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

It's probably been mentioned a few times, but the kerbal-themed dreams of orbital mechanics and interplanetary travel are pretty fun. I'm also really noticing the lack of orbital mechanics in the fiction I enjoy. It's slightly immersion breaking, but I still love those other games and films/shows.

Started playing maybe about 6 weeks ago. I've only really understood the navball for about 3 That was seriously the most disorienting and confusing thing about the game to me while first learning. I make a lot of bonehead mistakes, like the Engine-Adapter-Decoupler instead of Engine-Decoupler-Adapter mistake I made last night. Luckily I'd also put a little too much fuel on my middle stage nuclear engine I'm really still learning. I only just built my first items with docking ports (a science rover and a lab for it to drive under and dock with). I haven't even thought about plans for a space station or the like yet, I've not yet docked anything from orbit, etc. But I've had fun with things like precision hovering over low-gravity surfaces (maximum thrust capping for better control at lower thrust levels is my favorite ship control feature), and testing my science rover's stability by gunning it at 20 m/s across Grasslands (44 mph isn't bad for offroad ) and successfully climbing to a mountain biome on Kerbin, which often required moving somewhat sideways (and thus leaning to the side a little) instead of just straight up, and frequent braking for recharge, really testing the rover's stability. That stupid little rover is the thing I've built which I am most proud of. I try to build as small as I can get away with. I could probably build even smaller if I didn't eyeball my transfers. That may be something I move to doing later, possibly picking up my first mod at some point to make those calculations. I've done some spaceplane experimentation, but I really want to unlock some more science before I go too nuts on that. I understand the basics, but need more practical...uh...practice. I'm by no means an amazing player. I really consider myself to still be a bit of a n00b, I've only visited Duna and Eve outside of the Kerbin system and I've yet to return from either (though I've come very close on a Duna mission). I've established one science base on Minmus, and one pseudo-base - two ships on Duna that I eventually moved right next to eachother when I realized neither could quite return home. I plan to rescue them eventually. I make a lot of really silly mistakes. But I'm learning and I'm having a blast!

I was busy last night. Started out by sending my Minmus rover out, landed it right by the border of two biomes. Hit those up, and drove it the 12km to the science base. The wheels weren't aligned quite right (front right and rear left were just slightly higher than the other two), so controlling it was more interesting than expected Not impossible, just sort of a pain. I have a better version of that rover (with fixed wheels and which includes the Gravioli detector I unlocked tonight) that I might send along later. That done, I decided to send an unmanned probe to Eve. It succeeded despite my stupidity I did not deserve to go to space today. I came in a LITTLE high over Eve (okay, ridiculously high). Was thinking on the way that I had way too much fuel on my nuclear engine for an Eve run, and then I entered SoI to see the above. Spent 12 minutes burning that thing to get periapsis within 400k. Somewhere near Periapsis, I noticed I had put my landing stage's adapter and decoupler in the wrong order, a problem staging can't fix. Luckily I had fuel left in the Nuclear engine, so I burned another 6 minutes to establish an orbit, and made sure it touched atmosphere. A few trips around and I was good to go! Waited that out, landed on an excess of parachutes while burning the blocked LV909 out of curiosity/to reduce weight - it neither provided thrust nor burned hot enough to kill the adapter - and scienced Although without goo canisters because I forgot to put them back on when I rearranged something on that probe. Again, I really did not deserve to go to space today The science I earned I put to use improving my rover. I decided to take it and the new instruments for a test. Jeb wandered all around the area near KSC, for some science, then decided to go for a mission to the mountains. Gunned it at 20m/s most of the way. Found an equatorial tundra along the way (just past the little sand trap) and finally, after a very long time traveling, managed to climb to a place that counts as mountain. Planted a flag at the top of the foothill I was climbing along the way, named it Jebediah Foothills. Several times I was ran my battery to nothing just eking out 0.8 m/s climbing that stupid steep hill. So yay for brakes to stop and recharge! Once I got to the top of it, I noticed a longer, but shallower path behind it - part of which I ended up taking to finally find the the mountain biome. Oh well. This is roughly my path and the path I should have used. During that trip I also determined that an extra bettery or two can't hurt. So very much stopping to recharge batteries, particularly once I hit the foothills. But I was completely thrilled with how stable it is -- albeit on Kerbin. =) After doing this, I am just completely in awe of Wooks' patience. @Klingon Admiral: That's awful!

Tonight I started my first actual science base, on Minmus. It is the Kirmin Kerman Minmus Science Base, in honor of the first Kerbal on Minmus. Here is the crew watching their first Kerbinrise and Sunrise together. Limiting an engine's max throttle is amazingly helpful for hovering across low gravity worlds, much more precise control, I like it. This was the end of a kilometer of hovering at 5-8 meters altitude and less than 1 m/s, with the tiny LV-909 engine capped at somewhere around 12.5% max thrust. I realized during this long hovering process that I forgot to add a ladder to that habitat. Oops. At least the lab itself has one. This is a rover docking test, my very first use of a docking port! This is the next thing which will be sent up there. I suspect using this first rover on Minmus is going to be...uh, interesting. Poor Kerbals.

Not yet! But it's definitely something I hope to do later as I finish out my tech tree and branch out to bigger/different projects.

I try not to leave anything around Kerbin. If I did leave something major up there, I'd attempt to deorbit it. If all else fails, I'd probably destroy it from the tracking station. Other planets/moons? Same as above except that I probably wouldn't bother to destroy it from the tracking station. I just like to keep Kerbin clear of anything I'm not using.

A while back I sent a mission to Duna that I did not intend to bring back. They landed on the northern ice cap, which isn't what I originally intended, but a Duna landing is a Duna landing. They had enough fuel left to reach orbit, but could not return, which is okay as they weren't planned to. Today I launched another mission to Duna, this one with less weight on its lander and a nuclear engine for the Kerbal to Duna transfer, removing still more weight from the design and improving the effectiveness of the Launch stage. They landed fairly close to the Equator, and with quite a bit more fuel than the first ship did. ...but it turns out that though they landed with a decent chunk of fuel, it was just shy of a return. I spent ages fiddling with absolutely beautiful transfer windows and could not get anything done. I could get into Kerbin's SoI, just barely, but no closer than that. So after a while messing with that, I decided to move the two Duna-stranded ships together so the Kerbals don't get lonely having only 2 other Kerbals to talk to. I moved my Polar ship to within 10 km of the equatorial one, ended up landing in a very nice flat area which is of decent size as far as landing targets (for the future). Then I hopped the lighter and easier to handle Equatorial lander the 10km and parked it next to the former Polar lander. So I guess that's technically the start of my first base

Saw in another thread that you're attempting to get your Kerbapult to Minmus. You might end up dying of laughter when you pull that awesomeness off!

He might not be. The height is certainly variable, but I haven't found a way to change the distance between the clamp base and what the clamp is attaching to - extending it horizontal. Then again, unless they can retract horizontally you might not want that anyway. Sure, now you're connected to that higher, more central part of your ship, but the lower part of your ship slams into it as you launch.

Minmus has never given me problems. I love Minmus.