The one mission that has always gotten away

[Rocket Farmer]

For me it's my Jool 5 mission.  I've designed it at least 5-6 times (always with some remaining technical difficulties) but have never pulled the trigger and sent it out.  Duna, Eeloo, Dres missions etc I can do in my sleep but for some reason hitting all 5 Jool moons has always alluded me.

So tonight I do it.  I am going to design a Jool 5 mission from scratch including 1 multi purpose lander to hit all 5 moons, one aircraft for Laythe, rovers and small landed bases for Laythe, Val & Tylo, and small orbital space stations for each moon plus Jool.  All in 1 aircraft.

I shall not rest until all Kerbals have been returned to Kerbin from this mission!

 

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

Manned Duna. I know I can do it, but I can never quite bring myself to push the button

[TheSaint]

Sarnus. I've been planning and replanning a Sarnus mission for ages, and it always keeps getting postponed by lack of real life time, or waiting for mod updates, or computer issues, or something. I was just working on it again today, since all of the mods I need have finally updated again. It's a major undertaking because I want to fly a full mission, with two different landings on Slate and Tekto with full bases and extended surface stays. I've never flown a mission like that before, it should be something if I actually accomplish it. 

1 hour ago, Rocket Farmer said:

For me it's my Jool 5 mission.  I've designed it at least 5-6 times (always with some remaining technical difficulties) but have never pulled the trigger and sent it out.  Duna, Eeloo, Dres missions etc I can do in my sleep but for some reason hitting all 5 Jool moons has always alluded me.

So tonight I do it.  I am going to design a Jool 5 mission from scratch including 1 multi purpose lander to hit all 5 moons, one aircraft for Laythe, rovers and small landed bases for Laythe, Val & Tylo, and small orbital space stations for each moon plus Jool.  All in 1 aircraft.

I shall not rest until all Kerbals have been returned to Kerbin from this mission!

Funny, when I started playing KSP, three years ago now, one of the first things I did was look at the Kerbol system and say, "I'm gonna fly a mission to Jool and land on all five moons!" I don't think the Jool 5 Challenge even existed at that point, if it did I was completely unaware of it. It took me about three or four months of trial and error, but I finally flew that mission. Mine involved three different ships, so it wouldn't have met the rules to the Jool 5 Challenge. I've never actually flown a bona-fide Jool 5 Challenge mission, I probably should give it a try some time. 

[cantab]

Landing a Kerbal on Duna and returning them safely. I've only ever attempted it in Ironman saves - that is, no reverts or quickloads - and it went wrong each time.

More recently, establishing a base on Serran, a world in the New Horizons mod. I've been working steadily towards it but have had repeated delays and setbacks. Some of my own doing, others because of updates or bugs in mods.

[Brownhair2]

Interplanetary missions in general. I want to go to ALL DA PLANERTS but I also don't want to waste time warping, so I'm stuck trying to find things to do while I wait for windows.

[Wjolcz]

A permanent, self-sustainable (stock ISRU-wise) Laythe base/outpost. I always wanted to have one on the surface with a space station in orbit and an SSTO cycler. Would be great as a Jool moons exploration gateway.

I have landed many things many times there (including simple probes with chutes, jet-powered drones and base pieces), but never got to finish it. Always wanted to do that in career, but since that mode allows for limited creativity the plans to complete it are on hold until something sensical is done to the career mode.

Edited July 25, 2016 by Veeltch

[Pecan]

Eve return; just, never bothered.

[Archgeek]

Project Helios.  I have repeatedly designed several modular payloads (Daedalus and Icarus dangerously-near solar probes, with Icarus designed for a destructive plunge intended to try for atmospheric analysis, Pioneer 1kerb capsule return system, and eventually a full 3-kerb boat anchor pod into a circular near-sun orbit), the entire XenonTempest series of modular ionic transfer vehicles, plus plans to build something smaller for those little probes.  Yet, I've never really sent anything down there, except for the first test of XT Mk1 for some reason, though due to a misreading it didn't wind up that close -- 613km above the surface.

[tjsnh]

In my case it's "bases" on other planets/moons, orbital stations larger than 2-3 modules in LKO, and ANY orbital stations ANYWHERE else.

I play career mode almost exclusively, so these sorts of projects end up being enormously expensive but give almost nothing in rewards which forces me to wait to think about them until I've maxxed out the tech tree and set a "strategy" to convert research-to-funds etc etc. The problem is, my game pace is slow, so usually I end up starting a new save before I max out the tech tree (for various reasons, usually related to bugs or a mod plugin getting updated in some save-breaking way).

[NSEP]

Any constellarion type of mission. Sometimes im just too lazy to handle that.

[Snark]

Crewed return mission from Ernus, in New Horizons.

For those of you who have played New Horizons:  you know what I'm talking about. 

For those of you who haven't:  you can think of it as "Moho, cubed."  Everything that's at all hard about Moho, made much much worse.

Supermassive vacuum world orbiting scorchingly close to the sun.  Takes insane amounts of dV just to get to Ernus orbit from the home planet.  Has no moon, so, nowhere to refuel.  Takes another agonizingly huge chunk of dV to transfer between orbit and ground.  No atmosphere available for aerobraking or parachutes.  Surface gravity is ~1.6 IIRC... which means you not only need scads of dV, but you also have to have a really high TWR, and doing an efficient suicide burn is a real nail-biter.  Orbits so close to the sun that solar heating will overheat and explode components on your ship unless you've got active radiators pumping away.  Tidally locked to the sun-- and the only smooth, flat place is (you guessed it) the sunward side, which means your choice of landing site comes down to either "scorching hell" or "pitch-black landing on very dark surface consisting of spiky steep slopes everywhere".

Ouch.

The last time I tried it, I ultimately failed due to heat-management problems.  (That's not to say, necessarily, that "I would have succeeded if heat hadn't been an issue."  It's entirely possible I would have failed anyway.  But the overheating problem sunk me even before I had a chance to get to any subsequent inadequacies of my design.)  This was back when there was a bug in the active-rotating radiator panels, such that they absorbed solar heat even when visually edge-on to the sun, making them pretty much useless for dealing with solar heating.  (Worse than useless; they were heat absorbers.)  This problem got fixed in KSP 1.0.5, but I haven't been back to New Horizons since then.  Looking forward to giving it another go and (again) failing miserably.

[Andem]

When I first started playing, I had a plan to "Conquer the Inner Planets". I got as far as Duna.

[GRS]

Necropost

Jool 5 Podded Direct Ascent, i daresay it's super hard, nearly Impossible with my weak weak Hardware, Arkanus also had the same, it's roughly as bad as Ernus, but with less heat and deeper Kerbolar Gravity well (much like Ernus, it's a Dense Massive ball of rock, but slightly more masive, with 1.7 Gees and same size, and as eccentric as Moho to ease counters, i made that one myself, the eases are only for smart people, the biggest burden was the fact that Kerbin's Atmo is extremely inappropriate for Aerobrakes, so i need more Delta V and assists to reduce Relative Velocity, Arkanus isn't Tidelocked, but it's surface are relatively uneven and full of craters), and no Gas Giant assistor, just a Lava Giant 5 Times as massive as Kerbin and 1000 Km wide in Radius, but i went there with Hard Mode, Arkanus one is beaten, but DAJ5 is still yet to beat.

@Snark i suggest looking at that exalosm dude...but gain advantage from Moh instead of killing some computers.

Edited September 23, 2019 by GRS

[GRS]

On 7/25/2016 at 9:53 PM, Snark said:

Crewed return mission from Ernus, in New Horizons.

For those of you who have played New Horizons:  you know what I'm talking about. 

For those of you who haven't:  you can think of it as "Moho, cubed."  Everything that's at all hard about Moho, made much much worse.

Supermassive vacuum world orbiting scorchingly close to the sun.  Takes insane amounts of dV just to get to Ernus orbit from the home planet.  Has no moon, so, nowhere to refuel.  Takes another agonizingly huge chunk of dV to transfer between orbit and ground.  No atmosphere available for aerobraking or parachutes.  Surface gravity is ~1.6 IIRC... which means you not only need scads of dV, but you also have to have a really high TWR, and doing an efficient suicide burn is a real nail-biter.  Orbits so close to the sun that solar heating will overheat and explode components on your ship unless you've got active radiators pumping away.  Tidally locked to the sun-- and the only smooth, flat place is (you guessed it) the sunward side, which means your choice of landing site comes down to either "scorching hell" or "pitch-black landing on very dark surface consisting of spiky steep slopes everywhere".

Ouch.

The last time I tried it, I ultimately failed due to heat-management problems.  (That's not to say, necessarily, that "I would have succeeded if heat hadn't been an issue."  It's entirely possible I would have failed anyway.  But the overheating problem sunk me even before I had a chance to get to any subsequent inadequacies of my design.)  This was back when there was a bug in the active-rotating radiator panels, such that they absorbed solar heat even when visually edge-on to the sun, making them pretty much useless for dealing with solar heating.  (Worse than useless; they were heat absorbers.)  This problem got fixed in KSP 1.0.5, but I haven't been back to New Horizons since then.  Looking forward to giving it another go and (again) failing miserably.

I see...that's super annoying, enable cheats so that "Heat Absorber" issue won't fail you, as heat starts to get stable and make sense, disable the cheat, and someone need to tell SQUAD about this, the Timewarp heat absorbtion.

[Piper]

For me, it's always been a manned landing on Eve.  Every career play-through I do, around the time I'm ready to commit to a manned landing, something happens that leads me away from the game, and by the time I get back to it so many things have changed, so many new things have come out, that I end up starting a new career mode again.  Even right now, I'm getting close to being ready to send a Kerbal to Eve (I'm just waiting on crews to return from Duna, Ike, and Dres), and I plan on launching crews to Eve, and of course, I discover KSP 2 is going to be coming out.  Knowing my luck, something IRL will take me away from the game, and by the time I get back to it KSP 2 will be out and I'll want to play that instead.

[Barefoot Friar]

On 7/9/2016 at 10:45 PM, Brownhair2 said:

Interplanetary missions in general. I want to go to ALL DA PLANERTS but I also don't want to waste time warping, so I'm stuck trying to find things to do while I wait for windows.

I have largely felt the same way.  Kerbal Alarm Clock has been awesome because it lets me multitask.  But then I realized that I had flags on five planets and science stations in orbit around four of them within four or five Kerbal years, which for a space program seems a bit... fast.  Of course we only have the space programs of Earth for comparison, and the real solar system is much larger so the distances and time involved is much longer, but still...  It just seems wrong somehow to have an entire space station in orbit around Mun, complete with a science lab and an entire fuel tree, within a Kerbal week.

I've gotten okay with warping some, and with focusing more on one thing at a time.

Then again, the whole planet of Kerbin is united and is a space-faring utopia so they literally have nothing else to do.  Maybe it's not so unrealistic after all.

(Of course it's a game.  Play it the way that makes you happy.)

Edit: Dang, I didn't see this was from 2016.  Unintentional necro.  Sorry.

Edited September 23, 2019 by Barefoot Friar

[Guest]

On 7/25/2016 at 2:58 PM, Wjolcz said:

A permanent, self-sustainable (stock ISRU-wise) Laythe base/outpost. I always wanted to have one on the surface with a space station in orbit and an SSTO cycler. Would be great as a Jool moons exploration gateway.

Highly recommended. My most memorable career game revolved around one. I kept it up for a long time, upgrading pretty much everything as I figured out better ways to build the craft. The high point (and coda) of the career was bringing back Valentina in the original Pelikan I SSTO she flew there many, many years ago.

"Pelikan-1 to Tower, en route from Kosmodrome Laythe, requesting clearance to land"

"Pelikan-1, you are cleared to land on runway zero-niner"

"Welcome home, Pelikan-1."

That's her carrying the lander used to visit the airless moons of Jool, with the exception of Tylo obviously which needed a purpose-built solution. Her main job was hauling base modules to the surface and fuel back up. Terrific plane, the Pelikan-1, although about as aerodynamically efficient as a refrigerator. The Pelikan-2 was a massive improvement, and one I haven't managed to top for that particular mission (airbreathing medium flatbed cargo SSTO.)

[purpleivan]

The that got away for me was a challenge (can't recall the name now) that I had a crack at early this year. It required the recovery of a 20 ton stranded vehicle (with no propellant in it) from 10km offshore on Eve, back to Kerbin.

My plan was to send a huge lifter to the planet (check), then a rocket powered recovery "boat" and a wheeled transport to (check and check) to the Purple Planet.

I had all my stuff designed, all I had to do was test them.

The lifter and transport worked well, with my rocket powered erector (this was before the robotic parts were added) working as planned.

Even the recovery of the vehicle to the shortline went fine in "simulation" tests on Eve.

Yep, everything was good.

• The recovery "boat" did a fine job.
• The stranded ship could be got onto the transporter at the shoreline.
• The transporter/erector did its job attaching the stranded ship to the ascent vehicle.
• The launcher could drag the 20 tons of recovered vehicle into orbit.

Just one thing... the wheels on the transport broke every few metres, meaning that taking it's cargo from the shoreline to the launch site (it would have been a few kilometers) would have been hellish.

So I gave it all up after several days of work on it.

I did something out of it though... playing around with boats for the first time led to my Kerbin Sorta-Circumnavigation trip.