Enginerdy

Experimental science unlocks the narrow band scanner. Maybe when you get that part you should go back and scan in the area? I haven't gotten that far in my new career to test it out myself.

I'd like to see a gas giant in a tight orbit of the sun. I'm not sure if this needs to replace Moho, or if we can squeeze it in inside of that orbit. A lot of the planets that have been discovered around other stars have been this type of "hot Jupiter". This was mostly because of the limits of what the early planet finding methods were able to detect, but we do have good evidence that there are a lot of these types of planets out there. I think it would be a lot of fun to explore an object like this in game, and it might serve as a good example to help familiarize people with planet finding science.

I love KCT, I've been using it in my career games for a while, it completely gets rid of the feeling that your space program is progressing too quickly. It sets a nice pace so transfer windows come and go without having to just warp to them, and makes things a little more challenging when something goes wrong and you need a rescue mission there ASAP. Also, this is a fantastic philosophy: I've been working on and off on my 2.0 attempt at the challenge. I've noticed that the upgrade points buy substantially more build points when you spend them on additional production lines. What I'm thinking of doing is running 4 production lines in the VAB with 0.3, 0.3, 0.3, and 0.2 BP/s on each, plus the free production line on the SPH with 0.1 BP/s for a total of 1.2 BP/s. After seeing NeilC's post about the benefits of producing single big projects I may have to rethink that strategy. My original strategy also has some challenges with regard to getting the prestige points. However splitting production across multiple lines is definitely the way to go if you're trying to maximize total build points over the length of the challenge.

I'm happy with the size of the sun. It's definitely bigger than the sun IRL, but that's fine by me. KSP is a toy solar system the scale doesn't have to be perfectly right, in fact part of what I find fun are the differences with the real solar system. When I found out Kerbin had a second moon I remember how awesome that idea sounded. Having an over sized sun is also a cool thing to imagine. I've read about exoplanets around smaller cooler stars where the habitable zone would be very close to the star. A habitable planet would see the star taking up a large portion of the sky. Of course there are other differences you'd expect to see in the star and the orbit of the planet that don't really line up with the Kerbol system, but again it's a toy solar system, I don't require that it's 100% accurate. Maybe this last thought belongs in the "You know you play too much KSP when..." thread but... I'm going to admit that when I first played RSS/RO one of my initial thoughts was "Doesn't the sun look too small?" Of course it's just as big as it's supposed to be in real life.

Fantastic. I love your shuttles, that has to be a fun ride back to orbit.

This was a fun challenge. I'll make a submission. I do have a few mods installed and I didn't want to make a fresh install for this, but I didn't use any mod parts, and none of the mods installed change physics. Here's my album, my height was 83 meters. So, you'll see in the last picture that I suffered a pretty big failure. Jeb survived, but he's trapped inside my 2nd cargo bay, so that's not good. My plan had been to separate my 2nd cargo bay and dock it onto the top of my 1st cargo bay, then separate my tower segment and dock it on top of the 2nd cargo bay. If I can pull this off my design will get a lot taller. Unfortunately I underestimated the gravity on Minums (has anyone ever said that?). I have plenty of engine power to move my two extra tower sections around, but the segments are mounted in the cargo bay upside down, and I don't have enough RCS to flip them over before they fall to the ground. Once I saw that wouldn't work I reverted to my save at landing and tried a crazy strategy of launching onto a sub orbital trajectory and trying to mount my second segment in flight, thus leading to the large explosion. My tower was 83 meters tall but very short lived. I may be able to pull this off without a design change if I assemble the tower in orbit. My landing was actually really easy, I think I could pull it off with the rest of the tower assembled. Maybe I'll try that approach soon.

No, I'm not upset about it in the slightest. That's what I expected to happen as soon as I calculated a score of 1. I was hoping you'd make a rule change like this. It gives me a good excuse to make a 2nd attempt with some labs and habs. Also I did calculate a score in the event that I couldn't recover my vessel for funds, with the updated scoring mechanic I end up with a score of 2166, which isn't half bad. Unfortunately Tanya Kerman didn't take the news as well. She stole the ship rather than see it put in the landfill and is currently refueling on Minmus. We suspect she's headed for the Jool system.

Nice! That's a good looking ship. It looks quite a bit lighter and more efficient than mine, but we were definitely working to a similar concept. One of my big limitations was that it took ~100 days to refuel the ship. I believe you'll have a faster refueling time with the large ISRU unit. I felt like I had to rush to make sure I could complete the objectives within the 8 years. I ended up doing non-Hohman transfers to and from Duna to save as much time as I could, but got back with a good amount of time to spare. I'd thought about launching it empty and refueling from the runway first, but that felt like overkill. As part of a larger mission it sounds much more reasonable. If we really want to min/max this, the best solution is to launch a ship with ISRU empty, refuel from the runway and immediately recover it for a profit. You get 0 points, but then your final score is a negative number divided by 0, or negative infinity. That idea clearly wasn't in the spirit of the challenge though.

I was very impressed when I saw this challenge. It looks like you put a lot of effort into putting it together. I decided to stop lurking and join the forums so I could take a shot at it. This was one of my most interesting missions to date, I had a great time completing it. Thank you for setting this up. My plan was to design for the extreme end of reusability to keep costs to an absolute minimum. I used TAC as my life support system, and also had KAS/KIS and USI Kolonization running. I used a SSTO which included the small drill and ISRU unit in the cargo bay so that I could refuel multiple times during the journey. I named the ship "The Watney". I wasn't able to launch in time to get any of the prestige points, and I ignored any objectives that would've required me to leave something behind. I wanted all of the hardware that I launched to return to Kerbin. I ended up visiting 5 biomes on Duna, and 5 on Ike, before returning home. The cost of my ship was 228,992 funds, but I recovered it for a value of 228,883 funds. Apparently food, water and oxygen are a lot cheaper than I expected. I scored 27 points from visiting 5 biomes on Duna and Ike, and from putting one Kerbal into orbit and on the ground of each body. My final score was therefore 1.03 That score came out a lot lower than I expected. I feel like it may be because I used a ship that I'd already flown and worked out all the kinks on. There was no simulation involved in my play through. I'm not sure how to add an appropriate cost for the design work that had been done in a previous game. I also feel like it may be too powerful to recover vessels from Duna, if you end up changing the rules, I wouldn't be opposed to that. I calculated a score without funds recovery and got a score of 2166, which puts me at the right order of magnitude with the others who have done the challenge. Here's my album for the mission -Enginerdy