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Those friends of yours...

Starwhip

By Starwhip
in KSP1 Discussion

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Starwhip

Starwhip

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Don't you hate it when your friend just has those moments of stupidity when designing missions? Here's what happened to me...

My friend comes to me and asks me to dock 2 spacecraft together, in Minmus orbit. That was bad enough, as you definitely don't need to do Minmus Apollo-style, but to each his own, I suppose. I decided I'd play along. The lander was almost out of electricity for the reaction wheels (about 12 units), so I disabled them and used solely RCS power to rotate. So, I set up a rendezvous, and waited. Then the fun started happening: I realized that the lander only had 2 RCS ports, on opposite sides. So IJKL translations, and most rotation was eliminated. "Hmm," I said. Then I was like, "Aha! I'll just use the orbital craft's RCS and dock to the lander!"

Guess what. The orbital craft was out of RCS. :0.0:

Now I was in trouble.

So I re-enabled the lander's RCS, thrusting to slowly move towards the orbiter. I got really close, then it got complicated.

Since I only had 2 out of 3 axes for RCS, I thought I would just rotate the craft 90 degrees to thrust in the missing direction. But I was moving too fast. So I did it "Gravity" style: Last-second burst of RCS in a carefully planned direction. The docking ports bumped, reoriented, and... YES! Docked!

Now for more trickyness: getting all of the precious science home. Set up a return burn, executed, final periapsis: 20,000 Meters. Perfect.

Started getting closer. Then more bad planning (I'll admit, some of it was on my part :blush:):

The lander had the science, but room for 1.

The CSM had no science, but enough parachutes for return. So... I thought I'd do the same thing I did when I screwed up a Duna mission: Separate the CSM's capsule, still attached to the lander, to land on Kerbin. Executed, decoupled, reset parachutes to sets of 2 at 300 meter intervals. 800 meters, first 'chutes deployed. 500 meters, next set. And then at 50 the last ones popped open, and RCS thrust as a last-ditch attempt to slow. Hit the water at 6.5 m/s, bounced :0.0: and landed A-OK. 500 science saved!

So, what kind of incidents happened with you guys?

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Spanier

Spanier

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A lot of my fellow students play KSP, and some of theme were proud of having reentry effects ... at launch.

And my brother, who built an Apollo-Style-Duna-Mission, which succeeded despite to the loss of an entire stage (it was the third of four I think).

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Spanier

Spanier

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To those of you in the thread that have friends that don't play KSP, what is it you think didn't appeal to them? To those of you that do, what do you think kept them sticking around?

My university friends, that don't play it may be discouraged by the high level of KSP's realism (I'm studying physics by the way).

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Red Iron Crown

Red Iron Crown

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To those of you in the thread that have friends that don't play KSP, what is it you think didn't appeal to them? To those of you that do, what do you think kept them sticking around?

Some of them are into FPS games nearly to the exclusion of all else, the delay of gratification and more cerebral satisfaction of KSP were not to their liking. A couple of them wanted to keep at it but were turned off by the difficulty where they didn't know about orbital mechanics or gravity turns. (In fairness to the last point, the in-game tutorials didn't exist then.)

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Starwhip

Starwhip

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Nah, it's more like that mysterious game people talk about called "Outside". It's rumored to have top-level graphics and particle physics. :wink:

Anyway, most of my friends enjoy to at least watch, if not play, KSP. I find that they enjoy crashing things, even if I don't.

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timsfitz

timsfitz

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I've gotten 3 people to buy it but none of them stuck with it for different reasons. One friend said KSP was too unrealistic, but his rockets were terrible. Another completed a successful Duna mission bit then stopped. I don't get it. I was hooked from my first orbit.

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Kinglet

Kinglet

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To those of you in the thread that have friends that don't play KSP, what is it you think didn't appeal to them? To those of you that do, what do you think kept them sticking around?

The absence of mindless shooting keeps them away.

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cantab

cantab

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To those of you in the thread that have friends that don't play KSP, what is it you think didn't appeal to them? To those of you that do, what do you think kept them sticking around?
Most of my friends aren't that interested in computer games at all. One who is I mentioned KSP to but I don't speak to him that often so I don't know if he's tried it. Several others are very in to the Total War series, which I believe is similarly cerebral to KSP but has the competitive aspects, whether vs the AI or other players, that KSP lacks. Perhaps KSP in future will have a competing space program in career mode to put a bit of pressure on the player and recall the days of the US-Soviet space race. And then there are those who I know enjoyed KSP but aren't playing it right now, I'd guess they simply played it out already. I know I'll lose interest in KSP sooner or later.
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TerLoki

TerLoki

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I've tried to get two friends into KSP. One thinks just thinks it doesn't look like his kind of game (fair enough), the other is afraid he'd sink way too much time into it.

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Scotius

Scotius

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I tried to hook up my two nephews, but they both made succesful saving throw :) Older is not interested at all, younger starts the game ocassionally to fly planes a bit - but he's not going anywhere from what i've seen, just crashing them. Oh well... :(

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NecroBones

NecroBones

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I actually don't have a huge number of gaming friends. But one of them introduced me to KSP, and he's taking a break from it now (I think waiting for 0.24).

Another friend is interested, but doesn't really have time for gaming these days, with all of his family stuff going on.

Outside of that? *shrug*

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xcorps

xcorps

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What are these "friends" you speak of? Can I download them on SpacePort?

No, but don't bother. Imagine adding huge fuel tanks with no engines to a rocket that already gets where you want to go. That's all you need to know.

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