Max Grant

No Iron Maiden, though now that you mention it, I think I'll have to rip Piece of Mind to listen to while I am chained to my powershell console. Also, I made it to Minmus last night, again with the invaluable help of your ASAS parts, but unfortunately Jeb got all upside-down and had to back into the command module. Plus, I learned that Kerbals are not indestructible little people after all, as in don't jump quite so high up and then try to land without any fuel in your jetpack. Don't do it. Unless you really wanna, of course!

Ok, using Menecroth's worthless junk ASAS module, I have now actually made it to the Mun. I knew you'd be good at this stuff! Now, I think I have to like work tomorrow or something. Geez.

Oh, the parts work great, and are not why my rockets explode. My rockets explode because i design and fly them poorly. I think what is going on is I'm applying far too much thrust and when the atmo drag fades off the resulting sudden acceleration just asplodes it all sideways. That, and after too many struts added to keep things rigid, my CPU slows to a pathetic crawl and I get irritated and close the game. It is very nice to have a properly-sized ASAS module for them, as my piloting and keeping-things-straight skills suck ferociously.

Sir, I have installed your excellent parts and I wish to report that after several violent (edit: and very exciting) explosions, I am still unable to get a rocket into orbit, but at least it explodes in a nice straight line. Also, about the thirty or forty pounds of cheese -- high-fiber cereal seems to be helping and I have done a fair job of stitching my ruptured eardrum together. As for the parents, I often question them as well. "Can you please send more monies?" lol@that, your bro

I know this: telling me \'it can\'t be done\' just makes me want to do it all the more. I suspect most Kerbal players are cut from the same cloth -- look at how insanely detailed and difficult this game is! It is entirely about the challenge of \'I bet you can\'t do it!\'

+1000. Without Apollo, neither Intel, nor Apple nor Microsoft would have existed -- at least, not as we know them today. I work in IT and I\'ve been aware of the major contributions of the space program for a long time. Of course, what I love about this game is that it\'s coming along at a time when I see space exploration in a renaissance. I\'ll never be an astronaut, but I\'ll happily take being a Kerbalnaut, and I sincerely hope this game inspires a whole generation of real astronauts. EDIT: In the early 1980\'s my dad modified a Chevy van with a bunch of cool things, and one of the things he did was get an onboard computer which we would use to calculate mileage and other things. Playing with that DSKY simulator strongly reminds me of how that little thing used to work. Very cool. I have no idea what kind of computer it was, who made it, or even how much it was. It was just another weird toy my Dad somehow got hold of.

Vincent\'s pic of the terrain looks totally different than mine. The pyramids you see in my pics are from 0.14 (I think) and extend quite a ways off from the central point. When I was last there, it looked as if someone had intentionally placed like a series of 'spokes' radiating out from the pole. I just have to go back to see what is really up. The Mun looks like it was re-done between 0.14 and 0.15 and I have not fully re-explored it.

Hell, I want that on MY car, which is a Saturn SL2.

If you really want to get away from it all, I suggest lots of fuel tanks in your final stage, and the ion engine. Also, when I wanted to get up some wicked speed, I used the mun to gravity-assist. I one time got both the Mun and Minmus. By the time I passed Minmus, I was hauling ass so fast that the entire encounter lasted less than 7 minutes. You will encounter the Kraken if i am not mistaken. A complex ship at high speeds is well-nigh uncontrollable due to the limitations of the math, so get your delta-v built up before you slingshot, and eject all stages except your capsule/mechjeb. Also, endeavor to get your craft\'s final path in the same direction as the orbit of Kerbin -- you will acquire all of Kerbin\'s velocity, as well as your own. I keep hoping that one of the surprise features in 0.16 will be a final fix of the Kraken so we can all enjoy pushing the envelope even harder!

WOW, I only knew about this because Menecroth is my bro -- and posted pics on FB. Now must try! My question is, when docking is implemented, do we then get a refinery.part?

i launch straight up, then watch the navball. When it switches from surface to orbit, the yellow circle always moves over a couple of degrees, and I point my ship into the circle. Depending on how much fuel my first liquid stage has left, I often watch my apopsis(apokerb?) until it reaches the desired altitude. Usually the way i build rockets, I try to be out of fuel in the first stage when that happens, and I then eject the lower stage, and wait until I\'m almost at apopsis to fire the orbit burn. My mileage often varies, as I am a terrible pilot.

You know I never recorded them and I have re-installed the game and lost my save file since I was there. However, I can tell you that the Arch I was at is on the Kerbin-facing side of the Mun. You should go there when it is day on that side. There is a VERY large dark crater whose northern edge pretty much lines up with the munar equator, which lies more in the eastern half of the Mun\'s Kerbin-facing side. The Arch is on a prominent hill on the northern edge of that crater. So, if you get into an equatorial orbit, you are certain to pass over it. Orbit at anything under say 8,000 meters and you can eyeball it from there. Use the muon detector plugin and you\'ll have no trouble finding it. I understand there may be a matching arch on the far side of the Mun, though I have not tried to find it yet. Good hunting!

Dear Lord. My 13-year-old daughter has this whole pony thing going on too. She\'s an artist and is right this very moment in my living room painstakingly creating a gorgeous digital drawing of some of her own pony characters, which she intends to enter into some online contest in just under a day. I will mention the decals thing to her. I bet she\'d be happy to draw 1,000,000 more pony pics (in between her Soul Eater-like pics she also likes to draw) to make the Bronies on KSP jump for joy.

I have been wondering if those were fixed, or pseudo-randomly generated. VERY AWESOME. i still keep getting Bill and Bob and Jeb pretty often. I think right now they are orbiting the Mun on the Kublab in my persistent game. Of course, I end up re-installing fresh almost every release just to get all the custom parts updated correctly, which probably accounts for why I keep seeing them.

Well, it looks like they\'ve changed the terrain, and it now looks even more interesting. I must return. I have three spam in a can orbiting right now (saved game, been busy with work & house repairs this week) looking for artifacts. I guess I need to get back to them and do some landing, and looking at, stuff. Got a rover on the flight, so I will be able to explore more than one area. This game just never ever gets old. Always something new to look at or figure out. Fraking LOVE it!

Mine: http://qkme.me/3ppfqe

MOAR EXPLOSHUNS!

i dunno about youse guise, but I cause PLEN-TEE of my own failures all the time, and they are plenty exciting and usually with violent explosions. I sort of endorse this notion, but between the slapdash Wile E. Coyote engineering that this game explicitly encourages, and the Buzz Lightyear vibe of the characters themselves, this game has all of the slapstick of those old film reels of wacky (and unworkable) airplane designs that they always play when someone\'s doing a documentary on the Wright Brothers. I was looking at some sequence of screenshots, and I thought it would be a blast to put some of that rinky-dinky piano stuff to a clip of Kerbal creations blowing up, flying off in unexpected directions, falling over flat on the pad, and so forth. I mean, I\'ve had launches where one of my boosters just falls off, FALLS THE F**K OFF, leaving me in a world of hurt and etcetera. I have also done launches where my main liquid engine is inexplicably left behind on the pad. And now that I\'ve played with the fixed camera mod, it is really enjoyable to switch to one of those views and watch my whole rocket shake like a three-day drunk. One recent launch I did, I re-launched about six times with various canards and strakes tried out because inevitably, the moment I detached my SRBs my ship would enter a near-perfect axial spin, which I\'ve never seen happen before, and I COULD NOT get rid of it. I got it with three boosters. I got it with four boosters. I got it with strakes, canards . . . I eventually settled on a four-way symmetry with the canards mounted lower on the final stage, and that finally killed it. So, I\'m not sure we need to request additional programmed failures. Interestingly enough I just spent about 3 days going through every Wiki article I could find on the space program. Invariably the explosions and disasters in the real space program turn out to be because some doofus forgot to close a switch, remove a tool, or in some of the more painfully (and unnecessary) events, people routinely ignored a known, dangerous problem because it didn\'t hit them the first 8-10 times they let it slide -- until it literally blew up in their (and their poor pilot and crews\') faces. So most of the time, problems with rocket equipment are due to technician error or engineering boondoggle.

Gratuitous umlats are always welcome when silliness is required, and I don\'t know if you realize this, but this is a VERY silly game. I mean that with the utmost respect for the devs . . . I have not had this much fun with a game in over a decade. Not even Portal has taken this much of my personal time.

@jayther: LOL, I should set that whole series to 'Also Sprach Zarthursta.'

@brians200: the lights come with the cart model/plugin. At least on my lil\' HP laptop, they are a major performance hit to the game. The more lights, the draggier it gets. I try not to land in darkness. At the time, the 'H' key turned on the headlights, which also turns on the RCS nozzles for firing 'down' which I usually do to fine-tune my landing on the Mun, so every time I hit the RCS, the lights would go off, or on. A large 'jerk' would follow in the rendering. I think now the headlamps are keyed to 'U' so that\'s much better. @nova: I figured it was something like that. Looked far more like a rendering/wrapping artifact than a deliberate effort to make pyramids. It is nonetheless super-cool and I hope y\'all don\'t try to fix it.

Landed at the Arch. This second series is a long-range MechJeb probe I sent out to see how far, and how fast I could get a ship going. I happened to launch it in a sort of 'Grand Tour' trajectory and got a gravity assist from both the Mun and Minmus. Passing Minmus, I was hauling ass. Look at the timestamps and you can see I was watching Minmus whip by like you\'d watch a hill or landmark on the interstate. It was just cool. The last few shots you can see me firing my final burn at Perimin to make the most of the gravity assist (as I\'d read was best to do in several articles regarding real-world probes like Voyager, etc). I was in Minmus\' vicinity for all of about 7 minutes . . .

Well, when I visited the Munar north pole in .14, I found a whole series of pyramids. I believe they are the result of the model being stitched together at this point

FOR. THE. WIN.

i pronounce it 'Raymond Luxury Yacht' with a hard 'ch' sound.