Madrias

3 hours to put a small ant-engine powered spaceplane in orbit. No Mechjeb, no autopilots, pure manual flight. Built something that was stable, then slow-cruised into space. Had a mega-rocket where my counter showed 20 minutes, but real time was at nearly 4 hours. Never again do I plan to build things above the 4000 part barrier, then try to get it into orbit. Whackjob, I don't know how you do it on such mild hardware, but I couldn't take it anymore, even with a 3.7 GHz overclocked processor. Then there's that Ion probe I shot toward Eeloo... I don't speak of it.

It was a tough decision between KSP and the Arduino, they're two different levels of geeky, but I went with the community. Don't put my favorite game alongside my favorite programmable microprocessor.

I love the Firespitter parts pack. Between Firespitter, B9, and a couple others, I have a nice collection of parts to pick from, but Firespitter kinda keeps me playing. After all, it's fun trying to get a propeller plane into orbit and get one of your friends to see it.

Terrain seams suck! Nothing like hitting a seam while cruising on the Mun (or Kerbin) and having it rip the wheel off your rover and fling the rest of the craft over onto its back, wrecking solar panels and science equipment. I understand that the devs are trying to stomp out the bugs, but the seams have gotten worse from 0.18 onward. Yes, I play on low terrain detail. I do so because sometimes I build large craft and don't want to have to fight graphics settings the whole time, and I'm not too ashamed as a gamer to reduce settings. I mean, this is something I'm sure most of you consider minor (After all, it's a game about rockets and spaceplanes, why would you want to drive on Kerbin?), but it bugs the crap out of me. I know the new terrain looks awesome, but it sucks for driving rovers around to gather science rather than having to fly everywhere. Between uncontrolled rapid acceleration up slopes with the brakes on, suspension shake causing complete loss of control, and terrain seams that destroy your vehicle as sure as crashing into the VAB, I've found it next to impossible to slow-cruise around Kerbin with a goo-canister on the back of a rover truck.

You want more than 4GB system Ram, r4pt0r, because other processes need space to work. Trust me, you don't want to experience Windows running out of RAM because KSP expanded to fill all 3.6GB it can consume, leaving Windows and its various background processes that last 400MB to work with.

Oops. Guess I'm gonna have to think of a way to land what was once a seaplane a little differently. A note to the wise: hitting water at 100 m/s in a seaplane will not do your floats any good. Edit: I have a radical plan to save it that probably won't let the Kerbals survive, but brings it up from a 0% chance to a non-zero chance. Sorry for the night shot, decided to run the crippled plane out of fuel in order to try gaining a good chance to survive. Edited again. This was perhaps the most graceful landing I've had with an aircraft gliding in completely inverted. With no landing gear. In water. Turns out I'm still doing good for trying not to kill Kerbals with planes designed to mess around when I'm not grabbing science.

Rover wheels make great light-aircraft landing gear for two reasons: One, they're powered and can shave a lot of delta-V on the runway for takeoff. Two, I think they might be lighter than landing gear (unless I'm mis-remembering from 0.21 and they've changed that in 0.22). Either way, they do a good job as long as you don't exceed 60m/s when landing or accelerating down the runway.

The "Flying Ant" emergency escape and landing vehicle. Not meant to do what I'd done, which was take off from the runway, but it contains enough fuel and is stable enough in flight to break away from wrecked craft, deorbit, and glide in. Landing gear for use on land, though it is the MK-1 which does not currently have parachutes.

Heck, I had to set a laptop up with Steam in an offline mode so Dad can have his fun once in a while because otherwise I'd never see my desktop, given that Dad wanted to give a good thorough try before he bought it. He liked the demo, but couldn't believe it when I told him there was so much more. So I let him try. And now he's bought his own copy on his own Steam account. 50+ years old and laughing like a kid with a box of Legos as he's putting together rockets, sending them skybound, and watching the inevitable explosions cause of Career Mode's lack of struts early on.

YES! Yet another SSTO in my orbit! Revised the gear and carried it all the way to orbit. Still so satisfying when it happens, even after many SSTO and spaceplane designs made it. And this one still has half the fuel reserves left. 2 of the normal size 1.25 fuel tanks, 2 LV-N engines. Nice pretty 150km orbit, and docked to my refueling station. Takes a lot to make orbit, but it works. I'm building a new design so I don't have to pulse the bloody LV-N's the whole way up to keep the speed up.

Well, KSP has destruction too! (Just put a spaceplane through a station again... I hate docking sometimes...)

I tried to stop it. Deployed parachutes just at the instant of separation. As you stated, my assumption for role-playing purposes is that they collected the gear cart and returned it to the space plane hangar for the next launch. On the other hand, the redesign will still happen cause I'm tired of smashing the LV-N's on the runway when landing. It's bloody annoying.

I've carried 2 orange tanks to orbit on the back of a spaceplane. My proper SSTO design (jet engine + turbofan + 2x LV-T45) can haul 2 orange tanks plus one strapped to the docking port beneath the plane, though it makes takeoff a bit perilous. With rockets, I'm lucky to chuck enough debris in orbit to call it a payload. I think the single heaviest thing I'd brought up was my space station, though it went up over the course of 50, yes, 50 launches, carried up section-by-section on the backs of spaceplanes. Sadly, that save was in .20 and I don't have it anymore.

I had the Kraken separate my ejectable cockpit from the decoupler while taking off from the runway. Not at the decoupler end, but at the RCS tank and parachutes. Sorry Bill, we'll miss you. A 300m drop into water with no brakes does that.

Thank you for that. A redesign will follow to lower the height of the primary landing gear so that they stay on all the way to space, rather than ejecting the gear-cart. At least now I know as long as I keep the weight about the same as the main aircraft, it will make orbit. It'll look crazy, but it'll be one of a few SSTO designs I've built, and the first using LV-N's. Now to find the lightest structure parts...

Party on the Mun? I'll bring snacks. Let me fire up a two-stage-to-orbit spaceplane and I'll be right there.

Flying an experimental spaceplane around Kerbin. Two stages to orbit, if you want to be picky about me dumping the extended takeoff gear that keeps me from breaking the LV-N's on the runway.

Built an aircraft capable of getting to orbit, though it's not easy. Also makes me wonder this: if all I'm doing is ejecting a stage that contains struts, girders, and landing gear so I don't bash the LV-N's on the runway, is it still an SSTO, or has it taken on basic Spaceplane status?

I built an airplane (basic Kerbin exploring in Sandbox) with the jet engines at the front of the plane instead of the back. No reason, it just sounded like fun.

I've had issues related to construction that caused weird issues (I built a ship using the Hooligan Labs airship mod that had a good one: exceed 10000 meters and it silently kills all crew onboard, leaving the ship out of control. Even "killed" the OKTO probe core...), so if it really comes down to it, you might just have to build the same identical ship again and watch as somehow it fixes whatever glitch did it. I've also had 'ghost parts' tear wings off spaceplanes. KSP's a beta, and weird crud happens once in a while. Ships bug out on the launch pad, adding one more RCS tank causes random explosions, ghost parts wreck your ships, a perfectly stable craft that's survived 15 flights without needing modification suddenly folds like tissue paper, pilots suddenly expire in their seats, probe cores go offline claiming insufficient charge, yet there's still 5000 units of charge still in the module, and terrain seams catastrophically nuke your rovers. Yeah, that's a lot of bugs, but we all know that the devs will eventually iron most of them out. Until then, funny things happen, and we can try all we can to dodge the problems when they show up.

Probably the sound fundamentals behind making a space-based game that uses 0% random chance to screw you over. That, and launching completely insane designs that should never be considered, let alone built and shot down the runway. And the fact that it's highly rewarding. Everything from your first successful flight where no Kerbals die, to your first orbit, your first Mun flyby, your first landing on some other world, that first VTOL airplane you made for fun, and your first SSTO just all combine to make the game highly rewarding and keep you playing for hours.

I know it's a little (okay, a lot) off topic, but the somewhat-crazy-yet-science-interested part of my mind wants to know: Is it possible to, even for a short instant, make something hotter than the surface of the sun on Earth? It's something that's bugged me for a while.

Landing on Minmus and the Mun, then coming back to Kerbin. Not very impressive sounding until I mention this: First successful landing on Minmus after 18 failed attempts, and I landed back on the runway that I'd taken off of. Yeah, I felt good.

Any chance of getting to paint structural panels? Haven't tried painting one in game yet, but I build a lot of my rovers with 'em and it'd be kinda nice to give them some personality.

As lenient as I am about Kesslerizing my orbit, KSC stays clean. I hate debris around the space center. Not afraid to leave crafts around where they land if they're non-important ones, but debris gets blasted. In my opinion, there's nothing worse than that spent stage from your failed rocket mission laying in the middle of the runway to frag your spaceplane on takeoff. Or worse, on landing after grabbing precious Science from around Kerbin, waiting in the middle of the runway to destroy all of your precious experiments and kill your pilot.