FelixLyons

About a day into the game I decided to complete a plant a flag mission on the Mun. I botched the landing sending the vehicle onto its side. Attempted to right the thing and managed to destroy the fuel tank. I made a few remotely operated rescue attempts that also failed due to poor landings (ironically as I was able to make successful landings in other areas of the Mun.) Finally I gave up and left my Kerbal stranded on the Mun for twenty years before I remembered to get her back home. She was never the same after that.

I had built an Ariane style rocket for satellite launches. Ignition goes, then I stage the launch clamps, and the thing moves incredibly slowly (thought I had it set for 1.5 TWR on launch) and then it starts to nose over. It hits the central clamp on the east side and slowly crawls upward scraping the clamp the entire time. When it reaches the top of the clamp it noses over. It at this point is getting enough thrust that it is starting to stabilize and when it clears the clamp it remains airborne ... until it crashes into the water tower and explodes. I just stared at the pile or rubble for about five minutes following before giving a grunt of acceptance and fiddling with the throttle settings in the VAB.

I have found that restraint goes a long ways towards making the laboratories feel like a well-fitted part of the game. My personal preferences include not building truly mobile laboratories in any vessel short of an interplanetary transfer vehicle. As for those transfer vehicles I won't warp them all the way to their destination effectively collecting data and warping. I set a Kerbal Alarm Clock reminder and go about doing other missions for my space program until that friendly reminder pops. Yes, you can cheese out science even with a stationary surface base (especially on Minmus where a small RCS powered puddle-jumper can net you data from every biome.) I travel between biomes using rovers and I think we're all quite familiar with how difficult a proposition that can become. Orbital stations do add some difficulty through their very nature. Rendezvous, docking, et cetera. Further complications arise when you add a life support mod to the mix (I have come to love TAC Life Support) and have to budget for resupply vehicles to keep those stations operating. I'm also the type that tries to design a vehicle for a specific mission profile. If I'm landing on the Mun I'll design and budget my fuel/propellant/life support for that mission profile and a small buffer for when things go wrong. When doing that an error in calculation or a small mishap can result in an abort of mission or a complete failure. My Munar missions are designed with enough supplies for getting there and back with a short stop at an orbital station. I have managed partial failures of late necessitating that I forgo my orbital station visit if I want to have the necessary propellant to return to Kerbin. I could launch a rescue mission, but that requires the cost of another mission without any of the benefits. Do I really want to run one mission for the price of two when I can achieve a partial success just by getting that vessel home? If you're the type that likes to hop around Minmus with an RCS puddle-jumper collecting massive quantities of science and data to fill your laboratories for the years spent warping to come -- FANTASTIC. So long as you're enjoying the game we should all be happy for you. If you don't like that style of play ... think about ways to play the game that make it a better experience for you.

Greetings to the CMES team! I was compelled to register and comment here to thank you for the many hours that have been devoted to this mod which has become a much beloved piece of my KSP experience. As for the Orion command module re-entry tolerances (listed in the product cards as unknown) I can relate that my intrepid test pilots have managed to successfully return to Kerbin with a re-entry velocity of @3500 m/s and a periapsis of 30,200 meters without any shielding having been added to the module. The test nearly ended in disaster and any additional velocity or a steeper angle might well have experienced a catastrophic failure.