My Awesome Semi-Munar Expedition

[Cswartz9]

(Sorry I don\'t have any pictures, I didn\'t figure out how to make screenshots in KSP until just now )

Basically, this is an account of my first serious attempt to try and land on the Mun and then get back. I designed a ship capable of getting me to the right altitude and took off. My plan was to get to the 11,400 km orbit around Kerbal that the Mun followed and then drift until it came close, at which point I\'d go into the Mun\'s orbit and then land.

I got into the orbit near-perfectly, but I\'d misjudged the position of the Mun at the time and ended up nearly on the opposite side of orbit from it. I was going a measly 2 km/s slower than it, and I was worried that if I tried to speed up or slow down I\'d end up spiraling out of the galaxy. So instead I cranked up the Warp Speed to the maximum and started waiting. It took a while, but eventually the Mun started growing closer and closer, to a point where I was worried I\'d just end up crashing into the surface.

Now, here comes the problem: I ended up messing up again with my judgement of position, and wound up thinking the Mun\'s sphere of gravity was much smaller than it actually was, so I put the Warp Speed back up to wait a bit longer. But once the Mun was close enough it passed much quicker than I\'d thought, and by the time I turned off warp speed I was completely disoriented. I went the command place on the surface and looked at the map of ships, and it showed me as being right on the edge of orbit with the Mun. Thinking all was well I returned to playing and, much to my surprise, I ended up being immediately slingshot-ed to about 20,000 km. I went back to Mission Control or whatever the mapping is called, and it showed me in a new, very high altitude-and-velocity orbit. I warp-speeded in a last-ditch effort to get to the Mun and ended up getting slingshotted AGAIN. This time I ended up spinning out of control out of bounds. Sadly, I was forced to end the flight in failure.

What I learned from this: USE WARP SPEED SPARINGLY. SERIOUSLY.