What’s hard for you in KSP?

[Klapaucius]

Going to other planets efficiently.  I can get there, but I have not spent enough time learning how to optimize my launch windows.  This means I often run out of fuel before or just as I circularize my orbit.

 

I can do the Mun and Minmus just fine, but further afield is still a design and course plotting challenge for me.

[Guest]

I still really never ever do well with aerodynamics, so I usually always go brute force. But that's my goal for 2021, actually learning to work with aerodynamics

[MKI]

Having the guts to go to anything but Duna and the Kerbin moons. I'll get the courage up eventually! Let me just add a fuel more sections of fuel to make sure I can get back from Dres....

[Guest]

10 hours ago, Klapaucius said:

I can do the Mun and Minmus just fine, but further afield is still a design and course plotting challenge for me.

Every destination is its own thing. I'm getting pretty comfortable with the Jolian system at this point, especially Laythe -- I can get there from LKO with about 2500 m/s, and can deliver significant payloads there in a single stage from the KSC runway.

OTOH I overbuild like a maniac if I'm going for Moho, more often than not I have, like, 1500 m/s left in my transfer stage when I arrive in orbit around there. If I did more missions I'm sure I'd get more comfortable with the real dV requirements. 

[SkyRender]

The hardest thing for me is sticking around long enough in a given Career mode save to actually reach the interplanetary stage of things.  I usually stop some time around turning the Mun and Minmus into gas stations.  The sheer tedium of the ISRU process just wears me down and I call it quits.  If only it were possible to fully automate the process...

[Bej Kerman]

18 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

Unstable on ascent.

The trick is to put the COL very close (but still behind) the COM and make sure the fuel drains evenly

[InfernoSD]

Nothing is harder than Eve.

But beside that, I struggle with bringing enough dV for all the objectives I intend to complete. I often make rockets with 6+ stages, consume several of them just circularizing to LKO, then have to immediately bring up a fuel tanker to refuel before I go. By the time I come to a stop at the next planet, I'm down so far on fuel again that I have to consider either sending a second tanker or limiting the scope of what I had planned.

It's not as if I don't know how space works. I build aerodynamically, I wait until the ideal interplanetary transfer window, I use as much oberth effect as I can, all that. It's just that I always build too big to begin with, and I can't build enough lower stages to travel far. In other words I'm bad at building small. It doesn't help that I actively avoid Nervs, Dawns, and ISRU.

[KevinW42]

On 1/29/2021 at 9:21 AM, Mikenike said:

Mine is rover/ surface base designing. I hate how wheels can be sometimes, and there is no middle ground from the large ones to the regular rover sizes. All my surface bases have landing leg spring problems. Ever time I load one in, they are launched 10-15 meters up and then break on the way down. Its partly because of how the game saves part settings, partly because of how my craft are designed.

Same here. I recently decided it was about time for me to actually do a surface base contract with a modular base on Minmus, but the core segment had landing leg issues and kept bouncing around every time it loaded in. So when i made the connector sections I made my own landing legs with the robotics parts and something krakeney happened and somehow the hinges got flipped completely backwards into an impossible configuration that made the legs non-functional and I just gave up at that point.

[18Watt]

Surface docking.  My latest attempts have been using the BG robotics parts, which causes a lot of buggy kraken attacks.  Very frustrating.  All I really want to do is transfer fuel.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, 18Watt said:

Surface docking.  My latest attempts have been using the BG robotics parts, which causes a lot of buggy kraken attacks.  Very frustrating.  All I really want to do is transfer fuel.

One of my pet annoyances also.

I've had most luck by putting a docking port on the lightest piston, so that the port hangs from the top of the piston and the piston is vertically behind it. This lets me move it up and down the length of the piston to precisely adjust the height. It's not too jumpy... most of the time

[InfernoSD]

Am I the only one that struggles with finding anomalies? I will sometimes orbit a planet or moon for days trying to place navigation markers as close as I can to anomalies. When I finally land at one, the anomaly is no where in sight. In some cases I have multiple markers for one anomaly that are kilometers apart.

[paul_c]

For me, precision landing on Kerbin. I can de-orbit and get it safely home but the position is a bit random. If I have a ton of fuel - like 1000 m/s dV - left, I can get it closer but I've never landed exactly where I wanted to; nor when returning from elsewhere, been able to predict eg a daytime landing or even the rough place I'll end up.

[Kernel Kraken]

Maneuver nodes and transfer windows. I don't know what all the cool pink and blue circles do and I've been playing for so long I'm scared to ask. 

[InfernoSD]

17 hours ago, Kernel Kraken said:

Maneuver nodes and transfer windows. I don't know what all the cool pink and blue circles do and I've been playing for so long I'm scared to ask. 

If you're serious, it's not as complicated as it looks. Manuever nodes use the same six symbols that are on the navwheel, which are also the same six symbols that SAS can point to. The pink ones are up/down arrows which indicate burning in an upward or downward direction, usually. The blue ones are radial in and radial out which indicate burning toward or away from the planet, usually. You already know the yellow ones are prograde and retrograde. With all six combined you can plot three dimensional movement.

Transfer windows are simply the ideal time to make a planetary transfer, which is mostly dependent on the angle between you, the sun, and the planet you're wanting to visit. This is complicated enough to calculate that everyone just uses a mod or online tool, or they figure the angle out once and write it down for next time.

[vv3k70r]

Chores are worst. Mining, refueling, orbit, tanker, back - repeat. Sending rockets on same standard LFB and landing it again and again same way around KSC.

Bugs/wrong phy is hard. Base do not hold on place, to go to base I have to turn on cheats and keep them untill world stabilise back to some new, random displacement of rockets left as buildings.

Gameplay is easy and funny.

[Kernel Kraken]

6 hours ago, InfernoSD said:

Transfer windows are simply the ideal time to make a planetary transfer, which is mostly dependent on the angle between you, the sun, and the planet you're wanting to visit. This is complicated enough to calculate that everyone just uses a mod or online tool, or they figure the angle out once and write it down for next time.

Yeah, I'll just stick to my infamous strategy of never leaving Kerbin's sphere of influence. Thanks though!

[vv3k70r]

On 1/31/2021 at 6:48 AM, 18Watt said:

All I really want to do is transfer fuel.

KIS/KAS - fuel lines.

[Popestar]

Well, there are so many things I haven't done, so I can't say for certain what I'm worst at.  But what I'm bad at:

• Manual landing on any surface other than Kerbin
• Docking.  I've crashed and blown up in the tutorial, for pete's sake.
• Gravity turns.  Most of the rockets I design end up flipping this way and that during launch.  Which leads me to...
• Rocket design.  I'm not efficient; I go for the kewls.

[Curveball Anders]

On 1/31/2021 at 6:48 AM, 18Watt said:

All I really want to do is transfer fuel.

EVA Transfer from DMagics collection of small mods

 

[Opteryx]

On 1/29/2021 at 1:59 PM, Slam_Jones said:

It's hard for me to start a new Career.  I don't like have such limited funds, or building pieces, or having to do very basic and low-level contracts to make money.

As such I usually give myself a bit of a funds/science boost for an "advanced" start, where I can go to orbit and build stations almost immediately.

I'm also not very good at creative ships.  All of mine look boring and functional, unlike the fantastic (yet still functional) creations I see often on the forum.

I agree. There should be a "Advanced Start" button to do that automatically. Also for the Creative ships... I completely understand. Most of my functional ships look like glorified space stations or pimples with wings. Downloading OPT Spaceplane parts helps a lot with making large spaceplanes look good, by the way.

[OrbitalMechanic]

SSTO's. FOr the life of me, i cannot figure out ascent profiles, max load, how to utilize engines and fuels, etc etc

[modus]

Yeah totally ssto's.

Although I reckognize al lot of stuff mentioned here. Makes me wonder what I'm actually good at

[alphaprior]

Docking! Especially with heavy spaceships... even when I switch docking mode craft keeps behaving wrong and I'm always trying to find where is up/down/left/right... so I've left it to MechJeb2.
Same for rendezvous.

I'm in career mode I want to achieve things not just grab all tech and stuff at start so I enjoy that, but the game becomes harder and harder after the easy explorations of Mun and Minmus.
I've been to Moho and Eve which of course was the hardest and most expensive mission. And Duna easy. 
But now the game becomes harder because I need to build bases on moons and other planets this is gonna be most difficult. Especially because it's so complicate design, land, connect.

Edited February 2, 2021 by alphaprior

[Guest]

Getting my apoapsis at just the right height around Kerbin is pretty annoying.  When my bad rocket design has too much thrust, it fights the atmosphere, which makes the apoapsis hard to get right. It's the most annoying when I'm trying to rendezvous .

I wouldn't really say that it's hard,  but I'm pretty sure it's appropriate to put in on this page. 

[adsii1970]

The hardest things for me to do are:

• Keep track of time. There have been times I only planned to play for a couple of hours. But when I get up from the computer, it's been nearly seven hours!
• Making precision landings.  No matter how hard I try to plan my landings, with space planes or shuttles, I normally can fly my way back to the KSC. Good thing the runway is always clear because I would not have enough speed or fuel to make a second attempt at landing. For capsules, I find myself dropping then down within a 20Km radius of my intended target landing zone.