Space Peanut

I really loved the "flying by the seat of your pants" feel of trying to get to the Mun without nodes but you probably right here. New player would bumble along, get nodes and think "what the hell are these for???" and not really appreciate how important they are. Maybe the game needs better in-game manual to explain this kind of thing?

It could be the side effect of some mod I have installed but this map screen "burn time to 0 m/s" info is pretty useful!

I think this a cool idea although might be harder than we think to implement. Be a great modding project though if Squad do not take it up! I'm reminded of the TV series "Defying Gravity" which was based on a similar premise - travelling the solar system collecting mysterious alien artificats. Actually quite liked that program but it ended up getting cancelled midway through its first season and the final episodes got pretty confusing as they attempted to squash too much of the story in in a short time.

never had an issue in my short experience - 2 sub-orbital returns, 2 orbital returns, 2 returns from the Mun [sOI / Orbit] - so far. capsule with 2x radial chutes + service module [loaded with batteries and goo canisters] + heat-shield - my parachutes deployed while still in orbit [in same stage as stage-separator]. turned my capsule retrograde so heat-shield facing the right direction = happy landings. not sure what other people are doing differently? sure will happen to me too eventually (in another way!) but seems like a lot of us are following old habits that don't necessarily work in 1.0 instead of taking into account the [moderately] increased realism.

luckily (???) for me I work nights. So hopefully by the time I get back home at around 0730 28/4 New Zealand time [1630 27/4 Rio time] it'll have been released and downloaded...

good stuff. yeah i don't know if will ever have the patience to try this myself, much as i would like to. excited about 1.0 though! hopefully will be out by the time i get home from work tomorrow morning NZ time.

cheers, will give structural fuselage it a go next time i load up the game. Had a terrible experience with an incredibly wobbly four nukes docked to the bottom of a big orange tank. Because it was such a wobble-fest I had to be patient and do a burn to Jool at 1x speed... got bored and left the room to get a drink and came back to find the rocket De-orbiting!!!

People have mentioned this in passing but I have to say that designing ships that can get to orbit with sufficient numbers of LVN's to do the job in decent time is something I really struggle with. Have tried launching the engine blocks seperately and docking to the main ship but often it just ends up a wobbly mess.

god that must have scared the hell out of Jeb & Bob him banging on the hatch trying to get in, no wonder they left him out there!

not quite on topic but would love the different specialists to have different coloured suits. as well as the suggestion to be able to tell their level by what they look like. pilots maybe in orange, scientists in blue, engineers in green? dunno? but would be nice to be able to instantly spot which was which.

looking at that lift-off... thank god the aerodynamic update has not been done yet!!! good luck with this new project

Nice work! Quite extraordinary how much can/could get done with this engine and the world they have created. how long did your epic journey take in game time / real time?

phew! bet you and crew never want to see /anything/ purple ever again!!!

tragic story!!!! not hard to get attached to the little guys. must admit that I select new recruits based purely on the humour value of their names. Wehrbro is one of my favourites.

Glad to hear everybody is OK! Hope some of the developers have seen your great story, might be some bug fixes in order here.

nice work. so did the rover just use RCS for descent/ascent? not be surprised if am missing something but cant see any rocket engines. the rover looked great how you had it docked during transfer

wow yeah, a lot more beautiful than expected. definitely shows how much more there is for me to discover out there!

the excitement and adventure continues! think your mission planning here was pretty spot-on. The notion of the "target" probe is brilliant and definitely something I will use if i'm ever skilled / mad enough to contemplate doing something like this myself!

Awesome! Congrats. Great work! Normally I just slap a parachute on my Eve probes, the atmosphere is so dense thats all it really takes to land safely. So fun though that you not only did it for yourself but had a bit of an adventure doing it in a probe that wasn't really designed to do it!!!

nice work! never done this myself

Enjoying this as well. Good balance of detail in your story - think some people get a little too wrapped up in characterisation at the expense of describing the adventure!!! Hope you keep it up till the end even if it becomes an epic journey of survival for a lone kerbal! Cheers

This is how I do it! Experienced players can get a little wrapped up in efficient planetary transfers when for a newbie any old way to get there is good enough! My main method is to build ludicrously overpowerful rockets [definitely a lot easier with docking but not impossible without it!]. Then escape Kerbins SOI by getting into orbit and raising my AP until I escape. Then I select my planetary target, check that I am in the same orbital plane - and if not I setup a maneuver at the nearest ascending or descending node. Once I am in the same plane [orbital inclination = 0 with target] I setup another maneuver node to change my orbit until it intercepts that of the planet. Then I just move that node around my orbit until I get an encounter! horribly inefficent and people will probably slag me off for teaching you bad habits but it works for me!!! I think its a lot more important for you to learn about maneuver nodes than delta-V. You can always cheat [alt-F12] and give yourself more fuel if necessary. Thats cheating but I think its a better way to learn the game than relying on autopilots like mechjeb.

got to the stage in my (easy!) career that I had access to all the parts necessary to build a HUGE rocket (i think anything involving asparagus Rockomax Jumbo-64 tanks is a bit over the top!) that used half my available funds. (pics of rocket from 0.9 as I got no pictures from original mission this early) Designed a rather large lander for it, with a separate probe on top to land on Eve while I landed my two Kerbals of the moment "Desbro" (love that name!) and "Mermore" on Gilly. Unfortunately I didn't take much care to check that the engine didn't stick out below the landing legs - just slapped on the engine and the decoupler seconds later. So I took off and got to Gilly, very proud of myself. First mission to Eve on this save and I think my first mission to Gilly ever... Then decoupled and discovered my mistake, I thought it wouldn't be that much of a drama, looked like the rocket might just lean a bit. Because I was feeling lazy and had never used it before I used Mechjeb landing guidance to get me down. It did a great job, gently landing me at 0.5m/s but on the edge of a 45 degree slope!!! When I tried to correct it as it fell over I discovered that Mechjeb had put the RCS on and hadn't turned it off! To my amusement I discovered how one could fly around using only RCS on Gilly... Started fooling around and crashed into it headfirst breaking my rocket into what seemed like about 20 different pieces! Was really funny watching the rocket fall apart in that low gravity, was like my fail was on slo-mo. I put Desbro on EVA so that he could appreciate the view and jetted around for a bit. [picture above] Then I thought had best get back to Mermore and rescue him from the lander can. So i used the [ and ] keys to make my way through the debris field. Eventually I got to some still connected docking clamps that KSP called a probe. It told me that I "couldn't change from a vessel that was about to crash". So I had to wait until they landed, but then it started rolling and rolling and rolling - with KSP insistent that they were on the verge of crashing. Took about 5 minutes of real time with me laughing the whole way - with explosions from other parts in the background, one that I now know was the lander can and spelt the death of Mermore - before it stopped. Somehow with no input from me Desbro had managed to land safely so I took him on a 3km journey to reunite with his last piece of home and got the picture above. I then went to these forums, planning to share my experience and ask if anybody else has had a low-gravity disaster only to discover that 0.90 was out! I have been starting a new game with every update so thats why Desbro is going to be stuck there with the Clampotron Srs for a long time before I get around to loading up the old save and rescuing him! PS Sorry that was a bit longwinded as said and also no pictures of the destruction or the rolling Clampotrons - I was laughing to much to document it!

Long story but Desbro Kerman is now stuck on Gilly just as I am about to start a new save on 0.90!!! Think hes gonna be there a long long time!!!

I've sent some small probes to Jool in game but only explored some of the moons with the help of the 'cheat' menu fuel exploit. Looking forward to learning to dock so I can join you in adventures like this. Great pics