Magzimum

Regarding (3), I tried to burn to Jool from Minmus directly, but the burn time was in the same order as the time of 1 entire orbit... so I was just really confused where to start the burn. And I could not really do the burn over multiple orbits, because I was out of Minmus' SoI after just a few hundred m/s acceleration... so there was no 2nd orbit. Burning from Minmus' orbit seems to work only with LFO, so that you can keep the burn time short. Right now, that's not much of an option, since I just got myself a few nerv-based ships that I am quite fond of.

I have a mining station on Minmus. And I have the ambition to do a bunch of interplanetary missions in the near future. What's the recommended way to use the Minmus fuel, without making Mr. Oberth upset too much (see fig 1)? I see a bunch of options, but none seem easy or efficient. If I have a fully fueled mothership at Minmus, I could: (1) Fly back to LKO. Advantage is that launch is trivial. Disadvantage is that I lose a LOT of fuel to get down from Minmus, and lower both Ap and Pe. (2) Adjust my plane to Kerbin's equator, then lower only my Pe to 80-100 km, and launch for interplanetary at Pe. A lot more efficient than option 1, but much more difficult to plan, especially when I need to get an intercept with one of the smaller planets (I didn't forget you, Dres). (3) Just fly off from Minmus, straight out of the Kerbin SoI. By far the easiest to plan, because the whole interplanetary intercept is planned when you're on a solar orbit. This seems to make Mr. Oberth really upset though. Major disadvantage is that the extra fuel needed has to be taken outside of the Kerbin SoI, so if you want to drop those extra tanks, they are lost and cannot be recycled/refueled. This in turn means that the refueling business now also includes an extra launch from Kerbin for new tanks. If I have a tanker, I could: (4) Fly the fuel to LKO. I could repeat this as often as necessary, since the fuel is essentially for free. It would either mean lots of flights (my current tanker can deliver "only" about 20000 units of liquid fuel to LKO in 1 flight, but I have some ambitious plans). This is boring and repetitive, and downscaling the payload is not an option I want to consider in this thread. (5) Launch a new tanker, which is even larger, possibly including an upgraded mining station. Fly the huge tanker to LKO, and refuel whatever needs refueling. Costly (but possibly the most Kerbal way, and already my preferred option). Of course, a combination of the options above is possible too. For those using Minmus (or Mun) bases for refueling, how do you approach this issue? Figure 1, Mr. Oberth, already slightly upset with all of us getting fuel so cheaply from Minmus (source)

... When you post the text above about a week ago, then build it, add an additional big bottom stage, two additional probes, and many more docking ports, and take it on a test flight to Jool. w00t, she made it, and actually performs brilliantly!

Congrats on saving Jeb! You could also have used the jetpack. For Mun and Minmus landings, I personally don't bother with ladders anymore. I just fly my happy Kerbals to the hatch.

Attach 4 struts to the Kerbodyne ADTP-2-3 at its widest point, and attach them to the bottom of the lowest orange tank. That should remove any wobbliness from that particular part of the rocket. I am surprised that the SRBs at the base of the rocket don't give you any problems. I usually use one strut for each SRB to attach their nose cone to the central stage.

Yeah, it wasn't easy. To my surprise, landing was harder than getting back to orbit for me. Landing such a huge lander is not easy at all. This mission must have taken at least 100 hrs of preparation, trying, failing, fixing and trying again.

Ok, good that we cleared that up. I am not sure I understand what you mean by fair... I think that newbies should be held to the same standard as experienced players. If a challenge is hard, then it's gotta be hard for everyone. The challenges here on the forum are totally optional. We should not have a handicap for newbies, like in golf. What would be nice for newbies is to get an overview of some "classic challenges", like @Mikki mentioned above. Perhaps in a sticky post at the top of the challenges subforum. Also, if there are a few challenges in which you can get some kind of result with little build time (even if it is really bad), such as a runway land speed record, then players can start on a positive note. I am not even sure if a land speed record challenge exists or is open at the moment... but in order to keep the workload manageable for the person maintaining such challenge, you could say that only record speeds of over 700 m/s make it onto the forum thread. At least new players get some kind of result. My first attempt got me no further than 300 m/s, but I was excited and regarded that as an achievement. Such challenges are more "accessible" for newbies than the challenges with for example interplanetary travel. Note, I do not suggest that such challenges need to be set up. All I suggest is to make it easier to find these somewhere, if they are open for submissions.

@Starhawk, thanks for the clear answer. Now I know that there's no list. I'll just browse the pages and join a challenge that I like. @Mikki, What in your opinion is the difference between a "major" challenge, and other challenges? Is it e.g. complexity, or popularity? @Pecan, thanks for the tip. I had already read the Guide, and if I submit some challenge, then it should be a good one, tested, with good rules, an example and some badges. But I still maintain that I'd rather first participate to learn a little more about the forum and the game before submitting my own. There are enough crappy challenges already that nobody participates in. Frankly, if I can just participate without submitting one, I'd be happy too. The reason I may want to post a challenge of my own (eventually, after participating) is that in a good community people give and take: you enjoy the benefits, but you also invest time yourself. I do not fully understand your other comments under b). Frankly, it comes across as if I stepped on your lawn, and you're telling me to get off it. All I want is to figure out where the good challenges are, so I can choose one and give it a shot. The game is mostly about having fun, and I am looking for something new and challenging, but I struggled a bit to figure out how the forum works in this regard.

So, as I played my career, I got a contract to explore Eve. Since this was already the 2nd career I played, I did not just want to send a probe. No, Jeb was gonna go. I tried and failed many times. The 1st one flipped in Eve's atmosphere and burned up, 2nd one was just crap in every way, 3rd one flipped again, 4th one landed but had not enough TWR to get off Eve (super frustrating, as it was really close), and the 5th one was finally the good design. It needed some more tweaking to make sure it did not flip (because during test flights I was not satisfied yet) so I put some giant wings with Airbrakes on it. I present you, the Eve lander Mk5, aka "The Moose". Jeb was not enthusiastic to fly this thing. 997 parts, 21 stages, 58.9 m high. Total cost 1,200,441 funds. No mods except KER. Regular career (normal settings). It launched at 4 frames per second, which dropped a little more as aero forces kicked in a little higher up. It remained playable though (FYI, I have a 4-core Intel i5-4570 CPU with 8 GB of RAM, and a GeForce GT 640, running Linux Mint 17.1, so not an expensive system, but a light operating system). Because of the enormous drag on the top of the rocket, it was easy on the throttle and straight up until at least 10 km. By 25 km, it was still going mostly upwards. The bottom stage consisted of the SRBs, the big tanks you see separated below and the central bottom stage (blue vectors you see below together with a central mammoth). The liquid tanks were staged in with fuel lines to the central one. Then the four mainsails with orange tanks were the 2nd stage which carried it to orbit. They had roughly 500 m/s worth of dV left when it got to LKO. Below, The Moose is already accelerating to get to the transfer orbit towards Eve when it finally sheds the last big engines (and due to the heat of the sepatrons blows up a small liquid fuel tank at the top of the mothership, as you can see by the cloud of dust). Mother Goose and Goose Lander then made it to Eve with little problem. The Nerv stage had over 2500 m/s, which is easily enough to get to Eve. And since it would shed the enormous lander, would have about 3000 m/s for the return trip too. The huge lander was attached by only a docking point Jr (and MANY struts), because I only wanted to bring down the smallest docking port to Eve's surface. Notice that the periapsis of both lander and mothership is 69000 m at the time of separation. The lander used NO engines... so the mothership slowed it down into a low periapsis, and then quickly accelerated again in order to not burn up in Eve's atmosphere. Since the lander was already on the right course, it could just deploy its heat shield, and wait for the fireworks. Below you can see the antlers of The Moose a bit better. They had to be this huge because the lander has some stabilizing fins at its bottom which stick out from the heatshield, making the bottom drag even bigger. (Sure, this could have been fixed by just making the bottom more narrow, but remember that in my previous attempt I did not have enough TWR - I was gonna bring the big engines to Eve this time). By now, Fireworks: Because the periapsis was on the dark side of Eve from the moment I arrived in Eve orbit, the landing was also in the dark. Not sure if it is interesting, but here's a picture of the antlers coming off. And one of the parachutes. They slowed down the lander to a blistering 8 or 9 m/s, which was more than I had anticipated. The rough landing broke off 7 of the 8 the landing gear, but nothing else. The 8th one then decided to join its friends a little while later, so below you see exactly none. It was a perfect landing! Of course, the whole point of the entire mission was to have Jeb do the Mun-Eve-walk and plant that flag. Picture below shows Jeb, but also shows the first stage of the lander. Yes, that's nearly 100 sepatrons. I want to give that lander a quick boost, then go easy through the thick soup of Eve, before accelerating at higher altitudes. So I put on a stage that burns for only 5 seconds. I put them on small tanks. The entire first stage (tanks and sepatrons) comes off after 5-6 seconds. Probably a bit unnecessary though... luckily, the framerate remained ok. Also, I didn't fully realize how big that lander was until Jeb climbed out. Anyway, here's the mandatory Jeb-picture-with-lander-in-the-background: I had mounted some extra batteries and reaction wheels at the base of the lander. I sepated some time before take off. I think those parts are what blows up on liftoff. I wasn't missing any parts on the lander... It happened on every attempt I made to reach orbit (I must have tried at least 30 times). Made for a good show though! All pics below are not from the actual launch. I forgot to take screenshots. So, I loaded the save-game from right before launch, and did it again just now, for this post. I did not play through all the way until docking, so headings and velocities may be slightly off from here onwards, but this attempt made it close to orbit before the game crashed... at least it shows how the thing works, if anyone cares. Here the sepatrons already come off, at just 139 m above the surface. They really did just a few m/s extra, but I could max. out the engines on a large part of the flight now. The main problem with this rocket was the slanted fuel tanks on the 4 tanks on the side. Upon separation, they moved slightly inwards (due to the thick atmosphere), and crashed into the central tank. 9 out of 10 attempts, this was the reason to reset and try again. To overcome this, I had to keep the velocity under 300 m/s on separation, go straight up, perfectly prograde, throttle to zero, separate, and throttle to max quickly again. The problem did not occur on Kerbin testflights. Took me a few attempts to learn it on Eve. Once separated, the central stage had low TWR, so it just served to lift the lander out of Eve's atmosphere. 2nd stage, with 1 vector as main engine has way more TWR. Here horizontal acceleration starts... ... continues... (I actually had to throttle down sometimes to avoid blowing it up.) ... and ends. It has an awesome TWR of 10-12 once the side tanks come off. Pics above and below are still that reenactment that I just made. Wish I had pics of the real launch, but I don't. Heading may be off, but this thing was getting close to orbit too, before the game crashed on me. Final stage is 5 toroidal tanks inside a 1.25m service bay, with a terrier. No pic of it in action though. Note the G-force in the pic below! Final orbit was just 2.1 degree off from the mothership. That's the real launch again... here my nerves had calmed down enough to take a screenshot again. Finally, it docked again. Quite a wobbly connection, but strong enough to make it home. The docked lander cans next to the central pod are two Gilly landers that use only RCS (seriously, Gilly is a joke). This mission also passed by Gilly and landed in all 3 of its biomes... but I won't bore you with those pics too. I don't want to be the guy who lures people in with "some holiday pictures", only to reveal later he's shot 2000 photographs, and you're in for a marathon. Final picture: I had to launch a little "Get Jeb Home - mission", because I forgot to add parachutes for the Kerbin landing. Typical. Anyway, everything was equipped with docking ports, so not really a major challenge once the mission was back in Kerbin orbit. This is right before the main chutes deploy. Landing is at night... because if I can do that on Eve, why not on Kerbin too? (Real reason was that I did not want to land the thing on land because it may fall over and blow up... so I aimed for a large ocean). If you made it this far, thanks for your interest! Looking forward to your comments of this overdimensioned Eve adventure!

Hello! Intro: Not so new anymore with 90 posts, but I don't think I said hi here yet. Hi! Short intro: I play KSP since roughly 2 months - usually a few hours per day. I play the game as stock as possible (only KER), mostly career at the normal settings. My greatest feat is landing Jeb on Eve, and getting him back to Kerbin safely. Planning Jool missions now. Actual question: Ok, so my newbie question is where one can find the active challenges? I notice a lot of forum members with honorary badges in their signatures, but I only found a few active challenges, some with no active participants yet. Many nice challenges seem closed, or don't even have people maintaining them anymore. Is there a list of active challenges somewhere? Or do we just browse the Challenges & Mission Ideas subforum up to page 10 to search for all the active ones, and/or just wait until a nice challenge is created, and then start building? (Note: I wouldn't mind to create a challenge, and I have a few ideas... but I'd prefer to first participate in one or two wash off the n00bishness before doing that).

If you don't see the contract you like, you can just warp forward by 3-6 days, which should refresh most of the contracts. I assume you've made it to LKO successfully? I noticed that if you successfully complete a type of mission several times, the game assumes you like that type of mission and offers you many more.

Heh, true. But with a little patience, keeping it under 20 m/s (under 10 m/s is safer), you can drive the thing into the sea, whereas flying can still result in a crash, especially since you must land that Swivel safely, which has an impact tolerance of only 7 m/s, possibly using only a single parachute (the M16). With radial parachutes (Mk2-R), happy landings are already much easier because you can strap so many more parachutes onto the rocket. Another bonus of driving is that you don't stage anything, so you recover the entire vehicle if you drive it into the sea. (Yeah, I just read that last sentence back, and I also realize how silly it sounds).

This is probably your answer. Top tip, when you gotta test something "splashed down at Kerbin", the easiest way is to drive off the end of the runway and into the ocean, then activate it. (Much easier and safer than to fly and land again, although admittedly much more boring too).

... When you take the approach of a 10 year old playing with Lego: When you design a mothership for 14 Kerbals, when 2 or 3 would be sufficient, house them in cupolas and R&D labs because they look nicer, add 6 docking ports because "you never know", add landing legs on the 300 ton monster so it can land on Minmus or Gilly "just in case", and add totally unnecessary lamps on the sides to decorate it.

I for one love the looks of the Rockomax, for the exact same reasons that @XB-70A hates it. It really looks like a big barrel, and we have yet to find out if it contains rocket fuel, or some kind of pickled herring. <-- This looks very Kerbal to me. For me, the main "Silly little thing" is the fact that the vehicles run over the Kerbals in the VAB and SPH. Fixing it won't affect game play, but Jeb's job looks safe compared to the dangers that the poor Kerbals on the floor have to deal with.

Here's a typical lander+mothership design I use. (In this case the mothership is heavily overdimensioned for a Duna-Ike-Mun-Minmus flyby mission, where the lander is only for an Ike landing). In this case, the mothership had about 3000 dV left when it got back to Kerbin (did I mention it was overdimensioned?), but in case it had gone wrong, that lander could just disconnect, and attach to another rescue vessel with either the lower docking port (large), or the one on top (regular). Likewise, the mothership has additional docking ports, because if you haul 35000 units of fuel, it really does not matter if you add 1 ton worth of docking ports in various sizes. Combining 3 missions makes so much cash I could build this This mothership is obviously more likely to become a rescue vessel for a less extravagantly fueled mission than to run out of fuel itself.

I posted an answer in an earlier thread. It may be relevant. Executive Summary for the design below: I preferred fighting gravity than fighting the terrible drag, so gently on the throttle, no faster than 150 m/s until 14000m up, and keep it under 300 m/s until around 20 km up. Go straight up until at least 35 km. And bring some spare dV!! The one below had 5600 m/s dV to get to Minmus (one-way), which in retrospect was uncomfortably close to being insufficient. Add huge wings at the base of the rocket (note that I put 12 airplane wings on it). And empty the tanks of the rover if possible. The large white, and two orange tanks were all empty. [edit] and LOTS OF STRUTS. The rocket above didn't even have the slightest wobble in it... due to at least 30 struts strutting everything down.

True. You'd need 3 in total for this to work: one facing up to the heatshield. This acts as a decoupler and will only undock upon re-entry. And two docking ports facing each other below that, for regular docking and undocking. Personally, I didn't think all of this was rocket science, but I appreciate the positive feedback on my post(s). I hope it helps @steedcrugeon too!

Oops, no it does not explode under my ship. I put a decoupler in between. I don't like explosions upon re-entry. [Kerbals] [Science, batteries, parachutes] [heatshield] [decoupler] [docking port] [docking port] [ship] Other variations are possible too. But the general picture is that the Kerbals and the science can be landed safely on Kerbin (have heatshield and parachutes), and can be transferred between ships through regular docking ports, preferably in such a way that it does not wobble with engines on (so, preferably large docking ports). Another favorite method is to put the docking port at the top, and put a nosecone directly on top of the docking port: [nosecone] [docking port (facing towards the nosecone)] [Kerbals] [Science, batteries, parachutes] [heatshield] [docking port, facing the heatshield] [ship] This works especially well with the lander cans which do not get more narrow towards the top (thereby forcing you to use smaller docking ports, which will wobble more). The docking ports can act like manual decouplers. The nosecone is discarded anywhere above 50km altitude.

In addition to the previous comment, I often equip the pods/habitats and science with a heatshield and parachutes, so that it can land itself on Kerbin. The stack looks like this: [Kerbals] [Science, batteries, parachutes] [heatshield] [docking port] [docking port] [ship (fuel, engines, stages, more batteries, solar, etc.)] This way, if the mission goes according to plan, the important bit can land safely. If the mission goes wrong, I can send a rescue mission. Because I can just dock the top section to the rescue vessel, it keeps the rescue mission very simple. The same idea makes it possible to recycle the ship too. In the few cases where I went nuts properly Kerbal on a mission, and I built a giant mothership, the same strategy allowed me to dock and undock the top section with the Kerbals and science.

I bring back my Kerbals at any cost. I bring back the science if it is cheaper than launching a new mission. (I play career, so funds are important). I do not care about the ship. Often, I construct my ship so that I can disconnect the Kerballed pods/habitats and science from the rest of the ship, so that a rescue vessel can drag home only the important bits.

Obviously you can also use the TT-70 Radial Decoupler, which creates a little more drag than the TT-38K, but is quite likely to solve the problem too. I find this the easiest solution. These are unlocked in "Advanced Construction", at a cost of 90 science points, I believe. Personally, I had the most success with method similar to what @swjr-swis advised: placing the decouplers right on the center, and decoupling while moving nicely prograde. I found in tests that puting the decoupler high up (away from the CoM of the booster) has a risk of pushing the bottom (engine) of the SRB into the center rocket. But as was advised, you should also place them low, perhaps with their nozzles below the nozzle of the central rocket. As long as they are placed low enough they will move inwards a bit before being pushed out by aero forces, but all that happens below your rocket. If for whatever reason you need to decouple the boosters while going wildly off the prograde market, then sepatrons are the best. But I never use sepatrons on ordinary kickbacks... only on clusters of kickbacks or on much larger (2.5m or 3.75m) liquid fuel boosters with heavy engines at the bottom.

I play stock, and I can transfer charge from one battery to another without problems. I think @Palaceviking made a good suggestion: check that you have crossfeed enabled. On a sidenote: two of the smallest solar panels on opposite sides of a ship can usually prevent batteries being drained during time warp.

End game: My lander is about to descend onto the castle, then Jeb is gonna run past King Koopa, optionally fireball him a bit (*), and rescue the princess. Then he's gonna start a new career. (*) Fireballs are always an option

I agree with @Laie that the Mun and Duna are places where quick turns are needed. With some practice and determination, you can probably still go straight up first, then rotate, and then do the gravity turn. On Gilly, the story is quite different. If Jeb farts, the whole mothership will hover for 30 seconds.