Most Difficult Thing You Ever Archive In KSP?

[RidingTheFlow]

Capturing & putting ~750t D-class asteroid in LKO for base building.

[KerBlammo]

If you don't mind mods, the Docking Port Alignment Indicator mod makes it much, much easier without being too "cheaty".

Its certainly possible to dock by just eyeballing it but this mod takes the guess work out of it. The key to docking is to take it slowly. When I start getting impatient and start mashing the translation keys to get it done faster is when I usually get into trouble.

Align your docking port axis to be parallel to the target's axis (the DPAI is particularly useful for this) then start to move into position. Do one axis at a time at least until you get comfortable with the process. Take it slow and let it drift into position.

[Sirine]

1st mun landing. At 0.18 demo.

Fascinating for days.

[Red Shirt]

After my first successful Duna rescue mission - because I always strand the first crew on a new planet/moon (poor planning, not on purpose) - I tried an Eve mission. Well, let's just say that crew will never see Kerbin again. Sorry guys (pre-Valentina). I then decided on a Moho mission. This was way before knowing anything about deltaV. I didn't know it was hard. Landed with only vapors left. The rescue mission is the hardest thing I have pulled off so far. Wish I had pictures. The ship was massive.

The most fun was my dune buggy on Eloo, followed by my failed attempt to dune buggy the Dres canyon.

[Just Jim]

Probably this landing:

Finding the memorial was enough of a challenge, but this was also my first real precision landing anywhere besides the KSC.

Since then, with a lot of practice, I've gotten where I can land next to nearly anything. But this one was without a doubt the hardest thing I've done.. so far.

[Warzouz]

Probably my low TWR SSTO Tylo landing and return to orbit. I packed 6050 m/s and ended with less than 50m/s. Hopefully the tug was around to bring my 16tons ship to Laythe space station to envoye the view once more. That was in 0.9.

But the funniest was to try landing a 6 tons ship on Eve with Terrier engine without heatshield, airbrakes, or any kind of chutes.

Moho is quite a feat too, when you get there with low TWR and you have to do multiple burns to capture correctly.

I'm now on a Eve landing and ascent mission. It may be even harder as my sandbox/hyperedit tests continue to fail...

[oriramikad]

Hardest thing I ever did? Building a there-and-back moon rocket in the demo. It took me two weeks of late nights. XD

[Elowiny]

The hardest thing I ever did is docking, and making a flyby of every moon in the "Jool system".

[radonek]

Rescuing kerbal from LKO without any upgrades. Read: no orbits in map view, no targeting, nothing…

[cantab]

My first and last foray into RSS/RO, a Voyager replica intended to do Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto. Dealing with RO along with RT2 was just frustrating more than anything, I came to realise RT2 actually does *not* work at all well with RO. I only achieved a distant flyby of Jupiter, missing my assist to Saturn, and then gave up on the project.

The most difficult thing I actually succeeded in though - possibly an EVA landing on Minmus and return to the orbiter with *no* informational mods. If you have KER and NavHUD and whatever then EVA landings are easy, but without them with only the limited information the stock game gives it's a whole different ball game and real seat-of-the-pants stuff.

Also up there is my Tylo lander. The actual landing wasn't too bad, only took two attempts, but getting the ship out to Tylo in the first place was a complete pig, involving my biggest launch ever to refuel the thing in LKO. After all, this was the lander:

Straight-on view by cantab314, on Flickr

[NuclearNut]

Landing a tailsitter on kerbin outside of KSC. You see, I like making retro-futuristic spacecraft and my main crew transport is a SSTO, pebble bed NTR/Ramjet rocket. It can reach a decent orbit and carries two kerbals. To land it uses the main engine.

What happened was a simple failure of imagination. After going to a particularly inclined in a botched rendezvous with my new polar orbiting radar station for reactor refueling & restart I noted that my propellant had run quite low (I need some to land and prevent overheating). Ruling out the chance of jeb going out to push I decided to drain the sattilite of monoprop and then use RCS to reduce my speed to an acceptable level (saving some for the landing) and then use the main engine to reduce the speed more and then attempt to land.

Being the idiot I am I did not pick a nice flat place like the north pole, but I got lucky and landed in a relatively flat area and the crew survived along with the valuable things such as the reactor.

Yes, probably trivial, but to me it was impressive.

My current design takes off vertically and uses it's wings to land anywhere flat, enhancing survivability.

[LABHOUSE]

Look at my first replicas that were life sized, they were ​EXTREMELY hard to fly, and looked bad.

[TheMoonRover]

[h=1]

Most Difficult Thing You Ever Archive In KSP?

[/h]

All the science you collect on a trip to all 5 of Jool's moons.

Or should that say "Most Difficult Thing You Ever Achieved In KSP?"?

In which case I finally managed an Eve return the other day.

[Kerano]

Most difficult achievement for me was definitely building a ship capable of landing and returning from Eve... at sea level. Made all the more difficult by the fact that my attempt occurred around the transition to one of the 0.24 patches which made radial decouplers apply phantom forces that bent stacks inward and destroyed the rocket.

[Spacetraindriver]

Doing a loop de loop in a An 225 that flies like 10 trillion tons of bricks. It can barely do a ba... I MEAN alerion roll without losing a couple thousand feet.

[peachoftree]

The hardest thing is probably building a round trip no-refuel spaceplane to minmus that can carry 6 crew or a 2.5 length cargo bay. When I got to orbit with 3 km/s left in the tanks It felt so good!

[RocketBlam]

There have been a few really difficult missions, but hauling a class-C asteroid into the orbit of Bop from Kerbin ranks right up there.

[Aragosnat]

Rescuing kerbal from LKO without any upgrades. Read: no orbits in map view, no targeting, nothing…

Done that one. Not easy in the least bit. It is easy to get a Mün intercpet with out such helpful tools.

Knowing when to stop playing.... Knowing when it is safe to start playing again.

[nismobg]

Landing a plane at the pyramids that stalls under 300 m/s with FAR.

[Soda Popinski]

Easy. Building a Star Wars Podracer for the Kerbinside / Keral Foundries challenge. Actually, not easy. Very very hard.

P.S. I assume you meant "achieve" not "archive." Since I did back up the video, I guess it still qualifies.

P.P.S. I challenge you to try it with a Podracer.

Edited September 9, 2015 by Soda Popinski

[Othuyeg]

A mun trip, landing and return without gimball or any nodes.

[marcello639]

Hi everyone. For me it will be learning game without any mods. First mod I installed after 250h - KER.

2nd thing is recovering engine pushing back in EVA. Around 300m away from station. Coz didn't attach properly with KIS/KAS. I was so frustrated...

[waterlubber]

Moho. That evil space potato. Oh, and my Jool 5 that I abandoned because of Bop. The kraken was too powerful!

[Endersmens]

I would say...probably when I docked a module to my station with an accidental yaw trim. I accidentally added a yaw trim and couldn't figure out why my ship was turning by itself, even with SAS on. But somehow I managed to dock to my station, constantly fighting the yaw. Very stressful.

[SelectHalfling0]

Saving an interplanetary ship (it's orbit while leaving Duna was shifted by Ike). I only had 70 m/s delta-v left by the time they aerobraked. I was able to circularize using RCS.