No one

After they made battleship into a movie (Which I haven't seen, so I can only judge the theoretical stupidity of making that into a movie and not how well it turned out), I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by Tetris.

Dres. It's just so nice. By far the easiest non-Kerbin planet to performed a manned landing+return, and also it always seems to be at a launch window whenever I want to go there.

The same delta-v is needed, they're just much heavier. But at the moment there's just no point in having a manned mission, unless you intend to get out and push.

2707: (13707-10k for orbiting duna - 1k for no liquid fuel) VAB: Kerbin Orbit: Duna Orbit: Duna Landing: What ended up on Duna, one unpowered probe with no working solar panels: I could probably get lower if I lithobreaked rather than parachuting. But meh.

I did this a while ago for another challenge, which was almost exactly the same as this but was judged on Periapsis rather than Apoapsis and didn't require a Kerbal. I submit this in category 2, because it doesn't have a Kerbal. Other than that, everything's normal. All stock, no aerodynamics exploitation: Apoapsis: 253,066 Periapsis: 167,780 Launchpad: Orbit: Mission Report: It probably wouldn't be that different to send a Kerbal into orbit, but the ship was extremely annoying to fly so I'm probably not going to do it again.

Exactly. You have minutes to correct any error. You have minutes of just doing nothing. And then you try to speed up to land, and then BOOM you crashed by accident. You can't timewarp, sometimes you have to wait for 10s of minutes. Sort of like firing an ion thruster except you can switch to another window when firing ion thrusters. If you do that when landing on Gilly you crash into it and die. Also, the terrain is really hilly and annoying. Makes the lack of timewarp worse because you don't know how long you have until you hit the ground. And about landing with RCS, technically you can land on any moon with RCS. I landed on Tylo with RCS, because it made the entire thing lighter than non-RCS would have been. For some reason no one agrees with me when it comes to planets and moons.

Gilly is a horrible, horrible place and I'd rather land on Tylo. In my playing, Gilly has racked up the second highest body count after the Mun and Minmus. Yes, it's technically "easy" but it's really tedious and annoying and that leads to screw-ups and screw-ups lead to death. Go for Ike or Vall. Pol and Bop are also pretty annoying, and also the fact that they're technically easier makes landing on them less worthwhile.

If an AI goes rogue it will be due to human error. Computers do what we tell them, and nothing more. But sentient AIs should only be used where sentience is an advantage. Why does spaceship management require sentience? Why can't it be done by a non-sentient program?

"Rocket" is like "mad" in that most scientists described that way are just engineers. But it completely depends on which part you want to focus on. Lots and lots of people are involved in building and launching a rocket, and they all have different jobs with different education requirements.

Nukes. Project Orion had problems, but it would have been effective. Also, if we're evacuating the planet then we probably wouldn't care about many of those problems.

Not with your method. Various other similar thought experiments: You are stationary. You see a spaceship pass by at .8c, and you see a spaceship pass going the other way also at .8c. Thus, relative to the first spaceship, the second is going at 1.6c. You are in a rocket going at .9c with .2c of delta-v. You burn. Now you are going at 1.1c. (Your example) You are in a racecar on a train. The racecar goes at .2c relative to the train. The train goes at .9c relative to the ground. Thus you are going at 1.1c relative to the ground. All of the above are wrong. When dealing with non-relativistic relative velocities, you add them together. For example, if I see a car drive by one way at 30 m/s and I see a car drive by the other way at 30 m/s the cars are going at 60 m/s relative to each other. If you are in a rocket going at .9km/s with .2km/s of delta-v and burn you are going at 1.1km/s If you are in a racecar on a train, the racecar goes at 20m/s relative to the train and the train goes at 90m/s relative to the ground, you are going at 110m/s relative to the ground. That is, if you are going at v in the same direction as another object which is going at u, your velocity relative to the other object is v+u. When dealing with relativistic velocities on the other hand, you have to use a different formula: (v+u)/(1+(vu)/(c^2)) When v and u are really small, the difference is negligible. When v and u are sufficiently large, the difference matters.

This is why I will never use a mod which makes the game easier* until I have landed and returned a Kerbal from every planet/moon (Other than Jool). *Actually I wouldn't feel too bad about using FAR even though that makes things require less delta-v. I haven't used it yet because I'm currently all stock, but I might use it at some point in the future if I start using mods.

When escaping something it's best to orbit first because you can get into orbit with a gravity turn and spend less time fighting gravity. When landing on something, I don't think it is best to orbit first, but I don't know. I know that historically we landed probes on the moon before we sent probes to orbit it, so I think that it's probably easier not to orbit.

From Wikipedia's page on Specific Impulse: The intake air is how they get their additional Isp. Did you think that for some reason jets just magically had Isps of insanely high for no reason? Also, if it did work that way, then why has NASA not taken a fuel tank full of air and used them in space? In KSP we don't have fuel tanks full of air but if we did then jet engines would be better than nuclear rockets.

But the Kerbals do not need breathable air. They CAN breathe, as noted in EVA reports, and they CAN eat, as also noted in EVA reports, but they can also survive for an infinitely long time in only their spacesuit. What can the Grox do other than removing breathable air? Because it will take a lot more than that to beat the Kerbals.

Same. Except I'd like to keep my knowledge about shift and control controlling the throttle. When I first tried the demo a long time ago I didn't understand that and gave up. Though the 50% default throttle would probably fix that.

It was funny because this playthrough I went through a rather long period of indecision as to the merits of Ion vs Nuclear. I then went with the accelerometer. Science equipment is always the best thing to go for because it gives more science to unlock more stuff. Other than that though, I go for Nuclear propulsion because it can get me anywhere, and Ion Propulsion because it can get my kerbals back from anywhere. Of course, before I get them I have to go for strut connectors and fuel lines because they can get anything into orbit, but they occur very early anyway.

If any stock part is cheating due to being unrealistic it would be jets. Real jets have similar Isps but don't classify intakeair as reaction mass. KSP jets do, and thus are much more efficient. That said, I'm going to have to agree with what everyone else said that using a stock part for its intended purpose is never cheating. The 505 can be better depending on the mass of the ship.

Personally I sometimes launch when things aren't opportune and don't use gravity assists when doing anything with precision, but I do generally try to make my orbits efficient. And they're always elliptical. I have rockets with the delta-v for hyperbolic though, or at least I did in .235. I finally decided that I needed to stop doing right before .24 came out when I launched my standard rocket to Duna. Said rocket had a transfer stage which was very heavy and had lots and lots of delta-v (Capable of getting to Moho without the oberth effect. And probably more, but that was the most delta-v intensive thing I did with it). It didn't end up needing said transfer stage, it got to Duna with the launch stages alone. I then decided to stop using such overkill.

You should probably add another option for those who are so dedicated to efficiency that they get gravity assists from Eve before going anywhere. I don't think anyone would do this, but then I didn't think anyone would use hyperbolic trajectories either.

I agree, except I think they shouldn't just add .625m jets. Why don't we also have rockomax-sized jet engines?

It's an easter egg in the toolbar mod. Many, many, threads have been made about it.

But in this case the realism IS tedious. Why are you preventing players from just warping for research anyway? Timewarp exists specifically to prevent tedious waiting, you're just inserting tedious waiting and preventing the player from warping through it. Provided the main limiter (Money, science, whatever) was something other than time, it would be impossible to exploit because warping through research would be completely standard and expected. It would also be far more balanced to limit it based on something other than time, because anything which can be accomplished by warping can be accomplished by waiting, it just takes longer, and it would be much better to have a system which rewards the player for doing stuff rather than passing time.

But isn't that just realism for the sake of realism? In any case, experimental parts prove that all the parts already exist, you just don't have access to them for whatever reason. If you want an excuse for the insta-parts, you could always just take your system except replace "you attract researchers who design parts" with "you attract companies who become willing to sell you parts". Also, the parts are designed and made by companies other than you so if your researchers invented them that wouldn't really make much sense, would it? (Come to think of it, that's a hole in the current system as well)

I agree that in your system making you not get science while on maxtimewarp would be a good idea, or at least, would be more internally consistent and fair within the system. Your system would disconnect getting tech from accomplishments though. And if you're going to require people accomplish certain things before getting timescience, why not just give them the science/research/whatever for doing the accomplishments in the first place? As for the other suggestions, I thought that this one was very good, other than the ideas about the mystery goo and the materials bay. Also I take back what I said about "lots of". I thought there were a few more, but I could only find that one, and it was the only one which I remembered in detail. Well, there was one other I remember but it was more about what science did than how you got science.