What was the hardest thing you've done in KSP?

[RandomUser]

What was the hardest thing you've done in KSP?  Was it a Jool 5 mission?  Was it building a station around Kerbol? 

Share here! 

For me, it was getting to Eeloo.  Funny thing is, the mission only was intended to go to Laythe, but somehow I screwed that up and decided Eeloo would be easier.  Sad thing is, the hatch was obstructed by an RCS port, so I had to cheat and destroy the RCS port. 

Anyway, once again, post! 

[RocketBlam]

Returning a Kerbal from the surface of Eve. (I've done this twice, in seperate careers).

Second most difficult: Transferring a Class-C asteroid to a Bop orbit. I still have nightmares.

[LameLefty]

Landing a crewed mission on Moho and then returning it to Kerbin. I did it back around 0.23 or so. I had to send a robot tanker to Moho to refuel my transfer stage so the crew could get home, but I did it.

[RandomUser]

2 hours ago, RocketBlam said:

Returning a Kerbal from the surface of Eve. (I've done this twice, in seperate careers).

Second most difficult: Transferring a Class-C asteroid to a Bop orbit. I still have nightmares.

Wow.  I couldn't return my Kerbals from Eve, sure.  But carrying an asteroid the whole way to Bop?  You'd think it impossible upon first glance, surely. 

[Scotius]

I've built a big science station in low Moho orbit. Why i was thinking it was a good idea? I hate Moho to this day.

[spacebrick3]

I took a restaurant and deck to the Munar surface for my Munar Crusader challenge.

[RA3236]

Making my mod.

On a more serious tone, actually making a rocket that can get to the mods star.

[MiniMatt]

Without a shadow of doubt: landing on Tylo on razor thin fuel margins, with a wobbly modular lander, from a highly elliptical screamingly fast orbit. At night.

Followed closely by departing from Tylo.

The following is a paste from my old v0.24 Jool 5 AAR:

 

 

Chapter 4 - Tylo and why we hate Tylo

 

Tylo

A 100dv burn was required to capture into a Tylo orbit. It all went downhill from there.

Knowing that dv would be tight, the ion tug was launched to ferry the lander down into a lower circular orbit. After over half an hour of burning, the lander's orbit was still highly elliptical. In the form of 47 tons of Tylo lander the little ion tug had finally met it's match. So that plan was scratched, instead of reducing the apoapsis down into a low circular orbit, we'd shave the periapsis down to around 20km, come in very fast and very low, and perform a full thrust horizontal suicide burn to land. On the night side. Without landing lights. With razor thin fuel margins. What could possibly go wrong?

 

• First attempt wasn't too bad. Fire both the ascent nukes and descent skipper at full thrust at 1 minute prior to 20km periapsis. This timing turned out to be bang on *perfect*, bringing me down to about 100m/s at 1000m from the surface. Slight gravity misjudgement led to my final descent accelerating far quicker than thought. Bob died.
• Second attempt: Going ok! 7m/s descent just 300m to go - and then the skipper ran out of fuel; nukes were insufficient to hold aloft the full mass & I wasn't quick enough to undock the descent stage before we hit the ground at 40m/s. Bob survived. The ship didn't.
• Third attempt: Disabled docking port crossfeed midway through the burn to ensure skipper had enough fuel. In final seconds of landing I couldn't quite find balance point of thrust in time. Most of the craft survived. The important bits, however, did not.
• Fourth attempt: Textbook. Apart from the landing. Misjudged last moment before contact (landing lights would have been really helpful) & didn't kill thrust in time. Toppled over.
• Fifth attempt: As per the fourth. Being on the night side was really hurting. Toyed with idea of orbiting till periapsis is in daylight. Got increasingly worried about lander design - SAS is insufficiently strong to keep the lander upright if some rather shallow angles or lateral forces are present on contact.
• Sixth & seventh attempt: As per the fourth and fifth. Decided to orbit a few months till daylight and make next attempts where seeing the ground is possible. Discovered that orbiting my way into daylight was not an option. Seems my elliptical orbit is aligned with the sun, such that the periapsis is always in the dark...
• Eighth attempt: Experimented with timing of suicide burn. Was not a successful experiment.

At this stage I took a second quicksave in the final moments of an otherwise successful burn, allowing for repeated attempts at the troublesome final landing.

...

• Fifteenth attempt: LANDED! 380 units of fuel left, allowing for a full ascent stage and 20 units of fuel left in the descent to give a teensy initial boost.

 

This is why we hate Tylo.

Science and flag planting was undertaken with haste, the quicker to be off the cursed moon.

Take off wasn't exactly a walk in the park either. Undocked the spent descent stage a couple of seconds into flight as it ran out, then pointed at 45 degrees and hoped it would be plain sailing from there on. Gravity had other plans as she dragged my now puny 1.2TWR into a hillside.

This is another reason why we hate Tylo.

Eventually however, a 70km circular orbit was achieved. The ion tug headed back to the mothership to refuel before travelling back down to rendezvous with our spent lander, now shorn of it's Tylo descent stage fat I hoped the journey back up to the mothership wouldn't be too onerous. I was wrong.

I was quite biblically wrong. Spent a good 90 minutes initiating 30 or so separate burns to bring the lander up to the mothership. That little ion tug did just about OK at Laythe and Vall, but here it's woeful.

This is also why we hate Tylo.

Eventually however I reached the mothership. And as Tylo's final "screw you" I realised I'd made a mothership design error - the mothership, now sans Tylo descent stage presented no docking ports which wouldn't foul my lander's engines. So had to split the lander once more into it's component modules, docking the core cabin at the front, and the lander engines/legs at the rear.

 

Departure

The sooner the better. Glancing at xenon fuel reserves I realised I'd now burnt through 4346 units of xenon gas. At the 0.48/s burn rate of my single ion engine that's 9000 seconds spent operating that engine - TWO AND A HALF HOURS.

99dv burn to escape Tylo without bothering to line up a firm encounter - close enough would be fine, just get me off this rock! Once escaped a further 78dv, followed by another 5dv burn set up an encounter with Pol. We're headed to Pol next because Bop requires a large inclination change - if we visit that last we'll only need to make that inclination burn once rather than twice.

[Dafni]

not necessarily the hardest I ever did, but definitely took the most thinking. did it just the other day. it looks neat on the map too!

one single launch. 2 rings of equally spaced satellites, 3 on each orbit.

 

[Scarecrow]

Return manned mission to Eve.  Took a lot of trial probe flights to finally come up with a craft that I felt comfortable sending a manned mission in, with a better than even chance of being able to get them back again.

[Superfluous J]

The hardest single thing was landing on and returning from Eve with a Kerbal. Specifically, getting him back into orbit from the surface.

The hardest mission was the Jool-5 one, but I made it much harder by putting (literal) tons of restrictions on myself.

Though I think I'll blow both of those out of the water with my latest endeavor, a grand tour for the Ultimate Challenge.

Edited May 8, 2016 by 5thHorseman

[RocketBlam]

19 hours ago, RandomUser said:

Wow.  I couldn't return my Kerbals from Eve, sure.  But carrying an asteroid the whole way to Bop?  You'd think it impossible upon first glance, surely. 

19 hours ago, Scotius said:

I've built a big science station in low Moho orbit. Why i was thinking it was a good idea? I hate Moho to this day.

It was impossible.

But it had to be done.

(Why is this quoting two posts? Is this a new bug?)

 

Edited May 9, 2016 by RocketBlam

[Gaarst]

Trying to land an asteroid with a space shuttle on a single mission has got to be part of the hardest things I've ever tried in KSP. Still trying.

[RandomUser]

1 hour ago, RocketBlam said:

But it had to be done.

Learning lesson I guess, the KSP way. 

At least now you know how to do such a monotonous interesting and rewarding technique!  

Edited May 9, 2016 by RandomUser

[StrandedonEarth]

Trying to eject a 3600 ton asteroid from the Kerbol system. Before ISRU. I gave up after sending a phalanx or two of spearships out to it. If I had known about the TCA mod back then (if it even existed then) I just might have been able to get it moving where I wanted it to go.

[RocketBlam]

8 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

The hardest single thing was landing on and returning from Eve with a Kerbal. Specifically, getting him back into orbit from the surface.

The hardest mission was the Jool-5 one, but I made it much harder by putting (literal) tons of restrictions on myself.

Though I think I'll blow both of those out of the water with my latest endeavor, a grand tour for the Ultimate Challenge.

Um, pardon me? 

The man who flew an asteroid as an aircraft? 

THE 5th Horseman?!?

[NathanKell]

Probably 2 stages of spin-stabilized unguided solids to lunar impact.

[Superfluous J]

8 minutes ago, RocketBlam said:

Um, pardon me? 

The man who flew an asteroid as an aircraft? 

THE 5th Horseman?!?

Flying an asteroid was a glide in the park compared to Eve.

 

[Mastikator]

3 Kerbals on the surface of Ike and Duna and then back again while using TAC Lifesupport.

[nightingale]

13 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

Flying an asteroid was a glide in the park compared to Eve.

 

Yeah, but that may need an asterisk since it was done in the pre 1.0 souposphere.  Not sure if it's even possible with current re-entry heating system.

In case that's not enough: are you chicken, McFly?

[numerobis]

Successfully landing on Mun, manually, before I understood Kosmo-Not's technique.

Next-hardest: probably my current project, which is optimizing the flight plan to get the cheapest launch possible -- in my spare time while doing a startup.

[Superfluous J]

37 minutes ago, nightingale said:

Yeah, but that may need an asterisk since it was done in the pre 1.0 souposphere.  Not sure if it's even possible with current re-entry heating system.

In case that's not enough: are you chicken, McFly?

None of that is enough. I tried already to fly an asteroid in the 1.0 atmo. It was like... well... it was like trying to fly a rock.

[Guest]

Hardest thing I've ever done?  Docking, for the first time.  I built a massive station after that to hone my skills, learn about RCS placement, read the navball, etc...

Edited May 9, 2016 by regex

[Vanamonde]

It took me minutes to figure out how to reach orbit. But t took me 4 days of constant trials and experimentation to figure out how to land on Mun. But the first time I tried to rendezvous, I succeeded. But I spent about 3 months working out how to make fully reusable interplanetary ships. But making an SSTO that can carry cargo and reliably make orbit? Four years. FOUR YEARS. 

[Superfluous J]

I can now officially say that landing and returning to orbit on Eve in 1.1.2 is the hardest thing I've done. Because I've now done it

In the end it was almost comically easy, but that ease was the result of weeks of work, not even counting the time I spent having given up on ever getting it.

Edited May 9, 2016 by 5thHorseman