IncongruousGoat

I put salt on my toast.

Sadness!

Good idea! Distributed version control is what we need, and distributed version control is what Git/GitHub are for. We can just make a private GitHub repo, hook everyone's GitHub accounts up to it, and we'll be off to the races. Assuming we can get everyone else on board with this plan, of course.

Either way is fine. Nothing we're building is going to be over 30 parts anyways, so remaking lander designs and whatnot isn't a huge burden.

Floor -24: You find a clean, well-lit, tastefully decorated apartment inhabited by mole people. You quickly apologize for breaking into their apartment while they were eating dinner and keep heading down.

This one I'm going to have to disagree with. The second bullet point just adds grind (farming survey contracts is not exactly hard), and I (and probably @Muetdhiver) have broken the first one already. Plus, I like being able to test things. If this were being done as part of a proper caveman run I would agree, but it's not, and the nature of this challenge means that we're going to need to build some down-to-the-wire landers, i.e. the kinds of things that need lots of testing. Also, I've lost a Jool 5 before to a bad Tylo lander design and I don't care to repeat the experience. Given that I'm the one who proposed this in the first place, I totally agree. I'm going to wait and see what everyone else thinks for this one. The problem here is that I don't own either DLC, and while I'm not entirely against picking up one (or maybe both, though I can't see how MH would help here) for this, this would probably be the only time I got any use out of it. If there's popular demand for BG, I'll go with it, but for now I'm going to keep planning and testing in stock. As for the other rules (the ones that currently lack suggestions), my recommendations are: KSP version 1.7.3 throughout. Less chance of the save breaking, less trouble updating things, easier to co-ordinate, and makes it easier to judge the attempt if 1.7.4/1.8 change something in a weird way. Follow Jool-5 rules. The do-the-trip-in-a-pod rule was removed, and with that out of the way it's not hard to follow the rules, with all the restrictions we're working under. Difficulty setting normal, other than CommNet. Quicksave/quickload are going to be vital, and re-entry heating above 100% will make Laythe substantially more difficult than it already is.

I blame @KSK

Thanks! If you look closely, the radiators are attached to a decoupler. They're designed to be ditched at the start of the ascent. As for the docking port, you can always just tack that (and a .625m separator) onto the bottom. It's only necessary while en route, assuming we don't want to use this specific Kerbal tube for Kerbin re-renty. I don't know if I'll have any time to work on this tonight, but I'll definitely be trying to get this lander to work over the weekend. Oh, and @ManEatingApe - if you think there's enough interest between the three of us, we might want to start that separate thread? Mission planning alone is going to eat up several pages of thread space.

Peppercorn's same sun

@Muetdhiver I think I've found a solution to the Laythe problem. We obviously can't use a crew capsule based lander since it would be way too heavy, so we need some kind of ladder-based lander. Additionally, we need the ladder to be enclosed in one of the parts that blocks heating so our Kerbal doesn't overheat like we've been seeing from putting the ladder in a structural fuselage. There are 3 such classes of parts in-game: service bays (too small), cargo bays (we don't have any), and fairings. A "normal" fairing isn't going to work because there's no way to get inside, but there is something we can do. If you take a 1.25m decoupler, put a fairing base under it, offset the fairing base down a ways, and then build an interstage fairing ending at the decoupler, you get a hollow tube with an opening that blocks heating for any loose parts (and Kerbals) inside it. You can put ladders inside by attaching them to the decoupler and then offsetting them into place. The assemblage looks something like this (built upside-down, for reasons that will be explained later): I've confirmed that the heat occlusion part of this works great, but I haven't gotten a working lander design yet. I don't own Breaking Ground, so I've been working without hinges, but that hasn't been too much of an impediment since the Kerbal can just enter the lander from the bottom instead of the top. It does require some cleverness on descent, since the craft needs to be pointed nose-first (I think? Heat occlusion is weird), but I've been solving this problem by using a shuttlecock/landing pad arrangement built out of radiators. My current lander design looks like this: It fits within part limits, it's stable on descent, and can make it all the way to landing with an intact Kerbal. However, it's not aerodynamically stable on ascent, and I'm not super sure it's got enough dV due to drag losses from Laythe's souposphere. I hope it can be made to work with just some re-arrangement of the tanks to move the center of drag back, but the design might be fundamentally flawed. Also, I found a new bug in KSP. If a Kerbal enters the water while holding onto a ladder and then lets go of the ladder, the physics engine forgets that the Kerbal is underwater and the Kerbal falls to their death on the ocean floor. For our purposes, this means that it's probably for the best if we shoot to land on land on Laythe.

Option C, but only for launches out of LC-39A and SLC-40. Vandenberg AFB (SLC-4E) still has the old strongback. They've been doing this for a few years now, if memory serves. According to SpaceX, it's safer this way since the strongback supports the rocket on the pad right up until liftoff. Also, it looks much more awesome, which I'm sure must have factored into it at some point.

As promised, here's a Tylo lander design: It weighs 2.128 tons and has 17 parts, so it can be put in space without any pad assembly at all (hooray). Initial testing was highly successful; I was able to get it down to the surface and back to orbit on my first try with enough of a margin (180 m/s) left for a rendezvous. Annoyances with ladder warping aside, it seems highly promising.

@Muetdhiver I dunno if that would save mass down the line, though. For all the landers (other than Laythe), all you need for a "chair" is a ladder and maybe a couple batteries to hold the Kerbal in place, which is pretty darn light. I'm especially worried about Tylo; the high dV requirement makes lander mass go up like crazy with payload mass, and we're going to have to put it up in one launch if it's going to work at all because of how wonky docking port staging is. It's getting a bit late tonight, but I'll see if I can test out a lander design tomorrow after work.

@guesswho2778 I gotta say, a song about Morrowind was the last thing I expected to find in this thread.

Tested in 1.6.1 with Principia, and it seems to work. Unfortunately, the plane I was trying to test did not. Trying to break the sound barrier with an airplane in RP-1 is hard. I think I'm gonna do it by strapping a cockpit onto an A4 clone instead...

Actually, we're in the clear here. As per the Jool 5 rules: " Use Normal difficulty or harder, except, any ComNet settings are allowed including turning it off completely. ". As per past judgements on the Caveman Challenge, custom difficulty saves get stuck into the highest category whose difficulty settings are the same or easier across the board as the custom save, so we would get categorized as an "Easy" caveman. But I don't really care - I was planning on using a manufactured save with a pile of starting funds and science anyways. The real challenge here is the Jool 5 itself, not setting up the save. I like the radiator cup you have there, but I have to wonder about the mini plane idea. Laythe is a tricky beast, and building a light SSTO with caveman tech is hard. Every time I've done a Jool 5, I've had a much easier time getting lander mass down for Tylo than for Laythe. Hmmm. I like it, especially since it means it might actually get done (I certainly don't have enough spare time on my hands to do a caveman Jool 5 on my own now that I'm out of academia and in the Real World). If we're actually going to do that, I volunteer to put together the Tylo lander.

I've been giving the problem of a caveman Jool-5 some thought over the last month or so, and it seems to me there's a way around the Tylo mass problem if you're willing to bend the rules a little. If you turn off commnet (which is allowed under the rules of a Jool-5), you can build a probe-controlled Tylo lander that your kerbal rides by clinging onto a ladder mounted on top. With the command pod eliminated from the equation, you can get the lander mass down into the range of a couple of tons even with caveman parts, which is well within what can be sent up in a single launch. Laythe, unfortunately, is trickier since the ladder trick won't work because of aerodynamics. You might be able to get somewhere if you can cram a kerbal into a Mk.1 Service Bay, but re-mounting the lander once on Laythe would prove difficult.

Do you have Kopernicus installed?

I hope that's just flare-off burning there... EDIT: Fire seems to have gone out. Vehicle did not explode.

It's pretty similar to Titan IIIE/IV, both of which are classic rockets with a respectable pedigree of NASA payloads (Viking 1 & 2, Voyager 1 & 2, Cassini/Huygens). About the only difference as far as staging is concerned is Titan's extra hypergolic stage.

I'm also going to have to disagree on this one. There are plenty of people who use them, but trying to say they're ubiquitous is like trying to say Realism Overhaul is ubiquitous.

Yep, definitely still locked. Confirmed it myself. EDIT: *click* See? It doesn't do anything.

This is a really freaky coincidence, since I just decided to take running back up. I had a semi-consistent running schedule going through college, but then I moved 3,000 miles and started a new job in a new city and that just kind of stopped. But, I miss feeling halfway in shape, so I've decided to take it back up, and add some other exercises in there for good measure. With any luck, I'll actually stick to it. On the bright side, I've been eating pretty well (I actually managed to lose weight when I went off to college, which from what I hear is a minor miracle), so at least that won't be a problem.

I... honestly don't remember. Probably in a "you forgot the struts, you idiot"-type crash shortly after launch. This would have been back in the days when orange tanks were super wobbly and you needed vertical struts to hold 2.5m ships together, mind you. It was a lot more common of a problem back in the day.

9:46 PM Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-07:00) here on the Puget Sound.