Chiron0224

yeah, I saw that. Even though he probably had the idea on his own rather than as a response to this challenge, I'll add him to the board anyway.

I personally didn't and the challenge doesn't require it but you are certainly welcome to in order to increase realism.

I think many of you have hit the nail on the head. I think a memorial for Yuri Gagarin would be quite appropriate since he was first in space and Armstrong for the moon landing. Additional astronauts would go well on like a big monolith that would count for all fallen astronauts. As for the argument that there are a lot of games about space, that's true but this game is specifically about spaceflight whereas Elite: Dangerous is sci fi, so it's apples and oranges. This game in particular would make sense to have memorials in it, but I agree with not flooding it for every single astronaut ever.

Sorry to keep messing up the scoring. I'm trying to figure out the best way to do it.

@tg626 Nice! I like it better than the one I'm building right now. For scoring purposes, what's the tonnage?

Godspeed John Glenn. This is my first time submitting a challenge but I felt that this would be a great way to honor a great man. The challenge is this, launch a one manned capsule into Kerbal orbit using a launch vehicle with restrictions inspired by the Atlas that John Glenn used in Mercury. 1. All of the capsule's liquid fuel engines must ignite on the ground. 2. The capsule needs to complete orbit and de-orbit with solid rockets 3. The capsule must sit atop a liquid fueled rocket that is not separated into verticle stages and must have extra engines that stage off during ascent (basically no verticle staging, but the rocket must have a "half stage" with one big tank and staged off engines like an Atlas). 4. Capsule must return to Kerbin safely and splash down. Screw scoring. Let's just honor John Glenn. If you honored Glenn you go on the board. Tributes thus far (in no particular order). 1. @tg626 2. @Jestersage 3. @Rhomphaia 4. @JacobJHC 5. @Chiron0224 6. @illectro <- Scott didn't respond directly to this challenge but I added him to the board of tributes for having the same idea and doing it on his channel here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9OQOgMg80s No cheaty mods obviously and no Bluedog (you can't just build an actual atlas). Let me know if I need to tweak this challenge at all. I don't imagine it will be all that difficult for many of you, I'm mostly just doing this as a community salute of sorts EDIT: finally did my submission https://imgur.com/gallery/LEiBn

Godspeed John Glenn. I will be flying an Atlas rocket using Bluedog Design Bureau in his honor tonight when I get home from work.

helped tremendously. Also DPAI has already been mentioned several times in this thread and I'll say that I won't play without it. I dock all the time now. My Duna mission that I did recently was Apollo style and I often build orbital stations over the course of multiple launches.

I'm to the point now where in career mode I turn of respawning and manage to have my Kerbals live long enough to retire. My exception is Jeb. For some reason (and I'm not doing this on purpose) I manage to kill Jebediah in every single career save game. It's not a matter of him having a long enough career that death becomes inevitable. I manage to actually retire Valentina and some other pilots most of the time. I just always end up killing Jeb due to bad luck.

One trick is to arrange them in accordance with the faces of a platonic solid. Another way to say that is to arrange them like the faces of a die. So if you know the dice used in D&D this will be familiar, if not you can google them. So if you have 4 solar panels you want to arrange them in the pattern of the surfaces of a tetrahedron (or d4 to continue the die analogy) if you have 6 arrange them in the six faces of a cube, if 8 then arrange them like an octahedron or d8. These arrangements will guarantee that at least one of them is always facing the sun. I should also note that certain shapes are made necessary by the design of your craft (for example, it would be hard to do the cube since the bottom of your craft has an engine where your panel should go, but you could do a tetrahedron instead).

My most recent fail is that I sent a mission to Duna and they pulled off their objectives without issue and then burned for home. I got an encounter with Kerbin but I forgot to do a midcourse correction to fine tune it. They entered Kerbin's SOI but they were so high in the gravity well and were going so fast that they didn't have enough fuel to get a capture and come home. I then launched a big expensive rocket with a probe core to go rescue them and bring them home. I set my maneuver node to execute an escape burn that would get me a close rendezvous as well and started to burn only to realize that my node had me pointed into Kerbin's atmosphere and the rescue craft wound up burning up in atmo. I then launched another big expensive rescue rocket only to realize after putting it into orbit that it doesn't have an antenna. I then launched yet another big expensive rescue rocket (my agency is now almost bankrupt) and this time I put an empty three man capsule on it for the crew being rescued and a one man capsule for the pilot so that I don't have to have a damned probe core and antenna this time. lol. Here's hoping this one works.

There's this mod But a master list of transfer windows would be cool since I assume they fall on the same days on the same years in every career mode.

Manned Duna landing is probably your next step. I've only done it a couple of times but I do mine Apollo style with a Command and service mother ship and a disposable lander. One advantage that Duna has is that it has an atmosphere so you can make use of parachutes to help kill velocity thus conserving a lot of fuel on the lander. Here is an album of my own Duna mission, don't click if you don't want spoilers and want to figure it out on your own but do click it if you want an example of one way it can be done http://imgur.com/gallery/BCeWu

It took me a second but I realized that you were combining "Space" with "Pesos". Freaking brilliant.

First off, in the future questions like these belong in Gameplay Questions/Tutorials. The mods will probably move this thread soon. With that out of the way you'll notice that decouplers have little red arrows on them. The direction the arrow is pointing shows the part that will be removed and the wide part of the arrow is the part that will remain attached to the decoupler. So in your picture you have a decoupler on one end that will be forever attached. The other decoupler, with the fuel tank still attached will be able to decouple completely taking the fuel tank with it. If you can't find it in the staging sequence you can also right click and then click "decouple". Hope that helps Bonus tip: Decouplers only decouple one direction as mentioned above but stack separators decouple above and below so for certain applications they are what you need.

So a couple of people have mentioned that it's a similar name to the Rigel in Orion and it's no coincidence. Rigel means "foot" and in Orion it refers to the star that represents his foot. In Centaurus Rigil Kentaurus means "foot of the Centaur" so it's no surprise that the names are similar. The spelling difference apparently boils down to transliteration from Arabic. The star remains Alpha Centauri because it's the Alpha star in that constellation, it just now has an officially recognized common name (which was in use for a really long time anyhow).

It's important to remember what SAS is and what it isn't. SAS is not: Omnipotent. It won't magically hold a poorly designed rocket straight. It can only do so much A control authority. SAS won't steer the vessel if it doesn't have any means to steer it. You still need reaction wheel torque, RCS, fins (in atmo), and/or engine gimbal in order to steer the ship. SAS is autopilot, not a rudder. A pilot. The craft still needs either a pilot or a probe core. In 1.2 the probe core needs a signal in order to work so you'll need to put an antenna on it. It's very possible that if your probe doesn't have an antenna that your rocket will ascend for a bit and then suddenly go out of control as it no longer has a signal. It's also worth pointing out the SAS is limited on some probe cores and not all probe cores have reaction wheels built in (see entry above about control authority). SAS is: Stability assist. If you have means of controlling your rocket, it's built aerodynamically stable, fuel flows logically to maintain a forward COM, you have a probe core with appropriate SAS capacity or a pilot (specifically a pilot, not an engineer or scientist) then and only then can SAS keep it flying strait. Also a picture of your rocket might help identify any design flaws.

Very nice. It reminds me of this comic https://xkcd.com/1356/

Mechjeb has an autopilot feature which could be used to launch consistently. Not sure if you consider that cheating but bear in mind that these are unmanned craft and would fly mostly by programmed autopilot in real life anyhow.

Sounds like something that belongs in mission reports to be honest.

I did a Mun mission recently and realized once I achieved Mun orbit that, due to the new way that fairings work, the fairing had auto strutted in such a way that it was permanently bolted to the heat shield of the lander. The fairing base was part of the TMI stage of my rocket so I had this whole dead stage bolted to my lander. I had to use the lander's engines to return to Kerbin and then tried to bring the whole stupid mess in through the atmosphere. I spun the whole thing to prevent overheating and then when there were no more mach effects I jettisoned the heat shield to get rid of the TMI stage which somehow survived re-entry. The whole assembly flew back through the capsule due to atmospheric drag and destroyed the capsule, killing its occupant. This is in my custom hard career mode where there is not quicksaving or reverting. RIP Podsey Kerman.

I recently accomplished my first Duna landing and here's how I did it. I build the lander and then packed on a ton of parachutes. I had 4 drogues, 4 radials, and 4 of the biggest nosecone style (my lander had 4 radial fuel tanks so each one was capped with a big chute). I used my thrusters to decelerate in the upper atmosphere until my drogues could open. Then I opened the drogues and let them slow me down and then opened the mains. I then relaxed until the drag on the chutes killed my horizontal and vertical momentum and I was falling slowly. Then I extended gears and used a little bit of thrust to bring my descent speed down to 5m/s at the last moments. Easy peesy. EDIT: Imgur album of the mission http://imgur.com/gallery/BCeWu

I concur, now if they would only UPDATE THEM FOR 1.2!!! Seriously though I know not to poke the bears, they are working as hard as they can. I am getting anxious though because I've just gotten to that point in my current career save where my eyes turn to Duna and the other planets.

I actually got one in 1.1 so they aren't brand new. It's kind of a funny story, I had a Mun landing go really bad on me and used the tried and true "get out and jump at the last second" method of saving my Kerbal's life. So he was stranded on Mun with no EVA propellant (having used it to try not to hit the surface to hard) and the mission comes through. And I had the experience of not realizing what I was getting into when I accepted it. I ended up sending a probe controlled rescue craft to land near him and just had him use that to finish up the mission and then come home.

Me too! I keep a very detailed excel spreadsheet of all my missions with prime and backup crews status, results, launch vehicle, etc.