Some more of my craft so far

[ejhawman]

Hello all. I've decided to post pics of some of my craft developed so far.

Some background:

I first heard of KSP when I was viewing Let's Plays of various games on YouTube. I was primarily going through Final Fantasy XIII when one of the random recommendations that came up claimed to be for a mission to "Duna" being assembled in "Kerbal Space Program". It was, of course, Scott Manley's Interstellar series. I checked it out, decided it was worth looking into further when I had time, and went on my way.

Some months later I had the time, and went through Manley's videos. This led me on to macollo, ThorLP, Kurtjmac, and countless other KSP enthusiasts, and gave me a greast desire to play. Alas, my video card had died in December 2012 and the only replacement I could get for my elderly (mid-2006) system couldn't handle 3D gaming. I could only watch others play.

For Christmas 2014, my older brother took pity on me and got me an Alienware system capable of handling modern games. I immediately grabbed KSP from Steam on Christmas Day and started playing around with SRB configurations in sandbox mode. I intended from the start to get MechJeb and KER but these slipped my schedule for months as I got familiar with the basic game. It took me over a day to get the proper touch for guiding my craft into proper orbits manually, but from there I had no trouble setting up maneuver nodes and using them to get around the moons. It took another few weeks to develop the touch for managing my landers down to safe landings on Mun. Minmus ws much easier, of course. I was ready to move on.

I decided to use the sandbox save to develop craft, and started a science save for some sense of progression. I built flyby missions to Eve and Moho, then lander missions to Duna and Dres, in sandbox and copied them to science. This led to big, flashy missions like the Duna Science Fleet - five landers and a return bus, of which the bus proved unnecessary as the landers had the dV to return directly to Kerbin. Allison, Hersey, Kerwise, Joedous, and Burbles became heroes of the space program.

I suffered my share of tragedies. The first time I lost Jeb in Science, I was driving him across the Mun in a Super Science Rover when it jumped on a small rise in the landscape and flipped on its side. I tried to get it upright by firing my main engines and ended up destroying the craft and killing Jeb - then, when I tried to reload the quicksave, I reflexively hit F5 instead of F9. Later, during the Duna tests, the worst loss of the program occurred when I arrived at Duna too far out for my remaining dV to allow capture; I self-destructed the mission, losing Jeb, Bill, and Bob. After this, I started the practice of doing fine adjustments to my encounters from 20-30 days out.

Ike was raided for science points using rovers: Bill and Bob went down, one of them (I forget which) damaging his craft on landing when he landed near the north pole with solar panels extended and went for a surface sample, falling from the craft through two sets of panels, which he could not repair. This hampered power generation and limited him to half the expected science yield - he couldn't make it to two of his target biomes. Still, he made it back.

Dres was raided by four lander-hoppers each packing two science instrument packages; they would land, take readings, jump to another biome, take readings again, and return to orbit for rendevous with a bus that returned to Kerbin.They made it back just before 1.0 hit, which would have made their mission impossible to recover safely.

After that came months of developing craft for late-game missions: Laythe, Tylo, Moho landers for bus and single returns, Eve ascent vehicles (still in progress...), an Eeloo mission. Once I had everything but Eve solved, I returned to my science save to start using what I'd learned.

Which leaves me with these...

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[Majorjim!]

WOW that's a lot of craft you have there man. You really seem to have a handle on all things KSP. Have you struggled with anything?