How to go from Explosions on the Launchpad to an Eve Crew lander

[Guest]

One of the most interesting things I will ever see on a youtube video by Stratzenblitz or Matt Lowne or Shadow Zone is that in the comments I see people saying "and all I can do is land on the mun" or "I can't even get to orbit." And at one point I felt exactly the same, I felt like no matter how much I did I would never get there. This is my words to give to people on how to get from Explosions to success:

When I started playing KSP I got the inspiration to do so via Matt Lowne's amazing SSTOs. I was amazed by them, I dreamed about making my own fleet of SSTOs making cool names and going all over the Kerbol system! 

And that was the burning point to via a Christmas sale, grab a copy of KSP via steam and start playing. I fired up the game, got ready to go,

AND then I was like... UM... HOW DO YOU BUILD ROCKET?

Google was the ally of the day and I was able to find out the basics to add parts and delete them too. So I built my first rocket "The Cheetah!"

It had an SRB, a command capsule, and a parachute...

It didn't make it far.

And at that point there was that part of me saying that I was going to go down a bigger loophole then what I have thought. And the next following rockets fell to the same results, now this is where I start to just look at the tutorials. And they helped quite a bit. But it didn't get me into orbit. And I was starting hours of frustration, I didn't realize at the time that at that point this is where most will throw the towel and stop. On the first day after playing for an unhealthy 15 hours, I did it. with 8 SRBs and a big first and second stage, I was able to out of control get into a high elliptical orbit. It was the worst rocket you could have thought, it had no control, barely worked, and well... sucked.

I had screenshots but lost them but here is the first thing that you should try doing if you get stuck getting into orbit. 

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1. Evaluate

Some of the biggest things that we humans fail to do is to evaluate on what just happened. And that is something that helped make progress was to look at went wrong. I remember at one point where I was looking at the prograde and realize that is what I am using to know where I am going. It's important to observe the failing points of any craft. I still do this today, my first SSTO is a good example and you can watch that here and see how many revisions I made .

I still see this problem all over the place and am guilty of the same thing. If you go deep into my forum activity you can find some posts I made about trying to do the Expedition Dres mission THAT STILL HAUNTS ME TO THIS DAY.

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Back to the timeline, ok I got to orbit, but it was a sucky one. so I decided the best way to go was to make a science save and start learning how to fly, this was a starting point of when I wanted to learn parts of KSP better. I had a very old video but I don't want to share it. But something I did wrong here was that I didn't do much that help make progress. But I discovered something when I went back on track for getting into the Mun

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2. Tutorials help, but won't do all the work

I found that tutorials on how to get to orbit and how to get to the Mun where very useful (like how I used ShadowZone's tutorial [and was actually how I discovered SZ].) And one thing I realized is that when you use all tutorials, they help at first, but using them in the long run actually puts you down. Because I learned orbital mechanics easier from the tutorials but I also copied the designs, making all the learning possibilities little to none. The latest I felt like this was when I was learning to fly and Eve lander, it took me over a year and that was because I wasn't really experimenting with designs (and some cheats that where useful wheren't out.)

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So back to the story. Four days after I got the game it finally happened after two attempts at landing:

This is the only screenshot I still have of it today. It was an amazing milestone, and the crazy part was I did it on vacation.

But there was some kind of nerve I had with it. To get here, I lost a kerbal, and I didn't keep my quicksaves so he was gone. I felt bad about it at first tbh.

one of the easiest things that you can mistakenly do is to get sidetracked. I feel like I lost my progress from here on out. I tried making taller and wider and better landers after this design was used 3 times, but I never got it to work. It would take me four months to do another Mun crew mission successfully.

And this is where I feel like it's important to realize about one of the worst things you can say to yourself: I can't do it. That's what I told myself every single time I tried. And one time I remember telling myself okay this is the day. And after trying one hour trying to land on the mun I said it was impossible and only if you are lucky.

so two months later after playing around in LKO, I decided I should look at another destination. Minmus. I did it! I was so excited

Spoiler

 

Unfortunately I tried again with the same design on the Mun with less spectacular results:

Spoiler

 

ALSO I RECORDED VIDEOS AT THIS TIME

I did a new generation of landers which improved on what I learned (which was me implying rule 1.) And for the first time in almost three months I finally did it again after trying twice.

At this point I started finally doing celestial bodies again in KSP. But then I met my challenge.

Duna!

This was the definition of failure for me. but it leads to the next point

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3. Failure is the only way sometimes

One of the most frustrating things that a player can experience in KSP is failure. Generally failure is frustrating especially if you put hours of work into it. I felt exactly like this when doing a Duna mission, before my first Duna mission I had around 5 failure attempts. All of which I put tons of effort into. Something I didn't realize at the time is that you learn from each without noticing and here is a good video of why

Sometimes failures will cause me to cancel missions like my Comet Camp but sprout into new ones of what I learned which lead me to make Vall Mobile and Private Tylo.

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But after a few attempts of trial and error I finally made it. Dux was my first successful Interplanetary lander. At around 6:00 PM EDT on March 21st, it happened

Also I would love for someone to revist this site here is the link to info about it.

This is the point of where I finally realized nothing is impossible. Anything is possible. At this point it's where I made a quest to explore Kerbol system for my ownself.

I later did an Ike mission and after that, I joined the Forums... which is kinda cool.

I want to timeskip my first return of crew, my first base, and some other things to skip to a mission I have never really revealed to the public. Huoxing:

Huoxing-1 became my literal nightmare for crew missions. I call it: the mission that never came back. Because this mission had one final problem, return to Kerbin. And I was able to do everything great from this point. Just that one return to Kerbin problem, where I didn't think about aerobraking and thought I could circulize. I didn't have enough fuel and a year later if I only realized I could have just aerobraked I would have completed the mission. Huoxing was at the time... fear to try again.

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4. If you are scared to try, you won't fly

I was scared to do a crew mission just because of that one failure. Never wanted to try again for a while. Which is important to highlight that if you never want to try again, you won't. sometimes you just have to take that risk and hope that it works out. 

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So I decide to take it easy and go with probes. I am going to skip a lot of the probes but what I learned from flying to other celestial bodies in KSP was

1. Being adaptive is key to flying successfully
2. Problem solving is a good ability to have
3. when unprecedented problems arise, thinking outside the box can save a mission.

Eventually these probe missions taught me those ideals.

So I took up the crew challenge again and wasn't that hard to do. But when I got to late game it got hard.

Laythe crew mission pushed my limits.

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5. If it don't work, fix it

something that I learned from Laythe Crew mission (and this was before I used cheats to test.) Was that I was stubborn a lot to try a new lander design, and hope for the best with the current one. I then finally thought of possible ideas and after flying three whole missions to laythe, I finally got a lander that worked. I tried 4 times with number one, 17 with two, and once with three. Now with more current cheats I am able to change my lander a lot faster (which made Eve Crew Lander mission easier.)

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Eventually I got that to work but the biggest challenge yet was by far Eve Crew Mission. It took me another whole year of KSP to successfully do it. Which is honestly probably the hardest process I took on over September 2019 through August 2020, relearning KSP. I tried to learn better efficiency, better launch profiles, d/V savers, and of course no more clipping habits.  One of the hardest things you can do in KSP is to relearn how to play it. I had redeveloped how I played KSP and abandoned all my inefficient habits. So the last tip I have for new players or players that are stuck is:

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6. Small things make big missions

I started last year doing The Doodling Adventures which focused on making more efficient spacecraft and make them WAY smaller. I learned new tricks, got better, and even made memories. I still think the craziest one to me at least was the Moho Lander which surprisingly took a whole lot less than I previously thought. Starting with small missions to develop better skills is important.

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And that's where I am going to leave it off, I hope this tutorial and guide helped you with your current issue or if you just started. Thank you and I spent quick a long time typing this so I think I am going to go rest now