Kelderek

Yeah, this is why I build the whole apparatus for both the parachutes and landing gear linked together so that it is separate from the rest of the lander and could easily be ejected immediately after liftoff from Eve. I had something like 144 landing struts and maybe 120 radial chutes + 12 drogue chutes -- that's a lot of mass that I could lose early on in the ascent. I think I landed at about 9.7 m/s at 209m altitude.

I learn something new every day, thanks for the tip about the clamps! I still want to have some really big permanent spotlights on the ground at the launch pad pointed up at my rockets at night. I poured enough funds into upgrading my launch pad that I think they should be added so I can see what I am doing no matter what time of day it is.

Night launches can be really dark - especially if your rocket doesn't have its own lights installed. There is only a single small light on the water tower at the KSC launch pad (tier 3 version) that is aimed at your rocket and that seems to be very lacking to my way of thinking. I would love to see a bunch more powerful lights that are available when a vehicle is on the pad ready for launch at night. Obviously this could be scaled up with the upgrade tiers. Some inspiration:

Doesn't this vary a lot based on the planet chosen? A lot of the responses so far are not comparable since they are all different planets. I had a ~1060t lander on Eve that put about 7-8t of payload in orbit there. You can see the whole thing in my Eve Rocks Challenge submission

@parzr: thanks! I discovered on this mission that parachutes can be tough with a really heavy craft, they have a tendency to want to rip the ship apart when they deploy. My solution was to stagger the deployment altitudes in 100m increments from about 1400m down to 1000m, and since I used mostly radial parachutes (which are the smaller ones in size), they don't have a huge shock on the vessel when you only deploy a few at a time. My test landings when using hyperedit had been at a different location with a higher altitude and I was pleasantly surprised that I could slow the ship down even more for the low altitude location I used on the mission. The air between sea level and about 1000m must be super-dense. It was also nice to find that I still had enough DV to make up for that altitude difference on the ascent too. The lowest I had tested the ship was around 600m I think and I did the mission at just over 200m.

Kelderek's Eve Rocks Submission Objectives: * Complete the Eve Rocks Challenge at level 3, "going all the way" * Make the trip with at least Jeb, Bob and Bill present * Succeed and fail simultaneously in different ways * Outspend the competition to drive their economy to ruin Design Philosophy: * "Go big or go home" * "Anything worth doing, is worth overdoing" * Hide design flaws behind a sheer volume of vessel parts * Use a single launch to help with vehicle stability (don't rely on docking ports to hold a ship together) * Avoid refueling and using other vessels, mostly because I am lazy Stats: Vehicle on Kerbin launch pad (4 Kerbals on board): 11,566t mass 1818 parts 73.4m H x 29.4m W x 29.4m L 5,346,749 funds Payload to LKO (lander + transfer stages): 1,660t mass 1,330 parts (roughly) Lander on Eve's Surface: 1,056t mass 1,146 parts (roughly) Game Data: * Version 0.90 * Mods: KER, MechJeb, NavBall Docking Indicator, NavyFish DPAI * All parts were stock excpet for the one little MechJeb thingy Mission Imagery and Log: (My apologies for the low texture quality, but minimum settings were required to let the game handle this huge ship) Kerbin launch Transfer to Eve Landing on Eve Ascending from Eve Returning to Kerbin Science archive proof that I really did get a "splashed down" sample and a "landed" sample since I forgot to grab a screenshot in the act of collecting the splashed one. You can see that they have the same title, but different descriptions. Notes and Lessons Learned: * There are probably a million things wrong with how I handled this mission, and as ugly as it was at times, I got it done in the end. I am still fairly new to the game (only a couple months so far) and I found this to be a considerable challenge to complete, so kudos to Laie for the idea. * I've had a lot of trouble being able to fly large vessels comprised of smaller docked ships -- they just wobble way too much. For this reason I wanted to see if I could do this all in a single launch because it would allow me to have plenty of sturdy connections and struts for the entire journey. * At some point I decided to avoid refueling in the spirit of "can I do without it?". This obviously meant I would need a far larger launch vehicle at the Kerbin pad. This snowballed into a test to see if my computer could handle the game and if the game would survive on its limited RAM (I use 32bit version of KSP). I knew that if I could get to LKO, then the rest of the way would be easier on my computer. * The use of HyperEdit to test landing and ascent to and from Eve was a huge help, thanks to those who offered that up as a tip. * The biggest mistakes I made were to not test every last part of all my various stages to their fullest. I tested the transfer stage the least and suffered as a result. I mainly made sure that the decouplers worked, but didn't do many actual flight tests or I would have discovered the need for much more RCS/torque. It took ages to make a simple 90 or 180 degree turn for manuever nodes. I had to assist it some with low thrust engine burns since those at least have gimbals. * I tested my rovers a bunch and was happy with them on the ground. The only workable place to attach them to my vessel was on the sides, so I used two of them so they would be balanced symmetrically and in case one of them broke down somehow. The first time I tried this one of the rovers got caught up in the landing gear apparatus after decoupling. So I just decided to add a couple sepratrons with reduced fuel to push them away from the lander a little, but not too far. It completely slipped my mind that the speratrons would still be on the rovers afterward so I never tested the rovers after that - I only tested the decoupling to make sure they would fall clear of the lander and make it to the ground safely. As you can see from my images, the rovers ended up being useless due to how I had placed the sepratrons too close to the ladder rails. Of course it's good to know that in the future this type of design flaw won't be as catastrophic since Kerbals will be able to climb up on ledges. * I had never used MechJeb prior to doing this challenge. I had avoided installing it because I worried that it would do too much of the work for me and dumb down the game too much. But I finally decided to give it a try because I knew that the ascent autopilot in particular would be helpful for getting off Eve. I used it sparingly at the early parts of the trip, but eventually tried out more and more of the features as I went along. When it comes to using mods, I usually prefer a minimalist approach for any game still in early acess or beta and I don't install many until after a game is released. * I had trouble several times with my lander sitting on the ground at Eve wanting to rebalance every time I switched my focus away from it and back (like going back to the Space Center, or exiting the game and coming back). It acted like it had to land all over again and on a few occasions it would start wobbling and tear itself apart. I had to restore from quicksaves a couple of times to help the game remember that I had already achieved a safe and stable landing. * I had to deal with several game crashes on this project, but they were confined mostly to the work with the entire launch rocket and its 1800+ part count. The most common crash was simply trying to load the rocket from the VAB to the launch pad. These were frustrating but did not happen often enough to slow me down in my fervor to complete this challenge. Also, there were never any crashes of the game after I staged the launch base at LKO - even though my ship was still 1300+ parts, apparently I was below some magical threshold for causing the game to crash.

Haha, yup. Sadly my very nice 28" widescreen LCD died on me a little while ago and I don't have the cash to replace it yet. Luckily I still had this old dinosaur sitting around and it still works great after more than 12 years.

(Sorry this is poorly lit) That's a hammer and a pair of twig shears, holds down SHIFT + W nicely.

I just put 1500t into LKO and sent it on its way to Eve. About a third of that is the transfer portion, and ~1050t of it is my lander. The entire ship with its launcher was 11,500t on the launchpad at Kerbin. I've already tested the landing and ascent on Eve using hyperedit with success. The ship is actually en route right now with a long-ass transfer burn (lag is making it 10x slower than normal), and I'm trying to keep myself occupied until it gets there. If all goes well, I may have an entry in the Eve Rocks challenge, so wish me luck! It may take me another full day of working on it though since it is so slow.

Take it another step further and allow for named stage groupings. Create a group and give it a name like "Kerbin Launch" and then fill it with stages (which can also be named). Then allow for +/- buttons to collapse or expand the stages for each group -- that way you don't have to scroll through an endless list of stages, you can just expand the group for the stages you are focused on and access them quicker.

When I saw this contract show up I just had to do it, not only for the huge payout, but I knew it would be fun to drop a station on a tiny asteroid moon. This is the only contract I've seen so far over 2 million funds. My station is total overkill as was the launcher I used, but I think it cost me less than 300k for a payout of 2.7 mil funds. This is a custom difficulty based on normal settings (I started with normal and made the checkboxes match moderate and left the sliders and everything else the way they are for normal difficulty). This is also after I have unlocked the entire tech tree late in this career, so the only contracts worth doing any more are the fun ones or huge payout ones. I find it interesting that the archive view of my contracts only shows a handful of contracts, it must only show recent ones -- I've done dozens on this career.

Thanks for the tip about Hyperedit, I'll give that a try. The only mods I use so far are KER and a couple docking aids. I used the parachute calculator which worked well, my landing speed with full chutes was 10.4 m/s. I had 8 drogue chutes, 16 of the big chutes, and 8 of the radial ones. On this mission I learned that it helps to stagger the chute deployment altitudes (something I never thought of before). I would have about 4 symmetrical chutes deploy around 1200m then 4 more at 1100, and so on down to about 900m. The first batch of chutes to deploy after the drogues were also the smallest, my 8 radial chutes so these had the least amount of jarring to the ship. All of this worked really well once I figured it out. Based on what you're saying, I think my problem was the landing gear. I had 64 of the large ones and my ship is 430t that comes out to about 6.7t per leg which is why I had to add engine power to slow down a bit more.

I made my first attempt at this challenge this week... and failed HARD, lol. I spent several days designing, testing, flying, refueling, etc. -- all to no avail. I managed to place a 430t lander on Eve using parachutes, but the only way I could land safely was to burn some of my ascent stage fuel to soften the impact. Parachutes got me to 10.5 m/s which is enough to cause a beautiful explosion. Even a powered landing at 4 m/s blew up the whole ship. Finally got it to less than 2 m/s and came through intact. The problem was I had nowhere near enough fuel left to leave Eve and I doubt my lander could have done the job even with full tanks -- I'm pretty sure my design was doomed to fail. So I basically rage quit by restoring to a previous quicksave and bringing Jeb, Bob and Bill back to Kerbin and I have abandoned the whole challeneg for now. I think I must need to learn a lot more and get more practice before I'll be able to pull this one off. This makes me all that more impressed by everyone here who has pulled it off successfully. Question: Is there any kind of mod or debug hack that will allow me to either change the conditions on Kerbin to match those of Eve or to somehow warp my ship over to Eve's surface? I need a better way to test my ship designs. What works on Kerbin does not necessarily work on other worlds. I did use KER set to Eve in the VAB when designing my lander to get the DV values where I wanted, but I'm pretty sure that was not enough to get it right. EDIT: also, poor performance makes this sort of challenge a lot less fun than it should be. I counted 6 seconds of real time go by for every 1 second of game time. My transfer burn to Eve was a nightmare since I could not manage to steer my ship straight with the amount of lag I had and the autopilot skills of Jeb using SAS did not work at all - I had to do it all manually to have any chance of controlling where I went.

Haha, yeah, I thought the same thing. I couldn't even find the capsule under all the debris, and it was very laggy on my computer, so I just hit "recover vessel" and called it a successful day.

First of all, I suck at designing and flying spaceplanes. But I am trying to learn and get better. Learning rockets was far easier for me and the majority of my KSP play has involved the VAB and launch pad. After some frustration with recent spaceplane designs that I could not get to work well, I started just screwing around in the SPH with the intent of coming up with a ridiculous design with lots of wing surfaces. The result is my Wheel Plane. This large 139t, 544 part vessel was fun to build and it flies surprisingly well compared to my other more conventional designs. Of course half the reason why it performs well for me is that I don't have to land it horizontally on a runway (the part I suck at the most with spaceplanes). The idea was to have a lot of wing surfaces at different angles so that no matter how I turn the ship it would still have a decent amount of lift. The ship launches vertically due to its shape, but it flies horizontally like any other plane. Since I use turbojets and rapier engines, I have to use the standard ascent path to maintain good air intake. I also figured, why not take this ship to space as an SSTO? So I made sure to have some airless engine power and fuel too. In some ways this is still a lot like a rocket and not much of a spaceplane, but I figure it uses jet engines and flies horizontally so that should be good enough. I know there are a million things wrong about this design and I already know of ways I would improve on it if I were to do it again. The main design flaw was that I didn't plan on using the rapiers from the start. I initially had 16 jet engines which is why the fuel tanks that form the outer wheel only have liquid fuel -- if I had thought ahead properly, these would have included more room for oxidizer. In fact I may have made it so all the engines are rapiers. I felt it was too much hassle to replace those fuel tanks, so I just tacked on some extra rocket fuel tanks and drained some of the extra jet fuel. It works but it is not optimal and added too much mass and drag. I also probably have more air intake than I need, this is more a result of changing the engines and fuel around too much. I can't fly this ship without hearing "Wheel in the Sky" from Journey in my head. The flight I used for these screenshots ended in a wonderful explosion due to poor fuel planning, but as you can see I came close.

I managed to place a large fuel station in orbit around Jool by joining two fuel tankers there. After the orbit was established and the docking complete I had 8624 units of liquid fuel (and matching oxidizer) plus 1500 units of monopropellant fuel available for use by future missions to the system. Idiot that I am, I completely forgot to add any RCS thrusters to my tanker design which made the docking take at least 20 minutes of me cursing at the screen, followed by much rejoicing when the docking finally happened. At least now I am well positioned for some good missions to Jool's moons now. Here's the new station pic:

There are bigger and better pods later on, not to mention the processing lab and hitchhiker storage. I think the progression of these is fine. If you want to take more than one Kerbal to space early on, then just use more than one command pod -- this is how I did my first Mun landings in 0.90, I used 3 command pods.

You have to upgrade the other buildings too. I think for the maneuver nodes you need a combo of both the mission control and tracking station buildings to be upgraded. Upgrade the VAB to have more parts on your rockets.

The one mission I did for a a surface station on Duna needed room for 19 Kerbals, but I didn't send any at all, I used a probe core to fly it there. The contract completed just fine. I even wrecked the station as it landed, and still got credit. More story on that here.

Both imgur and steam are not working for me to upload and link images, so I had to use another site. I noticed that the radial attachment point has moved on the [crashed] station, so I guess that is another area that broke other than the landing struts. I also got some science from a new biome with this trip (though not much since I had no Kerbals there). Here you go:

I'm really glad that these are a bit more infrequent now in 0.90. I found them to be so prevalent in 0.25 that it was far too easy to get funds from just those contracts alone. In 0.90 they're still around, but you might have to zoom ahead 10-20 days before one shows up. They are still handy to take from time to time if you see them, because you can fulfill them with a probe or ship already in place. This leads me to a couple handy tips: -- After you've already completed the "Explore X" for a body like the Mun or Minmus or whatever, it can still be good for science, XP, and fun to go back and land in other biomes. Take on a satellite contract for the same place to pay for the trip. It's pretty easy to add a tiny, simple probe to your lander/ship so that you can drop it off in the required orbit before you land. I've started to design all of my landers to always include a tiny probe that I can deploy in orbit if I want. Since I've also started taking 3 Kerbals on every voyage, the added mas of the probe is pretty small compared to the rest of the ship. -- For satellite contracts, if you use a docking port to deploy it instead of a decoupler, then you can retrieve the probe again after you get credit for the contract. Then you can take it and get some of the funds back when you return home, or maybe place it into an orbit more to your liking. I usually will drop it off in low orbit so that I will always be able to do those "Science data from space around X" contracts later. You certainly don't need to leave the probe in space after the contract is complete, and it can help to avoid some clutter if you retrieve it.

I found this wonderful contract to build a large station to land on the surface of Duna. It was a pretty simple station as far as the requirements go, the main challenge is you had to have space for 19 (!!!) Kerbals and it needed a processing lab -- I used 1x Mk1 landing can, 1x processing lab, and 4x hitchhiker storage. So I built this large station so that I could fly it unmanned, sent it all the way to Duna (it cost somewhere around 200-250k funds). After I start my descent toward the surface from low orbit I realize that my transfer stage engines will not be enough to slow me down in the thin atmosphere, so I hope that my parachutes are good enough to finish the job -- but they aren't -- my station needed a couple more chutes at least. I had to reload from my quicksave a few times trying different descent tactics. The most useful change was to manually adjust the parachute deployment altitude for all of my parachutes to the maximum of 5000m. But even with this change, they still only slowed down my station to about 23m/s which made for a very loud bang upon landing. After the dust settled, I see the contract icon in the upper right of my screen flashing green with a (1) showing a mission success. Apparently enough of the station was still intact to get credit for the contract. I think the landing struts were the only parts to break. The mission had a payout of 1,200,000 funds -- well worth the adventure and challenge! These new contracts are a nice change and certainly make upgrading the KSC a lot easier.

I used to play moderate difficulty in 0.25 and I found that a bit much here in 0.90, so I decided to make a custom career starting with normal difficulty as a base and I changed all of the checkboxes to match the way they are for moderate (part entry costs, etc.), I left all the sliders and starting funds/science/rep the way they are for normal. With the entry cost enabled for parts, I have to think long and hard about which parts I really need immediately, and which ones I can wait on until later. For most of my early play I did not use any probes, but always flew with Jeb, Bob, and Bill to help them get XP. I did not try to go to the Mun or Minmus until I had unlocked level 2 for the launchpad, astronaut complex, and the VAB (in that order). This allowed my first mission to the Mun to have a ship large enough to take all 3 of my main Kerbals for a round trip with a landing and flag planting ceremony, netting me some excellent XP. I followed this with 1 more mission to the Mun and 2 to Minmus, hitting a couple biomes in each. I left behind a tiny probe in low orbit for each of these so I can readily do "Science data from space near X" contracts when they show up. In short, I've really enjoyed this new career a lot and I feel the difficulty is right where I would want it to be. The contracts could use a little tweaking for sure, but I didn't find it too grindy to advance.

It's the amount you can spend on a single tech. When you advance on the tech tree far enough, you will see the next tier faded out and it will tell you that you can't buy it until you upgrade your R&D building. You can gather as much science as you want, but you won't be able to spend it all until you upgrade.