Your nostalgic rockets!

[SiriusRocketry]

The title says it all- do you have any old rockets that'd you'd be willing to talk about? Your earliest attempts at KSP? Your venerable first lander?

This image showcases my Astro series of rockets, which were my earliest rockets. Here I've re-created them and put them on a comparison chart, from Astro 1 to Astro 5.

ASTRO 1

The first spacecraft I ever launched reached an altitude of 43 kilometers, before return.

ASTRO 2

The Astro 2, powered by two RT10 solid boosters and a sizable amount of duct-taped fins, brought Jebediah to space, at an apoapsis of 122 kilometers.

ASTRO 3

Astro 3 was a major step in playing for me. Utilising a basic gravity turn put Astro 3 on a suborbital trajectory which shot Valentina halfway across Kerbin at a max altitude of 267 km. Powered by a BACC booster first stage (with good fins!) and the classic RT-10 upper stage, this was the most advanced rocket yet.

ASTRO 4

Astro 4 used the first liquid fueled upper stage I ever built  (with an LVT-45, as I hadn't discovered that smaller engines like the Terrier used less fuel). It propelled Val into orbit with the Astro 3 booster stage.

ASTRO 5

The last Astro rocket to be built was a fully liquid fueled monster, which took Jeb to the Mun. Still using the LVT45 upper stage, it proved to be very tight on fuel margins, especially for the Mun flyby, after which there were only 29 m/s left in the tank!

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

My earliest surviving screenshots and saves are in my .25 zipped archive, even though I bought the game in .23.5. I was copying screenshots and saves over from version to version at that point though, since there are over 12 thousand screenshots and the very first game I ever named in that zip. The very first rockets I ever made would have been in the demo though, which I have long since lost.

I just unzipped it and fired it up. Here's everything in the VAB craft list:

https://imgur.com/a/iVvy0bA

Note massively overkill lifters, an excess of control surfaces, and sweet, sweet, soup-o-sphere "aerodynamic" designs. Also, those interplanetary tugs were as useless as you might imagine, given that I didn't have the patience to set up an interplanetary network of fuel depots, or even a Delta-V readout.

And some of the earliest screenshots:

https://imgur.com/a/xucqhGU

[Vanamonde]

This is how we used to land on Mun, before you young punks came along. 

And then we'd turn right around and come home again, because Kerbals couldn't get out of the ships yet. 

[SiriusRocketry]

1 hour ago, Vanamonde said:

 before you young punks came along. 

I started as a younger kid in 0.11 actually. Unfortunately as a seven year old I had no idea how to screenshot or anything so its memory only. I didn't buy the game at full release and only remembered it in late 2016, getting the demo, then the full game in February 2017. IIRC, KSP was in 1.2.2 then.

[RealKerbal3x]

Granted, I've only been playing the game for about half a year, but I still fondly remember my first rocket. I built this on my old laptop where I got only 20FPS on the main menu (you don't want to know how bad it was while actually playing) and I had to hit Shift-F1 to take a screenshot (because F1 brought up the help menu). The Moho-1!

The good old days, when I was playing totally bone stock. And notice the decoupler attached to the bottom node of the heatshield, because I hadn't found the top node that gets rid of that ugly shroud yet. I started on 1.3.1, so 1.4.0 was the first major update for me.

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

13 hours ago, RealKerbal3x said:

Granted, I've only been playing the game for about half a year, but I still fondly remember my first rocket. I built this on my old laptop where I got only 20FPS on the main menu (you don't want to know how bad it was while actually playing) and I had to hit Shift-F1 to take a screenshot (because F1 brought up the help menu). The Moho-1!

[...]

That reminds me of sticky keys. The "Do you want to turn on Sticky Keys" dialogue still haunts my memory of early Mun landings.

[RealKerbal3x]

10 hours ago, Mad Rocket Scientist said:

That reminds me of sticky keys. The "Do you want to turn on Sticky Keys" dialogue still haunts my memory of early Mun landings.

I’ll have to figure out how to turn off the Sticky Keys shortcut at some point. It always gets in the way during launching and landing, especially because if you click ‘No’ it minimises the KSP window and goes onto your desktop . 

[Roldmaster]

On 7/21/2018 at 1:50 PM, SiriusRocketry said:

The title says it all- do you have any old rockets that'd you'd be willing to talk about? Your earliest attempts at KSP? Your venerable first lander?

This image showcases my Astro series of rockets, which were my earliest rockets. Here I've re-created them and put them on a comparison chart, from Astro 1 to Astro 5.

ASTRO 1

The first spacecraft I ever launched reached an altitude of 43 kilometers, before return.

ASTRO 2

The Astro 2, powered by two RT10 solid boosters and a sizable amount of duct-taped fins, brought Jebediah to space, at an apoapsis of 122 kilometers.

ASTRO 3

Astro 3 was a major step in playing for me. Utilising a basic gravity turn put Astro 3 on a suborbital trajectory which shot Valentina halfway across Kerbin at a max altitude of 267 km. Powered by a BACC booster first stage (with good fins!) and the classic RT-10 upper stage, this was the most advanced rocket yet.

ASTRO 4

Astro 4 used the first liquid fueled upper stage I ever built  (with an LVT-45, as I hadn't discovered that smaller engines like the Terrier used less fuel). It propelled Val into orbit with the Astro 3 booster stage.

ASTRO 5

The last Astro rocket to be built was a fully liquid fueled monster, which took Jeb to the Mun. Still using the LVT45 upper stage, it proved to be very tight on fuel margins, especially for the Mun flyby, after which there were only 29 m/s left in the tank!

how do you even build these charts

[Roldmaster]

how do you even make these

[SiriusRocketry]

On 6/3/2021 at 3:41 PM, Roldmaster said:

how do you even make these

With a mod called Kronal Vessel Viewer, I screenshot the craft in the VAB, resize the screenshots in Google Drawings, and boom. 

[Roldmaster]

14 hours ago, SiriusRocketry said:

With a mod called Kronal Vessel Viewer, I screenshot the craft in the VAB, resize the screenshots in Google Drawings, and boom. 

Ok..... send me a link to that mod if you can, thanks

[SiriusRocketry]

On 6/6/2021 at 6:36 AM, Roldmaster said:

Ok..... send me a link to that mod if you can, thanks

https://spacedock.info/mod/1092/Kronal Vessel Viewer Continued

[Firemetal]

https://imgur.com/usuxb2D

This was a cargo SSTO from an old career game I had a few years back. To this day it's my Youtube profile pic. I have older in my signature links. Unfortunately, I couldn't seem to find my very old KSP screenshots, which had even more nostalgia, so this is as far back as it goes

Fire

[Wizard Kerbal]

My first rocket was a true MASTERPIECE but I have no surviving photos.
I'm gonna go re-create it I recreated it

Spoiler

Of course, it never got past 6,000 meters.
That last image was how I made my "farings." I'm disappointed with my past self. 

Edited June 22, 2021 by Wizard Kerbal
I still feel like something's missing!