BeanThruster

I see, thanks for the clarification! That's what I thought too.

Uhmm, woudn't that break lander rule #1 "Thou Shalt Not Land Thy Ship Unkerbed"? Anyway, it is intended that the probe can land only on the world(s) being targeted by the mission, right? Otherwise, it would be a totally different game (you could land an ore harvester anywhere for refueling). And also, can a relay that has been deployed on a given mission be used on the following missions? or should any missions be self-contained also in this sense?

Hi. I'm starting here the challenge I run very a lightly modded KSP 1.8.1 with MH & BG DLCs. list of mods: Chatterer alarm clock Transfer Window Planner Game settings are custom, with a 80% science rewards, which I feel is a good compromise between challenge and grind. Quicksaves and reverts are on, as well as parts and Kerbals G-force limits, parts pressure limits, and plasma blackouts Here's the link my first mission (there' also some initial science harvesting aroud KSC) https://imgur.com/a/08YYoWq And here is Munpollo. https://imgur.com/a/PZj99md Next stop, Minmus.

Thank you, president, thank you committee members for including me in the K-prize party guest list So proud to be there. After-mission debriefing revealed that the mission itself has been put at risk when Val and Matbrio started quarrelling about who was in charge for landing. In the resulting mess, pilots forgot to swich engines in open cycle mode, and rapiers flamed out a few kilometers away from the runway. Situation was promptly recovered, but responsibles has been assigned to paperwork duty for the next two years. All's well that ends well, anyway...

To K prize committee esteemed president, dear members, please accept the attached mission report, which I am submitting to your attention in the hope of being considered as a candidate for your very valuable prize. The mission purpose is the delivery of a biological research module, together with the assigned scientific personnel, to the LKO (120 km) station "Kerbin Gate". The vehicle assigned to this mission is the medium SSTO airplane Godzilla II serials UX002 which, being powered by 8 rapiers, results a little bit overpowered for a 6 tons payload. Personnel involved: Matrbrio Kerman: pilot and mission commander in charge Barmal Kerman: engineer (passenger to Kerbin Gate) Limnea Kerman: scientist (passenger to Kerbin Gate) Darwino Kerman: scientist (passenger to Kerbin Gate) Valentina Kerman: pilot (passenger, reentering to Kerbin from Kerbin Gate) Ascent Circularization and rendez vous Rendez vous and docking Delivering the payload After docking the biolab, scientists and technical staff are transferred to their final destination. Val boards Godzilla for his return on Kerbin Undocking and reentry And this ends the story. Hope that the documentation I'm providing here is sufficient to make your decision. Regards BT

Thanks for your answers. Ill give it a shot, then, at my own pace. I hope I'll complete it before KSP 2, anyway, But, you know, I've also got my career to take care of...

Are there any time limits once the challenge is taken? I mean, time limits in real world

# of failure = exp((# stars in this universe)*(grains of sand in the Sahara))

I would say, you have enough dv (1200 m/s) to get a transfer from Mun to Minmus. If I remember correctly, you need maybe 600-700 m/s to get an equatorial orbit, and then a 200 m/s for the ejection burn and a 100 m/s for Minmus insertion. You end up with 200 m/s spare dv, for final maneuvers and rendez vous. You may find useful the online transfer planner at https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ OR, you may take the difficult way and directly eject from the munar polar orbit. Quite difficult, but not completely impossible. The problem here is that you have a very small tolerance in getting an encounter and you could end up wasting a lot of time orbiting around Kerbin, but if you complete the transfer, you will have something to tell your grandchildren when you get old. Granpa TanDeeJay: Did I ever tell you about that time I transfer from a polar orbit... grandchildren (hysterically crying): naaa, not again

I believe you have not to "fix" anything. You just need a launch TWR grater than one, that in your case is easier said than done. What about your TWR? To lift that weigth, you should total more than 16,000 kN, that is, something like 12 mainsail engines (or maybe 4-5 Mammoth) plus a collection of BIG boosters to ease the initial ascent phase. You don't have to calculate TWR by yourself, KSP is doing that for you. Check the engineer's report in VAB (the small wrench icon on the bottom right corner). Consider that an efficient ascent profile will probably need a launch TWR of 1.5 (maybe something more).

I've got a very strict "no cheat" policy in my career games, being game reloading the only allowed cheat (and only in special cases). After all, in this case, I can afford to land the tourist in Kerbin and cancel the contract (I'm sick of it), or wait a couple of months until the tourist completes his second trip outside Kerbin SOI and returns.

Thank you all for your answers. I did some tests and experiments, and I'm letting you know the results, just in case you find yourself in similar conditions. In this process I did a lot of game save and reload, and by no means the bug was fixed (this to answer to @Snark and yes, I’m rather inclined to believe that this is a bug) As you can see in the screenshot I posted above, my orbit has no visible encounter along its path. However, even small (a few tens of m/s ) DeltaVs were enough to have some very distant (in time) encounter with Kerbin, like the one in the screenshot below. Among all the other random burning around, I also tried lowering the orbit, to remove any doubt of being on an orbit with a possible encounter with Kerbin or other bodies, but still no luck, the orbit requirement in the contract window was still locked in its grayed out status Returning back to Kerbin proved to be unfruitful, as the contract remained uncompleted upon landing, even if (weird enough) the pilot has been awarded with 6 experience points for being orbiting around the sun. The only way that worked was reentering in kerbin SOI and then leaving it (burning to get an encounter with Kerbin and then burning back to an orbit around the Sun while still being outside Kerbin SOI is not going to work, you have to actually enter Kerbin SOI). got an encounter with kerbin in two hours went all the way around Kerbin (it took more than 30 days) and eventually got "the orbit around the sun" checked out. I don't know if it is my previous orbit around the Sun that was bugged in some way, or it is a matter of conflicting conditions (Fly by the Sun AND orbit around the sun), like @AHHans says. Anyway, i believe this is a bug. Hope this post may help other kerbal brothers.

I accepted a contract to take a tourist on a sun fly by AND on an orbit around the sun. Now, I was expecting that just peeping out of Kerbin SOI would have fulfilled both the mission requirements (Sun fly by and orbit). instead, when I left kerbin SOI, the flyby condition was green-checked on the contact window, while the orbit condition remained grayed out. This is sort of puzzling, since I can see on the map view that my ship is on a clear orbit around the Sun. Any idea on how the game award the condition of orbiting around the sun?

Yup, the right answer was the quite obvious "just double click on it". I don't know why I din't think of it. However, thanks a lot again

Ahhh, double-clicking, you say... I'm playing on PC and, as I wrote above, I was probabily missing something. I'll give it a try and I'll let you know. Thanks a lot

Last evening I had this contract to fulfill the piece of equipment from LKO. being that lately I've been into SSTOs designing and devel, I saw a good opportunity to test my newly develobed flying toys. So, I built a small claw equipped recovering unit, docked it into the MK3 cargo bay of my shuttle-like medium SSTO, and took off. Upon reaching the targeted space junk, I opened the cargo bay and undocked the recovering unit, to realize that the the original target (i.e., the equipment to be recovered that, I discovered at that time, was a depleted booster) was not retained by the undocked unit, and that there was apparently no way to target it. Indeed, as far as I know, you can target a unit only in map mode, but when the unit you control is too close (that is, 20 m or less) to the unit you want to target, a correct selection is almost impossible. On the other hand, when in "normal" view mode, docking ports are the only things that can be selected as target in nearby objects. It could well be that it's me that is missing something. Any idea how to efficiently select a nearby object (with "nearby", I mean so close that cannot be distinguished by my craft on the map) without the agonizing pain of sub-pixel-precision clicking in map mode? PS: for those who might be interested, I ended up redocking the recovering unit in the cargo bay, and then maneuvered the SSTO to get the damn piece of junk into the cargo bay too, and eventually had the docked claw capturing it.

many thanks for updating the mod. I moved to 1.8.1 to realize that I could not bear the anguish of a space without chatter

Apparently, the drag / heat bug has been dealt with in 1.8.1. The drag coefficients in the PartDatabase.cfg file reverted back to values that are similar to 1.7.3. Didn't check them all, however the most significant variations (that is, the drag coefficients on z faces of the drag cube in fuselages (had been reduced by a factor of around 4), delta wings and shuttle wings (reduced by more than 10 times) I had found in 1.8.0 are no longer there. Which, together with the fact that the annoying not-saved-settings bug was corrected, allows me to happily step to the 1.8 universe. 1.8.0 is dead, long live 1.8.1 Ill keep a game backup ready for reverting back to 1.7.3, though

GREAT. My SSTOs now behave like they used to. Its kinda like being back home. Now, I can focus on the new fancy things. Thank you, devs

I confirm that. Any kind of wing and stabilizer overheat, not only Big S. I didn’t notice asymmetric drag, but for sure drag is not as strong as it used to be in 1.7. it is not that bad, I can effortlessy lift huge loads into LKO like I never did before. I feel like I’m kinda cheating, just a little bit. The problem is, ehm, taking your rig down without blowing it up

yes, me, see my post. I'm experiencing exactly the same thing. The right part of the plane (wings and rcs) is more prone to overheating. To the point that, if I roll over the plane upside down, the oveheated wing goes to the left and cools down a little bit, while the other one, being on the right, oveheats.

I was looking for someone else experiencing the same issue, didnt see your post before. Btw, I'm not using mods, except for chatterer and kerbal alarm clock

Am I the only one here experiencing a radically different behavior of the atmosphere? At least, Kerbin atmosphere (didn't check other bodies)? I had just completed the design of my own family of SSTO cargos to LKO, but in ksp 1.8everything has changed. Ascending and reentry paths are different, it seems that the drag has decreased, but at the same time the heat delivered to an ascending or descending vehicle has increased. I have RV105 thruster blocks on my SSTO wings which now happily blow up, and this had never happened before. I cant initiate the descent whith my usual aerobraking maneuver (that is, setting a 50-60 degrees attitude), because my SSTO light up with temperature indicators like a Christmas tree. The result is that it takes a forever lasting shallow descent profile to land safely. I looked through the changelog, but I didn't find any explicit item that could explain all of this. So what?