KerBlammo

I spent some time tweaking my toy SSTO & getting back up to speed on flying in KSP after some time away. I can get it into a ~125x125k orbit with ~730m/s dv available. Here it is at about 90k on its way down after the de-orbit burn. I over flew KSC at around 23K and turned it around to line up with the runway, but I could never get the approach stabilized so I did a flyby of KSC almost out of fuel: It was really hard to fly this thing low & slow just using the keyboard (I've never been any good at actually flying in KSP) but I did land it intact! I think I need to joystick for this. Sorry all this happened in the dark; I hate night screenshots too! Edited it add a better lit on orbit screen shot:

I threw together a toy SSTO (mk1 fuselage and a couple of RAPIERS) and to my surprise it actually worked the first time! It even survived re-entry completely intact but drastically over-shot KSC and ended up in the ocean. It is, however, completely useless with no payload capacity at all. I might be able to convert it into something that could transport 1 (one) Kerbal to a LKO space station.

I embed a picture by clicking on it and then copying the content of the "BBCode" text box & then paste that into the message.

"Hey where'd everyone go?"

Continues construction of my space station:

I think Kerbals don't see very well (which would explain a lot). Except for Jeb of course, he's a steely eyed missile man Kerbal.

Agreed. I just recently came back to KSP after a lengthy hiatus and before I installed any mods I did several stock direct ascent Mun landings just to get back up to speed with the game & I do think it would benefit a new player to stick to the stock game until they get proficient and then decide what (if any) mods would suit them. As far as mods go, I just don't understand why sometimes people have problems with other's game play styles. If there is a spectrum from un-modded career no-reverts at one end and anything goes mods, build a cool looking space ship and hyper edit into space with a spectacular nebula sky box and get 70s SciFi book cover screen caps at the other what does it matter where on that spectrum another player is? Personally I like to play sand box with lots of mod parts. I set my own rules and missions. I like to launch and land with no aids at all. I like to dock manually although I have the MechJeb auto pilot standing by in case I screw things up too badly. I use the rendezvous autopilot because I suck at figuring out how to get a close approach (at some point I will have another go at learning how to do that myself, but right now I'm building a space station). Some people no doubt pride themselves on doing a rendezvous manually and others like to automate their launches. Good for you! It shouldn't bother anyone that others enjoy this game in different ways.

Looks like it. As someone on NSF said "it landed too high".

Good to have confirmation from Musk that it was propellant depletion! Here is that video in the web player (larger image) https://twitter.com/i/videos/tweet/743602894226653184 Looks to me that it approaches the ship faster but is slower settling down on the deck. It doesn't look like a hard impact from that angle but we are seeing it from a distance. Hopefully they will release additional imagery. For comparison CRS-8 landing

No. I am talking about the 4 GTO attempts of which 2 failed due to "low thrust" on one one engine. In neither case has SpaceX said it was due to fuel starvation (that might be the case, but no-one outside of SpaceX knows if that is true). What I am saying is that unless it really is due to fuel starvation (which again is unknown to us) then they seem to have a problem with engines performing as expected after a launch.

I know its a brand new process. What I am saying is that it doesn't look like they are where they want to be yet as far as engine design goes.

True enough for the most part. I should have added that "assuming the low thrust was not due to propellant starvation... " blah blah blah. As far as the 1st landed refire goes, there were "thrust fluctuations" on one engine. At the time Musk speculated that it was due to debris ingestion and everyone seems to have taken that as a fact although AFAIK that was never officially confirmed. Indeed that static fire lasted less than 2 seconds and appeared identical to a previous launch pad abort (although again there was never any official word on how long the test was expected to last or whether it was terminated early due to the previously mentioned "thrust variations"). As far as the pre-flight static fire goes there is a world of difference between restating after a few seconds of operation on the pad and restarting after a launch with the vibrations, g-forces and thermal gradients that go with it.

So out of 4 GTO landing attempts 2 were successful (yay!) and 2 were not (boo!). Both of the failures were apparently due to low thrust on an engine. The GTO landings involve firing 3 engines during part of the landing burn (as opposed to 1 in the LEO landings). This seems to indicate that the Merlin engines as currently designed have a fairly high failure rate after being restarted and are not (yet) fully reusable.

I installed 1.1.2 yesterday evening. It crashed when I yet again encountered from the docking-causes-your-space-station-to-fall-out-of-the-sky bug.

Ahh. Thank you! I can go back to building the most awesome KSS ever now

What a fantastic looking set of parts! Amazing. I have been trying to build a station with these parts but keep on running into a serious issue. no idea if its anything to do with this mod or not, but since there presumably are a lot of station builders reading this thread it seems like a good place to ask if anyone else has this problem: sometimes while docking two sections together (or docking a crew vehicle to the station) the docking ports touch but instead of locking together they bounce off and at the same time the camera view goes crazy and I cannot reacquire the station. If I switch back to the tracking station and then to the station I can see it ok but it is now on a suborbital trajectory. I have so far lost three station and a crew vehicle this way. The last time it happened was in 1.1.2 and the game crashed entirely.

Entirely possible so long as it is done at night during the winter.

Not picking on the OP, I'm seeing this in just about every article about this: SpaceX said they intend to land on Mars "as soon as" 2018 not "by" 2018 (which implies 2018 or sooner). The next transfer window is in 2018. If they miss that they will have to wait 26 months for the next window. So its NET 2018.

Put up the core of a space station made of the very cool looking Hab Tech parts. Launched a second section and attempted to dock it with the core, & could not get it to attach. I ended up de-orbiting both parts (hence no pics) will try again using stock docking ports.

Some (nav) balls are held for charity And some for fancy dress But when they're held for pleasure They're the (nav) balls I like best.

Sounds like you need to increase the separation force to decrease the likelihood of collisions with your payload.

I did another Mun landing tonight and did not encounter this problem this time.

Its an annoying bug, but Jeb was able to complete the landing and return to Kerbin just by seat of the spacesuit flying (having a custom window with orbital parameters helps). Jeb is a steely eyed missile man.

Had the same thing happen to me on a trip to the Mun yesterday. Maneuver nodes worked as expected until I was in Munar orbit. I landed without using a node but encountered the same problem after getting back into Munar orbit.

I have discovered that I can't live without Kerbal Joint Reinforcement. I won't be playing much 1.1 until that is available again.