Trebuchet-Launch

Here's my try, after a few minutes in Painter:

I just did the most amazing thing, completely by accident. On my very first mission in 0.24, I was doing a little suborbital flight to get some cheap mission completions. After reaching 5000m I was drifting and decided to pad my science by having Jeb make an EVA report, reasoning that with the vehicle moving ballistically, Jeb wouldn't drift away from the hatch enough to prevent me from getting him back in. How wrong I was - he had a lot less drag than the vehicle, and was quickly whisked away. The amazing part? Jeb survived. I activated his EVA pack and managed to pilot him back to the free-falling spacecraft and climb back aboard. I didn't even know you could manuever so well with the jetpack in atmosphere....

I've been taking time and enjoying career mode step by step, but now that I have a small station up, Jeb is commanding it, with Bill and Bob as the first rotation crew.

I had the exact same sort of trouble (and solution) on my first career Mun mission. I'd designed something that could land and do science, and get back off... but didn't have enough oomph to return, and was stuck in such a low orbit that the "get out and push" method wasn't feasible. Bumping it into a Munar escape with a big huge claw made of the early girder blocks and then maneuvering it home... OUCH. But I was determined to (1) get that science and (2) get Jeb back...

I actually have one reason I like that there's no "real" science in Sandbox mode: it makes it easy to verify whether something is done in a career mode or sandbox mode save. All you need to do is take a screenshot of a working science experiment as proof. I just built my first (small) space station in career mode, for instance, and even if it takes forever to transmit down the science from the Science Jr rather than lug it back down to Kerbin, I'm still going to do it!

I've been doing things incrementally... two suborbital flights, two orbital flights. Learned how to collect science (not quite so obvious how that works, but: one pod observation, one EVA observation, and then all the experiments once too? Seems about right..)

A few days ago I added a new science module to my LKO space station. As I was making final approach I realized I had a problem: it only had one docking port, and no engine/RCS on the module itself. The station only had RCS. I gently lobbed the module at the station and caught it on a docking port. That is expert docking. Docking two large modules on engines alone is pretty good practice for that, though.

I docked an unpowered science pallet to JebLab-Kerbin by gently lobbing it at the space station and then using the space station's maneuvering jets to orient the docking ports correctly to 'catch' it. This was very difficult and nerve-wracking but ultimately successful. I also tested a new 3-man orbiter. After an unmanned flight with a probe core on top of the 3-man capsule, I was satisfied enough to do a manned test flight. However, I forgot to replace the probe core with a parachute. Fortunately, I had enough gas left to do an emergency powered landing (after letting the atmosphere eat most of my speed). I ran out of fuel a bit high, but fortunately the engine and tank helped cushion the capsule enough. No Kerbals KIA on the flight... or in the VAB afterwards, despite the best efforts of Commander Shepson Kerman to locate the engineers responsible for sending his crew into space without parachutes.

Finally succeeded in developing a reliable heavy-lift vehicle in the current version, and began lobbing large fuel depots into space for later moving into various orbits. EDIT: Also, a super-heavy nuclear tug for moving them. However, my initial tug lacked a docking port to connect to the fuel depots... derp. So, to avoid radioactive contamination of Kerbin, and given that it had no other use without the port, I sent it on a mission to the stars.

Build a vehicle with a whole mess of Hitchhiker modules and slam it into the station on a retrograde course. Poof, they're gone.

Build a vehicle with a whole mess of Hitchhiker modules, add lots of parachutes, and return them to Kerbin en masse.

A Kerbal version of the old SolarQuest game would be better.

I'm redesigning the nuclear transfer vehicle I use as a tug after the last series of tests.

Yes, as it turns out, the monyafeek is light enough to be hurled into both Munar *and* Kerbin escape by four sepratrons when launched from the Mun. Fortunately, a rescue craft was available to retrieve Jeb and return him safely home. EDIT: The concept was to land on liquids and then just be hurled off the Mun by the sepratrons into suborbit; the Kerbal would then bail out and attain orbit by EVA backpack. EDIT2: Furthermore, the ultimate idea is to use it as a kind of rescue vehicle. While four sepratrons is overkill on the Mun, it might not be on Tylo, and the extremely light nature of the monyafeek - plus the ability to build it ejector-style into a rover - makes it a useful concept for a rescue rover. If built into a rover with its own landing system, you can land it on the target world first and have a rescue craft already pre-positioned in case your landing is a bit, uh, rough.

Minimalism in lander design (inspired by the "monyafeek" of Anathem)

You know, having a swarm of Kerbol-hugging probes is at least novel in and of itself. I'll continue on my mad quest.

We were given new planets without flight planning tools or docking and were expected to do it the hard way. They might well add new orbiting bodies without adding search tools - I certainly endorse that plan. Imagine the thrill of finding a planet unexpectedly like that! Edit: Bah, cast low by the voice of the planet-builder himself.

The developers said (some time ago) that in future releases they would make us discover new planets. Has anyone else undertaken a search to see if anything has been added? Given the sheer size of space, I figured it would be best to have a lot of eyes working on the project. I've currently got a savegame "Explore" where I'm just chucking probes everywhere. Is this something anyone else is doing? Edit: My current area of focus is in the region between Moho and Kerbol.

I have a bunch of BooStars, ThruStars, etc, with I/II/III afterwards for successive revisions and such. The really big lag-inducing rockets carry acronym monikers: the OWL (OverWhelmingly Large) and MoaR (Mother of all Rockets) monikers.

I performed a Jool aerocapture with a perapsis of 127000m. Incidentally, it's difficult to build a completely stock, there-and-back-again vehicle which can land on any of the Joolian moons and then return to Kerbin.

Disregard people telling you not to perform radial burns. Radial burns will move your apoapsis forward or backwards along the target orbit for interceptions better than prograde/retrograde in most (not all) cases for correction. Additional prograde velocity will require more retroburning and/or correction for aerobraking at the target. Be aware that the most efficient time to perform radial burns for transfer are immediately following the ejection burn. Brown (inwards) to seek a later encounter and blue (outwards) for earlier.

To correct a bad ejection angle, you want to burn radially in or radially out. If you overshot the ejection angle, you probably want to burn radially out.

No. This is a means of correcting a bad trajectory, not setting it in the first place. Reread the section on flying to Duna on course corrections. You have an orbit which reaches Duna's. If you want to move your apoapsis forward along Duna's, you burn inwards, STRAIGHT DOWN. Burning outwards, STRAIGHT UP, you slide your apopasis backwards along Duna's orbit. This corrects for slightly bad ejection or phase angles in your launch.

If you are going to arrive too late then you want to burn inwards, to move your apoapsis along Duna's orbit, then burn prograde a little, because your apoapsis will move inwards somewhat during this correction.