Tortfeasor

It was originally supposed to be an orbital Moho probe. But I thought I had enough fuel to land it. Turns out I was right, by 67 m/s. It was also the first thing I've landed on Moho!

I guess I was really proud of myself for finally landing something on the Mun. For that matter landing something on somewhere that wasn't Kerbin. Note how good I did with those fuel margins Please ignore that like many before me, this was totally about my 10th try of landing something on the Mun. And in my early stubbornness I simply refused going back to the VAB and fixing the darn thing.

Today I built the Whirly-gig. Why? Because I could. (I'm in science sandbox and I've maxed the tech tree) 6 Wheasleys, air intakes, small landing gear, plus a central stack with some parachutes. Jeb is nothing if not optimistic about survival. It actually made it up to about 10 kilometers, and Jeb made it back alive.

I made a basic station in Kerbin orbit to practice rendezvous. Once I succeeded, Bob went for a walk.

I try to not use it, but it's launches like this that make me keep the revert button enabled.

I've had missions that went farther, did more science, and both at once. But I'm most proud of my first Mun rover mission in my last career. I finally got a rover that worked, hit three biomes on that mission, and everything else from launch to rendezvous to landing back on Kerbin just went perfectly. I stopped playing KSP for about a week afterwards because I just couldn't bear a mission that didn't go as well.

I don't know how horrible it was for poor Valentina, but it was crushing for me: Valentina came back from a very successful Munar survey mission. 85 degree orbit (to avoid the exploding south pole), got every biome, great re-entry, and to top it off she landed in the mountains. A biome I hadn't yet explored, so I got her out to cap my success with a surface sample and eva report. Now at this point it bears mentioning that this was a 1-kerbal expedition, and from being in this thread you can probably imagine what happened next. The Mk 1 command capsule bug hit, Valentina splatted into the mountains at the speed of fast, and I was reminded that I'd set the career to no respawns. I took the science from that mission and put it towards the Mk 1-2 capsule.

The flagpole. That version of my first vertical take off space plane did not make it to space. Nor did its successor make it back down. It clipped the last ridge before the runway. But the crew compartment and Jeb survived!

Flbarghl v. The fifteen minutes you spend incoherently sputtering in anger after spending hours trying to fix your bombuxle in increasingly complex ways. Only to end up fixing it with something stupidly simple.

Today I made it to Moho for the first time! Didn't have much time to appreciate it, though, since the probe 'landed' at 1.7 Km/S

Thursday night I got my first probe down on Duna. Then, last night, Bill, Bob, and Jeb followed to become my first Kerbals (ever) to get to Duna. The probe took some fine tuning to capture since it was such a long, narrow body. Once it captured though, it was easy, and low stakes. Getting my crew down was easier and harder. Capture was easy since I had that big, draggy lander up top. But when it came to the actual landing I realized that I may or may not have forgotten aerobrakes. And by may or may not have I mean I totally did forget them. It took more Delta-V to land them than I'd planned, but the lander/return stage was built to accommodate such mishaps. Now they're in orbit of Duna and a year and a half from the transfer window back to Kerbin. I've got about 700 m/s in the two side boosters still on the ship, and the CSM itself is full with about 2.7 km/s. Think I can orbit Ike and transfer home from there? Lessons for next time: The crew transfer stage still had about 800 m/s when I ditched it. I should have taken the opportunity to explore Ike then. In future operations I think I'll downsize the transfer stage and compensate by ditching the useless heat shields on the lower lander. Hopefully the lower part count is a bit more merciful on my computer. Oh yeah, and Aerobrakes!

It depends on how far I'm sending my Kerbals and how complicated the rocket is. Up to a Mun landing I pretty much just build the rocket and stick a 'brave' test pilot in. Landing on the Mun or Minmus, I'll have a test launch for staging which, if the staging works, will turn into the real thing. It's only once I start heading to other planets that the stakes get high enough and the rockets get big enough that I feel like I have to start testing all the phases of the mission in Kerbin orbit.

So today The Kraken gave me a rather impromptu and unexpected chance to re-enact Apollo 13. I was checking at the science center to make sure I hadn't previously visited my planned biome. When I came back... well you can see that my ship was in more than the one piece it was supposed to be in. This caused particular consternation because I had already circularized using the Command Module's engine and I had done exactly zero TWR or DeltaV calculations about getting myself back to Kerbin using just the Munar Module. Fortunately, missing a 3/4ths full fuel tank and engine and solar panels and a few Mystery Goo Containers lightened the ship enough that I made it easily. Of course, had they stayed attached to the ship like they were supposed to I wouldn't have had this problem in the first place. Short story short, everyone got back safe. Lesson from this mission: check your biomes at the science center BEFORE you're in orbit around the Mun in your suddenly fragile ship!