dire

"Land a station with a mobile lab and room for ten kerbals on the mun."

Very cool

https://kerbalx.com/direstorm/Duna-Express Slap enough radial twin boars on something and you can send anything to the Mun.

I used snacks on my run. I did run into an issue, though, where Kerbals were eating twice as many snacks as expected. It's probably been fixed, but keep an eye on it. I'm also going to declare my run from three years ago (DOMA arigato, Duna!) complete as-is because the computer with the save files is now dead and can't be recovered. I was also experiencing lots of glitching and noodle-ry at the end, it was turning into a real chore when I abandoned it.

The video you mentioned is five years old. It's a bit outdated xD In general as long as thrust + drag is directly in line with CoM your descent should be stable. You can add control with fins and gimbals.

Your audio is very quiet. You may want to bring your mic closer to you or download something like Audacity and run your audio through a normalization to maximize the peaks. Great job, though! Good luck on the next one. Also your first flight was not "failed," it just succeeded a bit less than you wanted ;-)

Y4 D116 - Figured out a workaround for the low fuel situation. SLV-5 Space Truck still had a bit of LFO in its main tanks, not a ton of dV for the behemoth but plenty to fill up the landing capsule and deorbit the Rover Hotel. I was really worried that the descent pair would crater because the Rover didn't have any secondary chutes and could only use the two small engines on bottom, but actually the chutes slowed it down to about 12 m/s just above impact and the engines brought it down to about 9, and I wound up with a lot more fuel than I expected left over. A little rough (about like falling off a one-story building) but very survivable. With a full-featured science lab on Ezekiel and another one on the ground, this completes the Science! objective and brings the number of colonists on the ground to 45. Could have had a couple more but I got careless with the kolonist transfer. And yes, I decided to rename the science rover "Mars Technica".

Still alive! Now with 45 kerbals and a science bay on Duna.

Grats! You can take screenshots by hitting the f1 key and they'll be in your kerbal space program directory under the Screenshots folder - for example, Program Files / Steam / SteamApps/ Common / Kerbal Space Program / Screenshots. Once you've found the pictures on your PC you can use an image hosting site like imgbb.com to upload the picture and then share the link. Be aware that imgBB.com in particular sometimes tries to embed ads in your image link, but you can strip those out before you post it.

@Death Engineering What's your take on glitched craft? It looks like SLV-7 Boring Rover has a glitch that prevents saving while it's loaded and prevents changing scene to Space Center while it's present. I'm worried my save is starting to get corrupted but I uninstalled Ship Manifest and I'd like to try deleting SLV-7 and relaunching to see if I can fix this. I might be able to roll back a few weeks, but that would represent a couple dozen hours of play time and I don't really want to throw all that away.

If you reboot this just have each entrant test and score at least two prior entries. Take the average of all scores per entry.

I am doing DOMA in career mode (although I started myself with 10 million funds and like 5k science, just because early mission grinding is boring and with the DOMA LKO rules it's a bit problematic to hit munar and minmal science early on). I'm using Snacks! for my life support which is much simpler and easier to handle than other life support mods but still almost got my first wave killed because I am sort of a newbie at this kind of thing. For example... Y4 D106 returned the parachute hopper to orbit and docked to the orbital Rover Hotel, but even with the spare fuel from the hopper it turns out the Rover Hotel only has 89 dV left, which is not enough to deorbit and land safely. So it's stuck there in orbit until Aries refuels and can swing by to give it a push. The hopper has one pillot, reducing the kolonists on Duna by 1.

Y4 Day 100 Decided to name this rover hotel "Bacchus," landed it and docked Aries to it to refuel (it doesn't have an ISRU, unfortunately). With it refueling I think it now counts as a "Backup Plan" -- double checking in VAB it's got a TWR of 1.5 and 1000 dV on the surface of Duna, meaning it should have no trouble getting back to orbit (Full lithium tanks give it another 2000 dV but the average TWR on unicorn drives is so bad that they aren't generally useful contributors to most launch dV), and that means my "Contingency plans" are complete! The longest any kerbal spent from launch to Contingencies Operational was 3 years 60 days so I think I'm good on that front. I also netted an extra 3 million credits from tourists touring already, with more on the way.

Y4 Day 100 Decided to name this rover hotel "Bacchus," landed it and docked Aries to it to refuel (it doesn't have an ISRU, unfortunately). With it refueling I think it now counts as a "Backup Plan" -- double checking in VAB it's got a TWR of 1.5 and 1000 dV on the surface of Duna, meaning it should have no trouble getting back to orbit (Full lithium tanks give it another 2000 dV but the average TWR on unicorn drives is so bad that they aren't generally useful contributors to most launch dV), and that means my "Contingency plans" are complete! The longest any kerbal spent from launch to Contingencies Operational was 3 years 60 days so I think I'm good on that front. I also netted an extra 3 million credits from tourists touring already, with more on the way.

Just for kicks I threw together an apollo-style rocket that, on paper at least, looks like it can get to Moho and back with flags and footprints. Its mothership has 10k dV and its two landers have like 2400-ish each. DV might change quite a bit depending on when and how satellites and landers are deployed, but at a minimum you should be able to reserve one lander as an expendable drop-tank for the return home and have loads of dV to spare. If anyone wants to give this a test run let me know how it goes. I remembered parachutes on the return stage this time! https://kerbalx.com/direstorm/Odin-24-XL-1-Huginn

In general, the delta-V readout for an SSTO is a dirty, dirty liar. Your craft might read 17,000 dV and it turns out based on drag, TWR and other factors that you can only just barely get to LKO. Once you actually get to LKO, you can use the dV map to guestimate how much fuel you'll need for your nuclear engines (but add 20%), but since your nukes use the same fuel as your dirty lying airbreather engines you don't actually know how much you're going to reach space with except through trial and error, and three different trials are likely to give you three different numbers. So, good luck! I tend not to bother with SSTO's these days, preferring JATO planes, but here's something to get you started that is not an SSTO. https://kerbalx.com/direstorm/Victor-Terra-Lumen

The normal answer would be, "Remove the decoupler from the rover. Hit the reroot tool and set the rover's root to the part that goes on the decoupler. Attach the rover by the root to the plane." Edit: Fixed

Then I would say, the easiest way to get the rocket on the launchpad is to have it land there. Have the crane on standby in case you miss and use the double-docking-port method. There are also mods that let you launch rockets directly from the VAB to like Ike. Or land a special structure that builds and launches rockets.

You would, but you could also recover each launchpad after each launch for 100% recovery. You'd want to make sure it can still fly with the weight of the rocket on it, if you do it that way.

Worth noting is that especially for your first time attempting a mission, you're likely to use more than the minimum possible amount of fuel on each leg. So when I put my Duna newbie ship in the craft exchange, I made sure it had about 10k delta-V all told to account for errors, side trips, rescue missions and so on. For the sake of efficiency, if you roughly break down each stage to 1500-2000 dV, then you know that for 10k dV you need roughly five-six stages -- lower atmosphere, orbit, transfer, braking if you're not going to aerobrake, lander, and return ship.

OK, so the easiest way to do this is, when you're ready to launch your rocket in VAB, hit load, and "Merge" your launch pad onto the bottom of your rocket. Then they'll both spawn at once and you can move both of them (Assuming it's some sort of tracked rover monstrosity). The second easiest, but much tougher way, is to have docking ports on the nose and base of your rocket. Build your rover as a crane where the distance between your wheels is at least the same as the height of your rocket so it doesn't tip over. You'll want sort of an A-shaped rover that's very tall. Dock your rocket's nose to the center of your crane and roll it over to your launch pad until the tail docks to the launcher. Undock the rover and back off, and when you undock the rocket from the pad you're ready to launch. I don't recommend trying to rotate the rocket at all when you move it; that's not going to generally end well. You have to move it in the same attitude it'll launch in. This guy has a rover crane like I'm talking about, although it's modded- skip to 7:37.

Hey folks, Is there a mod that will let me shuffle my tourists into one ship and my non-tourists into another ship without clicking literally five hundred parts looking for all of my 48 crew and cross-referencing whether they are a tourist or not?

So...it turns out the two rover hotels, after Leviathan lifted into orbit, had a TWR on Ike of like 0.95 with full tanks. Which is...not amazing. Fortunately I can just send Aries to get them back into orbit and down to Duna! What could possibly go wrong. Y4 D95 Left a trio of colonists on Duna and lifted off with Aries. Docked the science lab to Ezekiel and assembled it. In the interests of making Leviathan less noodly, I moved some snack tins to radial mounts. If I recall, Peggy Kerman's Craft is actually the station hub that was bolted to Ezekiel, so I swapped that with the station hub on Leviathan and I can complete the "Return Peggy Kerman's Craft" portion of Peggy's quest when Leviathan comes home. Y4 D97 Finally have a complete wave 2 colony with 46 kerbals...on Ike. Once refueling is complete, the whole train will meet with Ezekiel so the tourists can do some touring, and I'll probably land one rover hotel while they do their thing. Then with the 3 still on Duna I'll have a total of 49 kerbals prior to y5 d1 for double points. One of the rover hotels (the one without the science facility) should also qualify as a Backup Plan to Aries' Ascent Shuttle, meaning I won't have to worry about people getting homesick. Y4 D99 Everyone is all linked up at Ezekiel. I should probably shuffle some drills and radiators around, maybe a solar panel or two to make sure all the redundancies are evenly distributed. Unfortunately it looks like one of the rover hotels and the space truck don't have ISRU refiners, and I didn't bring spares, so that causes some logistical complications, but nothing I can't fix with Wave 3.