Most Complicated Successful First Try?

[Gods315Pawn]

I'm wondering what the most complicated craft/mission you ever managed to build/complete was. Without needing any revert launches or loading from a quicksave. Most of the time my (and I'm guessing the community in general) build process requires quite a bit of trial and error (or prayer) before it works.

Personally, the one time the maiden attempt was successful was with my "Faramir" probe, a Kerbal border explorer and negative gravioli detector. It entered orbit with both the Mun, Minmun, and circularized a Kerbal orbit outside of Minmun before returning home. The entire first attempt at launch went perfectly to plan. My deltaV calculations on the later stages had been spot on and I had about a third of a tank (my safety net) left over when I got back.

The biggest issue was that I had a lot more sensory equipment than was necessary.

*It was more successful than this post which took multiple tries to get the picture included.

[Arran]

My first rover delivery systems where way to much overengineerded, with the landing rocket in the way of the rover. So i came up with the simple sollution to make the lander itself the "mainsail" and reverse the order of stages, going from top to bottom instead of botton to top order.

The complexity of the launch doesnt really show here, but amazingly it worked on the first try..

[Gods315Pawn]

Wow, yeah. It took me a little bit of looking at the picture trying to follow fuel lines and figure out where everything was and went. That is definitely complicated. How far could you get that thing?

I just built my second attempt at a rover depositor about five minutes ago, but I don't have time to test it because I have to go to work. My first attempt resulted in two rovers and the landing stage as debris in the Farside Crater (one of the Rovers did still mostly work but I realized the decoupler was still attached and was obstructing the piloting seat). I decided to scrap the design and start over entirely.

That thing seriously worked? That's impressive. Well done.

[Arran]

It got me to the mun surface and back, it had enough fuel to make a dirty drop landing on Kerbin. This was before 0.22 (think its build 0.20) so it mostly parts relly needed, and vanilla made, and no dead weight Science parts on it.

And yes, this one worked the first try amazingly, idiots luck mostly i think ;-) , needless to say there where many MANY prototypes before this one that failed miserable :-D ..

It build it due, that the rocket i nomally used was top top heavy, it tumbled, or i had to make a really heavy lifter, so i got the idear to make the Lander the main engine, so i could keep the top as light as possible, but it a nightmare on fuel rigging, and like i said it took many tries to "make" it work, but this came up, and it worked like and charm.

[celem]

Yeah full props for that one. I generally cant make top-down staging work even after a weekend in the VAB, balancing it and not ending up with an unflyable inverted pyramid is half the battle, think all my tries went to bits before 10km.

My very first rocket went to minmus surface and back with a Kerbal. I immediately fell in love with the game and decided I was pro. Of course the following 50-odd designs failed hard until I learned some humility and started reading tooltips/doing sums. In my arrogance mk ii saved directly over the successful file and it was almost a realworld week before i hit 70km again

Since then plenty goes off without major hitch on the first launch. But I have a fairly consistent lifter design and 90% of failures that do occur are payload attachment fail. (not enuf struts)

Edited December 30, 2013 by celem

[Gods315Pawn]

I'm still working through the tech tree in career so I haven't unlocked the mainsail engines and largest tanks yet. Because of this I haven't bothered locking in on a lifter design. I've got a base that I typically use, but depending on the payload I add different solid fuel boosters or different styles of asparagus staging. This tends to result in 5 test flights to figure out all the issues that I didn't consider.

*sigh* The worst part about KSP is when you can't play it. I just keep mulling over possibles designs and concepts when I'm supposed to be working.