Pecan

It is a tribute to KSP and this community that *everyone's* first Mun landing is worthy of celebration - hats off to all of you. 'fraid I can't remember mine and certainly don't have any pictures any more but I can still appreciate the work that anyone puts in to make it there and your elation reminds us of ours. There is no greater, more deserved, feeling of achievement to be had from a computer game/simulation. PS: It's a lot easier to land on Minmus. Mostly because of the gravity but also because it's harder to find somewhere safely level to land on Mun.

Just seen KIS is updated now on Curse

I've played KSP for 48 hours straight several times (I'm like that) and 72 hours a couple of times. Over that period I'd dispatch various moon and interplantery/transplanetary missions and mess about in Kerbin orbit while they drifted through space. Sometimes I'd time-warp as well because I've never seen the point of real-time doing nothing. Or, I might just have spent 48 hours trying to get one particular launch vehicle to orbit as reliably/efficiently as possible. Why can't it be both?

Asteroids only appear if you believe in them hard enough ;-0 They only spawn when you actively look for them, so there's absolutely no risk to Kerbin unless some person was crazy enough to go to the tracking centre and ... OMG, Ranulf what have you done!

Oooh yeah :-) RCS for translation, SAS for rotation. Get rendezvous & right side with main engines then just bring it in. Everything you need to know is on the navball except the separation and that only matters for final fine alignment anyway. By the way, I've never got on with docking instrument mods much either, although I did like the minimalist NavballDockingAlignment tool. Docking cameras, on the other hand, are cool, even the ones that don't add anything useful *grin*.

Please remember Dres is 'exclusive', not empty ^^

Now I have to use the docking autopilot to see what it does! Haven't used that in years but it always used to drink monopropellant like mad. I'd dock with about 3, MJ would use 100, that sort of thing.

@Kerbart, @Atkara Exactly and fine - by all means deplore the use of MJ's autopilot instead of learning (although, you know, there's no wrong way to have fun). Let's remember that there's a lot more to it than that though - and in my opinion it bundles several other mods/web-sites into a single convenient package. Be clear it's not MJ 'the tool' that you're objecting to ... and I'll shut up again.

Ok. gotcha. Then we can agree. Although I do use the autopilot for some of the repetitive things, KSP is a far better experience if/when you fly vehicles yourself. I also don't doubt that you're a better pilot than MJ, it's pretty poor at some things. (Mainly I use the launch autopilot, since I'm either launching an old vehicle for the nth time and it's just not interesting or I'm designing a new one and want/need to test multiple minor changes in a reliable manner - there I can't trust my own piloting to be consistent enough. My general routine is design & test, if I can fly it it's good enough for me, if even MJ can fly it it's good enough to share).

And yet you still don't seem to realise that the *optional* autopilot modules in MJ are a very small part of what it does. I wasn't debating you as there was nothing to debate. If you'd like to debate then let's start with: Did/do/would you use KER or another information mod? Do you look-up transfer windows on the web or elsewhere? Of course, if you prefer to calculate dV by hand, or not at all, and just play by trial and error that's fine too. And fiddling with the maneuver nodes to get interplanetary intercepts and not knowing what your horizontal/vertical airspeed and groundspeed are and and and.

*Sigh* I thought things got a bit 'busy' when I had 70 flights in progress. 3,000+ hours and I'm still a beginner. No answer for you but good luck!

The OP also mentions that they don't use the landing autopilot. In other words, use is optional, it's not like MJ takes over and does everything for you as soon as it's installed. In any case; do you know anyone who objects to people using MJ for anything other than it's autopilot functionality? So - we're left with people who object to MJ because they don't know what else it offers apart from the autopilot modules or that the autopilot is optional. Notice I'm pointing my finger at those that "condemn the entire tool and all it's uses and users", not the ones that object to an autopilot. The people who think MJ=Autopilot and Autopilot=No manual option. They fired first ;-0

v 0.15 demo, no tutorials IIRC. First rocket didn't have enough fuel to orbit. Second rocket didn't have enough thrust to lift all the fuel I'd put on it. Third rocket went an awfully long way up before it came back down and I had to admit that I had no idea how rockets got into orbit. Nth rocket got to orbit. Bought the full game.

There is a tool that consists of optional and independent preset information displays, entirely configurable information displays, maneuver node setting and editing, some autopiloting. Because *some* people *might* use autopiloting *instead* of learning there are some other people who condemn the entire tool and all it's uses and users. Ask if they did/do/would use KER and laugh at them. Here is an example of someone who doesn't know what MechJeb is.

Without physics and science knowledge you will fail. With physics and science knowledge you will fail. In either case you will learn something. Next time you may not fail. Eventually you will repeatedly succeed and may even understand why.

Fly all the components of your base to the destination orbit Assemble there Land it (I remember Whackjob; although he'd launch the whole thing in one go)

Whether it's a failure depends on your point of view. “It's unpleasantly like being drunk." "What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" "You ask a glass of water.” HHGTTG

For any launch vehicle it's important to know what mass it can put into orbit. Well done, by the way, I've been having a horrible time with reusable rockets recently. Unfortunately a while ago KSP became all about spaceplanes.

Remember KSP was always intended to be a sort of 'Orbiter Lite' (HarvesteR was a big Orbiter player). As a consequence such detailed information is not in the stock game and, as regex says, not needed. It'll probably be obvious to you too that it isn't usually possible to perform an ejection burn to anything like the sort of accuracy called for by such precise definitions of when to go. If coupled to a time, for instance, it's quite probable you'll be on the wrong part of your local (eg; LKO) orbit at that moment, so have to wait half an orbit or whatever.

It's all a practical joke. Your 'friends' pull the planet away while you aren't looking.

Could we also point out that big miners (or landers in general) are paradoxically easier to land. Making them low and wide means they can handle just about any slope short of an actual cliff.

Seems fair. Wikipedia supports that with "The introduction of three computers aimed at personal users in 1977, the Radio Shack TRS-80, Apple II, and Commodore PET, significantly changed the market and led to the home computer revolution" Commodore Pet was my own object of desire and the RM 380Z the first "micro-computer" I actually used (also released 1977). Apple II was the first I used professionally, starting work in computing in 1980.

1.2.2 just because I haven't been paying attention and didn't know 1.3 was out yet. Thanks.

That book has a bit of history but is legitimate. (It was originally written in 2014 and had a publication-date a few months ahead - for 2 years. Once they got O'Reilly as publisher it was updated and released properly). I haven't read it - because all the time I was interested it was still 'coming soon' - but it should be ok, IF it covers the things you want to know. I was amused though by one of the *5 star* reviews which, in its entirety reads "Just arrived - haven' t opened it yet. However, can't download computer game!!!". So - someone who hasn't played KSP or read the book thinks it's the best thing ever! My own advice would be to just try getting to orbit, landing on Minmus and building a space-station by docking components in orbit. Check the forum tutorials and gameplay questions for things you don't get. Plus, Scott Manley on YouTube. Others, such as CupCake, can be awesome but a lot are either too advanced/unexplained or simply people screaming as they crash.

To put it another way: the hardest thing about going to Duna is missing Ike. ^^