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

[Merlin]

Docking has always been a real pain but Mech Jeb is the best.

[cantab]

EVAing in space. I'd done alright up until then, made it into orbit by a process of trial and error and addition of more boosters, but on my first EVA I just went flying off and got hopeless lost in space. I was mashing on the jetpack controls shooting around without a hope of getting back to my ship.

[Alphasus]

It took me like an hour to find out that spacebar started your rocket

Have you figured out action groups yet?

For me, it was mun landings. Still haven't landed on mun....

[SubzeroSpartan7]

Docking. This took me forever to get down, and even longer to master. I can't even tell you how many attempts I made for my first docking.

[MaverickSawyer]

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.

I remember those drones! Little solid fuelled booster core, two glider-like wings... Good times.

[Xannari Ferrows]

Everything.

I didn't even know the buttons.

[klesh]

Landing (on the Mun) without crashing or tipping over was the hardest for me.

[wossname]

The lack of any kind of good documentation was my main problem. That has not been rectified and seemingly never will. Happily, the forums exist and are crammed full of good info, some of it even KSP related!

[justidutch]

Although a fanboi of spaaaaace, I knew nothing about it, how it works, or how it really is much bigger than walk to the chemist.

The two biggest things that got in my way of dominating the space race, when I started, was learning how to get into orbit and learning how to set up an orbital rendezvous. Those are the only two times I've ever seemed help in the way of tutorials or YouTube.

Now I can pretend that I know how space works, and during the walk to the chemist I dream up funky designs for Eve landers.

[Nich]

I am an aerospace engineer so most of it came pretty easy. I had 2 that absolutly gave me heck.

1. Attempting an SSTO spaceplane with wheeslys and a poodle

2. My second time landing on the Mun. I still had not figured out that "T" was used to turn on SAS or how quick saves worked. My first attempt I accidentally found a perfectly flat spot and managed to kill lateral movement and set it down on an engine (overbuilt the transfer stage). the next 35 attempts were a series of impacts and tip overs that got reverted all the way back to kerbin

[peachoftree]

when I played the demo (the old .18 one) I could not no matter how hard I tried, do a mun return mission, I probably stranded around 15 kerbals trying:blush:

[problemecium]

I remember when I was literally just starting the full version of KSP that I had serious trouble figuring out EVA controls for several minutes. Now it's easy though ^^

[Garbonzo]

Getting a rocket to fly straight up instead of flipping upside down and stuff. Then I learned what struts did...

[nalfz]

Trying to suspend my disbelief when the explosions looked like tarantulas and you could land on water

After that it was RAM usage

[keeper]

Even now I generally struggle with airplanes. Always have done. And theres me dreaming of space planes one day.

I renamed the space plane hanger to the rover garage.

[WalkingShadow89]

The staging. It all looked like a jumbled confusing mess but it was fairly easy to learn. Also how to read the navball:wink:

[nhnifong]

When I first started playing the trickiest part was that the only way to make bigger rockets was the tricoupler, so everything flew like a christmas tree made of dildos.