butterknife

Whaaaaaaaat?

How do you make an amphibious vehicle?

Rocket science is super easy, guys.

I love the idea of setting up experiments via EVA. Maybe something like "Delicate Goo Samples," or something similarly goofy.

I want to send a crew down there to investigate the rocks and liquidy stuff, but there's lots of hills and really big puddles, so rockets seem like bad ideas, and a space plane wouldn't have a landing strip. Also, I don't have much in the way of space plane research, so there's also that. Any thoughts on how to get around?

Ah, didn't realize it was an old topic. I must have missed that when I read the "don't suggest this" sticky. I didn't realize it was a slated feature for 1.0. So that's pretty rad. Also, didn't know there was a mod for it already. That's also pretty rad. I really dig all the changes they've made so far. The last time I played this game was like, .14 or something like that. It was way early on. I knew you could repack your chutes now, but I didn't know you could fix rover wheels. I like running around collecting samples, so I kinda feel like just having more ways to interact with the environment has encouraged me to explore more. Career mode has forced me to try newer, bigger things. So just finding new reasons to actually leave the rocket has made the game a lot more fun.

I mean, right now it's only useful for moving around docked ships in space. But at some point, do you think they'll make it so you can use a kerbal to weld struts to reinforce docked ships? Or maybe repair solar panels that got destroyed? Maybe modify rocket gimbal ranges? Thoughts?

They made it. I'm just going to link you to my steam album of screen shots, documenting their return flight. I had plenty of fuel left, but I burned it all at reentry. I figured if I landed too hard, I'd rather go crunch than boom. http://steamcommunity.com/id/butterknife/screenshots/?appid=220200&sort=oldestfirst&browsefilter=myfiles&view=imagewall This was legitimately the toughest thing I've done yet in KSP. I learned a lot. Thanks for all the help, everybody!

Here's the save for this shebang. This bucket lander had four main stages. Because screw asparagus models. I want to fly rockets, not bloomin' onions. The launch vehicle consisted of the biggest main sail in the game, sitting under two of the biggest fuel cans. It had. . . I think it was four or six of those four-engine liquid fuel boosters, with three giant solid fuel boosters on the sides of each of those. The liquid fuel was rigged to flow back to the middle mainsail engine once it was all burnt. The solid fuel got shed at 25,000m out of Kerbin, the liquid boosters were shed at about 80,000, and the momentum carried the middle mainsail to around 200,000 meters. From there, orbit was easy, if not tedious. From here, that stage was shed. The next was another giant kerbodyne mainsail rigged to a modest single kerbodyne can of gas. This provided the necessary escape velocity that carried our intrepid seatbelt girder-drone on an approach vector for Duna. It also allowed us to correct our approach midway, and got us on a vector to within 1.5 million meters away from Duna. After this midcourse correction, it was shed. Now, you'll notice a big orange can of fuel? It's hooked to one of those more modest medium-sized mainsails. This was used to do a final approach correction that put us on course for a 128,000 meter periapsis from Duna. This was a very minor burn of about four seconds. Once we reached or near periapsis, the remaining fuel was used to slow us down to a shallow circular orbit of about 45,000 meters, and do most of the course correction. After that, it was just a lot of dead weight that was making turning around pretty hard. It was shed with about 30% of it's fuel remaining. My final approach was super shallow, and as you can see, we landed about 4km from the crew. I did a lot better than I thought I could. Now to hike my dudes out of there, and hope we make it back. Now I just need to take off and burn west, just like a mun return, right?

Yeah. It's a girder with seat belts, sitting on a big ol' can of rocket fuel. Took me almost all six of those tall cans of fuel to get within four kilometers. Unfortunately, the poodle doesn't offer enough control for me to be able to navigate it closer to my men. And since the rover is stuck, they're in for a little hike. Although, I think after these past five years on Duna, they'll look forward to getting off this dustball. Oh yeah. Because the auto nav is such a bad pilot and required so much fuel to do such a simple job, some budget cuts had to be made in the way of. . . amenities. So Jeb, Bill and Bob are gonna have to ride. . . Uh. . . What's worse than coach? They've got seat belts, though. So that should work alright, yeah?

Well. Here's where I'm at now.

At first, I thought those goo cans were RCS fuel. A flying wheeled rover sounds like a lot of fun. And dangerous.

What if you just made a chain of a few dozen landers with three or four long struts, and claws on the top?

It really depends on where in the orbit you're meeting the destination. If it's Duna, you're probably slowing down on the way to your apoapsis, or you're speeding up on the way from your apoapsis. If you can hit duna right on your apoapsis, you'll be going as slow as possible, so you'll burn less fuel if you have to slow down for your orbital insertion. Burning radially when you exit Kerbin will allow you finer control over where your apoapsis actually is. So your best encounters are going to be when you actually set that point as your encounter. You'll likely be going around 5000 Km/s when you're on your way to Duna, and in my experience, getting into it's outer SOI requires I reverse throttle until I'm at around 100-500 Km/s. That's a helluva long burn. Usually in the range of 2 minutes with poodle engines. At your midway point, you can adjust your radial burn and your vertical axis burn a little easier for fine tuning your approach.

Even once you got it on the mun, wouldn't the mun's rotation and lack of atmosphere cause it to swing like a pendulum? I can see game physics getting all kinds of wonky around this thing.

Oh, had to add a second stage of chutes, too. Since Duna's atmo is thinner, I put 4 chutes on the lander. I figure it should help me touch down nice and soft without having to burn much fuel to keep it soft.

Fixed it, and then got really really close to touching down next to the crew. Unfortunately, even though I had enough DV to reach Duna and return, I didn't really have enough DV to get to my crew. I strapped four more smaller FL-T400 fuel cans to the top stage, and I reckon that should probably give me enough gas to touch down within a few kilometers of the boys. I'll find out tomorrow. I gotta get some sleep.

Wouldn't my kerbals burn up on Kerbin reentry? Would the seats even hold? Shoot, that's like strapping your cousins to the hood of your dad's van, and then traveling cross country non stop. . . I need to try this.

This almost worked. I wasn't paying attention, though, and I was moving for orbital insertion in Duna's SOI, and instead of decoupling my transfer vehicle, I decoupled the four fuel cans around the lander. Oops.

I had kethane, home, and mechjeb, but I didn't use any of those in career. So I did a fresh install, and dropped the save file into it, and it loaded up perfectly.

None of my parts are loading. I thought I cleaned out an old Kethane mod, the H.O.M.E. mod, and mechjeb, but it looks like I deleted all the standard resources too. Not sure how to fix it, now. Edit: Fixed. All is well and as it should be.

Aaaand apparently while messing around in those files, I deleted all my parts. . . Huh. Well. At least I still have my save file. Gonna go use steam to check my game integrity. Reinstalling. Then I'll drop my career file back in. Cross your fingers, or Jeb's dead for real this time.

Here's a link to my entire career folder. It's got the persistence.sfs file, my last quicksave which should be where I landed my intrepid trio, and also all my saved ships. Warning, they're not that inventive. They're just big. And loud. And they don't have RCS, because inline stabilizers are all you really ​need. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32848101/KerbalCareerFuntime/KerbalCareerFuntime.zip

What's wrong with Mun Surfing? It's the most efficient way to travel.

When I get home, sure. I'll figure out how to do that. What if I just grabbed the save and posted that?