DunaRocketeer

It was waaay back in the old demo, something like 0.17 or 0.18. I remember it only had Kerbin and the Mun in. I don't remember what the very first one looked like, except that it didn't have sufficient thrust to leave the pad... This was back when the aero model was very soupy, and I just brute forced moar boosters until it made orbit. It was an extremely ugly rocket! And then even more still to get it to the Mun. I still remember that landing, even though it was something like seven years ago. I've played all sorts of games since then, but always come back to KSP

I put a Duna mission onto the red planet. Quite happy with what I manged to pack into a fairly small spacecraft:

Chillwave/Synthwave sounds like a great ksp musical accompaniment. I like playing The Martian soundtrack. How to Train your Dragon is good to if you're not doing long duration interplanetary stuff, but instead shorter, more hectic flights.

Friday commute to orbit:

I put my Laythe Lander on a diet, and eked out a bit more Delta V from the design: I also started figuring out the ship that would take it out to the Jool System:

After having a bit more fun flying my subsonic trainer plane... ...I focused my attention on planning my endgame mission - a Jool exploration flight. It's a bit of a diminutive design for a Mk3 spaceplane, but it will comfortably SSTO from Kerbin, so I reckon it'll do ok on Laythe: Also, it can deploy ISRU equipment to refuel its mothership. There are ore tanks in the bay, but I intend to dock a larger ore tank on the nose port when it's on refuelling missions. I plan to use the low-G environment of Pol as the drilling location so a big tank on the top shouldn't be much of an issue.

I created a small, low performance aircraft for beginner Kerbals to start out on.

I've been messing around with the Mk2 spaceplane parts. Created a pretty standard spaceplane for small crew and cargo missions: And also have been experimenting with very low-drag designs. For this next vehicle, I have paired the wings down to little fins. The landing gear pods, extra fuel, antennas, experiments etc have to sit inside cargo bays. No outboard engine pods, radial intakes or wing mounted tanks; everything had to be kept in the single in-line fuselage. The result is a lot of fun, very very fast, but doesn't glide or turn as well as the first vehicle in this post. It's pretty well balanced as far as CoM vs CoL goes, but as old F-104 pilots liked to say, it does a lot of 'banking with intent to turn' haha

After a long absence from KSP, I've decided to get right back into it. I'm in the latter stages of a career playthrough, and have decided to go for SSTO vehicles from here on out. Here are my Mk3 lifters; one for kerbonauts, and one for cargo.

Those sound like a good combo of mods, and I like the idea of Soviet style ships - lots of opportunity for creative builds there. I find it's good to take a bit of time between playthroughs; often I'll think of novel spin on the usual gameplay so I'm not repeating myself too much.

What a brilliant series. Great missions, great craft, and the screencaps are all gorgeous. Thanks for taking the time to do it all, partucularly the detailed write-ups that you made.

I had an interplanetary ship return to Kerbin, but before it reached the atmosphere, it entered the physics radius of a space station. Seeing it zip by was a blast!

I find that around 165km is a good altitude for a station - high enough that you can catch up to it quickly from below, but not so high that you're burning tons of propellant to get there. Oh, and I use Ver1.00, which is stable and quick on my pc, so it still works for me for most playthroughs

I've just finished a long(ish) duration mission with some ships I'm quite proud of, so I've decided to make a kind of story showing their journey. The three ships depicted (the DanDare, SteveZodiac and the BuckRogers) have previously explored Minmus, set up Munbases and orbital space stations, captured asteroids, deployed satellites and retrieved debris and stranded kerbals, but this is their first Duna flight. Unfortunately I forgot to screengrab some bits, so a couple of images from another mission are standing in, but I think it tells the story well enough. It's a biiig image so there's lots to zoom in on.

I like rocket SSTO shuttles that are hard to identify .

Thanks! I come from a family of scifi nerds, so it was inevitable that I'd start naming things after all those old classics :). In many ways, I think KSP embodies the charm of those old stories. I think the wing pods of this ship have something of the XL5 about them!

The first of hopefully three landings over the next couple of days: A Universal Transporter craft named Dan Dare touched down in a new Duna Lowlands location. I was surprised to the extent that this vehicle could fly in the Dunan atmosphere, as previous design iterations used much smaller wings. At one point, just before the final descent, it even climbed! The Dan Dare will soon be joined by Steve Zodiac and Buck Rogers, which are currently in orbit of the planet. The three vehicles will set up the infrastructure needed for base construction before returning to the KSC runway.

Happy to see this series back again, it's looking great!

I had a 1.04 (I think) install for a short time. Hated it, there were some weird bugs. I'll use 1.3 if I just want to mess around in a stock sandbox mode for a bit - the newer parts are nice and open up some interesting build possibilities. My main career playthroughs are all done in a modded 1.00, and I'm perfectly happy with that.

I've been flying around kerbin with my current fun-mobile ssto: And catching asteroids using a more serious ship:

It's really only there because the aerospikes don't gimbal.

I'll give it a go when I next get the chance, it would be a fun flight regardless of the result.

Thanks . It needs a supporting booster underneath, I doubt this thing could ssto, and even if it could, the payload would be tiny.

Completed the first orbital test flight of my new exploration shuttle. It worked very well; just a few more tweaks and it'll be delivering bases and servicing stations.

Great looking double-torus station!