Magzimum

I think it was about 30 minutes for me - as long as it takes to do the training. (I cannot remember if I messed up the training so bad that I had to restart it - it may have been closer to 60 min...) Did you play the training too, or did you prefer to figure it out yourself?

Are you sure you did a rendezvous with the right ship? Normally you should rescue the Kerbals from crew-compartments (command modules, science lab, or habitation modules). Frankly, none of those are orange. And also, usually the name of the ship is called something like "Staedith's wreck" or "Billy-bobby's hulk". Not "Debris". So, based on the information supplied to us, my first guess is that you somehow managed to do a rendezvous with an orange tank that you launched into orbit yourself on an earlier mission. That, or you have a mod installed that gives you other crew-compartments, which are somehow not working properly.

You can also just warp forward. Contracts are typically on offer anywhere between 1-6 days, so if you warp ahead 3 days a large portion of the contracts will have expired and have been replaced by new ones. When you are really close to a launch window, of course warping ahead several days is perhaps a problem, but if you save the game before warping ahead then you can always reload. (The 2nd time it will offer different contracts, so you can reload until you're happy). Personally, I don't reload too often as that feels a little cheaty to me.

Aww! Sending lone Kerbals on interplanetery missions is criminal! I typically send between 3 or 5. But lately I have been doing a-typical missions, with 25 Kerbals to Jool, and soon multiple mission (a fleet, basically) to Dres, because Dres needs love, with my entire crew of 27 Kerbals, distributed over multiple ships.

In KSP, jet engines cannot attach radially to wings or tanks themselves. You have to put something in front of them. For the Juno, you have only 2 options, I believe: Use a Mk0 fuel tank, and attach the engine behind that tank. (Yes, that is a little weird, but you'll get used to it). Use the small nosecone. Note that in this 2nd setup, you have to add a fuel tank somewhere else, and also an air-intake! Also note that these planes that I posted are not finished. Several parts (elevons, wheels) are still missing.

Let's keep the advice really simple: As Foxster said: install KER. It's a mod that just gives information. Play the trainings. That's it from me. Happy landings!

You are right with that calculation. And that shows that the end-product of the fuel cells cannot possibly be ore. Otherwise we could create free energy, which is thermodynamically impossible...

In terms of the KSP game mechanics: A fuel cell burns fuel and oxidizer (LFO), and generates electric charge and ore. To convert that ore back to fuel and oxidizer, you need at least the same amount of electricity. (If the game wants to be a little realistic, the conversion back to fuel and oxidizer should be a bit more). So, assuming this is a 100% efficient setup, you can do the following two steps LFO -> charge + ore -> LFO ... and you gained exactly nothing. You are right that you can regenerate the fuel cell if you capture its waste (ore, or in the real world: water). You need solar panels or RTGs to do the regeneration. So, you could use the solar panels or RTGs for regeneration while they are not being used (i.e. you are just cruising through space, and the ship is idling), and then burn the fuel for extra electric charge in times when electricity demand is high. But you should note that the ore storage and regeneration are essentially just a way to store electric charge. And batteries do the same. So, the questions you have to ask yourself is: how much electric charge can I store this way, compared to using ordinary batteries? And what if the efficiency of the system is not 100% but less (while batteries are pretty close to 100%)? Is it still interesting?

Maybe you should accept more challenging contracts, so that you also get some world-firsts bonuses. Also, combine multiple contracts into a single mission. I don't recognize your situation at all. In fact, if I had posted anything on the income (career at normal setting), then I would have said the opposite. The contracts pay more than sufficient. The world-firsts will actually pay you even without you accepting having a contract for it. To give you a picture: I rescued 23 Kerbals from various Kerbin, Mun and Minmus orbits (typically I rescued 3-4 per mission). I explored the Mun and Minmus quite thorough (as in: visited most biomes) and went to Duna, Ike, Eve and Gilly once. And after that, I was 14 million funds in the plus. Then I built a Jool-5 mission, which I launched without any contracts... The Jool-5 mission cost 3 million, but when it was finished, I had 16 million in the bank: the world-firsts alone had generated nearly 5 million, apparently. Try to combine contracts for e.g. (1) testing parts, (2) collecting science data, (3) rescuing Kerbals and (4) planting flags. For example, you can fly to the Mun, test a part in Mun orbit, save a Kerbal from the surface, plant a flag, do a science experiment on the surface, fly back, and cash in 4 contracts in one go. This gets harder later in the career, when the contracts are scattered over many planets and moons... so you may have to accept one or two contracts first, then warp forward a few days to wait for a third/fourth contract to pop up to be combined. It also helps to put a thermometer onto each satellite you launch, so you can instantly complete a contract to "collect science data from orbit of...". But I have to admit that this last comment feels a little cheaty to me.

I say a Kerballed mission to Duna or Gilly! Duna is the bigger challenge, but by the description you give us, you should be able to pull it off. Don't be afraid to fail, then you will only learn faster. If you wanna take it slow, you can first get your Kerbal in orbit and back. But you are probably ready to land them on the surface. Gilly is also fun. It's super-low gravity and weird orbit gives new challenges. With Gilly, orbit and landing are nearly the same thing. So if you go there, make sure to touch the surface. (I can't really call it landing).

Off the top of my head, Voyager is not a relay and is not designed to communicate with any other satellites or ships. I think you should compare the Voyager antenna to the Communotron 88-88, which is 100 kg. I am not a communications expert, but the game suggests that the relays are heavier. Maybe the mass of the dish is higher, because we don't have to add some complex electronic infrastructure inside?

Aww! Hate to say but I disagee. As I said in a previous post, the Rockomax 2.5m tanks really look like a big barrel, and we have yet to find out if it contains rocket fuel, or some kind of pickled herring. That's really Kerbal in my opinion!! (I mean, the Kerbonauts also look a little clumsier than the real ones, right?). Having said that, I agree with pretty much everyone else that we could use a few more LF tanks: different shapes and volumes.

Ok, everyone settle down. This is becoming quite a heated discussion (*)! Don't forget to include some compliments for each other to keep the atmosphere nice and friendly! I gotta say that there is something to be said for having an antenna that can allow probes to communicate from Duna back to Kerbin early on. Just looking at the table on the wiki, then you need to have either the 160-point-node and a tier-3 tracking station (>800,000 funds!), or a 300-point-node (electronics) and a tier-2 tracking station. I still think that is a little difficult to get early on. In the real world, the USSR And USA combined had launched 17 probes to the Moon (of which only 4 (partially) successful) before even trying their first launch for Mars (which also failed). That is probably something that the career mode wants to simulate. Luckily, a single successful Mun mission usually gives enough science points to go somewhere else... and if you also nail a Minmus landing then you can almost certainly head for Duna afterwards. On the other hand, in that same real world, missions (or accepted contracts) unlock cash. And cash (plus time, plus trained scientists) gets you science / engineering, which then 'unlocks' new parts. So, the way we unlock new parts directly by doing a Goo experiment on the Mun makes little sense. But this is again just a way that the game wants to simplify and simulate reality. So, if you don't like the 'grinding for science points by visiting the Mun first', or if you don't like to turn science directly into new parts, then by all means use the game's greatest feature: Mods. (*) At least for this forum's standards... compared to the rest of the internet, you're all still angels!

I am not familiar with a method to compare the two (slingshot vs. low Pe with Oberth), but who not try both? If the moon of your choice is in the right position, it mayh be possible to get a slingshot, thereby slowing down a lot, and (through some adjustments) still achieve a low Pe around the central planet.

So, just a quick check if I am doing this right... If I understood things right, then this should give me a really high chance to discover anomalies on the Mun: A satellite with the RC-L01 probe core (after the rover-core this gives the highest chance for detecting an anomaly: 30%). Orbit at 75x75 km altitude, so Kerbnet has a nice wide view, covering an about 150 km wide track on the Mun's surface, if I got my pythagoras right. (In the pic below it is a little less wide). An inclined orbit of the Mun, so I cover new ground all the time. Kerbnet window open, zoomed out to almost the max to cover the most ground. Phys. warp set to 4x, so I see the most ground in the least amount of time. Stare at the little Kerbnet window until a little white ? appears. [edit] I just realized that I can warp ahead in 50x warp, then refresh, to cover more ground quicker. If discovery of an anomaly is done on a 'chance/day basis', then warping ahead makes sense to me. Experience so far is not too good. One anomaly appeared all the way on the side of the Field of View, and I clicked twice on it to put 2 waypoints on it (the 2nd to doublecheck)... and they were many kilometers apart. So the practical width of the scan is certainly less than the 150 km I was hoping for. (On the plus side, I guess I can just send a lander, aim in between the two waypoints, hope that it too picks up the anomaly, and home in on the questionmark).

The "Science bombing" is done by more experienced players who will visit multiple spots on the Mun during 1 trip. If you can build a lander that can make some 'hops' on the Mun then you can do this too (i.e. take off and land several kilometers further for a 2nd visit, in a different biome). My recommendation is to just do several roundtrips to the Mun. The contracts will keep coming, and you can keep getting science. Also, realize that you can get science from space near Kerbin, and high above Kerbin... and the atmosphere is also divided into the lower and upper atmosphere. So you can get science from all those!

Thanks for the responses, @Ripper2900, @Starman4308. I noticed that with RTGs, I can fill the ore tanks with the ISRU turned off, then shut down the drills and start up the ISRU to get some fuel. Repeat until fully fueled. I managed to further optimize the hopper by giving it 6 drills and 4 fuel-cell packs (the six-packs), so that at ore concentrations of 6% and higher it will just run continuously and fill the tanks. But it's a thin line: at lower concentrations the rig will first drain (while the ISRU is warming up and not running efficiently) and then fill the tanks. I managed to run into trouble when I tried this with empty tanks - the rig shut down before the ISRU was warmed up. Finally, I went with the suggestion to use a 2.5m ISRU and 2 of the big drills. Because this Dres mission is more about having fun (and giving Dres some love), so I replaced that stupid Mk1 stuff with Mk3 tanks and 4 Rhinos. The hopper went from 17 tons to 180 tons (still only 5 Kerbals, lol). At least it has a TWR (on Kerbin) of 5.5 when fully fueled, and it can go to orbit and then land twice without refueling on Dres. I realized far too late that efficiency has no place in this Dres mission . Still, lessons learned here will probably prove valuable another time.

I want to build a planet-hopper for Dres. A little 5-Kerbal ship that can go from the surface to an orbital station and back. (Dres needs love, so it will get more infrastructure than it strictly needs). The ship is quite small, built mostly out of Mk1 parts. I want it to be able to reach all corners of the planet with fuel to spare, so I want to equip it with the small ISRU (Convert-O-Tron 125), and some Junior drills. Putting 2 large drills onto this small ship makes it look like a mining-ship, which is not the look that I want. However, I am running into an issue. The ships needs 30 electric charge for the Convert-o-tron, and some for drills, radiators and optionally lights. The ship is shown below, stripped of all electricity-generating parts... equipped with just 2 drills, but more can be put on. The formula that I am on right now is 4 or 6 drills, with 2 large fuel cell packs for electric charge (and two nuke-generators for when I am in orbit). But I am not sure whether this is the best combo. Other people surely used the small Convert-o-tron 125 on e.g. Eeloo, Laythe or Tylo, and therefore ran into the same problems... so any tips are welcome. What I would you do so that this thing can generate fuel on most spots of Dres (also those with low ore concentrations)? Note: I also considered solar power (but 15-18 gigantors seemed a bit much for this small ship), and nuke-generators (but spending >1 million funds seemed a bit much for this small ship).

Just like I never made the Lego set like described in the manual but instead used the blocks to make my own, I play the game to create something. Downloading therefore is not my way.

Does it have a probe core? An OKTO2 is lightweight and will let you control something without Kerbal on board. That doesn't always mean you can right the rover. With low gravity a reaction wheel or RCS can work. I've also seen people place landing legs on the top so they can extend that when upside down, but I haven't been too successful with that myself. [Edit] not sure why the Kerbal can walk straight through... but I noticed the same once or twice before.

Awesome post, and an awesome design. Just in case this is a serious remark: I'm afraid it is not a design flaw, and it's certainly not the bridge. The problem is the water. It's viscous compared to air.

Agreed. And the differentiation between "Splashdown" and "Landing" for Eve and Laythe adds something too... although I would prefer it if they would combine that into a single contract: Send 2 ships, one should land, one should splash down, both should send back science. (I was frustrated after succesfully landing a probe, that the next assignment was to visit the same place again for a splashdown).

I realize that. After said Jool-5, which cost me nearly 3 million funds, I came back 2 million richer (i.e. I must have made around 5 million by all the world-firsts). The possible income is sufficient, perhaps even too much (I play 'normal' settings, already told myself to go for 'hard' next time). My Program ™ has enough income, so that is not the topic of this rant thread (this comment is not a criticism of your post either, btw... I agree and like the summary you gave)... I just think that specifically the World-Firsts-contracts that pop up in Mission Control could be improved. In the early career, the World-Firsts give me exactly the challenges that I like and that I need to advance (so, that's a compliment to the game), but now that I have explored several planets and moons it feels more like a homework exercise than an award. From a World-Firsts, I would expect the contract to come up to either explore one of the unexplored planets, or to accelerate a satellite to >50 km/s and blast it out of the solar system... or something that's worth being on the front page of the Kerbal Times. Doing a docking-mission around Bop, when I just did an Apollo-style landing just doesn't feel very newsworthy to me.

My feelings towards the new World-firsts contracts start to incline towards positive for the early career stages. However, I would strongly recommend that they (they being the developers) drop the "rendezvous" and "docking two vessels in orbit of ...", because those just take too much time and slow things down too much. I just completed a Jool-5 (still proud), and therefore orbited, landed on, and returned from every moon in that system. But the contract system is not satisfied, and keeps suggesting rendezvous or docking missions on or around the Joolian moons... while my interests are now at Dres, Moho and Eeloo (in that order, don't worry Dres!). Basically, I would assume that of all contracts, the "World Firsts" would be the one aiming for new horizons, while the other contracts would now exploit the fact that I can visit Jool, and ask me to haul ore around and rescue some Kerbonauts from the surface of Laythe. I think that two docking missions (one in orbit or Kerbin, one in orbit of the Mun) would be sufficient. [/rant]

Ah, yeah. Gilly is a joke (albeit a good joke). If Jeb farts, he'll get himself into orbit!