JebNeedsHelp

After several failures along the way, I finally succeeded in landing a pair of Kerbals on Duna and safely returned them to Kerbin. Fuel looked a bit iffy right there near the end, back in Kerbin's SoI, but the guys made it back just fine. It's my first ever manned 'there and back' mission, so I'm proud I got it done, even if it did take two F9s along the way.

This - even in daylight the mk 1 gives you 400 meters' warning (at least in my stock game).

Today I summoned the Kraken while trying to land Jeb, Bill, and Bob on Duna. Twice. The first time I had no idea why, so when the same chain of events brought forth the Kraken the second time I went back and thought through my steps up to that point. Turns out I was trying to physics warp while my nukes were pulling lander fuel that crossfed through a docking port (whoops). For some reason that scenario overheated the nukes and blew them up - so much for getting the guys home, even if I hadn't screwed up the lander's fuel requirements. Ah well, back to the drawing board....

i can't stand when people don't capitalize i when referring to themselves. See how bad that looks?

This is IMO the most important thing. In D&D you're all players on the same team, trying to accomplish the same goal. Don't be that one player who does dumb things just because he can - it doesn't get you closer to the goal, and it annoys others in the game. Just do your best, and play your part for the team, and it'll be fine.

Today I sent Surplus Flag Depot Alpha to the Mun - six Kerbals who get to live on the Mun, play board games, jump around, and put up another flag whenever Mission Control wants them to.

I think 1000 OTEs should be known as a Jeb. Kerbal TV could teach bowl'o'porridge math to little Kerbals by showing Jeb eating porridge before a big launch. I know, that doesn't make sense, either. I haven't had my coffee yet.

I will admit, I simply thought that was an inside joke when I first signed on to the forums. I later realized that it was a valid method of propulsion, and soon enough, I needed to have Jeb get out and push for myself after a Mun lander didn't quite have enough oomph to get all the way home. Anybody else have anything that they heard on the forums that they didn't realize was actually possible at the time?

Today I made my very first, "there and back," flight to another planet, in this case, Eve. And I took Bill along for the ride as well. The plan was to land on Gilly, collect as much science as possible and return home, but Gilly proved too elusive for my nuclear engines (I couldn't slow down fast enough before escaping Gilly's SoI). After setting up an encounter for the third time, and still not making it, I wasn't sure I had the fuel to make it home. Bill gave up on Gilly and headed for Kerbin, and just inside Kerbin's SoI, the nuclear engines ran out of fuel. However, since I hadn't used my lander as planned, it had enough fuel to get back home intact, with the first science returned from another planet. Now I need to try again, with a more powerful engine available for that tiny SoI of Gilly's.... Not the overwhelming success I was hoping for, but I was still proud of myself for getting there and back, anyway!

Today I had a funny adventure on Dres. In my new .24.2. save, I haven't left Kerbin's SoI yet. Today I decided to send a 6-Kerbal Colony out - I thought I'd head for Duna but it was behind Kerbin, and Dres was just about in the right place, so I went for Dres instead. My transfer stage had enough fuel left in it that I figured I might as well try to land it, just to see if I could. Well, I came down in the dark and landed on the side of a crater. I decoupled the lander and gave myself some altitude as the rest of the ship bounced down the slope, breaking off three of the four engines. The fourth just kept going. Here's what it looked like the next day (notice the engine is still going): Jed (not Jeb) went out to check things out: I time warped ahead just to see how long this engine would run - it was at low power when I decoupled, and had quite a bit of fuel to burn. After 430 days, the engine was still going. This time Jed wanted to invent a new delicacy - vacuum-exposed nuclear cooked beanie weenies. However, before I could get Jed up to the flame, it died out. What were the odds? Jed was truly disappointed. It's funny how things turn out when you deliberately try dumb things, just to see if you can.

I had a funny Dres adventure today, but it looks nowhere near as cool as Jolly_Roger's. In my new .24.2.save, I haven't left Kerbin's SoI yet. Today I decided to send a 6-Kerbal Colony out - I thought I'd head for Duna but it was behind Kerbin, and Dres was just about in the right place, so I went for Dres instead. My transfer stage had enough fuel left in it that I figured I might as well try to land it, just to see if I could. Well, I came down in the dark and landed on the side of a crater. I decoupled the lander and gave myself some altitude as the rest of the ship bounced down the slope, breaking off three of the four engines. The fourth just kept going. Here's what it looked like the next day (notice the engine is still going): Jed (not Jeb) went out to check things out: I time warped ahead just to see how long this engine would run - it was at low power when I decoupled, and had quite a bit of fuel to burn. After 430 days, the engine was still going. This time Jed wanted to invent a new delicacy - vacuum-exposed nuclear cooked beanie weenies. However, before I could get Jed up to the flame, it died out. What were the odds? Jed was truly disappointed. I swear, sometimes you have to try really dumb things just for the fun of watching them go wrong.

Last night I made my first real attempt (still in stock, so far) at docking two spacecraft together. It was a dismal failure. However, after making pretty much every mistake possible, all at the same time, I tried again tonight, with a much better ship design. Success!! Jeb and Bill went EVA and swapped ships for the ride home. Bill left Cheetos floating all over the command pod for Jeb, but Jeb didn't mind - he'd stuck peanut butter on all the control switches for Bill. I know now that I took a hellacious amount of fuel for the trip, but last night's ships, woefully designed by me, were going to run out of fuel if I hadn't given up in frustration first.

Thanks, everyone. Gives me an idea of what to expect.

I've been holding off on upgrading because I'm still not really very good at the game. Does the update make things easier, harder, or both? Anything specific I should watch out for? Thanks in advance! JNH

DeMatt, I just tried what you said for a Mun landing, and still chickened out a bit, starting the burn early just because it looked like I was picking up a lot of speed falling. I wound up erring way on the side of caution, like The Yellow Dart mentioned, but on the plus side, I did uses a lot less fuel than I would have without using the node. I'm sure I'll get better with practice. Thanks, guys!

As someone who has only been playing stock KSP .23.5 for a few months, has yet to try version .24.2, and only has a small gray bar underneath his name, here's my take: I would be fine with increased physics realism, as long as my run-of-the-mill computer could handle it. Right now my computer already counts MET clock seconds as slowly as two or two and a half seconds long during liftoff of some of my bigger ships, and I can't even land a Kerbal on Tylo yet (my last frontier, if you will), nor have I returned any Kerbals from anyplace except the Mun and Minmus. If I had the .craft files of some of the monstrosities I've seen built by the really advanced players here, I'm not too sure my computer wouldn't burst into flames. The people I know personally who have heard of KSP and play it from time to time are not die-hard players with top-of-the-line PCs, and don't even bother with the forums. I'm guessing those casual players wouldn't even notice (much) if the physics was tweaked, unless their games started really slowing down. As for life support realism, though, I'm in the "less realism is better," camp. I enjoy doing things we can't do in real life, like starting colonies all around the system. It's already easy enough to kill a Kerbal without asphyxiating him or giving him radiation poisoning. Make life support too realistic, and long-duration colonies become death traps. Eventually I might try the Snacks mod, when I'm good enough, but with TAC LS every Kerbal I've ever sent somewhere beyond Kerbin's SOI would be dead, and where's the fun in that? (As an aside, it would be cool if your off-planet Kerbals had a way to break down the local rocks into the air they need to breathe and whatever it is Kerbals consume to survive. I'd be totally on-board with that. Right now I just role-play that they've got a machine for that tucked away on every ship for now, anyway. And maybe absorbing radiation is like giving haute cuisine to a Kerbal. No wonder they all want to become Kerbonauts! ) So I'd crank a physics slider as far as I could, while I'd leave a life-support slider where I wasn't killing off all my colonists. My two centiKredits, or whatever it is they use for money. JNH

I know I've seen this mentioned twice in other threads, but even though I've used maneuver nodes to plan encounters for a while now, I still can't figure out how to make this work regarding a suicide burn. The wording of the other posts just didn't quite make it clear, to me, anyway, just what I'm supposed to do (I guess I'm part Kerbal that way ). Could somebody give me a step-by-step? I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks in advance! JNH

I am old. I'm glad you posted the original, and not any of the covers and remixes that are out there.

I got it. Does not leaving the ground count as an ascent? Because I did that a lot before I figured out what not to do when building crazy big rockets.

Today I again failed to land a Kerbal on Tylo - I just keep running out of fuel between orbit and ground. However, I finally got my Sundiver One "near the Sun," and back, with the ship and all science intact.

I think it would be cool if you could terraform (Kerbinform?) Duna and Eve.

...where you try something several times, but the only headway you make is, how not to do it next time? Today my Sundiver One, with Macdo Kerman aboard, was trying to get "near the Sun" science and return home. First, carrying enough fuel to get a Sun orbit that close in the first place. Then, got the science done, but my Kerbin rendezvous (7000 m/s delta-v, and then some) used up all my fuel before I got close to Kerbin orbit. Loaded up a different design, tweaked some things, and made it there and back, only to find that this particular craft never had chutes installed. D'oh! Tried again, only to run out of fuel before Kerbin orbit again. So under, "What did I do in KSP today?" all I can say is, I failed miserably. Has anybody else had one of those days?

Some time ago, I was attempting to land a 10-Kerbal Colony in the Jool system, but as usual at the time, I ran out of fuel too soon, so I used what I had to place the thing in orbit around Jool (I think). Anyway, it didn't stay there long - I didn't see exactly what happened but while flying a later mission I saw the colony on a Sun-escape trajectory, and realized it had been ejected from the Joolian system somehow. Since then, the re-named Deep Space One has been on a Voyager-like trajectory - today I thought I'd see how it was doing. Man, the Sun is small.... Notice the G following the altimeter reading. And the MET... good thing they packed a bunch of Thai food. Now, you think I would have learned how not to do that again, but to the right of Deep Space One is, you guessed it, Deep Space Two. Ten more Kerbals hurling their bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out there, courtesy of the Joolian system, again. DS2 hasn't quite reached the 2G mark. Also, that probe way past Eeloo is my first attempt to return science to Kerbin from that far above the Sun. Since I'm running a stock game, I'm not completely sure I've got the fuel to make Kerbin, but I'll find out soon enough.

I have a lot of the regular names, like Jack, Chad, Gus, Lars, Alan, Mac, Will, Dudley, and more. Then for the female (?) Kerbals, I've got Rosy, Patsy, Romy, and Hallie. The silly names I have include Raygun, Seekin, Lembas, Hadgas, Dilbert, Doodlin and Doodler, Rodan, Seezer (get it?), Seemore, and Danster. Most of the rest make no real sense.

I have not yet successfully landed on Tylo, but I have dropped Kerbals on one-way missions everywhere else in the system (except Laythe's surface - I keep landing in the water). So far the only return missions I've done are Mun and Minmus flights. One of these days, though....