Xavven

LOL! Yes! And put lots and lots of solar panels on it.

I impose these personal restrictions for roleplay reasons: Every effort must be made to minimize risk and loss of life to Kerbals. No one-way missions. Extra delta-v margins (around 1000 m/s depending on the mission) must be present, and rescue missions must be attempted when things go wrong. Escape towers must be present on all manned Kerbin launches. Career mode players with early tech may launch without escape towers until the tech is unlocked. Use FAR. For stock players, build aerodynamic looking rockets with nosecones. Use fairings. For stock players, build payloads that would fit reasonably well into a fairing without looking like a giant bulb on top of a skinny rocket. No pancake rockets. Use Deadly Reentry. For stock players, only re-enter the atmosphere with the MK1 or MK1-2 capsules, or space planes. Assume all other ships and parts within reason would burn up when re-entry flames appear (Duna land+return still possible. Not sure about Eve returns.). During re-entry, 10 g of sustained force is allowed for a maximum of 1 minute. 15-25 g is allowed for a maximum of 10 seconds. Otherwise, the crew is presumed to be injured or dead. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-force#Horizontal_axis_g-force) Require a hitchhiker storage container for all manned interplanetary journeys to serve as living quarters. All landers must carry at least two Kerbals (no single-man landers) for safety reasons. No command seat riders during ascent/descent on any celestial body, with the exception of BACKUP Lunar Escape Systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Escape_Systems. The primary lander must contain all riders inside. Command seats are ok on rovers and short range suborbital hoppers. RCS nozzles may not point at any other part of the ship. This is easily achieved by placing thruster blocks at key locations and combining them with linear RCS ports, as well as mounting them on cubic octagonal struts when necessary to give better clearance. Radioactive nuclear material may not re-enter Kerbin's atmosphere. This includes the LV-N engine, as well as the PB-NUK thermoelectric generator. Solar panels must be retracted and stored in a fairing when travelling through the atmosphere. Exceptions: OX-STAT (non-extendable and presumed to be aerodynamically flush with the surface), SP-W and SP-L have their own protective case that would protect from high wind force. That's all I can think of for now. I'll add more later if I think of anything else.

I'm using the Thrustmaster T-Flight HOTAS X and it is very precise. In this game, I've found the biggest benefit of the HOTAS to actually be the throttle, not the stick (although the stick is a nice improvement as well) because it helps immensely when getting into a hover and landing.

Congrats! What a feeling

I use a joystick and throttle. I find it much easier to control everything, especially landers. It's much easier to fine tune your attitude and thrusters to reach a stable hover just before touchdown.

By "science module," do you mean the Mobile Processing Lab? If so, rotate the camera and left-click on the Mobile Processing Lab's hatch. It's the square piece with the yellow and black tape on it in this picture: You will then get a menu listing the Kerbals inside, with EVA buttons to remove them.

Did you mean to say thrust instead of trust?

I saw the game trailer on Steam, and my first impression was, "cartoony green dudes? This is obviously not a game to take seriously." So I passed the game over without a second thought. At the urging of two friends, I very reluctantly tried out the demo. It took some effort, but I finally got into orbit by launching straight up into space, then burning horizontally as others had mentioned. I wouldn't learn about gravity turns until much later... ahem. Anyway, I remember getting into orbit around Mun in the demo and texting my friend over Steam chat. Friend: Mun? Me: Wow! Pretty cool game. Yes, I got into Mun orbit. Me: It'd be cool if you could actually land on it though. Maybe in the full version you can? Friend: lol you can land on it. Me: Oh! What do I press to make the pilot do a landing? Friend: You have to land it yourself, lol! My next thought was, "whaaaaat?!? This has got to be impossible." So I watched a couple landing videos and eventually tried it myself. I remember getting within a couple meters of the surface, teetering this way and that, getting nervous and going full throttle to bug out, then trying to get into a hover again. I was all over the damn place. When my landing gear touched down and I shut down the engines, I suddenly realized I hadn't been breathing for the past 45 seconds. Gasping for air, I looked at my computer clock. 2:00 AM Wow... For some stupid reason, I didn't rush to buy the full version. I shelved the game for a couple weeks and then bought it when it went on sale. Once I got the full game and started playing again, I was up at 2:00 AM several nights in a row. I clocked 400 hours of played time in only a few months, ending with a grande finale of a 100% stock manned return mission from Eve barely a week before the ARM/NASA update was released. I had come a long way from my first, silly, non-gravity turn launch profile. My Eve return had to use everything I had learned: Asparagus Staging Thrust Plates Orbital Rendezvous & Docking Rovers Manually calculating delta-v (I built a spreadsheet... hehehe) ...and a mission profile inspired by Robert Zubrin's book, Mars Direct Ever since then, I've been much more interested in space exploration. Neil deGrasse Tyson is now my personal hero, I watch the new Cosmos every week, and I can now name the fathers of modern rocketry. KSP is now my favorite game OF ALL TIME, and it's practically the only game in my library that doesn't involve killing something intentionally.

You wouldn't happen to be using a joystick and throttle to control your game, would you? I'm using the Thrustmaster T.Flight Hotas X and the burn time estimates are always completely wrong. This is because cutting the throttle isn't done with a keypress, it's done by rapidly moving the joystick throttle back to the off position. Technically, since it's analog, it reduces the thrust from 100% to 99% to 98% ... to 1% to 0%, and this somehow confuses the heck out of KSP's estimation calculations.

That is so cool! Amazing that it works IRL too.

Agreed. It's easier and takes less delta-v if you switch your navball to orbit mode right when you start your gravity turn.

Orian has it right. To see how your ejection angle affects your trajectory around the sun, create a maneuver node in your orbit around Kerbin and drag the prograde marker until the delta-v readout says about 1000 m/s. Zoom out and look at what your orbit around the sun will be. Now zoom back in and move your maneuver node somewhere else around Kerbin (say, 90 degrees ahead) and look at what happens. The bottom line is that if you burn prograde and you leave Kerbin in the same direction it's travelling around the sun, you'll be on your way to intersecting Duna's orbit. If you burn progade and you leave Kerbin in the opposite direction, you'll be on your way to Eve. Hope that helps.

Plus, how is speedrunning with in-game cheats at all an accomplishment? I'm not talking about a TAS (tool-assisted-speedrun), which uses game saving and frame advancement to give the player exactly perfect reaction time down to the frame level. I'm talking about an infinite-fuel cheat. Uh, well if that counts as beating Aphobius, then I'll raise you a hyperedit at 0:00:00 game time.

In order for your lander to get off the ground, it needs a TWR higher than 1 for the body it's on. If mechjeb lets you switch the TWR readout to different celestial bodies, make sure you've selected Tylo. Otherwise, you'll have to convert by hand by dividing by 0.8 (Tylo has 80% of the surface gravity compared to Kerbin). As an aside, I highly recommend an even higher TWR for your landing. On my first Tylo landing, I vastly underestimated its gravitational pull and ended up crashing. I was successful only when I --- eek - lightning storm and hail IRL. Gotta unplug the electronics. I'll finish this post later

My 0.23.0 career mode campaign required keeping 1 Kerbal cramped in the small mercury command capsule for years to visit the outer planets. Now with the 0.23.5 SLS parts I can role play a little more and have a 3-man command pod, a living quarters, and a 2-man lander to visit everything. Less optimized from a min-max gameplay point of view? Yes. More fun, though? To me, also yes.

My first Eve return lander used this strategy, but I found that launching and transferring orange tanks for refueling took more effort than designing a transfer stage and lifter right underneath my lander with the SLS parts. Now doing that with stock 0.23.0 parts -- that was a challenge. But on the topic of Eve, Eve landers still absolutely need asparagus staging. Without it, you can you lose more than 1000 dV with the next-best onion staging model. Making up for it in lower stages is hard to do without going way over 100 tons and still getting near-sea-level capability.

I agree with pretty much everything here. I'd like to add that some technology that is obviously simple should unlock earlier, like ladders, large nosecones, and batteries. After about three times through career mode, I can say that the Advanced Rocketry node is extremely lackluster with the radial engine and FL-T800 tank. I hardly ever use the radial engine, and I can make a FL-T800 tank by stacking two FL-T400 tanks. There should be another level after Very Heavy Rocketry where all the NASA SLS parts get unlocked, costing at least 1100 science, maybe more in the ballpark of 3000 science. Heavy Rocketry and Very Heavy Rocketry should revert back to 0.23.0 levels. In general, I think engines should be moved farther down the tech tree and require more science points, and adapters should be moved towards the beginning and cost less. The Cubic Octagonal Strut should not be a more advanced technology than the LV-N nuclear engine...

At first I did care about it in my career mode. I didn't want my flags mocking me. "Hahaha, look at the noob! It took him 58 years before he finally planted a flag on Eeloo." We all pick what we want to roleplay for realism sake and what liberties we take because it's "just a game." I guess it's odd that I don't care about the clock anymore because of gameplay reasons, but I'll still bring along a hitchhiker storage container so my Kerbals don't stay cramped (a roleplay reason). Oh well.

Thank you everyone for your well-informed responses. This prompted me to do some reading on the role of a flight engineer, and I also read about the LESS -- holy cow! NASA designed what amounts to a command seat ascent vehicle! I guess I can't be too critical of some certain Eve return landers I've seen lately LOL! Anyway, I started to think about some of the flight sims I play (DCS A-10C Warthog specifically) and how task saturation can quickly overwhelm you in a single-seat aircraft, but computers have come a long way in helping with that. In fact, I read that flight engineer positions started declining as computers became more powerful and lighter. When malfunctions occur, the computer can even compensate on its own to varying extents. What do you all think of the prospect of single-person landers today, aided by advances in computing? Does anyone know what mission profile China is working on?

Well done, sir! And I have to disagree with the critics. The OP returned 3 Kerbals instead of 1, and used landing cans instead of command seats. Clearly the OP could easily do an Eve return with no clipping or mechjeb.

While I was designing a new Moho land and return mission, I started thinking I could really shave some weight if I brought only 1 Kerbal to the surface instead of 2. Then I wondered, why did NASA decide to bring 3 astronauts on the Apollo missions instead of 2? I get why you'd want at least 1 person in the CSM, but couldn't they have saved a lot of mass by making the LEM a 1-man lander? Plus, the CSM wouldn't need as much life support with one less body taking up living space, oxygen, water, and other supplies. Or were they trying to reduce risk on the surface exploration by having a buddy system?

It depends on the mission. For missions requiring less delta-v, I can get away with an Apollo style mission profile, but with a slight twist. Instead of the CSM docking with the lander and ditching the booster/transfer stages like in the real Apollo missions, it re-docks to the booster/transfer stage so I can use any leftover fuel on the earlier stages. It gives me that much more margin of error, but the downside is that I leave debris in all sorts of crazy orbits. Oh well. On harder missions that require more delta-v, I place a Kerbin-return vehicle in orbit years ahead of the manned mission. This splits the payload up so I don't have unwieldy behemoths to maneuver. In the case of manned Eve return, I additionally put the lander (computer controlled) down first to ensure it made it to a high altitude site, then at the next Kerbin-Eve transfer window finally send the Kerbal with a rover to land nearby, drive to the ascent vehicle, rendezvous with the return vehicle, then go home.

I use this as my guide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_force#Human_tolerance_of_g-force Sitting upright and sustaining g's along the vertical axis (spine), an untrained human can withstand 4 or 5 g's. Trained and equipped with flight suits, 9 g's can be sustained. But astronauts get the benefit of sitting in a "laying on your back" position so that the g forces are sustained along the z-axis, or "eyeballs in". This gives an untrained human tolerance of 10 g's for a minute or 20 g's for 10 seconds. I'm sure a trained astronaut could sustain more. Apollo 16 reentry from the Moon peaked at 7 g's. Assuming Kerbals have similar tolerance, I'm okay with a re-entry that peaks at 20 g for less than 10 seconds. Most of my interplanetary re-entries are direct with a periapsis of 20km, and are well within these g limits. A 30km periapsis is more gentle, but unfortunately I did have a Jool return end with a skip out of the atmosphere and out of Kerbin's SOI. The resulting recovery mission was annoying, so now all my returns are at 20km periapsis.

It definitely would hurt their image, but companies have been known to do things like this in the past, betraying their customers. Anyone remember the Sony CD rootkit scandal, for example? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_CD_copy_protection_scandal

DCS A-10C pilot here... Not a pilot in real life, though. I think landing the A-10C is easier in DCS than landing anything I've built in KSP, but I play without FAR (or any mods.) KSP planes roll far too easily, hold attitude too easily, and don't simulate lift realistically, making it hard to pull off a proper flare and descend with your nose up. The lack of a decent first person view is a major hindrance to me (fixable by mods, I know). I have trouble even aligning with the runway. Then again, I've practiced landings a hundred times in the A-10C, the SU-25T, and the F-15 in DCS. When you play a flight simulator long enough, KSP aerodynamics are so appalling that you can't stand to practice landing or even flying in it for more than 5 minutes. I'm sure that with enough practice I could land just as well in KSP, but it'd be more of a trial of patience with the engine (call me snooty or elitist, whatever) than a matter of skill.