Johno

[quote name='CliftonM']I don't even know how to describe that...[/QUOTE] "Hold my beer and watch this!"

I have finally caught the bug (after a couple of years of playing KSP) - I've discovered the joy of making stock replicas of real aircraft! So far I've created an F-16 (which flies like a slug, but what the heck, it fires up to 2 missiles and drops 2 bombs), an A-10 (Not sure how to make it fly properly yet) and a B-52ish sort of thing, with 8 jet engines and a bomb bay full of nasty goodness. Watching bombs rain down from a bomb bay, I have to admit, gives one an amazing feeling.

Wow, you really ARE evil. How do you get fuel out of infants? How many babies does it take to fuel a rocket? ;-)

Okay, but what about the early game phase, when you can't build spaceplanes? What is the lowest-cost method of getting a Kerbal reliably into space (and safely down again!!!) when you only have, say, the first three or four tech levels?

Some men just want to watch the world burn. (Almost literally in this case)

So I was just finishing a mission landing on Minimus. Over 300 science - nothing like what some of you folks manage, but pretty good for me. Unfortunately I accidentally took too long to drop out of time acceleration, and the big three dug into the atmosphere at 100+. Kaboom. Annoying, but fixable. I held F12 . . . And that, children, is when I discovered the difference between quicksave and autosave. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Several months of career, gone, just like that!!!!

Working on my Bible College Masters. Hey, it didn't say we had to be doing stuff on KSP.

"I swear, boss, I DIDN'T press the red button. It wasn't me!"

So after approximately 100 attempts to get my massive, re-usable cargo ship into orbit, I finally arrived at the target (a piece of space junk that someone wants collected - go figure!). It was hugely difficult; it involved engineering challenges, especially getting this thing to fly without spinning around, judging the launch time just so to arrive at the target with enough fuel to manouvre to rendezvous; and when I get there I discover that the cargo bay is too small to grab the debris!!!!!!!

Extra-Kerbinestrial travel . . .

When you can remember the planets of the Kerbal solar system by heart but you're a little fuzzy on the real ones . . .

I have no axe to grind with Mechjeb. I used it back in one edition. Pretty good. But I have eventually figured out how to do a lot of what Mechjeb does with vanilla controls, so these days I can't be bothered installing it.

For the first time EVER, I have successfully landed a spaceplane from LKO onto the runway at the Spaceport! (Previously I'd managed landings on random islands or whatever, and even one on the same CONTINENT as the spaceport, but this was the first time I'd actually managed to land on the tarmac. She nosed down after landing, but no damage. And as they say, a good landing is any landing you can walk away from. )

A long way behind the rest of you, to be sure . . but for the first time EVER, I have successfully deployed a spaceplane to rescue a stranded Kerbonaut! Not an SSTO; it's a small, canard-delta vehicle which launches with the aid of a disposable rocket engine and 4 SRBs. But it does the job, and you get to recoup an awful lot of your costs for the mission.

Everyone else is like "So, today I got the last 8000 tonnes of my mining mission into Jool orbit, now just waiting on 300 crew members." I'm like "Hey, got something into orbit without shaking itself to bits."