nekogod

Yesterday I went to the Science Museum in London, the first part you walk into is the space exploration exhibit.

1, http://xkcd.com/1350/ 2, silly tiles! 3, 4096! 4, three clones?! 5, bigger rockets!! 6, rendezvous! 7, ?????????????????? 8, profit!

Careful on minmus though, it's very easy to achieve escape velocity on EVA. Infact I believe it's possible to fly from minmus to kerbin on EVA power alone!

Intel I7-4470k @ 4.8Ghz GTX 780 (single card, saving for SLI) 256GB SSD 24GB DDR3 2333Mhz RAM Gigabyte Sniper G5 mobo Win 8.1 64bit

I actually left the Mun pretty late into my game, landing on Minmus first then Dres (though I can't remember how and the ship I have named Dres Lander seems to not actually work so I guess I broke it at somepoint and forgot, but there is a flag there so I got there somehow!) I think I even did flybys of the Sun and Eve before landing on the Mun. I actually did it completely by accident, was looking to head to Moho and completely by accident as I was setting up the node I ended up with a perfect Mun encounter and decided to go for it. I crashed into the Mun at 400m/s, one quick load later however and Jeb had touched down safely! Ran out of fuel on the way back and had to use Jebs EVA pack to push the craft into an orbit that would eventually degrade, a few months later we splashed down just a few 100 meters from the space centre! I'm at work, but I'll try and get a pic up later!

I put a manned probe in a tight orbit around the Sun before realising I didn't have enough fuel to return to Kerbin, so I had Jeb get out and EVA into the Sun.

Try and deorbit Gilly with it!

This is backed up by an exert from an artical I recently read here:http://www.braeunig.us/space/orbmech.htm (more maths and orbital mechanics information if you're interested) Plane changes are very expensive in terms of the required change in velocity and resulting propellant consumption. To minimize this, we should change the plane at a point where the velocity of the satellite is a minimum: at apogee for an elliptical orbit. In some cases, it may even be cheaper to boost the satellite into a higher orbit, change the orbit plane at apogee, and return the satellite to its original orbit. Nice tutorial OP, we'll all be expert fuel misers in no time!

My first post seems as good as any for some noobie fails. I started playing a couple days ago after watching Scott Manley's videos and thinking hmm this looks interesting, addicted now! xD Following his tutorials I haven't had any real problems so per se. My fails have been more noobie mistakes than forgetting things etc. Currently my most heartwrenching one, on my first attempt to send a craft to orbit the mun everything was going perfectly, got the craft there, orbited, sent it flying back to Kerbin. It all went wrong however due to a little impatience on my part I hit the atmosphere and would have come down 2-3 orbits later, thinking I was being clever I pointed my craft at what I thought was retrograde and fired the remaining 5 seconds or so of my fuel. Too late did I realise I'd fired prograde, 5 minutes and a blisteringly fast slingshot later I was now on an escape trajectory. Despite my best efforts I ended up in highly eliptical orbit around the sun, which despite my best efforts with Jeb's jetpack proved impossible to leave. I didn't want to leave Jeb to die alone in space so I tried to rescue him, but low level tech and inexperience with interplanetary encounters just led to 5 more stranded Kerbals. After a gruelling 50 years in orbit waiting for a favourable encounter with Kerbin (all the orbits of the sun passed within Kerbin's so I was hoping they would eventually get captured by it's SOI or at least slowed down to make rescue easier) Jeb just couldn't take it anymore and removed his helmet on a spacewalk, the other Kerbals quickly followed (I terminated the flights). On a lighter note, one of my other fails was not so bad! After getting into orbit and then running out of fuel and not being able to deorbit I panicked, but some 8 orbits and a bit of crafty jetpack pushing later I finally touched down!