User:Jyk

I've killed so many Kerbals.

So, here's a fun story. About four real days ago (today is 2/11/2014), a bright, eager me purchased Kerbal Space Program. I didn't know how to EVA, how to stage properly, or even how to get a reading from the Mystery Goo thingy. Those were all things I learned from this wiki. I also learned that Kerbin had biomes, and getting to each biome was worth science!

So, I put Bill in a spaceship that was only intended to go sub-orbital, and sent him off to do lots of reports on every biome he could get to. He went to the desert, the tundra, the highlands, the grasslands, and the shore. What I thought was a failed launch to the desert ended up being excellent science on the runway.

Then, I decided to visit the polar ice caps. The launch was fine, the angling into a pole to pole orbit was fine, and everything was going according to plan. Then I thought to myself, 'I don't have an EVA report from near Kerbin orbit yet.' So, I told Bill to EVA.

He got out and promptly spun off the ladder. Now, at this point I didn't even know that the Kerbonauts had cute little jetpacks for just this situation. I thought Bill was going to be lost in orbit, just like Jeb was drifting in orbit around the Sun. For some reason that I don't remember, the revert button wouldn't go and I didn't know about quicksaves at that point. So, I kind of wrote him off.

3 Kerbal Weeks Later...

I got docking technology, and thought that I ought to do a test run on something. I started to design two separate docking bits, but then I thought to myself, 'Wouldn't going up and matching orbits with Bill be about the same thing as docking?' So, I put strapped an EVA command chair thingy to my normal rocket and sent it up.

First try, forgot to put the chair on, so I reverted.

Second try, didn't realize that I should have angled for a pole to pole orbit instead of an equatorial one after I got to a good apoapis. Rather than painfully shave off a few degrees of eccentricity every ascending and descending node, I reverted.

Third try, Matched the angle pretty well, but in the wrong direction. Revert.

Fourth try, corrected all of the issues, but then I realized that Bill's periapis was below 40KM. He could stay pretty darn stable because he had so little drag. My ship would fall right out of the sky if I let it get that low. So, I matched his eccentricity and put my periapis above his at about 80KM. Then, I matched his apoapis as closely as possible. BOOM two very solid intercepts popped up. I chose the second one.

When I got there, I burned retrograde to let him catch up to me. When I eyeballed our relative velocity at about 200M/S and our distance at 3 KM, I popped over to Bill's POV. Using the newly discovered EVA propellant, I cut the closing velocity to 10M/S, and finally got him into that EVA command chair.

Now, I'd seen gifs of face first reentries, where some maniac straps a Kerbal to an EVA chair on the front of a rocket. Those always worked out fine, it seemed. I figured that it'd be just fine to put that chair on the side of my rocket. I was wrong. Bill fell off when the parachutes opened and the craft was subjected to about 5 Gs.

Fortunately, I had a quicksave from when I was doing a flyby of Minmus. Unfortunately, I'd just spent five hours doing absolutely nothing. Less than nothing, actually, because reloading that quicksave took me to before I had enough science to research docking, which is where I started that session.