Adam Novagen

Many thanks to the workarounds being posted here, but for my part the downside of the launch option method is that the Steam overlay fails to launch in-game, which of course means no convenient screenshots for me. In my case, I ended up adding KSP_x64.exe separately as a non-Steam game, which allows me to bypass the launcher and keep the overlay. Not sure if this would work for non-Windows users, but I'm guessing it would as I imagine Steam has that functionality across all OS versions.

Well, even Felsmak never said to stop, so with that in mind I guess I'll continue as I have been, but with a little belt-tightening. The series is close to wrapping up anyway at this point, Probably got like four more episodes before the colony has everything I want it to, and then I do a [super secret special mission] for a little finale. Thank you both for advising here, I'm grateful for the time and though you took! (With regards to the accent: it's no surprise you can't place it. It's a mixed-up accent gained from being born in America, spending early childhood in England, then living the rest of my life in America with my half-British family and watching loads of BBC sitcoms. I'm very odd.)

I'd like to ask you folks something, and I can assure you I won't be offended by an honest answer, good or bad. Is this mission series worth continuing/finishing? I mean, I enjoy playing KSP in general, that's not gonna change whether I'm recording it or not. See, I've been around the YouTube scene a full year now, and haven't really gotten anywhere in that time. At first it's easy to assume that you just haven't been noticed much yet, what with the Let's Play scene being so crowded these days, but as time goes on and nothing much changes you have to ask yourself whether it's really that your videos just aren't that interesting. I like to think they're decent, but it's almost impossible to be objective about your own work, and because I get so little activity there's no proper way of knowing whether my content's actually entertaining or not. So I hereby put the question to all of you lot: is it any good? Is it very good? Not very good? Am I funny, or boring? Do I waste too much time, should I cut more out of the videos, or is it nice to have a full "journal-style" playthrough? Making videos like these takes a significant amount of time and effort, both in recording and editing. Now if they really are halfway decent then I'll gladly keep at it, and improve what you think could be improved, but if they're really just a big snooze then I might as well save myself some labour hours and play KSP quietly like I used to.

OH MY GOD THE HITCHHIKER CONTAINER HAS AN IVA NOW NOBODY TOLD ME ABOUT THIS HOLY FLUFFY BUNNIES THIS IS AMAZING

Picking up my feet a bit, I've sent another fuel stack out to the Laythe station. In the meantime, I intend to test out the docking capabilities of the dropship that will act as an SSTO bus between the Laythe colony and Station L.

Now that I managed to successfully get the fuel stack into orbit, the challenging part is - as always - docking it with the station. I made a bit of a hash of this rendezvous, not to mention I almost rammed the station end-on.

Having got the space stations up successfully, it's time to develop a way of getting fuel between them so that I can refuel the SSTO for getting kerbals off of Laythe, and the bus for transporting them between stations. Getting three jumbo-64 tanks' worth of fuel into orbit proved to be a bit more challenging than I'd first though, however.

I'm really getting the hang of this orbit business. For some reason, it never occurred to me to use RCS to fine-tune my orbits before; I was always trying to use my rocket motors instead. Well, not this time! Now I am finally getting good at SPACE!

Well, getting the station out to Laythe was a simple enough success. Aerobraking it... Ehhhhhhhhhhh not so much. Makes a great splash though! Thank god for quicksaves.

Finally got this show back on the road again. Space station get! Time to launch!

Just a short episode today, due to some technical problems I had to sort out. The good news is I seem to be getting close to sorting out the remaining challenges.

Sorry, I'm confused about why anyone would call the Inline Advanced Stabilizer useless. The Inline Reaction Wheels are all well and good, but they only use torque to keep your ship locked in position. The IAS (and its larger counterpart, the Advanced S.A.S. Module, Large) will use all available control systems to keep your ship aligned; RCS, wing flaps, thrust vectoring, everything! Understandably that's not always necessary, but it's still bloody useful.

Hopefully it wasn't too disappointing; maybe I should land a stock exchange there too so I can picket it, eh?

Turns out the Duna launch was... Well, a fluke of the physics engine. Upon trying to re-launch for Laythe, I hit disaster upon disaster, and I'm reasonably sure I lost my sanity somewhere around the fifth launch attempt.

Our moon is not "the Moon." "Moon" is not a proper noun; Jupiter has more than 15 of the buggers, but while they're named Io, Europa, Ganymede and so forth, they are all moons.

... Which would be why Squad named them "Photovoltaic Panels," and not, in fact, "Solar Panels." astropapi, while I might have sympathized with you over the sheer magnitude of replies you generated, but I kind of left your corner when you came back to post a numbered list of retorts, complete with a self-generated meme. Using K may be "just wrong" to you, and that's fine, but if you're going to rant about it in a public place you must accept the inevitable backlash. I hate to say it, but... You kaused this yourself. :I

♪♫ How could this happen to me... ♬♪

Personally I think Pineapple's nailed it.

I feel like this thread is accidentally derailing into the old Minecraft-to-other-game comparison, and I don't want to push that along, but I still feel it's worth saying that a lot of the encouraging atmosphere in KSP comes from the close relationship between players and devs. I've loved Minecraft for many years, but Mojang is notoriously bad at two-way community interaction, for instance the fact that they've been talking about adding a proper modding API for years but have yet to even make steps toward doing so. Squad, on the other hand, is consistently enlisting the best-and-brightest in the modding community to work toward improving the game as a whole, which feeds a lot of positivity back into the community. Put more simply, Mojang goes "hey guys, check out this new thing we put in! Isn't it great?" Squad, on the other hand, goes "hey guys, we put in that thing you all said was great!" I love both games, but I'll take Squad's attitude over Mojang's any day, and I firmly believe it helps attract a different type of person to the community.

I had a pretty decent fail during my ongoing mission to sustainably colonize Laythe. It didn't look like a fail, at first; Jeb was piloting a science-laden craft past Jool, and while he passed, he popped a little rover that would ultimately make its way to Laythe to test the gravity, atmosphere, and scope out a landing site. Everything went reasonably well, discounting multiple tries to find the right periapsis to aerobrake the rover into a parking orbit before landing. That is, until I finished the rover landing, went back to Jeb, and realized that his 400km Jool periapsis had slung him into a gargantuan Kerbol orbit with a periapsis over 42 years distant. I never thought I'd need more than 100,000x time acceleration, but there you go. (If anyone wants to see that ludicrous orbit, both it and the rover landing are in the last five or so minutes of this video: )Nothing I have ever done, however, compares to my horrible, horrible, HORRIBLE lack of talent at making SSTO spaceplanes.

Didn't bother combing the whole thread; has "Koins" been suggested yet?

This, definitely. KSP is, quite frankly, a game that you will never really get anywhere with if you lack at least a modicum of intelligence. The very nature of its gameplay weeds out many of the "internet neanderthal" types because they simply get bored and give up. I've already known several people who bought KSP after seeing a few cool-looking ships and comedic YouTube videos, thinking this was some kind of Garry's Mod in which they could dash around in circles, spawning dynamite under ragdolls and guffawing endlessly. Within a week of purchase, they were loudly complaining to me that they couldn't even land on Mun; I naturally linked them to Scott Manley's beginner orbital tutorial, which was the only reason I ever made it to space because, like most complete novices, I thought you had to burn-up-until-space-then-go-sideways-lots. I think two of them, at most, even bothered to watch the video, and within three weeks they stopped playing altogether.

Possibly one of the most useful things I've ever seen, thanks a mil! This ought to be sticky.

My Let's Play series to colonize Laythe has so far also brought me to Mun, Minmus, Jool, Duna and Gilly, and I would honestly have to say Laythe is a bit of a charm for me. I've had absolutely stupid amounts of luck with it, always getting an encounter when I need one despite wild and radically uncontrolled Jool orbits. The very first time I reached it, I was sending a tiny unmanned probe out, because I had yet to unlock anything better from career mode and I simply wanted to see what the fuel requirements would be like for getting me out there. This was the probe: Believe it or not, I actually nailed a successful water landing with this. The only reason it didn't survive was because after I'd landed it, my brain panicked and I failed to cut the engines at the appropriate time, making it bounce back up in the water and break itself on the way down. Since then, I've made numerous flights there, the most recent being to land the entire colony vehicle (video next week), all of which have gone relatively smoothly compared to most of my missions. So yes, I would honestly have to say that Laythe just smiles and holds its arms out every time it sees me coming.

Welp, the test run of the colony to Duna has been successful. I'm still freaking terrible at powered landings though :B