king of nowhere

yes, of course it is. the terrier quadruple its deltaV in vacuum - though i don't understand how you can have 2 stages both based on terrier engines with similar twr there, unless it's some mod to rescale (i checked, only the terrier has that atmosphere Isp). anyway, this leaves you with 2300 + 2300 + 1200 = 5800 m/s. you should actually go to orbit and have half fuel left in the second stage. if you don't, then there are two possibilities. maybe the rocket is a lot more draggy than you think - just because it looks aerodinamic, it doesn't mean it is. aerodinamic is glitchy. or maybe you are not doing your gravity turn correctly

yes, I read somewhere that the equivalent Isp is roughly 1300 s, so an ion probe with fuel cells and lf/ox tanks will still have more deltaV than a nuclear rocket, albeit at a lower thrust. as for the right lf/xenon ratio, you will have to run some calculations yourself.

I will add that going for immediate rendez-vous like that is cool, but actually more expensive unless you have computer assistance to time everything perfectly. as a human, your timing won't be perfect, you will have to make some correction, and it will cost a bit more. if you go into a lower orbit first, it will be cheaper somewhat. also, the timing is different on different planets. on kerbin, you generally want to launch your rocket when the target is passing from the western desert to the ocean. on gilly, you just wait until your target is above you and go straight up

atmospheric and vacuum deltaV can be very different. using a vacuum engine for the first stage, or an atmospheric engine for the second stage, can make a huge difference. if you use a reasonably aerodinamic rocket with a good atmospheric engine for the first stage and a vacuum engine for the second stage, then 3400 m/s (vacuum) is a reasonable amount to orbit kerbin. if it takes 4000+ m/s, you are doing something very wrong. if you want a more detailed answer, post some pictures of your rockets and your ascent profile.

never had crashes myself, so far. though I did have conflict with other mods, but alone it worked perfectly

right click on the hitchhicker container with the detox unit, there is the option. just like you can turn it on from there, you can also turn it off from there.

too big? Not Albatross is 30 tons, so I can understand the concern; but Sole, the first plane, is only 7 tons total, including jet fuel - and a bunch of food, water, and radiation shielding introduced by a mod that you won't have in the stock game. you can't make a laythe lander for much less, not if you want it to move on the surface. as for landing on water, it's actually fairly easy. much easier than landing on land. just keep your vertical speed low, and you're good. And in general, Sole is very easy to fly. if you are willing to drive it on the surface, you may also be willing to not use your mod for the descent and ascent phases.

if you want to move on the surface and go back on orbit, you are better off with a plane. getting a plane to take off from water is hard, though, it needs a lot of thrust. I made a few such models this is the easiest case. it uses the panther engine, it's got the afterburner mode that gives it extra thrust at the cost of extra fuel consumption. I managed to squeeze some 500 km of range from it, plus two water landings and an ascent to orbit. to orbit, that spacepane would eject the wings and the atmospheric engine (you can see them on the upper left corner) and ascend with a terrier engine. it could reach 20 km of altitude on that panther engine, but i was running out of jet fuel. this instead is Not Albatross space seaplane, it works with propellers and nuclear power generation so it has unlimited range, it can take off from water as many times as it wants and it goes to orbit even on kerbin - though it is hard. to make it take off from water, it needed several adaptations: powerful propellers for its relatively low mass, high wing surface to increase lift at low speed, and most of the mass concentrated on the tail, so that it could lift the nose more easily. flight performance is not as good, but it can fly straight and move around. you can also use it as a boat, it glides on water at 50 m/s. building it is difficult to achieve, but if you want something that can land on water and move around, a plane is your best bet. if you just want to go to the nearest land and plant a flag before taking off, then just any plane will do, you can glide on water until you reach land and take off from there.

it's not about the center of mass, i have a similar rover that is not finely balanced, and it still manages to fly using gimbaling to compensate. in fact, you should not need rcs. maybe that's part of the problem? is gimbaling active? if gimbaling is active, you should balance no problem. wait, maybe too much gimbaling. the vector is the engine with the greatest gimbaling, and it often overcompensates, pushing so hard that it unbalances the ship more. so tuning down gimbaling to 20% or so may work. too much thrust? seems like that rover has a huge twr - unless it's a lot heavier than it looks - and I see sometimes ships have more instability problems at higher thrust. where is that rover supposed to land, tylo? another idea, maybe the rover is flexible? the rockets push at the edges, the rover bends, and the rockets are suddenly off-center. which is related to fuel draining and thrust, the fuel is on the edges of the rover, draining the fuel increases the acceleration of the edges compared to the inertia of the center. seems the most likely issue. and in that case, moving those rockets closer to the center of mass would help. P.S. I can tell you are experienced because the first half dozen solutions I thought, i read a line later "and i checked this thing".

yes, vessel orientation does influence radiation dose. cme events damage the crew of parts exposed to the sun, but if there is something else blocking the sun the crew will be safe. the easiest way is to put a large fuel tank on a narrow crew cabin. to ensure that your ship is properly oriented, you can turn it around during a cme, while checking the irradiation see in the image, the lower part of the info window, where it says environment, it has radiation and habitat radiation. radiation is external radiation, you can't influence that, but habitat radiation should be down to a few mrad/h, or nominal. in the case of the picture it's not possible because it's the effect of a radiation belt, but with cme you will see the value change as you shift the ship. afterwards, if you orient the ship correctly and then change ship, the game will consider it oriented correctly as long as it stays out of physical range. but save often, because sometimes the mechanism glitches.

Part 9: A tale of giants and dwarfs Boundless enters the Gememma system and explores the moons of binary gas giants Mandrake and Rutherford and the dwarf planet Pragnik. Left, the positions of Mandrake and Pragnik around Gememma; Gannovar highlighted to showcase how tiny is the inner Gememma system in comparison Right, the moons of Mandrake. Rutherford is a gas giant roughly the size of Sarnus, all the moons are bigger than Minmus but smaller than Mun 9.1) Welcome to Gememma! 9.2) Boundless in the sky with gas giants and moons 9.3) Rally racing on Tatian 9.4) Lozon and Jancy, not quite interesting enough 9.5) Remote Pragnik 9.6) Beagrid, the waxy ocean

actually, thinking of it a bit more, the comet does not have that high of an apoapsis, intercept speed on the previously suggested trajectory may well be over 3 km/s. the one below is probably better, though harder to get an intercept this way also realized another issue you may have, though it seems you already have plenty of missions that will pay off in a year, and your issue is that you want reputation right now. but a comet contract is slow. this trajectory won't give you a comet rendez-vous before 4 years, and you may have to wait another apoapsis before returning to kerbin if the alignments are not right - we're talking 10 more years, easily. the previously suggested trajectory will get you to the comet in 3 years, with excellent chances to get back to kerbin in 3 more years, even then it's 6 years in total. if you're worried about your reputation and you want a quick fix for that, to the point that you are not willing to wait a few missions to arrive to eve, a mission that will pay off in 6 or 15 years is not a solution. If you want fast fixes for reputation, I am afraid ferrying tourists around the moons of kerbin is the only way to go. once you take interplanetary missions, it's going to take years in any case.

Ok, I am confident I could meet the comet at apoapsis starting from LKO with no more than 5 km/s, probably a fair bit less. Could be as little as 3 km/s, depending on the inclination. however, it's very difficult to describe how, especially to someone who probably does not know the technical details. which brings us to the crux of the issue. I do not mean to be rude, but - as by your own admission you have occasional troubles even with regular mun missions - this is probably above your skill level. still, I'll try to describe the technique. You should leave Kerbin on the red ellipse. From LKO make a big prograde burn to raise solar apoapsis. You need to go very high, higher than the comet apoapsis - but fortunately, the farthest you go from the sun, the cheaper it is to raise orbit. It takes 2 km/s to raise orbit from kerbin to jool, I estimate roughly 3 km/s to get the high apoapsis needed for this maneuver (note that I did eyeball it here, the actual apoapsis may be higher or lower than that). You want to intercept the comet at apoapsis, so you will need to raise your apoapsis enough that you will pass right on the comet apoapsis when the comet is passing there. it will be a high speed intercept, but again, far from the sun costs are much lower. I estimate 1 to 2 km/s for it. You will also need a plane change somewhere, if it's far from the sun it will be cheaper. Once you are on the comet, you can make a slight tweak on your orbit to get a kerbin intercept, and from there you aerobrake. Yes, it is difficult, but it is the only way to intercept that comet in a reasonable time at a reasonable cost. To make an easier rendez-vous you need over 10 km/s, which requires ion.

well, the best way to get money, science and reputation all together is to get a tourist contract to land on mun or minmus, put science instruments on it, land on a new biome. you get money and reputation from the contract, enough to pay the spaceship and more, and you also get science from the new biome.

intercept the comet near apoapsis, it will be slower and easier to catch. pack a lot of deltaV - if you want to go safe because you're unpracticed, put in an ion engine and 10 km/s of deltaV. of course, to use that far from the sun, you will also need an rtg... which you may not have. and patience, a lot of patience. I would tell you to not try a rendez-vous like you would do in a normal circular orbit, but instead just to point straight at the comet when it's at rendez-vous - that is, go in an elliptic orbit similar to the comet, then make some corrections. but i am afraid your skill may be insufficient for that. still, one has to start somewhere. by the way, i understand you want to play a no reload career, but when a station explodes because you did some eva construction on it, that's an obvious bug, you can allow yourself to reload

even in elcano 4th, I got permission for those kind of brief, reasonable uses. at least, I was always very open about them in my reports, and the previous challenge keeper @18Watt never complained. either he never read the actual reports, or he was also willing to apply some leeway.

I would say, as long as your propulsion is entirely based on wheels, every jump is ok. Here it comes to the challenge-holder discretion. Too many individual cases to cover all with hard rules. I would sum it up with "rockets are allowed to help wheel propulsion, but their use must be limited in scope". That is, want to have backwards-pointing rockets to help climb steep slopes? acceptable. downward-pointing rockets to cushion the fall when you fall down a crater? fine. downward-pointing rockets to keep you glued to the ground in low gravity world? ok. Because in all those cases your method of locomotion are the wheels, and the rockets are only providing some minor extra utility. I think we can all understand the difference between that, and taking a suborbital jump. but there will always be edge cases, that will have to be evaluated individually. this is more or less consistent with your preferred option, except your preferred option would disqualify using of rockets to go uphill. would doing this be so bad? (notice the inclination of the slope on the navball, and compare the speed with the orbital speed for vall) regarding propellers, a second rule could be "on atmospheric worlds, propellers can be used to provide the main thrust, provided the vehicle stays on the ground". atmispheric worlds have too much gravity for that to create issues with suborbital jumps anyway.

i don't know what's the issue there, but i can at least confirm it is not a problem with transfer. the game does not model it. however, I have to ask, is having one convert-o-tron at 65% such a big deal? refueling a ship with a big convert-o-tron takes a few weeks, a few months even for a very big one. in the time scale of transfer windows, that's short. if one of four chemical plants is working at two/thirds capacity, you'll take a few extra days to refuel, nothing more. this game is full of those little glitches that you just have to live with

I have also noticed that at time warp greater than x1000 some of the authomated things don't work correctly anymore. the first time I had this issue, I simply had to limit time warp to x1000. the most annoying things was solar storms, I had to stop and wait with x1000 warp for them to end, because otherwise the shielding would not work properly. imagine a 3 years transfer to jool during a solar high with storms lasting a day or two at a time and happening every few hours. The other times I did play kerbalism I structured things so that I could ignore those malfunctions. I crafted resourse production so that I would have an excess of everything, it's slightly less efficient but it works regardless of time warp. as for radiations, after establishing that the shielding worked I used to deactivate them during interplanetary travel. I never paid much attention to science, though, because my goal had always been grand tours, and while I like to also collect science I don't really care how much i'm actually getting. so I can't comment specifically on your case

I can attest that I made a mission where I was able to harvest carbon dioxide successfully from duna, so it's a bug of some kind. Maybe a mod conflict, that "atmospheric composition" window seems like it could come from a mod that messes up the atmospheric settings.

a fiery descent on Lito, innermost moon of Reander, whirligig world planetary pack

Part 8: Reander and the seven moons Boundless visits the giant planet Reander and its seven moons. Not many difficulties here, but a lot of interesting worlds to explore. A family portrait of all the moons of Reander 8.1) No, we're not ready to start yet 8.2) A tour of the inner moons on the way to Lito 8.3) Lito: plains, mesas, and a giant ball in the sky 8.4) Totooa, the gas dwarf 8.5) Mally and the kangaroo race 8.6) Yawer, miniature Mesbin 8.7) Yalthe, land of volcanic plains 8.8) Yokane, the one with cliffs 8.9) Dakkon, cracked snowball

by the way, I tried the same method to see if I could trick the game to think I am landed on jool, but no such luck. standing on another ship only works on water. i even tried strapping 100+ parachutes to the contraption to make it fall so slowly it would count as standing still under normal circumstances, but it wasn't enough.

@JacobJHC I was thinking on another jool 5 science mission, after discovering by accident that there are ways to get more science than I thought possible - namely, i accidentally discovered that if I pick a sample with my kerbal on top of a splashed down plane, or swimming around the splashed down plane, it counts as two different samples. so this time i was planning to actually get all the possible science available, by landing an aircraft carrier on laythe and getting the exploration plane over it to get "landed" samples from water biomes. possibly throw in some circumnavigations too. and use magnetometer and eva experiments, that were not available I noticed, also accidentally, that some experiments will give more science if run multiple times. according to this table, for example, I can run mistery goo observation up to 4 times before i completely stop getting science. my question is, should I try to gather the same experiment multiple times? or is that against the spirit of the science grab? P.S. I won't run that mission for a few month yet anyway. I need to finish my latest grand tour first.

there was one called persistent thrust. but it bugged my game, so i uninstalled it