Your friend Jim George thinks you'd be a great addition to Ricochet, so we'd like to offer you a special deal: You can become a member for no initial charge for one month!
Ricochet is a community of like-minded people who enjoy writing about and discussing politics (usually of the center-right nature), culture, sports, history, and just about every other topic under the sun in a fully moderated environment. We’re so sure you’ll like Ricochet, we’ll let you join and get your first month for free. Kick the tires: read the always eclectic member feed, write some posts, join discussions, participate in a live chat or two, and listen to a few of our over 50 (free) podcasts on every conceivable topic, hosted by some of the biggest names on the right, for 30 days on us. We’re confident you’re gonna love it.
2013 – My first Mun landing, accomplished using the free demo of the game:
Sounds like an awesome game.
I think John Walker had a post on Kerbal a year or so ago.
Well, dammit, he did. And he used the XKCD as well!
Here’s my post on the Member Feed from September 19th, 2015, as part of that month’s Group Writing series about games.
That’s a mighty heavy lander.
Being the poor man’s John Walker is still pretty good.
Meh. 8 months is nothing. The game’s had an update since them -including the aforementioned ore-hauling. And it now has 64 bit precision, which is great, because it means my kerbalnauts aren’t getting flung of into deep space when they dismount their movers (claws attached to a whole lot of RCS for moving space station parts around) as often. Here’s my latest.
After much work, I dropped a Class A asteroid in the plains north of KSC. With all the trees I had to send a STOL to analyze it (the new engines are too large for this design to work as a true VTOL, but it can take off and land in only about a sixth of the runway’s length).
A closer look.
And speaking of ore -my first off planet colony. Jesyin-Lowell Stake, in the East Crater of the Mun. Eventually this will become a larger community. That’s my ore drone on the right. I was astonished at how much fuel it takes to lift 1200 tons of ore. After refining the ore in orbit to replace the spent fuel, we only net about 400 tons of ore. I’ve taken to driving across the munar surface some 40km to get under the orbiting station before lifting off to save a little fuel.
Also, obviously when groups come out we need a Videogame Group. Will we also need a dedicated KSP subgroup?
The demo does not include the docking parts required to have both a command module and a lander, so your lander’s gotta be able to make it all the way back to Kerbin (and I suck at orbital docking anyways).
Also, the physics of the demo version are way more forgiving than the full version. I wish I’d taken a screenshot of how many boosters were used in the first stage of the rocket. It was ridiculous…
…oh wait, I did get a screenshot of a similar demo rocket with an even heavier lander. It illustrates the madness fairly well.
Basically, the design philosophy of the demo version was that all a failed rocket design ever needs is more boosters.
Am I wrong to note that your plane looks superficially like an F-86?
How much fuel to you get for a ton of ore?
And just when I’d come to terms with being a poor man’s Charles Cooke…
I did later on get better at getting at astronavigation, so I could get to the Mun with a lander that didn’t require nearly as much fuel.
However, I hadn’t quite learned the lesson of not hitting the “separate stage” button when one means to hit the “throttle” button.
It’s a miracle it landed upright, and Jeb was able to get home.
In KSP, the failures are often as fun, if not more fun, than the successes.
I really wish I had some good shots of my most spectacular explosions.
I have done that several times.
My other recent screw up was somehow not noticing that my final stage included both the last decoupler and the parachute.
Oops.
Ok, but have you ever decoupled all your boosters at launch?
Every time one of the rescues crashed, I swear I heard the same sound as here:
It is an efficient design -but to make the STOL system work, it needs a lot more air intakes, so rather than the one air intake on the front, it has four on top and two on the bottom. Also, to increase stability in landing, the gear are on the wingtips.
I have!
More often, though, my I don’t align my boosters to the radial decouplers correctly, and they don’t disconnect at all. That’s just annoying.
9 K and 11 LOx per 10 ore, so effectively 1 to 1. Lifting off from the drill and plotting a 45 degree interception with the orbital station used 720 K and 880 LOx, plus the monopropelant for regularizing the orbit and docking. About 800 ore to replace that. 1200 ore roughly doubles the mass of that drone.
Sure. And who hasn’t failed to carefully review the staging set-up and have the parachutes pop out at the moment of launch? Embarrassing.
But then, the odds are, if it’s happened to you, it’s happened to NASA:
This makes me feel better about myself.
How about deploying the parachute while still in orbit, and praying that it doesn’t rip off when you hit the atmosphere?
I hate that.
Ever try to separate big boosters (or asparagus stages) with radials, and have one of them destroy the bottom stage of your rocket, because you’re ascending at an angle and gravity causes a collision?
The Return from the Mun tutorial has (had?) a glitch where the parachute fully deploys at 500m, rather than 1000. It took me over a week of slamming into the mountains and wondering what I was doing wrong before I figured it out.
They’ve changed the behaviour of re-entry and parachutes substantially over recent releases (and I haven’t looked at 1.1 enough to know what’s changed there). It used to be you could re-enter with almost anything and survive, and then they added the effects of heating like the third-party “deadly re-entry” mod, so you had to have a proper heat shield and account for re-entry velocity and attitude. This broke most of the previous strategies for aero-braking in the atmosphere of Jool (Jupiter analogue): it used to work fine, but now (at least in 1.0.5) you always burn up. I used aero-braking and capture for almost all of my probes to Jool’s satellites in 0.95, but now you can’t get away with it.
You used to be able to open parachutes at any time, even in orbit, and they’d work all the way to the ground. Now if you open main parachutes at an airspeed above 250 m/sec on Kerbin, they’re destroyed by aerodynamic forces, and they can burn up if exposed during re-entry. With some missions you need drogue chutes to slow down to a safe speed to open the mains.
There’s a fine line between realism and playability, and I think the developers have done a fine job balancing the two so far.
Is that like the fine line between what’s clever and what’s stupid? ;)
More seriously, in the Scott Manley video I linked, he says something to the effect that whenever the developers had to make a decision between fun and realism, they chose fun.
Right choice.
This is still my go-to game. I absolutely love it. I think I’ve gone thrugh the career ladder half a dozen times now.
I can’t wait for the inevitable VR port so you can experience flying your rockets and doing spacewalks from a first-person perspective!