What was the most glorious moment you've had in KSP?

[TronX33]

So, I'm going to start a thread where people tell about the most glorious moment they've had in KSP. I'm going to start it off by saying that for me, it was when I first docked. I was so happy! Proving to myself that I can dock, I going to launch a a manned mission to the moon. Hope it goes well. *laughs nervously*

[Mohole]

So far, the most glorious moment for me has been my first space station.

P.S this was not docked, I was too lazy to dock:P

[stanz250]

Mine was when I had my first interplanetary landing. I landed on Eve. I have no picture because I was so naive. I do have the area. Right on that peninsula.

[Random Tank]

Docking a 20-25t ship with a station using 4 units of monoprop

[Nothing But Rubus]

My most glorious moment? this one time i attempted a landing on the mun and had disregarded any fuel requirements upon building my lander. at first it was going fine; the 2-seat lander can above some fuel and 4 of those small orange engines, then i ran out of fuel 30 or so meters above ground going 60m/s mostly sideways. the reason for the awkward motion was my navball was set to orbital instead of surface, thus i burned in the wrong direction. as i panicked, pressing g g g, dear jeb retract the landing gear! while mashing the keyboard with my palm the lander hits the surface, bouncing off without 3 of the 4 legs. at this point i figure that if enough parts impact before the lander can, the speed will be slow enough to survive. so after the destruction of the lower half of the lander explodes for the second rebound, i flip the entire thing on it's head for the last time as the jr science thingamabob was on top. boom. as the can slides to a stop i reflect on the power of science and how i wouldn't be there without it. of course the save had been corrupted after switching to a landing leg that subsequently fell through the terrain but it was still a glorious moment.

[Mitchz95]

Saving my Moho mission with clever application of fuel and aerodynamics.

So I completed my departure burn and corrected my orbital inclination so that I had a Kerbin encounter of 100km. Everything looked good. Then I glanced at my KER display and discovered that I only had about 500m/s left -- nowhere near enough to match Kerbin's orbit. And since I had DR installed, aerobraking would most likely tear my ship apart as it did one of my previous ships. Basically, Jeb was doomed to either burn up on re-entry or spend the rest of eternity marooned in deep space.

But Jebediah Kerman doesn't give up so easily. He proposed a daring plan: a reverse gravity assist with Kerbin, then another with the Mun, and finally entering Kerbin's atmosphere dead-on and burning the rest of the fuel to mitigate the effects of re-entry heating. I also had to orient the ship so that the back acted as a sort of heatshield, absorbing the destructive heat and g-forces so that the capsule wouldn't have to. Naturally, I blared the Gravity soundtrack as I carried it out. And it actually worked!

[Xacktar]

The explosion that begins at about 2:42 in this video.

I almost cheered when it happened. Such majesty.

[panzerd18]

Going EVA in Kerbin's atomosphere on re-entry. Drifting away from the craft and using EVA to get back and re-enter!

[SpenSpaceCorp]

The time after I had landed probes on every celestial body (except Tylo) (I was still fairly new and learning more about KSP). A significant even of this was a rather large probe I landed on the "surface" of Jool, when it actually was possible (now, they automatically explode at -250m).

[m1sz]

Making a bipedal robot walk.

Making a bipedal robot run.

Making a bipedal robot ski.

Making a bipedal robot skate.

and the latest, making a bipedal robot kick the football ball: http://gfycat.com/BronzeHeavenlyBlackbuck

[dryer_lint]

Either first Mun landing, or first docking. Or first time opening KSP?

[LethalDose]

The successful return to Kerbin after my first manned interplanetary mission to Duna, 1 or 2 career saves ago. Getting ready for a repeat performance to Eve. Now with life support mods.

[Jon144]

Step #1 Go into SPH or VAB

Step #2 Put a probe core in the middle

Step #3 Put two Cubic Octagonal Struts on the sides

Step #4 Spam the smallest blue decouplers on them (The more the better)

Step #5 Attach Small diameter fuel tanks on the ends

Step #6 Put an engine under one side of each of the fuel tanks

Step #7 Launch vessel with gravity hacked.

Step #8 Throttle up and profit, and watch the glitchiness in full glory. Or have it smash into the ground.

(It is like a centrifuge!)

In all seriousness my first docking was far more inspiring than my first moon landing. It has been more than a year since then and now I take docking for granted.

Edited June 15, 2014 by Jon144

[ericwdhs]

My most glorious moment was my first Duna mission. I decided to get the game after my brother had mentioned it, and I was completely addicted. In 3 hours, I had a crewed vessel on Duna (with enough fuel to go back to Kerbin). My brother was most surprised when I sent him screenshots of my victory. Here is the craft in its over-engineered glory just prior to touchdown:

[kenbobo]

Jool Impact. My pride and glory was 4 SLS with 8 lfbs, and 8 srbs on each lfb. Made it impact at 10km/s

[Moss]

First Tylo Landing, for sure.

[Duke23]

and the latest, making a bipedal robot kick the football ball: http://gfycat.com/BronzeHeavenlyBlackbuck

That was absolutely beautiful.

One of mine, even though I may have downplayed it, was getting to Laythe for the first time. I couldn't even send my lander to the surface since I miscalculated a couple things but I sent a probe, and that almost made it even more intriguing. I had been wanting to visit there for a while and my Kerbals only recently laid eyes on it up close for the first time. Next trip is in the planning stages.

Other than that I still take pride in my epic Duna rescue mission from my .23 save, it was the first time I went interplanetary and returned. I cut that one close on all accounts. Landed 1.4km away from the stranded Kerbal who had to walk and ran out of fuel rendezvousing the lander with the transfer ship because of attempted course correction during the landing. Made an unplanned stop at Ike and landed there, costing me just enough fuel that I was running on fumes as I approached Kerbin. I ran out of fuel during rendezvous with my refueling station back at Kerbin and coasted in on RCS. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. A trip like that is pretty much routine to me now unless something stupid happens, but then it was the most exciting thing I had done since my first Mun landing.

[Fendleton]

Mine would probably be one of:

1. First orbital mission (0.13.3)

2. First Mun landing (0.14)

4. Getting up to nearly 1000m/s in a spaceplane back when that was really hard. (Before such things as air intakes did anything and jets cut off at a fixed height).

5. A few of the more special aircraft I've built over time...the glitch-shredder, my first flight to KSC2, my first return flight to the pyramids...there's a few of those.

6. That time I broke spacetime trying to make a K-drive and trapped Jeb in a time bubble was cool as well. (Edit)

But let's go with the first Mun landing, since it's traditional, and when I did it was literally the only thing you could do without doing insane stuff like no-instrument rendezvous and landing-leg docking, which I never got to try. I also have screenshots of it, amazingly.

I originally labelled my rockets sequentially, and from what few screenshots I've got from back then, it seems that my first Mun landing was done using the incredibly clunky Mk.50A. This thing blew up on launch a lot, and only ended up doing three landings before I canned it and rebuilt my (for the time) extremely capable Mk.41 to make a far more reliable (and efficient, and less laggy) vehicle.

That's 5 stages + SRBs. Before launch clamps existed and with the Launch Tower of Death causing regular deaths. Getting it off the pad relied on multiple seperate steps before and after firing the engines, all of which were time critical (From memory: Pause game to stop physics-load killing it. Wait 5 seconds. Unpause, then immediately pause once physics load. Unpause after one second, immediately launch, correct wobble in time to avoid the tower, engage ASAS. Sometimes it worked.). I think the eventual success rate was something like 3 out of 10 flights. If it got off the pad, it'd make it to the Mun. Usually, it didn't.

It landed what was basically the standard newbie lander + a load of useless RCS stuff:

Of course, there wasn't much to do there, but the mission was fun enough.

A close second, place, and related to this mission, is my first Mun flyby. This was accidental. My Mk.41 initially had a problem that caused one of the outer 3 engines on the second stage to shut down. When this happened for the first (and last time before I fixed it) time, I ran the engines at the highest thrust I could before ASAS lost effectiveness to see how far out I could go. Somehow, I lucked into an encounter and after using the Mk.50A to get there (Mk.42-MK.50 were not very successful), I eventually reworked it into something that could carry a full lander. Here's the original...I think I ended up making about 4 different versions of it, but this is the one that got that first lucky accident. You can tell that, because the fuel lines are visibly set up so one engine pod will drain first:

Then I stopped sequential labeling because I lost count.

Try as I might, it's unlikely I'll be able to beat the fun of first accomplishments in those earlier versions of KSP.

.....until I try really hard, of course.

Edited June 15, 2014 by Fendleton

[Tortoise]

When I left KSP to video edit, then came back 35 minutes later.

(I had just put kethane and scansat satellites in orbit prior to video editing)

[palioxis1248]

Doing a 5 degree inclination change with control fins while barrelling through Laythe's atmosphere at 7kps just 18km above the surface.

[DivisionByZero]

My first KSC landing which was also the first time I took my spaceplane to orbit and back. The new aerodynamic failures in FAR make this pretty tricky for newbs like me.

[StrandedonEarth]

The explosion that begins at about 2:42 in this video.

I almost cheered when it happened. Such majesty.

http://youtu.be/YU2irqzxptE

That was... simply.... AWESOME!!

My most glorious moment was just this morning. Last night I sent my Minmus science results (over 5000pts) back to Kerbin with Gregden and Kelden in a Mk1-2 pod. Well past the point of no return I realized they were gonna run out of life support just over halfway home. As the ground crew hurried overnight to prep a snack pack to do a high-speed rendezvous, Gregden dreamed up a solution. He did some calc's and figured he had enough dV to put the craft on a hyperbolic return course, drastically cutting the return time. Mission control was spared the difficulty of a high-speed intercept.

Now the only concern was whether the heat shield could handle the 3500m/s re-entry, so Kelden decided not to jettison the service module and burned it off instead. Gasping for breath, they popped the hatch as soon as the chutes were fully open, then jumped out and kissed the ground when the capsule landed. They fainted when they saw the sliver of heat shield remaining. That's how the recovery choppers found them.

*mission report edited for dramatic license*

Prior to that my most glorious moment was my first return from Jool, as my 100-ton tug+lander assembly did a screaming 4500m/s (non-DRE) blazing aerobrake around Kerbin.

Edited June 15, 2014 by StrandedonEarth

[Lheim]

Poor quality screen shot, but hyper-masculine none the less!

[problemecium]

I think my most glorious moment was my first Mun landing (and subsequent return), way back before I knew how to take screenshots.

A close second is the day I discovered I was capable of multi-docking nine ports at once.

[Whackjob]

"Oh, god, I actually made orbit! And nothing sheared off! *cheers*"

The day I made a ruckus enough for my pet Cockatiel to panic and bite me in the neck in response.

/thank you beard armor