TheHolyChicken

Why do these landers have *HUGE* wheels on the bottom? Are these landers mobile or....?

You come across as someone who has no respect for his children, wife or women in general. Is this how you want to present yourself to the world? You didn't blow up an entire space station, you just lost a lander and pilot. You haven't even lost any science. Deal with it.

Looks *SPECTACULAR*. I'll be keeping a close eye on this and will install soon. Basically I'm a newbie and want to play the vanilla game for a good while, but I'm starting to itch for some graphics mods (I love kerbal dearly, but it can be pretty damn ugly sometimes for 2015 standards). Keep up the good work, blackrack!

Thanks for the friendly help. I was indeed using hyperlinks instead of embedded images to avoid spoiling the flow of the writing - I wrote the story first, then embellished it using the screenshots I had taken along the way. I was happy with the text and didn't really want big images intruding mid-sentence, which would kind of require re-writing a bunch of it. Unfortunately, I suppose this way means it's less visually interesting, and I'm forcing people to click a bunch of links instead of being able to just passively read/look. Let's change one to an image to grab some attention!

POV from a newbie here, who has played for ~25 hours but hasn't yet been to the Mun (playing Career on Hard exclusively at the moment). The 0.5% elite players might be clamouring for a more advanced aerodynamics model, but that's far from being a deal breaker for your average new player/reviewer! Here's some things that bothered me: * Tutorials/GUI. On several occasions I've had to leave the game to google how some of the GUI worked. That's not the sign of a good GUI. For example, I didn't understand how some of the contract requirements worked, and couldn't figure out why I wasn't completing missions. Some terminology is foreign and never explained, like suborbital vs height requirements in the contracts. Again, I had to google it to find an explanation. * Science. What the heck is it? Where do I get it? Science painfully trickled in until - after googling (again) - I discovered you could do other things to gain science, like right clicking the command pod and selecting 'Crew Report'. Who knew? Not me! * Tooltips. If I hover over a button with my mouse, like SAS, I'd *love* if a tooltip could appear that would show you a little explanation of what it does, and maybe its hotkey. SAS? What the heck is SAS? Oh, it's stability assist, and I can turn it on and off with 'T'. It'd be really helpful if that was in the game, instead of having to search google for these things. * Automatic hints could go a long way to help teach players. For example, the first time the player attaches a jet engine, why not have a little popup to tell them that Jet engines will require the addition of 'air intake' parts to function? * Cancelling contracts - it turns out cancelling a contract is completely different from failing it. I didn't cancel any contracts for the longest time, until I was forced to cancel a contract because I'd bitten off way more than I could chew, only to discover it was totally fine. Again, the game doesn't tell you any of this. KSP has a really big learning curve, and that's ok - but players need to be given tools and help to scale that mountain. If new players routinely have to google for help or controls it'll drive a lot of people away.

These were my genuine experiences with KSP's career mode so far, expanded and fleshed out into something I hope you enjoyed reading. There is also an alternative version of these events, though - one where we had saves available to us: "Woops I screwed up lol, F9". None of it would have happened. The failure of the first craft, the disaster of the second craft, the abandonment of Jeb in orbit, the rescue and near-bankruptcy, the subsequent march into aerospace and financial turnaround. All blinked out of existence by a revert launch, or a quickload. If you're playing KSP's career mode with saves, I'd urge you to try without! I'm gonna go and see if Sean and I can go rescue Jeb from his plight now, and then perhaps we'll try to get to the Mun? Happy kerbaling everyone, and GL for your future endeavours

Reddit thread here: http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/2zc4ee/short_story_the_wait_or_a_newbies_adventures_in/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sean waited, alone, in space. Perhaps it was bravery, or perhaps he didn't understand the question, but Jebediah didn't hesitate to accept their most important mission so far - to save the stranded Kerbal, Seanemone, from (inexplicable) orbit. His family's eyes and hopes were on us. Our organisation - with its dodgy facilities and well-meaning (albeit stupid) employees - had barely skimmed the surface of space; this would be our greatest challenge yet. Top scientists and engineers collaborated to construct our flagship craft: 'RESCUE 1'. Courageous Jeb was catapaulted into orbit, assuring everyone that he "got this" and that he "knew what he was doing". Alas it was all bravado, and, after failing to rendezvous, Jeb was forced to re-enter amidst much embarrassment and shame. Sean waited, alone, in space. 'RESCUE 2'. After a near-disastrous launch (thanks to the engineers' "great tweaks") Jeb once again found himself in orbit, battling gravity and his limited understanding of orbital mechanics. His bravado muted, this time he directed his attention fully to the task of saving Sean. So fully, unfortunately, that he wasn't paying attention to where his elbows were, and - BOOM! - he accidentally progressed to the rocket's next stage. The stage where the command pod separated from the engines. "Uh Oh". He was adrift. Sean waited, alone, in space. Jeb understood how he felt. Back at home, the stricken engineers clamoured to construct 'RESCUE 3', and there were no shortage of volunteers - none remaining even knew how to fly a rocket but they'd be damned if that would stop them. Yet doubts grew - are we insane? Is it right to send more Kerbals to their potential doom? Is this moral? Sean gazed into the increasingly familiar black. A speck was taunting him again, trying to tease hope into consciousness. He wouldn't let it. It weaved back and forth, here and there, smaller and greater; like a stalking mosquito. He wished he could hear its buzz - he would let it come close and drink if only to break the damnable silence. This one's persistence began to frustrate him - how far had dehydration gone? The speck grew closer. Could it be? Surely not. It grew closer still. He blinked in disbelief, and fired up the jetpack with trepidation - his training hadn't covered this. If he ran out of fuel... it didn't bear thinking about. Fumbling with the controls, Sean zig-zagged erratically towards the speck until, miraculously, he was alongside the craft. With bated breath - still distrusting his senses - he opened the hatch and clamboured in. Cheers erupted from the command centre, and then from all the Kerbals watching at home. He was aboard! Seanemone was aboard! They had done it! 'RESCUE 3', despite the pilot's inexperience, had found the lost kerbal and was heading home. But, for all the celebrations, it was a hollow victory... we had left someone behind. Jeb waited, alone, in space. Sean understood how he felt. "Get me back UP THERE!" he yelled at Mortimer, the head of Finance; and Linus, the Science boffin; but it was no good. Even Sean had to concede that they were right - a rescue mission just wasn't feasible. They were broke. Almost bankrupt, in fact - the rescue attempts had bled them dry. Worse still, they didn't have the technology to get Jebediah home; to even attempt a rescue would first require a huge investment in their facilities. Where would the money come from? A radical new idea was proposed - what if the craft didn't explode every time? What if we made a plane that could land without exploding? No-one much liked the sound of that, but desperate times call for desperate measures. The road was rough; we flirted with bankruptcy for weeks as prototype after prototype crashed into the ground - it quickly became clear that no-one knew anything about planes. Sean piloted every test flight they would let him, nearly costing him his life on multiple occasions, but nothing could break his resolve. He had to believe they would get it right eventually - they just had to. Perseverance paid off: the plane 'BRAVERY' was born. We entered a time of prosperity - dozens of contracts were completed in record time, and none of the accidents were even fatal! New facilities gleamed proudly in the morning sun. Scientists did sciencey stuff. Finally, at long last, work began in earnest on a brand new space craft. Eyes started to look to the sky again... was he still alive? Jeb waited, alone, in space. Sean gripped the seatbelts. He felt the familiar rumble of the engines. It was time.