Railsmith

Sure, they wiggle about like cockroaches, the controls are a bit headwonky, and I have to twiddle my thumbs while Jeb ragdolls at the base of his command pod after a landing, but seeing Bill\'s poker face on the Mun makes it all worth it. If I could find a way to make them do badass poses at the press of a key, I would throw all of my money at the screen. And like others have said before me, ladders. My goodness, these ladders are the best-handled I\'ve ever seen in a game ever. I love doing a flying leap on the Mun to the too-short ladder on my lander, then grabbing hold and clambering up like a champ.

Not the way I do it... 636) When you rebuild a 0.15 design in 0.16 and only remember that the 909 engine is incredibly underpowered on your final munar approach. And you\'re using one of them to hold up a gigantic lander.

630) When your landers have to take you from suborbit all the way to the Mun and back. ...Actually I overbuild my landers so much this isn\'t a problem, but it is for those who like efficiency and all that. 631) When your bottom stage clips directly through the rest of your craft and the exhaust pulls every single part off of each other. Fun times.

Did somebody say Mun?! Here\'s my first successful Munshot rocket in .16, the Arctis 3. Following a mishap in which Jeb\'s prototype Arctis 3 exploded into thousands of pieces, Bill was chosen to be the first Kerbonaut on the Mun. Here\'s a shot of a prototype on the pad. Following a textbook flight, Bill successfully pulled off a dark-side landing, no small feat for a single pilot. Here\'s Bill at the foot of his lander, and a shot taken from an external camera as he returned to his capsule after a 20-minute EVA. After a whirlwind development cycle, a follow-up to the Arctis 3 was devised, the aptly named Arctis 4. A fundamentally sound design allowed the lander to be quickly put into Kerbin orbit for a test flight, shown here with the intrepid Bill at it again. As it turned out, the test rocket designed to put the Arctis 4 into suborbit was capable enough that the Arctis 4 lander system could attempt a landing. ((Yes, all of my landers take me from low suborbit to the Mun and back... I don\'t see a problem. :I)) Shortly after touching down on the rim of a crater, the crew took this historic photograph, the first depicting more than one Kerbonaut on the munar surface. While Jeb inspected the Arctis\' engine systems, Bill flew to the very lip of the crater and took this rather scenic photograph. Following some more scientific experiments, the crew of Arctis 4-M1 will return home within a week.

577) When your rocket decides it\'d much rather tilt towards the launch tower than fly straight up, despite being perfectly symmetrical.

544) When the wind-rushing sound takes less than a half a second to reach its peak pitch and volume. 545) When your spaceplane is sitting at a 45-degree up angle before you touch anything. 546) When said spaceplane hits the lower atmosphere when coming down from a 990 m/s speedrun, and your engines do their best chromatic impression of Big Bird. 547) When you legitimately consider a spin-stabilized lander. 548) When your second stage has the same number of engines as the first. 549) When your flight plan includes a powered backflip in-atmosphere. 550) When you get your watch out to measure the time between frames on launch. 551) When you get a clock without a second hand out to measure the time between frames on launch.

Yeah, once you\'ve done a retrograde burn for long enough, and you\'re on a slow descent, you can actually see the direction-of-travel thing scoot around as you fiddle with the translation thrusters. Oh, and always have at least eight RCS thrusters: four as close to the top as you can, and four just about on the bottom. If your ship\'s heavier, add four more above and below each group, nearly touching. Personally, I\'ve never done an orbit around the Mun when pulling a landing. I just goose the throttle on my TMI burn so that the entry and 'exit' vectors are as close to each other as possible, then do burns at 1 million, 500k, 20k, and 10k to keep my speed under ~400 m/s. At 5000 meters or so I slow down to 30 m/s, and once the ground rolls around I\'m doing like half a meter per second. If you\'ve got a ridiculously overbuilt lander (which I do-- see picture) and you keep your speed low, you can land on almost any surface, dark side or light side. And since this monster has a separate return stage, you don\'t have to worry about having enough fuel for returns or aborts. It\'s incredibly handy, and a total of three stages! If anyone wants this rocket and lander which work incredibly well (and have an inordinate amount of fuel), just let me know and I\'ll post the .craft and a more detailed tutorial. Have fun! Oh, and how in the heck do you post an image? Can\'t seem to get it to work. Never mind, thanks imgur!

Yeah, judging by my ~50% success/swirly-twirly-explosion ratio, it probably IS more luck than design. The only reasons I thought it was a thrust thing were the way it goes apeshit after the fuel runs out (which is probably just because it\'s in thin air, herpaderp) and because a five-engined earlier model wasn\'t as well balanced as the E4 over there is. Hooray for lucky accidents!

Call me crazy, but I\'ve actually found that an inordinate amount of engines seems to help with controllability. For example, my Ulan-E4 has 10 engines on a tiny chassis, arranged in a fat rectangle with one at the nose to keep the beast from parking on its tail on the runway. As stable as I could ever hope for, and I\'ve clocked the thing going at somewhere around 964 m/s at altitude. ;D On a related note, if you\'re ever gunning to go fast in a turbojet aircraft, keep your altitude around the second white line in the second blue section (sorry, my altitude indicator dies on ascent, that\'s all I\'ve got). Any higher and the engines suffocate, any lower... Well, your speed gets capped at ~700 m/s at the edge of the lower atmosphere, and you can start roasting weenies on your innermost engine nacelles. Try taking the E4 for a spin, you might have some fun! And you\'ll probably beat my speed record on your first flight because I\'m terrible at piloting. Edit: Oh, and canards. I haven\'t flown a successful jet yet without the wings in the back and canards as far up as I can push them.

Definitely a good idea to read that series. I mean, the world\'s dominated by giant mobile cities. That eat each other. Worth a read.

Oh boy, another jet speed record challenge! Here\'s the latest test flight of my Ulan-E4 that I have screenshots of. Unfortunately, the ejection system didn\'t work on this flight, and so we have three dead kerbonauts. Still, 932 m/s! Or 938. I\'ve gone faster in this plane, but I forgot to take a shot. Record title: World Airspeed Record Record Stastic: 938 m/s Version: 0.15 Screenshots: Attached. Mods used: None, like a normal lazy person.

I got up to 877 m/s last night testing this design, after noodling about and wasting half my fuel. It was still accelerating when I ran out of fuel, so I\'m going to try to break that record later.