Whovian

Not a huge deal compared to some of these, but put myself into a Keliosynchronous orbit. For those of you who aren't aware, that's about 1/3 Moho radius. I didn't even have Ion engines. FinePrint can be a jerk.

Firstly, Markiplier. Secondly, a friend of mine was building his first rocket; if I remember correctly it consisted of a capsule, two of KW Rocketry's biggest 3.75m tanks, and a Griffin XX. And then he put 6 humongous B9 wings on. For no reason. Wings. No flaps. I suppose if you can do that in a way which preserves your horizontal velocity at ap. You'd probably need to burn upwards very slowly as otherwise your orbit would go through your launch point.

I call all mine things like "Upgoer," "Spacegoer," and "Testdoer," along with numbers to represent order of invention.

Not really a "you will not go to space today" rather than a "you will not return from space today." You see, I was in early career mode with assorted mods including Deadly Reentry yesterday when I got one of those "rescue this guy in orbit" missions. So I built a rescue craft with two Mk1 command pods to go rescue him; the plan was separate them and land them separately. Just as I was about to deorbit the rescue pod, I realized I'd forgotten a heat shield to protect that construction. And while the Mk1 command pods have a built-in heat shield, the way I mounted parachutes to make stuff inline meant that while the pod might be able to survive reentry via the heat shield, the parachutes surely wouldn't. This is the story of my life. I might try deorbiting anyway and hoping I can survive reentry.

I've used HyperEdit to get a lander in orbit and (successfully) test it, but I've never legit done a mission.

You had the right idea; copy the files from the VAB folder of one save file over to the VAB folder of the other save file. If you want to copy things in orbit, etc., you'll want to copy your persistent.sfs folder with a couple modifications (make sure your science, money, reputation, and gamemode are right.)

Firstly, Modular Fuel Tanks (not RealFuels) really doesn't change anything but lets you edit the contents, so I highly recommend it. Anyways, I don't think you need to install either (I remember having this mod in 0.23 without Modular Fuel Tanks,) it just won't let you do anything with the tanks in the Utilities tab.

I know Novapunch adds some small SRBs and maybe KW Rocketry does too. Some of Novapunch's are only on par with Separatrons and I can't remember if there are any bigger small ones, though.

It's easy to make a single stage to Kerbin escape (though I had FAR installed) by slapping an RT-10 on the bottom of an OKTO-2 (with, possibly, fins,) so I assume an SSTO is very possible.

Nothing's denser than water, so I think the only way to get something to properly sink is with upwards-facing engines (and yes, people have done this.)

Feels a lot like a B9 competitor. In the current release, this doesn't seem to offer much B9 doesn't other than Mk2 cargo bays and inline docking ports; can I recommend trying to find some sort of really convenient niche for spaceplanes that B9 doesn't fill and working on that? Just a random suggestion from a random forum user; it's obviously your mod and you can therefore do whatever on Earth you want to with it. FYI, you could easily make use of Modular Fuel Tanks or Real Fuels to let your current tanks store Electric Charge or Monopropellant.

Probably either my single stage to Gilly taking off or this, just a proof of concept for ridiculous delta-v in a single stage (though absurdly tiny thrust to weight ratio)

This would probably be quite doable (but difficult,) if it weren't for the restriction on release altitude. With this restriction, you need to be able to get onto a collision course, release it <500km above the solar surface, and then (here's the hard part) not crash into Kerbol. The delta-v required to make this course correction so low is probably somewhere at least 3 km/s and could be anywhere from 3 to 20 km/s (I have a little experience with sundive speeds cos I tried and failed to get to Ablate from PlanetFactory once.) Getting enough delta-v to sundive, make that course correction, and get a Kerbin intercept in a single stage without ion engines is probably just very very hard, but then getting a high enough thrust-to-weight ratio to perform that course correction before you hit the overheat line while maintaining enough delta-v to perform your maneuvers is, I am willing to say with absolute certainty, completely impossible in stock without resorting to Kraken drives or similar bugs. EDIT: It just occurred to me that you could do it instead by getting into a 500 km circular orbit around Kerbol, making a small course correction to make your orbit a collision course, release the OKTO, and then get back into your circular orbit, and thus bypass the thrust-to-weight ratio problems. But getting enough delta-v (almost certainly around 40 km/s) in a single stage to do this is way more impossible. EDIT 2: This is possible. I repeat, this is possible. It just requires a ton of precision. This is because of the bit about the Alcubierre Drive. Someone uploaded a tutorial on youtube about transferring anywhere using those and expending 0 delta-v; the basic idea is to warp into various strategic orbits and let gravity do all the delta-v for you. Once you're in solar orbit, this is probably most quickly doable by warping to ~500 km above the surface of the sun, releasing (due to the velocity preservation you'll be on a collision course,) and warping the **** out of there. The only problem is that the most precision I can seem to get with the Alcubierre Drives is about 80 megameters, so you'll need to use some nuclear engines anyway. The first scheme I proposed is probably the easiest; you'll have to do a warp instead of doing thrusting to get out of your collision course. I might try to do this once I'm done with Jool-5ing to my heart's content.

Well, I have got something which will probably work built, though I have yet to run the entire mission. I did use HyperEdit a lot for testing the landers, but that shouldn't be much of a problem, right? I'm a little worried about the landing on Laythe, given my only landing gear is heat shields with 9 m/s of crash tolerance, but I figure I'll just tack on a couple more chutes. As I suck at aerobrakes, I'll probably quickload a lot during the Jool aerobrake and the Laythe landing. Plus, I have to be even more careful during the Jool aerobrake than usual because the heatshield side pointing forward isn't aerodynamically stable. The only non-stock parts used were DRE heatshields, KSPI radiators, and life support containers from TAC; I managed to get rid of the Novapunch structural parts. Fingers crossed. I'll be very busy this weekend, but I'm planning to do the mission afterwards.

I don't see any indication of a mod like TAC fuel balancer, so probably not. Looking at the screenshots, it looks like there isn't a perfect symmetry between the tanks; the strut structure, for instance, is a little asymmetrical. Were they put on freelance, in two chunks of 3x radial symmetry, or ... how does the symmetry on this ship work?

Perhaps scoring should instead be done by the total science data obtained in Career mode? Just a suggestion.

I'll just be using the huge procedural heatshields b/c things seem to be sticking out over the edge otherwise. I have another idea; I might try it so I can pull it off with the "stock" DRE 6.25m heatshield. EDIT: I am such a fool. I just remembered I have Kerbal Joint Reinforcement primarily to prevent things like Krakens. I'll uninstall it.

As I can't seem to manage a proper aerobrake otherwise (even those 6.25m heatshields aren't big enough!) I'll also need to use Procedural Parts for the heatshields. Is this okay?

I have a lot of the same mods as you installed, including ATM, and there's no problem. Try making a new install with no big parts packs so it takes less than 10 minutes to start up, and add in mods which have to do with textures and/or IVAs one by one. No, I have B9 and the Firespitter *plugin* (so I could get B9 to work) and I'm not having this problem, so that's not it. Try what I suggested to the last person?

My personal headcanon is that the units in KSP are different from human measurements; that is, what kerbals refer to as a meter isn't what humans refer to as a meter and so on. Thus the gravitational constant might have the same number in front of the units, but the units themselves have different values, leaving Nova's views to possibly work. I dunno. That's just me.

He's pretty much always at KSC; I usually run a bunch of single missions with him after, of course, designing them.

Seconding this. Dres is the grey hunk of rock no one seems to care about. In a way, the fact that there's nothing interesting about it makes it lonelier than the chunk of ice that's hard to get to. (Notice that these views are my opinion only.) Then again, having PlanetFactory installed makes Eeloo quite easy to get to comparatively, and I have a moon for Eeloo installed to it as well. Eeloo having a giant cube circling it makes it quite a bit less depressing. Personally, if Ablate were a choice, I'd go with that. But, of course, it isn't.

DRE's Deadly Reentry - I'll be using the heat shields and some decouplers. I think they're slightly less massive than the stock ones, but ships look somewhat ugly if I'm using the stock ones, so ... After nearly finishing my transfer stage along with the landers, it seems the only modded parts beyond stock, TAC, and DRE parts are a few of the radial mounts from Novapunch. I could probably emulate them out of girders if required; they're basically radially mounted things with a node at the bottom. I'm definitely not going for minimalism here; the transfer stage weighs about 75 tons. Come to think of it, since I'll be using solar panels, I'll probably need a couple radiators from KSPI. No worries - they're the only KSPI things I'll be using and dealing with just them makes the game very slightly harder. The other mods I'll be using are pretty much utility ones like VOID (basically Mechjeb's readouts without having to add on parts) and Kerbal Alarm Clock (which I trust you're familiar with.) I'll have mods too numerous to list such as Kerbal Attachment System and cBBp's Dragon installed, though they won't affect the craft in any way - if there are any mods not mentioned in this post which are anything beyond utilities and the ones you specifically okayed, I'll ask about them before submitting my entry. Here's to praying I can get back to the mothership in half a day so I don't have to deal with adding life support to the landers. BTW, the Near Future engines have higher isp and around the same thrust (between 1.75 and 3.0 for the .625m ones) but much higher power consumption (around 4 times for the least power-hungry one, I seem to remember?) than the current PB-Ion. Be aware that the comparisons in the thread were written in 0.23, when the PB-Ion had .5 thrust. I don't think there's a table anywhere of the details and I don't have KSP open atm, so I can't give the exact values. (If loch.ness is referring to argon engines, I've no idea since I haven't really played around with argon. And it would pretty much be tomfoolery to attempt this challenge with hydrogen engines.)

I'm planning to try this challenge with TAC, FAR, and DRE installed; I'll try to limit mods which make it easier to KW, KSPX, B9, and maybe Procedural Parts just for the heatshields and life support tanks or the occasional Novapunch structural part. If I must, I could probably do this with only stock, TAC, and DRE parts. First level, of course, cos life support's going to be difficult otherwise. Once the "legit" mission is done, I plan to attempt it SSTJ (single stage to Jool) mothership style; I'll probably need to enlist the help of Near Future Propulsion or KSPI if that's okay. Not quite legit, but I figured I'd do it anyway just for the sheer impressiveness of a single-stage mothership with the landers as cargo. If I manage this, it'll use B9 quite heavily. In both, I'll have about 70 mods installed, but I certainly won't be using them all. Also, what's the policy on basing designs on other entries? I'm thinking about basically copying a couple lander designs with a couple tweaks; is this okay?

Holy sniznizl! I'd considered this, but figured it was impossible without mods like KSPI due to the thick atmo. Good job!