Jasonden

how about a bonus for not using those overpowered Jets to bring down your initial launch mass?

Why force the lander to be heavy? Do we need to bring along ballast to meet that requirement? Seems kinda superfluous to me . . .

Okay, with evidence this time. 2 parts to Minmus! Gotta think that this is the theoretical minimum. Right? I mean, right?

I got it to work with a lander can, liquid booster, and EVA pack last night. No pics, as I wasn't sure that I could make it go. Ran out of EVA propellant while moving at about 6 m/s still, but Kerbal survived impact onto Minmus

Here's entries for Apollo 8 & 15.

Something that I could/should have done to improve the score a lot would have been to carry a little extra fuel, and then take a bit of a tour to land the Kerbals on Ike. This "touch-and-go" landing on Ike could have added 150 points for low marginal cost given that most of the effort and cost is dedicated to getting to the Duna/Ike system in the first place. . .

Looks more like Apollo 10 maybe. A8 didn't carry a LM.

technically wasn't it already history, given the negative dates?

Any objection to using TweakScale? It really helps when trying to gauge the right scope for recreations like this IMHO.

Funner than their landings, where all of the Kerbals are facing backwards, hurtling toward the surface at 600 m/s without being able to see their approaching doom This thought actually had occurred to me while flying the missions . . .

we've all been there, man! There needs to be an autopilot for Kerbals gone walkabout on EVA. Otherwise my fingers start to hurt from pressing the "w" key for so long.

Shouldn't that be: Marüned?

Okay, new result! 50 total Kerbals landed on Duna across the 3 launch windows. Final score: 1197, on the back of 216 points and a cost of 2,397,030. This was completed before the new rule change. I had 4 boosters by the end, w4hich I would have used in expendable mode with higher mass to orbit had I known that I couldn't reuse them -- but no big deal, this came out pretty good regardless. PS: re-scoring my simple duna trip without reuse gives a score of 3966 instead.

Okay -- thanks for the advice about keeping the CM forward! I gave up on small missions, though, and went big instead. Here's an 0.625 Duna return mission:

How do you guys keep yours pointing straight? Mine keep flipping.

Although it produces a (somewhat) adverse affect on my recently completed mission (pics soon!), I like this change. It encourages reusable if you go for a long-term program (i.e., "Extended Research") and suitably accounts for shorter programs.

Check out the Japanese H-2A rocket launching the X-ray observatory. Very nice strut job that they have going on holding the solids!

Yeah; I think that my final score, too, will be as much a function of when I decide to call it 'good enough' rather than when I'm finished doing everything that I could possibly do. Even with KCT, those first 4 Duna windows give you a lot of time to work with! Also, I find that I'm designing with much higher margins on my missions that I usually do. The reason is that while flying so many missions in parallel, if just ONE runs out of fuel/supplies or something, then I don't just lose an evening's worth of work having to go back to the backup, I lose like a week or two's worth of work. All in all it makes me design a bit more like aerospace people really do. More gold plating please -- I need it for my fuel tanks

It's maybe 1.5 years of supplies or so for 24 Kerbals. To last them on the surface while waiting for the next window back to Kerbin.

Very sweet mission dude. And you've definitely recognized that, given the rules at present, the best score would come from an empty fuel tank with ISRU sitting on the launch pad, mined, and then recovered. For a score of -infinity! Maybe we could say that anything that has left Kerbin's SOI (Mun and Minmus are within Kerbin's SOI by this definition) gets no recovery on cost, or partial recovery on cost perhaps. I'm going to have a hard time scoring my returned spacecraft anyway because they're in some ocean somewhere and I'd have to do the percentage recovery by hand based on the lat/lon. TAC LC must be fundamentally different than USI: for USI, the life support supplies are the most expensive part of the whole mission. Kind of ludicrous, but there you go. I launch 20t of supplies and it costs me like $260000. I launch a full spare 20t fuel tank and it runs $110000. Go figure.

OMG yes. How have you ever lived without it? Seriously, dude

Awesome -- this would have made my present attempt way simpler to math! Kudos!

Presumably it's the Challenge of the Month, which didn't translate well to the new forums I guess.

I only now saw it when I stepped way back from the screen

Wow, what is that, dude Is it a porkchop plot converted to ASCII?