Kelderek

If you swap to a mainsail as I suggested before, your first stage will have an even higher TWR than the 2.05 you have now. You may want to consider adjusting the thrust on the SRBs down a little, this will increase their burn time and keep your TWR lower for the first stage. I usually shoot for a TWR of 1.6 to 1.7 for the first stage on the launch pad. Changing the thrust on the SRBs will not lower the DV, it will just make them burn longer at lower thrust and that will help prevent you having too much drag from the atmosphere. Do not adjust the mainsail thrust when you add it, leave that at 100%. You shouldn't need to change much else. Adding some struts to those SRBs might be a good safety measure though.

This is just a guess, but I would assume that they probably balanced most of the science collection when they did the biome update. If anything, they may alter the science costs in the tech tree and move things around there

At first glance, your second stage (after the SRBs are ejected) looks like it has too little thrust. Your TWR for that stage starts at 1.07 and that is extremely low. Remember that 1.0 TWR is the bare minimum to move upward at all in Kerbin's gravity, and 1.07 is not much of an improvement. If you have access to the Mainsail engine I would consider using that instead of a skipper for that stage. Otherwise you would need to come up with an alternate solution that gives you more thrust. Your first stage is fine for thrust, it's the second one that is the issue I think. You have plenty of DV to get to orbit, but you are wasting too much of it by fighting against gravity too much. By adding more thrust, you will burn fuel more efficiently. Keep in mind though that adding more thrust will likely also add to the mass of your vessel and that will affect your DV numbers. I would suggest you aim for at least 1.4 or 1.5 TWR for your second stage. I wouldn't go much higher than 2.0 though as you might start losing efficiency to atmospheric drag.

I think I heard something about getting some larger wings intended for Mk3 aircraft coming in 1.0. Not only that, but I think they will be "wet" wings that contain fuel too. Presumably these would be much larger and should help with part counts.

This is rather vague, can you be more specific? And do you actually have a question here? Screenshots and more info would allow us to help you better.

It would probably be less mass to just take along multiple copies of science experiments (goo + material bays) than to take a processing lab and it would allow for a single kerbal and smaller pod/can. Also, you only need to take the data to orbit, you don't need to bring a processing lab or science equipments back, just move the data to your command pod before you leave the surface. So you could build a whole base on Eve's surface and use a rover to collect science and then transfer the data to a smaller ascent vehicle to get to orbit, leaving the base on the surface.

How close are the rear wheels to the CoM? It's hard to see from your images, but if they are too far behind then that makes it much harder to pivot the plane.

I think the OP is referring to the camera relative to your vessel. As you move the camera around you can lose track of which way your camera is facing. This can be especially confusing if your lander has a lot of symmetry and it's hard to remember where the "front" of it is (this can get harder the more you zoom out from your vessel too). Some type of optional overlay that shows N, S, E, W on the ground if you're in surface mode, or the orbital markers (prorade, normal, radial, etc.) when in orbital mode. So as you pan your camera around you will see these markers in their appropriate directions and help you to stay oriented the way you want.

Opening and closing the ladder does not do anything to the plane. The nose only lifts up whenever there is a kerbal on top of the hatch or near the top of the ladder. Maybe I should try doing an EVA with the ladder closed and see if it still tips up.

Well the funny thing is if he descends to the bottom of the ladder then the plane drops back to the ground and he can just step off and get back on the ladder easily. When he climbs back up the ladder the nose lifts up into the air again until he boards the cockpit and then the nose drops back down again. This isn't really any sort of problem, but it's bizarre behavior that I just want to understand. EDIT: Oh and BTW, this was my first ever landing on Laythe with a space plane, yay me!

My space plane naturally wants to pivot on the rear wheels because they are close to the CoM, but on most landings it stays stable on the ground on all wheels. I've noticed this on the KSC runway with full fuel tanks and also with reduced fuel landed on Laythe (pointed slightly downhill even). The plane is stable, but when I have a Kerbal go on an EVA, the nose lifts up in the air - as if that was a small enough difference in mass to cause the pivot. Do Kerbals actually have noticeable mass or is there some other explanation for what I'm seeing here?

Also, if you use KER or MechJeb or something similar to show you DV values, make sure you pay attention to whether the number is for atmosphere or a vacuum. Most engines have different ISP values for these and will result in different amounts of DV depending on where you are. So for example, make sure that for the stages of your rocket that take you from the launch pad to low orbit you look at the atmosphere numbers and then use the vacuum numbers for any orbital maneuvers or transfers. I have made the mistake a few times of seeing 4500 m/s DV and thinking I was fine to get to Kerbin orbit only to realize that I was looking at vacuum numbers and did not have enough atmospheric DV to get to orbit.

I've had aerobrake maneuvers that came within a couple km of hitting mountain tops on Duna, so yeah, be careful.

God, this makes me feel so old. I remember making references to this movie WAY before the internet, lol.

Bill's plan to conquer other worlds: (yes, I know, I have too much time on my hands)

That will depend a lot on the altitude of your landing spot. Sea level on Eve will probably be more chute drag than sea level on Kerbin. Best bet is to test it out on Eve directly using the Hyperedit mod. You can use that to warp your lander directly to Eve orbit so you can practice your landings and ascents in the real environment instead of relying on Kerbin as a substitute. That mod makes this challenge a lot easier to manage and saves a lot of time for testing. Of course, you can't use hyperedit when you do the mission for real, that would be cheating, but there's no reason you can't use it for testing.

"Slow and steady wins the race" Is there a slowest plane category? Haha, I doubt it, but I wanted to use this challenge to also test how slow I could take off and land and maneuver with the SSTO Mk2 Dromedary craft I had used for my K-Prize entry. Mass = 19.2t Parts = 141 Max altitude on island run = 144m Max speed on island run = 62m/s Relevant mods installed: KER, MechJeb (didn't really use either for this challenge) I might have done it slower if I felt like throttling up and down a lot, but I was too lazy to try that. Most of this flight was cruising around 55m/s. I did a quick EVA at the KSC runway to test my ladder so that shows on the stats screen.

I'm not implying that being cruel is a bad thing. I sent a kerbal to Eve to scout it out and he's still there enjoying some "alone time". The main thing is to think carefully about who you send if you do a one-way trip. You might want to avoid sending your highest leveled kerbals or even consider sending kerbals only as passengers with a probe core to fly for the one-way trip.

Your TWR is fine. My Eve ascent vehicle ranged from 1.4 to 1.6 TWR, but mostly hung right at 1.5 and that was from near sea level at 200m altitude.

@OP: 279 posts on the forum and you're just now starting interplanetary travel? I would be curious to know what other stuff you've focused on all this time (I'm guessing it's a lot of airplane stuff in Kerbin's atmosphere).

Either is fine for unmanned exploration, but if you want to send a Kerbal on a round trip then stick with Duna. Getting off of the surface of Eve is one of the hardest challenges in the game. You could strand a Kerbal there with a one-way trip if you are the cruel type, but I would just work with Duna first.

This is why moving the explore contract items into achievements would work so much better. Do them in any order you want. I do think that some form of the explore contracts would be useful as an indicator to nudge players in a good direction, but they definitely need work to make sure you don't miss out if you do them out of a more traditional order.

An achievement system would be a nice alternative way to earn funds. There are a ton of possible milestones that you could complete to gain some bonus, though I would limit it to only funds and maybe reputation and not any science. I tend to think of the challenge system from the Borderlands games as a good example. The counts would be cumulative yielding larger rewards the more you do. They would also take into account inherent difficulty (a surface sample from Eve > one from the Mun). Here are some examples off the top of my head: Generic Biome Science: "transmit or retrieve science data from 5, 10, 15, ... different biomes" Body specific biome science: "transmit or retrieve science data from 1, 3, 5, ... different biomes on the Mun" Experiment specific science: "transmit or retrieve science data using a 2HOT Thermometer from 1, 5, 10, 15, ... different biomes" You could separate out transmitting and retrieving to promote doing it both ways. So if you want to send a probe to the Mun first you'll get some credit for doing that and then later on if you send a Kerbal you could get credit again. You could even move all of the "explore" contract items into milestone achievements: Flight specific location science: "transmit or retrieve science data in space near Minmus" Flight generic location science: "transmit or retrieve science data in space near 1, 3, 5, ... planets or moons" The main difference with this sort of system is that you do not get any funds in advance like you do with contracts, but it also gives you more freedom to explore and make your own mission plans, knowing that you will accumulate gradual achievement unlocks which will pay for future missions. I think this method would be far more fun than only grinding out contracts. It would really promote freedom and exploration. There is no reason why you couldn't have both contracts and achievements together as long as the payouts are balanced properly.

I thought this was cool: Apollo CM and LM locations Contains all of the known locations for the command modules and lunar modules (ascent stages). The CMs are all in museums, so you can use this list to see if one of them is located near enough to visit. I had no idea that there was a CM here in Atlanta, GA where I live, so now I can set up a time to go a check it out in person. The LMs were mostly sent for a targeted impact on the moon, but I found it curious that a couple of their locations are still unknown - especially the "Eagle" from Apollo 11. We've had all sorts of orbiters mapping out the lunar surface for years I would have expected this to have been found by now. Of course it took them a while to find that "Beagle" lander on Mars. Could "Eagle" possibly still be in lunar orbit?

Well for me, the amazing part of this Apollo 11 document is that it represents what they HOPED would happen, before they were actually able to do it. That and the sheer volume of planning that the whole thing took.