Jasonden

Yes! But that will put you over into the 'modded' category for scoring. I am interested to see how this would improve the costs, though!

I'll give you half-credit for the returned ship, without direct evidence for the return value. That puts you at $7730-3573/2=$5943. Have to say, I love the explosive decoupling -- that is really hard to get right. Nice job!!! - - - Updated - - - Sweet -- I love the look of the Mk-1 pod atop the C7 adaptor. Looks very streamlined, like a real lander might look! - - - Updated - - - Dude -- masterful as always. I totally *LOVE* your Kerballed second stage; great way to get around no probe cores in Level 2! What was the cost of your parts -- you should get 98% return on them since you landed at KSC but not 100%. . .

Looks good in principle -- can we see it in flight? Clearly getting the order of the solids right is going to be tricky; the rules do state that you need to show pictures of your craft at key points. I look forward to seeing it! I'm perfectly okay with manual staging, too, if that gets you cheaper You'll also likely gain some money back when you recover your vessel after being at the Mun, so that should help your bottom line.

Okay, noticed another thing -- the distance used to calculate the recovery % for money seems to be off. Maybe 10x high due to the RSS stuff? I don't know, but I was a few klicks west of KSC and got 50% return on a spent stage. Just FYI -- excited about my upcoming Slate base mission!

I'm happy to give you at least half credit on your recovery value, as usually it's possible to hit the proper half of Kerbin. That puts you at $4372. Yeah, what I found was similar to you, it seems, in that SRBs are super-cheap for their top-line costs, but actually in terms of fuel alone liquid fuel/oxidizer is cheaper. Hence if you're recovering a stage you're better off with liquid fuel, but if you're disposing of it go solid. - - - Updated - - - Oh I fully expect this! I'm a rockets guy so I always have jet people blow me away with their smaller designs

The object of this challenge is to develop the cheapest possible system to deliver a Kerbal to the Mun, plant a flag, and then to return him safely to Kerbin. This is particularly useful in the sense that minimizing costs leads to maximized profits. In hard mode at 10% funds, planting a flag contract gives only something like $7000. So ideally you should be able to do it for cheaper than that! By cheapest system, it doesn't need to be initially cheap -- it's net costs that matter. So if you recover stages then those costs do not count against you. You may use spaceplanes, rockets, ions, anything you want. There will be two categories -- stock and modded. Stock will count as stock parts that affect performance -- so MechJeb is okay. Modded parts and use of Parts recovery mods will be put in the other category. No cheats, infiniglides, etc. Please post pictures of your craft at key points, and a calculation of your net cost. Also include the tech level of your craft -- I will include separate categories for cheap missions at varying technology levels. Good luck, and let me know if you have questions! [table="width: 500", class: grid] [tr] [td]Tech Level[/td] [td]1[/td] [td]2[/td] [td]3[/td] [td]4[/td] [td]5[/td] [td]6[/td] [td]7[/td] [td]8[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Stock[/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [td] Mesklin $3672 bhauth $5943[/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [td]Tsevion $4372[/td] [td]Tsevion $424 Jasonden $1433 Coam $6367 [/td] [td][/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Modded[/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [/tr] [/table] And here's my entry to get things started -- $1433 net; just the cost of fuel, as all stages recovered for 100% return on the landing strip. Tech level is 7 due to the Probodobodyne HECS modules on stages 1 and 2 -- I think that I could get it down to 5 maybe by replacing the HECS with some Stayputniks and ASAS controls.

I'm having an issue with OPM in relation to the Fine Print survey contracts in career mode. I can select survey contracts normally. However, when I go to the tracking station and then switch focus to a New Outer Planet or moon, all of my survey contracts get deleted. As did my 'Explore Sarnus' and 'Explore Slate' contracts. Are other people having this issue, or is it an interaction with my (many) other mods?

Here's another Moho entry. Stock, with MechJeb and Scansat parts that don't change performance at all. Hit all 12 biomes. Initial cost was $348,120, but I recovered the first stage for $161383, the second stage for $40306, and the spacecraft for $73461. Net cost then was $72970, most of which went to fuel and the droptanks.

I really find tavert-style engine graphs useful -- more of these multi-engine ones would be awesome!

Well, anything between 90 and 270 would technically be retrograde. Or 90 and 180, really.

Kerbin-days vs. Earth days. Back when this challenge was first hatched the game didn't use Kerbin's 6-hour day, using Earth's 24-hour day instead.

Agreed; Kerbal Titan would be totally awesome. To have similar landforms to our Titan (see my pic at left), put seas/lakes at the poles and sand dunes around the equator. Low gravity, thick atmosphere. And -- I know this might be hard, but given the atmospheric methane you could make a jet engine work there, but it would run entirely on OXIDIZER, and not need any fuel. Woah. Oh: and color? Orange! Let me know if I can help with that in any way

Yeah, don't fight it on this one. I'm trying to save up the $3.2M to upgrade to Tier 3 on science, and wow, it's sure hard all right I'm making a few 100K profit on giant expeditions to Laythe and Dres, for instance, emplacing big bases on wheels with 6 actual Kerbonauts and driving around to accomplish survey missions. I'm at $2.2M so far, but seems like a long way to go. I can only imagine if you had to save up $32M!

Yeah, funny thing I had called it Duna Biome Rover in the game. But then later on when I hit that 'craters' biome and realized a more efficient way to do it I came up with the new name that I could later append with a '2' for a possible forthcoming entry. Stay tuned

Yah; retrograde planet in a system that has nothing but prograde, planar planets is pretty dumb. I see what the creator is going for, though -- some way to represent Uranus' odd obliquity. Too bad obliquity isn't possible to add in as I understand it at this point . . . Edit: Just had an idea. Maybe instead of ORBITING retrograde, you could make Urlum ROTATE retrograde by putting in a negative value for its rotation rate. That might be a better way to make that 7th planet distinct.

Yeah! Don't you wish that you could just speed up time until when the update is done? Oh wait . . .

does it need to have any specific payload capacity, or just the docking port?

Would there be a mechanism to assign the suits based on Kerbal attributes then, automatically?

This makes a lot of sense. I have literally never used a Mk2 lander can because two Mk1's are always better in every way. Maybe I can try them out!

I've been flying around with lots of Kerbals these days in order to let the experienced ones drive and the noobs gain experience. The problem that I've run into is that I can't exactly remember who is who, and when I get someone out on EVA to fix the wheels, I have to cycle through each Kerbal until I find my experienced Engineer. It is also annoying when I need that quick EVA report and accidently EVA my pilot, thereby killing SAS. I note that NASA had this same problem: Neil and Buzz had identical uniforms, but starting with Apollo 12 the Commander always had that red stripe around the arm of their space suit so that Houston could tell who was who on the video. I would really like to have some similar mechanism for our Kerbals. I was thinking that part of the uniform could be a color that corresponds to their expertise. I'm partial to blue for scientists, yellow for engineers, and red for pilots like the scheme in Star Trek: The Next Generation but the precise scheme is less important than them having one at all. If the top half of their uniform is colored, say, then there could be white stripes on the arm corresponding to the number of stars that they have. Or all-white uniforms with colored stripes on the arms for everybody with the number of stripes corresponding to number of stars (noobies might not yet merit different uniforms, say). But something to help me tell everyone apart in-game would be really helpful. Any ideas on how to do that or does anyone want to take up the torch?

This is dead apparently? Shame; these look very cool.

Here's an entry that hits all 5 Duna biomes. It's a 'hopping rover', I suppose -- after it nabs each biome it needs to launch to dock with the orbiting lab module to reset the Goo canister. It then refuels and lands again. Having done this, I now think that the better solution for Duna would be to land a bigger rover at a single spot and to rove to each biome. Since 'craters' only occurs at the fringes of 'poles', you can get all 5 biomes by landing at a spot that has lowlands, midlands, and highlands all within spitting distance of the polar transition. And with a single module you can do without the dumb lab module, bring all the goo home, and do it all at a lower tech level without docking. Maybe I'll try this later on

I'm playing on super-hard but with normal penalties -- it's expensive enough to upgrade the buildings with 10% income without making them 10x more expensive, too. But the game on this level is VERY different from what it was in 0.25. Back then "absurd-hard" was all about making cheap ships so that you could turn a profit on a "return science from the Mun", "Plant a flag on the Mun", and "return science from space around Kerbin". I developed a series of reusable launchers for the purpose, allowing me to run missions for the cost of fuel. But in the new game, with FinePrint, the economics have changed. Now with the money and science that you can get from a good contract, you can pile-on with contracts at a single body and send a single, more expensive, but more capable, mission to make lots of revenue. Then the cost of the rocket becomes less important. This is good, too, because with the new part and launch mass restriction, it's WAY harder to build a reusable launcher early.

Yeah I'm hoping for this too

3 comments: (1) yes (2) Yes (3) Kcuf YES! This is obviously awesome; great job!