Hotaru

Here is my attempt.

This is my Elcano Challenge entry. 1.0.2 career-mode, custom difficulty, stock physics and aero, plenty of mods installed including Stock Bug Fixes and MechJeb but no part mods besides Procedural Fairings and RealChute. I use MJ for pretty much everything except rendezvous and docking, which it's terrible at, and Stock Bug Fixes makes rover wheel brakes non-useless. A bunch of engineers drinking coffee in the R&D building trying to think of a use for the Mark I air-portable rover they had designed and recently tested, came up with the brilliant idea of sending one on a circumnavigation of the Mun. In addition to testing the rover, they supposed, the mission would collect samples and data from various regions of the Munar surface as well as searching for ore deposits for possible future exploitation. So they came up with an extremely complicated and expensive plan involving a modified Mark I rover deployed by a dedicated dropship, and brought it to the director of operations, who told them the plan was much too expensive and would never fit in the budget. Disappointed, they went back to their coffee. Then, one of them had an idea. "Why," said he, "does the rover have to go in the middle of the dropship?" "So as not to upset the center-of-gravity when it's deployed," said another. "Don't you know anything?" "But why," said the first, "does that matter in space?" He was right, of course. Excited, the engineers sat down again, poured new cups of coffee, and designed a new mission. This is what they came up with: The redesigned rover would be launched in a fairing by a standard reusable booster and be carried to the Mun by a standard Aqualung unmanned tanker, where it would be deployed on a suborbital trajectory and land under its own power, then drive around the Mun. Since several boosters were already in stock, and several Aqualungs were already in orbit, the whole mission would cost less than a quarter of the engineers' original plan. Much to the delight of the engineers, the director of operations approved the new plan and the Mark II rover was ordered for production. A few weeks later, it's ready for launch. Liftoff. The engineers had worried that the large fairing would upset the rocket's stability, but with added tail fins and a slightly slower-than-normal ascent, it makes orbit with no trouble. Fairing jettison. This is why I use Procedural Fairings, not stock fairings. Note the lack of confetti. Booster recovery. Space! Rendezvous with Kilgore Station in low Kerbin orbit. Engineer Shannon Kerman, who will drive the rover, transfers to it by EVA. An engineer is necessary, of course, in order to repair potential wheel damage, and Shannon is the most experienced one available. Unfortunately the docking with the Aqualung happened at night, so no pictures of that. To the Mun! Burning into Munar orbit. Separation. The Aqualung burns back into orbit to rendezvous with Barbicane Station; Shannon and the rover descend to the surface. Powered descent. Touchdown. Shannon establishes the origin base for the circumnavigation. I don't expect most updates to be quite so pic-heavy as this one, most will probably just have a couple pics of the rover and maybe a progress shot of the map. First leg is already complete, will post report soon.

Tested out my circumnavigation challenge plane: Behaved well, and completed a 1600km round-trip research flight with more than three-fourths fuel remaining. It's now back in the hangar for refurbishment and minor modifications.

Airplanes fly like airplanes, not supersonic submarines, and rockets with nosecones go faster than rockets without. I'd say that's a definite improvement.

The eyelashes were an experiment, as was the freckle/blush effect TaintedLion commented on. I'll change them back to something more stock-like for the next update. Experimenting with different hairstyles too. Harder than it looks, might take a while.

Which way is it going in that screenshot? Nose-first or tail-first? Mine always reenter tail-first, with the airbrakes at the top to keep them stable going backwards, but mine don't have chutes. Did you do it that way, or reenter nose-first and then use the chutes to turn it around for landing?

In career mode, my first probes made it to Eve.

FASA Launch Towers. Wish there was a Soviet-style one as well but I do not know of one. On topic, here are a few more:

For me the trick is to pick and choose mods such that there's still a challenge, just a different challenge from stock. For instance, right now I'm playing with the stock parts in the stock solar system, which feels pretty well balanced. But later, I might want to install Outer Planets Mod, which gives much more distant destinations, and TAC Life Support, which makes flight duration a much more serious issue, so I'll probably also want to install something like KSPI or Near Future Propulsion to make up for that increase in difficulty, KW to make it a little easier to build super-heavy lifters that still superficially resemble rockets (and have a civilized part-count!), maybe even Extraplanetary Launchpads so I can build my big interplanetary ships on Minmus instead of on Kerbin. Still a challenge, still limited, just not the original challenge. Trying to do a harder thing, but working with better tools. And as an added bonus, the future-tech stuff means more tech nodes to research, which means more incentive to keep collecting science. The downside, of course, is I'm no longer up against the same challenge as everybody else, so comparisons between my achievements and everyone else's get a little less meaningful. Which is one reason I'll probably always play mostly-stock at least part of the time.

Another point is that it can sometimes be interesting to play with only mod parts. I had one career save in 0.90 where I removed about 90% of the stock parts--including all the engines and spaceplane parts--and used KW engines and tankage and B9 spaceplane parts exclusively. It was fun, not easier or harder than stock but a different challenge. Might try something similar again sometime. The downside, of course was it was a lot more work keeping things balanced, I had to do a fair amount of adding and deleting of parts and lots of config file editing, mostly to make sure I got parts at appropriate points in the tech tree.

Interesting, so they do have at least some cooling effects! I did not know that. I will try swapping it for an LF tank and see what happens.

The whole issue of compatibility with other players hadn't actually occurred to me before reading this thread, but I'm starting to realize how nice it is to be able to compare notes knowing we're all on the same page. I've been trying to keep my current career mode mostly stock so far (I think my only part mods are RealChute and Procedural Fairings), this aspect is definitely an incentive to keep it that way. I think I'd at like to get at least as far as Duna with stock parts before I go back to playing with lots of mods.

Most of my existing non-Rapier designs go the opposite route, two turbojets and a single LV-T45. Here's my first attempt at doing it with one jet (stock aero): Pretty ugly, but made it into a 121x80km orbit and return first time up. (It's not in the rules, but personally I don't count an SSTO as successful unless it can also land safely.) Not optimal, has a surplus of oxidizer. About 200 m/sec left on orbit. Still haven't figured out if the intake pre-cooler actually does anything or not. Will make a better one later. Hopefully prettier as well. Craft file. PS. Just noticed I didn't give it a name. Let's call it the Duckling Mark 1.

In my career mode currently I have two classes of SSTO (which I posted here in the SSTO showcase thread if anyone's curious). One is a four-passenger spaceplane, the other is a 2-ton-to-LKO reusable rocket. Both are pretty much 100% stock (there are a couple of mods involved but they don't affect the ships' performance at all), and both have been extremely profitable. The spaceplane costs 35,428 funds per unit and 952 per flight in fuel costs, for a total cost of 1,123 per Kerbal to orbit (including the cost of the ship amortized over ten flights). That's compared to 42,864 per flight (14,288 per Kerbal) for the expendable rocket it replaced--an order-of magnitude reduction in costs. The rocket costs 33,933 per unit and 5,275 per flight, for a total of 4,334 per ton to LKO (again amortized over ten flights). Compared to 25,900 per flight (12,950 per ton) for a comparable expendable lifter. Not quite as dramatic an improvement but still better by a factor of about three. Whether the benefits scale up to heavy lift vehicles or not I don't know (I have a 3.75-meter reusable lifter under construction but it hasn't flown yet), but I bet they do. Wanderfound's SSTO above costs 176,000 funds or so (not sure how much is fuel and/or payload) which is about twice the cost of my current expendable tanker ship (which is basically just a Jumbo tank with an engine, probe core, and docking port, launched by an expendable lifter), but being fully reusable I expect it would make up the difference after three or four missions at the most. I don't think SSTOs are dead in any sense! PS. Actually it occurs to me the rocket is not 100% stock, it uses Procedural Fairings, which are so essential I often forget they're not stock. It would perform about the same with stock fairings though, just wouldn't look as good.

I'd have lost interest long ago if not for mods, to be honest. There's no single mod I literally couldn't play the game without, but if I didn't have MechJeb to automate repetitive tasks and give me delta-v info, KAC to keep track of multiple flights, and Procedural Fairings to give me non-useless fairings (and probably one or two other mods I'm forgetting as well), I'd probably get bored and/or frustrated pretty quick. And of course there's a whole suite of cosmetic mods that I consider borderline-essential as well. That said, I do find playing the game with only stock parts to be an interesting challenge. That's ultimately the way the developers envisioned the game being played, after all. Adding part mods makes it a lot harder to keep the game balanced, things can quickly get much too easy. Personally, I like to either keep my parts catalog mostly stock, or balance out part mods (which tend to make things easier) with realism mods like TAC LS (which tend to make things harder). The end result is a similar level of difficulty on the whole, but a challenge that feels more realistic and less arbitrary and video-gamey. I could definitely still enjoy the game even if I couldn't have part mods.

Finally tore myself away from sandbox long enough to make some progress in my career save. Here's the Starlet Alice returning from the fifth mission of my SSTO program: It did a variety of odd-jobs in LKO, delivered some tourists to the Kilgore Station and back, removed some unnecessary components from Kilgore and returned them to Kerbin (helps with the part-count, plus I get some cash back), rescued a Kerbal from LKO, and bolted some retro-rockets and a chute onto a derelict Mark 1 pod, which Jebediah then flew back to KSC to be recovered. Not a particularly profitable mission but all stuff that needed doing.

Very cool! Love the interior, all the right-color lighting and everything. And working escape pods, always fun.

My dad wanted me to show him something straightforward in KSP, so I sent Jeb, Bill, and Bob to the Mun with the stock Kerbal X, fully expecting to have to rescue them later. Turned out, in spite of making a mostly MechJeb-free flight (including a rare manual descent and landing), the Kerbal X in 1.0 makes it to the Mun and back with about 100 m/s of delta-v to spare, presumably thanks to the new aero causing it to waste less fuel during ascent.

Impressive! Especially doing it in one shot. I've never even seriously contemplated a manned Eve surface expedition, I'm still working my way up to Duna. Not bothered by the non-stock parts personally, I almost never play a fully stock game and KW and B9 are two of the best mods out there in my opinion, both fill in a lot of major stock gaps.

I voted internal only, actually I have it turned up to 200% for internal and down to 25% for external. I love it in IVA view, really makes you feel the acceleration on launches and reentries. I like it in external view too, in principle, but I found the swaying effect really distracting since I could never tell whether the camera was swaying or the actual rocket, so I had to turn it way down so it's hardly noticeable anymore.

So I figured out one good way of building a Mark 3 SSTO... ...TweakScale abuse! There are a couple of odd effects but it happily carries a full Jumbo tank to orbit and back with a single TweakScaled Rapier. All well and good in sandbox mode, not sure how/if I'll use this in career though. Even if the scaled parts themselves are balanced, which I'm not 100% sure they are, unlocking 3.75-meter Rapiers at the same time as 1.25-meter ones feels like cheating. Really wish we had bigger stock air-breathing options... guess I'll have to wait for B9 to be updated.

They're complaining because they're veteran players. New players just have to learn from scratch how to fly in the new aero, veterans have to forget four years of flying in the souposphere first. (I was the opposite. I flew X-Plane for years prior to getting KSP, and never did learn to fly in the souposphere. Now that we've got actual air instead of soup, I'm happily building SSTO's.) On topic: Your Moho lander turns into a Moho flyby when it arrives and you realize you need 3 km/sec of delta-v just to burn into orbit. (That was me for sure, still haven't managed more than a flyby. Moho has given me new appreciation for why we've only orbited Mercury once in real life...)

Or you do what I did on my first one in 1.0, after not looking up how much power it would take, and put four OX-STAT's on it.