buggy

The bailout idea is nice, but the orange suits are demonstratebly still in their capsule <1 seconds before a crash. If you put yourself in a retrograde solar orbit and crash into Moho at 30 km/s, the several million gees they would have to endure to deaccelerate quickly enough would atomize them, and the exhaust from something that can accelerate them at several million gees would probably blow away a large portion of a planet's surface.

If two parts are strutted together, does adding more struts increase stability? Does the positioning of the struts affect anything either?

-continued- I also finally relented a little and decided to use a couple mods. I figured I might as well do someething once I got there, so I installed Kethane and ISP Mapsat, but I'm not going to actually use any of them untill I land on Eeloo. My heavy lander has a onboard large refinery, two heavy scanners, a 32 ton (when full) Kethane tank, and 2 large drills. Since I have to be on the ground to use the drills, I by definition can't use them untill I land. I also installed both ISP and small Kethane sensors on the probes, as well as several large sensors and ISP sensors on the primary ship. Also on the primary ship is over 100 tons of Kethane storage, as well as 8 large refineries and numerous power generators. Actually getting all that into orbit is not gonna be easy, getting it to escape velocity even less so. I'm guessing somewhere on the order of 60-100 mainsails with jumbomaxes, aspargus style. Noooot gonna be pretty, but at least I don't really need to worry about part count or lag during takeoff so long as the game still works. The ship already can't hold itself up under its own weight.

Continuing on my last post, I reached and orbited Eeloo sucessfully. At that distance from the sun, the detachable probe could maintain thrust at about 1/4 max, and it was intended to land with its ion engine. I correctly assumed that the gravity of Eeloo is tiny compared to Kerban. I failed to realize it was not so weak that a ion engine with half a ton of fuel and probe above it could have a twr greater than 1 at quarter-thrust. By the time I realized this, I was no longer able to deaccellerate at max sustainable thrust and it was too late to recircularize my orbit, and my last quicksave was about 2 days of thrusting behind. Thus another failed mission. My next attempt was also to Eeloo, with a better designed Plutos V.2. Same basic design, but 4 Crewmen, built in automated control systems incase of a lack of crewmen aboard, 300～k units of fuel, and a lander-rover with three seats and a unique curiosity-esque landing system. However the total number of parts were in the 700s, and combined with the over-doubled mass but same 8 ion engines, and greatly increased lag due to said 700+ parts, any actual attempts at a mission would take far too long. Not to mention the initial launch failed to reach Kerban escape velocity, and the lack of room for the (internal) crew modules greatly complicated rescue attempts. Thus Plutos design was deemed to be flawed by its very nature. My latest design, a incomplete and unlaunched nuclear-propelled monstrosity called Nuclos, is currently massing in at 800～ tons with a soon to be reduced part count of 500. The original design had 36 nuclear engines and over 1600 tons, and a part count of nearly 1000. The current design has a mere 20 nuclear engines. It carries a few dozen crew members and has 2 3-seater rovers that use a (soon to be reusable) skycrane system to land, like Plutos V.2's rover. It also has several orbit-only ion-propelled probes, but the primary lander is a stationary, 4 seat heavy duty lander. -letter limit-

I've had only a few fails in my KSP career, but boy were they epic. My KSP career is odd in that I've never landed(sucessfully) on anything other than Kerban, or even gotten a paticularly circular orbit, but not because it is too difficult, but too easy. I took a look at circular orbits, the Mun, Minimus, and the near-Kerbin planets (Duna, Eve, and so on), and though "bah, too easy. I promised myself the first planet I would land on would be amoung the hardest, and that I wouldn't cheat my way there, via (potentally unfair)mods or otherwise. I've been fairly successfull in achieving this via determination, and the eternal mottos of "needs more struts" and "MOAR (BOOSTERS)". My first attempt was Moho, at least I think thats the name, the Mercury-equivelent. Nothing too special, I got a simple, small ion propelled probe into such a eliptical orbit that it intercepted nearly perpandicular to Moho's orbit and waited a few hundred orbits(over 2～) rl days for a near-intercept, then adjusted to directly intercept Moho. As I approached Moho at 14 km/s, I realized something. I knew Moho was a Mercury-equivelent, but I failed to realize(or remember) that Mercury lacked a atmosphere. And I certainly didn't see the haze of one on Moho. Seeing as I was planning to aerobrake and then parachute to land, this was a bit of a issue. And I realized this all about 5 seconds from landing. My next attempt was more substantial, and I switched targets to the slower Eeloo, aka Pluto equivelent. This time, I built a monstrous craft(400～ parts), dubbed Plutos, that was still unmanned and still used ion engines. This time though, it had eight of them. And carried 150k units of xenon gas, as well as a small detatchble ion-propelled probe. Needless to say, its Delta-V was more than sufficient. After nearly a week of constant thrusting, I successfully reached and orbited Eeloo. -reached a letter limit, sorry, will continue in another post-

Do I win? Completely addonless, whatever happened was a bug, because somehow I managed to set the warp to 100000x even though I was close to kearth and about to reenter the atmosphere.