For everyone who hangs about in IRC, you're probably aware of the fun that can be had with KSP. If you're not.. it's basically a rocketry sandbox.

I'm just going to use this thread for chronicling interesting things; feel free to contribute or discuss.

A shot that happened to remind me of Apollo 8's "Earthrise" photo. (Click to embiggen.)

Captured this one in the early phases of the return of one of my Mun landings.

Nothing like sticking the landing!



Pretteh :3

If I bought KSP, I would build the Starship Enterprise (NCC-1701) and fly THAT to the moon, then use a shuttlecraft to land on the moon (or the TRANSPORTER BEAM!)

I built a rather large space station in low Kerbin orbit.


Eclipsing the sun.


And a bit of complete nonsense from testing the power + radiators struts.

The end of a (failed) attempt to land on the Mun for the first time. Ended up landing on the dark side. Demo version = no lights.

Kind of a necro post but here goes...
Lately, I have been playing a lot of KSP, testing out new designs to try and get spaceplanes to eve and Duna. I have succeeded in doing so at Duna, and with the help of the wiki, flying to the Giant Duna face and placing a flag where the nose should be if kerbonauts had noses
Here is a picture of a beautiful sunset on Duna from this flag (which is just barely visible over the front of the face if you squint a little, the face was larger than I expected!)

I have been on an endless quest to find all the Easter eggs in the game. I have found most of the interesting ones, but still have a few to find. Here is a list of the ones I've found and placed a flag at:

The Mohole (a Kerbonaut died falling into it and glitching at the bottom )
The giant face on Duna
The desert temple
The monolith on Minmus
Vallhenge
The Neil Armstrong memorial on the Mun
The crashed saucer at the North Pole
The 2nd space center
The Magic boulder (crashed near it however)

I have not been able to find monoliths on Kerbin besides the one right by the space center but I am blaming the land for covering them up for making them in the air I have not yet found the deep space kraken because I've only attempted it once because it is so hard to get to and land at Bop, and I have yet to find the crashed ufo on the Mun, the camera on Duna (which I have not even tried yet) and the big terrain features (arches on the moon and the cave-like formations)

Well, I do have some experience since I bought the full game.

I recently went to Moho, but landed on a hill while coming down and tipped over.
My current plan is to finish going to all the celestial bodies. All that's left is Eeloo, the Joolean moons, and Minmus.

Can you get KSP for free, and/or is there a download for it?

You can download a demo version of it here: https://kerbalspaceprogram.com/en/?page_id=17, and you can purchase the full game on steam or through their website.

There is a free demo available on the KSP website/Steam and it usually has a nice track record of going on sale during the bigger Steam sales.

Jool and Minmus are fairly easy to get to as well as Jool's moons because of its massive gravity which you can grab onto without really having to wriggle around with your orbit too much and use up a bunch of fuel. Minmus on the other hand is nearby so you can time your launch to get caught by its gravity with minimal corrections and get there.
I personally have never made it to Eeloo without cheats and I assume round trips aren't possible or are so insane that they aren't really feasible (I've only been once as I was landing on all bodies and had to use cheats or I probably would not have been able to land).
EDIT: This is no longer true, I've been to Eeloo many times now and round trips aren't particularly difficult (much easier than Eve without refueling).
Also, if you plan on finding the monolith on Minmus, you might have a hard time, the way I did it was to get into orbit around it with the least amount of fuel possible and then try to land in the general area by changing my orbit and using the wiki to know where it is, then since it has no atmosphere, I was able to look around a little before landing and ended up landing pretty close to it, walking there and placing a flag. If I remember correctly, it was towards the northern side of a crater which I was able to find just by looking for crater patterns on the surface while in orbit so the general area was fairly easy to spot. And yeah, Moho is pretty much covered in mountains, it's a little tricky to find a nice place to land especially near the Mohole, from what I can see, you didn't use landing struts, which might be a good idea next time

Just noticed this thread

So I just started my Duna mission prototype (test in sandbox mode, without science devices) with life support today, it works from four rockets.
One launches two and a half years of food for three Kerbals and a transporter rover with basic mining equipment as a backup if the landing site is poor on resources.
The next one launches the interplanetary spaceship, which will be on Kerbin escape with spare fuel from launching, the rest is ion driven.
The third rocket launches the hab, which will land at the supplies site and will have science devices in the real mission.
Finally, the fourth rocket launches a two stage lander. It lands, fills up its stages by mining and has two full stages to get into duna orbit and dock with the space ship.
Then the Kerbals return with it to Kerbin and move to a reentry capsule (The spaceship may be used another time, if refueled on Xenon).

I am pretty sure I could've saved a lot of money with another design (Every of the four rockets is between 150 000 and 200 000, plus the reentry capsule, 20 000. Refuelling the ship will be around 100 000 because of the expensive Xenon, I estimate.).
What would you do?

Wow, you've got a pretty nice mission cut out for yourself, I get that the ion engines can provide a great amount of delta v, but are you sure you will be able to get large spaceships moving at considerable speed with just ion engines? Or will all the big stuff be sent by conventional rockets in which case why are the ion engines even involved? getting rid of those and sticking to atomic rockets (ideal for interplanetary travel) would probably save you quite a bit of time and money... Also, I would recommend keeping the rest of the final ship in orbit of kerbin to prevent having to send another one up if you ever need one, you will just need to refuel it and send it back off when you want (if you have a docking port on it)... Also, this may be a bit tricky but for the duna lander, you may want to consider an airplane style because with a hybrid engine you would be able to get to a few biomes (assuming you haven't studied them all) and back into duna orbit with smaller amounts of fuel (however if you intend to mine some ore, then I guess it doesn't matter and you might not have it unlocked? I remember it being at the end of the unlockable stuff)
Anyways, good luck with your missions and don't forget to give us/me some screenies

As I said, this is only a test and practice mission in sandbox mode, so I didn't even look at the tech level.
Oh, and the idea is actually "The Martian" inspired. All the same, except the interplanetary spaceship travels completely by itself there, and they use two separate landers to land and ascend back, rather than a two staged one. I wouldn't have thought of mining without reading the book. (The mission is even named "Ares", like in the book)

I will skip to the next launch window and launch my manned module now, so I will post more soon.
About the screenshots, I'll do my best.

EDIT: Although expected (wise me started a sandbox mode) the mission has terribly gone wrong. I broke off a solar panel on the lander because it's constellation of parts required me to limit two of the engines, else they would burn the drills, and the lander was too fast at landing (still not sure how a closed, side mounted panel could break off, though). Anyway, it did, and i also landed in a false spot where there was not enough ore to mine. Then I noticed my rover was useless, because the lander didn't have a docking port to transfer resources (ore). I initially planned only to use it to transferfood to the hab, and only the supplies probe, the hab and the rovere had docking ports.
Now, with not being able to mine, my lander has not enough fuel to get to orbit and with throttled engines I have not enough thrust to hop to another place without burning the drills. Congrats Nik.

The next days I probably won't have enough time (Maybe I will today, but no guarantees), and I plan to work on the spam filter a bit (PS, made huge progress with it in the break at school today) so I will either reattempt it today or not before tuesday.
On request I may display the few screenshots I got by now, but since the mission failed it's not that cool.

However, I just had the idea, I could remove a docking port from the hab or the supplies (I have KAS installed) and m ove it to the lander. Then the rover could mine. Let me try it out...

To welcome this topic to the brand new games section of the forums, here is an image of a solar eclipse I got today on my way to Dres (for a contract of course, why else would someone want to go there ).

I don't know how rare these are, it only lasted about a minute or so, so I'm assuming I might have missed some while time warping over the years, but all I know is that I only see them very rarely, I've seen transits of various other objects, which are always quite cool, I particularly love the Joolian system for all it's nearby bodies, which are always visible in the background Also, I think Minmus might be visible in the top right of this picture??

Solar eclipses are very common in the Kerbin system, since

1. The stock launch site is exactly on the equator
   
2. Kerbin's axis has zero inclination
   
3. The Mun's orbit also has zero inclination

Consequently, there is an eclipse on the surface of Kerbin every month, and most orbits that pass outside the Mun's orbit will see at least one eclipse.

Kerbal Space Program 1.1 is coming out soon! There is a prerelease version available on Steam. The new version bring 64-bit support on Windows (and Mac I think) and huge performance improvements along with a whole new UI. Several mods have already been updated.

What are all of your plans for the new version? I'm hoping to focus my efforts on accomplishing more in Sandbox mode, but still being somewhat realistic. (Stranded Kerbals must be rescued before new missions are started, send probes and set up space stations before massive manned missions, don't warp 10 years for one mission without starting another one, etc.)

I got a nice sunset on my way to the Mun Apollo style

Whoa, how did I not know about This thread? Im (obvioisly) a big KSP fan! You can check out a few of the things I've made by clicking on the KerbalX in my signature. this is totally not self advertising : P

Kerbal is still great y'all