RocketPropelledGiraffe

Nice one. I get a completely submerged KSC a lot, never saw it partially under water though. Maybe it is connected to the real earth, I would guess Flight Control in Houston propably faces similar problems at the moment... I assume, in my case, that it is a problem in one of the beauty-mods, going to the VAB and back fixes it so I don't really care.

I assume getting to the Mun and to Kerbin involves landing? E.g. Take off Kerbin, get to the Mun and land there, take off the Mun and land on Kerbin, and repeat? Are we allowed to refuel, dock, assemble several craft in orbit? Or is this SSTO only?

Pretty far. http://imgur.com/a/kyuCM This was a challenge done early after full release, with a similar idea for limited career start launches. Granted, I did not land on the moon and Val was still not picked up on Laythe, but still.... Edit: I did not link the actual challenge thread, sorry:

Since it looks somewhat like a swan in flight: CYGNUS! Make that Cygnus X-1 for black hole features, especially if you want to attract the Kraken!

Careful now! I sense that there could be someone in this thread, who is having fun wrong!!

If I wanted to play Railroad Tycoon, why would I buy Kerbal 2?

I thought the EVA pack hat about 500 m/s, so it will propably work without pushing? Another thought, just in theory - I usually don't have the patience for optimization like that. How much delta-v do you save if you take a gravity assist from Mun to Minmus?

The Twin-Boar+Can gets you to the Mun but you cannot make orbit. When you launch at the proper time the Twin-Boar+seat can propably get you to Minmus, but I think that's it, unless you want to land in EVA, which is entirely possible of course. At least that's it from the KSC - Now how much Delta-v do I save when launching from a high mountain on Kerbin *looks at the "Launch from somewhere else" challenge...*

There is a limit to how many SOI changes are plotted in advance, you can change it in the settings.cfg file. Close the game, open settings.cfg with a text editor and find the entry "patchedconicslimit". That's the number of SOI changes that are plotted for your trajectory - set the number to 5 or 7 and try again in game, you should be able to see where you are going after a gravity assist. Be sure to save a backup of your settings-file before you mess with it, of course.

For the parachutes, just bring along some drogues. I use them all the time since 1.0.5 and feel a lot safer with them (I never used them before). You propably still need a little thrust for the final landing, but the parachutes do help even in the thin atmosphere. The trajectory projection was always problematic for interplanetary missions when your encounter was close to the SOI edge, but I somehow got the impression that it is worse in the newer versions. Recently I encountered problems with a Duna transfer even for a projected trajectory within Ike's orbit, which used to work fine for me.

I am not sure for stock KSP. Gilly with its high eccentricity would certainly be affected the most - What SOI reduction would we be talking about? The basic in-game consequence would be to simply make all orbits tighter so there will be no accidents during time warp. Most people (including me) propably don't enjoy continuously shepherding all their missions, they would just bring more delta v to avoid the effects. And if everyone would avoid the effect, then what's the point anyway? Now for comets, that's a different story entirely. First of all, comets should totally be in stock. If they are implemented with their own SOI and gravity (and a Rosetta-Philae style mission would be soooo cool) the resulting problems have to be dealt with reasonably and as realistically as possible within the bounds of KSP's simplifications. That not only includes the details for orbiting probes and possibly variable SOI - although a stable orbit should always be possible to avoid the shepherding problem - but also interaction with other bodies. If a Gilly-sized comet flies very close to Bop there should be an effect. Dealing with all of this is devastating for the on-rails system, that's why we will propably never see it in stock and propably also why Squad chose to give the asteroids no gravity of their own. I am pretty sure that was the most sensible decision, even though it makes me a little sad everytime I encounter an asteroid... Edit: Ok, I just put in the numbers really quick for Gilly. Assuming that instead a constant SOI size based on the semi-major axis the SOI is calculated dynamically using the actual distance between Eve and Gilly, the SOI at apoeve would be 195 km and 56 km at perieve. That's certainly a big difference, but there would still be no problems to maintain a stable orbit.

It's a super cool feature, and one of KSP's best-kept secrets. I did not know that, it's always awesome with you guys. Thanks!

Is this true, there is actually a compensation for RCS when in precision mode?

It seems to me that the topics of "hot" challenges are mainly planes and SSTO, I guess there are two main reasons for that: 1. Aero- and spaceplanes offer a lot of optimization potential. Small design changes can have a huge impact on the performance. This is a huge playground for those optimizers and tweakers out there, who love to scratch even the last m/s of deltav out of a given design. 2. "Normal" space-related challenges need a very catchy special feature to make them popular. To stay on the "first page of awesome" instead of the "second page of doom" requires constant posting, which mainly has to come from the most active people in the forums. Let's face it - the games has been around for quite some time now, and the most active forum people are mostly also very active players. "Normal" space related challenges without a very unique feature will often just earn you a "been there, done that" response. The obvious exception are challenges that have been around some time or return regularly, just because they feel "natural" for everyone playing a while - Returning from Eve or doing Jool-V type missions are appealing to almost anyone who picks up the game and most people want to do it at least once. Personally, I do not enjoy optimizing planes as much. It just feels like work to me and not so much like recreation, which is what I look for in a game. I also do not have a lot of time to play anymore, so I will generally not consider the very time consuming challenges like Elcano. Regarding the original post: I thought the burn-down-the-ablator thing was a nice idea, but too much optimization necessary to do well. All things considered, I do not post enough to keep anything on the first page anyway...

Before the first successful landing I crashed a couple of minimalistic landers, until I realized that the deltav map numbers for landings should always be multiplied by 1.2 (or even more when you are unexperienced), because they represent highly efficient maneuvers with almost no margin of error - certainly not what Kerbals are doing in their space flights. All my crashes got me frustrated, but once I had redesigned my lander with a huge amount of deltav to finally be successful it certainly felt twice as rewarding!