antihifi

Oh I know! I just wanted to send up all five for fun!

First of all, I'm lazy. As we all know laziness costs you a lot in this game… In career mode I got a contract to put a base on the Mun with capacity for 5 kerbals, a cupola, a research module, power, etc. Aside from being lazy I'm also cheap so ideally I would have put this together in orbit in a couple of SSTO Spaceplane launches but sadly I have not been able to design a mk3 based spaceplane that can carry up those large 2.75m parts. So, being a cheapskate I decided I would not spend more than 100k on this mission and wanted a low part count. This would be a one way mission for five brave (stupid) Kerbals. Now my first rocket was a bit too much over 100k and in testing I decided it was overpowered and I knew I could get to the Mun with less. I rebuilt the rocket and didn't really check the deltaV. To be extra cheap I also decided I was going to try to recover the boosters (a fatal mistake). During launch I hit "[" to switch to the boosters to deploy the parachutes. I then switched back to the rocket and from that point there was no "revert to VAB" option. I was stuck with this rocket. It became immediately clear that this rocket wasn't going to make it to the Mun with the little deltaV it had. So I reverted back to the launchpad. As you can see it has a measly 5,508 deltaV. I thought it might be on just the outside of possible to land this thing on the Mun but it had to be flown perfectly. Let's give it a go!!!!! Oh great Wilbo is already panicking. If you're freaking out now man you're going to be really loving it when you're coming in for your landing on the Mun at 800 m/s 2000 meters above the surface nearly horizontally. Take a chill pill. I've got this. Getting into a very low 80km LKO was crucial to conserve the little deltaV I was working with. I was watching my time to apoapsis like a hawk trying to build up a lot of orbital velocity without getting too high up. Ok! We're in orbit and have sue deltaV to spare. Let's start messing with maneuver nodes and see how low of a periapsis we can get for out Munshot. We're well on our way to the Mun now. Doing one last correction burn to drop our periapsis near to the surface. To conserve even more fuel we're going to tweak the periapsis down further using just RCS. We're being reaaaaally conservative with what little LF we've got left. The last bit of tweaking was done with just RCS. We don't have the LF to an orbit. We are coming in low and very very hot. We are going to have to bleed off a lot of speed with just our tiny radially mounted rockets and a splash of fuel! We came in at around 860 m/s 11km up. We had about 45 seconds to burn off all that excess horizontal speed. The first few, um, "simulated" attempts resulted in spectacular crashes. I couldn't take a screenshot of the final approach because Wilbo and I were way too panicked and furiously trying to bleed off speed while not draining the little fuel we had left. Touchdown! We did it! With a whopping 39 m/s deltaV to spare! That was hairy. None of us thought it was even possible!!! Enjoy your new home you Fine Young Kerbals!!!!!!

I've had KSP for a few months now but this is my first post on the forums. Thought I'd go for something big! After 0.90 came out I wanted to build an SSTO Spaceplane as an efficient and low cost means of completing satellite contracts. Submitted for your approval, my Shuttle MK V HV (I'm pragmatic when it comes to naming.) On this particular mission I lifted a ~3 ton satellite (an LV909+FLT200 with SAS/RCS, Power, etc. a basic Satellite I use for most contracts) into LKO. The satellite has about 2600 delta-v which was more than enough to put it into this missions required orbit at Minmus. I then de-orbited my shuttle and landed it back on the runway at the KSC. I usually don't do this since I think flying in this game is harder than real life (I fly in real life). But I wanted to get that sweet Precision Flying and Utilitarian award. Here's the story: Pretty low cost considering how capable she is. You can see my standard satellite in the bay there. It has RCS too which it really doesn't need for most missions but oh well. Overall designs could be way streamlined. I'm lazy. Taking off on just the two Turbojets. I don't turn on the Rapiers til much later. Spent a bit of time mucking around and closing the pod bay doors (for Dave). Also sorry for my crappy graphics, I have a weak old macbook. I forgot to disable the crossfeed in the satellite so just doing that now for posterity. at 24k meters I kill the turbojets and am running on just the rapiers now. Orbit circularized and ready to deploy our payload. Normally I would have a TON more fuel left over to do things like lift the satellite to a higher orbit or change inclination or whatever but because I'm not used to taking screen shots I kept forgetting every time i hit command-shift-3 I would turn the engines back on and raise my apoapsis by like 30k meters before realizing it. Whooops! Bye bye birdie! The probe is off to do it's work (complete contracts for me, or presumably provide satellite TV for the inhabitants of minmus which is, currently, Jeb). As you can see I have flight engineer so you can see how much Delta V the little satellite has. More than enough to get around anywhere it needs to go in the Kerbin area. The only two mods I've ever used are Flight Engineer and Kerbal Alarm Clock. I don't think my computer could even run much more than that. I spent some time fussing with the satellites orbit and then had to wait a while for the KSC to come back into the light side of the planet. Here I'm setting the de-orbit maneuver node. Honestly I'm always off on this but this time around I got really lucky and she came down on a near perfect trajectory west of the mountains near the KSC. I barely had to touch it coming down aside from the last adjustments to short final. Normally I wouldn't care at all and just land it anywhere near the KSC but for this I wanted to put her on the runway. Gliding it down. Pretty lucky. At this point I've usually either overshot the KSC by a lot or am under power trying to maintain speed so I'm not bored for ten minutes flying to the KSC since I came in too far before. Final approach and power is turned back on. If you let the speed drop below 100m/s its very easy to stall and break her up. It happens more often than I would care to admit. Also with my low powered computer the runway is all of 13 stair stepper pixels which is another reason I usually don't even bother with putting it down right on the runway! Short final. Aim for the numbers. Light on the yoke. Full flaps. Hand on the throttle. Oh wait this isn't a cessna 172. More like wwqqeaaassssswwweeewqq. Take a screenshot. Damnit I hit *shift* again! Ok *control* slow back down you're fine. Touchdown. Breaks on. I actually put her down just past the numbers but didn't take a screenshot til I was almost to a stop. But there you go. Another successful mission in my simple little fully reusable utilitarian SSTO Spaceplane!!! Thanks for reading!