Kelderek

The lab will not function without an active pilot in a command pod or a probe core. I tried to take only 2 kerbals in a ship that had a pod and a lab and you cannot use the lab. Slap on a probe core and you'll be ok, or bring a 3rd kerbal to be the pilot in a command pod.

Scott Manley will be having a "special stream" next Saturday, but he can't tell us what it is: https://youtu.be/pChmQz6FpR0?t=600 Hopefully it will be KSP and not some other game, and hopefully he'll be allowed to show us 1.0 stuff!

Don't convert your reputation to funds or science. That is part of your problem. You need the reputation to get the better contracts. Eventually you can get station contracts that pay upwards of 4 million funds (though most are in the 1-2 million range). I know it seems like you will lose out on funds by not converting reputation to funds, but in the long run you get a lot more funds by having high-rep contracts, not to mention a lot more efficient use of your time. Combine contracts for the same trip (i.e. put a satellite in orbit around Duna and also land a surface outpost on Duna that holds 7 kerbals - this could be combined for one voyage).

What they really need to do is just make a "Custom" game option. Allow the player to pick and choose which features to include, and then allow the usual difficulty settings after the initial choices are made. This would allow for the most flexibility. Mix and match and take only the features you care about. You could have funds + contracts, but skip upgradable buildings.

Thanks! I find it to be a real pain to have very long ladders in this game, the kerbals are sooooo slow moving up and down and if the rungs are not perfectly aligned then they cannot proceed. They also cannot move sideways on ladders so you need to be able to have a straight path down the side of your vessel. My first Eve lander had 7 or 8 ladders in sequence and it took a couple hours just to build and test the long climb. I figured I could find a way to make the staging work with the cans at the bottom - it's probably the way I will always try to build my larger landers from now on. The huge first stage block of tanks and engines work a little better for me than trying to deal with any decoupling. By removing the need for decouplers and sepratrons, I can fit more tanks in a tighter space and keep the part count slightly lower. As you can see from the pictures, I also just let MechJeb fly it: with a horrible frame rate I find controlling it manually to be a huge pain. When you add in the autopilot, that huge block is kind of a "fire and forget" launcher that gets me all the way to space.

I've already done the challenge before, but felt like doing another trip to Eve. In case anyone wants to see my mission, I'll add a url link for it here. I'm not asking for an official review of that, but I figure people working on this challenge might benefit from another sample example.

If you want to take 3 kerbals to Eve with a single container, then use the hitchhiker can (holds 4 kerbals), it only weighs 2.5t. That is what I used for my Eve Rocks submission a while back (see my signature). I just ran another Eve mission with the three orange-suit guys using 3 of the small landing cans. This was not for the challenge, I just did it for fun with a sandbox game. I'm thinking this design may be worse than my first one, but it also got the job done with 3 kerbals. This is mostly stock with MechJeb because I am lazy and go AFK a lot.

I'm pretty sure I saw somewhere recently that a new 1000 point tier is being added at the very least, in addition to a lot of other tree changes.

At first glance you might be a little low on lifting surfaces which would impact the necessary takeoff speed. The CoL might need to be closer to the CoM so you don't turn it into a lawn dart. Also, if you move the rear wheels forward so that they are immediately behind the CoM then that should make takeoff easier too. Add more intakes if you want a more efficient ascent, right now your engines probably need switch to rocket mode at a relatively low altitude due to low intake air.

Kelderek's STS Shuttle flight Made several orbits at 182km and landed back at the KSC runway safely except for a busted right wing. I did a couple roll maneuvers during the ascent as seen in the images. This was my first attempt, so I chose not to carry any cargo. EDIT: I guess I forgot to name it, I'll call this the Space Shuttle Icarus

Build your new ship with a scoop on the front end made out of structural parts. If you design it right, then you should be able to at least partially swallow your original ship and push it home. There is also the advanced grabbing unit, but that is probably not available if you do not also have docking ports yet.

Kelderek's Speedy Duna run: Direct flight to Duna: 16d 3h 35m Vessel Info: I did not use nuclear or ion engines, my highest ISP engine was 390. Mass = 4691t Parts = 722 Delta-V = 20km/s Mods used: MechJeb, KER, NavHUD Notes: * My phase angle was roughly +15 degrees * I set my Duna periapsis at about 2.5km which was enough to aerobrake and apparently the path I took kept me clear of mountains * My lander tipped over on its side, but I was able to get in and out using the EVA RCS to plant my flag. * The first two big stages are separated by 9 stack decouplers which required some careful throttle control to keep the ship from blowing up when I staged them. I did not use asparagus for those stages to make the separation safer. * The core of this ship was the same as my Eve entry, but I modified the bigger stages to get a little more DV. I could probably beat my Eve time if I tried this ship for that run.

I think that for fuel sliders it automatically snaps to certain increments - something like 1/8 of a full tank. I'm guessing it does this to ensure that you always have equivalent amounts of LF and O. What the game really needs is an improved slider control for all sliders that allows you to optionally type in the value you want directly.

Thanks for the help all, I ended up doing a significant redesign which ended up being a bit of a pancake, but it was very stable and accomplished what I wanted.

Kelderek's Speedy Evey Run: Direct flight to Eve in 9d 4h 18m Vessel Info: I did not use any nuclear or ion engines, the max ISP engine I had was 390. Mass = ~3800t Parts = ~480 Stages = 24 Total DV = ~19.9km/s Mods Used: MechJeb*, KER, NavHud * I used the autopilot on MJ for the early part of the launch, and switched it off once my ship was pointed in the right direction. I was lazy and wanted to make a sandwich and MJ bought me a couple minutes to do that. Once I was in the upper atmosphere and pointed at the sun (which is mainly where I aimed for most of the flight), I switched the autopilot off. Notes: * Once I had the encounter with Eve, I had to do a ton of manual steering to make sure that I kept the Eve periapsis as small as possible. At the high speed I was going it fluctuated up and down very fast and it was hard to get it to hold steady, but it was pretty close to the target marker. I burned until I had about 500 DV remaining and then time warped until I arrived at Eve's SOI. I ended up at the south pole and used a parachute to land. * It took me a couple tries to get the right phase angle. I think I ended up around -8.8 degrees. I hope I have enough screenshots.

There is no wobble at all, the whole thing is steady and solid when all of a sudden the girders fall off and those top tanks become debris. Here's some more pictures. I added even more struts and as you can see everything is fine in the first image, no major pitch, yaw, or roll movement. Then 10 seconds later the girders have broken off and the top big tank and the two Mk3 adapters have broken off. (I used MJ for the autopilot so I could focus my attention on why this is falling apart. I'm fairly certain the problem has nothing to do with piloting) - - - Updated - - - I'm not sure how I could have too much thrust at the bottom, my TWR numbers are mostly on the low side. I tried launching straight up with no gravity turn and that is no better. I guess I need to turn this thing into more of a pancake - I was hoping to avoid that, but I don't have much choice.

I need help. I have a large rocket (3370t, 473 parts) that keeps having structural linkage failures during my launch ascent. It happens at the same point every time I launch: shortly after all 8 of the big boosters have all been separated (at about 32-40km altitude). The reason why this boggles me is it happens more than 10-15 seconds into that stage and there is no wobble - I have added about 40-50 extra struts and a bunch of girders all over the place and my center stack still fails at this point in the launch. The top-most Kerbodyne S3-14400 fuel tank fails first followed by both of the Mk3 adapters above it. As you can see from my first image I should have more than enough struts to hold it together. In the second image, all of the girders and struts have broken off and those 3 sections of the center stack are now all debris while the lower portion of the rocket is still intact with engines running at full power. Can anyone help me figure out why this always has structural failure?

Often more important than fuel is power, make sure you have solar panels and a battery on your satellite probe too. When I did my first 0.90 career I designed all of my ships to carry a small satellite probe with a simple 2HOT thermometer so that I could leave it in orbit wherever I go and always be able to complete any "science data from space around X" contracts that come up later - it's a handy way to make some extra funds during your career. EDIT: just make sure you leave the satellite "in space near" instead of "in space high above" if you plan to use the thermometer.

If you're not averse to using the debug menu, you can hit ALT-F12 to open that up and select an option to show biomes on the map view. This will show a very colorful overlay on a planet or moon where each color represents a different biome - it can be useful for finding good landing spots on the Mun and other places. It's also handy to let you see where you are going better if you are on the dark side of the body you are orbiting as these colors show up independent of sunlight.

When Eeloo it gets to the spot with the red arrow (Eeloo's periapsis around Kerbol), it will have the highest velocity of any point on its entire orbit. Since it is such a large orbit compared to your transfer orbit, when you rendezvous at the encounter the difference between your velocity and Eeloo's will be the biggest it could ever be. As mentioned above, Eeloo has no atmosphere so slowing down to orbit and/or land on Eeloo will be much harder at that red arrow. The transfer you already have is going to be very good, close to ideal if you want to land on Eeloo. If all you wanted was a flyby without any orbit or landing, then the red arrow spot would be ideal because you wouldn't care about the difference in velocity between your ship/probe and Eeloo - but it would be a very quick flyby.

I can understand how this looks from a logic point of view, ladders are fairly simple items and it is likely that they would be invented a long time in the past along with the wheel and fire. But my point is that you don't need to have ladders for a trip to the mun. I suspect that if the Apollo space suits had similar RCS built in that they might have saved some mass on the lander by taking off the ladder rungs - they were smart enough to realize that they didn't need any seats in the lander. Right now the first mobility enhancer sits in the 90 science tier and I think that is fine. Maybe move it up one tier to the 45 science level. Based on what the devs have been saying in the DevNotes lately, I suspect this sort of thing will be addressed for everything in the tree for 1.0.

Keep in mind also that you do not have immediate access to EVA either - you need to upgrade the Astronaut Complex first. So when you consider the lack of early EVA as well as the fact that the early non-Kerbin destinations (Mun and Minmus) have low enough gravity to use RCS, then I see no problem with where the mobility enhancers are in the tech tree. If you're worried about the intuitiveness of using RCS while on EVA or lack thereof, then that would be more of a tutorial issue than a tech tree one.

You most likely ran out of electric charge. Try adding more batteries or solar panels if they are available.

Another way to think of it is like this: imagine you have a 75 km x 120 km elliptical orbit where the 75 km periapsis corresponds to the same location where you would do your transfer burn to the Mun (or wherever else you may be going). In that example, the 120 km apoapsis is already in the right direction, so the DV you used to go from 75x75 to 75x120 is not wasted. If you were to circularize at the 120 km apoapsis, then all the DV you spend to do that would be entirely wasted relative to your plan to eventually leave orbit because in that example you are burning on the opposite side of the orbit. So at a minimum you would be wasting the DV that it takes to go from 75x120 to 120x120, and at a maximum, if your transfer burn location does not match up with the 75 km periapsis, then you would waste even more DV than that by going to 120x120. Keep in mind though that if your transfer burn is long enough (like several minutes with a low TWR like with an LV-N on a high mass vessel), then you might run the risk of re-entering the atmosphere if the altitude of your orbit is too low. Also, if you plan to use any of the popular online transfer calculator tools to find phase angles, ejection angles, ejection burn times, etc., those tools are all expecting that you start from a circular parking orbit. I'm sure the math gets far more complicated if you try to do a direct launch into your transfer without making an orbit first.

I would love to see Kerbals able to move sideways on a ladder too. That would allow for moving from one ladder to another that beside the first, and also possibly stepping off a ladder onto a ledge to the side.