Confess your KSP sins

[FishInferno]

I have never calculated my delta V. Ever.

[goldenpeach]

I have never calculated my delta V. Ever.

Me neither. I either go by guessing(and I can tell that Gene was right: it does make thing worse ) or use mods to do the calculation for me.

[Esme]

Where landing on the Mun is concerned, I may just be the worst ship-designer and pilot ever, as I still mentally refer to the Mun as 'the nasty grey sphere of impending death and destruction'. I can happily build bases on Minmus, and interplanetary I've about a 30% success rate, having managed to send unmanned landers to both Eve and Duna (both surviving the landing), as well as a rather distant flyby of Jool, but the Mun remains a near-certain death warrant for anything I try to land on it. I can fly orbital rendevous' unaided but am too lazy to do so unless I've simply forgotten to add a Mechjeb unit to the ship in question.

Oh, and I've watched ALL of the Scott manley KSP-related videos (yep, every single one!) plus a handful of others of his. :-}

Edited April 20, 2015 by Esme

[StrandedonEarth]

Jeb is not my top-ranked pilot, Bartbo is!

[Xannari Ferrows]

I have resorted to the Debug Menu on more than one occasion.

[Terwin]

* I have never calculated my own Delta-v, I always use the KER readout or something similar.

* I can never let my Kerbals die or be stranded(that is what revert, F5 and mod-F5 are for)

* I have re-loaded some games more than a dozen times trying to get the same landing right(on Minmus even)

* I landed on the dark side of the Mun without illumination before ever getting a ship to Minmus(but it took many game-loads to get down safely)

* Half my trips to the Mun or Minmas haul along the second stage because it is not yet out of fuel(first 2 stages get me into orbit using fuel cross-feed) I have even brought it back because my nuclear engines never finished burning the last of the 'get into orbit' fuel(with 5Km/s in the lander stage never even touched)

* I can't seem to land on Mun or Minmas unless I zero my orbital velocity and fall from at least 1 km up

* My jets all have parachutes and only one of the designs has ever landed intact without dangling from a parachute(it has 9 small wheel pods: 1 on each of 4 wing-tips, 1 in the front, 2 in the back, and 2 more on a modular girder sticking out of the back past the engines, and I still need to parachute it half the time)

* in my first science career(I started in March with 0.90), I visited almost all of the KSC biomes for science before I ever went to the Mun or Minmas

* I uninstalled FAR because it messed up my rockets(uncontrollable spinning mostly)

* I have only once visited a body outside of the Kerbin SOI(Dres, in a sandbox game started for that exact purpose, and he ran out of fuel before being captured by Kerbin) (I have sent ships, but I don't like to time warp more than a day or so at a time)

[Riisos]

I spent all my time building one super-omega-ultra stock ship with a huge crew and multiple vehicles and probes attached that was capable of going anywhere in the solar system ( http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/48947-What-s-the-Largest-Rocket-you-ve-ever-built-Interplanetary-and-Launchers-Mostly?p=1754929#post1754929 ), but never actually went anywhere further than the Mun. It was so laggy to fly I thought the Kraken had cometh.

[Quote]

I have never calculated my delta V. Ever.

Same.

Confession:

- I don't use mods, at all, ever. I tried a parts mod in the past, didn't feel like it worked as well or looked as good as I hoped it would, reverted, never did it again. Not even MechJeb.

- I can't make a decent space plane that can leave the atmosphere and return to it and land. Every one that I've created, as soon as I hit atmo would immediately become an uncontrollable mess that usually crashed in some sort of spectacular glory.(I did make them go decently fast in the past, like 1500m/s+)

- I guesstimate fuel to the point where in some situations I need to perform emergency aero-brake maneuvers in order to not get lost to the space between worlds. This has led to me using more robotic missions instead of kerbal manned missions.

[Roflcopterkklol]

I clip will clip 200+ parts inside a 100 part craft to make it work better.

I had no idea SAS was a thing until 0.24

I use glitches and broken physics to my advantage all the time

[Fearlessjames118]

I have played KSP since 0.16 and I am still unable to launch interplanetery missions.

I also cannot dock\rendezvous other ships

[timandy1]

I've Never used math in KSP. Ever.

[Red Iron Crown]

I've Never used math in KSP. Ever.

I can't play KSP by the seat of my pants. At all.

Sinners at both ends of that scale.

[Alchemist]

Well, I have my excuse for eyeballing almost everything. My specialty is physical chemistry, I have enough of precise calculations IRL. That's why in KSP I prefer what I call Rocket Alchemy. Funniest part: with some precautions this approach works for career on hard - some occasional ultra-expensive disasters only add challenge to ensure you don't lose too much by messing something up.

Now here is a sin: I don't use LES. Somehow, RUD events this early are not happening often enough for me to use that. Well, I once lost 5 Kerbals and blew up the launch pad because I messed up the staging completely (didn't notice that it reseted), but LES wouldn't help much with the messed staging, would it?

Mid-ascent accidents usually either leave enough time to disassemble the ship or... do this work for me (exception - Kraken attacks. Kraken eats all the safety measures in the first blow.)

[eddiew]

I spent half a day at work drawing diagrams and writing algebra, trying to work out the formula for the most efficient height to deploy Remote Tech satellites in order to get 100% coverage given a specific antenna range.

Nobody dared challenge me because it looked too complicated

(Not sure if it's a KSP sin... or a sin involving KSP...)

[Anister]

I use hyperedit to skip getting to LKO....

[Streetwind]

I've now owned KSP for one and a quarter years. I started with .23 and played at least one savegame in each major version since then.

In all this time, I habe not visited Jool even once. Or Dres, or Eeloo - but I feel like not visiting Jool is the biggest sin.

There isn't even a reason. I just... never went.

Edited April 21, 2015 by Streetwind
O autocorrect, how I loathe thee.

[LGRMEP]

I've never landed Kerbals on another planet. I tend to get distracted by a major game-changing mod halfway through an interplanetary transfer and restart my career.

Additionally, it is never I who creates said transfer nodes, but rather MechJeb. I can get them neither sufficiently precise nor sufficiently efficient.

[Blake81]

I can't play KSP by the seat of my pants. At all.

Sinners at both ends of that scale.

I never use math in KSP, either. It seems like things like delta V change depending on the specific spacecraft you're building, and I may be wrong, but it seems like the game doesn't tell you the delta V of your spacecraft. So, amount of fuel and which engines to use seem to be just winging it, maybe with some educated guesses based on previous experience thrown in.

I have two "sins" to confess, although I have some justification for them in my mind. I get the basic concepts for how orbits and transfer burns work, but I use MechJeb for everything. I can go to the Mun with just SAS (and have done it) but I figure that NASA has flight computers and automated modes for various stages of flight. Yes, they know how to do things if the computers die (Apollo 13), but they have the computers.

Second sin: I use Impossible Innovations deuterium tanks. I'm not sure, but it kind of feels like it could be a sin. Slap the largest deuterium tank on there, and you can get anywhere and back....twice.

[LostOblivion]

I spent half a day at work drawing diagrams and writing algebra, trying to work out the formula for the most efficient height to deploy Remote Tech satellites in order to get 100% coverage given a specific antenna range.

Nobody dared challenge me because it looked too complicated

(Not sure if it's a KSP sin... or a sin involving KSP...)

Me too. I started in Photoshop, but soon realised using SVG graphics and XML lets you draw things pretty accurate, and it is easy to change the numbers later.

Oh, and my most recent sin was to use the Infinite Fuel supercheat to make it those last km back to KSC after flying half way around the planet. Felt bad for that one, but CBA doing the whole thing again efficiently. :-P

Edited April 21, 2015 by LostOblivion

[FOARP]

I've never installed any of the mods. This isn't because I'm a purist or anything, I'm just lazy

[Armchair Rocket Scientist]

Now here is a sin: I don't use LES. Somehow, RUD events this early are not happening often enough for me to use that. Well, I once lost 5 Kerbals and blew up the launch pad because I messed up the staging completely (didn't notice that it reseted), but LES wouldn't help much with the messed staging, would it?

Mid-ascent accidents usually either leave enough time to disassemble the ship or... do this work for me (exception - Kraken attacks. Kraken eats all the safety measures in the first blow.)

Honestly that isn't bad a sin. In my experience, usually when a failure happens the command module can detach safely with just an upper stage because KSP doesn't simulate stuff like exploding SRBs flinging showers of burning propellant that melts parachutes. Plus, all rocket engines have lower TWRs in KSP than in reality, so an LES ends up being very heavy.

[ImperialistPigDog]

If a ship fails to get a solid orbit around a planet, I send the same one again in a vain attempt to see if it will make orbit. Many Kerbals have been doomed to orbit Kerbol for eternity this way.

[EtherDragon]

In Career Mode 0.24:

I build a craft to land Jeb the Mun to get a bunch of science - but, it turns out it couldn't return.

I was able to redesign and launch a second craft to land and return from the Mun, but I knew it wouldn't have enough Umph if I made it a dual cockpit rescue vessel and I didn't have solar panels unlocked just yet, so no Probe core piloting.

So I left Jeb stranded on the Mun for the second mission to collect all the Science! With the science injection, I unlocked Solar panels, and was able to finally rescue Jeb.

Never leave a man Science! behind.

[AverageLlama]

If I run out of a fuel on a mission I will accidentally hit the infinite fuel.

[Trann]

I just edited a persistence file to change solarPanels3 to solarPanels4: I'm assembling a Jool probe in orbit and the 2x3 panels would open into the 6 radially-mounted probes; the 1x6 panels were what I actually intended. I collapsed all panels (it seemed that this would be the safest since their orientation before being deployed should be the same) then located the only 3-mount reference in the Jool ship and made the change. Loading the file and visiting the ship was a heady time, indeed.

If I could have sent an Engineer up with a ship holding the proper panels and used him to uninstall both and reinstall what I wanted, I would have.