StrandedonEarth

RIP Milbur. My first failed contract. Milbur was in need of rescue around Gilly. During his rescue, all the solar panels were ripped off the rescue ship. He was able to catch a nearby scannersat with the Klaw before his power ran out, giving him power generation once again. Exhausted, he fell asleep, not realizing his current Pe was a mere 4km. Eventually Gilly caught him with the highest mountain.

Should probably be "Keep Calm and F9" with the crown logo re-stylized into an explosion.

Just finished reading the book and then watched the trailer. Great book, some good laughs with the pop-culture references. Can't wait for the movie release in November, it'll help fill the gap until SW:TFA

It works wonderfully, until you realize that you forgot to deploy solar panels only when you're halfway through transmitting a large science experiment when it dies. When you turn on that pitifully small 10ec probe core battery, it starts transmitting again and dies again before you can deploy panels. :facepalm: (seriously, someone needs to make a kerbal :facepalm: gif) Now I turn off a larger battery.

I picked up a contract to rescue Milbur from Gilly orbit. I already had a JumpStart ship in-system after the earlier debacle with the Interplanetary Lab, and the rescue would pay back the JumpStart launch. Rendezvous went smoothly, and Milbur bailed out of his stricken command pod (he refused to comment on how he ended up in Gilly orbit in just a command pod, aside from "Jeb would be proud") and EVA'd over to the rescue ship. As he approached, some numbskull thought they'd make it easier for him and rotated the ship so the hatch was facing Milbur. This was done at the last second, with the result that Milbur was lightly swatted away by the 1x6 solar panels, breaking all 4 of them in the process. :facepalm: Milbur still made it back to the ship, but now he was in a rescue ship with plenty of battery power but no way of recharging them aside from the Poodle. Luckily he spotted the Gilly Scannersat whipping by at a 90deg inclination, and was able to give chase and catch it with the Klaw. So now he happily has power again, and is waiting for the Eve-Kerbin window to open up, hoping he'll have the dV for it. The plan is to release the sat and make his burn, then shut down the batteries until they're needed for course corrections and re-entry. He'll be a little cold, but he'll live.

(Sorry if I'm pushing the acceptable envelope)

TCA-Assisted Anti-Flip System (TCAAAFS)

^This. I'm a Canadian, but a West Coaster, and I had never heard of IF day. At least the 'Batman' riddle of last October was more widely known, if still a cultural thing.

Best: Warcraft II, which got me into the "modern" (Win95+) age of PC gaming, superseded by Starcraft. I also hugely enjoyed Star Wars Galaxies, until SOE completely destroyed the game (and everything I'd accomplished) with their "New Game Experience." Worst: SWG after the "New Game Experience."

Very sad to see the facility and its contents abandoned like that. The original Buran was destroyed in a hangar roof collapse. Buran Wiki

Maybe he wants to study sunspots from underneath

No screenshots, just a list of fails in space. I sent a batch of probes followed by a station to the Eve system. The Eve scannersat was able to maneuver into the contracted orbit, but ran out of LFO when maneuvering into scanner orbit. The Ap was only 35km (1535km, needs to be under 1500km) too high for the scanner to work. Fail 1 Never really noticed that the probe carrier entered the system retrograde. Neither the Gilly scanner nor lander have the 1700dV needed to brake into Gilly orbit. Fail 2 When my station arrived, I retracted the the solar panels for aerobraking, and used a burst of engine power to bring my Ap a little lower. With the engine on, I switched to map view, which summoned a Kraken glitch (no orbits visible, Eve the color of rocket flame). Restarting KSP solved that little issue, but when I went back to my station and warped back up to Ap, it took me a few minutes to figure out why nothing was responding. I thought maybe the Kraken was still hanging around, but then I realized I hadn't put the solar panels back out! So I sent Carselle (whom I had rescued from Mun orbit before burning for Eve (long story in the What I did Today thread)) out to deploy the Gigantors (again). Unfortunately, the throttle had been left on full! So when the Gigantor deployed, the station took off, clipping Carselle with Gigantor and shattering it. Fortunately there was only a whiff of fuel left in that stage, so Carselle was able to hit the RCS pack and catch up. I'll call that Fail 2.5. The only named quicksave I have to go back to is way back at the midcourse correction. Or maybe I'll use the JumpStart ship still attached to the station to do the 'Explore Gilly' contract. I dunno yet. G'nite - - - Updated - - - Having my Gilly probes going retrograde around Eve wasn't as big a deal as I thought. My initial maneuver planning for Gilly orbit insertion was at the worst possible time, with Gilly at Pe. By maneuvering for an encounter near Ap, I was able to complete their missions with much less dV required. However, I did lose my Gilly lander hopping from one biome to another. I was watching the trajectory in map view and must have had a CFIT (Controlled Flight Into Terrain) incident.

Yes, I know it's old and I posted it many times, but it still cracks me up.

In map view you can click on the Mun and 'Focus view'. Then you can see what your trajectory will be like during the encounter. You can also use tab to cycle your focus through all the bodies, and backspace to focus back on your ship. There's a stickied thread at the top of the Tutorials sub forum about keeping silly payloads going up

Super-Heavy Launch Vehicle type A, or (time to steal one from the Hindu pantheon ) "SHlV-A"

I like using VOID. It used some code from KER so it gives you most of that info. It also has a nice little HUD for the most important info, like TWR, dV, altitude above surface, and what biome you're in/over

There are good ideas here, fairings are certainly not necessary. For more ideas check this thread

That'll teach me to check the stickies before posting my own how-to.... Could you merge this thread I posted into the older, stickied thread please?

I've recently tried to launch some ungainly rockets that would have been just fine pre-1.0. After many test flights fiery crashes, I think I've figured out how to stabilize these beasts all the way to orbit. First and most important, Throttle Controlled Avionics is required. This is a very useful mod, especially for VTOLs that may not be perfectly balanced. TCA adds a button to the right-click tweakable menu that cycles between 'Main Engine,' 'Maneuver Engine,' and 'Manual Control,' and will throttle engines as necessary to maintain balanced thrust. The first thing I tried to launch was this LFO-moving rover, to move LFO around my Minmus operations. Fairings didn't help, as I guess it was too far off balance. I tried different things, like fins on the 2nd stage, but still no go. Even going nuts with vernors wasn't enough. I already had TCA for landing the rover, and with a bit of tweaking, I was able to make orbit. All of the main lifter engines were set to 'Manual Control' . The 'Twitch' engines on the rover were left as 'Main Engine' and assigned to a hotkey. Some big control fins (delta wings and elevons) on the bottom got it through the first stage burn. When I staged, I also activated TCA (press 'y'), RCS, and the Twitch engines. This was enough to keep the flame side rearward the rest of the way to orbit. My next difficult launch was sending a science package of probes to the Eve system. Each long cargo bay holds a lander and a scanning satellite, and I wanted to launch a set for both Eve and Gilly in one launch. The result was this tall skinny thing, which was totally flip-happy. The lifting-body cargo bays probably didn't help. So I did the same thing. I put some Twitch engines at the top of each cargo bay, and set up the engines like I did previously. I lit the Twitches and activated TCA at the first sign of an impending flip. It was stable all the way to orbit and is currently on the way to Eve. I hope this helps somebody.

Impressive! Yesterday I launched an orbital lab to the Eve system. Through an oversight, it was unmanned. The beancounters probably didn't want to pay the big bucks to hire another kerbonaut, and they didn't need anyone on board to collect on the contract anyways. After it left Kerbin SOI, they realized nobody flicked the switch to deploy the Gigantors. Reluctantly, a scientist was hired (the only one they could afford), to ride the "Jumpstart" ship. A stranded pilot was also spotted in LMO, at a mountain-scraping 10km. Today, the Jumpstart ship was launched. It swung by the moon to pick up Carselle and then managed to rendezvous and Klaw up with Eve station and deploy the Gigantors before the crucial course correction burn to make Eve intercept. The Jumpstart may continue on with the station and make a Gilly landing, I dunno yet. Too bad it didn't pack any drills; there's an ISRU unit on the lab. Incidentally, The Jumpstart ship had a little problem in the Mun's SOI; it too ran out of power. Again, nobody deployed the solar panels. One engineer on the ground suggested "Switch SCA to Aux," which reconnected the Command Pod's internal battery and allowed deployment of the Solar Panels. The same engineer had disconnected it for just such an emergency.

StarCraft: Broodwar. Hallucinated Arbiter Double Recall FTW! (famous last words: "Hey, where's my base go?") Rogue Squadron. For a real blast from the past: the "Strike" series (Desert Strike, Jungle Strike, Urban Strike) on the Sega Genesis Edit: Almost forgot "Wizardry" and its sequels on the Apple IIe

In older versions of KSP, some of my larger rockets used the big docking ports in place of decouplers, just in case I wanted to re-dock something. Setting 'control from here' on these mid-stack docking ports did lessen the wobble, because they weren't swinging around as much as the top of the rocket. Perhaps having a mid-stack root part has the same effect.

That's not wobbly. This is wobbly.

Liberation of the concentration camps?

Finally got this beast into orbit, after several attempts and liberal application of TCA and vernors. It's mission is to move fuel around my Minmus operations. I was disappointed that it was only doing less than 3 m/s on the surface of Minmus, so it mostly flies from place to place. When I was finally getting it dialed in, one launch had a pilot error that resulted in a flip, but at that point I knew it was controllable. Revert*. During the next launch I managed to execute the pitchover perfectly (started at 1km, reached 45 deg @ 10km), but that meant it was going too fast too low and it went into RUD. Revert, and with a slower pitchover it finally made orbit! *Yes, I was reverting during the last few launches, but funds were getting low by then. I absorbed the losses during earlier attempts that left debris all over the place. I had to delete fairings to allow RCS and TCA to do their thing.