Unistrut

I eventually gave up and just strapped parachutes to my plane. I'm not very good at either plane design or landings, so I crashed many, many times. So my "landing" procedure was extend gear, slow down as much as you can and then pop the chutes. Once on the ground, have the pilot repack the chutes and you'd be ready to go somewhere else.

What this person said. Technically you get the ribbon upon leaving Kerbin's SOI and get the orbit dot almost instantly unless you somehow manage to leave Kerbin SOI on a collision course with something else. The equatorial orbit device means you need to flatten and circularize that orbit. I didn't write a requirement of any particular distance, and technically any ship that leaves Kerbin SOI could also go on the Kerbol ribbon - however if you want to restrict the decorations to missions and vessels that are purely involved in solar missions and get, as far as you're concerned, "close enough" and ignore the ones that are "just passing through", then Go For It! I think that's what I did...

Yeah, I consider reverted flights to be "simulator runs". For a Kerbal to be "lost" he needs to remain dead. Also, for a Kerbal to be "saved", the mission has to go wrong in such a way that they wouldn't normally be able to return and you have to launch new missions or seriously change the plans of existing missions to recover them. Examples: Kerbal lands on Duna. Ship does not have the ability to lift off, but the mission plan included a separate lift off module - not a rescue. Kerbal lands on Duna. No way off, but with the assumption that later on you'd send a mission. Poor planning, still not a rescue. Kerbal lands on Duna. Ship breaks into a dozen pieces, but pilot survives. New mission launched from Kerbin to retrieve them. Rescue! Kerbal lands on Duna. Hard. Breaks engine on lander/lifter. A second lifter from the same mission, originally meant to be used once, is refueled and reused to recover them. Rescue! EDIT - An example from my own game - I sent a mission to go find the [REDACTED]. A PROBE BASTARD FOXTROT and a pair of Kerbals in a tiny DEMV rover were dispatched to Ike. The Kerbals set up shop on the north pole of Ike and waited for the [REDACTED] to pass by, whereupon they sent commands to the PBF. I did not have a plan for getting them home. As I was winding up my 0.18 save, I decided to return all the brave Kerbals who I'd gone so far with to Kerbin. Including the two that I had so callously stranded on Ike. So I sent a ship to recover them. Not a rescue yet. When that ship ran out of fuel in a strange, strange orbit around Duna instead of docking nicely with the fuel tanker in Duna orbit and I had to send the City of Pomona to retrieve them, then it became a rescue. It would also count if you have a vessel specifically designated for rescues that gets used. Thunderbirds are go! Apollo 13 would be an example of the "no new mission" rescue. They had to scrap the original mission due to explosion and then repurpose multiple parts of their craft in order to make it safely home. No "extra" ships were sent, but it still required a lot of frantic work and using bits of the mission in ways that were not part of the original plan. Zeroignite - thanks for the heads up regarding the first post. I thought I'd fixed that... The problem with adding Challenge Wreaths to more locations is, well, Conservation of Ninjitsu - the more of them there are, the less impressive each one is.

Well, the original Grand Tour was a sweep through Europe to see the various culturally significant sights, I'd say that you need to take one vessel and go see the solar system, without returning to Kerbin after every stop. Meeting up with a refueling barge or doing some resource extracting is to be expected given the dV requirements of the trip. I'd avoid mapping / scanning or anything that requires a polar orbit as that just makes your transfer burns way harder.

Hello! I'm the doofus who wrote those sentences in the first place. No need to guess. I'd say that if you visited multiple planets and then returned you have "returned" from all of them. You started at Kerbin, went to that place and returned to Kerbin. You just took the scenic route. The very, very long scenic route. You might also grab the spaceport version and make yourself a Grand Tour shield. Edit - and the RC does count for probes - in the current version of the game the difference between kerbals and probes is solely one of weight and remembering to pop the solar panels before hitting time acceleration. Well, and a slight pang of guilt when you auger in the kerbal. If you can design a craft that can make it to another world and then make it back, even if it's just a probe, you've done the tricky part. Doing it with kerbals just means scaling up a bit. This may change once life support becomes a thing and keeping kerbals alive for extended periods of time becomes a more serious design consideration.

My first Mun mission didn't need a rescue craft as the pieces would have been far too small to "rescue" in any meaningful fashion.

Well, after that thorough oratorical drubbing I guess I have only one option. Release the new version! http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/missionribbonsv60/ New things: Meteor Device - for that craft that doesn't even survive to make it to the surface! Armada Device - Seriously, it's harder than it sounds. Brotoro said it was hard. Flag or Monument Device - Not sure I'd ever use it, but someone asked for it, so here it is! Challenge Wreath - Get off Kerbin in one stage! Get off Tylo or Eve using any means necessary! Also introducing, the I Got BC'ed special hard edged Grand Tour Ribbon. I also updated KSPFM-42 to incorporate some of the changes that Zeroignite made when adapting it for the web app (such as continuous satellite overwatch counting for the geosync device when geosynchronous orbits are not possible). I didn't make the change to the station one, but I probably will if there's another update. It says refueling and housing as those were really the only two things you could do with one when it was written. I'm not going to order angry men named things like "Vinnie" and "Nico" to come to your house if you use the station device for something that can only house Kerbals. It's okay. Now - the really important note - this is not the new version of the web app - this is the DIY special. Moustachauve is in charge of the automatic web app. I haven't worked with html in almost twenty years, so I'm no help there.

That's a question for the web app thread, which can be found over here.

You need to visit (enter the SOI) of two non-Kerbin planets. Slingshots do count. You get the appropriate pip for each SOI entered. The type of vessel used goes bottom center. If you orbit a planet / satellite then you get the first orbit device. Each one after the first adds another arrow on the bottom left edge. If you drop a lander to a world you first gain the landing device, and for each after that you gain an arrow on the bottom right edge. I don't think M has made a generator for the Grand Tour yet, but if you download the DIY kit from the first page and load it up with GIMP (free graphic software) all you need to do is toggle the visibility of the appropriate layers and then export it as a .jpg or .png.

Zeroignite, GET OUT OF MY HEAD. I actually sent the newest version to Moustachauve a few days ago to give him a head start on the web app and one of the new changes is that the Device Formerly Known As The SSTO Wreath is now the Challenge Wreath. Of course I didn't just go straight to that idea, I had to spend an hour or two creating various terrible looking frames and borders and brackets first. You can also earn a Challenge Wreath on Tylo, for escaping back into space from the Eater of Landers.

Isn't that how we first became aware of the M**** B******? Someone smacked into it and saw it on the event log?

Open your browser window as wide as you can, lean back, cross your eyes and try and focus on the hitchhiker can in the middle.

Okay, I realize this will probably only matter to a very, very small number of people. Maybe even just me. I have a stereoviewer (Victorian Viewmaster type thing) and enjoy making my own cards for it. I can take photo pairs pretty easily by just holding the camera over each eye in turn while taking a picture (as long as nothing is moving very quickly ... stupid pedestrians). While retiring my old 0.18 save I had the idea of trying to take some stereo shots of my old workhorse ships. While I was able to achieve pretty good results just by hitting the screenshot key and then rotating the camera view slightly to the side and taking a second one, the speeds at which things are moving sometimes means that the planet below has moved far enough to mess things up. It would be pretty cool to have, possibly as a menu option, "stereo screenshots". You hit the "stereoshot" key and it pauses the game for a moment, takes a single screenshot, swings the camera to the right slightly and takes the second, maybe even labels them "screenshot123-L.png" and "screenshot123-R.png" to make keeping pairs together easier. Even with the crude method described above, I was able to make this pair - it is a "cross your eyes" pair, so you don't the special viewer, just lean back, cross your eyes and then try and focus on the hitchhiker module in the middle.

Well, what problems are you having, specifically? I went from "OMG WTC IS GOING ON" to "Ho hum, another day, another docking" so I might be able to help you through whatever bits you're having trouble with.

Original creator person here: For those looking for larger resolution ribbons you can get the DIY kit from Spaceport. It's not as easy as Moustachauve's generator, but it produces them at the original resolution. http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/mission-ribbons-v-5-0/ As for the other suggestions, a "Monument" marker might be something I'll add to the next revision, "Base" would mean it actually does something "Monument" means it's just sort of there. Although, would a "flag" device be more awesome than a manned lander? Since you sort of need to have done the second to do the first. The SSTO wreath is currently only for Kerbin as on most of the other planets SSTO is either trivial or impossible. Kerbin's got just that right amount of challenge. "I jumped too hard on Gilly .... SSTO WREATH!"

Dagnabbit, now I'm going to think of that every time I dock.

I'm imagining a Kerbal on EVA with a sharpie adding in the loop on the "d"... Anyway, congratulations! Docking is one of the trickier things to do in this game, really only superseded by landing on Tylo and taking off from Eve. Heck, even real astronauts who've had training and stuff find it tricky.

Yes. Especially once you've got some standard designs that work well and you've moved beyond "Can I get this to orbit?" to more complex missions. I finally sucked it up and figured out how to use mechjeb since I couldn't bear to launch another half dozen interplanetary transfer stages and then the refueling barge they would push to another planet because I fluffed my fuel requirement calculations again without going insane from the tedium. I still do all my own docking though, since MJ uses frankly ridiculous amounts of RCS fuel to do so, and docking so far remains fun for me.

Only if you remember to turn it on, and it doesn't always stay turned on between reloads and vessel changes.

I found that my big lifter could, depending on it's cargo, make it into orbit with it's two side tanks still attached, so I slapped some probe cores and docking ports on the side and turned the next launch into a fuel depot. Added an RTG and some crew modules later. Yes, that did mean that one incautious press of the space bar would cause my station to blow itself apart, but hey, welcome to KSP.

I've found that it really depends on how seriously the rest of the movie takes it. If the film is trying to be all HARD REAL SCI-FI and then they completely screw up the orbital mechanics I get annoyed (Yes Prometheus, I'm looking at you). If the film is just "Whoooo! Things exploding in SPACE!" then I'll roll with it and eat my popcorn. Seriously though, KSP gave me my first warning that I wasn't going to like Prometheus. A: they do their de-orbit burn facing the wrong way. B: they just drop down into the atmosphere without spending any time mapping the surface (or checking to make sure the atmosphere isn't Venus-style superheated acid). C: they then just happen to fly past the alien goo factory. Having gone off in search of the various anomalies on Kerbin (and elsewhere) even having the ISA mapsat dot back in 0.18 still meant a lot of flying around going "okay ... where is that bastard...." You didn't just drop out of orbit and go "Well hello there building!"

After splatting one pilot I just gave up and built the next plane with a set of parachutes. It was a bit tricky getting it to settle level enough to land on it's wheels as opposed to it's nose or tail, but it worked, which is more than I can say for the conventional method.

Earliest space events I remember are Skylab landing raining down in bits on Australia and going to a neighbor's house to watch images come down from one of the Voyager probes reaching Jupiter.

I used a jet first stage for most of my launches back in 0.18 (haven't had as much time to play since then, baby started crawling) and I avoided the problems with the following adjustments: 1 - Spool up - First stage, jets light. Second stage, launch clamps release. Light 'em, wait until they get up to speed, then away! 2 - Flameout - Dump 'em before that happens. Now, if you dump them while running you will have more excitement than you originally planned for, but it's simple enough to set an action group that closes all intakes and shuts off all jet engines, so you can then eject them all and light your rockets. So flights with these were Engine ignite, wait until fuel use increased to 1.8 (IIRC), launch clamps release. Watch intake air until it drops to 0.2 then press "3" to kill the jets and immediately follow it with spacebar to light up the rocket stage. Proceed into orbit.

I had some friends working on a Space Hulk style game on the Amiga and the death sound was just this little "DING" noise. They wanted a scream or meaty crunching sound, something appropriate, but they didn't have one. So there was just this "DING". They left it in so long that they became conditioned to panic any time they heard that noise. They'd be in line at the dining commons and some piece of kitchen equipment would go "DING" and they'd all twitch. That was the early nineties and he actually still does it. I guess what we've learned today is that developers should be aware - fans may get attached to your placeholder art...