Kerbal Space Program, Revisited.

[Vanas]

This sounds like a plan; pretty much my last two posts combined. On fire. FOR SCIENCE.

Might take a while to get it all stable though.

[Admiral Valdemar]

The idea makes me giddy. Do it. Do it now.

[Vanas]

Working on it. Until then, this guy has been making warships. And then did a play-by-email battle around Laythe. Dedication and insanity in equal measure.

Speaking of...

[Vanas]

Good news, everyone!



HyperBlimp 1 was deployed as a test run. I seem to have inexplicably doubled up on one set of the engines, but what the hell.

At Mach 3, things started to get a bit iffy.

It did get a bit faster than this, but at the time, I wasn't able to screenshot. By my maths, it was doing about mach 3.85 when...

+++Out of Atmosphere Error, Please Reboot HyperBlimp+++


Admittedly, it's spectacular.

[Nephtys]

Working on it. Until then, this guy has been making warships. And then did a play-by-email battle around Laythe. Dedication and insanity in equal measure.

Speaking of...

Unmodded space battle.

My god.

[Admiral Valdemar]

That is so beautiful. Need energy weapons next. I imagine it'd be a little harder to do that with a laser CIWS.

Also, one of those craft gave me The Last Starfighter vibes.

[PeZook]

Good news, everyone!

HyperBlimp 1 was deployed as a test run. I seem to have inexplicably doubled up on one set of the engines, but what the hell.

My God...this is...Kerbalness incarnate!

[Eternal_Freedom]

That guy whose done that whole series of videos is amazing. I particularly like the Vanguard even if she did get whacked.

[Vanas]

I'm not a huge fan of his commentary style, but he's got serious talent and some of the story bits are great.

And the space battles are beautiful, with all that debris being blasted away.

On a side note, in case you were wondering how well the Hyperblimp flies, I've created a video to show it off. This is a slightly different variant to it's predecessor, now only existing in the correct dimensions.

[PeZook]

What does the range look like on this most beautiful creation?

[Vanas]

Hard to say. Int hat video, I got about 1/6th of the way around Kerbin on 1/4 of my fuel. But, it looks like there's a sweet spot around 24km altitude, above the shock heating and below the lack of atmosphere that would possibly allow for slightly higher speeds. With careful nursing, it might be capable of circumnavigation.

I can't realistically add any more fuel to it though; it's barely lightly than air as it is.

[TimothyC]

This is the winged rover prior to take off for testing, the final version won't have the SRB kits on the sides of the aft boom, but will retain the tail liquid engine, and the wingtip mounted RCS gear. The goal of this is to be able to fly this to Eve, Duna, and Laythe and circle around for landing sites, and once there, rove around. Totally stock (although prior versions had some non-critical not-stock parts like cameras and mini lights). Once on the ground, it can't rove constantly due to the limited output of the two RTGs, but with occasional pauses, it can drive forever, boosted with the solar arrays:

[TimothyC]

An updated version of the Mini-rover above was launched on the back of a mini-Energia booster, docked to an atomic transfer stage, and transfered to Duna. In the first picture you see the final stage booster/refueler prior to the orbital boost it gave to the Duna probes, and the second one shows the probe having circularized Prior to target selection.

[Imperial528]

Here's a space station I've got in construction:



And a part en-route:

[HMS Sophia]

I suppose I should finally post this thingy I built:


Sorry for the poor quality. It's a four piece satellite just for the fun of it rather than anything important

[Imperial528]

Very nice use of struts. I like the general decentralized feel it has.

Quicky of my station before I go back to work:

[Imperial528]

And now I have a solar array mounted:



In unrelated news, fears of the station suffering a debris-related incident have increased 500% in the past day.

[TimothyC]

That's not a bad station Imperial. Right now I've got three stations in orbit. The lower station (120-135km) is not pictured here, but the middle (150km) looks good:



You may note the two cupolas, two chemical transfer tugs, crew return vehicle, and docked space shuttle. The entire assembally consists of 8 docked parts, launched over 6 missions (Central Core + Tug 1, Tug 2, Habitation Module, crew return vehicle, Cupola 1/cupola 2, & Shuttle launch).



And the high(er) orbit (325km) station is mostly there as a refueling depot:









I am strongly tempted to not use the refueling station concept in favor on an on-demand launch system, mostly because my PC starts to slow down when I interact with the high-orbit station.

[Imperial528]

Yeah, my station lags as well, so I think at the moment it is more or less a trophy station.

[TimothyC]

We have 0.22!

[PeZook]

SCIENCE!

I love that it's a resource now. Where are we going? We need to harvest more SCIENCE!

[Grumman]

What strategy are people using in Career mode? I pushed for Basic Rocketry, Survivability, then Science Tech so I could start using the Science Jr., then pushed for Electricity to get some solar panels. Now I've got a couple of unmanned vessels on high orbit missions - one on a Mun flyby - and will be sending up a third to do a Minmus flyby.

[Imperial528]

I'm trying to get to heavy rocketry, mainsails and such, but mostly I have been spending science without much of a long-term plan. I've done landings on areas of Kerbin (South pole, desert, highlands) landings on the Munar midlands and Munar orbital experiments, Minmus fly-bys and landings (also returns from both satellites) and also a Kerbol encounter.

Pretty much anything I can do to get science that I can think of.

[Jub]

I've just started mission mode and I must say that it certainly adds something to the game. Thus far I've completed a few suborbital missions and observed both my Kerbals and the goo in atmosphere and space. This has earned enough science to gain funding for more advanced liquid engines with thrust vectoring and the larger solid fuel boosters. This next mission should give us enough in the budget to fund those winglets our pilots have been asking for.

I have a mission in progress as we speak that went slightly wrong, I aimed to get a full orbit of Kerbin (and managed that much) but didn't save enough fuel to allow for a proper re-entry. Thankfully my PE was still low enough that I'm losing about 200m altitude per orbit due to the atmosphere. I hope that we will gain much science from this when Jeb finally makes it back to Kerbin.

[Jub]

EDIT: And I alt tabbed to check something and crashed... Now to restart that mission.