Hodari

You do have to be VERY careful with these contracts though and make sure you understand exactly what is required before accepting them. If it's just testing the part at the launch site, it's basically free money and almost always worth taking early on in your career. Sometimes though, you'll get a contract that asks you to test the part at a very specific speed and altitude(which may be almost impossible to match both at the same time) or to test it someplace where you would normally never use that part(like using an SRB while in orbit around Minmus). Contracts like this are probably not worth even attempting. Also note that there are two types of these contracts. Some will just require you to have the part in your vessel under the required conditions(these will usually say "Haul PartX to...") while others will require you to actually TEST the part under those conditions, which means for things like engines, you need to activate them through staging(just throttling to 0% and then back up won't work) and for other parts like heat shields, you need to right click the part and select Run Test while ALL of the conditions are still being met(and again, note that in some cases this may be a VERY narrow range of speed and altitudes, leaving you very little time). Obviously, the "Haul" contracts are a bit easier. As for more general advice, just be smart about which contracts you choose and try to pick ones that you can complete by doing missions you were planning to run anyway or combine multiple contracts into one mission. Try to be as efficient as possible with designing your spacecraft. As mentioned above, just the advance payment on many contracts will be enough to cover the cost of the craft needed to complete it. And finally, keep in mind that this is mostly an issue early on in the game. The biggest thing you need to worry about is upgrading all of your buildings. Fortunately, you'll also be getting a lot of money from World First bonuses at this point which should covers a lot of those upgrade costs.

I usually use the shielded docking port. Aerodynamic shape, high heat tolerance, and it serves a useful function as well.

If you're not worried about being especially efficient about it(and for stock game at least, you really don't need to be), then just do the following: 1. Launch your craft into orbit. Any stable orbit will do for now. 2. Set the other vessel as target. 3. Warp to either the ascending or descending node and burn anti-normal/normal in order to match the target's inclination. 4. Warp to your periapsis or apoapsis and burn until your orbit intersects the target's orbit in at least one point. By now, you should see a 'closest approach' marker on your map. 5. If the target is behind you in its orbit, you'll want to put yourself into a higher orbit so you take longer to go around and it can catch up to you. If it's ahead of you, you want to be in a lower orbit so you catch up to it, if possible(but don't forget that you need to stay high enough to not enter the atmosphere, so if you can't go any lower, you'll have to put yourself into a higher orbit instead and wait until you circle all the way around relative to the target). 6. From your closest approach point, do a burn to put yourself into the appropriate orbit described in step 5. Watch the separation distance shown at that closest approach point. The greater the difference between your orbit's height and the target's, the faster you will catch up to it, but you'll also be moving faster relative to the target when you do approach it and need more dV to slow down. There's usually no rush, so don't be afraid to spend several orbits slowly approaching your target like this. 7. Keep time warping ahead to just after you pass the closest approach point and watch what the distance will be for your next orbit. When it shows you getting reasonably close to the target on your next orbit(or passing it altogether), burn either prograde or retrograde to adjust this distance and try to get it as close as possible(ideally under 1km). You might also need to do a slight correction burn on exactly the opposite side of your orbit to get it as close as possible. 8. Once you have the close encounter set up, warp ahead to a couple minutes before that encounter. You should now be close enough to see the target and will no longer need map mode. From here on, switch to the craft view and you can do everything visually or with the navball. 9. Switch the navball to target mode and point retrograde. Burn your engines until you get your relative velocity down to under 10m/s. If you're planning to actually dock, click on the port you want to use and select 'control from here'. Now set SAS to point towards Target and turn on your RCS. All remaining maneuvers can be done with that. 10. Maneuver so that the prograde marker is exactly aligned with your target marker(meaning that you are now moving directly towards the target). 11. (Optional)If you're planning to dock, switch to the target vessel, select the docking port on that ship and point it directly towards the other ship as well, then switch back to controlling your other vessel. 12. Keep SAS set to point at target and continue adjusting the prograde marker to keep it aligned with the target marker as you approach. Also as you get closer, reduce your approach velocity so you don't overshoot (or worse yet, collide with) the target. I usually keep it to 10m/s when I'm within 1km of the target, 2-5m/s when within 100m, and all the way down to 0.2m/s for the last few meters. If you're not actually docking and just doing a rescue contract, you can stop 20 meters or so away and just EVA across from there. If you're trying to be more efficient about things, or course you'll want to try to wait until the target is going to be passing overhead and launch into the right inclination to begin with as well as timing it so you end up close to the target right when you get into orbit. But since time doesn't matter much and it's easy to make a ship with plenty of dV to spare, this isn't required. For targets in equatorial LKO, I'd say launch when the target is over the ocean just before the continent the KSC is on and you should be fairly close. The exact spot will depend on your ascent profile, so adjsut accordingly from there.

Yeah, like I said...I'm not that worried about the score anyway, just figured since you were asking for feedback, I'd mention that changing the rules/scoring is something that should be avoided as much as possible. And yeah, the actual mission itself might only take 15 minutes or so, but especially with SSTO's, there will be a LOT more time going into designing and testing the craft first. I'm probably not going to do another entry for this challenge, but if you come up with another good one, I'll definitely give it a shot.

My only real feedback on this is that I would suggest putting more thought into the scoring system beforehand and then sticking to it once the challenge has been posted. Not that the scoring matters THAT much(I think a good challenge should be one where just completing it at all is a significant accomplishment and the scoring is secondary from there), but if you are going to have scores, it's not fair to keep changing the system multiple times after people have already put the effort into completing it. Try to spend some time thinking about what types of crafts you would expect people to use for it and make sure your scoring system works well for those. Put at least some thought into what ways people might come up with to try and "beat the system" with something unusual in order to max out their scores and make sure your scoring system accounts for those as well. And if someone still manages to come up with something that you weren't expecting...unless it's a rather blatant exploit, you might just have to accept it. After all, these challenges are just for fun anyway, so don't take things TOO seriously, but do try to think them through ahead of time.

Yes, people are idiots, but I don't think a useful idea should be ruled out just because of that. If someone does something stupid, let them deal with the consequences and learn from it(especially in a case like this where it doesn't actually hurt anyone). Having an option to at least recover/destroy all items marked as "debris" at once would definitely be nice. The "batch recover/delete" would also be a good option.

Gotta disagree on this one at least to some extent. There's a lot of factors that go into designing a craft, some of which may not be immediately obvious just from looking at a picture of it, so it should be up to the person submitting an entry to demonstrate that they(or at least SOMEONE) is capable of actually performing the task. Landing an airplane(and especially a spaceplane is definitely one of the harder things I've tried to do in this game, so it's not something that should simply be left to "Well it looks like it should be able to, so that's good enough." Similarly, there's a lot more that goes into being able to dock than simply "It has a docking port." You need to reach orbit, perform additional maneuvers to achieve the rendezvous, have the ability to make the fine adjustments(in all directions) needed to actually dock rather than simply crashing into the target, and finally STILL have enough dV left after all those maneuvers in order to separate from the target and perform your deorbit burn and land. I've had a few times when I had a ship that I thought SHOULD be able to do all of those things until I actually tried to dock it and then find out that there's no RCS control along a particular axis or that it can't slow down fast enough. Or even that the vessel was just too big for the docking port to stay connected. I'd say it's fine to say "I'm not very good at this so I had to quicksave and revert a few times in order to get it right." but not to completely give up and say "I can't do it but I think it should be possible, so that should still count." Yeah, I agree that high TWR was rewarded too much and the change was necessary.

First of all, be patient. You don't need to make the encounter happen on the first time around or anything. You can spend several orbits slowly catching up(or letting it catch up to you, as needed). If the other ship is behind you in the orbit, you normally will want to put yourself in a slightly higher orbit, thus taking longer and allowing the other ship to catch up. If it's ahead of you, you normally want a lower orbit. BUT, if that's not possible since any lower orbit would put you into the atmosphere(or worse yet, colliding with the surface), you can go into a HIGHER orbit instead and you'll just have to wait until you circle all the way around and catch up from the other direction instead. A lot of times, it will end up being a tradeoff between spending more delta-v in order to get a faster encounter or saving fuel but needed to spend time orbiting the planet several times in order to catch up. It all depends on how much fuel you have left at that point and how patient you're willing to be, but since(in stock at least) you don't need to worry about stranded Kerbals dying or anything, you can take as much time as you want.

Yeah, they used a "free return trajectory" where if the engines failed altogether, the craft would end up going around the Moon and coming back to Earth more or less exactly on the correct path for reentry. This ended up being very useful on Apollo 13.

I made this for another challenge, but it's been a while since my last K prize entry, so might as well post it here also. Made it to 150km orbit, docked with another vessel and landed on the KSC runway, so I believe it should qualify for advanced pilot precision first class, as well as being my first YouTube video ever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f81DjmcmKw

Here's my entry(and also my first YouTube video ever!). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f81DjmcmKw Just raw footage for now, but I'll try to edit it down later. Mods used: http://imgur.com/a/hDGSg

Tity Kerman.

Whatever you do, don't blink...

Yeah, that sounds like about the limit of what they should be able to do. And that "souvenir" shouldn't count as a surface sample for getting science points either(since they'd want to keep their souvenir and not let you experiment on it) or at the very least, should give greatly reduced science value(since they don't know how to pick INTERESTING samples and will just grab whatever rock looks cool to them). Planting flags could at least count towards completing contracts though and maybe getting to plant flags, collect souvenirs, or even do EVAs at all could also make the tourists pay you an added bonus in addition to the regular contract reward.

Yeah, much better to make a mod that ADDS something to the gameplay rather than taking it away. If someone actually wants to explore all the planets for science instead of just farming one place, they don't need a mod for that. They can just...do it. Having a mod that actually adds a reason to go to the other planets would be good though.

It would also be nice if the contract screen showed the orbital parameters so you can decide whether or not to take it. I've had a few times where I see a contract for rescuing from orbit of Kerbin, accept thinking it'll just be the usual equatorial orbit, and then find out it's actually some highly incline orbit 3/4 of the way out to Minmus...or worse yet, something close enough the the Mun's orbit that they get ejected into solar orbit before I can get there.

It's not so much about the actual part now, but the mod also adds in several contracts for detecting and capturing or deflecting asteroids.

The problem is that the range depends on BOTH that antenna and whatever other antenna/tracking station it is trying to communicate with. So ALL of the numbers apply at some point.

You, sir, are a steely eyed missile man.

I'm also missing those nodes and it won't let me research the nodes beyond them without getting the missing ones first which pretty much blocks out any spaceplanes.

Again, it's certainly POSSIBLE, but very difficult and will take a lot of work perfecting the design to be able to do that. Or the other option would be that if you already have an SSTO that can make it to LKO with the desired payload, just do that, then launch a second one but replace the payload in that one with an extra fuel tank and use it to refuel the first one. Once you're in LKO, it doesn't take THAT much more dV to go the rest of the way.

In the VAB/SPH part lists, you can right click on a part to show more info about it, including details about how much control surface or gimbal those parts have.

Why do some people insist on typing "lol" so much, even when what they're saying isn't at all funny?

Yeah, even getting an SSTO that can reliably make it to LKO and back safely is at least a moderate challenge, especially for one large enough to carry a decent sized payload as well. It's certainly POSSIBLE to make an SSTO that can go just about anywhere, but it won't be easy.

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the RUD ?