Screenshots!

[Maniacal]

First Holdfast Linebattle, first round was actually a lot of fun, second one server started lagging the main admin who's server it was (there were a bunch of servers being used for LBs tonight) didn't really know how to run it (also the admin tools are being overhauled because they kind of suck).

http://steamcommunity.com/id/Maniacal/screenshot/866238054440793897

http://steamcommunity.com/id/Maniacal/screenshot/866238054440788160

http://steamcommunity.com/id/Maniacal/screenshot/866238054440787246

 

[warpus]

I'm in the middle of an epic mission to Jool involving 5 motherships, the assembly of which required 9 launches and cost me all my money (6,800,000). The overall mission is to establish a foothold in the Jool system and set up communications for future missions as well as explore all the moons and do science. The first ship to arrive put an asteroid-based fuel refinery in orbit just outside of the orbit of all the moons. Then 3 of the other ships arrived, refuelled, and de-assembled into individual modules, then re-assembled to get ready for their next missions. The last ship is still on the way with 4 additional modules.

Here are 2 of the ships after they have refuelled at the Jool Fuel Refinery and re-assembled to tackle mission #1 - Land on Tylo and return



The one further away has a reusable lander (attached to a tug) piloted by my most veteran pilot - Valentina. The ship in the foreground has a booster stage, which is required to land on this particular moon. A third ship that can't be seen here arrived earlier and put 3 relay satellites in orbit around the moon. The ships you see have their solar panels retracted, because it's time to dock, and as we all know docking can mess up solar panels.



In the image above you see the landing on Tylo in progress. The bottom part of the booster stage just ran out of fuel and has been ditched. It only held fuel, no engines. The design allows the pilot to land on the surface with the upper stage of the booster still attached. (but just barely, for this setup you have to get into a 50k orbit and land from there)



For EVA purposes the booster had to be attached very carefully.



In the above image Valentina just got back into orbit. Phew. She will dock with one of the tugs and rendezvous with the rest of the fleet in orbit near the Fuel Refinery.

The next part of the mission will see Valentina refuel and get in orbit around Laythe. There she will dock the lander with another booster - almost exactly the same as the one used here, except that it has parachutes, so that you can land the whole thing on Laythe and then return. This booster is currently all fuelled up and attached to a tug in orbit near the fuel refinery. These two ships will make the journey to Laythe together, and will be joined by a science ship with 8 probes, 7 of which will be launched down to Laythe. The 8th one will be eventually launched into Jool itself, perhaps during another mission.

After that Valentina will fly slightly easier missions to the remaining 3 moons and land on all of them. On the way in the 5th mothership (with the 4 modules) is another pilot, who will relieve her after those missions are complete. On the way are also more relay satellites, so that I can have 3 relays per moon. Also another Tylo booster, because the original one was defective. It had struts sticking out at the front making it impossible for me to dock the lander to it. Then after I sent the replacement Tylo booster with the last mothership, somehow the original booster was fine... and worked fine, as you saw. So anyway, now I have an extra Tylo booster heading for Jool, so I'll probably end up using it to send Bill to the surface. Gotta give Bill something to do, he actually somehow snuck onto the 5th ship along with a scientist. I swear they weren't there when I launched and put the ship in orbit.. but as soon as I docked with the tug and got ready to burn for Jool, somehow Bill and his buddy were on board. I don't get it, but I was going to send a relief pilot for the mission anyway, so that Valentina can get some rest after landing on all the moons (she was also the first to land on the Mun and on Duna, and the first to lead a mission to orbit around Eve. Bill was first to land on Minmus and do all sorts of other things on Minmus)

Yeah I'm not finishing this whole crazy mission until after Nepal, so here's some screenshots for you guys of the most exciting part of PROJECT ZEUS so far.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

That's astounding. Good job! You must have a very powerful rig. Lag has improved 10x from the early releases of the game but it's still a monster.

I've begun using electric propulsion for all of my interplanetary missions while reserving nervas solely for landers. I've come up with a massive all-electric science bus that has over 20 km/s of delta v. It has every science experiment, several copies of the non-reusable experiments and a SAR antenna for mapping. I have launched a few on checkout missions to polar science orbits about both moons, kerbin and venus.

My next goal is to push outwards. I am confident the standard bus can handle Duna and the asteroid belt but I'm less certain of jool. For sure the electric prop can get a transfer orbit and I've packed enough RTGs (this is a 40 ton satellite) to power the 9x ion drives but I don't yet have a comm network set up that far out yet. I've launched a few of the early test missions (all of them ended up with minor flaws before I wound up with something nominal) into heliocentric orbit but I need to send out more into the deep system. (Oh they have the relay comm antenna to serve as relays, in addition to science).

The difficulty with that the comm network (and to a lesser extent, the science probes to follow) won't generate much funding and they're quite expensive.

To that end I cranked the admin over to turn science into money full throttle and I've put a series of manned science labs in polar orbit about the moons and Kerbin. They periodically generate about 500k. I'll have to supplement them with news stations and also rotate out the crews for experience.

Finally, on the manned front, I've developed a very large, 7 person lander which is capable of landing on and returning to orbit about the moons of kerbin. It has a similar transfer stage (with docking port) as the satellite bus only it has less RTGs (safety) and has its own flight computer for controlling without a pilot. All in all it can deliver 23 km/s to the lander which itself has about 2.5 km/s. The only part of the huge lander that doesn't make it back from space are the 4 nuclear engines which I drop as a safety precaution. Because it's so large I usually get back about 600k in parts after landing. Also, (and I don't always do this yet), the transfer stage has so much deltav that after bringing the lander back to kerbin it can easily go out to deep space and serve as a relay.

Learning to dock with all electic propulsion (I don't use the landers nukes for docking) was tedious. It's not especially hard, you just have to plan everything out to an even greater extent than normal docking and it takes much longer. Also, the lander was intended for Duna science sorties but it's come up short of Delta-V for that purpose and will need to be revised. It can land on the moon of Duna but not the planet itself.

So my goals are

Set up comm network in deep space
Launch probes to every planet
Launch current lander to Duna's moon and return it
Launch science polar orbits to Duna and its moon
Revise lander
Launch new lander to Duna and return it

 

[hobbsyoyo]

20170923005448_1

• hobbsyoyo
• Sep 23, 2017

So this is my polar orbiting science station. It has docking ports but I never intend to use them. I find that docking ports have gotten somewhat worse than they were a few game builds back. The attraction force is much lower than it used to be and every docking event feels like rolling the dice on whether or not the spacecraft will rip apart. So I'm going to use claws from here on out. The tiny fuel tank left this design with marginal propellant margin for polar orbits so it will be revised for the next wave of deep space stations. It's also power negative during long downlinks so I have warped through them to get my data down.

20170923010027_1

• hobbsyoyo
• Sep 23, 2017

This is an early model of my exploration satellite bus. It has lots of undesirable clipping, and is ugly. It does have all of the science equipment but it was such an ugly duckling that I gave it up and developed a MK II.

20170923010048_1

• hobbsyoyo
• Sep 23, 2017

This is the backside of the MK I Deep Space Exploration Bus (DSEB). It shows the standard ion configuration I use for all my missions right now with a central engine and eight surrounding engines. It took a bit of R&D to get the upper stage connection to be stiff, light and somewhat aesthetic.

20170923010334_1

• hobbsyoyo
• Sep 23, 2017

This is the transfer stage for my lander. Notice the huge docking port up front - it's used to shuttle the lander to the target moon separate from the lander, dock with it, then take it back to Kerbin. At that point I can send it back out into deep space to serve as a relay (note the huge antenna) as it has about 18 km/s DV at that point. I will have to make a MK II for deep space operations that will include a suite of RTGs, an inner ring of ion engines (for 15 total) and perhaps detachable xenon tanks of some TBD implementation.

20170923010421_1

• hobbsyoyo
• Sep 23, 2017

This is the MK II DSEB. It's nice to look at, can do all the science, is easy to fly and I just kind of love it. I'm about to start lobbing a massive wave of these out into the solar system to fill all of the comm gaps and take up science polar orbits at all the bodies. I'm fairly confident it has enough DV for anything as the sat itself packs over 20 km/s and the upper stage of the launch vehicle is all NERVA which can place the satellite into heliocentric orbit. I may end up putting antennas on that upper stage too in order to provide even more communication relay links.

20170923010639_1

• hobbsyoyo
• Sep 23, 2017

This is the MK I lander. It seats 6 and was originally sized for Duna. Unfortunately, it wound up only having 2.5 km/s which isn't enough for a comfortable Duna landing and SSTO. It can handle both of Kerbins moons quite handily and the parachute system proved so robust that I always ended up landing with the big fuel tank on the bottom still attached (it has its own heat shield and decoupler but it was intended to land at Duna and then be ditched before returning to Kerbin) which allows me to get back quite a bit of money.

It took four or five checkout flights with this vehicle before I worked out all of the bugs. No one died but there were some close calls and failed mission objectives. Also, by the time the development had finished I had already taken it all over the Kerbin system and completed my science objectives (and a ton of tourism missions) there. Since the design is maxed out from a DeltaV standpoint and it can't leave the Kerbin system, this design is now retired. I anticipate to double the fuel capacity in the MK II and further spread out the leg base to better handle inclines. I find that above 6.5 degrees it wants to tip.
Note: It launches upside down with the transfer stage in control. The avionics in that are more advanced my pilot's manual skills anyways. :-/


I'm really frustrated with a few things right now -
Docking ports (mentioned above)
Fairings - totally useless for all but the smallest rockets. They introduce massive amounts of aerodynamic disturbances and weak points in every large vehicle. I basically never use them anymore. I don't even feel that they really help with drag, aero heating or structural loading.
Lag
They took away the ability to save launch vehicle stages that don't include the control module - or at least I can't find it
When I take a screenshot with steam it triggers the aerodynamics overlay prompt which ruins my pictures.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Got a contract to send back science from the surface of Gilly.. My earlier mission still had a science lab orbiting Gilly (with the interplanetary stage attached) so I figured I would see if I could land the whole thing on the surface. And.. success!

Do you use a mod to swap out all the oxidizer for fuel in those tanks with the nervas? Or do you just drain the oxidizer out?

I really wish they would add a feature to change fuel types in tanks. I ended up grabbing a mod just to have access to a very large xenon tank and have to use goofy airplane parts for my nervas or take a massive weight penalty by draining the oxidizer.

Also I like how your Tylo landers use a drop-tank form factor where the engines are mounted above tanks that feed up to them. I also used that design for my Laythe project. I really regret never finishing it but once I assembled the Laythe refueling station and delivered the four SSTO landers, the lag became unbearable. I basically had to warp into docking to prevent the game from crashing.

I had delivered a skycrane with four man-able rovers, a train of linked roving habitats and a small base station that contain mini sounding rockets for science.

 

[Leonel]

First Holdfast Linebattle, first round was actually a lot of fun, second one server started lagging the main admin who's server it was (there were a bunch of servers being used for LBs tonight) didn't really know how to run it (also the admin tools are being overhauled because they kind of suck).

http://steamcommunity.com/id/Maniacal/screenshot/866238054440793897

http://steamcommunity.com/id/Maniacal/screenshot/866238054440788160

http://steamcommunity.com/id/Maniacal/screenshot/866238054440787246

Looks like the Napoleonic mod for Mount & Blade but you can fight with ships too. I'll have to take a look into it!

 

[warpus]

That's astounding. Good job! You must have a very powerful rig.

Thanks! This is exactly the sort of stuff I imagined myself doing when I first heard about the game and you told me what it was capable of (i.e. persistent missions). It feels great to have all that KSP knowledge and experience under my belt so that I can do stuff like this now. It's crazy how much it took, from those first tutorials you wrote up for me, to eventually docking, to getting enough experience with the game to be comfortable designing things like this



That's the 5th ship that's currently en route to Jool with a new booster stage, 8 new relays, a part of a return ship for 4, and a Jool Fuel Refinery expansion that will make refuelling easier.

My rig was decent when I first got it a couple years ago, but I guess it's still pretty good! I see some slow downs but it's reasonable.

I don't have much experience with electric propulsion or RTGs. I haven't used them at all. Your missions sound intriguing, time to read your next post

Do you use a mod to swap out all the oxidizer for fuel in those tanks with the nervas? Or do you just drain the oxidizer out?

I drain the oxidizer out before launch. I've played this whole career mode 100% stock, no mods, with 1 exception - I used hyperedit to test the Tylo and Laythe booster stages and the Zeus lander.

It is a bit annoying about the fuel/oxidizer, and I wish you could replace stuff in stock, but I just go with it I guess, at least for this playthrough.

Also I like how your Tylo landers use a drop-tank form factor where the engines are mounted above tanks that feed up to them. I also used that design for my Laythe project.

It works way better than I expected. It's basically the exact same booster that works on both Tylo and Laythe, the only difference is that the Laythe booster has parachutes. I managed to make it work with the lander on both moons without doing any math. A half-arsed approach to engineering that worked out better than expected. The engines for the booster had to be radial, so that I could easily dock the booster stages to other things, so the next step was sort of an Engineering necessity - put them up high.

I am slightly fascinated by the completely different approach you have for stuff in your last post. I tend to overengineer everything and rely on certain dynamics that I am now very familiar with. Maybe it's time to experiment a bit

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Thanks! This is exactly the sort of stuff I imagined myself doing when I first heard about the game and you told me what it was capable of (i.e. persistent missions). It feels great to have all that KSP knowledge and experience under my belt so that I can do stuff like this now. It's crazy how much it took, from those first tutorials you wrote up for me, to eventually docking, to getting enough experience with the game to be comfortable designing things like this



That's the 5th ship that's currently en route to Jool with a new booster stage, 8 new relays, a part of a return ship for 4, and a Jool Fuel Refinery expansion that will make refuelling easier.

My rig was decent when I first got it a couple years ago, but I guess it's still pretty good! I see some slow downs but it's reasonable.

I don't have much experience with electric propulsion or RTGs. I haven't used them at all. Your missions sound intriguing, time to read your next post



I drain the oxidizer out before launch. I've played this whole career mode 100% stock, no mods, with 1 exception - I used hyperedit to test the Tylo and Laythe booster stages and the Zeus lander.

It is a bit annoying about the fuel/oxidizer, and I wish you could replace stuff in stock, but I just go with it I guess, at least for this playthrough.



It works way better than I expected. It's basically the exact same booster that works on both Tylo and Laythe, the only difference is that the Laythe booster has parachutes. I managed to make it work with the lander on both moons without doing any math. A half-arsed approach to engineering that worked out better than expected. The engines for the booster had to be radial, so that I could easily dock the booster stages to other things, so the next step was sort of an Engineering necessity - put them up high.

I am slightly fascinated by the completely different approach you have for stuff in your last post. I tend to overengineer everything and rely on certain dynamics that I am now very familiar with. Maybe it's time to experiment a bit

You've definitely accomplished waaay more than I ever did or even could! I've never even attempted or even planned for a Tylo landing. Tylo is the moon that has ~1 g gravity and no atmosphere, right? That's as challenging as Eve to land and return from. That's truly a powerful lander, you could put a massive payload on Laythe with that thing.

-----------------

20170923113234_1

• hobbsyoyo
• Sep 23, 2017

I took a contract to do an Eve rover because the payoff was quite high. The contract specifies wheels bigger than I would have liked which caused a ton of problems down the road. The initial concept was to have the transit stage set up a low Eve orbit, then dip to about 50 km periapsis, detach the lander and then boost back into orbit to serve as the relay.

The mission was a failure - I forgot to put a heatshield on the rover which made a landing impossible. I put the whole stack (rover + transit stage) back into a heliospheric orbit. I'm not sure where I'm going to finally place it so it's just hanging out in space for now with 18 km/s deltaV.

When I went to add a heat shield to the rover, the wheels ended up sticking out a great deal. This meant I had to add a quad stack of heat shields and this ended up making the rover so stack so heavy that the launch vehicle couldn't orbit it. I tried using lofted trajectories (basically hurling it straight up) and using the transit stage to circularize but it's just too low thrust to reach orbit before reentry.

This meant the launch vehicle had to get significantly bigger.

20170923122535_1

• hobbsyoyo
• Sep 23, 2017

Here is the upgraded launcher in the VAB. I am about to add sepatron rockets to the side boosters for safety.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

This is the revised lander on Eve entry. I read some incorrect atmospheric data for Eve so I thought the atmosphere started at 97 km when in reality it starts at around 88. My periapsis was just barely below this so it took 7 or 8 passes before I fully entered. It did make for the smoothest possible reentry though and with the big beefy heat shields, I completely decelerated by 30 km.


I fell maybe 200 km short of one of the oceans. BTW that's new since last I played. Previously Eve had some lakes and large seas but no global ocean. Neat.


Eve's atmosphere is so good for aerobreaking that a decoupler made it all the way to the surface. I tried to drive to the ocean but it's too far and this rover is too unwieldy to drive out there. If I do this on another planet I'll use much smaller wheels and make sure to do more test driving. I did some on Kerbin but it was not enough to really understand the drive train issues that causes it to do doughnut.

 

[warpus]

You've definitely accomplished waaay more than I ever did or even could! I've never even attempted or even planned for a Tylo landing. Tylo is the moon that has ~1 g gravity and no atmosphere, right? That's as challenging as Eve to land and return from. That's truly a powerful lander, you could put a massive payload on Laythe with that thing.

I have never tried an Eve land and return mission before, I've been under the impression that it's one level harder than what I did on Tylo.

For Tylo I basically I have to get in a 50k circular orbit and use up 95%+ of the fuel from the booster stage to land. To get back in orbit I use 92%+ of fuel I have in the lander proper. So it's all very tight. You'd think I did a bunch of math to build all that, but I basically first designed and built the lander, then used hyperedit to see if it was powerful enough to take off from Tylo and get in orbit. It was just barely perfect somehow. So then I built the booster stage and after a couple tries it was good enough to do what I wanted.

When I tested the exact same setup on Laythe next (plus parachutes on the booster stage), I had enough dV to land and get back into orbit with slightly larger error margins than what happens on Tylo. So basically I think I just got pretty lucky with my design. I haven't tested the lander anywhere else, but it should be able to land and return from any of the other moons too.

A rover on Eve.. I think I did one of those missions a long time ago, before heat effects were in the game. I should give that one a try again.

My roommate wants me to build a "Polish" submarine that uses wind power to recharge its batteries. I'm not sure if I'm taking him up on that challenge or not. I think it'd be cool to have a sub on Laythe though, so I might design that first. For wind power though I would need a mod, and I don't even know if it's possible.

 

[Maniacal]

Looks like the Napoleonic mod for Mount & Blade but you can fight with ships too. I'll have to take a look into it!

Yep it's the successor to NW (which is pretty much dead already, we stopped going to LBs in it a few months ago). I think one or so of the same devs is working on it but I don't remember exactly, different studio.

 

[SuperBeaverInc.]

Started a game of CK2 as the count of Limousin in France at the earliest start date.

Spoiler :

Things may have escalated.

 

[Arakhor]

That's... an interesting map.

 

[trader/warrior]

The Morrowind graphics overhaul is quite pretty and I'm amazed as what the modders can get out of a game engine that is now 15 years old. If it wasn't for the horrifyingly stiff animations, modded Morrowind would rank up there with many recent releases.

On the topic of Morrowind graphics mods, I've been trying to make one of my own using OpenMW's new normal mapping feature to give textures a 3D light-interacting look. MGExe also has this feature, but my MGSO installation doesn't need even lower FPS from enabling that experimental feature. Though I swear morrowind at 20fps looks at least as smooth as most other games at 30fps, but that may just be out of habituation to low fps. OpenMW runs super smooth at least.

Even got permission from the creator of this imperial texture pack to possibly release it, but it's hard perfecting this stuff. The edges of the 3D features like bricks sticking out gets some visible texture distortion.

Some quickly made comparison screens, though they came out quite dark as MW screenshots always seem to do for me. No idea why.

Spoiler :

Spoiler :

Spoiler :

I might dare to say the graphical difference is larger in motion due to the whole 3D effect.

 

[Maniacal]

The Unsung mod for Arma 3 is a little crude graphically and feels a bit arcadey at times for ARMA 3 but damn is it fun and detailed with an insane amount of uniforms, one hell of a dense jungle map and really makes you feel like you're going to get PTSD.

Cruising through the jungle (one of the boats even has a radio for music!)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1154140475

Off for some bush wacking.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1154140511

The Zeus crashed so we killed time looting the VC weapon cache and set up some MG42s around the perimiter. Everything went south from there. Forgot to take a photo but our reinforcement chopper with the respawns crashed and killed them all again.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1154140548

Moments before being ambushed again, we pushed them back but the few of us not wounded (inc myself) who did so got wiped by their counter attack. I could not see where they were coming from.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1154140593


Last night's mission in ARMA 3, we shot down a heli and it crashed right on two of our own guys, I think they both survived.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1154140675

Please be careful when backing up exfil boats...
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1154140720

More Holdfast: Nations at War

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1154235373

Still a bit rough around the edges but the devs have definitely been improving things. Melee is still a WIP but not as bad, I'm starting to get the hang of it... er most of the time. The smoke effects in Holdfast are just amazing. Actually makes it hard to see.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1154235407

Walking bayonet charge for the all melee fun round at the end of Friday's LB.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1154235450

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1154235481

Glorious.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1154235573

 

[TheGryphonPrince]

Does EUIV get this bad?

 

[warpus]

Cyprus invaded Anatolia? Nice

 

[TheGryphonPrince]

Thanks.

By the way, I gave a quick peek through your posts in your sig. I wish I could tell a travel story half as well as you do.

 

[cardgame]

bad how?

 

[warpus]

Thanks.

By the way, I gave a quick peek through your posts in your sig. I wish I could tell a travel story half as well as you do.

Hey thanks for the vote of confidence