suicidejunkie

People have planted flags and collected surface samples from Jool. They were even more concerning. And there are vehicles that can descend and return to orbit which are very Kerbal. I don't think anyone has actually combined the two for a sample return mission however.

Add Moar Struts achieved: It was still wobbly; the Kerbals fled the physics bubble in the truck. The RTG powered DTS-M1 on top + Omni is designed provide contact with a matching reflector on Mun, and bring Kerbal Internet to the southern continents of Kerbin.

Design vehicles with struts (or autostruts) The closest I got was adding some KAS strut points in-situ to stiffen an ore->docking port->docking port->battery stack combo that was making my munar shuttle into a bobblehead miner, but it wasn't worth the EVA in the end. A 30 degree kink in the rocket stack at 30km up is a piloting challenge followed by a design review, not a revert-and-add-struts moment. (Executive summary; LV-N is no longer allowed as a joint between rockomax+ sized stages despite the success of the mission) Edit: Until today. Add Moar Struts achieved: South pole Radio Tower for contact with Mun

Two to three early game. My handy mun lander used a 909 + FL-T400 + payload to get 2km/s on the ascent/return stage, then four tanks + 909 for the 2km/s transfer+lander stage. The tourister booster's boosters have 3-way symmetry for 9 tanks vs 4 in the core, and it works good enough for me. Later on the ratio is undefined, since it is SSTO or bust.

Launched an SSTO spaceplane to go rescue a Kerbal in Mun orbit. Packed on the pilot and four passengers to deliver while I was heading to Mun anyways. I got to the Munar station, and swapped out my 3-star passengers for the local 1-star rookies, and took off to finish the training. Just as I finished the escape burn to take me to Minmus, I realized I forgot to pick up the rescuee. And this was the third bus to have flown past the poor, stranded, very forgettable Kerbal.

I designed a nice big all-in-one ISRU+Greenhouse base module for supporting 8+ Kerbals. I was careful to measure and make sure the strut legs were long enough to clear the Strut&Spacedock "X-pad" it would be built from with EL. After many many days of work, it was ready to deploy. And then it immediately started a slow tip over and shattered into pieces on impact, because I'd forgotten to remove the Xpad copy I'd stuck on the bottom to measure the leg height. The south pole radio tower team is working on a second copy of it now, but at least the process is going faster now that there is a big pile of scrap metal to supplement the terrible rate on the drills.

Don't cut the throttle? The RO is all about these realistic limitations. Or do you mean that there's a physics thing and your engine is shutting down without touching the keyboard? Also, do you still have oxidizer to go with the fuel? Depending on the type, things boil off over time.

Going back to orienting your sticks with the fire end upwards? You will not go to space today!

You've already done the actions that could have completed hundreds of contracts, except for the clicking 'accept' part, and the getting scorepoints money part. You'd also have a bunch of points from the world firsts. Its not grinding hundreds of part tests or something absurd like that. Instead it is putting comm relays up, and planting flags and orbiting/landing/doing science around. And overbuilding your rocket to the point it can carry tourists perhaps. The sort of things you've already done in sandbox, except for the challenge of chaining combos at lowest cost with limited parts.

I have 5 in orbit; 2 running the science lab, 1 engineer who has been moonlighting as a surface-to-orbit shuttle pilot, and 2 low level scientists sitting around waiting for the training bus. I've got a pilot being delivered so that engineer can get back to real work. Then there's two more engineers on the surface working Munbase Alpha to generate fuel and supplies. So, a semi-permanent population of 6, with 6-8 temporary visitors on top. My Kerbals are pretty evenly distributed between Mun, Minmus, Kerbin and deep space (aka Dres)

I'll be testing that as I work. For the Munar connection (if I don't get signal earlier), I plan to build the tower and then place an independent probe gently atop it as a separate vessel... then run away quickly and unload the physics while giggling madly and/or evil-laughing.

I have been building out a surface grid of comm relays, and the southern hemisphere of Kerbin has a distinct lack of convenient mountains with LoS to the northern hemisphere. But look, I hear a little voice say; the south pole is such a nice place, with a constant view of the sun! How about a relay there that will be able to reflect signals off the mun and back to a station in the north which would then kindly forward the connection on to KSC! And hey; it would even be able to mount giant antennas for pointing at planets with constant contact all day and forever as well! From the mountain closest to the pole, I found it took a mere 5 relays flat on the ice cap to reach the pole (12.5km of radio distance with only 30m of terrain height!). A good sign surely! But no, it was not to be. When I finally sat down to determine how many struts and ladders I would need to assemble the radio tower with KAS, the harsh facts of geometry show their true nature. 1) The mun is 11400km away. The radius of kerbin is 600km. This means a 0.053 radian angle is needed to get LoS over the horizon. 2) Those 0.053 radians are 31.564km away from Kerbin's spin axis, as the tunnel bores. 3) Said tunnel ends up 869m beneath sea level of the pole, or 899m below the ice cap. 4) 0.053 radians on the LoS, across 31.564km to the axis, leaves a shocking 1.661km of height. 5) 1.661 km, minus the 899m to reach the ice cap, leaves... 800m of tower to build in order to see the equator of mun. Settling for sight of the matching pole of mun (200km higher up, giving 0.035 radians for the LoS angle), drops the tower requirement to 340m. To me this seems slightly plausible. It will take a KAS screwdriver, a huge pile of girders, many many ladders, and nerves of steel. Maybe a bucket of struts as well. However, the relay pairs on the way to the pole managed 12.5 km with only 30m of altitude each... 12.5km around Kerbin is almost 0.021 radians. If we build a ring of towers 12.5km from the pole, we'd only need 0.014 radians of sight line to see the pole of Mun. And that, my friends, works out to just 31m of radio tower above the polar cap. Hardly monumental, and in fact nearly trivial. It would require an infinite number of towers forming a circular wall at just 31m, but we can build them a little taller than that, and have 3 evenly spread instead. My dream of a single giant tower on the pole with LoS to everything always and forever will be quite Kerbal, and it shall be attempted, but it is still good to know that there is still a practical fallback option remaining. (And of course, if we neglect Mun, all other planets and moons are easily in LoS to Kerbin's poles thanks to the incredible distances; inclination means they'll only see one pole, but that's fine)

I'd say that's more a result of spending absurd amounts of dV for your trip over and above the minimum requirements. All else being equal, spreading the thrust out hurts you. If you expend the same amount of dV in a shorter time at the start and end, you'll go much faster on average and spend even less time exposed in space as you travel.

I've had plenty of tipped Mun landers because I didn't bother changing the design, so here's a list of rescue ideas: 1) Roll the vehicle along the ground and bounce the nose off a flagpole and then gun the engine while pointing roughly upwards. 2) KAS +screwdriver to move the landing gear to the front and lift the nose. EVA and remove lopsided gear while in a suborbital tumble, then proceed to orbit. 3) Use precisely timed engine burns to rock the ship back and forth on the edge of a hill until the momentum gets you sufficiently vertical. 4) Instruct probe computer to hold radial orientation, then get out and stomp/kick/headbutt until rocket rights itself. 5) Disassemble rocket completely. Reassemble from the bottom up in the proper orientation for launch. 6) Roll into a crater, then use the edge as a launch ramp. Destroy engine in the attempt. Wait for a rescue ship. Then wait for a bigger rescue ship. Then wait for 2.5m research. Then wait for a rockomax sized rescue bus with wide stance.

I had never even thought about making a maneuver node for entering orbit. Even the non-sassy engineers can handle "pointy end forward, then go faster until you're safe". Any craft that has enough non-panicking time during the launch to make a node doesn't need it...

I like it as an overhead command dome for ground bases. Useful for wrangling Kerbals in habitat modules doing science (MPL) or engineering (EL) without needing an actual command pod. And since I have a mountain-mounted world-wide-web of RT relays, there's always a connection to KSC.

Sorry, the high part counts and mentions of Xenon tanks got me on the wrong idea, and the images are blocked at work.

There would be no atmospheric phase in this idea; you don't have any probe cores unlocked, and Kerbals aren't allowed outside the VAB, so the engines can't be started. The rocket will remain in the pre-launch landed state, unless it tips over on physics load. By getting it to move under the force of gravity, it will count as launched, and then you can recover it for Science! Not likely *enough* science to research a probe core, unless you turn up the science % to max, of course.

Now I'm imagining a stroller propped up on cubic octagonal struts in the bad part of the space center.

If you design an unbalanced rocket that will fall over when physics kicks in, you can get science points for recovering "A vessel that survived a flight" If you allow for Kerbals to walk around the surface without getting into a rocket, you could also scrape up enough to get a probe core by kicking things around and doing the KSC science. Or you could just skip that by setting the starting science points to 35 or so in order to buy a stayputnick right off the bat.

I'd suggest some large LF tanks and an LV-N. I'm sending a crewed rescue chaser to catch my Dres colonizer, and 10k LF + LV-N goes pretty darn fast even with 2 tons of payload. Using Mk3 fuel tanks, that comes in at only about 10 parts for the interplanetary bit (including lifesupport) to get 14km/s, and a pair of drop tanks to stage off could do the rest to get you to 21km/s for the cost of 6 more parts and 20k more LF. You'd of course be swapping out the pod for a probe core, and the lifesupport for large relay antennae.

On Mun, the difference is only about 20m/s. As Valentina discovered in my career, that is not sufficient margin for a soft landing when the math says you will just barely make it with a perfect burn. Thank goodness for lithobraking.

What if there were a Monolith floating in Jool somewhere you could ~carefully~ land on?

What about a floating storage yard? Do you still have trouble with physics load if the craft is splashed down and there are no hard surfaces to explode against?

This post triggered an idea. The challenge here is to build the most impressive spaceship you can from parts solely launched by other space agencies: 1) Accept Kerbal rescue and part recovery contracts 2) Gather up the command modules, fuel tanks, engines and whatever else you are given. 3) Bolt your collection of junk parts together into a functional vehicle using KAS 4) Apply Klaw to fuel and charge your creation for some test flights. 5) Get points for technical merit and artistic impression with screenshots and stats. Bonus points if the vessel can be its own recovery craft and land on Kerbin to complete all the contracts. Given that you won't ever get non-root parts, things will be a bit more difficult on the technical side. Having to assemble by hand will mean a lack of symmetry making things more difficult on the artistic side.