Magzimum

True, so you gotta wait until you got both (or multiple) contracts, then build a new station that fits both requirements and launch.

While the word count may point towards a novel, I am not sure it would be interesting without the pictures. I'd say it's more like a (series of) comic book(s). Thanks again for the story! I am starting to enjoy the plot a lot [edit] Also, welcome to page 5 of this epic story.

Mechjeb looks dangerous - that's a proper suicide burn! Even though I don't use it myself, it makes for good videos. It's probably much easier to build the station in orbit than to assemble it on the uneven ground of the Mun. I've only built stations that consist of multiple parts on the flats of Minmus, where everything is much easier.

You can use only one separator. If the SRB is flopping around, and you need to attach it better, you can use struts. Best connect these from the booster towards the central tank. If you need to eject the SRB with more force (that could be the 2nd reason you ask this), you can attach sepatrons to the SRB. If you put the sepatrons in the same stage as the separator, then will ignite at the same moment, and basically fly your SRB away from the central tank. As DrLicor said, you can use docking ports to attach parts at multiple points, but I think that's far too complicated for your question regarding SRBs.

I noticed that in warp 10000x the drills just keep going. I guess I just wasn't impatient enough earlier. I am guessing that this is essentially the same solution as what @EpicSpaceTroll139 suggested, where the game just doesn't perform any checks to shut things down... It's not cheating either in my opinion, because I would have more than enough time to fill the tanks but I'm just happy to find a way to do it with less effort on my side. Now the mining rig stands idle, waiting for the giant mothership to land (it needs to be built first). Thanks for all the answers!

My Minmus mining operation has the habit of running out of power at night, because I did not put the equivalent of a small moon worth of batteries onto my mining rig. However, the mining rig does not automatically start up again as the sun comes up. The ISRU (Convert-O-Tron) parts don't shut down, and it looks like the radiators also keep working... so the problem is just 20 drills, which I can manage, but which is rather tedious. Are there any tricks or fixes? And is this a bug that it won't start up again, or am I possibly supposed to manually restart the mining process every day? I guess that nowadays the advice #1 is to wait for 1.2 to come out, and upgrade... but I am in the middle of a really awesome career, with some Jool-5 plans that are quite advanced, so I am not quite in the mood to redesign everything, and would love to play 1.1 for a few more days - possibly a few weeks. (That's also why the mining rig is quite large - I intend to go big). Weirdly, my older mining rig did not have this issue. It just kept going through the night. But I think that was because of a bug where some solar panels received energy through the night.

Welcome to the forum! I love your little lander, and especially the stairs made me smile. I guess there are multiple lessons here! I'm not sure I fully understand what you intended to build with the bits right below the capsule itself, but I just want to encourage you that we all started this way. My first Mun lander was a giant wobbly contraption with more dV than is necessary to get to Jool (I needed all of it to get to the Mun)... and despite all odds I managed to make a soft landing, after which it slowly fell over on its side (it was really top heavy). I went from really excited to really disappointed in 1 second, but those are the best learning moments. Happy landings!

I keep my spaceplane with Mk2 cockpit at "Radial out" for as long as possible. I even mounted 4 Place-Anywhere 7 Linear RCS Ports on the bottom of the cockpit to keep it up for longer. because I have large wings at the back, at some point during the descent the drag becomes too much, and the nose comes down despite me keeping the SAS at Radial Out and the RCS on. But I can usually still keep the plane at 30-60 degrees up, which still slows it down significantly, all the way down to 1300 m/s at which point I finally point the nose prograde and set the SAS to the regular "Stability assist". I can do my re-entry with a periapsis anywhere between 40k and 20k. I'd post a picture of a re-entry, but I don't have any.

Interesting business proposal, that.

If you're bored, go do something else. If you want to get beyond playing stock ships to the Mun and blowing up giant rockets on the launchpad: Play a career. Careers were designed to take you by the hand, and guide you through the steps. While we complain a lot about the missions that you can get, they are quite clever in the sense that the difficulty increases quite gently, and is coupled to the science you have discovered.

Something similar happens to me all the time. I never tilt my wheels, so I doubt that has anything to do with it. Two suggestions: The quick fix that works quite often is to get your Kerbal out of his seat, and then just let him/her board again (take the seat again). That resets quite a few of the wheel problems. If that fails, then toggling some "control from here" between a small probe core and the seat may work. I usually let my Kerbal board a capsule or pod, and then EVA again to the seat... but since you don't have a pod, you may hopefully let the Kerbal leave his seat, control from a probe core, then let the Kerbal take the seat again. My gut feeling is that solution 1 will work, because the rover worked initially, and started failing only after reloading.

Oh, but I am not saying that you shouldn't do that... keep your efficiency up to that same level! However, if you do happen to have 4000 units of liquid fuel (and the corresponding oxidizer and/or engines that can use just the liquid fuel), you could design an efficient mission to use it all. Maybe my suggestions were not ambitious enough. Maybe 4000 units of fuel enable you to not only land a Kerbal with some science equipment at 4 different spots on the Mun, but also allows you to land that entire station and lift off a return vehicle for the 7 Kerbals. Then you should wait for a contract that pays you to build a station on the surface of the Mun... and cash in both the orbit station and the surface station in one go (they really don't seem to care if that station does not remain in Munar orbit for more than 10 seconds). Just collect missions until you're actually putting that 4000 units of fuel to an efficient use. It helps if you have the mission control upgraded, so you can accept more missions.

I agree that some contracts are completely unreasonable, but I don't think it's too much to ask to carry 3 or 4 barrels (i.e. Rockomax X200-32) of fuel to the Mun. What would be unreasonable is if you carry it there for no reason. It's up to you to find a reason. If you are planning on a Mun landing anyway, or perhaps if you have one of those "visit 4 locations on the Munar surface for temperature readings" contracts, you could use (a part of) your station as a lander. Then the contract is just a bonus, because you need all that fuel in Munar orbit anyway. Then you only need to bring along a few extra Kerbals and an antenna/docking port for a lot of extra cash. If you don't have those contracts yet, you could just warp ahead a few days, and check if the right contract has come up yet. Recently I joined in a conversation about contracts where you gotta bring ore to somewhere (often a place where you really don't need any ore). Those contracts are stupid and could be improved to make more sense... but the "bring a bunch of Kerbals and some fuel to location X" are not a problem for me. If you think that the fuel is excessive, then you just plan your missions too small.

That would make the learning curve even steeper for the newbies. It should not be a part of the stock career game in normal settings. Perhaps an option for experienced players at the "hard" setting.

Exactly. When I wrote "submarine-rover", perhaps I should have put the "rover" part in italics and underlined. But I think I got an answer I can work with: the ore tanks come in several sizes, so I can build a design around that. I wonder if you can mine under water, to fill them up.

Thanks! Glad I asked. Those were not on my list of options yet. @DrLicor, interesting, but I don't want to be buoyant. I want to sink and stay down.

For two completely different missions I am interested in the density of the various parts we have at our disposal. I'd like to build a submarine-rover, but a lot of parts float. Also, I want to make some rover that has good grip on low-gravity moons, but that isn't too large (and Dres, never forget Dres). For both ideas I could use some parts that have a high density, but as far as I can see only the beams and panels seem to have a high density. Did I overlook some parts? (And yes I realize that parts are logically as light-weight as possible... because we need thousands of m/s acceleration, and because Mr. Newton's Second Law ™ says Moar Mass does not help to achieve that).

So for this challenge you want us to build 19 space stations, 15 ground stations, 11 rovers, 2 boats and 2 hovercraft, and to do this without ever reverting. Was that all? If this was a realistic challenge, you would at least demand we launch it all in 1 ship. It is generally appreciated (and encouraged in the Challenge Submission Guide) to try your own challenge first, and to include the results as a benchmark for other players.

Yeah, I did the same. Take off, then aim the nose straight up and go. That shock cone exploded every time at around 1400 m/s, and a lot of other parts got super hot as well with their heat bars in the red. Do you recall what your top speed was? My max. was 1430 m/s going straight up, but that was with the antenna-trick, which really helps. Any higher, and stuff still exploded.

How the hell did you keep the shock cone intake from blowing up due to the heat? I tried several designs with a shock cone at the front, and I could not get it over 150 km, because the nose cone blows up at around 1400 m/s. I went with a fairing and the old antenna trick at the front... I did not take any other screenshots (even though they're asked for), so I'm ok if this doesn't make it to the board... but in case anyone cases, it's fully stock, only KER installed on my game. Played a little with the offset tool to push the wings in a little (but noticed zero difference actually). And utterly failed to land this thing. I do think that a landing is possible, but it would need more luck than I have patience for tonight. Anyway, wanted to post this to support the challenge! I enjoyed playing with it!

A few weeks ago (playing v1.1, completely stock with only KER installed), I took a mothership to Minmus to refuel. Then went to Jool for the main mission. Does that count? I compiled a short imgur album from the screenshots of that mission. Picture 6 shows the landed mothership. Not nearly as impressive as the enormous motherships in the first few posts... but I thought I'd share anyway. Curious to hear if this is what you hoped to see! Here she is landed at Minmus: From left to right: Tanker, Mothership, Refuel-rover, mining rig, auxiliary rover. On a sidenote, I think that the challenge could use a few more clarifications what counts as a mothership in your opinion.

I work on the assumption that visiting the planets is still a novelty, just like visiting Mars in our current times. If some company would actually succeed to deliver 10 tons of Martian regolith to Earth in 2017, then I am sure they'd get more than the current marketprice for sand on Earth. In fact, I think that several space agencies, as well as companies that plan on some Mars missions, would happily pay millions to be able to do some tests on the material, ranging from using it for building purposes to using it for growing potatoes. Obviously, the value of such material is decreased over time. If you come in with the 15th mission with again 10 tons, then at some point no more researchers will have a need for it, and it loses its value. But I typically don't repeat too many missions in this game. If the dust has some precious metals in it in huge quantities (in quantities uncommon on Earth), then it may have a value as a mining material.

Depends how many science experiments you want to bring along! A single Kerbal on EVA from a mothership surely gets the most science per fund, and may be the easiest to fly as well! But doing a seismic experiment may prove more difficult.

This is an awesome thread. Love the story. Thanks for all the time you put into it.

Easiest way to land on Gilly is to use a small lander with only RCS and no landing legs at all. There is no need for any engines, since you just need about 100 dV to get down and back up. The reaction wheels in a lander can are sufficient to keep the lander upright even on a slope. A small solar panel is sufficient to keep those reaction wheels powered. I don't see the need for any new part, because landing on Gilly is a joke. My Gilly lander can be seen on this picture at the top. It is the tiny module containing a Jr. docking port, monopropellant and RCS, lander can, a science Jr and finally another Jr. docking port. A bunch more science instruments, a solar panel and possibly some small batteries are mounted on the outside. This could easily make it from the mothership to Gilly surface and back twice. I had plenty monopropellant to hop to some biomes (I think there's only 3 biomes in 1.1). [Edit] Note, in order to not sound too smug, I would like to mention that my first attempt to land on Gilly ended in a lot of frustration too. The engines were far too powerful, the landing legs made the lander bounce up again and finally the hatch was blocked due to some stupidity on my side. But I did have some "Place-Anywhere 7 Linear RCS Port" to push the lander it back to the surface quickly after it bounced, and I was lucky enough to find a horizontal patch to land on.