RocketPropelledGiraffe

If you send a Kerbal to gather science you can get a lot of EVA reports from orbit, and you get he full value from transmitting. If you can get to the Mun and return you easily have the delta-v to get to Duna and Eve orbit for a lot of EVA report science. Returning is optional at this point - you can get your Kerbal back when you have unlocked all the parts you need. Kerbals are not exaclty in short supply, you can alway rescue another one from LKO. The main problem with "no probes" is propably that you get no satellite contracts, which can make you a lot of money in normal games...

To expand on AbacusWizard's calculations, which cover your first question very well, you can determine the mass M of your moon from the given gravitational data. As Steel said you need to know at what altitude the acceleration a = 0.49 g are measured. Newton said F=m*a, the gravitation tells you F=G*M*m/r^2 => m*a=G*M*m/r^2 =>M=a*r^2/G Put in the correct distance r for your given accelaration (e.g. at sea level 4,368.9 km), and you get the mass M.

Circumnavigation (nautical term) - historically the act of sailing around the globe with a ship. In KSP challenges it usually means going around Kerbin or another planet by rover, plane, boat etc., basically any route around a body that is not spaceflight in orbit.

If you are on a collision course the correction burn is a lot more expensive for Mun in my experience. It is rather cheap for planetary encounters, but because Mun's SOI is comparably small while you are going fast, you can burn a lot of fuel if you do it after you enter SOI. It's always best - and cheapest - to set it up correctly as early as possible, in this case a single digit amount of delta-v will always do the trick.

This will get you to the Mun, mission accomplished! There is still room for improvement in your future attempts, as Taki mentioned you overshoot the target, which is not the most efficient way to go. This will not matter in the tutorial, but when you build your own rocket and delta-v is in short supply, being more efficient helps a lot. Keep it up and play around with the maneuvers a bit if you like. This can be very delicate because tiny changes in the maneuver can change your encounter a lot.

The updated trajectory will get you an encounter, but there is still room for improvement, if you play around with the maneuver position and delta-v a bit. Ideally you want an angle between Mun's current position and your projected encounter position of around 90 degrees. The plotted maneuver will acutally get you on a collidion course with Mun: See how the purple part of your trajectory does not have a periapsis value. You can improve with very small adjustments of the maneuver to get a nice close encounter.

I think gnomechompsky is talking about spinning rockets, not flipping rockets. Maybe you accidentally offset your trim settings and induced a permanent spin command? Try resetting them using alt+x.

It seems to me that for each body you can either get the "Explore" contract or the series of World First contracts "Fly by"->"Orbit"->"Land/Splash Down". So far I have not seen a combination of these for the same body. I hope the World First contracts will eventually become automatic, like the altitude records in 1.0.

The thing is, warp (basically a teleport) actually does cost a lot of delta-v. When you teleport from Kerbin orbit to Jool, you have 5000 m/s of velocity to kill just from this transfer alone. (Kerbins orbital velocity is ~9 km/s, Jool has ~4 km/s around Kerbol.) When you do the warp you basically step outside the regime of orbital mechanics for a moment and enter again at a completely different position in phase space - in this example that would be a very high Kerbol orbit close to Jool which you have to reduce to get into orbit.

Is the temperature actually that linear because it is coded that way, or does the graph not have very many data points?

I had good fun playing around with this challenge and doing launches, which were clearly aimed at getting as much as possible, but still felt "organic" like you would play in a normal career game. I confess I omitted the fourth "natural" launch - landing on Minmus - because it would not have gotten me any further. If it is fun for someone else to grind "Science from Kerbin Orbit" for 50 hours, I don't think anyone will stop him. @LittleBlueGaming: If you want to maximize your science in the fourth launch, try to work with EVA reports from both Mun andMinmus orbit. I am not sure if you can have enough delta-v to make multiple hops on Minmus if you bring along a Science Jr. and Bob. You propably cannot collect surface samples, which yield the most science from landing - the R&D Upgrade is expensive...

You don't - at the moment. I understand that the delta-v readout was delayed to one of the next updates. If you want to get the information with a mod, try Kerbal Engineer.

Anything you wish for: I made a plot for low and high altitude. The blue dots are acalculus' data, red line the basic exponential law p=p0*Exp(-h/5000) as in Beta. The blue line represents the model for linear temperature decrease p=p0*(1-0.006*h/T0)^7.2 p0=100 kPa and T0=288 K were measured in game at KSC.

I played with your data a little bit, and found a reasonable match for atmospheric calculations with the assumption of linear decrease of temperature (The exponential law from the the "old atmo" assumes constant temperature). The German wiki has a lot of information and math, unfortunately I did not find the corresponding info on the English wikipedia: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometrische_H%C3%B6henformel#Internationale_H.C3.B6henformel If I use 100% pressure at sea level, the temperature of 288 K at KSC, I get a reasonable agreement with your data for up to 15000 m (I use 0.006 and 7.2 as coefficients). The relative deviation is not very big, so the formula is propably not too far off. The model does not work for your data in greater heights, I assume that we could try to work in the actual temperature, I guess it does not decrease linearly. I did not have those data available for this quick test.

In Beta some test would be run by staging and others by using the part menu entry "test engine". I did not take a lot of test contracts since 1.0, so I am not sure if that difference still exists. But maybe it is something to check for if your staging approach does not work.

Kudos to you! I see you basically had the same flight profile as myself, but with more TWR. Was overheating any issue at all? I never got the temperature bars in my attempt, which basically means you can go a lot faster with more thrust. I am now really motivated to see if 1:30 or less is possible with SSTO.

The only way to refuel your vessel in flight is by docking with a tanker. This is only an option if Jeb's craft has a docking port or if you have the Klaw ("Advanced Grabbing Unit") available. Nevertheless, you can still get your science back home without refueling, if you have unlocked the first upgrade of the Astronaut Komplex. This allows you to perform EVA. Send a craft with an empty seat up and perform an orbital rendez-vous maneuver, when you are close enough goe on EVA with Jeb. You can use the jetpack to fly to all your scientific instruments and right-click to grab the stored data and then get into the rescue ship and get everyone home.

I think some tie breakers are propably a good idea. Maybe the least number of unlocked parts or used parts in the best launch is another idea - and obiously bonus points for return missions. Your other thought sounds like a nice idea for a separate challenge actually: How many experience points can you get for a single Kerbal in the first career flights?

MY second attempt was a lot better than expected, Mike Kerman is an excellent pilot! I made it into orbit in just under two minutes, 1:59! Same rocket, same general launch profile, same antiradial burning to raise the periapsis as fast as possible.

Made it to orbit in 2:30. I actually messed up my launch profile and it took longer than necessary - c'est la vie. You can propably go faster if you are a better pilot, I had trouble to control the rocket since I had to push the nose down all the time - the gravity did not do it fast enough with this short, high TWR rocket. Ghostbuzzer, maybe clarify in the rules that the heating effects must not be deactivated for the flight. Edit: Great, I actually messed up my album and and managed to delete the flight summary screenshot. I guess I have to give it another go, as a placeholder I inserted an orbiting screen at MET 2:34.

Seriously people, it has to be Jool: I have not seen a single flag planted on Jool in a long time! Talk about unpopular!

Thanks Vanamonde, I acually misclicked "start thread" instead of preview, messed up the link, and things sort of got downhill from there... I think I got it working now.

It seems The trajectory prediction for multiple encounters is confusing. This is sort of in between gameplay and technical question. If I do a swing-by on a body, leave its SOI, and get on a trajectory that immediately gets another encounter with the same body, the orbit prediction does not recognize the second encounter until the ship leaves the SOI. Is this a limitation in the course plotting system, or basically just a corner case that almost never happens anyway and no one cares about it? I actually never noticed this until yesterday.

I like the idea of this challenge, since you have to get to the limits of what is possible with the very early technology. I am trying to go for an interplanetary run, but I do not have a lot of time atm. I only managed the first two flights so far... Next target: Mun! Finally did it. Placed Val on Laythe in four launches, I am told her return is planned some time in the future... I got to the point where I did not expect a fifth launch to make a difference. It seems a lot more money and science is needed to get the upgrades to put together a Laythe return mission or to be able to get to Eeloo or Moho.

Frankly, as far as tutorials go the KSP ones are pretty mediocre... They got better for 1.0. Granted, orbital mechanics is not a simple thing and spacecraft are necessarily complex, that's why scripted tutorials are really difficult to set up. That's why getting started is so much easier with some videos. But you make a good point actually, for the tutorial craft design it would propably be a more sensible design to either not include any RCS thrusters at all or to place the 4-way thrusting RCS systems - would have spared some confusion here.