The Wrong Stuff

Made my first landing on Duna today. Now to send the rescue mission....

Well its not April 1st....

It took 5 attempts to get this rocket to fly.....the first four can all be seen here. I stranded my first Kerbal on the Mun in my current career. Landed on a steep slope which I thought was the edge of a crater. Spent 20 minutes trying to get the thing to stand up, it fell over, then I stood it up, just to see it fall over again. After breakdancing on the Mun for 20 minutes (I took video), the parachute broke off. but I managed to stand it up finally, got out to do an EVA to plant a flag, bumped the landing leg on my way off the ladder and knocked it over again.....I opted to give up there.

Thank you for the suggestions! Also thank you to everyone who contributed pictures. I have noticed the lack of nosecones on the rockets, by adding them am I just adding excess weight? This is the launch system I'm currently using for just about everything. Its done me well so far, with 5 trips to the Mun, and 1 trip to Minmus (never did find out if it would return from that or not). I'm currently fairly early on in career mode, and I don't really have a large selection of tanks and engines, or solar power for that matter. I've been keeping stage 1 basically the same for each launch, and either removing stage 2 for a Kerbin orbit, or leaving it for Mun and Minmus trips, and adding and subtracting tanks on the lander to get to and from Mun and Minmus

So, I've been playing KSP a while now (since .18 or something, honestly don't remember anymore). But I have always had trouble reaching beyond Kerbin. Now I'm not exactly a rocket scientist (actually I work on steam locomotives for a living) but I know enough to get by, know how to make orbits, can easily reach the Mun and back. Even had one mostly successful trip to Minmus (until my Kerbal got EVA happy and bounced along the ground for almost 6km before bouncing off a cliff and being killed, the lander is still there though...), I've made one trip to Duna, but did not have enough fuel to make a decent orbit. I've decided to go back to a stock game, rather then trying to keep up with mods, and also now using KMP (hence stock). But my biggest problem seems to come down to the size and possibly the style of my rockets. I'd like to make a trip to Eve or Duna, but most of my rockets are too heavy at liftoff to get a good enough start to make it to any other planets beyond the Mun. The Mun has become routine for me, so its no longer a huge challenge as it once was....although one 215 M/S decent to the surface can change that. Anyway, I was sort of curious what people were using the stock game, and how they achieved orbit of other planets, and what their rockets look like. I'm not looking to copy by any stretch, but I've always sort of stuck myself to a very typical Apollo style rocket, and I was wondering if perhaps I need to rethink my designs a little. Thanks for any help -The Wrong Stuff

I crashed into the Mun (loss of 3 including Jeb, however they all somehow survived and were waiting back at the KSC when I finished my Duna mission) Launched a second space station (why have one when you can have two for twice the cost?) Mostly successfully sent a spacecraft to orbit Duna...it ran out of fuel before the orbit became circular...but oh well, it made it.

Been fine for me so far, other then the long load times. And my Kerbals won't stay dead....which is fine in some cases....but I was planning a memorial wall... On the bright side of that Jeb is still alive, and manning my second science station. This of course is after he piloted the first mun lander into the surface of the mun...at about 250 m/s.....whoops...

Bill, Bob, and Jeb were sent up as the first part of my space station.....granted funding is not in place to build anymore of the space station, but the first capsule and service module are in orbit

I had actually stopped playing because the game was running very slow. After the update, everything is golden! Hoping the spaceport addon's will be updated soon as many of the old system I was using no longer work (remote tech, MK3 cockpit, Radio Chatter, and so on) Best update so far in my opinion!