When you first began KSP what gave you the most difficulty?

[oglommi]

I struggled with all of it. After first discovering KSP, i started enthusiaticly(don't know how it is spelled) slamming rockets togheter. Did not know I could just move the stagings with the mouse, so whenever the staging was wrong, I rebuilt the ship from scratch. Neither did I know about the symmetry button. After that It was figuring out that getting to orbit was about moving horizontally not vertically.

I've learned stupendous amounts of spacestuff and orbital mechanics from KSP. Fantastic game

[StrandedonEarth]

At first docking was hard for me, until I learned how to properly fly the navball as well as a docking alignment indicator mod. Now the hard part for me is not overbuilding

[Red Shirt]

With the extremely well detailed manual that came with the game and all the roll over in game tool tips, I had no problems at all. (Oh, my pants are on fire!) Seriously, like oglommi, everything was a challenge. Thanks to Google I discovered MechJeb and learned to fly by observing.

[Starwhip]

Okay, amusing typo in the OP fixed. Please stop with the jokes and get on with discussing the thread topic.

But not in the title?

[Jett_Quasar]

I had so much trouble trying to land on the Mun at first that it got me freaked out about docking and I kept avoiding doing it because I figured I would fail miserably. As it turnd out it wasn't as difficult as I had convinced myself it would be. It was all just like walking downhill after that. There's one exception however; the one thing I still haven't done in this game is a return from Eve - but I'm working on it with a little help from my friends.

JR

Edited August 17, 2015 by Jolly_Roger

[SAI Peregrinus]

Avoiding overengineering.

I have a contract to take a temperature reading from Duna's surface. I decide to send some extra instruments, because that will surely save effort by sending one probe instead of 10, right? But some need a scientist to reset them, which requires a capsule (and in my case life support). And Ike's right there, it would be a shame not to grind it out for science too while I'm around. And an MPL would really help to maximize those science rewards... And...

Very quickly a temperature reading (tiny probe, nothing complicated) has turned into a full-blown multi-ship colony convoy mission and a fully self-sustaining MKS+OKS setup, EPL manufacturing, etc.

On the upside I can build rockets in orbit of Duna now.

Though that syndrome has come on more recently. I've sent tiny probes everywhere in previous versions, now it's time to colonize all the things!

[TrooperCooper]

Finding workarounds for the many bugs.

[RizzoTheRat]

Orbital rendezvous. Scott manley's tutorial vid helped with that one.

Same here, Scotts videos helped massively to get me to a rendezvous, and it then took me a while to work out the easy way to dock once I'd RV'd

I also used to always burn to the prograde marker to land but I'm just starting to get the hang of the more efficient technique of low altitude approach and controlling the sink rate with the attitude. Still not got the hang of precision landings yet though.

Other noobness: once i clicked the iva button, and couldn't come out of iva.

Forgot about that one, I had to revert back to launch to get out of it

Edited August 17, 2015 by RizzoTheRat

[AndyMt]

For me I think it was actually flying my rockets. I was pretty good right away in building efficient rockets, but doing the proper ascent profile manually - especially in the early souposphere (started with 0.22) - was really hard for me.

And then in 1.0: not burning up during ascent!

For repetitive standard maneuvers I now use MechJeb... I have much more fun in building and planning.

[AffinityCrafts]

Oh, I understood the basics alright. But when it came to orbital rendezvous, It was completely horrible. 13 times failed, 14th time, I FINALLY DID IT (I broke 5/8 solar panels as they were in the way). That was 17/8/2015 (today). SO HAPPY:kiss:

[Thomassino]

How to lit that SRB under my capsule

[worir4]

Figuring how to throttle liquid fuel engines. I could have just looked at the keybindings, but who does that any way?

My first week of KSP was all SRB rockets.

[Bangstry]

Gravity.

[Sharpy]

It took me literally months until I began doing a proper gravity turn. I still have problems with it sometimes... yesterday I circularized at 32km. Getting above the atmosphere from there was quite a chore.

[Bev7787]

NOT trying to blow up KSP... I started in 0.25

[theend3r]

But more seriously, docking. Did it once myself. Now MechJeb does it.

That's a shame. I find docking enjoyable and it becomes really easy after a while.

For me it's interplanetary maneuvers. I've returned from everywhere in stock 0.19 or so but now I let MJ prepare the maneuver nodes.

[rudi1291]

For me, the hardest thing to learn was orbital rendevouz. I did not know that the navball´s target mode is useful (or how its information would be useful) , so i switched it back to orbital as soon as it switched automatically. Yeah, that was fun...

I still remember switching back to KSC every few minutes to save, because i did not know that you can quicksave

[n.b.z.]

For me, it was dealing with modular designs and subassemblies. Before we had the root-part tool, I found it difficult to put together more complex things. I don't even remember how that was done.

Today, I find the number of action groups too limited. I wish we could use the same number keys while pressing shift for another 10 groups. Whenever I build some multi-module contraption, it becomes tricky to find enough groups, and I regularly end up abusing the ABORT, LIGHT, and GEAR groups for some other stuff.

[Leoworm]

For me, it was building a rocket that actually got into orbit. In the beginning, about 1 in 5 rockets got into orbit, and none of those had enough fuel to return to Kerbin.

[Red Iron Crown]

Getting to orbit. I knew nothing of gravity turns and there were no delta-V calculators available at the time (or plugin-based mods at all). I didn't even know delta-V was a thing!

[Goddess Bhavani]

I started off with a really early version that had the Mun but no maneuver nodes and certainly no Kerbal Engineer. Heck, our planes didn't even have landing gear, we just landed on skids and hope we didn't break our spines (and the entire plane).

So how did I get to the Mun? Direct ascent. Aim somewhere ahead of the Mun's current position, timewarp 3 hours, see where the rocket ended up, note deflection error, launch with corrected firing solution.

I pretty much smacked head on into the Mun at a ridiculous velocity on the third or so try.

Oh... did I mention we had no probe cores back then too? Every single mission was manned

I believe the "ultimate" in rocket design back then was also the mighty tricoupler, which, if not laced up as tight as a traditional corset, all 3 1.25m cores would flail about wildly like the Kraken's tentacles in flight for as long as the fuel lasted.

Whoops, went off track there - okay, the hardest thing ever?

Flight testing an unmanned recon drone. No, seriously, the drone was launched like an expended rocket stage with a radial decoupler off a Mirage IV jet bomber replica in flight, and my job was pretty much to fly in formation with the drone while taking notes of its flight parameters as it went supersonic in the stratosphere. I attempted to 'program' the drone's thrust, thrust vector, fuel load, and lift of its airfoils in order to try and achieve the maximum possible range.

The drone had no SAS and no active flight controls so it felt like trying to mod guided missiles into 1990s flight simulators! I made the drone climb to the stratosphere right after launch, cruise at 15,000m and stay there until its fuel ran out.

Most of the other (winning) entrants in this drone contest actually did the opposite from me, making it fly low and slow for up to 14 hours. But I decided I liked going as fast as possible, as high as possible like some supersonic Russian cruise missile that thinks trying to reach hypersonic speed before impacting is fun.

Edited August 17, 2015 by pandoras kitten

[Mister Dilsby]

I played the old v0.18 demo for a few weeks before I got the full version, and I had a heck of a time landing on the Mun. My ships were too tall for their base (not an uncommon problem when restricted to the demo game parts kit) and I had simply not yet mastered the art of thrusting to the navball markers. However I did learn the trick of landing a rocket on its side, 'breakdancing' with SAS and mashing the throttle as soon as the nose was pointed to space

[Sharkman Briton]

Rendezvous, and probably docking but I don't know because I'm still horrible at it, the first time I did a good rendezvous was a few days ago, and I remember trying to figure it out for ages, well, read my signature, if you can't be bothered, basically, I had no idea what I was doing and I flew by the target at thousand of meters per second.

[Godot]

It was 1.2, where we still had only a rather limited assortment and those (engines/fuel tanks) were rather small.

Therefore the most dfifficult thing at the beginning was to make a rocket that would have enough dV to get me into orbit and enough TWR to liftoff.

And all of this before I had a clear grasp on the concepts of TWR, dV and Isp and also had to learn that you have to gradually go into the horizontal during ascent

I already considered it as a major success when I managed to attain a suborbital hop across the next continent

The next major difficulty afterwards was, to land on Mun, at a time where Landing Legs hadn´t been invented yet and we had to land on our wings

[Cirocco]

Definitely docking. I wasted soooooooo much RCS fuel the first couple times I tried. I got the hang of orbital rendez-vous rather quickly, but figuring out the combination of "control from here", how to use the navball, the lack of air friction in space, etc. ... that took some doing.

After that probably comes spaceplanes. I had to read up on quite a bit of aerodynamics before I got how to properly build spaceplanes.

oh and powered landing. Damn I wasted a lot of fuel on my first mun landings. And I tipped over ALL the time.

In fact I still tend to tip over if I take full control of powered landings. So much easier just to let the pilot keep the ship retrograde and focus only on teh throttle