IncongruousGoat

Could this thread be locked? The challenge has been moved to a new maintainer:

The new thread can be found here, courtesy of @Stamp20:

There's no real good way to say this, but: I'm looking for someone to take over maintenance of this challenge. My ability to keep up with this forum and with developments in the KSP community has been decreasing steadily for a while now, with time increasingly consumed by work and my other hobbies, and I've come to feel that I'm no longer capable of doing this challenge justice as its maintainer. If you're interested in taking the challenge over, please let me know. Otherwise, it's been a sincere pleasure to see the amazing things people have come up with for this challenge, and I wish all of those with submissions in the works the best of luck. This thread will stay open until the next one is up and running, but I'd ask that people not post any submissions here - instead, hold them for the new thread.

@king of nowhere Congratulations on completing the Ultimate Challenge for a second time! Grand tours with Kerbalism are hard, and grand tours that don't use ISRU are hard, but one that does both, plus long-distance rover driving, at hard difficulty, is in a category all its own. Well done indeed! The hall of fame has been updated to include your latest entry .

Don't worry about it - I was intending to waive the rule in this case, since (given the radiation exposure constraints imposed by Jool) I'm not sure it's actually possible to follow with Kerbalism installed. Besides, that rule is designed to prevent submissions consisting of a whole bunch of independent interplanetary missions all launched at the same time, which is not what you did. Speaking of which... Congratulations on completing the Ultimate Challenge! Completing the challenge at all is a noteworthy accomplishment all on its own, but you went ahead and did it under the constraints of Kerbalism. I didn't even think it was possible, going in, but I'm glad to say you proved me wrong. The hall of fame has been updated, and you may pick up the badge at your leisure.

In my experience the Reliant is far more useful than the Swivel, even though it lacks gimbal. The Reliant is .25t lighter and has markedly better Isp, which really makes the difference when trying for something like a Mun flyby. The lack of gimbal does hurt, but I've found it's possible to get away with just capsule reaction wheels if you're careful about aerodynamic stability on ascent. Funding is less of a problem in NCD than it might initially seem, actually. Before orbit, you're spending a lot less money than you'd think, since rockets are cheap and science is so scarce that you're not spending a lot of money on unlocking parts. Then, once you can get into orbit, it's possible to generate infinite money by farming survey contracts, which makes the whole problem moot. NCD is pretty grindy, but it's not quite that bad. If you look at existing submissions the most anyone has done is 19 Mun landings, one per biome (and that was me, doing things in a stupid and brute-force way). It's possible to get enough science/tech to land on Minmus just from Kerbin & low/high orbit science, and being able to land on Minmus opens up enough science to either let you clean out a Mun biome in a single mission, or to go interplanetary and get science that way.

They're fine if they start off as part of the original ship.

As a further reminder, the challenge rules are flexible. In this case, I'm willing to waive the "one Kerbal lands everywhere" requirement, since it's near-impossible to fulfill when using Kerbalism.

There's a couple of semi-sneaky things I did to get as much science as possible out of science rollers. Here's the full procedure I used: 1. Very carefully roll the science roller over to the target biome 2. Collect 1 crew report and 1 Mystery Goo 3. Have Bob go on EVA & collect EVA science 4. Have Bob retrieve the science from every container and store it into one of the capsules 5. Collect the other Goo 6. Have Bob take the science from that Goo experiment and store it in the other capsule 7. Use Bob's scientist powers to restore both Goo experiments 8. Get Bob back in his capsule 9. Go to step 1 One additional thing to note is that, if you get rolling fast enough while traveling between biomes, you can sometimes get "flying over <insert space center biome here>" science, which is worth more than ground science.

I'm fine with it, as long as that's the only thing you bring over and the only thing you use it for is science messages.

Given that you're working under the constraints of Kerbalism (!), I'm more than willing to consider it. I've been thinking about adding an honorable mention section to the hall of fame for a while now, for submissions that don't quite follow the rules but are still worth looking at.

Yep, looks like this thread is still locked. *click*

The surefire thing to do here is to put it (and any other small science you bring along) inside a service bay. Those have a really high heat tolerance, to the point of working as substitute heat shield, and as a bonus work as a great airbrake if you open the bay doors. You still need a parachute to land safely, but the airbrake effect is nice for those times when the capsule ends up pointed the wrong way during descent.

Advanced Construction, for fairings. After that the best choice is probably Propulsion Systems, for good probe and lander engines & tanks, but you need fairings to take full advantage of those.