cantab

For the lander, that does seem pretty heavy for a 1-Kerbal lander, even with the science gear. If you want to lighten it, I'd start by changing the engines, the Mk 55 is convenient and has a good gimbal range but it's not very fuel efficient, and four of them is probably more thrust than you need for a Mun lander. With lighter and more efficient engines, you'll need less fuel - which in turn means you need less engine thrust and can use still lighter engines, a virtuous circle. For the satellite launcher, you appear to be using shielded docking ports as nose cones. The actual Aerodynamic Nose Cone (with the blue tip) is a third of the weight, and of course no nose cone at all is lighter still.

Congrats on the success! Oh, and as for "why the entry for when you want to leave doesn't go below a year", that's because the game calendar starts at year 1, day 1.

You might have too much torque. I've found my little asteroid control sections vibrate if they have both reaction wheels and the probe core torque enabled and SAS on when they're unloaded, and that's in deep space. They work fine with no or one wheel enabled.

Be careful with parking lots on larger stations though. I have one on mine, and several modules hanging off it, all heavy and with a fair bit of torque, the SAS can try to destroy the station.

Note that the solar day is a little longer, because of Kerbin's orbit round the Sun. The solar day is the same as the synodic orbital period, since the Mun is tidally locked to Kerbin, and that's 141115s.

I expect it will fly, as BadRockets says I think it's pretty well along its development now, much further than the cancelled Ares was. But of course who knows what Congress might do. I don't, however, expect it will fly very OFTEN. Like monty says, there aren't really the payloads for it. Unless the military, or maybe commercial interests, decide they want to put something huge in orbit then it could well be a one-launch wonder.

I suppose the silver lining is the 9 series chipsets are out now, so if you're an Intel man you can get a nice future-proof mobo.

Building that must have been a titanic undertaking.

Regarding Hyperedit, remember that this is not an objectively scored challenge, but one where the winner will be chosen by public vote. Assuming that "full disclosure" of mods used is required, voters will be free to shun the Hyperedited entries.

However weak the wind is, it can blow over a sufficiently unstable structure or object. For the rocket to be so unstable that it can be thus blown over is a pretty serious engineering mistake, but then engineers do make mistakes. I believe the strongest recorded Martian winds are around 100 kph (60 mph), so it's plausible that the engineers might think "Ah, more than 150 kph is never going to happen anyway". Also bear in mind that wind load goes with the square of wind speed. So a 150 kph martian wind would be comparable to a 12 kph Earth one. Maybe stronger, since I think wind load depends on atmospheric density rather than pressure and I believe the Martian air will be denser at a given pressure. That's still pretty weak, but you'd feel it, and I can see how a rocket on a poor footing, perhaps already sitting at an angle, might be knocked over by it.

A wet shave is always going to give a closer shave than an electric shaver can. Of course not everyone wants the closest possible shave, some people prefer the stubble look. I've not used the Fusion myself. I use a Mach 3, gives a good shave and the blades are a lot cheaper than the Fusion ones. I tried the "power" model that makes the razor vibrate, I found it gave a more comfortable shave but not a closer one, and haven't bothered replacing the handle since it stopped vibrating. I also had a supermarket own-brand razor once, that was nowhere near as good, I've stuck with the M3 since then.

I don't believe we have anything like that in the UK. Sudden natural disasters are relatively rare here, so that's one of the big use cases mostly gone.

There's no significant fuel penalty to parking your return transfer stage, which may or may not be the same as your outbound stage, back in LKO on your return. It will however be more complex and more real-world time consuming, since you'll need to hit your aerocapture right and deal with rendezvous and docking to use it again. Of course whether you feel like spending that time is up to you. Modular ships can be useful if you need to reconfigure things. For example I had an asteroid tug that had a single LV-N in its engine section, which was docked to the command (+ claw) section. I was later able to swap this for a much bigger engine section with 6 LV-N's, without needing to send a new clawing bit, and I put the original engine to use bringing the old crew back to Kerbin. Then again, I could have done the job just as well by sending a whole new tug.

Emphasis mine. "Make it into space" would count out hyperedit along with on-orbit construction a la extraplanetary launchpads. (And claiming your trophy will make it into space if launched from Gilly is Playing Silly Buggers and can be expected to be disallowed.) Whether it counts out in-orbit assembly from parts properly launched is debatable.

Just got to playing with this. Some of the timber parts should be just the ticket for my planned luxury yacht. Also noticed the Water Boiler consumes NitrousOxide but stores Oxidizer. Is that deliberate or a mistake?

It certainly does work. It might make it no longer an SSTO, but it works.

If need be, others would simply be taking on the challenges a week behind. Edit: On inspection, the update includes a file ModuleBounce.cs, which I assume is the source code

A near-ideal Hohmann transfer is "realistically feasible" if you leave on the right date. IMHO a map should take into account variations from eccentricity and inclination (to my knowledge the former is easy to factor in but the latter is not), but should not start putting in its own safety factors. Conversely it shouldn't give figures based on complicated trajectories like bi-elliptics or gravity assists.

Those dirty Kerbiets! What you need is . Jeb Jong-Un's first rocket shall have a million Isps and land on the centre of the Sun.

Do you have engines forward of the centre of mass, for example in "puller" arrangements? SAS assumes engines are aft of the CoM and will gimbal them the wrong way when they're forward. Solution is to lock the gimbals on the engines and rely on other means to steer.

Give a mod you've not used before a spin. Near Future Technologies is a fun one.

Now that would be good. Squad announce that .24 includes a new Magic Boulder, somewhere within 150 Gm of the Sun, and the community are challenged to find it. And of course it's been implemented so it can't be easily revealed by mods.

If you want, you can regard this as an abstraction of a debris-removal process. Much the same as how the "Launch" button is an abstraction of actually building the rocket, wheeling it onto the launchpad, fuelling it up, the crew walking into the capsule, and so on.

That stands to reason though. Only a small number of people can compete, so they're going to be selected based on their demonstrated abilities. There's been a bit of time between the announcement and selection for anyone who wants to show off their skills; maybe not enough, but then I'd say the forum teams ought to be made up of people who have a strong record of forum activity.

Well, good luck being a dad! And you're naming the baby Jebediah, right? If it's not on the save already, then if you get the chance to upload the craft file for your Kethane rig that would be great.