mk1980

it's plain science fiction at this point. calling it "near future" is optimistic to the point of being naive. especially fusion engines. i mean, we don't even have functioning stationary fusion reactors despite many decades of research. scientists keep moving their projections for when it will be a viable technology deeper and deeper into this mystical magic realm of "the future". so it's actually questionable if nuclear fusion will ever become a working technology at all.

the trailer is funny :) not too thrilled about the whole colonization / sci fi angle. don't think a space exploration game need sci fi content to be interesting.

i don't think it's possible in practice. maybe in theory if we are very very optimistic about the future of our species. if (and only if) we can solve the many problems we are facing on our planet right now (and the many more problems that will likely pop up in the not so distant future), mankind may actually become a mature species that can look "outward" in earnest. i'm not optimistic that this will happen.

i like the idea in general, but in my opinion it would make more sense to (for example) launch 2 separate vehicles - one bringing the lander can to mun orbit, the other bringing the crewed capsule that will later return. then you'd have an actual reason to do a rendezvous & docking to get the kerbal into the lander (and a reason to get him back into his "mothership" capsule afterwards) when i was a kid, i was curious and didn't shy away from asking questions. i think i would have asked something like "ok dad, i get it, but why don't we just land on the mun and return from there? what's the point of the docking afterwards?" if you split it into 2 separate vessels, you can trim the lander down (only needs the lightweight lander can), probably also only the tiny starter landing struts with a spark engine on the bottom and a fuel tank on top of the lander can (and docking port on top of it?) and you can add a heatshield to the capsule and point out that the capsule + heatshield + parachutes is maybe twice the weight of the lander can, so it would need much more fuel and maybe also a bigger engine - which would be heavier and require even more fuel and requires longer landing struts to not hit the ground - which are also heavier etc. etc. just a few thoughts. hope your son likes the game and likes your lessons :)

i don't use asteroid mining a lot, but the few times i did, one purpose of the mining rig was to drag the asteroid into LKO as a cheap fuel source in orbit. (same logic would apply for dragging it to some other point of interest, though). my first miner had only 1 or 2 nuke engines to get there on the cheap (high isp) but their thrust is annyoingly low when you suddenly have to push a few hundred tons of asteroid around. i'll probably send out an asteroid miner soon in my current campaign. i think i'll use the new high Isp lf/o engine that was added by the expansion (wolfhound i think? the one that has over 400 vacuum Isp). will need some more fuel reserve to intercept the asteroid, but has much more thrust to push it into target orbit in a reasonably timeframe. ions or puffs would be 1-2 orders of magnitude to weak for such a purpose ;) oh also, don't know if anyone mentioned it but you shouldn't use the small IRSU for asteroids. it converts ore to fuel at a terrible ratio, so you waste most of the (limited) amount of ore on the asteroid in the inefficient conversion. i think it has something like 5 ore per unit of fuel (vs. 2 units of fuel per ore from the full scale ISRU - ie. 10 times as efficient). you can use the small drills on asteroids, though - they always work at full capacity there (only difference between small and large drills is that the small ones don't work on very low ore concentration, but that's not the case on asteroids)

to be honest, i usually skip those contracts altogether :) anything involving science from kerbin, really doing them with a capsule (if it's about crew reports) or a simple probe (other experiments) in a polar orbit is probably the least effort. takes some patience, though. may take a few roations until the capsule crosses over the target area at the right moment. as for a plane based solution - i'd either wait for panther engines. they operate just fine up to 12+ km or something and have enough thrust with afterburners to do a steep climb to slingshot above the required ~18km before falling back down. for a wheesley + rocket solution, i'd go with very little liquid fuel (wheesleys don't need much). don't know how much fuel you have in that plane, but the rocket fuel should easily be enough to push that bird up a few kilometers multiple times. unless you made the plane too heavy. might also be worthwhile to try a terrier instead of reliant. wheesleys should get you high enough for the terrier to work efficiently, so you'd save some mass. a few sparks would also do the trick if you already got those. i'd probably put the wings a bit further in the back. the engines should be roughly the same weight as the cockpit (engines probably a bit heavier) so if the wings are roughly in the middle of the plane, the dry and wet COM should be reasonably close to each other.

example of a simple crew plane similar to the one OP asked for: https://imgur.com/a/9NRZv quickly thrown together. very simple handling - basically just throttle up, take off, set nose to ~10° and let it soar. engine cutoff after about 4 minutes, then fast forward to AP and circularize after ~10 minutes game time (maybe 5-6 minutes real time due to physics warp/normal time warp after engine cut off) still plenty of fuel left for some rescue missions in low orbit or docking to a space station somehwere in LKO.

you could replace the 2 mk1 liquid fuel tanks behind the shockcones with same size LFO tanks. the 600 liquid fuel from the wing strakes should be enough for the whole airbreathing phase of the flight anyway. simply take off, set the nose somewhere between 8 and 15° above horizon and keep it that way until you're in orbit. if you can't break the soundbarrier, either change to a more elaborate ascent profile or simply add a 3rd rapier into the mix. if you accelerate to fast and the nose explodes, use a higher angle. it's just a simple passenger plane to get some people to a low orbit station - a task you could handle with a rocket quickly thrown together and launched in only a few minutes. so the plane shouldn't require an elaborate ascent profile that takes 15 minutes to orbit. that would kinda defeat the purpose, imo. just make it a little overpowered and enjoy a quick ascent - you probably won't need more than maybe 500 m/s left in orbit to dock to your spacestation (and for the retro burn to get back to KSC) anyway.

guess i'd make a small plane that can land in rough terrain. mabye add parachutes if you aren't good at landing (and a 2nd seat for an engineer to repack the chutes). tbh, i skip those contracts when they pop up. the reward is fairly low for the real time investment.

make sure you're actually switched to surface speed. some of the areas on minmus are high enough that the game won't automatically switch from orbit to surface. if you zero your horizontal speed relative to orbit, you still move relative to the surface, so the lander will always flip over / crash.

your poll lacks a "noone" option for the first question and a "never" option for the second. and a "we won't colonize mars" option in the 3rd.

ok fair enough. but the problem is now that you can't get elon style when you use a separate ascent vehicle, and even if you make that MAV solid rocket powered, you only get 24% bonus for it. elon style is (arguably) easier to do and defintiely requires less mass in total. anyway, i guess it's too late to re-revoke it now i suppose you could increase the score bonus for the solid rockets from 6% to 8 or 9. so a fully stacked mission with a solid powered MAV gets 97% (or even 98%). which doesn't sound sound like much, but actually allows you to make it 1/3rd (?) heavier (or twice as heavy at 98%) and still break even with a 96% bonus.

i must have missed the rule change about rovers and full reusability. don't understand why you reverted that rule. that rule change renders the "separate ascent vehicle" mission profile pointless. the extra mass of the rover is trivial compared to the mass of a separate ascent vehicle that also has to be solid powered to (almost) break even with the bonus you'd get for full reusability.

imo payload fraction isn't such an important metric when designing a rocket. when i bother to optimize a disposable lifter, i optimize it for cost. if i can get a payload to orbit using a stack of SRBs and that solution turns out cheaper than an alternate design with LFO engines, i couldn't care less which of the solutions has a lower weight

the cone shaped capsules don't really need SAS for reentry - they will automatically keep that retrograde alignment even if you turn the SAS off. they also don't really need a heatshield to reenter from low orbit on their own. the problem with an mk1-2 on top of a hitchhiker is that the mk1-2 is much heavier than the hitchhiker, so their combined CoM tends to be fairly high up. you would be better off using two hitchhikers and control the vessel with a probecore. the CoM for two hitchhikers sitting on top of each other will be right in the middle between them, so once you add a heatshield below them, the CoM will shift towards the shield. or you could use the mk1 or mk2 passenger cabins instead of hitchhikers - they have better heat resistance and crash tolerance and lower mass per seat. the hitchhiker isn't really designed to survive re-entry - i think the flavor text of the part also mentions this. you probably won't need a heatshield to bring the spaceplane cabins down safely from low orbit. i've also landed unshielded mk2 passenger cabins returning from mun or minmus - those spaceplane parts have pretty decent heat tolerance.

it's almost there, but apparently not close enough yet. set a maneuver node at Pe to get an exact overlap. it looks like it's also a bit off radially (can't tell for sure from the images), so you may have to add a small radial or antiradial component to the maneuver (the vectors with the light blue icons) to rotate the whole orbit to the correct alignment. that burn should be cheap. only a few m/s.

there are no blimps in the stock game

a separate leaderboard for larger scale missions (maybe only one for all sizes, normalized/scaled by a "per kerbal" score) would probably make the most sense. so the entries that are already in the existing leaderboard aren't devalued by some new scaling rule.

well it could work as a separate multiplier as @Physics Student suggested. basically a "scaling modifier" for the whole mission. so a mission with 3 kerbals that reaches a given score and another mission that has 6 kerbals and uses the same mission profile with twice the total mass gets the same score. that would likely bias larger, upscaled missions, though. some parts just have better mass ratios if you scale them up. a 2 man lander pretty much has to use 2 lander cans, but if you double the scale, you could use the 4 man MK2 passenger cabin that has an even lower mass per kerbal. or if you upscale it again and send 16 kerbals, you can use the mk3 cabin that has 16 seats at 6.5 tons (or something in that range). or the engines - if you make it big enough it makes sense to use a dart (aerospike) rather than a spark. the dart has 10 times the mass and 10 times the thrust, but much better Isp. stuff like that. on the other hand, that would encourage some large scale mission, which could be fun to design (or to watch)

did you try using the translation controls (IJKL) instead of the default rotation controls (WASD) to move? maybe that could work (haven't tried). i like that original design. looks like a funny solution. i guess i'll use a more conventional rover design with 4 wheels (or maybe 3) for the duna challenge using some lightweight parts (small octagonal girders or something) as the frame. will probably make it small enough to fit into a 2.5m service bay. those things have high crash tolerance, too, so the rover should be well protected when the powered "one way" lander hits the ground.

i doubt i will be able to get the ascent stage to an orbit that is anywhere near that of the mothership with the SRBs. might use a hammer with thrust limiter that burns long enough get above 50km and can also push the PE out of the atmosphere. or maybe a flea that just pushes the AP up and a second stage made of separatrons (they are also SRBs, after all) that push the PE up once the capsule reaches AP. i guess i would still put a small LF engine on the ascent vehicle to maneuver it towards the mothership once it reached *some* orbit with the SRBs. doesn't have to be much. maybe an oscar tank and an ant engine or something along that line. would be much cheaper (mass-wise) than maneuvering the whole mothership to a rendezvous with the ascent vehicle. will have to think of a clever solution for the kerbin lander. i guess it would be possible to cannibalize the mothership and have some of it's extra crew capacity actually being the kerbin lander, but that would (imo) violate the whole "transfer ship ends trip in orbit ready for next mission" idea. does the kerbin lander need a proper crew capsule or can we also use command seats? that would make it a whole lot easier, of course

another attempt. geting closer, but really huge now. https://imgur.com/a/DdioZ good to know that the ascent vehicle can have command seats. that should make things a lot easier the only difficulty with the SRBs is that they are really heavy and you need quite a lot to shoot 2 lander cans to orbit. i guess a single flea would be almost enough to get the near massless command seats up. not sure about the other bonuses, though. the original lander remains on the duna surface, so the ascent vehicle is also the part that eventually has to land on kerbin, isn't it? also, the command seats probably don't count for the 2 seats per kerbal bonus, so the transfer ship will require 6 seats (ie probably 3 mk1 cabins ).

trying to figure out a way to make the duna ascent vehicle solid rocket powered, able to land without chutes or wings and small enough. no luck so far. got one to the ground without breaking important stuff. can also get it back into some sort of ascent trajectory, but not enough fuel to make it. https://imgur.com/a/aJ3op not sure if "partial" SRB launch is enough for the bonus anyway. i packed a pair of fleas on the vehicle and they push it but to ~20 km (at which point the surface speed meter auto-switches to orbit speed), but that's about it. to get further, i'd have to bring something even heavier. a pair of hammers could shoot the capsule to orbit, but then it will probably mass something like 8 tons or more. don't remember if the projected bonus for that mission profile was high enough to improve the current top score with such heavy machinery.

was that a retrograde reentry into kerbin atmosphere? looks like it on that image. nice mission! i liked the tree-like mid section where the terriers and tanks are separate from the fuel tank that is moved in between them. that's some orbital precision maneuvering

that's actually a pretty good idea! would be a nice convenience feature much like the other SAS functions.