JeanHavoc

When I first saw this image I thought it looked a bit off. Then I realized why; Skylab never looked that way in its operational configuration and seeing it as it was intended to be threw me off a little. In retrospect, I wonder if the Russians ever had to repair any of their old Salyut stations due to launch complications? Might be interesting to find out!

So I've been doing a ton of crew rescues and tourist hauling lately. The work has made me quite a bit better at orbital rendezvous than I've ever been in the past. It does get a bit grindy though - especially since I basically use the same craft every time. Namely this thing: It can land on Mun, orbit Minmus and bring everyone back alive all in a single trip with fuel to spare. You can't see it in this image but the Crew Cabin and Capsule are connected with Clamp-o-Tron Jr.'s, mostly for role play considerations - I think of it as a conduit between the two that the Kerbals can pass through. In any case, it works. My only complaint is the Kerbin system is now becoming clogged with derelict capsules of every sort. I'm not sure what to do about this, to tell you the truth. Plus I'm still trying to figure out how all these unfortunate Kerbonauts ended up stranded in the first place.

The color of the surface of Minmus has always reminded me of the green patina that is associated with well weathered copper. I'm not sure how you could get an entire planet covered in such a metallic overlayer, but it's more plausible than iced cream and or frosty treats I should think. Perhaps the "lakes" represent molten copper that solidified over time. I mean, why not?

I feel I should clarify here that I've tried suborbital reentry going East, North and Retrograde - the result (without drogue parachutes) is always the same - explosive death. At least, that is, when I don't have a rocket powerful enough to give me a very long arc, like say half way across the planet's surface.

There are certain science benefits to heading north, including landing at the pole. Since, in this case I wasn't planning to go to orbit anyway I felt there wasn't a need to go the usual eastern route. It's just an expedient way to keep things moving forward in the early going.

I never really suggested "more power" was the solution. I tried trajectories that peaked at 40 Km and covered more than a fourth of the circumference of Kerbin and still blew up on impact without the extra parachutes. That must have been something like 900 Km or more and the result was the same as if I had gone up to 70 Km and only covered say half that distance. I consider the matter solved as the drogues work perfectly well; it just wasn't an intuitive solution for me. Orbital rendezvous and rescue, easy - this, very hard. Strange how that works out sometimes.

I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I can tell you the trajectory was not covering (as mentioned above) half the planet. I think my definition of "very steep" and what others have presented here may be rather different. But in any case, the point I was getting at - more broadly - was in the difficulty of replicating a truly intermediate mission profile between atmospheric and orbital flight. When I return from orbit I aim for about a 25 Km periapsis which has never given me any complications For very simplistic designs that barely hit 40 Km of altitude I'm not going fast enough to encounter these problems. I feel like KSP is rather nudging me to go from atmospheric directly to orbital flight without any in-between, which is certainly doable at early tech levels. I think perhaps the rocket I was using was simultaneously too powerful and not powerful enough, including as it did an LV-T45 engine and around ~ 2,500 m/s of D/v (per KER). It could get me to 70 Km, and give me some horizontal velocity but not nearly enough as it turned out. I felt like it was a perfectly fine incremental design, I think the game might disagree.

I'm early in Career mode. I'm wanting to do a simple suborbital flight wherein I reach the atmosphere and come right back down. The ascent and reentry go fine; heat shield works properly, rocket exhibits no peculiar instability. The problem is on the way down; namely I'm going too fast and by the time it's safe to deploy my Mk16 parachute, I'm too close to the ground and I end up making my own crater in the surface. Now, I follow a launch profile that's similar to what I'd do going to orbit - and my path is a wide arc covering a fair bit of distance between KSC and, in this case, the northern areas of the continent. I've attempted to slow my rocket's speed, I've changed the apoapsis from 70 Km to 50 Km to 40 Km all with the same end result; and again I apply plenty of horizontal thrust, but obviously not enough. The common factor is that I exceed 1,000 m/s of velocity on the way up, which puts me "over budget" if you will coming down. All I can think to do is to build a rocket capable of reaching orbit and then simply fail to do so, in order to fudge what should otherwise be an intermediate step between atmospheric flight and orbiting the planet. My vessel is just a Mk1 Pod, a Mk16 parachute and a 1.25 meter heat shield. That's all. Update: Well the solution, obviously, is to use drogue parachutes. I tried everything else and no re-entry profile works without them. That's fine, lesson learned. I'm still curious though if this is really working as designed, particularly when considering the constraints of early career mode.

So, I've played KSP a bit since 1.1 was released. I haven't got any of the (newer) updates but I do have a question. It would appear that nowadays the most difficult mission profile possible is a simple suborbital launch from KSC itself. I'm find it easier to get to Eeloo than to go up to 70 Km and come back down without exploding on impact. I'm -not- going straight up and coming down again either; in fact I'm finding even an apoapsis of 50 Km to be too much. Although it seems to be more dependent upon the velocity I reach - anything over 1,000 m/s prior to decent is a guaranteed death sentence. This occurs even if I'm just coming down with a one-kerbal capsule, heat shield and parachute. This isn't a huge problem but I like to progress in a natural way to orbit and I'm finding myself stumped by this problem. Any advice, and is this how things are supposed to be? Somehow I have a hard time imaging Freedom 7 being way more difficult than Apollo 8, but maybe I'm wrong there.

I would say the most important part of it for me is, I just can't be bothered to relearn everything at this point. There's no incentive - moreover, to me the earlier product wasn't broken and didn't need fixing. It did exactly what I wanted it to do and gave me a level of challenge that was fine - I wouldn't have been opposed to implementing heat damage and/or making incremental adjustments to that model but Squad has gone in another direction. Now after three years I have to ask myself why I want to sit down and start over - to do the same missions to the same places all over again? I mean I liked the game, but it's not like my life revolves around it. I don't have any angst or hate against KSP, as I said. I feel I got my money's worth and then some. As for me, I can't get to orbit; nor can I find any tutorials on how to get to orbit with just the basic parts available in the first 3 tech tree nodes. I have plenty of money but no science; purchasing the EVA upgrade is doable, but at this point redundant. I've watched Scott Manley's tutorial on flight, and I get his points - but he used parts I don't have and can't get without an enormous level of grinding in the form of tiny science returns (which I simply don't want to do). Once you get above the atmosphere from what I know you must get some kind of heat shield in order to, you know, live, so the fourth choice tech-wise is already made for you. I've lost kerbals within my first couple of flights due to the rockets coming down spinning due to wind and losing their parachutes; and this is before I could get decouplers. I've had capsules slam into the ground because I deployed the 'chutes too late - despite following the tooltip info which claimed deploying earlier was risky or suicidal. I use fins on my rockets, they seem to do little good, the rocket usually falls over of its own accord and spins out of control. I never built super asymmetrical monstrosities even before the aero changes, so its not like I'm trying to fly cubes into the Stratosphere. This is just frustrating; however wrong or fanciful the previous model was I at least understood what was going on; and this to say nothing of the changes Squad has been making post 1.0. Why should I keep doing this? Until I have a reason I see no purpose in -not- stepping away.

I'm pretty much done with KSP I think. And this isn't really a bad thing. I spent seven U.S. Dollars to enjoy a game for three plus years. I got my money's worth ultimately. The thing is I don't want more realism, or more challenge in the game; for me it was fine just as it was prior to version 1. All the extra layers of complexity combined with no new places to go just add up to frustration on my part. I know most of you (apparently, anyway?) like the additional real world details, but for me it's just stuff that I don't want to have to deal with. The game isn't fun anymore and I have other things to do in life rather than try to figure out how to play all over again. To hear some of the comments around here it's like a significant segment of the player base wants to require a degree in Physics and an internship at CalTech to be able to make sense of the game's mechanics. For those of you who want to be required to recreate MESSENGER style missions in KSP, involving multiple gravity assists, years of transit time with zero room for error, excelsior to you. That's awesome, but its not for me. Perhaps in the future when and or if KSP gets more planets, and or more stuff to do with the new features I might be convinced to take another look. For now I'm content to move on (more or less). I have no bitterness or angst, like I said, I got what I paid for and then some.

I have never flown by or landed on Bop. Not sure why, I keep thinking about how I'd put together a mission expressly to land there but I've not really gotten the plan off the ground yet. Not that I don't want to go; I'm sure I'll get there eventually.

Well that explains that. I somehow set a thrust limiter that was holding up my rocket without realizing it. At any rate - at least to contribute here it all seems pretty interesting so far. Flying without maneuver nodes or patched conics is a pain though, I think in the future I might upgrade that capability first, despite the cost, it just seems really worth it to me. Also, I don't get much use out of my non-Pilot Kerbals early in the game - but I imagine the scientist will be pretty good to have along once I get two and three seat capsules/landers. The Engineer I'm not as sure about yet, repacking chutes could be a useful benefit down the line though. Anyway, I'm having a good time.

I also do not have the Steam version of KSP. Mostly because when I bought my copy there -was- no Steam version, and I've just elected not to change over. Primarily this is because I see no actual benefit to making the move. As it is you can put KSP into your Steam menu and launch it from there, and get the Steam overlay and take screenshots in Steam all without giving up your Store copy. Unless/until they can show me an actual benefit to doing something differently, I'm going to keep things as they are.

At this point, the only object in the Kerbol system that i have never encountered at all is Bop. I actually had to research that a bit since I thought I might have had a flyby or some such in the past, but evidently not. I suppose I'll need to remedy that situation in the future, perhaps with a lander of some sort.