The Grand Return

[Tex]

Hello everybody! I'm back!

I have come with a tale of a great journey, one that helped to re-ignite my love for KSP after probably almost three months of continually waning play. And though I won't be back to full strength for a while, I thought I'd share my most recent adventure.

- - - - - - -

So long story short, the only rig with which I am able to play KSP with is my Acer laptop. It works pretty well for everything except for what I use it for: gaming. Particularly KSP. So this mission with which I am currently reporting on was basically a test to see if my laptop could handle some small-scale space operations, and for the first test I did a very very simple mission: LKO and return.

So I quickly whipped up a Mercury-Redstone-esque three-stage rocket to test out the basics of my FPS. Got it all fine-tuned how I wanted and hit Launch.

Already I'm kinda laggy at the launchpad, and as I blasted off the rocket began to crawl upward. I don't have Engineer on my laptop so I was playing it by ear, and came out just barely with a first stage that would heft the rocket up. I had also never fiddled with the 1.0 camera wobble, so I turned that off in the external views to help as well.

Previous experiences playing KSP on my laptop revealed better frame rates when looking towards the sky, and further experimentation confirmed that. In addition, I also had the idea that playing in IVA view would also give better frame rates, and indeed it did. So it would seem I am going to be attempting to fly all my missions from the cockpit! Woohoo!

So when I got to space (it felt SO good after so long...) I did a few maneuvers and saw Kerbin out the window of the MK-1 Command Pod, always one of my favorite experiences. Afterwards, I discovered that after attaining a ~400,000m orbit above Kerbin I had about 12 units left of fuel left in the tanks. Uh oh.

So when I got set up for the retrofire, I made sure to do it right at apoapse to make the most I could out of the Oberth effect, and when I ran out of fuel the periapse was about 86km high. Not good.

So to try and combat this, I turned the ship around and jettisoned the third stage, hoping that it would give me some extra kick to slow down. And it did, but only by about 3km.

So THEN, I did the last thing I could do, and that was to get out and push. I ran Bill Kerman's jetpack down to about 2 units of EVA propellant before I realized something. I didn't have a heat shield. That was a problem.

So with the propellant I had left, I pushed the unsafe capsule down to about a 39km apoapse. I was aiming for a shallow descent to generate the least amount of heat possible while still bringing myself down. I stopped at .15 units of EVA fuel left before deciding that was enough and returning to the safety of the capsule.

Re-entry was probably the most nerve-wracking part of the whole affair, as when the bottom of the pod began to glow orange and then yellow, my eye was constantly on the altimeter and the temperature gauge, praying that it would hold up. After I noticed the altimeter reading 20km and the flames dying down, I knew I was home safe. Deployed the parachute safely at 1500m and came in for a nice and easy splashdown. Success!

- - - - - - -

So that marks my triumphant return to KSP! I'm gonna try a few more missions in a new save file and just kinda mess around while I wait for a better rig to play on. Just thought I'd share the experience, which was a lot of fun.