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!

So what exactly is "one burn" for landing? One perfectly timed full thrust suicide burn? This will propably lead to a lot of (semi-)crashes. (I assume no autopilot, since the space program is lacking that kind of money?) Or are we allowed to change the thrust while landing to make necessary adjustments, as long as the engine is not turned off? Is changing the thrust limit ok? What about RCS? Also, is returning home at all relevant for Jeb?

Sounds interesting, I might give this a try. Just to clarify, how is the time measured? The timing starts when the ablator starts ablating and it's stopped when everything is depleted? Can the ship have more than one heat shield and which one is tracked for the challenge in this case?

While Chatterer is a mod with a nice idea, I find the backwards gibberish very annoying after about 30 seconds in flight. If something like that would become stock please make it relaxed and subtle enough to blend into the background noise.

On low gravity worlds you can often use an EVA Kerbal to push the craft back up if you jump against the correct spot of the lander... it is dangerous, though, because most of the time I end up tipping the craft in the opposite direction.

Asteroids don't have a SOI and do not come with their own gravity, in this regard they are essentially like starship parts. As a result you can neither get into polar orbit around an asteroid nor land on it, so none of the scanners can work anyway. Just grab the asteroid and then it's simply "Drill, Baby, Drill!"

Great work, finally there's another supporter! I started to get lonely in the Dres-Supporter-VIP-Lounge - which someone should totally set up at Dres north pole! I am pretty sure that the design engineer would be granted full access as supporter by SpaceplaneAddict?

The only thing that comes to mind is to check that the target is not on the far side of Kerbin? I cannot think of anything else right now...?

I second the advice to think about Aerospikes and Vectors for the ascend. You want your final return stage as small and light as possible, especially for your first try you should work around the possible minimum - if you feel you require Mainsails you are propably trying to bring back too much stuff, so check if you cannot make it lighter. For the landing leg design you can always work around with octagonal struts and radial decouplers - attach the radial decoupler where your legs are now, and connect down from there with struts and finally attach the legs to the struts. You can get as far down as you want and can also decopule the legs at launch so you don't have to carry the extra mass. As a side note, additionally to tweaking the legs make sure that your ladders reach all the way to the bottom, otherwise your EVA Kerbals will not get back into the lander... That's really all there is to tell until we see some images to give more specific advice.

Sorry, I did not see a topic or open points list to indicate it was a known issue - Even though Forum Rules threads are important, we are all aware that they don't get as many reads as they should so it was at least possible to be unnoticed... I am curious though, why it would not simply be a matter of deleting the existing pinned threads and create new ones with the proper link. It is only one per forum section after all? I know, my naivity with computer administration and software development topics has no limits, even though I work very closely together with our company's software development guys each and every day...

I understand that you try to mimick different climate by using latitude and altitude as parameters? But actually the biomes already try to do exactly this, because the local climate also depends on additional factors. On Earth for example: Naples, Italy and NYC are located at about the same latitude and altitude, but have very different climate due to additional effects. As a consequence both places should give you different data for weather and climate experiments. I do agree that the biome system is lacking some detail, to better represent climates there would have to be things like "Temperate Grassland" and "Subtropical Grassland". There is no "Scrubland" or "Tropical Rainforest" biome, and so on. But if you do too much detail everybody will lose track. The middle ground we have at the moment is not too bad. That's for planets with atmosphere - on other the worlds latitude and altitude would propably be the relevant factors for weather and climate readings. But there is no weather anyway. It already does not make a lot of sense to do all those pressure and temperature readings in space all the time...