense in mission control. At the 750m mark, burns were made with the intent to reduce the relative veloticity of the Kraftworld and the Kraftwerk to nil in preparation for docking

To aid the docking effort, the Kraftworld docking port was aligned with the Kraftwerk and SAS engaged.

Final approach, as seen on live Lenmark TV

CONTACT!

The K-LAMP docking standard system engaged and the Kraftwerk began operations.

Lenmark formally invites their fellow nations to come join the Kraftworld Kommunity.

 

[Ulminati]

Kraftworld Kodexia welcomes Stereotypical Villain! Total number of residents: 1

Took a few attempts (retract solar panels before docking to reduce risk of station shaking apart), but now there's a cargo tug with tons of monopropellant storage up there. If you can get your modules close and with very low relative velocity, SV can come and dock with them to bring them in. You'll need 2 clamp-o-tron docking modules for this. One for the Kraftworld and one for SV.

The save file in previous post has been updated to include SV

 

[Burning Bridges]

That's a magnificiently designed space station, and we would like to contribute.

But we suggest that Poland, which already has docking experience, should go up first.

We are absolute greenhorns when it comes to docking - and still need to practice.

 

[Ulminati]

Burning Bridges -- You can always grab the persistence file. SV is up there on his tug (you may have to refuel it from the station reserves), so you can un-dock him, move away a bit and re-dock him on another of the docking ports for practice. I recommend going one step into time acceleration and retracting all solar panels to reduce the risk of wobble as the docking ports disengage and engage.

Or if you're feeling extra-cheeky, re-dock him to the port along the fuel/solar panel axis and fly the station off to Mün.

(lv 909 and a nearly completely full orange fuel tank. You should have enough fuel for the delta V to go pretty much anywhere).

Essentially, what you want to do is this:
1- Launch vehicle into orbit.
2 - target space station. That'll give you two markers for when your orbit is above/below the orbit of the station. That's where you want to align your orbital plane with the stations.
3 - Ideally, you want your orbit at 80km (station is at 100), so you'll slowly catch up to it.
4 - Once you're catching up to the station, burn prograde into the stations orbit to close for rendezvous
5 - Once you're within a couple of kilometers, you want to try and eliminate all relative velocity to the station. That will effectively mean you're in the same orbit
6 - Slowly (ever so slowly) throttle towards the station. I like to use RCS when under 1km away
6b - TO make things easier for yourself, control the station when you're about 100m away and at 0 relative velocity, then rotate it to align the docking port with your ship and enable ASAS
7 - Switch to chase cam, then use IJKL + WASD to align yourself with a docking port, and use HN to move in. You generally want to be stravelling less than 0.3 m/s when you make contact
8 - Go smoke a cigarette once you finally get your first docking right. It's that good.

 

[Hellraiser]

Polant will attempt construction of orbital science module for Kraftworld Kodexia called "Incline". Will research ways in which incline affected by Cosmos.

 

[Hellraiser]

Kraftworld Kodexia has been inclined:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pzkm3ro34k3jp2b/persistent.sfs

Link here, added the science/hab module where SV can chill/plan world conquest in it if he wants to. And study incline obviously. Anyway you have some industrial might of Polant in a lower orbit. Consider it a bonus as I didn't want to deorbit it.

Incline Science Module for Kraftworld Kodexia, an effort of mutual cooperation between nations in Cosmos, to ensure they see wrongness of capitalism and imperialism thus join revolution of proletariat.

Capitalist want build station together, could be trick but general say we go ahead. West may lift sanction and embargo on toilet paper exports to Polant as reward. University of Dorun collegue we drink much vodka with suggest we build science module. Guy really like studying incline, not sure what to think of all these science stuff. We engineer we not do science, we build rocket! If rocket not work we add more rocket, no need for science.

Either way he say we need build "Incline Interferometer Array", steel structure function both as stable base for instrument and amplifier for particle detector. Boyarski-Sawyer particle probably linked to incline levels, not sure but want to test theory. Popamole known to interfere with incline, use satelite antenna looted from Kamerica to repel popamole. Also add lab and habitat so cosmonaut have where to sleep after drink too much vodka.

*I wanted to get rid off all superfluous nonsense, this thing is 100% a space station module. No need for RCS, generators, batteries or SAS. Just the hab module, incline interferometer arrays and two docking ports. Minimum parts to ensure it doesn't lag the station to hell. Everything else is stuck on the tug which will get it to the station.

If cosmonaut need to know weather of cosmos, he look out window at thermometer and barometer. Wear warm suit if space blizzard strike.

*I'll probably add such an ingenious assembly to bases on planets/moons with atmospheres. Makes sense doesn't it? And in the future, when they'll add actual weather it (the devs are also working on it) will make even more sense.

Use Mursus Mini variant of Orbital Tug to dock module to Kraftworld Kodexia. Figure we put much rocket together and it get to station, more rocket always work.

*As I assumed it's all heavy I went for 4 mainsail double jumbo siderockets with two boosters each. The main section has a quad-coupler 4 LV vector engine array. Fuck efficiency, I just wanted this in orbit. The design was tried and proven (outside of the 4 vector array, but they have a lot of thrust and decent ISP so they should have worked) so it worked flawless on my first attempt.

All separation going smooth.

Overshoot target altitude, engines shutdown.

*I prefer my LKO altitude to be around 120-150 km personally. Not used to having stuff this low.

Separation flawless, vector engine continue operation with no damage!

We burn to lower periapsis, lower a bit too much. No problem, tug have plenty fuel for correction.

Orbit made into circle, planning burn to align plane of orbit at ascend node.

As plan burn and point craft we deploy instrument, vital popamole repellant field full strength!

Planes matched, now plan to bring orbit closer to Kraftworld station.

New orbit take craft within 1,7 kilometer of target. Encounter deem close enough for rendezvousing.

Vessel bit closer before encounter due to orbit trajector. Starting rendezvous maneuver.

Burn toward target despite not see thing. Need to add many streetlamp spy steal from Mondon, Kengland in future. Anyway velocity should be enough, need to check project separation.

*Honestly, it needs more lights. They'll add airplane lights in the future, should be useful on spacecraft as well. If they blink it will be even better.

Most accurate rendezvous after first burn in SAP history, capitalist exploiters envious of socialist success!

*Honestly, I did one burn and it was that fucking good! I didn't even know you can get a separation lower than 100 meters displayed.

Standard rendezvous maneuver using RCS, speed maintain below 1 meter per second.

Need lateral movement to left, uhh wait not left. Anti-normal? Direction name other than prograde/retrograde still confuse us, need read more Cosmonaut manual from Koviet Union.

Making last correction before dock attempt, very close now. Everyone tense at cosmodrome, hopefully many female await to meet SAP engineer after docking. Help release tension by more docking.

Docking clamp look attracted to each other, this bode well even if we not use alcohol to help process.

Dock success! Capitalist "astronaut" Stereotypical Villain inspect if all work.

*one warning if I even tried to dock faster than 0,1 m/s the following happened:

what happened

Clamp connected good, module appear intact.

Cosmo-weather equipment not broke.

Mursus Mini Tug look operational as well. Astronaut return to his small tug.

Detach orbital tug from station, move to lower orbit so not impact station.

*As the tug itself is fairly complex it makes the whole thing laggy. I move it out of the 2km simulation range to improve performance.

Tug move away, enter orbit on lower altitude.

*It still has like 98% fuel left and about half RCS, mostly because I had to use it during orbital insertion with the non-nuclear stages. The actual docking didn't use much RCS.

Anyway I left it in orbit in case you want to move something, it has one standard docking port on top which was connected to the bottom of the science module. It could probably push the Kraftworld Kodexia into Munar obit. However I fear the panels would break apart before that. Also don't even try turning on RCS and SAS when controlling the station, it will break the panels as well.

Final look at now expand Kraftworld Kodexia. Science module sure to detect what cause incline and what cause decline now. Also probably discover source of popamole.



*Actually I managed to almost dock it flawlessly but the clamps didn't link for some reason. I also tried disconnecting and rotating the thing to align it better, but it either kept misaligning after the clamps locked-in or impacting the station a bit too fast and destroying the Gigantors solar panels. Or both at the same time.



Either way the file link is at the beginning of this post.

 

[Ulminati]

Welcome to the Kraftworld Kosmonauts.

Yeah, the solar panels really love getting shaken apart when docking because of wobble. I find switching to the station when you're close, hitting time acceleration to cancel spin and pressing 1 helps. (Solar panels and antenna on the Kraftwork are in action group 1). Also, for the love of god, don't have RCS+SAS engaged when docking. Once the clamps connect, every RCS thruster on the Kraftworld starts making corrections, which results in everything breaking apart.

I'm pretty tempted to make a less wobbly kraftwerk and replace the current one. There's only a small docking clamp atop the Kraftwerk, so SVs tug can't interface with it. In hindsight I should've given him a bi-coupler with both a large and a small docking clamp.

 

[Burning Bridges]

As you know I am quite busy with the problem of interplanetary flight.

I have just started thinking about the docking problem, a little bit. That is to say, I made a first attempt, but without Kraftworldia for now, and I'm still not good at it.

The approach to within a few meters seems doable, but I'm still trying to figure out the exact alignment of the ship. It's apparent none of the devs plays this game. I wonder what would happen if we put Buzz Aldrin in control and asked him to dock two spacecraft with a keyboard. He'd probably crash the thing, or say right away that it's ridiculous. You know Buzz, J is for left, K is for up, but make sure ASAS is turned off or it will fuck up everything with its use of the thrusters.

 

[Hellraiser]

As for interplanetary flight I have to say that encountering Duna is hard. It's SoI is simply small as fuck, getting Eve encounters was a piece of cake (turned out it has more gravity than Kerbin when I landed a probe on it) but Duna ones are rather difficult for me because of it.

For docking they actually did play it and admit the current state of docking is a work in progress. Instrumentation is too simple for one, it is rather hard to guess if I properly aligned/pointed the vessel and can go into lateral docking mode or not (lateral mode really helps, for one the controls are better, if the vessel is pointed in the right direction that is). There should also be an option to turn of ASAS RCS thruster use when trying to dock. Also targeting clamps doesn't work as intended yet. So there is a lot of eyeballing you have to do, but with a lot of the craft you design you have no way of of seeing the target.

Perhaps a clamp point of view camera would be one solution to the problem. Click on clamp, set it as a docking clamp allowing the C key to switch between normal outside view, IVA and the clamp. It would still be eyeballing it but far easier IMO.

 

[Burning Bridges]

As for interplanetary flight I have to say that encountering Duna is hard. It's SoI is simply small as fuck, getting Eve encounters was a piece of cake (turned out it has more gravity than Kerbin when I landed a probe on it) but Duna ones are rather difficult for me because of it.

yet everyone keeps telling me it's "easy" to go to Duna

You could still try the method I described - which is to enter Duna's orbit around the sun until there is an encounter. It uses up a little more fuel, but not that much.

But I can definitely confirm that landing on Duna is easy, if you use enough parachutes.

For docking they actually did play it

There should also be an option to turn of ASAS RCS thruster use when trying to dock.

I took me 1 attempt at docking to figure that out, why didn't they?

 

[Hellraiser]

As for interplanetary flight I have to say that encountering Duna is hard. It's SoI is simply small as fuck, getting Eve encounters was a piece of cake (turned out it has more gravity than Kerbin when I landed a probe on it) but Duna ones are rather difficult for me because of it.

yet everyone keeps telling me it's "easy" to go to Duna

You could still try the method I described - which is to enter Duna's orbit around the sun until there is an encounter. It uses up a little more fuel, but not that much.

But I can definitely confirm that landing on Duna is easy, if you use enough parachutes.

I actually sent a 4 lander probe to the Duna system. Getting an encounter with Duna is a lot more time consuming than with Eve. There is less of a margin for error when planning the maneuver, so it takes you a while before you find the right spot and plan a maneuver that gets you into rendezvous trajectory. I can do it but it takes more time.

The landers were:

- 1 ion only Ike lander as light as possible lander (but also with all 4 scientific instruments, legs and 4 radio antennas), result - at about 20-30 km from the surface TWR fell below 1, I need to do math to see if panels for full thrust+ion engine have TWR>1 to determine if it is possible to land/take off from Ike using an ion engine at all.

- 2 identical standard small parachute lander probes, had 4 small radial engines and 2 oscar fuel tanks each, attempted to land one on Ike. It didn't have enough fuel, although I did waste a lot of it on getting it into Ike orbit and on a descent trajectory. The other got slowed down to about 10 m/s using the parachute in Duna's atmosphere (however it landed at a 3 km altitude so it might be more effective in a lower region) with velocity going down by 0.1 m/s every 2 seconds IIRC.

I had a very low periapsis of 13 km so I didn't do as much aerobraking as I could have and had to kill some velocity using thrusters. In the end I also burned some for the final landing to get velocity below 5 m/s so that the probe would land softly.

- 1 drogue parachute lander, otherwise identical to the other two parachute probes (looked kind of silly with that over-sized parachute on it). Periapsis was about 18 km IIRC, no burn to kill velocity. Drogue parachute worked very nice, final fall velocity was about 14 m/s, had to use the engines to make a soft landing (kind of like NASA does every time it lands something on Mars). Overall, apart from the mass, I would say drogue parachutes are more reliable on Duna. If only because they generate more drag earlier allowing for a more accurate landing. A regular parachute may overshoot the target area because it opens so late. Which means you need to use engines to slow down if that happens.

 

[Ulminati]

As for interplanetary flight I have to say that encountering Duna is hard.

I found it quite easy once I realized you could move maneuver nodes around after applying the prograde burn to pick the exact angle you want the apoapsis at

 

[Ulminati]

As you know I am quite busy with the problem of interplanetary flight.

I have just started thinking about the docking problem, a little bit. That is to say, I made a first attempt, but without Kraftworldia for now, and I'm still not good at it.

The approach to within a few meters seems doable, but I'm still trying to figure out the exact alignment of the ship. It's apparent none of the devs plays this game. I wonder what would happen if we put Buzz Aldrin in control and asked him to dock two spacecraft with a keyboard. He'd probably crash the thing, or say right away that it's ridiculous. You know Buzz, J is for left, K is for up, but make sure ASAS is turned off or it will fuck up everything with its use of the thrusters.

What I do when docking is switch to chase cam mode and align the camera so I'm behind my ship. Then I rotate until the docking target is ined up and tap SAS on and off to kill rotation. From then on, it's a simple matter of using IJKL to stay lined up with the port and HN to keep relative speed at 0.2-0.3 m/s. Chase cam is a LOT better than orbital for docking purposes.

 

[Burning Bridges]

As you know I am quite busy with the problem of interplanetary flight.

I have just started thinking about the docking problem, a little bit. That is to say, I made a first attempt, but without Kraftworldia for now, and I'm still not good at it.

The approach to within a few meters seems doable, but I'm still trying to figure out the exact alignment of the ship. It's apparent none of the devs plays this game. I wonder what would happen if we put Buzz Aldrin in control and asked him to dock two spacecraft with a keyboard. He'd probably crash the thing, or say right away that it's ridiculous. You know Buzz, J is for left, K is for up, but make sure ASAS is turned off or it will fuck up everything with its use of the thrusters.

What I do when docking is switch to chase cam mode and align the camera so I'm behind my ship. Then I rotate until the docking target is ined up and tap SAS on and off to kill rotation. From then on, it's a simple matter of using IJKL to stay lined up with the port and HN to keep relative speed at 0.2-0.3 m/s. Chase cam is a LOT better than orbital for docking purposes.

Chase cam is actually a great idea, I have to try it out. The problem is of course that I lose orientation. For an uninitiated it feels impossible to figure out which thrusters to use, and I am working on an idea to arrange the thrusters in a more logical way. I think the H and N thrusters for forward and backward movement are the easiest to figure out, but up / down and left / right are not at all so easy.

My problem with ASAS is that whenever you use it you must always (!) deactivate RCS beforehand, because ASAS will fire a lot of the thrusters, which fucks up everything you did before. And I keep forgetting 'R' key every time. That may hurt me more than you because I always use very small, light spacecraft. Perhaps it would be better to use only a regular SAS on my orbital spacecraft.

 

[Ulminati]

Münar Megalander Mk I

Currently messing about to see what works. The Megalander has a docking port underneath intended to carry a rover along with the 2 Kerbalnauts. It's got plenty of thrust to carry the payload onto the surface of a moon (and parachutes for planets with mroe gravity and an atmosphere) and ground clearance is high enough that the rover should be able to drive out from under it. It also has solar power, thermometer, barometer, a communications array and living room for 2 Kerbals. I moved it into orbit around Kerbin, docked with the Kraftworld to refuel, then sent it on a transfer trajectory and still had enough fuel to bring it back to Kerbin after landing.

Now to get a rover mod.