The Landing

[CoinFlip]

I found this game not too much short of three quarters of a year ago now, and I've not not loved it since. I started off struggling a lot, trying and trying, making many a futile attempt to get a ship even into orbit. After a lot of general silliness and wasted hours, I left the game for some time, giving in on ever managing a real orbit.

After month of cold rejection I finally returned to my loving KSP save and promptly deleted it, starting anew with the freshly crafted Career Mode. Starting small as is generally started in career mode, I slowly began to understand the laws and rules and mere guidelines that govern the universe of KSP, managing to get pathetic and laughably sized things into stable orbits of little erraticity, and then decided that the next step was to be made; a Mun Landing.

That... didn't go as planned.

After several attempts, I finally built a marvellous creation called the FlyHard Mk3, capable of hauling a single kerbal alongside two (2) Mystery Goo units and one (1) materials bay all the way up those 11.4 thousand kilometres, and setting them down with a gentle 'thunk'. After sending my little green screw-up around collecting stuff and planting flags, making semi-inspiring comments covered over by radio chatter, I noticed that when on low gravity bodies, the curious idiots of little willpower under my control would snap into a poetic and humorous ragdoll mode after taking a sharp smack against a landing strut/rock/hull. I decided that with a full tank of EVA fuel and enough little green men to throw at an orbiting body, I would have some fun.

After a few minutes of 'Mun Skipping' (a sport involving high-speed collisions with planes nearly parallel to a kerbal's line of movement resulting in unpredictable bounces) my underling suffered a major blow and quickly disintegrated.

Oops.

After this, the Flyhard Mk3 II, III, IV, V and VI were launched in multiple attempts to land, gather and return information - all unsuccessful in the lattermost field. I finally decided we needed something new.

In the midst of this decision, a new beast was born - something more terrifying than a falling piano, more unstable than Francium, and really, really overkilled. Out of the forges of the netherlands, the MiniMonster was built.

It didn't go well.

Only one unit of the MiniMonster series ever made it past the point of the final layer of atmosphere, which very quickly managed to escape orbit of Kerbal, and was slowly re-organised and turned into a mission for the first interplanetary travel. That too, was unsuccessful.

With this, I drafted a new plan - instead of taking with me all my scientific utensils at first, I would simply create a beast capable of return-travel from the surface of the Mun, and then later build onto it what must be built on, and add what must be added to create something capable of gathering all the recordings necessary and taking them back in one piece. With many a lost kerbal and many more an hour spent at the drawing boards, a rocket of a new science was built - something of a design able to push it past the first 10 km at a speed of 0.5 km/s without starting the engines that would have been considered "mainsail FL-T's". This articulate and precise rocket proved itself on it's first true launch ( a term I use to describe a launch where nothing blows up while still attached to the rocket).

The Arrow Mk1 arrived 100 metres above the surface of the mun still with a stage more than I had planned. I ditched a half-full tank of rocket-fuel purely because it didn't have legs, proceeding to land the tiny 'Arrowhead'. The return trip was laughably easy, and I used some of the leftover fuel to make life easier on my parachute, and attempt to finally find out what the hell is in that little circular lagoon to the far west of the Kerbellian Space Centre - a failure still, but only in where I would land. The whole ship landed itself not far from the desired location, if too far to bother walking, bearing hundreds upon hundreds of science points.

I decided a ship like the Arrow was too good to only send out once, so I decided to take a step up again, and aimed towards a site now called Compound B.O.W. Minimus was, to say the least, entertaining.

The low gravity environment mocked the amount of fuel I had prepared for a lander stage by showing me that my ship was in fact light enough to land after dispatching of the usual half-full tank of fuel using only RCS thrusters.

After giggling at the captions and collecting samples of nearby areas, I returned to ship and blasted off on the return mission. I lowered myself to an orbit of low speed allowing for easier entry. With little trouble did I slow my ship down, but unaware of the mountainous terrain below. within 10,000 feet of impact the ground rendered and I panicked. I remembered that the kerbal I took with me could see a little meter showing distance from the ground as opposed to sea level, which I took to with gratitude whenever I was landing at all.

I reached for the IVA button, remembering that this was what was to be used to swap to the view of a little green nutjob, but my click was a miss.

The small, willpowerless idiot threw himself out of the capsule door, finding very quickly that it was more aerodynamic than a small, fat lander with a semi-deployed Mk16 parachute slowing it down, plummeting to the ground.

This, my friends, is the point where I did something I am neither happy with or proud of - I used the advantage of Physics-warp to give my little greenie a chance at life.

4X speed was enough. his lower body glitched through and back through the ground, before my screen bared a living green suicidal prick with a concussion.

Unfortunately, in my relief I did not use the remaining three (X4) seconds to slow the time back down.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Arrowhead did not make it through the flight, and this is why I am here tonight posting something possibly longer than some short stories. The Arrow took an hour to launch, land and return, and did so with unbearingly great force.

[Vanamonde]

No pics of this epic failure?

[CoinFlip]

In truth the ship was but a few sets of batteries by the time Entropy had proven it's self.