pasukaru76

I keep returning to Laythe, landing on one of the islands that has Jool hanging in the sky just above the horizon.

No crashes in 1.1.2 for me so far. I've been playing a new career save, with about 20 active craft all over the system. I'm guessing that's about 20-30 hours of gameplay. I rarely switch scenes and usually only spend at most about 15 minutes in the VAB when I build a new craft. I don't fly many craft during one gaming session, mostly just one or two, maybe four if it's a long session and I want to get a lot of things done. The only mods I run are KER and HyperEdit. I'm also on a Mac.

Stall speed also seems to be lower on Laythe. Yesterday I crashed on Kerbin again, mostly because I flared way too hard and stalled my plane. Val walked away from the crash site unharmed, though.

Funny how I always wreck my planes landing at KSC, but have no trouble at all landing them on Laythe.

Flew a spaceplane from Kerbin to Ike to make use of the ISRU unit stationed there. Next stop will be Pol for another refuel, and then a trip down to one of the fabulous vacation spots on Laythe.

I have mastered the fine art (ummm, yeah, that's what it is, I'm quite sure) of eyeballing transfer windows from the tracking station. Actually, I use the the edge of a piece of paper to keep track of the tangent of the inner planet's orbit in my transfer, and timewarp until that tangent intersects the outer planet in its orbit. Then I stop timewarp and launch. I probably look ridiculous twisting that piece of paper around in front of my laptop screen, heh. Sometimes I'm not patient enough even for that and launch without looking at launch windows, and then perform my interplanetary flight similar to how you would fly a rendezvous with two craft in Kerbin orbit. I don't usually launch multiple missions at once and I am quite okay with timewarping a lot. It's a waste of delta-v, of course. What I would have trouble living without is KER's delta-v readouts, though.

Then you'd need something else besides a drill to pick it up again.

There should be an orange suit probe core.

I like the sound of "intermunar" or "transmunar", though that only works for KSP and not so much for real life.

Learing to dock with ease, because that really took a long time to master compared to anything else I've learned to do in KSP (even compared to returning from Eve and flying a spaceplane to Laythe and back).

First Mun landing, first succesful interplanetary mission, making orbit at Moho, seeing your periapse rise out of the atmosphere at Eve. And, oddly, successfully managing to launch non-aerodynamic monstrosities into LKO.

Well, as a Mac user, I have to say 1.1.2 works better than any previous version of KSP.

Thanks for digging that up. So it doesn't matter all that much for going to Duna, but for going to Jool it makes a surprisingly huge difference.

You're right, of course. I seem to recall a while back (must have been last year) someone did the math and the difference in delta-v between "eject directly from high orbit" and "eject from high orbit by lowering pe first and burn in low orbit" wasn't all that big for some situations, but always in favor of the second maneuver. It seems installing an ISRU network has made me care less about efficiency. Interesting, I didn't expect that to have an impact on my style of playing.

I started a new career on normal difficulty when 1.1.2 came out, just to see what has changed in career since my previous career save from 1.0.4. I haven't unlocked the whole tech tree yet, but the few 550 and 1000 point nodes that remain don't really interest me. For example, I don't need the Rapier engine or the large ore tank. I have 5 million in funds which means there's really no pressure to do contracts for money. I wish the "explore X" contracts came up in a more consistent fashion, so one would get all the celestial bodies offered in a logical progression (possibly based on delta-v requirements). Right now it seems pretty random which "explore X" contracts show up and when. They could also be fleshed out more, for example by having missions that require you to send a probe, followed later by a contract to send Kerbals. That would give me more interesting stuff to do in late career, because I normally don't bother with sending Kerbals further than Duna (though I did send Jeb to Bop once).

I tend to launch my current interplanetary stuff from Minmus orbit, but that is only because all craft get fully refuelled by an ISRU outpost there. Usually that means more delta-v available at the target, since I basically leave Kerbin SOI with an almost full tank after a short escape burn from Minmus.

ISRU unit installed at Pol. Now my Kerbals can go to Jool without having to carry the fuel for the return trip all the way out there.

True, I just find the Skipper to be a lot more convenient, as the first stage of my launchers becomes very simple, with no staging involved until LKO is achieved.

I usually go interplanetary as soon as I have unlocked the Skipper, which is powerful enough as a first stage engine to launch unmanned probes to anywhere. I normally don't bother with anything inside Kerbin's SOI after that.

Successfully installed my third automated refuelling outpost at Gilly. The other two are at Minmus and Ike. Next up will be Pol.

It's whatever building Whackjob decides to use.

When your next door neighbor can't hyperdrive in Elite because of mass lock from your KSP rocket.

The partial transmit thing was added in 1.0.5, so it's relatively recent and I think the Scott Manley video with the rover (I think I know which one you mean) was on an older version of KSP where some details of how everything worked were a bit different.

Payload? What is payload? 7 parts including the launch clamp, 6.2 tons.

Certainly true. In my single Eve landing and return so far, I landed at 1200m above sea level and burned through the equivalent of an orange fuel tank before even getting to 2000m altitude. Fortunately I allowed for a large margin of error in my fuel supply and made orbit with 77 m/s to spare. So from true sea level I would have been borked, most likely.