Wait- Was That Important?

I made this little guy, hoping to make a stable yet lightweight and safe way of emergency orbital escape. I failed to make it stable (center of thrust was off for some reason), and the little guy fell off when it landed. Regardless, science was conducted, the mission was declared a success, and Kerbal engineers clapped each other on the backs.

How about a parts modification? I don't know how open people are to changing things like that, but I've taken to reducing the mass on the fairings. For example, 6 tons for the largest fairing base? That's just ridiculous. I reduced the masses of all the fairing bases larger than 1.25m by a factor of 5, just for balancing issues. Any other useful rebalances made to the pack?

I actually made a thread about this awhile ago in the suggestions forum about profitability when Eve gets resources. The conclusions I got from the thread were thus: 1.) Eve will not be a fuel stop, as it's too impractical to ascend with any appreciable amount of weight. 2.) Eve will have Blutonium, a vital component of NERVA's and RTG's, which will only be required in small quantities yet will be very useful. 3.) Ascending from Eve will always suck until we get balloons or engines that can breath it's soupy, hellish atmosphere.

If you hold ALT and use >, you can force physical timewarp. If RCS is too slow even at 4x physical timewarp, I'm surprised your PC is still running with such a monster. You could feasibly use the engines to change attitude, but it'd be dirty and quite wasteful.

I was fine with making rockets that could get to orbit, I just didn't understand orbital physics when I first played. I actually burned towards the planet in an attempt to deorbit myself After that it was about 3 days before making orbit became possible for me.

That's amazingly huge. How much fuel are you looking to get to Jool at the end of the mission?

I think, perhaps, that this takes the cake for most impressive journey I've seen in the Mission Reports yet.

The trick is to make the bases small. Each base only weighs about 6.5 tons with all batteries, panels, legs, and other equipment (it's a single hitchhiker with some fluff stuck on it, really), has 2.5 tons of skycrane/ headshield on it, and 12.5 tons of propulsion equipment. I'm also shooting for the second launch window on day 283 to bring the crew to Duna, whereas only the two bases will go on the first window. I'm making a separate manned ship to bring the Kerbals to Duna, as I usually do. Instead of pushing bases this time it's moving the lander, but it's the same principle. My only fear is that the lander, which weighs as much as the ship, will be too much for the ship to push there one way and still have enough fuel to get back. I'm hoping that it won't be that bad, and at the same time that the lander will have some extra fuel I can transfer after ascending (probably, as it has 2500 m/s of dV for what should be, at most, a 1500 m/s dV ascent). I technically wouldn't even need the ship to move the Kerbals, being able to move two at a time in the bases themselves, but for the sake of realism I won't stuff the Kerbals in the bases before they land. I'll post pictures of all the stuff later!

Beautiful! I've neglected Laythe so much in favor of Duna, seeing something this cool makes me want to make amends and fly back there!

Happy birthday! Enjoy the feeling of success!

My plan so far entails a launcher with 21.5 tons to LKO. Unlike the OP and several others in this challenge, I'm forgoing the extra difficulty of building wheeled bases and docking them (mainly because stationary bases hold more appeal for me- wheeled bases just look like funny cars to me). I'm using more per launch than the first entry mainly because, unlike OP, I'm doing direct-to-Duna packages. That means that in one launch I've got all the materials needed to fly the payload to Duna and land it there. Even though my overall tonnage to Duna is lower than OP's 17.5 tons (mine has about 9 tons), it only takes one launch. Despite being slightly less efficient overall (0.42 tons/day for me versus OP's 0.5 tons/day), it should hopefully get a better efficiency as it requires less launches. The current plan is thus: 2x launches of a long-term two-man base with propulsion and landing equipment 1x launch of a propulsion/ crew section of a Duna venture/ return ship (I hope it has enough dV to put the lander there one way) 1x launch of a Duna crew lander/ return vehicle At the same time, I'll launch two crew vehicles to fully crew the ship and all should be good. Since the two bases are fully self- sufficient, they'll be launched on day 10 and day 56, respectively, and should be able to make the first Duna encounter. The ship will take one launch (I hope!) and will be launched on day 99, and crewed over the next few days. The lander will then be launched on day 142 and docked and the ship will depart at the next available Duna window on day 283. Depending on the dV requirements, the lander should be able to take dual two-man rovers with it. Nominal Mass to LKO: Approx. 86 tons Launches: Four Kerbals: Four Launch Schedule: base one at day 10, base two at day 56, ship at day 99, lander at day 142 (potential for 3 more launches before departure) Mission Schedule: depart Kerbin on day 283, arrive and land at Duna on day 347, minimal ascent window at day 495 (return at day 559), nominal ascent window at day 951 (return at day 1015, with possible fudging of the Hohmann transfers to get it below 1000) Mission Execution: 3 Crew Mobility: 2 (or 0) Base Mobility: 0 Crew Safety: 2 (all crewed rockets have escape towers, all crewed ships are escapable and the lander works as a return vessel if the ship breaks) Mission Robustness: 2 (room for three replacement launches) Achievement Score: 9 Mission Value: 592 (4 kerbals @ 148 days minimal/ early mission), 2416 (4 kerbals @ 604 days nominal) Efficiency: 28.1 You'd better worry OP! If all goes according to plan I may have you beat. Here's the LV I'm using, with the extended fairing to cover the bases/ skycrane/ Kerbin departure stage

Do not use a hitchhiker. The cost to bring any appreciable tonnage from Eve's surface at about sea level (where I assume your kerbals are) is horrendous, and the hitchhiker weighs 2.5 tons. Here's my suggestion: build a two-part ship controlled with a probe core. The booster section should be rather large to push the weight of your lander, and have a hitchhiker module on it somewhere. The second part is your lander- this will land near your stranded Kerbals and pick them up, and should also be remote controlled. It should use seats instead of a command pod, otherwise it'll be needlessly heavy. Bring the kerbals up to orbit in the lander, dock with your boost section, transfer the kerbals and whatever fuel you have left, then fly back to Kerbin. Good luck!

Didn't upgrade and now I won't. I'm glad that I read this thread before updating- reinstalling my mods is a hassle.

Well, yeah, but I'm going for quasi-realism in my program. Using the second or third stage engine to boost a payload to Duna or somewhere is probably cheaper than launching a throwaway NERVA, or even using a tug.

I laughed for far too long at what was probably an unintended pun.

Wow, this beats any rover I've seen so far for looking awesome. How well does it drive?

I aim for 2 meters per second per second in space at minimum with nuclear engiNes, as otherwise those thousand meter per second burns drag on forever. When I use the upper stage on my rockets instead of a Nerva though, I can get up to 50 m/s squared. It has a good kick to it!

The website loads very slowly for me, and it's certainly not my internet connection. Has anyone else had this problem while running the most recent version of Chrome on Windows 7?

I invoke internet rules 13 ("Anything you say can be turned into something else- fixed") and 8 ("there are no real rules about posting"). I dislike how reactionary this community is. The people here are literally rocket scientists but a stupid troll post gets 15 pages of responses and two/ three offshoot threads slyly or sometimes not-so-slyly referencing the main thread. That being said, elitism is a factor in all games, and it isn't really that bad in the KSP Community. There's never a really huge influx of annoying noobs after a publicity boost, and we're lucky to have people nice enough to greet them and answer their questions.

Sci-Fi ships will always hold some appeal in my mind, just as a figure of nostalgia. However, any argument of their being useless is pretty much null and void. This is a goal-less game at the moment, any argument of practicality is inherently invalidated. They're pretty great for just existing, as all things in KSP are. The developers have planned FTL and procedurally generated solar systems, you may one day get a destination for the good ship Enterprise.

GROOV3ST3R's entry, along with 12 other entries from the other thread have been added! A slight change was made to the competition leaderboards however: they are now restricted to ten spaces (the complete leaderboard just holds all, and the engineering challenges are still only awarded to one person at a time) to save my sanity. Good luck, and fly safe!

Update: Captain Kalawang's entry for "One Big Mother" has been displaced, yet still holds the record for slowest entry (mebbez I should be adding a new category, no?) and instead has earned the "Phallic Symbol" engineering award, as it's still the longest plane by far. Also, I'm looking for some kind person to make a logo for this challenge as well, just so people can get a shiny for their participation.

I halved the base time and applied the bonuses to that, considering that you went around twice and that it's not a super-competitive entry. Congrats on getting that monster to fly! I'm still scared by anything over 60 tons in the air. It also does seem to beat Kalawang's entry for "One Big Mother"- let's see if he comes back to reclaim his title!

Somehow I think 55 NERVA's will get you wherever you want to go quite quickly indeed.

Update: Fixed some broken links to the challenge entries in the leaderboards, sorry for not catching that earlier. In other news, B9 Aerospace pack is kicking my ass and refusing me to take off, but I'm determined. So far the strategy of "moar boosters" hasn't worked, so I'm adding more boosters and will let you know how that goes later.