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

[teag2]

4 hours ago, RandomUser said:

Sounds just like mine.  Went to Eve using a craft designed for Duna, that I built using a tutorial (while back, was still a noob at interplanetary missions) everything worked until I got to Eve and tried to land.  That is of course, when I learned that Eve had an atmosphere way to thick to simply fly into.  Needless to say, I didn't survive and had to then redo the entire mission with a heat shield. 

Funny to look back on, cause now I know how to build a capable craft and land, all with relative ease. 

Heh, that's kinda funny. The probe I was using I had also just flown to Duna. Needless to say, that mission went better than the Eve mission.

[Curveball Anders]

The thing I find hardest thing in KSP is playing career and not smacking my monitor and use bad language at the criteria in most contracts.

Which is why I rarely play career

 

Edited May 11, 2016 by Curveball Anders
Gramer

[RizzoTheRat]

Turning it off and going to bed.

[DChurchill]

8 hours ago, RizzoTheRat said:

Turning it off and going to bed.

/thread

[Mjarf]

It's embarassingly difficult for me to design a non-derpy rover...

[SpenSpaceCorp]

A Tylo return mission; the ground was pretty hard.

[cantab]

Hardest thing I've done ... I'm not sure.

Tylo ... actually wasn't that hard. The tough bit was dealing with structural issues and horrendous lag to get the oversized lander out to Jool. I could have done a smaller lander, but I thought Jeb should go in style. Once I was there I got the landing right on my second or third go. Had to jetpack to finish making orbit again though.

Eve I have yet to even attempt. Likewise I've never tried descending into Jool and returning.

As for what was hard:

Way early in my KSPing, I did a Minmus EVA landing and returned to the ship in orbit. Bone stock, back when Kerbals didn't have navballs. Real seat-of-the-pants stuff.

I sent this tiny probe flying by *every* planet in the system, plus Mun and Ike, in an epic string of gravity assists. Its twin missed Eeloo and instead finished with a sundive. Some of those assists took hours to set up just right.

I made orbit ... in KSP 0.7.3. The first public release of the game, it has no ability to stack tanks to feed an engine, no map view, no struts, and no symmetry.

I did a save where I mined all my own rocket fuel using the kethane mod, and built a couple of tanker planes to go out to deposits on Kerbin, fill up, and come back to KSC. They're kind of heavy fully loaded, and taking off from rough desert terrain took an awful lot of quickloading.

In my current save I have a modded solar system and I'm playing no-reverts. Serran is one of the mod worlds: larger than Duna, smaller than Laythe, with an oxygen atmosphere but no oceans. The program to land a Kerbal on Serran and return them safely was quite involved and really gave me a new experience. First I landed probes and characterised the atmosphere - actually using the barometer to take pressure readings and various heights and graphing my results. Then I worked to bring a probe back, and learned that making a lander that flies stably backwards on atmospheric entry and forwards during ascent is kind of tricky. Only then was I ready to land, and first I did a "dummy run" a la Apollo 10, before finally running an actual landing. And I pulled it off too, without a single quickload, revert, or Kerbal death during the entire program.

Getting the Burj Kherbalifa into space was hard only because the game lag was the worst I ever experienced, and I was trying to make a deadline to submit my mission. Two hours real time to make orbit. (Actually it only got suborbital on its own power, then I activated infinite fuel because I sure as heck wasn't sitting through the ascent again).

But for me the hardest thing has to be the thing I've attempted three times but never succeeded at: landing a Kerbal on Duna and returning them to Kerbin, without screwing it up and quickloading. The first time, the lander disintegrated on chute opening. The second time, the lander had no chutes and its engines couldn't stop it in time. The third time, it was a rover and I wrecked it in an 85 mph rollover crash. (In fairness, I've not actually attempted Duna in a save I was using quickloads in, whereas my Tylo and Moho landings both relied on quickloads.)

[MaxPeck]

I think the hardest thing is the second mun landing. With the first, as long as you get down in one piece, it's a success. The second mission to add to or resupply the first was incredibly hard until I finally unlocked the wonder that is mechjeb. 

[FungusForge]

One time I wanted to do an Apollo-style Mun landing. You know, separate module stays in orbit and all that jazz. Well, launch and Munar parking orbit was a breeze. I undock the lander with Jeb and Bob in it and de-orbit it. The landing was extremely terrifying because I touched down with something like 0.2 LF left in the descent stage. But I touched down, so I deploy the ladders, plant a flag, drop the rovers and almost kill Jeb in a Mun race. I return them to the lander because I didn't want to lose either of them after a successful landing. The ascent stage pops off and returns to orbit. However it runs out of fuel just after getting a satisfactory orbit, so it was up to the command module to rendezvous with the lander and recover Jeb and Bob. I get there, get ready to dock the lander to the awkwardly placed docking port (It was tacked to the side of the Mk1-2 Pod) on the command module, only to realize I forgot to put RSC thrusters on the Command module, and the lander didn't even have mono in the pod, let alone RCS thrusters. So we finally get to the hardest part of the mission: joining the ascent stage with the command module without RCS, while the docking port is at whatever angle the Mk1-2's side is. Took me probably 20 minutes to line up a good shot and actually dock the ships together (where normal docking procedures could be done in <5 minutes, this was serious), but I did it.

[Sevant]

The hardest for me is tied between two missions. The first was my very first Duna landing. I didn't have any concept of calculating delta V at that point, so I just made the biggest rocket I could and went for it. After safely landing my 3 kerbals, I discovered that I didn't have enough fuel to get back into Duna orbit; though I was close. Not one to waste time designing a new rocket (after all, surely there would be enough fuel for the round-trip if my rescue craft didn't have to land on Duna), I sent a sister of the stranded ship to rescue my crew. After getting the rescue craft into Duna orbit, I used the first ship's fuel to make near orbit, and then I sent all three kerbals on EVA and switched rapidly between them to finish the orbit using their jet packs before they hit the atmosphere. After collecting my floating, fuel-starved kerbals, I headed back to Kerbin--and promptly ran out of fuel again. A third rescue ship and a deep space rendezvous later, all three kerbals landed at home no worse for the wear, though quite a lot older than when they'd left.

The second hardest mission was building a rocket capable of reaching a stable kerbin orbit using only the parts you start with before doing any research in science mode in 1.1.2. No decouplers, no struts, no aerodynamics, no liquid fuel engines--only the very smallest solid fuel engine for thrust, some girders, a parachute, and a command capsule. A lot of ships (and launch pads) blew up, but good abort sequences and a few autosaves meant no kerbals were harmed in the process. Upon success, however, 1 kerbal was stranded in orbit. I'm sure he'll be fine...

Edited May 13, 2016 by Sevant

[Deoxist]

I know this thread is dead but fly into Sarnus (From the Outer Planets mod). I had to timewarp because if I didn't it would take ages but when I did my probe would start to freak out so I had to balance it out. In the end it ended well!

[MythicalHeFF]

Landing a small science  base on Tylo. Doesn’t sound too hard, right? Well, it shouldn’t have been, at least. Turns out that, in all my wisdom, I forgot to add any SAS modules to the descent stage, and on top of that, the only engines I was using were Aerospikes, which don’t have gimbal. Yeah. Wasn’t fun. Must have taken me at least five or six attempts to get it right, made no better by the fact that I couldn’t throttle my engines to 100%, as that would destabilize the craft more than its probe core’s puny reaction wheels could handle.

[king of nowhere]

Definitely my first kerbalism grand tour (mission: lucy in the sky with deadly radiations).

Even though I am now trying more complex versions of it, with more additional objectives, I know the mod much better. The first time i didn't knew well how to deal with radiations and malfunctions

As for something on a smaller scale, the rendez-vous of Dolphin 3 with the Dream Big in the aforementioned mission takes a special place. Dolphin 3 was a return capsule with ion engines in a high energy trajectory to return from Eeloo in one year. The Dream Big was on its way to getting a Kerbin gravity assist to eventually reach Duna with limited fuel. They met in Kerbin's SoI, coming from different directions; both ships were on escape trajectories - Dolphin 3 was even in an escape trajectory from Kerbol itself - there were over 3000 m/s of speed difference between the two crafts, no chances of getting a close approach marker. The Dream Big was too big, low on fuel and on a delicate trajectory to move, and Dolphin 3 had low thrust ion engines. And the docking had to happen before periapsis, because Dolphin 3 was supposed to swap crew, get resupplied, pick up a lander, and then make a retrograde burn and get captured by kerbin. I had to try it a half dozen times to get it right

Edited April 26, 2021 by king of nowhere

[Philae_Rosetta2021]

My hardest was a landing on Laythe with Jeb and my Aquila Mk1 Lander. I got into a highly elliptical orbit of Jool, found out my giant communication dish didn't work, and on top of that, I brushed Jool's atmosphere at around 5000 m/s (don't ask how) and 1/2 of my solar panels bought it as well as 1 of my landing legs. I then got to Laythe, on a direct collision course travelling at 7000m/s. Needless to say the 1st attempt went VERY badly. 2nd time, I got into orbit with my nuclear engines still having 4000m/s of dv. I went down and then realised I was landing on the dark side. I could see, had no lights and, even though I aimed for the largest bit of land on Laythe, I splashed down rather hard and it demolished everything except for my capsule, 2 solar panels, 1 fuel tank, and luckily, all my science! Now Jeb has been waiting for 7 years for a rescue mission, which is on its way, ready to collect all of its sweet science. Not exactly sure how I am going to take off again from water, but I will give it my best shot. I hate stranding my Kerbals without sending a rescue mission, I feel really sorry for them.