Spricigo

To make it clear: The only thing you both can say for sure is "I don't know" . It may be anything, but there is no evidence to support any hypothesis. If you are convinced that we don't know what happened, now let's try to find it. @JStevenson did you left the craft alone long enough to give a chance to something bad happen? (e.g inadvertently left in collision course with Mun) Save your game and try to reproduce it again. This time with all attention in it. While you are in control of the vessel, check if its not tagged a different way than you expected (e.g rover; relay) and if this type is set to be displayed. Check your trajectory if there's a chance of a celestial body(including Kerbin) disturb it. Only after you are sure to get covered all possible mistakes from your part switch away from the vessel and look for it in the tracking station and/or map mod.

Bringing fairing to a booster discussion? I'm not sure I understood your point.

@Starman4308 @Norcalplanner thanks for the mod suggestion. Unfortunately for the intent of the question Eve optimised engines don't count. 'Typical' moded engines (e.g SpaceY) may be considered but the focus is for stock. An interesting tool to play with. I think it'll keep me busy for awhile Strongly disagree. Even your decision, to rebel against this talk of Isp and TWR, is about efficiency, just the metric you use to assess it is different. Mind you, a valid metric in its own merit.

Fine (Your challenge, your rules) I think is a fun one now. Good job. I'll try to find time for a proper entry.

I suggest a small tunning in the scoring system. Make the penalties based on Lift rating and Trust instead of number of wings/engines. @Spricigo drinks @sevenperforce beer.

Not sure if Kaingang is still a valid entry . I never had it with periapsis over 75km. It can comply with the rules(without any issue) , just I didn't made an 'official run'.

And that's why stock game don't check if crew part have a hatch. And modmakers that create crew parts without hatch (because reasons) often don't consider it a problem.

All that discoveries looks like fun. At least is fun to me imagine what comes next (unlike when was me gaining all that experience) In Spoiler for a reason. Read after a few more experience. We all were there at some point.

I suppose at this time you already use those science points but I will post what I'd pick and my reasoning: You already picked Propulsion Systems and Electrics that I'd also pick before the other 90science nodes Fuel Systems needed for fuel crossfeed. I use a lot of pseudo-asparagus staging (DropTank+SRB combinations), basically essential for me. Advanced Construction unlock the Fairing. The use for launching satellites is obvious. I also use as a hollow nosecone cointaining small parts that need protection fron drag/heat (e.g probecore, battery, reaction wheel of unmanned passenger vehicles) Miniaturization Unlock the junior docking port, not very useful in itself (weak joints are not fun) . After you have it contract to build a station with antenna and docking port that can generate power for !!! Heavy Rocketry what can I say, those are three excellent engines the rest of 90science and all 160 science nodes are almost equally useful/uninteresting for me. eventually I pick then all but the order don't matter much. 300science I got first are science tech (experiment, survey scanner), Electronics (experiment) and Field Science (Command Seat) .

something he also considered important Instead of reverting you may just go to the settings and disable CommNet. For future references consider the use of free-return trajectories

how about this one? Abuse of reusable specialized vessels like Kerbin<->[celeestial body] transfer vehicle and [celestial body] lander and return to orbit with freigther and passenger versions for each. BTW: AYBABTU!

Push it into re-entry trajectory and turn off [impact damage]? You may also use [set orbit] to put the pusher and the rescue closer to atmosphere if they are far away. Another possibility its to edit the savefile to change where the kerbal is asigned. sorry about the vagueness , I'm unable to check the game at the moment

Much better after the removal of MJ and Ker parts.

That is really turning on my curiosity. The twin boar, being a engine with built in fuel tank is another oddball Not convince it necessarily holds. At Kerbin SRB's terrible Isp is compensated by high Bang/Buck ratio, being good for a burst of energy right after launch. it may have a similar performance on Eve, not being beaten down as hard as other engines by the high pressure. I don't expect it to have a stellar performance but there is not enough evidence so far to say they are useless. And thank you all for the opinions and experience. Keep it coming.

well, without parachutes the slowdown need to be done with wings and engines, a score system that encourage minimal wing area and engine activation would make things interesting. You may even make 2 separated categories, for example flaming suicides cannot use any parts with a lift rating, relying on engine thrust to stop and will be ranked considering how much of propulsive power is required to stop (not sure exactly how) while flying elephants cannot use engines and are ranked by lift/weight ratio with lower being better. Also instead of failing from 100km I'd consider start from a circular orbit just out of atmosphere (minimum periapsis 70km) with a small deltaV budget for a deorbit burn. The reasoning its that it encourage more practical design, reentry from space being more common than kerbin's sub-orbital flight (at least based in the anecdotal evidence of my experience) and also it seems a more restricted situation than just apoapsis over 100km. well keep it open as an "Work In Progress" until you decide for how to refine the challenge. And don't forget to post a link to the new thread before asking a moderator to locck this one.

Due high atmospheric pressure engines are seriously hindered at Eve Surface Level. Most engines become useless with only a not beaten so badly. Ignoring how the vessel end up at ESL (assume Hyperedit, Eve Space Program or let's do it anyway) how that goes in regards of solid rocket engines? A related but secondary question; which liquid fuel engines perform better at ESL(kinda top 3-5)?

well...https://kerbalx.com/Spricigo/Kaingang is collecting dust in my hangar. It usually follows a typical gravity turn (original design goal was to go orbital) , straight up to 100km and return is even easier. (And that is the problem with your challenge: vessels to complete the task are as common as explosions in KSP* ) Maybe if you add some constraints or a score system to encourage borderline designs you can make it in a fun challenge, but in the current status is, unfortunately, not interesting at all. *as @sevenperforce posted while I typed.

Aussie lawmakers, take notice.

I guess is exactly what he expects to use RCS for. As (self-reconized) experienced players we have a tendency to press or bias towards the OP (oh, well! That's just what he asked). But he need to acquire his own experience.

Well, we only know no one actually posted an attempt like that. Go figure how many different ways we all have failed and keep silent about.

Yep, that is the point. I suppose it's a cause of frustration (however small) . And since the rule is self-imposed I think you can save yourself of this frustration just by taking down the rule. At least you are not losing anything if the rule is not enforcing the desired behaviour. Just my 0,02

I see... 72km is just a arbitrary value (and I fact my calculation was with 75km and rounding induced errors) . Assuming we first reach a arbitrary circular orbit just out of the atmosphere is not necessary but useful. There here is several factors that only matter during launch/atmospheric. All those factors contribute to make launch to East cheaper (possible exception being inconsistent Piloting). Assuming we first reach a arbitrary circular orbit just out of the atmosphere let us recognise there is a difference while for a first approximation is sufficient to know that launch we st will use some extra deltaV , at minimum twice Kerbin's rotation velocity. Even if we directly launch (which indeed will increase overall efficiency) we need, in actual flight, time perform the maneuver. In fact we don't 'skip' any flight phase, rather we perform then in a continuous and combined way. We just pass from putting effort in 'getting into space' to 'staying out of the atmosphere' to 'reaching target apoapsis' without interruptions or much a notice. In any case the later phases will be performed at higher altitude then the previous (just because we are going up). For the sake of analysis is useful to consider its done at a certain altitude, by the very nature of our procedures a arbitrary altitude. We may not know exactly where the turning point is, but Reactordrone's conclusion that if the target orbit launching east is a better option. And for a target orbit at least that high the most fuel-efficient way it's to raise the apoapsis to the edge of the SoI, invert the orbit, adjust apoapsis/periapsis to target orbit.

Let's assume the next time is also an unmanned vessel (I'd say for the sake of consistency). In that case we are talking about an Experiment Storage Unit + Probecore combination instead of command pod. Yet another option is to maintain the sensible parts shielded by fairing, service bay or cargo bay. I suspect that possible issue was spotted by some people when the OP posted a picture of his vessel in a previous thread. No one though a warning was necessary and the OP didn't had the same experience to avoid the trouble by himself . Unfortunately in the hard way, but at least the lesson is given. The important now is find out some way to salvage the mission and, to a lesser extent, avoiding to commit the same mistake again in the future. There is, so far, plenty of good advice for this but in case of doubt ask.

@Reactordrone I thought the 8Mm was a value you got from practical experiment or at least a estimative of typical deltaV losses (launching east VS west). Unfortunate if that is not the case. Because we need to reverse the trajectory somewhere(we start with some velocity toward east) . Given that to reverse the trajectory we need to expend twice the velocity we have when performing the reversal burn, the ideal moment is at the apoapsis (lower velocity) . Doing it at the launch time is the only possible exception because we didn't reached full orbital velocity yet. There is also the possibility of a bi-elliptic transfer save bit extra m/s (for the discussion we have there just a detail but one deserve some tinkering which I didn't give) but the General idea is: if the target orbit is high enough, launching east is cheaper.

Did you realise that it basically means turning the self-imposed limitation meaninglessness? Anyways, not arguing you should change. You may find a significance I missed (also "make sense to me" is a irrefutable argument for that kind of decision)