Norcalplanner

I will retain all my other installs for nostalgia's sake, but plan on starting a new career in 1.0.

Cannon firing a cannonball on flat ground vs. from the top of a hill. It stays up longer and goes further when fired from the top of a hill because the ground falls away. Then imagine the cannon on the surface of a large round ball (say 500 yards in diameter or so), with gravity pulling inwards going in towards the center of the ball. The cannonball, with progressively higher charges, will start going further and further around the large round ball before gravity drags it down to hit the ball's surface. When you finally add enough powder, the cannonball will fly all the way around the ball and hit the cannonier (sp?) in the back of the head. Voila, the cannonball has achieved orbit, so long as the cannonier ducks. - - - Updated - - - Wow, just found a great video showing the exact thing I just described.

Congratulations, FlipNascar! You have completed the Grand Orbital Space Station Challenge with a Stock(-ish) Division entry scoring 4,826.95 points! Truly an impressive feat to do the whole thing with cargo bay launches. I counted the comfy seats on the shuttle as well - if Worf can go into the Defiant when it's docked to DS9 to listen to Klingon opera at high volume, then it seems to me that a ship attached to the station is functionally a part of that station. Interesting use of the claw - I know some players have had trouble with that particular part. Part count is a little high for the size of the station, but that tends to happen with modular designs. Feel free to add the badge to your sig. If you enjoyed the challenge, rep is always appreciated. Well done!

Laie, It's definitely not for everyone. I've put about 20 hours into RO/RP-0, but it's now been on the back burner for a while. Here are the things that I learned: 1. Read the guides linked in the OP for RO on how to launch your first rocket, Ferram's tips for launch vehicle design, etc. They will help out a lot. 2. Use procedural tanks and procedural tanks only. Customize the tank sizes and shapes for that particular mission, taking into account fuel types and TWR from the beginning of the stage to the end of the stage. 3. Start with a lot lower TWR than stock, down around 1.2 or 1.3. Start your gravity turn early (1 km altitude or so) and make it a true gravity turn. 4. If you need to make fine adjustments to a satellite or orbiting pod, it works best to use hypergolic propellants and deep-throttling engines once you're in orbit (and be sure to use the service module tank type). The LM descent engine is a good one. I ended up making several 4-stage rockets. First two stages together were about 9 km/s delta V, (kerolox for stage 1 and hydrolox for stage 2 a la Saturn V) then the last two stages were both hypergolics to actually put the satellite where it needed to go. 5. For lunar transfer, put a small pathfinder satellite in an orbit that is coplanar with the Moon's orbit. Then for future launches you can then see exactly when the satellite's orbit crosses over KSC, and launch into that plane knowing you'll be lined up with the Moon. 6. Think tiny. Simple satellites shouldn't weigh more than half a ton, and should be able to be launched with a craft weighing 40 tons or less. Good luck.

FlipNascar, Well done on having the first station launched entirely inside cargo bays. As I indicated a few pages ago on this post you'll get a 3,000 point bonus for constructing the station that way. You can also subtract out the recovered weight of any craft. If you have landing weights for each of your space plane runs, either post them (and I'll calc it) or subtract the total landed weight from the total launch weight before figuring the -2 points per ton. Once that info is posted, I can give you an official score and put you on the leaderboard.

Do it quickly - Eve is about to change a lot with new aero and Isp scaling.

Final score - 31,974 m/s. From an 8,500 ton rocket, all that was left was an Ant pushing a tiny FLT-100 tank. Enjoy. Note: MechJeb is present for informational purposes only. All flight and staging was done manually.

Got it up to 29,993 m/s before crossing the orbit of Minmus - I think I can do better with a different craft with slightly more fuel and lower TWR in the upper stages. May take a day or two due to RL time commitments...

At the risk of being a party pooper, is it even possible to do a SSTO in RO? Nobody has yet figured out how to do one in real life - everything is at least 1.5 stages, and most are 2 or more. Turning off engines as you ascend means they turn into dead weight. Maybe cut the number of engines down to 6 and then add some SRBs for the initial kick up to speed?

Yep. All sorts of RL wackiness! I actually saw the Goblin at Wright-Patterson AFB about 15 years ago. Crazy looking craft.

Whoops! Thanks for the catch on the level of the challenge.

I've completed my review of Hanniballa's low mass entry. Lots of jet packing, but not against the rules. Well done!

Hanniballa, I've reviewed your entry, and determined that it meets all requirements for a Jool-5 Low Mass Challenge entry. Well done! Lots of gamey use of massless parts, which is almost required for this sort of challenge. Very creative use (abuse?) of the jet pack, but you managed to bring the lander can home to Kerbin. You definitely have more patience than I do - ions are not my thing. I like you how made a cage of sorts with the ion lander legs to hold the jet packing kerbal in place while pushing the craft. And thank you for putting text in with the pics - it made it easy to follow the action.

I've completed my review of John FX's entry - he's good to go. Well done!

Well done! I agree with previous reviewers - this is a legitimate Jool-5 level 3 entry. I recognized some of the same building and piloting techniques I've used myself in similar situations. It would have been a little bit easier with fewer pictures and more captions for the pictures, but that's a minor issue in the larger scheme of things. There were also a few pics missing at key points - no powered descent for Bop, no ascent shown for Laythe - but the fuel, delta v, and mission times all work out. I liked the serial staging using docking ports and the big 3.75 meter tanks. You may want to consider putting the orbital tug LV-Ns a little further outboard on future designs so they can fire along with the main engine cluster for a higher TWR. SpaceY also has some good 3.75 m docking ports for even stronger connections between the big tanks. At the risk of being presumptuous, I'll go ahead and say it: Congratulations, John FX! You have completed the Jool-5 Challenge with a level 3 entry! Feel free to add the badge to your sig.

This one is the largest station I've ever built, or ever will build. 1200 tons in orbit around Laythe, and room for over 1,000 kerbals. But it runs at about 2 fps without any ships docked to it and was an exercise in frustration.

For those who don't know, the idea of putting a small craft inside the bay of a larger craft was actually tried in real life back in the 1940s. More info here.

I'll take a look at some of these entries today - I've done Jool-5 twice, have helped out Laie with Eve Rocks and am currently running the Grand Orbital Space Station Challenge, so I have a pretty good handle on reviewing these sorts of things.

I think it's a great idea. Now there's a good in-game reason to do ARM contracts, which I only did a few of before I moved on and never did any ever again.

Also make sure to upgrade the mission control building so you can accept more contracts at once. And don't be afraid to say no to the ones that don't interest you or aren't lucrative. Daisy-chaining contracts together in a cost-efficient manner becomes part of the fun/challenge. And although some people think it's a bit cheaty, consider installing Stage Recovery and/or Kerbal Construction Time. Both allow you to retrieve a portion of the cost of staged parts, so long as there are enough parachutes on them to slow them down below a certain threshold.

It's possible to add pieces after the fact with KAS, so long as the mass of all launch vehicles is accounted for. You could also launch a science module and permanently dock it to the station...

Congratulations, Kuzzter! You have completed the Eve Rocks challenge with a level 2 entry! Very good looking mission. At first I thought there were some big gaps in your documentation, then I realized that imgur was only loading up the first 10 images in each album for some reason. Good solution for the descent tanks/parachute problem, and you avoided having to stage the landing gear by using the massless aircraft gear. Also good use of the newer spaceplane tanks, which have a better empty tank mass fraction in exchange for costing more. I liked the rover - somehow landing 20+ kilometers away just added to the authentic non-MechJebian nature of the mission. Nice recovery after discovering that your nuke engines were in the wrong spot in relation to the lander - you got into a bit of a pickle in part due to the use of two different size docking ports on the front and rear of the Wasabi Maru. Good use of the KS-25-4 motor - I'm not sure I've seen one of those before on an Eve lander. Because of that engine, TWR per stage kept going up on the ascent, instead of staying flat or going down slightly as some other designs tend to. My only suggestion (other than checking the size of the capsule vs the size of the cargo bay and making sure the docked configuration allows the LV-Ns to work ) would be to watch the atmospheric efficiency number in KER and throttle back a bit during the ascent - there were a couple of screenshots where the atmospheric efficiency was well over 100%, which means you're losing a lot to atmospheric drag. Feel free to add the badge to your sig, and please spread some rep around if you enjoyed the challenge!

Don't start any new big missions. Finish up any outstanding loose ends. Then sit down and figure out what mods I'm going to use and what tasks I'm going to set for myself with my new career. One of the big things I'm planning to do in the next version is make an honest-to-goodness surface colony. Not a big ship that lands in one piece, but a modular colony that has to be assembled on the surface with no inherent movement ability. And to make sure that I get paid to do this, I'm going to use contract configurator and the appropriate contract pack. No actual mechanics need to be done - I have 8 separate installs, and never run the game out of the default steam location. The only downside (which may actually be a good thing) is that steam doesn't let me know how many hours I've really played.

That nuclear light bulb is a thing of beauty. :-)

I'll take a look at Kuzzter's tonight.