What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Felsmak]

I built a throne for Jeb - the ion throne!

[KSK]

Decided to do an orbital rendezvous mission early on in my current career mode game, forgetting that this is much easier with RCS! Managed the rendezvous anyway, to within 30m just using good timing on the second launch, the navball and the main engine.

Doubt I'll be docking without RCS any time soon but nailing the rendezvous was satisfying.

[capi3101]

Crashed the Auk VIII four times last night. I'm kinda annoyed - though as I wake up this morning, I think I may at least know what the problem is.

[Xacktar]

I built a throne for Jeb - the ion throne!

[snip]

Amazing, kudos to you!

[Wooks]

I built a throne for Jeb - the ion throne!

http://i.imgur.com/ZmLgNsC.png

I think I love you

[Richy teh space man]

That throne looks awesome, one I'm sure Jeb would be proud of!

[magico13]

There are rumors going around that Whackjob intends to one day launch KSC into space. Now is your opportunity to beat him to it!

Unfortunately when I tried to launch it it just fired off a null pointer error and forced me to stay in the VAB. Forever. I no longer could exit the game. Had to Alt-F4 out :/

[Deadweasel]

Unfortunately when I tried to launch it it just fired off a null pointer error and forced me to stay in the VAB. Forever. I no longer could exit the game. Had to Alt-F4 out :/

Well now you know how the game handles (or at least refuses to handle) launch-ception! XD

/insert "Yo dawg" meme here

[John Crichton]

I built a throne for Jeb - the ion throne!

http://i.imgur.com/ZmLgNsC.png

So I'm not the only one who wants to send Jeb to the stars on an outside seat ion space ship

Looks cool!

[Tiakatt]

This is my last two days of play, but wow.

So I decided to go rescue those 6 Kerbals I left on Duna, the two ships I moved next to eachother a while back when I realized neither had the fuel for a return.

This mission did not go as planned, but started out very, very well.

I achieved my most fuel efficient Orbit to date, my best ever gravity turn. I had full fuel in my transfer stage by the time I reached Duna orbit, something that has never come close to happening with that lifter before.

Oh, also I reached Duna's SoI with absolutely no electrical power because I forgot to extend the solar panel =(

So I had to wait a while for another good intercept, yay for that full nuclear engine.

So here I am with a somewhat less full nuclear engine, entering Duna's SoI a 2nd time

I see that I can very cheaply score an Ike flyby, and I can get a gravity brake from him, right into orbit around Duna - excellent, more fuel savings!

I come out of Ike and cheaply refine my orbit around Duna. 154093k peri, 154577k apo, equatorial. It's almost a shame to break it, but I do and set my sights on the stranded Kerbals' site a bit to the north.

My nuclear engine still had fuel in it when I dropped it at the last possible safe moment. Oh well.

So I land 3.8 km from my target, and set to work walking Kerbals. Walked the kerbals from the first ship (yay for 4x speed), and picked up the 2nd ship - which still had just a little fuel - and easily dropped it 200 meters from the rescue vessel (the pic above) and quickly transferred those 3 kerbals as well.

Alright, things (and the two captains) are looking up, time to get these Kerbals home!!

Launch, get an escape trajectory, with a free gravity assist as Ike just sort of got in the way, but he was helpful again.

Aaaaaaaaand run out of fuel with my periapsis still very much near Duna's orbit and nowhere near Kerbin's (I missed a shot of this because I was distracted by "oh CRAP"). My poor Kerbals are stranded again and like an idiot I didn't put a docking port on this ship. =(

...you know what? No. I'm not losing these Kerbals!! They've waited too long for rescue!

So I picked crewman Wehrgee, oriented the ship to the sun...and set him to the task of pushing against roughly its center of mass (I got more precise about all of this with practice).

Wehrgee could produce ~5 m/s Delta-v with each refill of his pack. 5 Delta-v, a little over 2 minutes at a time. It was slow going. All told, he pushed for five hours JUST to get the ship's orbital trajectory to intercept Kerbin's. And there's no 4x physical warp here unless you just really love cuddles from the Kraken =( Yay for music.

Then we waited a few orbits until a close pass occurred. Spent maybe 10 minutes pushing to make that a proper intercept, not bad!

Spent another 10 minutes or so making some correction pushes until they had a Kerbin periapsis of 11,000 km, and decided to go ahead and enter SoI.

Saw I was going to swing past Kerbin's south. Was far, far less Delta-v to swing north instead of pushing retrograde forever However, that was a little trickier than pushing east/west (where the ship was quite stable as I could push through the center of mass), as I couldn't get Wehrgee to orient quite right for that in EVA mode. So finally I put the ship upright again and sent Wehrgee under. Had to fight its tendency to want to lean a fair bit, but it worked!

That's using your noggin, Wehrgee.

Got into atmosphere, and against the drag I didn't have enough torque to get the ship upright. The parachutes deployed in a way that just made it worse. So I cut two of the paracutes and then deployed 2 more on one side but not the other, so it would right itself. Once that happened I successfully deployed the remaining chutes. Whew!! That would have been an embarrassing end to this.

Here they are landed!!! I pushed them home FROM DUNA, on KERBAL POWER!! I'm pretty stoked right now...as my brother will know when he signs onto steam and sees my somewhat expletive laced exclamations of my rather paradoxical status as The Man

Welcome home:

Captain Kirmin

Captain Jedbert

Crewman Jenford

Crewman Macberry

Crewman Gilhat

And especially Crewman Wehrgee, who did all the heavy lifting, literally!

I salute you, Wehrgee. You may not have the badass trait, but you are a badass in my heart.

Edited February 11, 2014 by Tiakatt
Missed an image tag =) I also appear to have forgotten how to English, mostly fixed now.

[Sanpo]

Two probes arrived each at Mars and Venus.

[Jank]

Well my first Moho intercept didn't work out, so on the backswing, I caught Eve. Going way too fast though, I burned through the atmosphere ~70km up and back out into space. Barely managed to burn into a captured trajectory, but without enough fuel to ever get home or even achieve orbit.

So I sent Lars Kerman in to meet his destiny.

He landed in the middle of a vast purple ocean, with the lander curiously upright sticking 10m up out of the sea. So he got some good science, but he's marooned and pretty much unrescuable. R.I.P.

These last few tech tree items are costing me a Kerbal each...

BTW Tiakatt, coming in upside down like that, I see your SAS is on. Your ship probably would have righted itself with parachute drag if you'd turned it off, no?

Edited February 11, 2014 by Jank

[Tiakatt]

BTW Tiakatt, coming in upside down like that, I see your SAS is on. Your ship probably would have righted itself with parachute drag if you'd turned it off, no?

I did try that, actually, it did not help one little bit, which is an issue with my design. I still could not flip even quite to horizontal, let alone past it. It would not flip by itself just leaving it alone, either. Turning SAS back on and cutting parachutes followed by deploying others did the trick, though. I had an excessive number of 'chutes for Kerbin because it was intended to land almost entirely on 'chutes on Duna

That particular vessel, once the fuel runs out, tends to have an issue where whichever direction is pointed down is the direction that wants to stay down in atmosphere, especially as it gets thicker. It needs a redesign desperately, not least because of the run-out-of-fuel fuel issues

[Biker Joe]

After a few days I decided I better do something so I built a rocket and sent it to Minmus, only a fly by though, next mission is to land on the Mun.

[Wooks]

Today I tested my pyramid in its maiden orbital flight.

Next landing targets: Pyramid complex on the Kerbal deserts, the Mun and Duna!

Edited February 11, 2014 by Wooks

[Comrade Jenkens]

Continued to refine my SSTO. Its actually working quite well now.

[thereaverofdarkness]

Made my first rover that worked. Putting a reaction wheel inside the dashboard is the best thing I have ever done to a rover. I landed it on the Mün and drove for a few hours toward some marker on the horizon, only to discover Jebediah sitting in a rocket, stranded, on the first Mün mission I had made on this save! Luckily for him, the VAB took all my kerbals off the ship and I was only able to put one of them in the two-seater rover.

The rover was really amazing because it has I-beams and panels protecting everything brittle, so it can tumble all over and not get damaged. Somehow I lost a headlight though, and I keep seeing explosions when it tumbles, but nothing seems missing other than the one headlight.

Edited February 11, 2014 by thereaverofdarkness

[capi3101]

Made my first rover that worked. Putting a reaction wheel inside the dashboard is the best thing I have ever done to a rover. I landed it on the Mün and drove for a few hours toward some marker on the horizon, only to discover Jebediah sitting in a rocket, stranded, on the first Mün mission I had made on this save! Luckily for him, the VAB took all my kerbals off the ship and I was only able to put one of them in the two-seater rover.

The rover was really amazing because it has I-beams and panels protecting everything brittle, so it can tumble all over and not get damaged. Somehow I lost a headlight though, and I keep seeing explosions when it tumbles, but nothing seems missing other than the one headlight.

Headlights have relatively low impact tolerance; you land funny on one of them and they're liable to blow up. Quite spectacularly too.

If you're seeing other explosions and you've installed RTGs on it, it'd behoove you to make sure they're all still intact. Their ends can stick through structural panels, making them vulnerable when you think you've got them secured. Same goes for small battery packs.

[Richy teh space man]

Spent some time trying to get my Eve SSTO working again:

It gets close to orbit, but just falls short by a small amount of delta V. I think I should be able to make it workable again, if I spend enough time on it.

[NoPanShabuShabu]

I realized I'd never really done a group shot with flag so here are Rongel, Seefrod, Dantop, and Bobsen Kerman posing with the Ferdos Kerman Memorial Moho Science Base, the Bob Kerman Memorial Moho Rover, the Bill Kerman Memorial Moho Flag, and the Jebediah Kerman Memorial Moho Pirouette Jump.

[Brotoro]

I did a Duna Direct mission, inspired by Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct mission plan. This involved carrying a half ton of hydrogen to Duna to manufacture the 6 tons of propellants in situ needed to return from Duna.

[capi3101]

By taking some of the fuel I delivered to my docking target back, I was finally able to successfully land Auk VIII. Didn't need to take back a whole lot either. I probably will still go ahead and try to iron out the kinks in the design just for the sake of future knowledge.

[Mystic]

I finally left Kerbin's orbit tonight. I'm sure it seems like old hat to just about everyone in this forum, but I have only really started to spend any significant time in KSP in the last few days, and I'm doing so in Career mode and with no add-ons. I wanted a bigger chunk of science than I'd gotten on my first four or five flights, so I decided to finally try for a Munar orbit. Well, Jeb got out there more or less, with a pair of materials bays and a pair of goo canisters along to make the trip worthwhile, but my Munar insertion ended up being more of a gravity assist than an orbit, and after the one close pass by the dark side of the Mun (should have been some Pink Floyd playing for that one) it was going to catapult Jeb and the ship right out of Kerbin's orbit entirely. He burned up all of his remaining fuel in an attempt to keep that from happening, but the fuel ran out when he was still not going to get any closer to Kerbin than 2700km. So ... after a moment of despair, he and I decided to do the trick I've read about here, and Jeb proceeded to do about a dozen EVAs in which he pushed the capsule with his own thrusters until he managed to get it onto a path that would bring it and the 200+ science points on board (plus himself) back home. Mission accomplished, sort of ... didn't actually get into a stable orbit of the Mun, but collected science within about 20km of its surface at least.

One more thing I did today - I learned that Jeb is a stud. Out there in the dark, over and over again, repeatedly burning up everything but the last few drops of monopropellant in his jet pack to try to get home, and never once did he stop smiling. Yeah, I get it now.

[Ithicatic]

I realized I'd never really done a group shot with flag so here are Rongel, Seefrod, Dantop, and Bobsen Kerman posing with the Ferdos Kerman Memorial Moho Science Base, the Bob Kerman Memorial Moho Rover, the Bill Kerman Memorial Moho Flag, and the Jebediah Kerman Memorial Moho Pirouette Jump.

They... they didn't all die on the same mission did they? It wasn't some weird Goldbergian sequence where Jeb piroette jumps into the science base, causing it to fall on the rover which is then launched through the flag, killing each memorialized Kerbal in turn? Was it?

[spinomonkey]

I learned to dock...such a magical feeling I almost felt a tear form.