TheFlyingKerman

The lazy man's method: Actually it does not matter which way the rocket lands, the rover can always right itself with reaction wheels.

In response to popular demand, Kerbus is offering a variant of the K-210 with traditional cockpit, the K-220. https://kerbalx.com/TheFlyingKerman/Kerbus-K-220 It is more or less the same as the K-210. Cruising speed: 300m/s Cruising altitude: 5800m Range: 1050km And again, AG2 toggles the flap. We also slightly increased ground clearance to reduce the risk of tail strikes (although we tried pulling up as hard we could and didn't get any tail strike). It is slightly more expensive, though, at 11,151,000 Kerbucks each. Note: neither this plane or the K-210 is designed to takeoff repeatedly from water, because the water floods the engines during landing, and is like to cause damage.

@CrazyJebGuy I have no mod installed, not even KER. The initial post reads: "With a little help from the afterburner to push it above the sound barrier, it is capable of cruising at 640m/s at 11400m, in dry mode." It means the plane takes off and sets its course in dry mode, then fires up the afterburner to climb and accelerate to the required speed and altitude, then switches back to dry for the long haul flight. IRL the Concorde also uses afterburner for acceleration and then cruises in dry mode.

I guess the problem is the plane never reaches the required speed? As a result it does not generate enough lift flying prograde, which further increases drag. Using the afterburners until you are flying level at 640m/s should fix the problem. ... Unless things change from 1.2.x to 1.3.x

Assuming the starting node is tier 0, tier 5 is the 160-point nodes, here you go.

I am not familiar with KerbalX. Do the links work now? Kerbus K-350 https://kerbalx.com/TheFlyingKerman/Kerbus-K-350 Kerbus K-210 https://kerbalx.com/TheFlyingKerman/Kerbus-K-210

You get the bonus as long as the signal strength is good. You get 40% bonus if the strength is above 83%, the bonus goes down quickly to 29% with 81% strength. Not sure if this works. You get OK connection between your relay ring and KSC, but the connection between RA-100's aren't that strong. A even simpler solution is a bigger relay at Kerbin orbit.

No more reviews??? I updated my Kerbus K-350 entry, with some fine tuning. It now flies slightly higher, at 11400m (was 11000m) and has even better fuel economy. At 0.0044 Kallons per passenger mile it is probably the most economic plane out there. https://kerbalx.com/download/craft/36834

I tried auto-strutting. They must be much weaker than the regular one...

Something like Mythodea or Conquest of Paradise by Vangelis

I am lazy so I use about 10 lifter designs from 4 families for pretty much all my launches. I use SRB heavy because they are cheap. For my pure SRB rockets the TWR at takeoff is around 1.5. For my mixed SRB/LF rockets the TWR is around 1.7-1.8, but goes down to 1.0-1.2 when the SRB's are dropped.

I found that parts on my car (especially the air intake and fuel tank in front) break away without even touching the ground, after landing from jumps as slow as 50m/s. How do you guys overcome that?

My entry Total time: 56 min. 06 sec.

@CrazyJebGuy You should apply to be an official judge. There are too many entries.

I've got one question. I did a test drive at Dres. My rover would just jump from one ridge to the next, and the planet is all ridges. I ended up spending 95% of the time in mid space. It gets even worse on Gilly, where each 'jump' is several km long. Do you still call this rovering?

It takes a long time, both in game and in real life to do this challenge, because I am flying other missions during the probe's long trip. This is my first time flying to the Jool system. My game is stock and I make no attempt for the craft to look like the real Cassini. Entering the Jool system. I just took a direct Hohman transfer. Greeted by Tylo I used gravity assist from Laythe to capture into the system My probe doesn't carry a lander like the Huygens. However, the whole probe skims the Laythe atmosphere. I originally designed the probe to deliver a relay to low Jool orbit for long term use. However the relay's solar panels broke during aerobreaking, and the signal at Jool wasn't good. So I decided to crash both into Jool instead. Low Jool orbit I decided to use a second gravity assist from Laythe to visit Vall as well A third flyby to Laythe to get back to Jool, now with even lower, almost touching the atmosphere. First areobreaking at Jool. The probe would then go back to space to transmit the experiments The final descend. Again my probe is different from Cassini. It uses a heat shield and parachute to go deeper instead of just burning up. Found another design mistake. The probe doesn't have enough battery or electric generation to transmit everything back Finally crushed by the immense pressure of the Jool atmosphere The mission is more epic than I thought. Thanks @rev_dude

A couple more counterpoints: 1) Terrain scatters is very bad for computer performance, especially when driving, because each of then have to be rendered in high detail. That is why there is an option to reduce or turn them off. 2) If these objects get turned into real, solid obstacles, they would make driving even more dangerous and impractical.

My first two inter-planetary probes ever have returned to Kerbin! The first was a Duna lander. The landing was not so different form the Mun. The second one was more exciting. It was a Sun diving probe. I gave it a 4000m/s ejection burn, so that it had a Kerbol PE of 1000Mm, where it performed experiments near the Sun. It was in 2:5 resonant orbit with Kerbin, so that after 2 years and a couple of small course corrections it returns with the same speed, some 6300m/s. Burning nearly all the fuel retrograde reduced the entry speed to 4800m/s. The difficulty was maintaining the PE, that I ended up at 29000m. The engine blew up and I found the heat shield ablator gone after being heated by the Sun...

There are different design choices here. I build my rover light and fast. My main rover can do >50m/s on Duna and the Mun, >55m/s on Minmus. It took me 2.5hrs to drive 400km from the Duna polar region to the equator, covering 8 biomes (poles, polar highlands, midlands, lowlands, northeast basin, western canyon, highlands, midland sea). I suspect biome hopping is at least going to be equally tedious.

My low tech entry, the HKA-3A. It just uses the panther jets and Mk.55 rockets, and 90 tech node parts. Nothing than a LKO tour bus. Taking off Turning on the afterburner. This gets the plane to about 850m/s at 15000m Then switch to the rockets Orbit. Re-entry. I just extend the tailfin to keep the nose 35-45deg above horizon. I am overshooting KSC. Have to fly back. Landing back to the runway. I am not a very good pilot...

Yes. And my computer is an ultrabook. The OP's laptop should be better in every way.

I am running KSP on a Thinkpad X260 with 2.3GHz i5 core without problem. I drive quite a lot on the ground. However my OS is Win 7.

I found another asteroid on collision course with Kerbin... I redirected that one away. It was harder than I thought. Clearly the first one can be safely ignored. Indeed. I am a moar SRB rocket guy. There isn't much to refuel at LKO. I am experimenting with small scale mining at Gilly and soon at Pol, though.

I found a class C asteroid going to reach PE of 5500km in about 100 Kerbin days. Currently I am not mining within Kerbin SOI. Ideas?

Took my usual contract/science plane for a flight... Everything is stock and I just flied with prograde lock. Take off North Pole South Pole Back to KSC.