rewinderon

Today I spent many many hours trying to land on Eve this thing to test it's ability to lift itself. Failed all the time, it kept tipping over even after I made sure ALL the fuel, even from upper stages, was down.

Sounds great! Besides, needing to do ground and air tests in order to unclock eqipment is a great idea of it's own. I mean, think of all the testing! The aircraft parts could finally cpntribute to the tech tree (I always thought it's sad that you don't actually need them as all the science can be made with rockets and aircraft parts remain highly optional) So what I see is actually contracts that allow you to permanently unlock certain parts For example: a contract that makes you launch a rocket to a certain place and land it there will unlock better guiding surfaces (wings and stuff) as well as jet engines. Contracts that require to build and send to specific location aircraft will unlock additional parts. Occasionally contracts like "build a hovering plane" appear, with something like "hover for 10 seconds with horizontal/vertical speed lesser than 10 m/s", that will award you with landing legs and RCS system. "Drop a probe from orbit, we want to see what will happen" will reward you with heat shields, etc.

Hello everyone! Today I finally managed to land on Laythe and return, after many-many days of figuring out reentry and gravitational manoevers. The craft didn't actually have enough delta-V to return, so this was the first time I successfully used other planets to give it a little boost. Very happy now, I spent the entire yesterday to design the craft and it wasn't even supposed to be the final returning version - I only wanted to check the reentry of multiple-stage craft and then refine the design. Glad it worked)