Aletus

Try the two tutorials that come with 0.17. It covers orbital maneuvers and getting to the Mun

Had a thought about the stock landing leg if you could turn that into a shock absorbing balloon. You would need to incorporate the landing leg module specs for the balloon model. For what I have experimented the stock landing leg, it can take impact speeds almost 200m/s even with it's low impact resistance value.

Excellent work! You should also add the Prometheus movie ship to the projects

http://youtu.be/EHHBWcE_D_E You can comfortably crash the probe with a long structural beams attached to it. Just make sure you aim straight down. The beam that I used is "Probodobodyne DYI Kit Strut" Anyway, great probe.

Dishy, would it be possible for you to make a spherical outershell design with connection points on each hexagonal part that the sphere is built from. For the connection points, you would mainly use for shock absorbing parts when landing at high speeds. For moving the sphere, you could use rover inside it, making it much faster on straight than with the pod's gyro. You could also have hollow honeycomb-like parts to put cameras inside for 360 view.

+1 for hexagons or honeycomb-like blocks

You should change this to something like "closest orbit with the sun challenge" where you try to get as many orbits around it and as close as possible.

Kayaking4autism, could you post a bigger outside picture of that thing

http://www.hyperionics.com/ Hypercam2 is free and records everything

"shield" being as if any part of the vessel gets cut off or destroyed on impact.

I think it qualifies, but I think I'll put this one to the 3rd category as shield being used.

http://youtu.be/eBGtn3MHDzI 204m/sec with a small impact shield. I'll allow impact shields from now on, but I'll make this into a 3rd category

I think I'm at max with this setup, struts open http://youtu.be/UbWrqqGH3H0 161m/s

http://youtu.be/BoefEx6NIpk 156m/s