ammonia_ocean

When you're studying solubility constants in chemistry, see "Ksp" on a test, and end up getting immediately distracted by thoughts of Bob, Jeb, and Bill.

Not to mention when you mess around with the plot of the novel thing you're writing just so you can have a part in space.

When your notebooks and binders are covered with drawings of rocket designs that you and your friends have showed each other. When you play Mass Effect 2 and wonder "where are the deorbit burns"?

Parachuting down for a Duna landing. The skycrane detaches after landing and flies off with solid-fuel motors. Is it acceptable to post pictures here that contain anomalous features?

I was trying to build an SSTO craft and got frustrated, so I just slapped a Mainsail on top of it, opened the throttle, and hit space. It went about 30m before flipping over, crashing, and exploding... but this canard flew (literally) out of the fireball and off into the sky. It left at some ridiculous speed (~400m/s) and continued to gain speed while ascending, so for a minute I actually thought that I might have just pulled a Jules Verne and created an explosion powerful enough to put it into orbit. Sadly it ran out of air at ~10.5km, peaked at around 500m/s, and plunged back to Kerbin, to splash down in the ocean some 25km from the launch site.

This has been one of the most amazing and addicting games I've ever played (which is saying something, given that I usually prefer role-playing games and shooters). I like to play at being creative and mess around with exploding things, and I couldn't think of a game more suited to that than KSP. My only complaint is that I got introduced to it a few weeks before exams... meh, who needs college. TO SPACE!

Traverse Space Agency, a large and powerful multinational organization. Since it's widely regarded as the pinnacle of Kerbal intellectual and scientific development, its engineers and scientists are free to do whatever they want in the knowledge that it'll be automatically regarded as genius (c.f. its brilliant satellite docking... I mean, ASAT missile test). Its top priority is bringing Kerbals home safely. Its second priority is launching things that look cool. Preventing property damage and recovering launch vehicles... ehh, that's somewhere down the list. I started off naming most of the spaceships after Greco-Roman stuff. Then I started running out of stuff, so I named things I landed on the mün after marine life. Now I just call stuff what it's supposed to do, with a few exceptions.

Slap a flag on the Mün, then use flag planting as an incentive to finally send manned missions to Minmus and Duna. Those manned missions will definitely be rovers with seats on them.

One of the best uses I've found for MechJeb is executing particularly tricky or precise maneuver nodes. Say what you will, but it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to manually maneuver a 64+Mainsail using the magic torque from a probe body.

Oh yeah, I heard about that. The dangers of collaboration without communication...

The "Perigee" is a mid-size (~1t), unmanned scientific rover purpose-built for exploration on Duna. It has 6 fixed solar panels for driving up steep hills or rough terrain, and two SP-A deployable panels for when it's stationary or moving on flat ground. A skycrane brings it down with 4 parachutes and a drogue, then decouples on landing and uses 9 sepratrons to fly away and crash.

The combination of this and the whole forgot-to-extend-panels thing is the entire reason why I eventually caved in and downloaded Hyperedit.

I sadly didn't get any screenshots, but when I was placing a Protractor-equipped satellite in orbit, I found that my first-stage engine still had quite a bit of fuel even after I had gotten everything nice and smooth and orbit-y. So, being the eco-conscious fellow I am, I began pointing my satellite retrograde. I was about to fire up the engines when I realized I was going to deorbit the whole thing, instead of just the first stage, so I quickly decoupled the first stage to rectify my mistake. Using the probe core I had thoughtfully placed aboard, I took control of the discarded stage, carefully reoriented it so that it faced exactly retrograde, pushed the throttle wide open, lit the engine... and proceeded to blow my satellite into tiny, tiny pieces. Protip: Make sure you point your stages in a new direction after decoupling them, unless you want to fire off an impromptu kinetic kill vehicle. Or if that's too much trouble, you could just go with a good old-fashioned staging error. (Do these ever happen in real life, or are only Kerbanauts stupid enough to light their fourth stage and decouple their second stage simultaneously?)

My main issue with MechJeb is that it's not very good at autolanding from orbit. It tends to waste fuel, screw up the deorbit burn, perform endless plane change burns, etc.– usually, I have to perform the deorbit burn myself and work out the trajectory, then, if I still feel like using MechJeb, only hand over control for the final braking burn. Does this happen with any of you guys?

No problem! Have fun with the base

Kerbals sometimes respond to these crashes with a joy that seems almost sadistic.

That moment when, on final approach to the Mün, you deploy your landing gear and realize that it doesn't clear the engine nozzle...

To echo others, I really don't think that this started off as a bad thread. OP wanted a legitimate discussion about MechJeb and its capabilities, plus a friendly exchange of ideas about how people use it. Admittedly it's a touchy subject, but in the end, MechJeb's still just another mod and we can still have fun talking about it as such.

Not denying that it is a selfish attitude, but I think that you may be misinterpreting what he's saying. I'm reasonably sure (could be wrong) that he's just explaining what he thinks of the viewpoint of those who oppose the use of MechJeb and similar addons, as opposed to actively supporting said viewpoint.

I like to do things first manually, then once I've done them manually, decide whether or not to use MechJeb based pretty much on what I feel like doing (The role-playing justification I use is that data collected from the manual flight can be used by my Kerbal software engineers to develop MechJeb programs for accomplishing the same task). I almost always use it for docking (my first manual docking was a terrible, terrible ordeal), and sometimes use it for landing and orbital maneuvers. My guideline has always been "what would be more fun?" KSP is a game; I'm not about to sit in front of a computer tapping WASD for four hours because I designed a cool-looking ship that handles like crap and I can't get it in the right position to dock, but it's not really any more entertaining just clicking "autopilot enable" and sitting down with a cup of coffee to watch the game do everything for you. Tedious or annoyingly difficult stuff, I'm more than happy to use MechJeb for, as long as I've shown that I can do it first, but it just feels boring to sit back and let the game play itself.

How about an experiment platform? Put some sciency-looking stuff (like batteries, antennae, and science equipment) on some kind of flat surface, then put it on top of a small surface tower/dock it to the space station. If you want, put some ladders on it so that Kerbals can check the progress of their research.

Hey! I started playing KSP about two or three weeks ago and am absolutely amazed by the size and depth of the community. I can already tell that I'm going to have a great time!

After weeks of testing, KSC had finally developed a suitable craft, creatively named "Manned Munar Lander III", with the glorious mission of... landing a manned (Kerbaled?) vehicle on the Mün. For the position of crewing the one-man lander, no other options presented themselves but distinguished Kerbanaut Raybin Kerman, commander of three space-station resupply missions and consequently the most experienced pilot in Kerbin history. He followed flawlessly in the path of münar flyby pilot Chad Kerman, plugging data collected by his predecessor into the state-of-the-art MechJeb autopilot system in order to perform a smooth orbital transfer. (Yeah, it was kind of pointless automating a münar flight, but I had never done it before and I just wanted to see what would happen.) Entering into a smooth, flawless equatorial orbit with almost a full Rockomax Jumbo-64 fuel tank and Mainsail engine aboard the service module, he paused for a moment to enjoy the view. Command told him to stop messing around, ditch the service module (still with a couple km/s of delta-V aboard), and perform his deorbit burn. He obediently did so, and landed perfectly (read: danced his ship around a cosmic game of spin-the-bottle until he managed to extend his lander legs the right way) after a few minor hiccups (read: crashes and reloaded quicksaves). With light feet, he danced atop the dusty, space-kissed regolith of the virgin münar surface, took vital data samples for the science techs back at KSC, and reascended his vehicle's ladder. That was when he noticed the fuel gauge. That worthless, bulky service module with its thousands of liters of fuel, now nothing more than a fresh crater on the pitted münar surface, was looking pretty important right then. After a few more weeks (three-ish hours of gameplay) and many frantic reassurances to Raybin, a better-designed three-man rescue craft (incorporating the novel innovations of radial-mount engines) was sitting on the launchpad. Naturally, one Kerbal had to get out to provide space for the newcomer, and Lunfel Kerman happily volunteered for the job. He leaped joyously out of the 80-meter rocket to his death on the concrete launchpad below. Minor technical difficulties aside, the Munar Rescue Vehicle was landing smoothly with the aid of MechJeb data gathered by Raybin on his own manual landing. It touched down, Raybin got out of his ship to meet the rescue crew, and... ...well, hope he likes long-distance running. (I didn't think to use his EVA pack on the first try, and I wasn't confident enough in my flying abilities to try "hopping" either vehicle. By the time I had accidentally reloaded the quicksave from the MRV's initial landing halfway through, started the journey again, skidded Raybin on his face for 5km using his personal RCS, and walked the rest of the way, I had spent two two-and-a-half hour sessions just watching a Kerbanaut waddle across endless grayish hills. Luckily I managed to keep him walking in the KSP window while I surfed the Web in Firefox, but it was still ridiculous.) Fortunately, the rest of the flight was much less eventful. After a Minmus flyby and EVA, the MRV reentered Kerbin and splashed down safely. Sadly, it was too late for Raybin. He had been driven mad, partly by isolation on the Mün, partly by having to run a 10k in an EVA suit, and partly by spending almost a month crammed in a capsule with fellow Kerbanauts Alan and Lanfel. Upon landing, he wrenched the hatch open, laughing maniacally, and greeted the recovery teams by ripping off the capsule's AR202 MechJeb module and balancing it on his head. (...yeah, I don't know either.)

Thanks for all the replies! Sorry I didn't get back to you until today, I'm a bit unfamiliar with the posting system. The problem is now fixed.

I'm fairly new to KSP, and recently docked a Hitchhiker Storage Container to my space station. I put a kerbal into EVA, flew him to the container door, and made him enter the container. However, when I tried to get him out, I couldn't select the container door to bring up the list of crew names. I tried with other ships and parts of the station, then tried left-clicking, right-clicking, control-clicking, command-clicking, fn-clicking, shift-clicking, alt-clicking, and pretty much every other key combination I could think of. Only once did I actually manage to bring up the list of crew names for a ship, and that was with a Mark 1-2 command module. I left-clicked the door, changed the ship name and icon, and when the menu was gone, the crew roster was up. I was unable to repeat this with either the same ship or others, however. Does anyone know what's going on, or how to fix it? (I'm using the latest version, for Mac, with the MechJeb, Quantum Strut, and Subassembly Loader mods.)