What is your favorite "I did it!" Moment?

[Stargate525]

Most recently, I managed a mun return with less than two units of fuel left. I usually want a quarter tank of wiggle-room, so that was... worrying.

My favorite though has got to be my abort of an under-fueled munar ascent vehicle. I ran out of fuel, and so my kerbals bailed from the doomed ship and made orbit using their EVA packs for later pickup. Juggling three kerbals and eyeballing an ascent trajectory was... interesting, but seeing them all orbiting the mun safely made me cheer.

[JetJaguar]

So far, it's my first manned Mun landing. I was fairly early in a career game, and I hadn't yet advanced in the tech tree far enough to build a booster large enough to launch a single vehicle to land on the Mun and return. So I split the mission into two vehicles - a command module to fly to the Mun and back and a lander that stayed at the Mun. The two rendezvoused in Munar orbit and the astronaut spacewalked over from one to the other.

[GarrisonChisholm]

My first Mun landing- I built a Cadillac of a lander, and used 2/3's of my fuel getting down, but when I could finally cut that throttle and not be dead it was amazing. Return to Kerbin took far less fuel than I feared, so I had a bit left to burn on re-entry to ease the re-entry pace. :]

[JetJaguar]

Just thought of another one. I recently started a new career game, and I was sending Bob out in an airplane to complete some observation contracts. A contract came up to make some EVA observations on the ground at three locations that were clustered together about 80-90km due west of the space center. It was close by so it sounded easy enough, but go ahead and picture what is 80 km west of the space center. That's right, when I got there I found that one of the locations was on the side of a mountain something like 3500-4000m above sea level!

It was tucked into a ledge, surrounded by sheer cliffs on three sides, and the site itself was on a fairly steep slope. Bob circled around and approached it from the only open side, and the approach wasn't so much of a descent as it was flying level as the ground rose up to meet you. Bob's landing flare was more to just match the pitch of the ground, but he made it! He taxied to the waypoint and made sure to leave the brakes set as he got out, but the weight of him in the cockpit was all that was holding the nose wheel down. When he jumped off, the plane tipped up and rested on it's tail. After making his report, he managed to climb back up and the weight of him back inside was enough to tip it back onto the nose wheel.

Now, at this point I could've just recovered the vehicle, but I like to end airplane missions back at the space center. Using the engine to keep from rolling backwards down the slope, Bob was able to get turned around. He managed to get airborne as the plane dropped over the side of a ledge, the way a hang glider launches off of a cliff. Made it home safe and sound, and I bet he didn't have to pay for his beers that night!

[Scarecrow88]

3 things stand out for me. My first ever successful Mun landing, mastering how to rendezvous and dock and, having been everywhere else in the Kerbin system, finally managing to do a manned mission to Eve and successfully returning the pilot to Kerbin.

[nicky4096]

a while a ago, i managed to tie 1st place in the machingbird challenge. that made me happy

and recently i got first in the kerbin circumnavigation challenge, which also made me happy

[luizopiloto]

[BurnPrograde]

When I survived a landing to Minmus (only the command pod survived) but it was the first time I realized I was just starting to get a grasp of astrodynamics. I must have taken about 30 screenshots

[Geschosskopf]

My biggest "I DID IT!" moment would have to be this:

This was during the original Kethane Travelling Circus way back in v0.21 or thereabout. This was my 1st major interplanetary expedition, my 1st long-term mission anywhere, involving multiple waves of flotilla launches. And the centerpiece of the whole show was the airplane in the background, the D'OH (Duna Observation Hybrid), running its electric props on solar panels augmented by a Kethane-burning generator as needed. In those ancient days, Duna had a very thin, Mars-like atmosphere so flying there, especially at any altitude, was very hard and required an insane amount of wing. Being able to maintain controllable flight at a low enough speed to land safely on rough terrain was even harder. And then getting a plane capable of doing all this off the ground at Kerbin in the first place was harder still. So a huge amount of time, labor, and whiskey went into making the D'OH and getting it (and its supporting infrastructure) to Duna.

AND IT WORKED! On its maiden flight, it went about 3/4 of the way around Duna seeing various sights, the highlight of which of course was the Face. This is IMHO the coolest anomaly so I very much wanted to see it. Thus, here are Samlorf and Obbal admiring the view of Ike way out there on the horizon.

It was this view that really, really hooked me on KSP. Up to this point, I'd mostly viewed KSP as a "puzzle game". It was fun to build stuff to do difficult missions, especially when they worked. But Mun is just to stark and boring (especially before procedural terrain) to be interesting and Minmus is just cartoony. And flying over the endless, monotonous dunefields of Duna hadn't been all that interesting either, especially because I was concentrating on keeping the D'OH flying in the right direction. This view from the Face, however, was an epiphany. Wow. It really made me think, "I'm actually on another planet".

Here's a quote from the ancient thread itself, from when I tried to put this into words at the time:

From their vantage point, Obbal and Samlorf looked down the valley to east and saw Ike hanging there on the horizon, eerily illuminated by the mid-afternoon sun effects on the alien atmosphere. This vista awed them; it was way better than the underside of the big bridge at Kerb City, which is all they'd seen in as long as they could remember before the KSP Pressgang caught them. They realized they were the 1st Kerbals to see this and would be the only ones for a long time. They also realized they had a plane that flew reasonably well, a company car, and a whole planet to explore. They hadn't been on Kerbin in nearly a year but suddenly they didn't miss it. The spirit of St. Jeb touched them. They came down from The Face no longer galley slaves but willing participants. Of course, with it getting late in the day and not having much Kethane left, they had to camp out under the D'OH's wings to await a new day, but given their lifetime living under a bridge, this seemed just like home to them.

[viktor19]

When 1.0.2 SSTO with x200-32 made 80x80 orbit, and then released it's payload and safely landed on KSC's runway.

[Wemb]

Did an an approach and docking to my LKO station entirely within the IVA with no GUI and without switching back to the map or external view and nothing but the RasterPropMonitor MFDs and the Docking Alighnment Indicator mod - that really felt special.

Wemb

[DancesWithSquirrels]

Kerbinrise in 0.25, on my way home. I had landed on the Mun before, but this was the first reasonably planned expedition that didn't reek of desperation, where I had time to appreciate the view.

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This was a really fun expedition, too. Complicated mission, and everything actually went as planned!

Edited July 10, 2015 by DancesWithSquirrels

[Camaron]

There have been quite a few of these moments for me! As an advanced (modless, fully manual) player, I've done a lot of cool stuff.

The first one I remember was my earliest Mun landing that didn't involve death. I don't remember the craft very well, but I do remember landing with a pretty steep slant around 12 m/s, which broke one of the landing legs and sent me rolling, which destroyed a battery, a solar panel, one of my parachutes (Lucky I had four, the craft was quite overbuilt and redundant), and both Goo containers as I rolled. Fortunately, after coming to a stop, I was able to right the ship, and exit the pod with Jeb, collecting huge science (minus the shattered Goo Container), and successfully flew home and landed, again, without death! SUCCESS!

It looked a little something like this. (Please keep in mind this is a recreation from VERY faded memory. All I know for sure is that it was a tripod, I knew how to stage, I know my general build habits.) The Control would have been the brown SAS module before its size reduction, same for the goo pods)

[Hobbes Novakoff]

Probably assembling one of Rune's Base-in-a-Box crafts on minmus, then docking a lander to it. (The lander, incidentally, was another Rune build. I had a thing for stuff made by Rune then.)

[Robotengineer]

Landing my RSS Space Shuttle at Brownsville, then one or two missions later at the Cape, building that shuttle may have been my most gratifying KSP project so far.

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[MalfunctionM1Ke]

Landing on Tylo.

With a totally overbuild craft.

[Goddess Bhavani]

Mine has to be making this fly and sending it into space.

Forward swept, variable geometry wings, primitive engine tech and old infernal robotics joints with the structural integrity of a wet noodle. Oh, and it's supposed to be an S/TOVL too.

[-ELF-]

Landing a base+rover ship on Duna, with rover landing separately. seprated rover from base at about 3 km over the surface with deployed chutes, it came down a bit faster, popped some wheels, but at least it was intact and able to drive around, and base landed perfectly fine.

The thing is. base landed three second before rover, and rover came down on chutes 10 meters away from base. It was awesome!

[TimePeriod]

125 tons goes into the air, with only 5 basic jet engines and a lot of wings.

Don't ask me why, I just wanted a long duration flyer.

(40m/s is minimum speed, else it stalls right out of the sky)

The thing is, I didn't plan this aircraft. I just kinda built it from scratch and the CoM/CoL lined up pretty well, didn't even need to adjust the wings.

[Azimech]

For me it was building a helicopter out of stock parts with my own stock turbine engine.

After that, performance and reliability increased steadily until 1.0 came along and completely obliterated the concept of being able to do it stock.

[Stargate525]

I just built my first WORKING shuttle! And the main fuel tank is recoverable! WOO!

[livefree75]

Definitely my first orbit without MechJeb. It was a polar orbit, which I proceeded to launch myself into many times because 1) I was very excited, and 2) I didn't know how to do an equatorial orbit.

Another big moment for me was my first rendezvous. I got the two spacecraft 200-100m apart. I was using the demo, and the experience made me want to buy the game more so I could use docking ports.

[pandaman]

My first 'solo' rendezvous and docking.

My youngest son helped me get my first ever (he's a natural at stuff like that).

It then took me ages (weeks) to do it successfully on my own after that. It's never 'easy', but now I have the confidence to tackle it any time.

First Mun landing was a high too, but running out of fuel a few metres off the ground and tipping the lander over took the edge off a bit.

[Red Iron Crown]

KSP is fairly rich in such moments. Some of my favorites:

- First orbit

- First Mun landing (probably the best moment in KSP)

- First orbital rendezvous (with no nodes!)

- First docking

- First successful return from another planet

- First working SSTO plane

More recently, I derived a lot of satisfaction from getting to Laythe and back in a single stage (I'm not much of a spaceplane guy so this was a big deal for me).

[SuccinctLemon]

First Duna base. I was really new to the game, and had to fix ships using KAS. No pics sorry, but I had 6 modules + 6 kerbals + rover.