Wanderfound

As mentioned above, landers and docking ports stack just fine: If it's not clear from the picture, that's a space station with an integral lab/fuel store/LV-N, sitting on top of a Munlander (which has a docking port on top), sitting on top of an onion-staged booster. If you're not connecting docking port to docking port, you can use decouplers just like you would anywhere else. Just make sure you flip the decoupler so the left-over bit desn't stay stuck to the port if it's below the decoupler.

You've stuck a lightweight box on the outside of the heat shielding, directly in the path of the hottest zone of reentry effects, and also at the most intense point of aerodynamic stress. It should die if you put it there. Shift it further back and it'll be fine. Note the solar panel placement on this: Comes through a hot reentry and max-Q flight without any fuss. It may take a bit of creativity to balance reentry survivability with useful airbag placement, though. Why do you want airbags on a winged aircraft, anyway?

The cartoon in post #29 is looking more appropriate as this goes on.

Roflcopterkklol: they're nifty ships, but are they entrants for the contest? If so, in which categories? One ship per category per entrant, remember.

To further emphasise, being able to do this is way cool: Being able to get it back into the cargo bay afterwards would be even cooler.

Woo! As mentioned previously: Mk2 SAS/decouplers/batteries, adjustable height landing gear, Mk2 -> 2.5m adaptors, ROVER LOADING RAMPS (apologies for the shouty emphasis). And, as hinted at upthread, something that maintains SP+ aesthetics while stretching the bays just enough to accomodate a conventional 1.25m lander.

Still chasing a Mk2.5, personally. Cargo bays designed for 1.25m cores + radially attached miscellany.

Flight info: Kerbal Flight Data (works best with FAR/DRE). For building, I use Mechjeb.

FAR, DRE, RPM, Chatterer, Kerbpaint. Plus EE, PAD, RCS Build Aid, Kerbal Flight Data and Kerbal Flight Indicators.

No. I will however, avoid encouraging that toxic nonsense to this forum. I will also, however, note the implied threat.

This will save me the hassle of having to remember to remove the Mechjeb unit before I share craft files. Thanks.

Yup, nukes make distances easy. It can be done without 'em, though, it just requires a bit more fuel. Actually, that could be another stretch goal: who can make it with the least efficient engine. A KR-2L powered Munlander could be fun...

Plenty of fun to be had at altitude, too...

Just put spoiler in square brackets at the start of the bit you want to hide (followed by =Whateveryouwantthespoilertosay if desired), and /spoiler in square brackets at the end. Like this: [NOPARSE] There is no spoon [/NOPARSE] ...which gives a result like this: There is no spoon

Thanks for the entry, Roflcopterkklol. I've put you down as an entrant in the tanker category; let me know if you want to enter that ship for any of the other categories as well. Any chance I could get you to put the extra images behind a spoiler tag, as outlined in the OP?

It's sea level altitude, not radar. The required altitude for this waypoint is about half the height of the mountains. I had a similar low altitude contract in the west KSC mountains. I was about to give up when I found a hidden valley just within range of the waypoint (not exactly on it, but close enough to still be in the required area) and with a floor about 50m below the required altitude. Lotsa fun. Just keep circling the waypoint until you find a low spot, then dive to treetop height.

See the discussion following http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/80796-0-24-Spaceplane-Plus-1-3?p=1392939&viewfull=1#post1392939 for what PJ might possibly be working on, BTW.

There's the Double Mission Challenge which is involving a lot of SSTM (then back to KSC, then back to the Mun, then back to KSC, then...) designs. See http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/94210-The-Double-Mission-Challenge This could be different enough to be interesting, though. As for stretch goals... * Do it in style: spaceplane, the sleeker the better. * Tour company: do it while carrying lotsa passengers. * Take a rover with you (like this: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1504987&viewfull=1#post1504987). * Take a laboratory with you. * Do it without using nukes. * Do it without using jets. * Land on the dark side. * Speed challenge: shortest possible KSC -> Mun -> KSC elapsed time. * Do it IVA. * How many biomes can you hit while you're up there? etc.

Everyone has their own tastes, and that's all cool, but as we're stating personal preferences here: no implausibly unrealistic SF. Which means no interstellar travel, no FTL, no profitable interplanetary resource extraction (limited in-situ resource utilisation is fine, though), no large scale interplanetary colonisation, no sentient aliens other than Kerbals. What I would like the "end game" to be...more of the same, just more and bigger and harder. Flesh out the contract system so that it runs the full spectrum from novice to expert; give us contracts to put giant asteroids into low Kerbol orbits, or do part tests at treetop altitude Mach 5 while pulling crazy high negative G's, launch ridiculously huge but fragile orbital telescopes, etc. The latter stages of the tech tree should contain a great diversity of scientific instruments (and almost nothing else), and I would like to see missions along the lines of "get science instrument X to position Y in time to observe event Z". The Kerbal equivalent of the Royal Society sending Cook to observe the transit of Venus. Making the science more meaningful would help a lot, too. I'm not exactly sure of the best way to do that, but "you have 100 science points" falls a long way short of capturing the wonder of scientific discovery.

Same here. I routinely use AV-R8's and Standard Canards as tailplane elevators. No problems at all. Ditto for jumbo canards made from wing + control surfaces.

DRE is the Deadly Reentry mod (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/54954-0-25-Deadly-Reentry-v6-2-1-Oct-12-2014). As for what bearing that has on the challenge...

400m/s is just shy of 1,500km/h (or about 900mph). Regardless of the size of Kerbin, 1,500km/h is still 1,500km/h. If you're not aware that this speed is "fast", the problem isn't on the side of the modders. This does seem to be a recurring KSP issue, though: see the assorted threads based around people complaining about flipping rovers while travelling at "only" 20m/s on the Mun. Adding a mph or km/h readout to the stock game probably wouldn't be a bad idea (there are already mods that do this, of course).

Just as a friendly counterpoint: I think it's great that you offer contracts that may stretch the abilities of novice players. The need to look at the contract and ask yourself "can I actually do this?" is a good thing, IMO. The more diversity in the contract system (in terms of both mission and difficulty) the better. Easy contracts, hard contracts, almost impossible contracts: there's a place for all of them. The newbies can rescue kerbals from circular equatorial orbits while the mavens are flinging jumbo asteroids into Kerbol. Give everyone the opportunity to play the game how they want to play it; that's the KSP way.

Yup; it's a workaround that is only required if you insist on both maintaining destructible buildings and launching oversized craft. Personally, I just build sensible ships; a 100t fuel tanker will launch just fine and deliver more than a Rockomax 64 into orbit in a single flight. Regardless, it's an issue that's likely to be sorted in a few months when 0.90 drops.

Neat. This may be beyond the scope of what you do, but: it would be wonderful to have some sort of deployable loading ramp to get rovers back into cargo bays. Trying to boost back up to a docking port via RCS when you're affected by gravity is a right pain. See http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1504987&viewfull=1#post1504987 for the sort of setup where a ramp would be nice.