Jetski

yes, the thrust works fine to pass through, at least in 1.05. I don't think it has been changed. Unfortunately, 5 ions stacked gives 0.01 TWR in atmosphere

Here's my unmanned Low Mass contender for SSTO 1.1.2, playing stock + KER 14 parts, 6.04 tons on the Runway. Landed back with 60 LF still in the tanks, so room for optimization.

Reminds me of this:

Nope.

So I landed on Mun, Minmus, and Eeloo without using any ElectricCharge. Used about 12 units of Mono, and just toggled Torque off in the Lander can, steering primarily with engine gimbal and occasional bumps of RCS. Flew an asparagus staged Terrier with a Poodle core up on a big lifter. Wasn't really intending to land anywhere, so the Poodle sticks out and makes all the landings wonky. Had the alternator running on the Poodle, but didn't need it as total consumption was 0. I'll say this was proof of concept, and we could have gone anywhere. No battery locking or other shenanigans used. Do I get a badge?

Initial surveys with probes indicate this challenge is unlikely to succeed at the widest point. 4.4 km is well out of the 2.25km physics range of KSP. Next step is to see how large a ship can actually be built. That will determine the location of our bridge. Here's a 1km section of teakscaled 400% I-beams. It destroys the launchpad instantly, but I was able to HyperEdit it out to the canyon. It starts spinning insanely fast immediately whether in orbit or landing, and destroys the probe core that controls it as soon as it touches down. Also it's clearly not long enough. Second attempt was a smaller section, only 700m long, but I included pillars, reaction wheels, and tons of struts. I think the results speak for themselves. Has anyone else even attempted this? I'm looking at you @KSP Bro AE Also an attempt with Tweakscaled Kickbacks at 3.4km long. Everything over 2.3km just vaporizes, and all the joints let go. Possibly KJR could help, but I'm not sure what can be done about the physics range issue.

No, it was a failure just attempting to assemble it in LKO, much less get it to Gilly. Just picture about 80 girders in a line with an SAS on each end, wobbling like a giant evil mechanical wormbeast and you pretty much have it.

Just a suggestion - HyperEdit a probe core next to Bennu (outside its SOI, if it even has one) and then use that as a target to approach it like a docking is intended.

Yep, project on hold until at least SpaceY, NFT and MKS-Lite are updated. Had the solar panels fall off my colony ship, and some major texture glitches with a SpaceY fuel tank

Yay us! Nice job on the station guys!

That's pretty much what I'm concluding here as well. Tested a few other configurations, and although I continue to get imbalanced drag arrows, it doesn't seem to be affecting the performance of the aircraft at all. I managed to fly straight for quite a while with SAS turned off, which is a big deal for me (I don't do planes well). I'll update the OP so nobody goes on a witch hunt, and I think I'll skip the bug report. Really it's a just a display bug on a debugging tool if you get right down to it.

That's why I took screenshots of all 4 sides, there's always a large drag arrow on the starboard gear. The port side drag arrow is elusive, only appears when viewed from a certain angle, and appears to be aimed towards craft centerline. I'm thinking the issues people have been having on takeoff are a separate problem. I always use the rotation tool in Absolute mode to snap my landing gear straight (thank you Squad for that!), so that shouldn't be part of what I'm showing here. Edit: @GoSlash27 are you seeing the same thing on your install? I'm half convinced this is a hardware issue unique to my setup. Not game breaking (just played most of a career planes only on 1.1.2) so it's fine if it's just me

OK, recreated it on a completely clean install, no mods, brand new from the zipfile. Here's a sample plane. But any plane at all with the LY-01 wheels has the same display when you enable aero. Visible even with the brakes on before taxi or flight. Arrows get much larger at higher speeds, but only on starboard side.@sal_vager, how do I enable that nifty aero stats display? One thing I'm thinking is that it may just be the aero display glitching - different designs have been more or less stable, maybe the drag isn't really there, just showing the arrows? Maybe my laptop just pulls to the right a little? I used to have a car like that...

I did a fair amount of more testing, maybe it's something with my system. It's easy enough to recreate for me, any time I place the gear in Mirror symmetry the drag is uneven. I tried really hard to get good pics, but in play it appears that the drag arrow on the starboard gear is pointing straight back, and is fairly large. The arrows on the port gear actually weirdly seem to point towards the center of the craft, but they are quite small so hard to tell if that's significant. All the following pics are from straight flight, not turning or anything. Also I was able to show it (last pic) on a plane with a single steerable forward (no problems there) and 2 fixed gear (clearly asymmetrical drag). Edit: I'm going to wipe out my 1.1.2 install and start fresh, see if it's still happening.

Edit: This appears to be a minor glitch with how the aero display screen shows drag on fixed wheels, and has no actual impact on the gameplay. Drag arrows are displayed in an asymmetric way, but the aero and plane handling is unaffected, so no real offset drag is experienced. Trying to figure out if this is me doing something wrong, or if I should post a bug report. New since 1.1.2, when I place LY-01 landing gear in the SPH, no clipping or offset or rotation tool, just 2 gear in symmetry. The aero overlay shows significant drag only on the starboard side of the plane, both front and rear pairs of wheels. I thought it might be a weirdness with the aero display, but the plane flies clearly badly as though it has a drag only on one side. Doing an observational survey contract, and had to constantly twist the plane to counteract the drag. Eventually went with giant tail fins (seen in these pics) to overcome it. No mods except KER.

...sigh. Another update, my colony transport full of Kerbals is broken until SpaceY and NFT are updated. Going to play a quick career using only planes until things are updated.

Going big - working on the Jool 500 challenge here.

Looks good. Someone was perhaps sloppy about de-orbiting their lifter and removing debris? Feel free to deorbit or delete any craft that isn't part of the KSS (or a Jool ship once we launch)

Next chapter is up. Loaded 55 Kolonists aboard my first Colony Transport in high Kerbin orbit and froze them. Interesting way to hire Kerbals, DeepFreeze removes the frozen Kerbals from your roster, so prices go back down for hiring. With my mining profits, I can buy them in batches of 30ish and freeze them for about 8 million funds, and repeat as needed as long as I keep them frozen. I intend to hire and freeze all 500 before I send them to Jool, pretty much the only way I can afford that many without yet another mod.

Chapter 5 - Loading the Kolonists After a brief hiatus while I burned through a 1.1.1 career, we are back on track for the Jool 500. Most of the mods I'm using are working reasonably well or have been updated. I found out an interesting quirk of DeepFreeze - any frozen Kerbals don't count when hiring in the Astronaut Complex! This will allow me to hire Kerbals in batches of 30ish for around 8 million funds, shuttle them to the Colony Transport, and freeze them down. Prices for Kerbals will drop back to manageable levels (less than 600,000 funds is doable with my mining rig profits), and I can hire a new batch. Cool! I was worried about how I would afford 500 colonists, but if I plan right this will work out. I tried a nice Space Shuttle replica for ferrying the colonists up, but it didn't work well. Next I launched a very cheap disposable lifter for 20 Kerbals, which worked reasonably well, but I installed the wrong docking port. After the tedium of EVAing over 20 Kerbals and freezing them, I upgraded for the next launch. My third ship is a reusable shuttle using the new inflatable heat shield, and it worked perfectly to ferry 35 more Kerbals up to the Colony Transport for freezing. The freezing process took quite a while, but now I have over half the colonists for my first 100-Kerbal transport frozen down and waiting in high Kerbin orbit.

Hrm. Upon closer inspection there do appear to be a lot of RCS ports... Rather than disqualifying the submission, I offer this as an opportunity for a KIS station maintenance mission (see OP for details) to remove them and mount them on the scout ship. Volunteers? Also for future reference, KSS modules are capped at 5 parts plus 2 docking ports, ship modules at 8 + 2.

1.1.1. Hot fix for wheel bugs

My two cents on the funds based scoring - if you are playing in Career mode funds are naturally difficult to obtain and will keep your ships and bases from being ridiculous. Even my high-profit mining rig required quite a bit of thought, and a fair amount of in-game time to manage, much like if I were doing contracts or something. Let the stock system handle the funds issues. I would only base score on funds if it's a Sandbox attempt to prevent SpaceY spamming of the entire challenge in an afternoon. If funds weren't part of the scoring, my attempt would look quite different Edit: also, when in doubt, resist the urge to nerf the entire challenge - just add a lower tier for players who aren't up for the full version. Sure, lots of the rules for this are difficult and potentially grindy. It's a challenge - find a way to make it easier or more interesting! Although I do agree that Keepfit is one of the main reasons I'm not attempting on Hard

Amazingly, I haven't had errors on any of the following

Just testing out my favorite mods with the new 1.1.1, I'll post results here. Anyone who has mods working (or not) or knows more details about compatibility please post here!