Duke23

For giggles I loaded up an old version of KSP (.12) and made it to orbit. There's a thread around here with links to them... I guess they're demos? Anyway it was an entertaining experience. I want to try making it to the Mun! I tried some older versions than that (.08) and I was just absolutely dumbfounded at how anyone could accomplish anything other than a brilliant crash. Gotta say KSP has come a looooooong way.

Apparently Anfield isn't as good with rovers as he is with planes, and he flipped one over by the launchpad at KSC. I had to send the crane prototype to flip the rover back on its wheels. I'm pretty sure he got a neck injury, hopefully that won't keep him from testing out my new designs. (No, but seriously... I couldn't control him after the crash so I "recovered" him and then didn't see him in my crew manifest). Bartbree, don't touch Jeb's things. BARTBREE!!

I think we're just getting better and those of us who have been around for a couple versions are used to working around bugs or shortcomings that are being fixed... So yes it's getting easier, but in a refined way, not a dumbing the game down for stupid people way. You can always mod in more difficulty or mod out features (I think).

Mouse and keyboard at the moment, which feels normal enough with rockets. Now that I'm trying to play around with planes a little more I may need to dust off the old Extreme 3D. And subsequently buy a different one because surely there's a reason it hasn't been used in a year.

That's pretty cool! I was thinking of building a true station... Not like that, I'd surely destroy it before I ever got it complete. But most of mine just end up being orbital refueling / construction depots with room for a few Kerbals and aren't much to look at. Not to be a thread hog or anything, but in this post I said there was video... Here it be. The last 2.5 minutes or so is pretty routine docking but yeah. The lucky shot, lol. Also just wanted to say it's good to see Whackjob building again... This guy and a few others around here have inspired me to keep trying. After seeing some of the things others build and launch, I felt pretty stupid ragequitting over my measly 150 ton payload not wanting to cooperate, or not being able to get to Jool and back, or whatever my problem would be that I just needed some time and a half baked plan to accomplish. I'm still scratching my head over that RCS tug though. Kind of scared to see what you have planned.

In other seat of the pants news, after successfully docking my SSTO (codenamed SSTOP -- as in STOP torturing yourself trying to make this work), I remembered that I had the previous iteration codenamed Batwing still in a low orbit piloted by the more-skilled-than-we-thought Anfield who has been doing most of my test flights recently. Everything was going alright for the first part of reentry and we were optimistic. But as we came in over the mountains behind KSC, we realized the fatal flaw that almost caused the first SSTO design to crash -- fuel balance. It was manageable to a point but the lower we got the worse it was and trim wasn't helping. suddenly all control was lost, the plane stalled and went into a flat spin and started careening for the mountain at a lousy ~180m/s, like an insult. We thought it was over. Mission control held their breath, Anfield was cursing the kraken. But then everything just tightened back up and he was able to regain control, sort of. He transferred fuel forward as fast as possible and lit up the engines to plan for a controlled crash in the foothills... But you know what? Screw that. We were going to land at KSC from orbit for the first time, even if we had to cheat a little. Anfield hugged the mountains and steered back on course for KSC (the cluster of markers by the wingtip), staying around 1500m above the terrain. The kraken would have to wait, this Kerbal was coming home. Anfield says this plane should be destroyed so no one else can get almost killed in it.

I've been experimenting (not so successfully) with SSTOs the past couple days... One very simple design was promising so I decided to modify it slightly for more fuel capacity and give it a payload. Originally its mission was to dock with my "space station" (I use that term loosely) with no payload just to test how far I could push the design Delta-V wise. Well when I examined the station I realized I didn't put any Clampotron Jr's on it, which the SSTO would use to save weight and drag. So its first true mission was born out of necessity -- bring up a module that would add a single Clampotron Jr so it could refuel once it made the rendezvous. This mission, of course, was very poorly thought out. Taking off -- Can't believe this thing even flies straight. Obviously this isn't going to work... OR IS IT?! I was too busy biting my nails to get screen caps of this next part but I do have it on video that I may put up after I trim it. Well this was basically an impossible mission -- The ports wouldn't line up no matter what. Jeb radioed from the station that he had an idea... That is never good. Well I got the ports as close as possible, the shuttle below the orange tank close enough to reach out and touch it, and still a significant vertical distance between them... Then fired off the decoupler that the module was attached to. I just KNEW I overshot and it was going to go hurdling through space or blow something up, but the magnetic force caught it just at the right time and it swung around for a few seconds before snapping on and knocking everything out of balance, but I didn't care about that. It worked! I was able to re-stabilize the station and then dock with it. There will be champagne and snacks in the hitchhiker container!

I did that by accident once... It was more like a ship that didn't quite make it to its destination. Kidding aside, I don't see any advantage to doing that unless you just want to for whatever reason (roleplaying?). Seems like it'd be a pain to get to though.

Haha, done that a time or two. For me it's usually sideways instead of upside down though because of the way I sometimes mount probe cores... Last night I was attempting to build an ssto and when I checked my delta v with Mechjeb it was in the negative. Hm, must be something to do with the engines I'm using. Or possibly the fact that I had built everything in front of the in-line cockpit instead of behind it without paying attention. Luckily I caught that one before it left the ground.

Today I learned that just because I made one small arguably successful SSTO (it DID make it to stable orbit and land safely, but not enough fuel to actually do anything in orbit and no payload other than a kerbal)... doesn't mean I know anything about building large planes, let alone large SSTOs. The idea was to build something reusable to refuel my reusable interplanetary ship(s). Go green, right? Hey wait, where did my engines go? Oh yeah, no air intakes for the RAPIERs. Although it did get off the ground... for a few seconds. Stupid thing is too heavy to take off using anything air-breathing, so obviously I should just add more engines and wings. ...Or not. Technically this happened because I had the RAPIERs toggle air/closed set to an action key and when I added more I only had them mapped to one side. Needed a little extra boost and, well, this. This actually flies better than the craft as a whole. Hey, this might actually work. Maybe. Kind of. I wouldn't know, I'm still in the atmosphere slowly climbing. Anfield isn't optimistic. Edit: Or not. Hit 20km, asymmetrical flameout. Swapped over to closed system and regained control... Forgot about overheating. Oops. I think I'll just stick to rockets for a while, mkay?

Last night I did something borderline impossible and I have absolutely no proof. It's not even that it was impossible... Just highly unlikely especially since I was flying completely by the seat of my pants. I was at a friend's house who also plays and I quickly threw something together that I boasted (half joking) would go to Duna but not return. I put a tiny last ditch stage at the top, then a 360 unit tank with an LV-909, below that an orange tank with a skipper. Radially attached 6 of the smaller (1440 unit) tanks with skippers feeding to center, and each of those had another stage below it with mainsails. Threw two solar panels and two batteries on it and hit launch for a test run to see how bad I had just screwed up. It worked surprisingly well and got into stable kerbin orbit with 3/4 of the orange tank left so I decided to head to the Mun, laughing as I claimed I was going to land it. I ditched the orange tank with 1/4 still left as I approached the circularization burn at the Mun because it had no SAS and I was tired of fighting it. I decided not to bother with circularizing and just came in hot from about 200km out, my speed had to have been 650m/s by the time I was at 10-13km and I started burning retrograde like I've never burned before, but it wasn't enough. About to make a little green splat on the surface my friend started laughing as I was still going about 200m/s and close enough to taste Mun dust. I panicked and dropped the 360 unit tank and fired off my last ditch stage (if you've seen my landers you know what I mean) and at the last possible second as far as I could tell, I started moving UP. I gently set down what was left of my ship right on the engine, and it leaned over a little. We thought it was over but I did some guestimating and decided I could get it into orbit for rescue, which I did (although polar). With an almost dry tank I exclaimed I could get it home! Friends thought I was stupid (so did I). I got on an escape trajectory but it wasn't enough and I was 1500km away from kerbin at pe. I was about to give up... But I was highly elliptical with my ap out past the Mun. So I started time warping. Time warping until I hit another Mun encounter which miraculously would sling me straight at the surface of kerbin. I reentered, plopped down with my chute and the engine exploded but the rest of the craft was fine. After a brief moment of disbelief and celebration, the three of us declared that it was impossible for any of us to replicate and just shut down the game. Lmao... I don't have so much as a screenshot of this entire mission and I can't believe I actually did that. I plan to get the craft file from my friend soon and try it again so I can fail miserably.

That would have to be Bill's Duna mission that deviated from the plan a little... We knew it was a high risk mission but the plan was for him to land on Duna and transmit data back then get into a stable orbit and await the rescue ship to bring him back, with the assistance of the tech gained by his data. Well it turned out he freaked out and burned most of the ascent fuel on the landing approach and didn't have enough to get into orbit. So his rescue was delayed for three years, not including any time spent traveling to or from Duna in the first place, while more technology and better designs were tested that would allow us to land and return with multiple Kerbals. Jeb headed the rescue mission with the help of a promising young pilot fresh out of training. That was an interesting experience all around. Especially when poor Bill had to walk several km because the rookie underestimated atmospheric drag and couldn't correct it for fear of getting two landers and both Kerbals stranded, as Jeb yelled at both of them from the transfer ship in orbit...

Anfield Kerman just flew my first successful SSTO (ever). It's very basic, but I just got RAPIERs and wanted a proof of concept. I could see a design like this being used for space station missions in the future... Hopefully less ugly. At around 15km it flipped the bird to the atmosphere and really started to pick up speed. It's currently in a mostly circular ~90km orbit and by my guestimation has barely enough fuel to deorbit and land, but I feel like once I get more comfortable with designs like this it could be very useful. Edit: That design clearly needs some work. When I brought it back down it got really unstable as the atmosphere thickened back up -- The nose would drift up almost uncontrollably, unless I tipped it below about 15 degrees then it would drift down. That landing was a rough ride... I chose to put it down near a coastline because I miscalculated (read: derped and lost my bearings) and KSC ended up being halfway around the globe on the dark side when I deorbited. Not that I probably could have landed it there anyway... Although I did do a pretty good job of putting it down where I wanted to (when I originally looked for KSC I just went by a rover marker that I knew was within a km or two, but I was seeing the marker through the other side of the planet). Just over there Almoooooossssttttt. Crap. Good thing I wasn't planning to go anywhere else. As you can probably see, I'm not very experienced with KSP planes... But hopefully I can change that now that I have motivation. I couldn't build an SSTO to save my life before I got the RAPIERs, but I knew it was a matter of time. Now to go bigger and farther!

This little guy is way too happy playing with winches (and almost getting crushed by 5 tons of crap because someone doesn't know how to use RCS while tethered). This was before my ship decided to spontaneously dismantle itself as I was going back to LKO for a refuel... There was nothing left but the command module, SAS, claw, and bunch of little pieces. I still have no idea what happened but I chalked it up to a weird bug and reloaded.

I think the Kraken just got my ship. I had just captured a class b asteroid and brought it back to ~2300km then sent up a hitchhiker container with a KAS winch to hang on. Got everything set up and the kind Kerbal who made the attachments volunteered to stay in the hitchhiker. Disconnected my ship and grappled the mostly full fuel tank I had left floating nearby from the hitchhiker rendezvous, drain and release, and started to bring the ship back closer to Kerbin for an orbital refuel... I alt-tabbed and was checking some stuff out online, then went back to the game. Everything was fine and I was waiting on a maneuver node, then I hit the map view to check out the orbit and make sure the node was right, and I heard an explosion. I went back to the staging view and my ship... wasn't a ship anymore. It was just the command module floating aimlessly (both Kerbals with big grins on their faces) as the rest of the ship floated quite quickly away from it in a million pieces. I don't even.

Uhh... This is a little bigger than I thought it was. My ship is mad at me now since I can't seem to balance the stupid thing out, but I'm working on getting rid of that escape trajectory we're on. Edit: Scratch that -- I got it "balanced enough" and I'm headed back to Kerbin... Very very slowly. Edit again: Got it into a sort of circular ~2300km orbit of Kerbin. Not bad for coming half prepared.

I don't think I've ever broken anything (on a rover at least) by using a decoupler on the bottom but I tend to use docking ports for pretty much the same reason.

After lots of cussing, redesigning, and relaunching... I finally got my new prototype asteroid grabber up in orbit and poised to catch a 'roid that aims to come into my domain. It's nothing special and basically a slightly smaller and more fuel efficient version of the first interplanetary capable ship I built in .23. I debated back and forth about using MechJeb on this ship because sometimes I just feel dirty. I haven't used it in this save until this ship for anything except calculating DeltaV and gathering some info, but I really really hate long burns. If only you could just warp through them. I hope I'm not going about this completely wrong for my first asteroid heist but I don't think I am. Give me another 25 (game) days and we'll see. Just happy to have this ship up and running after being stuck in development hell for several (real life) days while I messed around with other stuff. But I had to get going because asteroids wait for no Kerbal! Now what will I do with this asteroid once I latch onto it, assuming I succeed? Well I guess I have a few options. -Botch the mission because my ship may or may not be underpowered for this and float out into Kerbol orbit for a while, possibly requiring tanker assistance. It's a class B so I should be good... (Right?) -Bring it back to LKO and try to make a base on it / station out of it. -Drop it (gently) on Kerbin and do... something with it. -I'll get back to you on that.

Running a few tests on a new design and had a derp moment... The thing originally had 2 SRBs and it could barely get into a circular orbit the normal way using a bit of the nukes, but it wasn't too fond of this direction of orbit (which is what I need to grab a particular asteroid I've been eyeing). This particular fail wasn't catastrophic, but it didn't make it to orbit either (mostly) thanks to this little oversight. I conveniently forgot how I had it staged when I went to give it a little more umph and this happened: I'm debating whether or not to leave MechJeb on this one. So far I haven't used it for anything in this new save except DeltaV calculations and other info... But I really, really, really hate long burns.

I'm quite a bit behind on the "heavy lifting" aspect of the game compared to some of you. My biggest comes from my last save in .23, the KSS Trident. ~8000 DV depending on what you're doing with it (that figure is with only a small lander I think), slow as Christmas, and completely useless for taking most payloads out of Kerbin SOI due to the 3 way symmetry. Here it is awkwardly loaded down with base supplies for Duna: And my smallest isn't really a ship per se, it's an experimental lander that I haven't used at all other than making sure I could get it somewhat stable. It's in developmental hell on a back-burner somewhere but the final version (if it ever makes it that far) will probably have the command chair moved to the side and the docking port moved to the top, to solve a couple problems at once.

I asked the same question when they put the limitation on what science modules you could reuse in .23... Personally I don't (normally) use probe cores for gathering science, but I do use them for missions that don't require a Kerbal, like sending a refueling tanker out to a planet / moon or docking parts to a space station. I know it's bad form to leave debris in orbit on purpose, but a lot of times when I'm building things in orbit it's easier to just release whatever isn't part of the final product and not have to bring a Kerbal back down to the ground each time I take a piece up. Satellites I sometimes put up or bring down just as a role-playing mission since I don't use any mods that require it, unless you count the ones I mention below. I just thought it would be interesting to design them. I just recently started using SCANsat and Kethane, I almost always put those sensors on probe cores rather than manned ships because it's a simpler launch.

Earlier in the tech tree my landers are 2 stage (or 3, but the 3rd stage typically only gets used if something goes wrong). I'll have the whole thing pushed out on a transfer stage, use the main outer engines on the lander for deorbit, landing, and at least half of the ascent / circularization. Then I'll drop all the empty tanks and head home on something minimal. This usually only applies to Mun and Minmus. Or for my first landing or two of a new save it's usually something small (no outer engines) that ends up cutting it close, maybe staging on the descent and using the final stage to touch down, ascend, and hopefully return home. But those don't bring any equipment, just a Kerbal. Once I get docking ports and other useful stuff I usually make them single stage so I can take the lander out on a large reusable transfer ship, go down to the surface and do my business, then redock with the transfer ship and either top it off to hit another spot or take the whole ship wherever I'm headed next. Sometimes that "single stage" does include a backup plan though depending on the design, like the lander's command module having it's own small fuel tank and engine so I can dump everything and at least get to a safe orbit if I miscalculate and don't have enough fuel.

Most of my pet peeves are the result of problems between the keyboard and chair instead of the game itself but a stupid little bug got me the other day, I meant to say something about it. This: This is a general design I've used a good bit in the past. Exploring, skycranes, etc. For some reason, I don't know if it's just this ship or if it's something with .23.5 (first time I've done it in this save), the rover gets stuck between the engines and it's obviously not touching them. I swear that didn't happen in my .23 save... I'm tempted to go back and check just to make sure I'm not crazy. How am I supposed to drop a rover like that?! I mean it's simple enough to space the engines just a tiny bit apart, but WHY. I didn't even test that before I blasted off to Minmus because I've used that design SO MUCH in the past. My base on the Mun and the one I started on Duna literally rely on that not happening, unless I "accidentally" did something just a bit different.

Wow, I'm impressed with this. I just downloaded it earlier for anomaly hunting and scanned 99.8% of Kerbin in about 4 game days... Would have been faster but my orbit was a bit wonky. It's a tiny bit taxing on my computer depending on what you're doing with it, but I expected that. Most of it is pretty straightforward but I was curious is there a way (built in or planned) to select a place you're headed to find it easier? Like a compass arrow or one of the markers like you get for a lander etc? Maybe I'm just not used to it yet but I feel like it's going to be a little difficult to land / drive to a specific spot... Guess I can just use the infinite zoom if I'm already on the ground. No disrespect to the author of ISA Mapsat which was great while it was maintained from what I hear, but this blows it out of the water especially since it's pretty much been broken since I started trying to use it (.22 or .23 can't remember). Look forward to seeing where this goes.

Proudest moments would have to be first landing on Duna and the subsequent rescue mission to get my stranded Kerbal. Holy crap that first landing was a trip. I was sweating bullets trying to conserve fuel by waiting till the parachutes fully deployed to gauge how much power I'd have to use on landing. The size of the planet coupled with the thin atmosphere made that pretty nerve racking. The rescue mission went quite well, and even had the extra fuel to stop by (and land on) Ike for a minute, but it was also my first interplanetary trip with a successful return.