Postby bert_the_turtle » Mon Oct 21, 2013 11:14 am
Kerbal Space Program deserves to be mentioned again. They now added the career mode and saving subassemblies in the editors. Just in time for me. In sandbox mode, I was following the "Go big or go home" philosophy combined with "Why plan if you can take a bit of extra fuel?"... quite frustrating if you can't test your lander and rocket separately. In addition to allowing that now, career mode forced me to start small and keep it small. Currently I have two manned crafts in their final approach to Duna and Ike, only minimally modified from the one from the Mun and Minimus missions (Added an intermediate nuclear stage for interplanetary travel, the possibility to dock back to it, and more science modules). The almost identical unmanned probe already made it back safely, so clearly, Nothing Can Go Wrong*.
*: As long as I lose more Kerbals to bugs than to my own mistakes, I am happy. So far:
Landing crew of three was hurled into the NaN starsystem when one of them fell off the ladder while getting out and got wedged badly.
One parachute tore off when it fully deployed itself during 4x time warp (perfectly safe at 1x), dropping one Kerbal to his death.
Another vehicle with one occupant was sent to NaN country simply by switching control to it.
Three were lost in space when I accidentally undocked the command module early. Could have easily saved them, the decoupled rocket part had a remote control unit and could have picked them up. But I quickloaded in panic, so they count.
The first attempt to land one Kerbal on Ike didn't go so well because I trusted the height meter when judging when to initiate the landing brake burn. Turns out Ike has high mountains.
Lander test deaths with version 0.21 on Kerbin itself do not count!
