What Is the Greatest moment you have ever had?

[loch.ness]

There are a few moments that stand out for me.

getting a constellation style mission to Duna in .90 with enough snacks and deltaV for a return trip ( didn't make the return because of 1.0 launch).

a wacky rescue back in .23.  I didn't really know how to redevous and dock yet.  Jen was on minmas with a bunch of science and not enough fuel.  I got a 1km intercept node on a suborbital trajectory to the rescue ship and had him jump (Eva) over before the rescue went orbital again.  I did something similar at Mun in .90 when a lander ascent stage suffered a engine malfunction through DangIt!

 

But the greatest moment was the first time I lined up a figure eight return during my AAP challenge attemp.  Between the nasa designs and flying I really felt like I was part of a space program.

[justidutch]

This is right up there...

[Brainlord Mesomorph]

On 1/13/2016 at 11:00 PM, Ten Key said:

First successful rendezvous and docking, best successful rendezvous and docking. 

My first docking caused me jump up from my chair and walk around the room pumping my fists in the air going "Yes!, Yes!, Yes!" for several minutes.

(thanks for reminding me why I love this game so much)

[samstarman5]

On 1/13/2016 at 9:00 PM, Ten Key said:

First successful rendezvous and docking, best successful rendezvous and docking. 

 

That's probably the top one for me, especially as it did come after my first Mun landing. I never forget how difficult it was that first time, even these days when I practically do it automatically.

[AndyMt]

For me: achieving orbit with the 0.18 Demo - and bringing Jeb back unharmed.

Then bought the game and continued with 0.24 and then it was: 

My first munar landing! One of my most rewarding moments in the last few years! Honestly!

[Choctofliatrio2.0]

Definitely the first time I landed on the Mun. Okay, I didn't land, but I got close. I just discovered how to make orbit (I thought you just fly straight up ), and was feeling ambitious. I watched a Scott Manley video about how to land, and I tried it. I got really close, but I think I crashed at the very end. I was shaking from excitement. T'was fun.

[Commander Jebidiah]

My greatest moment was RV and docking two satellites in LKO. I remember my excitement in that moment.

Actually just before lunch I had my best ever RV.

If I ever land on Laythe that will be better though.

Edited February 2, 2016 by Commander Jebidiah

[Drethon]

Every time I reach the Mun the first time in a career is a great moment.  Probably from being a fan of the Apollo program.

When 1.0 came out with changes to tracking, performing a rescue with minimal information was quite a workout.

I think my top accomplishment though is reaching moho with a small ship with fairly low delta-v (but still using a Mk1 Can for everything) was one of my most interesting challenges so far.

[ment18]

When the ARM patch came out (the one that added asteroids and 3.75m parts), I decided i would finally figure out how to rendezvous.  Asteroid on an escape trajectory in a highly inclined orbit isn't exactly the best first target.  I was excited when I got it.  but it was still in a retrograde orbit, so I built a large rocket and flipped the orbit .  It was only an a class.

It was also cool to do my first rendezvous without tracking upgrades.

[n.b.z.]

For me it's also the first rendezvous. Which wasn't planned...

Aawww sh*t, storytime.

Skip this. Really.


When I was new to KSP, I had great success with the "strategy" of taking my first Mun-landing-capable launch stack, which carried a crew of 3 Kerbals, and going to inreasingly more difficult bodies by adding more and more stuff to it. Bigger tanks, more stages. This had somehow worked fine for Minmus, Duna, Dres, Pol, and Bop, leading me to a false belief that this was the way to keep going.

This approach fell apart with Vall. After successfully landing there, and having explored the place - I had developed a habit of always bringing 2 light rovers along - the three kerbonauts made orbit, and escaped the Jool system.

It was at this point that I learned that if you only have 95% of the delta-V required to get back to Kerbin, and you thus make 95% of the required burn, this does NOT result in being in a place where you have "only 5% more to go" to get home.

Instead, I inevitably found myself in some highly eccentric orbit around the sun. The last spent stage was separated off the capsule to do my first experiments in pushing capsules with RCS from space suits. This was leading nowhere.

I realized that in order to get the three stranded Kerbals back, I needed to fly another craft there and do a rendezvous. Which I had never done, not even in Kerbin orbit. The capsule had no dock port, the guys would have to transfer by EVA.

Since I'm a learning-by-doing guy, not really good at studying "in advance", I knew this was going to be a giant mess of trial and error. So my rescue ship consisted of the entire Jool-moon-landing stack minus crew and rovers, and I spent nearly all of its delta-V figuring out how to get to the crew.

The moment when I first spotted the capsule, floating silently through space, was unbelieveable.

The following image shows nothing more than an Mk1-2 pod with a battery, a probe core, and a chute, against a backdrop of nothing. Yet it was a breathtaking sight at the time it happened.





The good news was, that the three Kerbals made it back to Kerbin alive.

The bad news: I had wrongly concluded that I just didn't "add enough stuff" to the old stack for the Vall mission. I failed to understand that the approach of adding ever more stuff to that launch stack had reached its limit.

So the next crew of three was sent out to explore another of Jool's moons, again with the same launch stack, which had again been greatly upgraded with A Whole Lot More Stuff™. They were in great spirits, and highly confident; the space program had never caused grief at this point, and the safe return of the three stranded Heroes Of Vall had instilled a belief that even severe problems could be solved and that there would always be a way to bring back Kerbals in distress.

They were headed for Tylo. I am saddened to report that their mission failed in a way that tragically made any rescue effort pointless, as there were no longer any distressed Kerbals left to rescue. These brave pioneers were the first to reach Tylo, but also the first to vanish whilst touching a new world for the first time, and their spirits will remain on Tylo forever.

Tylo, the unknown beast, had insisted that the first crew to touch its surface would do so while their instruments display a surface-relative velocity north of 800 m/s. During the descent, the crew had assumed for a while that Tylo was kidding - somehow fooling them, messing with them, pulling tricks on them. The scientific worth of their mission lay in their discovery of the most fundamental scientific fact about Tylo, reported shortly before their demise, in their very last radio transmission - a truth that every mission needs to take into account when going there:

"Tylo is not joking - repeat - Tylo is NOT joking."

Their sacrifice was not pointless, as it was finally recognized that the old historic Tons Of Stuff Stack had seen its last flight, and that for Tylo, a technical approach specific for that body was needed.

Their memory was honored by an effort to land three Kerbals on Tylo and returning them safely to Kerbin, whilst presenting Tylo with a gesture of two middle fingers firmly held high, in the form of insisting that Tylo would be no exception to the rule of "always bringing 2 rovers along" with a crew of three.

When the 800-m/s-impact happened, I had been enthusiatically addicted to KSP for about a month, making fast progress by playing it obsessively. But there was (and still is) SO much stuff I didn't know, and I didn't have the finesse or efficiency skills needed for Tylo. However, I knew this. And, I had seen a bunch of Whackjob's screenshots. This resulted in an epic, yet totally insane, undertaking of brute-forcing The Tylo Problem, which took up at least another full month of KSP obsession, and involved the destruction of the launch pad through the combined force and sheer awesomeness of no less than one hundred Mainsails at full throttle. But that's another story.

[katateochi]

One fav moment (from quite a ways back) was a dual launch from Mun and flight of two craft side by side up to orbit.  It's at the end of this vid - https://youtu.be/XP_epphsiwM?t=10m59s 
(No longer possible in the same way because of the annoying restrictions on craft switching that automatically cut the throttle.)

But it's a hard choice between that and a very precise targeted landing (onto a docking port) towards the end of my Constellation vid - https://youtu.be/Tp6yj2k0Fpc?t=27m20s

[Findthepin1]

Landing on Duna. So far. 

[HebaruSan]

There are many over time, of course, as new feats are attempted and overcome. For me what turns an ordinary successful mission into a "greatest moment" is the uncertainty leading up to it, when you don't know whether it'll work and you're on edge throughout. This is the story of the first such moment I remember.

Two years ago this week, three days before my first Mun landing, when science mode was still called career mode, the greatest scientific minds on Kerbin had invented airplane cockpits, air intakes, jet engines, wings, and aerodynamic control surfaces, but were still confounded by the idea of retractable wheels. There were a few biomes on Kerbin left to supply the science needed for them, but they were not easy to reach.

Jeb called an emergency meeting and declared his intent to collect the needed data from the South Pole. Not wanting to risk re-entry, he would remain in the atmosphere for the whole trip, using a craft clumsily cobbled together from these strange "airplane" parts. Of course, the lack of wheels presented certain challenges for the take-off and landing...

That touchdown had me whooping, jumping, fist-pumping, etc., for several minutes. I fully expected it to end with a huge fireball and revert, but only one part was lost (and it may have absorbed a crucial bit of velocity for us, kudos if you've already spotted it). Yes, I had absolutely no idea how many intakes were needed per engine, because I was going by the completely uninformative descriptions in the parts list.

[Dr.K Kerbal]

Lovely SSTO! With booster! Hope you make more great creations!

[Kaiser82]

@n.b.z.

those are my favorite stories about, and favorite moments in, this game. 

[Evanitis]

On 2016. 02. 02. at 4:35 PM, n.b.z. said:

This resulted in an epic, yet totally insane, undertaking of brute-forcing The Tylo Problem, which took up at least another full month of KSP obsession, and involved the destruction of the launch pad through the combined force and sheer awesomeness of no less than one hundred Mainsails at full throttle. But that's another story.

Great stories (both the posted and the linked one), enjoyed them both pretty much. Makes me wanna' do Tylo run - I'm somehow unsure if I ever returned from there. Though probably I'd remember if I did.

2 hours ago, Dr.K Kerbal said:

Lovely SSTO! With booster! Hope you make more great creations!

More like MSTP (Multiple Stage to Poles). Not that it makes the creation any less lovely. I'm fond of the hedgehog look and the 'chute landing.

[LordCucumber77]

Setting down on Duna with a fully equiped base set as part of a mission. It's probably the heaviest thing I ever launched in one go, so without refueling or modular building it in orbit, and it included a science lab and habitat unit. The landing did not go very smoothly though, as I was very nervous (it took me a couple of 'simulated' tries but I felt it had to be possible) & I fiddled with the landing gear and the last of my Delta V upon arrival:

A landing you can walk away from....

 

[StarManta]

I had a contract to build a base on Minmus for 11 Kerbals plus a research lab, and a bunch of fuel. I had most of the requirements on one craft, but I'd come up a bit short on fuel. I happened to have a mining ship nearby that had a docking port on the bottom (I've gotten in the habit of putting docking ports on top and bottom so I can connect multiple ships in a row and thrust).

I flew the mining ship over to the outpost, then plopped it on top, taking advantage of Minmus's low gravity to 'hover' while lining up my docking ports.

 

 

[maceemiller]

On 13/01/2016 at 9:48 AM, RizzoTheRat said:

Any firsts really I guess.  First orbit after several sub orbital cockups, first landing (as opposed to crash) on the Mun, first docking after ages jockeying around to try and get in position...

That Sir sums up exactly what I was going to put. Identical for me also. My next greatest moment will be after ive finished building and launched my Jool 5 Challenge craft which is currently under construction

[Death Engineering]

A direct aero-capture around Jool into a perfect orbit around Laythe (tiny <50m/s burn to circularize). Apparently I was excited and am not allowed to make that much racket at night anymore.

 

[Dr.K Kerbal]

Well, the part where all the flames that come out of those thumper boosters doesn't make it beautiful. Just a personal comment: I don't really think that the thumpers booster flames are all that well animated. SSQUAD, if you read this post...

1.) Make a booster that lasts for 2 minutes ( Just like the space shuttle boosters. ) and...

2.) Just run over the graphics on the Thumper booster.

@Evantitis 

Edited February 6, 2016 by Dr.K Kerbal
Quoting

[Puggonaut]

So far it has to be , Getting into Mun Orbit , using the Stock Navball an no other help thingies ( <-----technical term) .