MinimalMinmus

True story. During my caveman run, on a lander that's supposed to partially exhaust the top stage before landing, and THEN ONLY stage. I lost so many landers (or more specifically, their oh-so-precious science cargo) to accidental staging instead of simply enabling crossfeed...

Without mods, I'd say Minmus, followed by Ike as an outsider for its treacherous topography (during my Elcano, I've reached 90 m/s in a downward slope, which is faster than a high-speed train...). If modded moons are taken in account, I'd take Hale, yes, another outsider, from OPM. If you also have OPM-VO, at this point, it's not even eye candy, it's more of an "eye diabetes".

Honestly, that sounds like more of a waiting game than anything else... As @EpicSpaceTroll139 said, you need a ship with at the very, very least 100 km/s dV, and even then it'd take real life days. The fastest ship I've ever seen on YT is barely faster, at 106 km/s past Kerbin. This barely shears the remaining waiting time by 5%, and we're already talking about some hyper-efficient ion asparagus, which was expended in low Kerbol orbit for 4 in-game days [!!!]

I've already seen the glitch in the video, but with rovers. I call it the "landmine kraken".

Me: "Let's launch a rover to Eve!" Everything goes fine, 200 days later I deorbit it over Eve, then switch to it... "No control"??? Oh, right, I forgot the probe core. *proceeds to bang his head at the nearest wall*

Y'know, among the MOAR series is "MOAR ANTENNAE". And y'know what? Rebuild it. But around Minmus. Now it will be useful for refuelling!

An antenna cluster, so that they get HD internet on the station?

The jackpot, I'd guess, is precision engineering for the RA-2 and the HECS. Other good 160 nodes would be advanced electrics (better panels? Priceless), advanced exploration (the lab would be a major game-breaker) and actuators as it would simplify rescue missions.

I kinda like the poles that go haywire, it's kinda like the Far Lands from Minecraft... as you get closer, the terrain goes more and more distorted, until you reach what's pretty much the core of the warping.

Speaking of which... is it considered cheating if you find a randolith and it unlocks a 150 node?

1.25m cargo bays are just better than heat shields. Not only they can protect your stuff and make you more aerodynamic at launch, but they also are lighter, impossible to deplete, and you can use them to MASSIVELY increase your ship's drag coefficient, which is good during a re-entry.

Actually, there are two harder difficulties, namely diamond (20% science), and nanocrystalline diamond (10%). The next one I'll tackle is diamond.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(2014_film) As much as I'd have liked it to be an old film... you read the "2014" right.

Me and my father (who's a physics teacher) were actually bursting in laughter due to how bad this film was. A complete waste of leptons and photons.

About diamond? Well, it's brutal. You need a lot of efforts to get the 5 first science you need for the thermometer.

Well, it's already the last chapter! Now that i have a reliable source of income and (spoilers, spoilers, that dream wasn't insignificant) science, the challenge is more of a work of patience than anything else. One landing on Minmus gives about 82 science, on Mun it's 60 science, so I need to land and come back 8-10 times to finish the challenge. Caveman tip of the day: Can't remember where you went? Use one of the debris you let on the moon as a beacon! Oh, and more than in any other chapters, as the lander is more complicated... fails galore. No, seriously. I burn up in the atmosphere, the last engine burns up and I can't do a powered landing, I decouple the last separator instead of enabling crossfeed, I suicide burn too late and crash, I get a signal failure and crash, and lastly, in one memorable example, I forgot to take the data before I left. Cue the very unfortunate RUD of the lander in frustration. Chapter 5: Demolishing the final frontier UnKNoWn TranSMIsSioN

I have a suggestion about this mod for early-game programs when Kerbin isn't the primary body of its system. This is the case, among others, with the planet pack "New Horizons", in which Kerbin orbits the gas giant Sonnah, with 4 other moons. As a result, there is a "Sonnah V" contract, but it's pretty much impossible to complete, because you need to do all the game up to the point you have an admin building level 3, chances are you'll have sent something out of Kerbin. So, here's my suggestion. If the mod detects Kerbin is not the primary of its system, but instead the moon of a GG, there are 2 types of contracts created: -Moon contracts: For these, you need to land on 3 biomes/plant a flag on the moon of the GG "X" -Multi-landing contract: This contract is unlocked at level 2 if the GG has more than 1 moon excluding Kerbin, and you only need not to have already completed it to be able to do it. You need to land on all other moons of the GG with a ship, then return to Kerbin to complete it.

Well, here goes nothing. Or rather, here goes something. A very, very bad something. The problem at this point is: I still need to do at least 1 manned flight (2, ideally). But now that Jeb kicked the bucket, the safety net is off. Val dies, I'm not dead but I lose quite a bit of science (namely, the crew reports around Minmus), on top of other things. Also, and much more pressing, it doesn't solve at all my cash problem. And let's not even think about getting another pilot: the cost is 500k kerbucks, more than all the mony made during the entire run! So, here's the objective of the day: 1) Finally stabilize the balance 2) Get a reliable cash pump 3) Go to Minmus to get a few milestones and science 4) Land probes on Mun and Minmus 5) Using all those, develop a probe capable of doing the round trip to Mun and Minmus Lastly, here's an utility assessment of all the 90 science nodes from the most to the least useful, as the caveman tip of the day: Priceless: Electrics (do I really need to say why?) Very good: Propulsion systems (an absolute necessity for high dV stuff); Miniaturization (0,625 decoupler; docking port) Good: Advanced construction (fairings and good nose cones), Advanced flight control (RCS) Alright: Fuel systems (not much beyond the t800, but it's quite useful), Space exploration (Yes, rovemax, but either you got it earlier, either it's not a massive priority anyway, and the rest is useless) Bad: Aerodynamics and Landing (The parts you need are too expensive to be viable on harder cavemen, otherwise alright) Useless: Heavy Rocketry (sigh...) Chapter 4: Do you wanna build a lander? Edit: well, this chapter was longer than usual. But we're nearing the end, you know. There aren't a lot of pictures left (well, still more than 100), but many are from redundant/failed tries. I didn't mention, but actually there are quite a few fails in-between what you see, for various reasons. I only show important things, though.

Cliffhanger break: Valentina is on the way home. Now, there's the re-entry and she has no heat shield... but she has a cargo bay, and that should be fine. By the way, here's the first Caveman's tip: always use cargo bays instead of heat shields. Not only they're lighter, but they can also make a surrogate drogue if you open them due to their immense drag when opened, and that's on top of their primary function, namely making you more aerodynamic. But aero forces aren't the monster of the day. Instead, kerbucks are. You see, apart from some limited gains from milestones, you get very little money from contracts, due to the -1000 rep and 10% rewards. Worse, few contracts are easily repeatable, and you'll have to live off your income from world-firsts, mostly. In this chapter, I'll need to find a way to get a reliable source of income, on top of unlocking electricity, as a mistake with a probe is much less dangerous. Chapter 3: Credit Crunch Crisis

You nailed it! I inspired myself of the style @K3achas used in his/her unsuccessful nanocrystalline diamond attempt (this is the "you know, getting shot 15 times is much more pleasant" difficulty, same as corundum but 3x less science...). "You will not go to space today", from xkcd 1133, is already a bit of a leitmotiv in my runs, this time it's the whole thing. Oh, and by the way, welcome to the forums!

when you realise you made a pun accidentally

Cliffhanger break: Phew, Valentina did it! Better yet, she managed to reach high orbit, which brings some more science... but so little, too. Corundum causes a conundrum: I must now find a way to get the terrier, an indispensable engine if I want to go any further. Chapter two: Fly me to the big sky thing

I completed my 5th caveman challenge, this time with one of the custom very hard careers. I started my mission report, too.

Here's my mission report:

Hi! Welcome to my KSP caveman run! For those who don't know, the rules are: 1) You cannot alter the vanilla gameplay 2) You cannot upgrade any facility 3) Your objective is to rack up the ~1200 points of science you need to unlock all nodes under 100 science. 4) There are seven difficulties, rated from easy to "you know, getting shot 15 times is much more pleasant". I'm playing on corundum, a.k.a difficulty 5, which is... hard. How hard? THAT HARD. Needless to say, the beginnings will be taxing, one single mistake and it's the end of the run, and in fact, this already happened twice. So, I created a series of reliable crafts capable of doing various stuff. If you're interested, I'll give you the excel "blueprint". Let's start! Chapter one: Also spracht cavemanusthra