Tiakatt

They aren't his, they do belong to someone who works on Crash Course, however. I finally hunted down where I saw it: https://twitter.com/badastronomer/status/563719366760349697 But yes, that is Phil threatening not to return one And Hank Green (one of the cofounders of Crash Course) has a KSP playlist on his GamesWithHank youtube channel Still cool, though, and I also smile every time I see them on that set.

Um... learn to use RCS.... I've been playing since .22 and I've always done everything, every positional adjustment major or minor, every rendezvous, with main engines. It's time.

Testing a small VTOL in career mode, I decided to test lifting off on my Vertical engine and then switching to my Horizontal engine. A few things went wrong. The first is that I misjudged the spool up and spool down times of my jet engines and I cut my vertical engine far too early - this is the immediate cause of the crash. The second is that I accidentally had control surfaces on my nose functioning on yaw and roll rather than just pitch, so any tiny correction would often put my nose down. This is the cause of crashing at such gloriously high speed from such a low altitude with what I later learned is twice as much jet fuel as it takes that particular plane to circumnavigate Kerbin.... I hadn't realized until that moment that the runway could blow up, but it was spectacular.

Nothing disastrous (yet). I did fail to rendezvous properly with a stranded Kerbal. Ended up light on battery power so I simply landed the rescue probe so it wouldn't get stuck. I then bought solar panels with the science that flight earned, so there's that And yeah, I've definitely noticed Jeb sneaking onto my rescue ships. I removed him from the ship's crew manifest in VAB for a reason If I then save the ship that way, I wish it would remember if it has seats empty. But Jeb just can't resist a chance to go to space. I can't blame the little fella, but still I need that seat for that poor stranded guy, Jeb.

YES! You go, Steam, it's happening! 4% downloaded

Come on, steam, passengers are waiting!

It's too long to wait on the Hypeshuttle to get to the Hypetrain! I'm jumping down with my jetpack and riding the roof all the way to .24!

This is a great project, thanks for doing this. Here's my stuff FPS: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byklrb1gybyDTkdnOFhaQjhLamM/edit?usp=sharing Frametimes: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byklrb1gybyDYkdrajE1WGVJYjQ/edit?usp=sharing CPU-Z

I did try that, actually, it did not help one little bit, which is an issue with my design. I still could not flip even quite to horizontal, let alone past it. It would not flip by itself just leaving it alone, either. Turning SAS back on and cutting parachutes followed by deploying others did the trick, though. I had an excessive number of 'chutes for Kerbin because it was intended to land almost entirely on 'chutes on Duna That particular vessel, once the fuel runs out, tends to have an issue where whichever direction is pointed down is the direction that wants to stay down in atmosphere, especially as it gets thicker. It needs a redesign desperately, not least because of the run-out-of-fuel fuel issues

My nubbish Minmus science base, with lab, habitat, and science rover. I love BigDad's Precarious base. That's very nice looking!

This is my last two days of play, but wow. So I decided to go rescue those 6 Kerbals I left on Duna, the two ships I moved next to eachother a while back when I realized neither had the fuel for a return. This mission did not go as planned, but started out very, very well. I achieved my most fuel efficient Orbit to date, my best ever gravity turn. I had full fuel in my transfer stage by the time I reached Duna orbit, something that has never come close to happening with that lifter before. Oh, also I reached Duna's SoI with absolutely no electrical power because I forgot to extend the solar panel =( So I had to wait a while for another good intercept, yay for that full nuclear engine. So here I am with a somewhat less full nuclear engine, entering Duna's SoI a 2nd time I see that I can very cheaply score an Ike flyby, and I can get a gravity brake from him, right into orbit around Duna - excellent, more fuel savings! I come out of Ike and cheaply refine my orbit around Duna. 154093k peri, 154577k apo, equatorial. It's almost a shame to break it, but I do and set my sights on the stranded Kerbals' site a bit to the north. My nuclear engine still had fuel in it when I dropped it at the last possible safe moment. Oh well. So I land 3.8 km from my target, and set to work walking Kerbals. Walked the kerbals from the first ship (yay for 4x speed), and picked up the 2nd ship - which still had just a little fuel - and easily dropped it 200 meters from the rescue vessel (the pic above) and quickly transferred those 3 kerbals as well. Alright, things (and the two captains) are looking up, time to get these Kerbals home!! Launch, get an escape trajectory, with a free gravity assist as Ike just sort of got in the way, but he was helpful again. Aaaaaaaaand run out of fuel with my periapsis still very much near Duna's orbit and nowhere near Kerbin's (I missed a shot of this because I was distracted by "oh CRAP"). My poor Kerbals are stranded again and like an idiot I didn't put a docking port on this ship. =( ...you know what? No. I'm not losing these Kerbals!! They've waited too long for rescue! So I picked crewman Wehrgee, oriented the ship to the sun...and set him to the task of pushing against roughly its center of mass (I got more precise about all of this with practice). Wehrgee could produce ~5 m/s Delta-v with each refill of his pack. 5 Delta-v, a little over 2 minutes at a time. It was slow going. All told, he pushed for five hours JUST to get the ship's orbital trajectory to intercept Kerbin's. And there's no 4x physical warp here unless you just really love cuddles from the Kraken =( Yay for music. Then we waited a few orbits until a close pass occurred. Spent maybe 10 minutes pushing to make that a proper intercept, not bad! Spent another 10 minutes or so making some correction pushes until they had a Kerbin periapsis of 11,000 km, and decided to go ahead and enter SoI. Saw I was going to swing past Kerbin's south. Was far, far less Delta-v to swing north instead of pushing retrograde forever However, that was a little trickier than pushing east/west (where the ship was quite stable as I could push through the center of mass), as I couldn't get Wehrgee to orient quite right for that in EVA mode. So finally I put the ship upright again and sent Wehrgee under. Had to fight its tendency to want to lean a fair bit, but it worked! That's using your noggin, Wehrgee. Got into atmosphere, and against the drag I didn't have enough torque to get the ship upright. The parachutes deployed in a way that just made it worse. So I cut two of the paracutes and then deployed 2 more on one side but not the other, so it would right itself. Once that happened I successfully deployed the remaining chutes. Whew!! That would have been an embarrassing end to this. Here they are landed!!! I pushed them home FROM DUNA, on KERBAL POWER!! I'm pretty stoked right now...as my brother will know when he signs onto steam and sees my somewhat expletive laced exclamations of my rather paradoxical status as The Man Welcome home: Captain Kirmin Captain Jedbert Crewman Jenford Crewman Macberry Crewman Gilhat And especially Crewman Wehrgee, who did all the heavy lifting, literally! I salute you, Wehrgee. You may not have the badass trait, but you are a badass in my heart.

The Cadbury, or the Hardboiled Food on my mind, I suppose

Messed around with Gilly, Eve, Tylo, Jool, and Laythe tonight Started by fixing the problems with my Eve lander and adding some missing science modules, then sent it off again. Got to the system, established orbit around Eve...and realized I had just a ton of fuel in that nuclear engine still, so decided to hit up Gilly. That's my lander en pointe with its nuclear engine still attached. It danced down the hill a bit but I didn't manage to get video of it. It was definitely amusing to watch, though. It landed, bounced a little, and the engine swung back to vertical by the time it touched again, repeat with ever smaller hops until it stopped. I planned to let it fall down gently and just launch it horizontally against Gilly's low gravity, but it landed like that which was perfect. Gilly was a tough target to get an encounter with, but it was worth it to watch that. Then I headed back to Eve to do the science I'd missed before. So Eve stuff done for now, I spent my science, then instead of actually using it to build anything, I decided to see if that Eve lander could make it to Jool with no changes at all to either the lander itself or its earlier stages, or if it would need modifications. Loaded it right back up, and headed for Jool for the first time. My transfer wasn't perfect even after a midcourse correction, but I got there no problem, yay! ...Then I accidentally missed the SoI change and used my only F9 of the night, a personal best! So this time, with no changes except not zooming past the SoI change, I entered the system on a lovely equatorial plane, but VERY far out. So I corrected course to establish a proper orbit, and while working on lowering my Jool periapsis I saw that Tylo was more than willing to give me a nice gravity brake, so I happily accepted that flyby. Swung south of Tylo, picking up more gravity readings on the way, and on to swing past Jool. Coming back in from apoapsis, Laythe decided it wanted to be friends as well, and though my original plan was to drop this probe into Jool I decided to land on Laythe and get a little more science instead. I'm beginning to grow rather fond of this probe

Aha, so I indeed did not quite understand correctly (figured that might be the case). Sorry about that. Glad to see Vexx was able to provide actual, useful help! Very cool

I've also encountered that symmetry issue with struts. No idea what causes it or how to make it stop doing that. It's annoying enough on small crafts, I can't imagine how hair-pullingly enraging it must be when it crops up on a project of that size I think that might work. Not sure how helpful this is to you (I may very well be misunderstanding what you mean), but I built this with a preconnected dock in VAB - it bounces a little on loading at the launch site, but the connection holds: This only has the one command pod. The engine, despite having no command pod of its own if not docked fires on the command of the main "ship", so this behaves as a single ship. I don't have a shot of it, but I did drop and explode that tank by separating the connection as well. Docking connections built in VAB should work (okay, unless you're me and occasionally build them backward). Unless, again, I'm just derping and misunderstanding you, which is always a possibility