Two

You can go for a Periapsis of 87km at best without an unshielded craft. This is not enough to get you into and orbit and you cannot land in any way without appropriate equipment.

If you use KIS don't forget that the inventory of a Kerbal adds to its weight. This can significantly change the effect of falling.

As RocketPropelledGiraffe said: any lift-off is considered "leaving Kerbin" and the Kerbal is not allowed to return. And yes space-planes are kinda useless in this challenge except for maybe saving some dV as they are not allowed to fly without a Kerbal on board, and the Kerbal is not allowed to land. You could in theory have the plane fly really low and then have a new Kerbal somehow hop aboard mid-flight. Not sure though if that is of any use.

I will give that a try. In my first attempt I messed up the installation and RP-0 caused parts to appear completely randomly, so I thought it was broken.

Many many thanks for this mod-pack, it really freshened up the KSP experience for me! There are however a few technical challenges I had to fix before this pack run smoothly on my (rather powerful) PC, all of them because of RAM consumption. The link to the pruner program is very helpful, but it doesn't tell me which prune script to actually run. It would be great if you could actually add a set of files to prune for this mod-pack. I found the amount of new features very refreshing, but with a complete lack of (in-game) documentation also very confusing. Especially if you are not used to FAR, the abbreviations are a mystery. I wrote and added a "Getting Started Guide" to the Wiki and it would be great if you could link to that. Also a link to the FAR documentation would be very helpful.

You start with 4 Kerbals, that means you have 4 launches left before you run out of Kerbals. Those guys actually become a resource with this challenge that you need to manage. That is: incoming money vs. buying new Kerbals. Also doing rescue missions won't really help, because you are not allowed to get them back to Kerbin for your next launch nor launch an unmanned rocket to pick them up on the way. So already your first rocket needs to have an antenna and batteries to get the science back down to earth, as it will either reach orbit and stay there (with the Kerbal) or crash into the ground and gets destroyed (probably with the Kerbal). In both cases you loose the rocket, and the Kerbal in question will not launch a second rocket ever again, because he is either dead or drifting in orbit. You also cannot easily do missions, because you need to spend a Kerbal for each one of them. Simple refuel? Costs 1 Kerbal. Satellite positioning mission? Costs 1 Kerbal. And so on. At some point you face the issue that buying another Kerbal will cost more than the entire mission nets you, leaving you with the only option to sacrifice one Kerbal (and loose the 10% point bonus) so you can buy a new one (hence Kerbal Morghulis). It is not as easy as it sounds!

If you plan to land on Kerbin setting the minimum pressure to ~.72 will do the trick. If you plan to land on Eve you are basically screwed without an engineer or cheating.

When in doubt: add heat radiators. Those things are really strong against raising temperatures right now, too strong actually imo.

Unless you enjoy the grind I wouldn't turn down the money rewards, it just forces you to do the same mission over and over again (90x VIP orbit just isn't fun). On the other hand you could add a rule to never decline contracts, in which case you would be forced to do the hard ones as well.

The challenge: Start a new career then never return any Kerbal that was launched ever. Details: 1. Start a new Career mode at least at normal difficulty. 2. You can do whatever you want, except that any Kerbal that leaves Kerbin may never set foot back on that planet. 3. In addition any Kerbal that ever lands on any planet may never again leave that planet. 4. All spacecrafts must be manned at all times, unless you abandon/destroy it right away. Some hints: - It is ok to have an orbital space station where you house your Kerbals temporarily (i.E. for recover type missions). - You are allowed to suicide-burn a vessel, then exit mid-flight (for example to land on Minmus) with just the Kerbal, but only if that vessel gets destroyed in the process. - Keeping a vessel in orbit and leaving it alone to return at a later point is not allowed by rule #4. You however can leave on Kerbal in the orbital vessel while another one is doing whatever you have planned. - A Kerbal that has not yet launches is considered to not yet have left the planet (even if he is already in a rocket). So you are allowed to gather the ground science on Kerbin. You can build a rover to get the ones far away, but as soon as you lift off with anything (even a plane) the Kerbal and vehicle may not touch the ground again (at least not alive). Score (if you want): 1 Point for each planet visited. 10% bonus for each planet that contains a "house" for the landed (living) Kerbal (house = any accessible crew cabin + working power generation + working antenna). If you kill that Kerbal at a later time, those 10% are lost retroactively. 2x score if you play on hard difficulty. Make sure to take pictures!

I definitely have to check a few more rocket designs. I so far never made it to orbit with a single liquid engine.

Thank you for the links. It seems my major mistake was to include 2 Whiplash and 1 space engine (which had to be the Swivel for TWR). But then the other way around seems to be the way to go. I will try that. =)

I've been building around an SSTO in career mode for a few hours now following Scott Manley's great tutorials and my pre-aero-update designs, and so far I got it flying almost to orbit with about 300 dV short. The problem is: my current design is at it's peak fuel/dV rating, so if I add more fuel it actually lacks even more dV afterwards because of the added weight. Since I currently only have the first 2 aircraft engines unlocked (J-X4 "Whiplash"), I wonder if it is even possible to build a SSTO so early in career in 1.0.4. If anyone built a SSTO in 1.0.4 with only the J-X4 available I'd love to get some ideas on how to do that (pictures would be nice, too).

Thanks for the quick answer! Looks like I have to actually attach some parachutes then...

Hello fellow engineers, I just got a mission to splash into the oceans of Eve, while on the same time I'd like to actually land something on land for EVA action and such. Now my plan is to just have a small probe on the vessel that I can let splash into the oceans to fulfill the contract while the main ship lands on safe ground. Does that probe actually have to survive the impact to fulfill that mission? Or is the "splash" mission going to be completed even if the impact velocity will cause the ship to explode?