KevinW42

After taking this thing to Laythe I decided to do an (assisted) grand tour. I forgot to take screenshots for a lot of it, but here's what I got: Because I didn't really plan ahead I ended up taking kind of a weird route. It went Kerbin-Mun-Laythe-Vall-Pol-Bop-Pol-Tylo-Pol-Duna-Ike-Dres-Eeloo-Ike-Minmus-Eve-Gilly-Moho-Gilly-Kerbin.

I also just remembered that weird bug where heat transfer between the mainsail and the orange tank didn't work right so if you attached them directly together the mainsail would always overheat and explode unless you throttled it down or put another part in between.

I think 2.5m parts may have been introduced already, but they weren't available in the 0.18 demo version. (those screenshots are actually from the 0.19 full version, but I imported the craft file from my demo save.)

This is why I like making LF only spaceplanes. Probably not the most practical solution most of the time, but it just feels "cleaner" to me.

Before I knew about terminal velocity ascents I definitely took the the more boosters approach and just powered through the atmosphere instead. This is what my first Mun rocket looked like: This was before joint reinforcement too so it wobbled like a piece of spaghetti. The canards were actually necessary to stop it from folding in half.

Always make sure your center of lift is behind the center of mass. Since you say it's during reentry, a common problem with planes is that your COM often moves as you burn off fuel. So when you check to make sure your COL is behind the COM in the VAB/SPH, make sure that's the case both with fuel full and with fuel empty.

I remember playing before they added flags, so I would always design Apollo-style landers that left a descent stage behind on the surface so I could leave my mark. I also found it endlessly amusing that nosecones actually increased drag in the old souposphere. Even knowing that I still used them anyways just for the aesthetics.

According to my account I bought the game on March 31, 2013, but I played the 0.18 demo for a few weeks before that. I remember deciding that before I spent money on the extra features from the full version I wanted to make sure I was good enough to actually use them. So after achieving my first Mun landing I gave myself the goals of performing a rendezvous and dock (using landing legs to create a makeshift claw since there were no docking ports in the demo) in both Kerbin and Mun orbit, and then doing a full orbit around the Sun and returning to Kerbin to simulate an interplanetary flight (and also crashing into the Sun just because).

Same here. I recently decided it was about time for me to actually do a surface base contract with a modular base on Minmus, but the core segment had landing leg issues and kept bouncing around every time it loaded in. So when i made the connector sections I made my own landing legs with the robotics parts and something krakeney happened and somehow the hinges got flipped completely backwards into an impossible configuration that made the legs non-functional and I just gave up at that point.

There was no landing gear when I did the tests in the screenshots, but once I found a solution it worked with or without landing gear.

Autostrut wasn't the issue. Setting the servo autostrut to heaviest part did lock both of them up, but even with autostrut turned completely off on all parts I still had the problem where only one servo would move. After using my workaround with the KAL-1000 everything worked just fine, even with the servo autostrut set to root part.

I considered that, but I figured Mun would make setting up the Jool transfer simpler. Maybe I'll try Minmus next time.

Decided to give interplanetary SSTOs a try. I had exactly enough fuel to stick the landing on the first refueling stop on the Mun.

I think I ended up doing something like that in the process of trying to troubleshoot, but it didn't work for me. Though I actually did end up finding a solution, which I've edited into my previous post.

Ah, I'm still on 1.8. I guess that explains it. I think I figured out a workaround by allowing full rotation and using the KAL-1000 to set the angle instead but I'll have to test that later. (Edit) Yup, that worked. If I allow full rotation and remove the angle limits the KAL-1000 seems to control both servos just fine.