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What is your proudest moment in KSP?


JacobJHC

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Probably the infamous Jool "landing" back in 0.21 , http://imgur.com/a/dahmU
think I was the first who did it without hyperedit, only mod used was mechjeb.

Yes I made an later run without refueling, as I found that the LV-N upper stage was inefficient and going all chemical during accent let me cut size.
http://i.imgur.com/DXQdQmZl.png
You can not do this anymore stock as the engines will have almost no trust deep down 

Also did an single stage grand tour, but many has done this. 

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It was a dark and stormy night outside. I knew I should have gotten off Kerbal , (I had other things to do) but I stayed on. Val Kerman was stranded in an eccentric, inclined orbit around the mun. I needed to rescue her, but how?

 

i had no choice: I would have to preform a miracle. I (pause for dramatic effect) would have to DOCK!!!

 

i knew it might not work, as I had never docked before, but I went on and attemped it anyway.

 

i used the claw, because my stranded ship had no docking port. I managed to get an encounter 0.2 kilometers away....

with a relative velocity of 23 m/s.

slowly, as the stranded ship got closer and closer, I lowered by relative velocity to 0.3 m/s. Suddenly, the stranded ship with Val on it was next to me... My heart beating with excitement , I Maneuvered my ship and docked!!! (yay!)

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Happened just the other day. It was a seat of the pants recovery I had no business making but got out of it.

Normally I'm a one mission at a time, restart/restore when stuff goes wrong. This career I've been doing all sorts of concurrent missions because KAC.

I was running what I called a "stick" and "fetch" mission. Launcher with 4 science probes scattered around Mun's biomes. They would transmit science back to Kerbin. This followed by "fetch", a lander w/scientist and refuelling mothership to go in a polar orbit and hop to the landed probes to reset, rerun and collect science to bring back later.

The lander is small and light, with ~1480 DV... enough for a fetch to the surface and rendezvous with the refueller. Lather, rinse, repeat was the plan. I was going for efficiency not contingency. My orbit was directly over one of the probes in a crater, just at the edge of the north polar biome. It was currently on the darkside, but went for it anway. Landed ~1 km away (no lights, it was a little dicey but made it). EVA'd to the probe, grabbed the science and went back to the lander for rendezvous with the fueller.

I started my nice gentle climb, forgetting I was in a crater, over 1000m in altitude and climbing. Then I notice KER distance to ground rushing up on me. Oh oh. I put the nose to the sky and mashed the throttle thinking this was it. Smearing poor Bob K into the side of a crater. Ground closed within low double digit meters, but I made it. Apoapse was way higher so I went to circularize. I had little dV in the lander left, I ran out of gas with a periapse of Mun.

I was ready to hit F9, but couldn't remember the last quick save I had so I decided to commit. At apoapse, pointed prograde and RCS'd my way to an ugly, but stable elliptical orbit. I think I exhaled after I realized I had a stable orbit. Bob K was shooting me all sorts of dirty looks in the IVA camera. I avoided eye contact and very quickly ordered Kerbal Command to send a better lander to Bob ASAP. Stick and fetch mission continues. At least this lander won't have the same problem on Minimus.

Landing, rendezvous and docking always feel like proud achievments to me. But this one caught me by surprise. Being able to respond to the situation and pull the dog out of the toilet made me think "hey...I'm not a complete newb at this".

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@ghpstage Congrats on the rescue, but how? Did it have anything to do with Jool.

@ClamBoy I have always considered missions such as the stick and fetch, but I mainly planned to use it for space probes. However I always concluded a manned return was easier than chasing down a space probe. I tried it once when I sent a kerbal with a collection of science experiments to Duna.... or maybe it was Eve, either way he either never left or never returned.

I sympathize with Bob for the crater smear, once I had an emergency Tylo event where my mothership passed within 100 meters of a mountain, it was a slow fear as I was boosting up a heavy craft with only 2 nukes... GG on the rescue though.

 

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Suppose I have to echo others. Science teacher with a bio degree and a few physics classes under my belt, but when I started I knew very little about orbital mechanics.

Making orbit for the first time was a thrill, as was landing on the Mun for the first time. Docking took at least an hour or two, even with Mechjeb to arrange the rendezvous.. finally managing it was quite exciting.

Most exciting though.. realizing that I'd learned enough about orbits to start tearing movies like Gravity apart, and knowing that I'd learned it all from a video game, YouTube, and reading game forums. Who said learning can't be fun?

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Kerballed Eve landing and return.

It was exciting to be on the final, tiny stage, watching the fuel slowly drain as the PE slowly raises... a nervous Jeb, calculating whether he's going to make it, whether the ascent profile was efficient enough or if he'll sucked back down into the maw of the giant purple beast.

Then, there is a moment of elation, when, with seconds of fuel left, the instruments indicate a stable LEO (Low Eve Orbit) is achieved.Hooray!! All that was left was to pick Jeb up in mothership and to tow the lander back for display in the museum (I realise thats pretty inefficent, I could just leave it there, but its a momentous achievement for Kerbal kind, so worth it to bring back the heroic vessel.  

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1 hour ago, JacobJHC said:

At least he's floating in a position for rescue. As for biome science harvesting, last career I did hop and return. I didn't like building a lander around a materials bay, not so much functionally, but aesthetically. I went with littering probes and rendezvous because I wanted an excuse to work on some precision landings since I've been having fun with the technique below. Now I gotta find a way to launch so that I'm in the same inclination as my targeted polar orbit rescue. For this mission, I'm doing it with brute force. Bringing along a lot of extra dV

@ClamBoy I have always considered missions such as the stick and fetch, but I mainly planned to use it for space probes. However I always concluded a manned return was easier than chasing down a space probe. I tried it once when I sent a kerbal with a collection of science experiments to Duna.... or maybe it was Eve, either way he either never left or never returned.

I sympathize with Bob for the crater smear, once I had an emergency Tylo event where my mothership passed within 100 meters of a mountain, it was a slow fear as I was boosting up a heavy craft with only 2 nukes... GG on the rescue though.

 

 

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On 30/05/2016 at 10:01 AM, Skorpychan said:

Being accused of taking it seriously while mucking about in KSP with friends, while slightly drunk. They were seeing how far up they could get. I threw together a Mun landing from memory and winged the whole mission.

Nothing like getting a chance to show of and everything a actually working. :D

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Mine is probably when I first rendezvoused successfully. Besides that probably the first time I went interplanetary.

I did land on the moon in the demo though before I bought the game, and that was pretty cool. They never came back though.

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14 minutes ago, Tw1 said:

Nothing like getting a chance to show of and everything a actually working. :D

The landing didn't work so good. It fell over and I couldn't rotate it upright again.

I ended up just saying 'screw it' and blasting off horizontally before banking upwards.

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I'd have to say my proudest moment from the space part of my KSP play is from a while back, and was landing a rover successfully on Duna after it ate 3 different probe/rovers I sent to it (I'd landed there before, but for a while after it didn't seem to like me)... I apparently have an analog of the Curse of Mars in my game.

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Way back, when I was just a beginner, I made a rover for the moon, which i would find was useless and I wanted to walk away from. I sent a tourist/rescue ship to go retrieve the pilot and failed to profile the engine low enough causing it to be destroyed on impact (before i learned about autosave). Had 2 tourists and 2 employees stranded on the mun The tourists meant it would be a tricky rescue. So i started researching teh internetz and found a lot of cool mods including KIS/KAS, Many people told me to just get a claw and I suspect now that would have been a better idea. However my bright idea was to use KIS/KAS to send a engineer up there who could strip the lander down, and setup a winch connection. I built this mission and sent it there, when I did I found not only was it super difficult to lift it off the moon tied to a rope, I also found that any time I had to fast forward my winch would loose connectivity. It took a while, and many EVAs to reconnect the winch, but eventually i got it back to Kerbin and was able to drop it into a 35-40km decaying orbit then normalize my rescue craft. Got both back. Nowadays, I do so much planning it would be unimaginable to do something that stupid, either the origonal things that got stranded or the rescue, but with how difficult it was, I was pretty proud I had done it.

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