JanoFett

That's my shuttle. It was inspired by the Dream Chaser by Sierra Nevada, which is a new shuttle they are working on to take astronauts to the ISS, etc. I spent way too much time failing at a Discovery style shuttle with the belly tank, etc. As we've found out, it won't work with stock parts. Ascent was unstable with a bigger shuttle with bigger wings. Once I made it smaller and made the wings smaller, it was a much smoother take off. All 3 of the "shuttle" fuel tanks are nearly full once in orbit, so there's plenty of juice left for whatever maneuvers you may need to do.

Jeebs, nice work and good eye. I'm sure there will be tons of easter eggs to find when the other planets are put into the game. As far as the origins of the arch, I think it's fairly obvious that they were put there by aliens. Maybe even a sentient space robot that talks and sounds like Leonard Nimoy.

I usually watch Scott's videos at work and I'm glad there was no one around to hear me laughing out loud when his Kerbal smacked into the ship, not minutes after saying someone would have to be a moron to do exactly what he did. And thanks for the tip on the steep ascent trajectory on your big SRB design. I made one similar to it and using Mechjeb's standard trajectory, it just didn't work.

Scott, what's the mass difference between rocket using the old style Munar lander and the new one you made using the crewable empty capsule (Apollo style) mod? Please keep the videos coming, they're brilliant!

Scott, your videos are great. My wife loves when I play them when she\'s in the room because she LOVES Scotland and thus, your accent. Anyway, after realizing that my previous .16 Munar missions probably wouldn\'t have been successful without the fuel consumption bug, I\'ve been trying to design Munar rockets that will get there and back on full throttle. Seeing you do the delta-v calculations has been a big help. Keep the videos coming! Michael

I saw this article on Gamespy last March talking about Kerbal. http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/kerbal-space-program/1221987p1.html It looked so cool that I had to download the demo immediately.

I second this idea, or at the very least the KSP Wiki needs a lot of updating. For example, the tutorial of landing on the Mun with stock parts basically says 'You should get it eventually'. I know I\'ve been frustrated trying to find a hotkey and eventually ended up smashing every key on my keyboard trying to find it. My first EVA I started to panic when my Kerbal was slowly drifting away from the ship and I couldn\'t figure out how to thrust up/down and the wiki page of keyboard hotkeys hadn\'t been updated to .16 yet.

I prefer Ozzy\'s Bark at the Moon when I\'m doing any sort of Munar expedition. Otherwise, the whoosh of liquid fuel rockets is music enough for me.

That is a beautiful ship! I\'ll have to try it out when I get home from work. Have you tried to pilot it manually from start to finish?

I\'ve been frustrated by the same thing. I\'ve been trying to make a shuttle using the shuttle type stock parts - the ones with the heat shields - and it\'s been going horribly wrong. There are a number of things I\'ve learned by reading the forums and testing myself. I finally got a shuttle into orbit. It\'s a powered shuttle with a gimbaled engine connected to a tri-coupler and 9 fuel tanks. I used the 175 thrust gimbaled engines and also have a booster stage of 3 solid rockets. Trying to do a shuttle that was connected side by side to the fuel tanks/engines was bad news. Everything was going well just after launch, with RCS and SAS on, but then I\'d get a nasty oscillation from the control surfaces trying to counter a wobble. It eventually caused the ship to start spinning out of control. Once I added an advanced canard to the very front of the shuttle, that gave it enough of a control surface to stabilize the whole thing all the way up. I also removed the rudder and have 2 sets of RCS thrusters near the cockpit. I haven\'t tried to land the ship yet, but at least I can get it into orbit with a full tank of shuttle fuel left.

Hello all Kerbal Space Program addicts. I bought/preordered/whatever KSP last week after getting hooked on the demo. And now, your gift. I took this picture and many more from the parking lot of my work building this morning. There must have been at least 100 of us watching Discovery do it\'s Victory Lap around the DC metro area. Now I have to go find a good space shuttle addon for KSP. Discovery-firstpass6-small by Michael Janowich, on Flickr