What did you do on your first KSP Flight?

[blimpsnack]

tell me, i'm bored.

[Geonovast]

Probably the same as nearly everyone else.  Flea Booster, Mk1 Command Pod, Mk16 parachute.  Straight up, straight down.

 

Now, as far as first where I vaguely knew what I was doing... I don't really remember.  But my first few weeks were essentially trying to leave atmo and crash into the Mun.  I played for quite awhile before I even tried for orbit.

[Rauko]

Crash

[bewing]

I did the first 8 or 9 tutorials.

 

[Scarecrow]

Crashed and burned.

[Snark]

Moving to KSP Discussion, since this isn't really a question about how to play the game.

My first flight?  Tried to get all fancy-shmancy and make a craft with 3-fold radial symmetry, except that I just charged straight in without reading anything first and didn't know about the symmetry controls, so I built it manually, and therefore of course didn't get it quite symmetrical (this was before editor snap was a thing) and it went all wobbly and wouldn't fly straight.  Did not go to space. 

[GDJ]

Capsule, solid rocket motor, parachute and 3 fins. About as basic as you can get.

I lived.

[Hunony]

did the tutorials, and then crashed on kerbin with a small srb mk1 pod, 3 fins and a parachute

[adsii1970]

Much like what @Snark did. I overthought it and made a huge contraption. Made it into a pretty nifty sub-orbital path. And at about 50,000 meters and a speed of 790 m/s heading straight to the ground, I realized I didn't include parachutes...

[HerobrineLiu]

I stuck a LV-T30 onto a MK1 fuselage and spent 20 minutes trying to figure out why it wouldn't fire. When it finally did, my parachute fired with the engine and I crashed. (similar to the fleeing the complex scene where henry tries to fly a rocket away)

[Ultimate Steve]

April 2013. 0.19. Sandbox, as that was the only mode back then.

Mk1 pod, Mk16 parachute, TR-18A Stack Decoupler, and an RT-10 Solid Fuel Booster. Made it up to a decent altitude.

My second mission was a rover made of a mk1 pod, six large girders, and two gigantors. Guess what happened to the gigantors when I got up to speed.

[StrandedonEarth]

I have no idea what the first thing I did was when I first got the game. But the first flight of a new career always seems to be the same...

Flea, pod, chute, launch. Watch it twirl all around because the chute deployed when the Flea ignited....

[Mike Mars]

A quadruple flip, with a twist.

MM

[N_Danger]

About Mach 1, then the rocket flipped over and exploded. 

 

 

[CobaltShock]

Did not know how to stage, so I made a single stage manned spacecraft with about 8 or 9 LV-909's. Pretty sure it got to like 500 km and flipped over

 

This was in May 2013

Edited June 13, 2018 by Steeeeve

[Vanamonde]

Went up a few thousand meters, popped the capsule off, rode down on a chute. Was in the original demo. Couldn't even get out of the ships back then. 

[Raptor9]

Well, I was drunk and playing 0.12 or 0.13 at the time, but I remember a few black flips a few seconds off the launch pad and then crashing and laughing...and that was my first lesson: "Check yo' stagin!"

[SiriusRocketry]

Back in 0.11 (iirc) I built a rocket with two badly asymmetrical SRBs, two fuel tanks and a main engine. Made it to space after fighting my way up, then crashed because I forgot a parachute

 

[MythicalHeFF]

Died. Need I say more?

[RealKerbal3x]

It was a early-Mercury style flight. A Mk1 capsule with a heatshield, attached to a couple of 1.25m tanks. It was a resounding success, surprisingly!!!!!!!

EDIT: Actually didn't go to space on my first try. First I had the launch clamps on the stage before the engine, so I fell and my engine blew up. The second time, I checked my staging but forgot to throttle up before detaching so the same happened again. On my third try I managed to reach SPAAAAAAACE.

Edited June 13, 2018 by RealKerbal3x

[Gargamel]

Under powered thrust, crashed into the launch tower.

[eddiew]

Had the engine and the parachute on the same stage, flipped out, blew up the SRB and somehow survived.

[recursive_mouse]

Found my old HDD, and instant nostalgia! 

This was my way to go Mun lander then 

 

 

Lots and lots of vertical launched aircraft

[PrvDancer85]

I crashed with a stock rocket, then i looked up the controlls

[wumpus]

Way back in the dawn of time (actually about a year later than the "free DLC" cutoff, but long before "career mode"), I started with campaigns: https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Campaigns

So presumably build a rocket, google to find out how to launch it.  Come back, hit the space bar, google some more to learn you have to either have a kerbal in the capsule or a probe core, rebuild and finally launch.  Note that the "campaign" has you launch unmanned first.  I think after starting there is a "hit a different continent with a missile" but I decided that it would be hard and use skills I wouldn't really need in space so I went straight to working on going to orbit.

Campaigns were a good start, and basically didn't have any grinding (if you didn't like the mission, you did the next.  If you needed the skills in the next,  you backtracked until you could dock.  Career mode was more or less inevitable, but that doesn't mean it will ever graft well onto the natural sandbox that is KSP.