JoeNapalm

Adnard Kerman was one of the great heroes of my original save game, Jeb's greatest rival to be the first to fly a new ship or visit a new moon or planet. I built a replica TIE fighter, complete with twin ion engines, and Adnard got the tap to be the test pilot. The TIE obviously couldn't make orbit on just ion engines, so I'd strapped it to the top of a big booster system. Oh, I know what you're thinking, but the lift stage worked grandly...until I hit a big hunk of orbital debris during my orbital burn phase. Much like Darth Vader, poor Adnard spun off, out of control. Some idiot (no idea who) forgot to link the decoupler to the ABORT button, and with the help of an unfortunate Mun gravity assist, the prototype TIE fighter was tossed into a Kerbol orbit. The damage took out half the solar arrays and engines on the TIE, otherwise it could have eventually just flown home. Instead, I launched four separate automated rescue vehicles after it. Only one made it all the way to the damaged craft, and that one lacked the DV to make it back into Kerbin's SOI. Then my save game was corrupted. I lie awake, some nights, imagining the crippled TIE floating next to the out-of-fuel SERAPHIM IV DSRV, and poor Adnard, running the rescue command module in low power mode so he can watch the one VHS tape of Gilligan's Island they'd put aboard for his planned return trip, licking empty snack wrappers. Poor Adnard. -Jn-

Heh, that reminds me of a recent SSTO test, when my tilt-wing Anhinga broke up as I was testing the flight characteristics. I'd equipped it with an escape pod...which apparently broke free of the moorings, caromed around a bit, and then exploded inside the cargo bay. Thankfully the crew survived (those Mk 3 cockpits are tough!) but the irony of the life boat sinking the ship was not lost on me. -Jn-

Oh God. Oh God. What have I done?! Started a new "Career Lite" game (all the money and science, but with Contracts). Got a couple different overlapping contracts to just orbit some tourists. "Simple," I thought. "I just had the Warthog I goto the Mun and back!" I took the newly upgraded Warthog Mk II, which integrated the lift stages from my absurdly overbuilt satellite program with the landing module from the Warthog I, slapped a Hitchhiker between the Command Module and the heat shield. "Easy money!" I thought, not that I needed it. The Warthog II-H was ready to fly! I had four ladies and Jeb's cousin, Jebadoh, to take over the horizon. With so many passengers, I had to put Cindi Kermann up front. Bob was kind of sweet on her, so we bumped Bill so she could ride in the command module. Jebadoh didn't mind riding in the back with the other three ladies. Everything went so well. The Mk II was absolute overkill. I'd even made sure to add some airbrakes to keep the added mass from doing anything unpleasant to the chutes... ...the chutes... ...the chutes... ...the chutes that had been designed to de-orbit just the Command Module, not a Command Module with a Hitchhiker full of tourists bolted to the bottom. The math started clicking into place just as I was deploying the airbrakes. I didn't have the heart to tell the passengers, but Cindi must have seen the look on Bob's face when Bill called up with the numbers. We aimed for the ocean, but it didn't matter. Hit the water hard. Little Cindi, Bob, and Jeb survived, but only because the Hitchhiker acted as an airbag. The horror. The horror. (I was going to live with the mistake, plant four flags for the honorary Kerbonauts at the Space Center, but thankfully the game crashed when I tried to recover the module. The Universe couldn't live with the nightmares.) -Jn-

Been out of the loop, awhile...what mods did you use for that?! -Jn-

Any update on the multiplying buttons? EDIT: Worked around this by simply setting up the configuration I wanted, saving the game, then uninstalling the mod. -Jn-

This is so cool that I may have to install it, even though I'm not currently running with LS. (No pun intended.) Cue the Aliens quotes! -Jn-

I overbuilt the #@$% outta my mapping satellite deployment platform. Then...I put on MOAR BOOSTERS! Then I ripped the wings off an SSTO and made it a quad tilt wing. (And it flew, right outta the box!) Then I pulled the wings off that (forgetting to save it) and made it a STOL flying wing, which also flew, until a rogue wobble in the rototrons smashed half my control surfaces and I had to ditch, with Death having one hand heavy on the yoke. SSTOcean, but no casualties. Can't get to my pics, right now, but suffice to say - THIS is why I play sandbox. Go big or go home! -Jn-

Kalypso? Korsair? Kerbin Klipper? African Kween? -Jn-

Now I have schematics for klaw-mounted wings, heat shields, and parachute arrays popping into my head. Thanks. I was TRYING to design another SSTO, but I guess that's a lost cause now! -Jn-

By "home" you mean you're trying to bring it gracefully back to the Space Center?! -Jn-

Ooooooooooooh, Gotcha. Well, that's good news to the crew of my orbiting procedural-winged SSTO. There's a life raft on that one, but they checked the tags and it's a revised model that hasn't been tested yet, and they were throwing roshambo to decide which option to try. -Jn-

So, the description says "You must FAR 15.3.1 or later. [sic]" However, I find I don't enjoy FAR very much (yeah, yeah...I have a lot of time and designs with the soupy mock aero in stock, lemme alone!) so I uninstalled it. That said, my B9 Procedural Wings seem to work just fine in stock. Am I headed for disaster if I just keep rolling this way? What's the reason behind the bold admonishment to use FAR? Thanks, -Jn-

Thanks. I'm pretty particular about what mods I use, and I absolutely love your stuff. -Jn-

Okay, maybe I just need more coffee, but the download catalog link just takes me back to the forums. Is the one one Github the latest and greatest? It says 1.0.4? -Jn-

Late one night I hopped on, threw together an SSTO from scratch, launched it, deployed a mapping satellite in polar orbit, de-orbited and landed on the Space Center runway... ...when I realized that I'd eyeballed the entire design and had done the whole thing, from the ground up, on the first try. No test flights, no aborts, no reloads, everything just worked perfectly, I hadn't forgotten any parts, and nothing fell off. (Can you believe the LUCK?! ) -Jn-

I don't get it...isn't that a chute on the...no...oh no, that's just a nose cone. OH THE KERBMANITY! -Jn-

I prefer to dwell on my miraculous survival stories (including a few fell-outta-the-spaceship-on-reentry survivors!), but...since you asked... [DANGER: Wall o' Text approaching!] The one that still haunts me is the SERAPHIM I HIRV (Heavy Interplanetary Rescue Vehicle) mission: My very first manned Mun landing went almost perfectly...ABORT decouplers threw command module clear of the crash, Jeb salvaged an antenna to use as a parasol. MISSION SUCCESS! I dispatched SERAPHIM I to rescue him - this was early in my KSP days, and I was still building manned rescue vehicles. The SERAPHIM, being a "heavy" rescue craft, had a hab pod and a 3-man command module. I was intending to send only one crew, but two more conspired to stow away. No big deal, I've got room for four more, and this is just a one-man rescue. Until SERAPHIM I crashed on the Mun, leaving me with four stranded Kerbals. SERAPHIM II was hastily designed, and designated a HARM (Heavy AUTOMATED Rescue Module). It landed very neatly, just a few meters from the original crash site...leaving it about 10Km from the wreckage of SERAPHIM I. Not a problem. I began to use their jump jets to ferry the three "rescuers" over to the robot rescue...and by the third one, I got a little careless. Harlan Kerman was doing over 100ms when he caromed off the hull of SERAPHIM II and slammed into a cliff face, then plummeted into a crater. His body was never recovered. Just last night I had a another bad one. I just started a new sandbox game, and decided to do one of my patented "grip-it-and-rip-it" SSTO designs (try to throw together an SSTO by just eyeballing it, put it in a stable orbit, and then land safely back at the space center, without any testing). This might sound pretty hard on the test pilot, but as long as you get her off the runway in one piece, you're probably in good shape even if it fails spectacularly, as long as you build in enough safety systems (as I learned on that first Mun landing, having the ABORT button get your command crew as far from the explody bits as possible is a very good idea). Anyway - the BANSHEE MK I was a huge success, right from the get-go. A little in-flight tweaking of the control surface settings and she was steady as a rock in atmospheric flight. (Well, maybe not ROCK steady, but disabling the secondary elevons helped keep her from shaking apart.) And she was FAST. So fast, in fact, that soon she was shooting across the night sky like a comet. I made sure to bring up the heat indicators in KER. Climbing surface temperatures, but not critical. Jeb was balancing the increase in speed with thinner air of higher altitude, and grinning all the way...but I couldn't see him, because the heat gauges, had expanded my displays. Need to fiddle with that, can't be block-*KABOOM* Ship rocked by violent explosion. Jeb's portrait, gone. The BANSHEE was still stable and climbing, still sheathed in plasma. It took me a second to realize what had happened. After the events surrounding SERAPHIM I, I had taken to installing drone cores on all my rescue vehicles. That had lead to me installing cores on ALL of my ships to test them out, unmmaned, until they were (relatively) safe to fly. Out of habit, I had done the same thing with BANSHEE I, testing or no. Apparently I'd misjudged the acceleration potential of the BANSHEE, and while I was fiddling with my HUD, the Mk I cockpit had rapidly heated beyond 2400 degrees and...well...exploded. The BANSHEE is a solid little design though, because she shook a little, parts fell off, and she just kept climbing and accelerating, plowing though the atmosphere with her trusty drone core leading the way. She carried on to stable orbit, but I couldn't let poor Jeb go out like that. I reloaded, took her up again, solid orbit and re-entry. Well, okay...I maybe have left the autopilot on and hit the time acceleration while on my glide path back to the Space Center, and that may have caused the back 2/3rds of the ship to break off (did I mention there was a wee bit of a shimmy from those control surfaces), but the remaining chutes deployed perfectly, and Jeb set her down gently on her two remaining wheels and the nose. MISSION SUCCESS! -Jn-