swjr-swis

Thou art hereby anointed in the Holy Order of Antioch, having fulfilled the Quest to its honourable completion.

Making it too hard. I shall read from the Book of Instructions, chapter two, verses nineteen through twenty-one: And the Jeb spake, saying, 'First shalt thou start a new career, granting thyself the maximum starting funds. Then shalt thou upgrade one facility, no more, no less. One shall be the number thou shalt upgrade, and the number of the upgrading shall be one. Two shalt thou not upgrade, neither upgrade thou zero, excepting that thou then proceed to one. Three is right out. Once the number one, being the only upgrade, be reached, then spawnest thou thy intrepid kerbal, who, being within sight of the Holy Twins of Ginormity, shall explore it.' Takes all of one minute maybe. Just don't let Jeb start on about the sloths and stuff.

1 and 3 unequivocally discovered. I can't confirm 2 though. I think the wormhole evaporated when they redid Kerbin's textures, so that may be why you don't see it anymore in 1.11.2. Although on mine it still looks very sandy. But the shape of that patch is unique and spot on. I do recognise the background, you're in the correct vicinity. I do however not recognise those specific towers. I went and loaded up 1.11.2 and went back and forth in time to see in what epoch those existed... but I can't find them. Any chance those are a residue of Kerbal Constructs? The only place on Kerbin with that particular structure.

Let's revive it then.

Start with something like this, and build bigger around it: Craft file: https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/SMOL-VTOL

A recently posted challenge found me sleepless and bored and ... ... .. why am I doing things with props again?!

'Distrubutur' huh? Don't eat potato chips and type...

There I went.

Ok one more then. Sally calls this The Philadelphia Experi-truss. o.O Hint: Obviously on KSC premises, but... you can't walk the walk, unless you retier the career. Same place, moments before the scientists hit the switch...

There's also this very temporary feature my kerbals named the 'Bank of Einstein-Rosen' (which incidentally may actually explain where kerbals come from and how they came to be on an otherwise uninhabited planet in a barren solar system): Hint: Thinly veiled by the sands of time, facilitated by its secondary nature, soon to be washed away by the tides of entertainment. Edit: Hmm, are youtube links suddenly no longer embedded? Just shows a non-interactable black panel for me. Gif-ified imgur link then: Bah, doesn't seem to work either, just gives me a still image. The interwebs are making me sad today. video is at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MsWeC9B3mo

Val also found this old snap of her visit to what she calls, with a mysterious grin, 'the Ginormous Twins'. Hint: Things are not as they seem. This pad is next level, yo.

Val has some fond memories of that little place.

Jolly well. In that case, I wish to nominate @Akagi to be added to the roster of intrepid explorers whose club affiliation shall not be named or discussed, and request the awardance of the appropriate amount of pointage. Have you decided by what name we shall henceforth know this quaint little lake?

Might this be the place? Terrain detail is different due to 1.3.1, but the outline of both the lake and the background mountains are pretty much identical.

There's zero need for cheesing or aero abuse, just plain spaceplane design with a minimum of drag optimization. More than once I've left to do other things with a regular spaceplane aerobraking because I only had a puff of MP/LFO left to retroburn, and couldn't lower Pe below 55 km. They would circumnavigate multiple times purely on glide, staying in that upper layer of the atmosphere with Pe only marginally lowering every orbit. If it had been the goal at the time, a minimum of reboosting at the right moments would've kept them going round and round for hours. I suspect most potential participants will be long bored before any cheesing or aero abuse would need to come into play to make a difference in top entries. The first one that enters an under 10 t LFO-only spaceplane will pretty much end this contest, because it will basically become a number-of-circumnavigations challenge and who's willing/able to babysit a craft for longer. Not contradicting that electric props may end up having more total range than LFO, or that drag optimization tricks would extend even that, but seriously, no need to go for extreme tricks off the bat.

Helpful answer is helpful nonetheless. To the top you go.

Nice! No footage? I have quite a collection of planes based on concepts you started, triggering the good ole 'Hmm but what if...' tinkering juices. Same with the Kuryakin. Speaking of things you started, a work in progress of the past days: I know, right? Me and stock props? Even Jeb looks flabbergasted.

Are you running into any specific issue? I don't find Mk2 inherently harder than other hulls to work with, just the payload space requiring some creative thinking in cramming functionality into a 1.25m cross section. When you say 'explore', what do you have in mind? Will you be using it on worlds with atmosphere only, so it can be optimized for spaceplane glide trajectories? Or do you need it on airless worlds, which will need you to decide whether you want/need to land on the tail or VTOL-style? Or is it for transfer and/or low orbit only? Depending on what you want or hope to do with it, there's a whole range of Mk2 hull spaceplanes/shuttles on KerbalX.com you can get ideas from.

See https://kerbalx.com/Janus92/Flagship

<signals the waiter> I want whatever they had. In fact, two portions, please.

In my defense: it was built in 1.2.2; DLC didn't exist yet so there wasn't much of a choice. Been toying with updating this to at least 1.3.1, so the aero performance is up to date with all the later versions. I just haven't got around to it yet. The Wright brothers went through a number of different iterations of their Flyer, and record of the differences is sketchy at best, so it's hard to put a finger on exactly what iteration this is most like. I added it under the Wright Flyer "B", because the military version was the one that added a machine gun, I think. I've seen no pictures that show the whole of that one, and I've never been to the museum, so I don't know for sure. If you think it should be otherwise let me know.

That'd be my top suggestion too for a stock career. If I may add a tip to this which might make things a bit easier: Minmus is so ridiculously easy to land on compared to Mun that it actually pays off to not even bother circularizing when you get there. The dV you'd use to circularize can be used to make a safe landing and have a bit more margin for the trip back. Either way, it's totally worth the trip for the amount of science you'll get. Edit: and congrats on the Mun landing of course... almost forgot the most important thing I wanted to say.

Ambiguous instructions are ambiguous. Ok never mind then.

Also spoilered since it also was the wrong tunnel.

I guess it would be appropriate to start off with, well, the start of it all? https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/Kerman-Flyer "It's an older model, sir, but it checks out." Would this qualify? There are some obvious concessions to the likeness, but as pure stock non-DLC replicas go, this is pretty close. Up to you though.