James_Eh

Nuts. I should have spent a few seconds worrying about minutiae prior to thundering my landing craft into a Kerbin sea due to a horrible lack of fuel in the outboard jets of the lander. RCS will not save you from a 2000 m/s blunder. (bad KSP night, coupled with guilt because I really should be outside shoveling or something)

Just yesterday I executed what I thought was a perfect docking manouvre. One of my first to be executed without the help of MechJeb. As I bounced off of the ship I was headed towards I realized that I had installed the docking port upside-down. For the record, that confuses the Docking Alignment Indicator to no end as it tries to tell you to dock THROUGH the target... Moral of the story is - it is always good to occasionally look away from the Indicator to make sure that you are actually going where you think you are going. Well, that and "install docking ports correctly".

Mine do. It bugs me that my screen is littered with flags that all read "PARTY!!!" because that's what Billy-Bobrod Kermin puts on each and every flag that he plants. He went hog-wild on Laythe, returning to the ship, getting new flags, and covering the entire island with "PARTY!!!" flags. He was all excited about the sand, you see. Meanwhile, the other crew plant boring flags like "One step for..." and "A Great Day for..." and all that committee-designed stuff. Jack always misspells at least one word on his flags. On missions, it always seems to be the same crew of 3 that decides to "Go For It!!!" and winds up running out of delta-V with 100 m/s left to go. It seems to always be the second crew of 3 that sighs and goes to rescue them. My wife keeps trying to explain to me that, in fact, I am all of the Kerbals. I disagree vehemently. Off to the couch!

So I think I have done everything I can without a crash development of a new lander / drive. Remaining targets to land, flag, and successfully return from: Moho-ly it's hard Eve-ntually you crash Tylo-sucks (I've got nothing) and Laythe (O2? Really?). (Well, and Jool the jerk, but c'mon...) I have even rescued the approx 15 Kerbals that I left in awful spots during my early experiments with the game. (Including one poor slob in a polar orbit around Vall... That rescue mission was the most fun I have had in the game thus far!) I suspect I may need to ditch my self-imposed rule of not abandoning engines along the way in order to accomplish any of the above. Am I correct in assuming that I need a whole new set of vessels to beat my four arch-nemeses mentioned above? Research on this forum would suggest yes... Gonna hate to kill off the atomic drive section that has taken me to ~15 targets... I haven't tried this yet, but can you scrub off a bit of velocity in Eve's atmosphere on the way in order to make a Moho encounter a bit less dV cumbersome?

I hope it was pretty. My only successful SSTO was a squat, awful looking thing with rocket engines pointing both up and down and some air-breathers hanging from cubic struts. Landing after re-entry always involved a momentary head-first dive at the ground...

When you fashion little KSP ship models out of the foam ear plugs that you have lying around on your desk.

Heh. Or when you accidentally launch through a Trojan point the screen starts to get blurrier and blurrier, signifying dust pitting on the ports. (Thanks Larry!)

My MechJeb question involves the delta-V calcs it does when you have a number of fuel tanks linked by docking ports rather than by stage separators. I find that it drastically underestimates the total delta-V of your craft when fuel is allowed to "flow freely" to the bottom (engine end) of the craft. I have set up 1000 m/s burns and seen the delta-v only drop by 250 m/s from start to end. I have resorted to using Excel for delta-V calcs... Does the Engineer tool mentioned above do it better?

Refuel tug was necessary I guess, just because I wanted to keep the mother ship alive so that I didn't have to relaunch it. I really had NO fuel left. I could have dipped low enough that the lander could make it, at the expense of strewing a few trillion K$ of ship across the landscape... Anyhooo, kids and wife are in bed now - time to try to rescue the poor slob who has been orbiting Vail for 10 game years!

Oops. Hey, look! This forum has mission reports! Sorry for the long post in the wrong spot - I was excited. But I am a newbie forumer...

Wish I had joined the Forum sooner, have been addicted for a while now... Off to Duna! No problems getting there. Areobrake #1 at Duna, no problem. Aerobrake #2 put me straight into a collision course with Ike. SO, we landed on Ike. Planted flags. Took off, only to realize that we had underestimated how much fuel the lander needed to achieve orbit. Barely made orbit with the help of RCS tanks. Flipped to mother ship, had it make the rendezvous. Looked like enough delta-V left to still visit Duna. Aerobrake #3 and #4 and we were in orbit. Detached and headed for landing. Huge landing botch - chose a 7 KM high landing site and the parachutes were near useless. Finally managed to safely land, planted flags. Took off, and once again realized we were shy of fuel to achieve orbit. Once again drained monopropellant tanks and got into something resembling an orbit, and flipped to mother ship to make rendezvous. At this point it was looking a bit shaky for a return home. Detached the middle (empty) fuel tank to save weight. Threw caution to the wind and headed home. Suddenly realized one of the 4 landing legs was broken. Had to do an EVA to fix it - and DIDN'T wind up losing the Kerbonaut into the void!!! From there it was very routine, Aerobrake #5 and #6 in Kerbin atmosphere, wound up circular @ 200 KM with a teaspoon of fuel. Sent up a refuel tug, de-orbited, and came home safely!!!! LOVE this game (pant, pant) !!! Was a great Friday night, albeit involving a few too many beers.