JAFO

HarvesteR also created that jazz piece (titled Stratejazz) that plays in the VAB/SPH.

As others have said, there have been many such moments.. first orbit, first Mun landing, first docking, etc.. But one that stands out for me, I think, was when I finally understood that less really was more, and stopped overbuilding my ships.. Now that's a tutorial I look forward to reading!!

Heh.. That's quite a challenge you've set yourself.. good luck!

A question.. is this actual height above ground (ie - radar altimeter), or is it height above sea level, as per the stock altimeter? Edit: Never mind, reading through the earlier posts, I see it's a radar altimeter.. excellent.

I've only just had a quick look since getting my Blackwidow Chroma keyboard today (I'm at work), but I'm loving it so far! Any chance this can be extended to do the same thing with the Razer logo at the bottom of the Blackwidow keyboard?

The Blackwidow is the one I've just bought.. can't wait for tonight, am about to try it out now.

Having recently done some LKO assembly, I'd suggest going with lawn building.. regardless of the hassles involved, it's got to be better than orbital assembly.

I'm in the process of building myself a gaming rig, and this mod certainly influenced my decision to buy a Chroma keyboard as well.. it just now got delivered! 'Tis a pity I have to wait until tonight to test it out..

Heh.. no, I was just responding to you as the hosts aren't in this thread very often, of late.. and I'd hate for you to only hear of this weeks down the track. For the record, I'm very impressed with your Minmus Rover.. it would never have occurred to me to re-enter the whole darn thing. I will have to give that a shot myself.

Well.. it's not really my call as to whether or not to call it a clean run. I was simply pointing out what I'm pretty sure @MoeslyArmlis and @GoSlash27 will tell you next time they're here. The wording of the rules are, unfortunately, a little vague in places.. but if you read through the posts in the three Caveman Challenge threads, you'll see it very clearly stated, on numerous occasions, that information mods are not ok, in that they provide the player with information which the stock game doesn't supply. Anything that can/does make the challenge easier in any way, for instance even by simply providing you with Delta-V information, is not permitted. The reasons for not permitting Hyperedit should be pretty obvious. (Calculating your craft's DV manually by means of the Rocket Equation, however, is perfectly acceptable)

Nice work there, @Cunjo Carl. Unfortunately, as can be seen in the screenshots, you have both Kerbal Engineer and Hyperedit installed.. under the rules, either of those mods on their own would be enough to disqualify your entry. I'd suggest trying it again, without the mods.

Fair enough.. then, per Rule 1 in the OP of this thread, the proper place to discuss such patches would be in the relevant thread for that mod.

Ahh.. ok. So far as I'm aware, no stock parts (which is what this thread is limited to) have snap rotation applied.

Heh.. sounds not unlike the Mun lander I posted above.. batteries, reaction wheels and probes clipped into each stage, in an effort to keep COM manageable. I'm still working on a multi-launch design that can get a Kerbal to the surface of the Mun and home again.. haven't succeeded yet.

Now that's impressive.. I'm dying to know how you soft-landed that thing on the Mun without a tank & engine under it!

There is.. (it's in ModuleWheelMotor, and it's called driveLimiter) and it's already set in-game to 100% by default.

The entire point of these patches is that they are automatically applied by ModuleManager when you start KSP. None of the stock ports have angle-snapping defined. Creating this patch is what applies it to them.. (assuming you already have MM installed, of course) That's what the line "@PART[dockingPortLateral|dockingPort2|dockingPort3|mk2DockingPort|dockingPortLarge|dockingPort1]" is all about.. it's a list of the "system names" of all the stock docking ports in the game. If you want the patch to work with non-stock docking ports, you need to open the relevant .cfg file for each port and look for the line "name = xxxxxx". (It's usually right at the top of the file). I'd recommend making a separate duplicate patch (suitably named, of course) just for the non-stock ports. Replace the section "[dockingPortLateral|dockingPort2|dockingPort3|mk2DockingPort|dockingPortLarge|dockingPort1]" with the list of parts you want to patch.. eg: [mydockingPort1|mydockingPort2|mydockingPort3] Installation instructions for the patch are at the top of the first post in the thread. Nice.. somehow I missed this.. thanks!

You can probably make it work with ships you've already launched by using KML to edit your persistence file. Find a (new) craft that has a working collapsible heatshield, and compare the heatshield configuration with one that doesn't.. copy/paste the config differences from the functional heatshield to the non-functional ones, save, and you should be good to go.

Completely agree (though not so much about the "asking for problems thing").. Reentry Particle Effect is one of 148 mods (and 20 MM patches!) I have installed, in a 16GB system, with zero memory/crash issues even after running for hours.. Something else is going on. It may have been some other mod that was recently updated. But without logs, there's no way to know what's going wrong.

It's working fine with 1.2.2

I'm currently most of the way through my KSP1.2 Moderate difficulty entry for the challenge (just 4 nodes left to unlock after the mission I'm about to describe), but I just had to post this now.. last night I finally pulled off a mission I've been wanting to achieve ever since I completed my first Caveman Challenge something like a year ago. To give some background, I've always been somewhat in awe of the Cavemen who do lawn assemblies.. building a craft with higher part-counts and mass than is possible with the basic VAB/launchpad, by manually assembling it a section at a time, out on the KSC grounds. They launch bigger, higher part-count, heavier payloads to orbit than anything a regular Caveman can do, and then fly them out even to the outer planets. It's something I want to try at some point.. but not yet. I had a different approach in mind. And I wanted to do something that, to my knowledge, no other Caveman has done. I've never been a big fan of transmitting data back to Kerbin.. I'd much rather return the raw physical data, and get the extra benefit of the maximum points available. So what I wanted to do was land a probe on the Mun, and fly the data back to Kerbin. And it had to include a Materials Bay. I wanted the juicy science points that thing gave. And I wanted to do it using a lander assembled by docking sections together in orbit. My first attempts, a year ago, did not go well. Only after (with considerable pain) docking a couple of sections together did I discover that fuel-transfer is not an option for Cavemen.. that tech only becomes available after upgrading the R&D buildings. Clearly, this was going to be a lot more difficult than I'd anticipated. The dream sat on the back-burner until recently, when the introduction of the Science Container in 1.2 gave me cause to reconsider the concept. Orbital assembly presents some interesting challenges that lawn-assembly doesn't face. To begin with, there's the lack of patched conics and manoeuvre nodes to complicate matters. And at best, it's only possible to get a few tonnes of payload to orbit at a time. So a sub-assembly is very limited in what it can carry, if it has to carry useful amounts of delta-V as well. If at all possible, none of that payload delta-V should be expended in getting to orbit. Ideally, none of it should be used when rendezvousing and docking with the other sub-assemblies. Sometimes one is forced to choose either function or thrust for a particular sub-assembly, because having both together simply isn't feasible. Launch aerodynamics for each sub-assembly becomes a serious consideration too. Building a practical, useful craft given these constraints is not easy. But over the last week, it all came together. I wanted a squat, wide-based lander if at all possible, but tests proved that without fairings (which I hadn't yet unlocked), this just wasn't going to be possible. No matter how hard I tried, the induced drag on launch prevented any of my designs from reaching orbit. Instead, I had to come up with a taller, more narrow design, that still had as low a COM as possible.After a number of re-designs, this is what I came up with: Atop the Lander Stage sits the Science Instrument Package (SIP), and atop that sits the Data Return Stage (DRS). Each section is coupled together by a pair of Docking Port Jrs. All told, there are 39 parts, with a combined mass of 2.65 tonnes. And, of course, this is just the lander.. there would need to be a transfer stage as well.. so all told, I'd need four launches, and three rendezvous & docking manoeuvres to pull it off.. During the course of this mission my ability to perform rendezvous and docking manoeuvres without manoeuvre nodes or patched conics has considerably improved .. I'm starting to develop a good feel for setting up intercepts by eye, with minimal fuel used. For the first time since I started playing KSP, I dug out my scientific calculator and began calculating delta-V by hand. There were three powered sections of the craft, each of which absolutely needed sufficient delta-V to complete its assigned role. And the margins were pretty tight.. the only stage with much spare capacity was the Lander itself. As it happened, this extra capacity was crucial to the success of the mission. The DRS was first to launch, and the SIP soon followed it. The Lander Stage, being mostly fuel, was fairly heavy, and although I got it to orbit, the booster that got it there was almost empty on arrival. This had been discovered during testing, of course, so it was planned to dock the Munar Transfer Stage to it first, before rendezvousing and docking both together, to the SIP and DRS. The Transfer Stage had, I believed, sufficient delta-V for its task.. what I hadn't counted on was that almost 30% of its fuel would be needed to reach a stable orbit. You guessed it.. this was the only section that hadn't undergone considerable testing beforehand. But it was the biggest payload I could put in orbit.. it would have to do. And it did.. but only just. When the transfer burn was complete, the tank was almost dry. The Lander Stage carried almost 3 times the theoretical delta-V needed to land on the Mun, so it would have to handle Munar Orbital Insertion itself.. with luck, there'd be enough left over to give a nice boost to the DRS when it came time to depart. Making a successful soft landing on the Mun was a challenge.. I've never been particularly good at landing small probes. Crewed landers are easy, but small probes are very touchy, and can't cope with much lateral drift on touchdown. Most of my probes fall over on landing. This mission was no exception. It took three attempts at making a landing that stayed upright. And the winning attempt was on a 10° slope. Right at the limits of stability. If I turned the SAS off, it very slowly tried to fall over. I took my science readings, dumped the data into the Science Container, and used the remaining lander fuel to boost off the surface, heading directly for an escape burn, rather than wasting fuel on achieving orbit first. The landing site had been carefully selected with this strategy in mind.. it was perfectly positioned for a direct escape burn. When the fuel was spent, I jettisoned the Lander and SIP, and fired up the three LV-1 Ant engines until escape velocity had been reached. A quick calculation showed there was just 600m/s of delta-V remaining, so entering a stable orbit around Kerbin before re-entry was out of the question. I would have to hit the atmosphere at around 3km/s, so the remaining fuel would be used in a braking burn when I got close to my chosen periapsis of 43km. It proved to be a very flat re-entry profile, and things were pretty hot for a long time.. I was glad I'd decided not to jettison the engines too soon.. they soaked up a lot of excess heat. I was glad of that braking fuel I kept, as well.. thanks to a crossflow oversight, my first re-entry attempt hadn't had that fuel available, and the DRS burned up shortly after hitting atmosphere (to be fair, that attempt had a much steeper re-entry profile, too.. it may have just gone too deep, too quickly). All told, with milestone bonuses on top of contractual bonuses, I picked up 259 science points for the mission.. I was so stoked at finally achieving my dream that even though I went to bed almost immediately (it was 12.30am, and I had to be up for work at 6.30am), I didn't sleep a wink the rest of the night. The full album of the mission, with 38 pictures, can be seen here. Since I believe this meets the requirement of "achievements above and beyond the call of a KSP caveman" I'd like to submit this flight as my official entry for the Caveman Challenge Order of the Troglodyte award.

Absolutely each craft needs its own settings.. even apparently minor changes to a design can make a difference to what is the most efficient launch profile for that craft. Every time I make changes to a craft that I suspect will impact the launch profile, I add a character to the end of the name, to force GT to begin the calibration process again.. for instance, as a design progresses, there will be versions such as Mun Lander 2, Mun Lander 2A, Mun Lander 2B, and so forth.

Now you're beginning to see why many of us who've already completed the challenge continue to take it on again and again.. the restrictions push you to the limits of your ingenuity, and make you a much better KSP player overall.

48 hand-steered kilometers across the Mun with a tiny rover.. I'm impressed. I'm also thinking you just qualified for "masochist of the year".. Seriously though.. well done. That must have been hell.

Getting to Minmus isn't torture.. it's a lot easier than doing Mun landings.. even crewed return missions aren't too hard (see my first post in this thread for clues). The trick is to use @5thHorseman's very fast and simple technique for getting Minmus encounters without patched conics. See this video for details.