I had a satellite in a specific orbit contract, but the target orbit was way out past Jool. Not a big deal, but as a result I had to warp several years to complete it. Luckily only two minor contracts expired in that time. However, once I completed the mission, I figured I would check my Minmus Base science station pictured in my previous post. Of course it was completely full up on science, ohhh yeah 500 science to transmit back home. I click transmit....out of battery when only ~30% complete. Fuuuuck. There is no way I can beam back all that sweet sweet science without more battery capacity. Luckily, part of my Minmus base contract required a docking port, which I placed at the tippy top of my base. No problem I thought. I will just build a battery pack "hat", with a docking port on the bottom, fly that shit to Minmus and land her on top of my base. For whatever reason, I forgot to add RCS to my flying power hat, so I only had regular throttle to perform this maneuver. Can't be that bad right?
Dear lord, it was so nuts. It was by far the most challenging piloting skill I have ever done in this game. I didn't have advanced SAS either, so it was only stability control and the rest was purely manual. I should have just left it on Minmus or in orbit and launched a second craft with RCS. In the long run, I was happy I didn't because it felt amazing when I finally landed that puppy on top of my Minmus base. Plenty of battery power now, and I was able to transmit back over 1,000 science already with it. Such an awesome KSP moment.
Comin hot. No way I was going to be able to go straight from orbit to a perfect docking hover without RCS. So I got close to the base then landed.
I had to drop my thrust limiter down to 5.5 on all four engines to have a finer control throttle where I could find the hover point. Slowly took off and inched toward my base.
After miss after miss, I finally got that son of a bitch on there. Power hat is go!!!
So majestic. I now have a Burning Man art installation / functional science lab on Minmus.