Kegel 3

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

I've been working on a utility craft inspired by the Eagle from Space: 1999. I present to you the first working model of the Kegel!

Kegel 1 and 2 are simple 4-Kerman landers. This is the first one that can carry stuff to leave behind. It's purely experimental  the SABRE is the wrong engine, and there's a subtle, but infuriating, sizing issue with the width of the cargo hold*  but it's very nearly flyable, as you can see!

I'm very excited about the Throttle Control Avionics mod! It should really help.

_{*It's maybe 10cm too short. That means that one of the three docking rings just sort of mashes up against its mate, rather than actually holding it all together.}

[Rune]

Ah yes, the joy of the first Eagle replica. Keep at it, they are tons of fun and lead invariably to interesting things! Mine doesn't look much like an Eagle anymore... but on the flip side, it SSTOes up and down on both Kerbin and Duna with a 20mT cargo. I built my modular base to fit it, so I can feel the pains having to line things up. At least now with the gizmos you don't have to do what I did!

Rune. KER's torque indicator is also another useful thing I didn't have when I first built this.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Neat! This is my upteenth draft. I had one that used a Mk3 cargo bay. I might go back to that general design, though I like the mission flexibility (though not the physical flexibility) of the open structure.

I'm doing a lot of smackin' it into stuff so far. At least I'm crashing into the helipad, now! I couldn't make it that far before.

Things will probably get easier when I find my joystick, but for the time being, it blows up in really funny ways  sorta like a pile of wooden blocks.

The earlier draft:

[Rune]

Well, Kerbin is pretty much the hardest planet to VTOL in (with the exception of Eve, of course, everything is harder at Eve or downright impossible), so don't blame yourself. On the plus side, once you master VTOLs on Kerbin, landing anywhere else is a breeze.

One trick I found to stick the landings: while you have a lot of vertical speed, zeroing it out is best done controlling from a top-facing docking port, but when the vertical velocity is very little you can't see where the damn prograde went (i.e: precision landing on, say, a helipad), and you start picking lateral speed. For those times you would prefer to control form a horizontal position, so the controls are like instinctual like in a plane, but clicking around in the middle of a delicate maneuver is a recipe for disaster. Well, you can switch from any other control point to the cabin by pressing "C" twice: the first will put you in the eyes of a kerbal and reset the control scheme, while the second will get you back outside with the same camera angle. Can be done in like one second! Sadly, there is no handy way to do the opposite.

Rune. Other than that, I see you are having tons of FUN!

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

That's a great trick! I'll try that out tonight! I'm really looking forward to trying out the joystick in KSP for the first time.