the_wizard

Here's my submission many many years late! Simply called the BoxWing SSTO, the design is based loosely on one of Matt Lowne's SSTO to Minmus, and can deliver at least 18 tons to LKO. This mission involved sending a rover to my new Minmus gateway station and collecting the engineer who was sent with it to set it up! Mods installed are Paralax 2.0, and KOS, however the craft itself is completely stock! I realized after, most of my screenshots were taken without the UI, which if need be I can redo the mission and resubmit. Preflight: Playing with Paralax 2.0 always makes taking off very pretty. Ascent and orbit: Transferring to Minmus: Arrival in Minmus and completing the first stage of the mission deliverables: Returning home: 94 days later the crew + Podrick have successfully returned to the KSC safe and sound, ready for some non-packaged rations!

This is interstellar distances though, shouldn't that be the pinnacle of the grind in KSP 2? We obviously don't know what tools they've implemented to help players with interstellar travel, but it's a fundamentally different mission profile that should be more difficult and one of those difficulties is managing SOL communications. I think a system like this is the sweet spot, my idea was to have homogenous science points, but each system's space center would have individual pools set once they've left the originating system. From there an unlock in the system would start timers in the rest of the systems, with the option of spending local science points to speed up the research in each subsequent system. With this individual systems could prioritize different technology but you'd be able to timewarp to complete the research across the board and sync everything up.

Something that has been working for me is placing a cubic octagonal strut on one of the nodes of the servo, then attaching the fan shroud to that.