Mister Dilsby

How is this possibly an easter egg? The asteroids are blatantly visible the first time anyone gets a ship near Dres. I mean, I never go to Dres personally (I will now!) but really, they thought we'd avoid the lonely space potato for two--whole--MONTHS? There is... another egg. There must be.

My wife does note how much time I spend playing, but generally gives me a little slack when I point out it's pretty much my entire personal entertainment committment--the equivalent of her novels and crossword puzzles all rolled together. The kids are not helping matters today though, as they are bouncing around the house yelling "Hype! Hype! Hype! Hype!" and asking when the V1 download is going to start. I never should have shown them that video... What DOES help is that my daughter is much more interested in playing the game now that Valentina is on board

Capital ships like KSS Wasabi Maru will work fine, but will benefit from some new parts and also will likely need new delivery systems to get orbit. I will probably end up relying more on orbital construction due to realistic aero effects...actually am looking forward to the challenge! But the backbone of Kerbfleet is its spaceplanes, and of course those will all need a complete re-do. From the single-seat Pogo series of crew shuttles, to Gliido light interplanetary craft, to Bumblefly medium cargo ship and Spacecow heavy tankers--all of it starts over today. The design team couldn't be happier

Nicely done! We'll see you over on the Eve Rocks challenge thread, there may be a wait for adjudication as I expect all the reviewers will be spending the afternoon and evening flinging Valentina into suborbital trajectories on the new "Flea" mini-SRB...

Wowza. OK, I will have to make sense of this and update the leaderboard later--but for now I hereby declare the Unlimited category BROKEN! due to Juzeris's epic feat of flinging a driveable rover to Kerbin capture and landing! You, my friend, win ALL the coconuts!

Thanks! Being non-atmospheric it should work fine in 1.0 as well. I'll just need to add an equipment bay for the science and hope that additional mass isn't a problem.

Agreed--based on the info so far I think they did not nerf the engines themselves so much as threw in some consequences (like heat) for going to orbital velocity within atmosphere. The balance (or lack thereof) in 1.0 will be all about how intakes perform. They should heat up faster than other parts at high mach because of the work they do--literal work, compressing the air for the engines (since there is not a separate "compressor" part) That, plus an aerodynamic model that prohibits unrealistic airhogging, would give a realistic challenge to SSTOs while still allowing the fun of ridiculously dangerous high-speed aircraft at low altitude

I'd love it if when you mined a class E for a long time, it turned into a D, then a C, and so on until "puff"!

Hopefully it's balanced, and the drilling and refining equipment should be heavy enough to prevent a ship that carries it from refueling itself and making orbit again single stage. A permanent base that drills and stores fuel, though, would be very cool. Rover tankers could transfer the fuel to landed ships, or shuttles could take the fuel to an orbiting station. I suppose I want the game to encourage 'model railroad' style building, not a fantasy realm where a ship can go everywhere and back with zero infrastructure. If the stock game doesn't do that I'll just move the slider until it does--but wow, the folks running big challenges are going to have to scrutinize everyone's resource settings.

Speedbrakes! Speedbrakes! Aaaaaahhhhhhh! *dies*

I voted "scrub". I scrubbed mine, and am spending my VERY small amount of play time these days working on ship and lander concepts that I think will work in v1. The main reason I think you should scrub is that let's face it, like me and almost all the rest of us you are going to post your mission report in the Forum and sit back hoping for praise, adulation and maybe even a little +rep. I'll be so bold as to say you fall into the camp of valuing this validation, or else you might not have asked several thousand total strangers for their opinions on this subject So how are you going to feel when in a week or two you finish your 0.25 vintage Jool-5 mission, you're feeling pumped, but the whole focus of discussion on the challenge thread is around how much harder/easier it is now to aerobrake though Jool to Laythe, and whether it's OK to mine Bop for fuel on the way home, or whatever? You won't be playing the same game as everyone else so the mission you worked so hard on might not get the attention and respect it deserves. My 1/50 of a Fund, and the reason I won't be launching for Jool until Valentina Kerman graduates from Kerbfleet Academy.

Hilarious! How do you even steer that thing?

Thanks, and yes I think "electrically driven wheels" should be the standard for Unlimited, not requiring Rover wheels. Unlimited is all about SAS abuse, after all! As for 'touching a ramp', I thought about that way back when I first wrote Unlimited rules, but did not want to restrict the definition of a 'ramp'. My thinking: in Unlimited unlike Open the ramp need not be inert...but once the ramp is not inert, the logically absurd conclusion is a ramp in name only (RINO) that ends up looking like the massive centrifugal flingers that led us to this point. So, suppose we required that the last thing the rover touch is some kind of 'ramp', said ramp being inert and in contact with the ice sheet, but you can use any kind of electrically driven flinger and any combination of ramps and terrain to accelerate prior to that point. How then would we treat a concept like mine, in which the rover that goes off the ramp flings a crewed, driveable piece of itself for distance? - - - Updated - - - Actually I was considering adding a third stage to my original Fling-O-Matic, a command seat behind the Mk1 cockpit that could hopefully achieve orbit or escape. I would attempt to land the first two rover stages safely on Minmus, and then let whatever fate befall the third...

Bill: Remember that time we fell out of the rover and couldn't move? Bob: Yeah! There we were, just standing on Vall like a couple of idiots. Couldn't move, couldn't do anything--like we were still in our command seats. Bill: Alive, standing, but immoble. Weird. Good thing our helmets are so tough, we could have been brain-damaged. Bob: Good thing. --pause-- Bill: Remember that time we fell out of the rover and couldn't move? Bob! Yeah! There we were, just standing on Vall...

All right, I've looked things over a bit more and would like to get some opinions regarding the direction of the Unlimited challenge. Per the rules in the OP, both Petronator's and Juzeris's entries are perfectly valid for Unlimited. However this is a ROVER jump challenge so in that spirit we may want to modify the Unlimited rules, to wit: Thus (perhaps too conveniently? hey, the OP has to have some privileges ) my entry in Unlimited still works because it was a drivable rover from beginning to end of the run (actually, at the end it was TWO drivable rovers!) Petrnonator's second entry looks drivable at start of run, if he can retract enough gear bays to be able to drive in a straight-ish line without toppling the whole structure. The capsule is not a rover after release, but it easily could be with addition of a couple of wheels. With some modifications Juzeris could certainly also meet this standard. Note that the 'drivable after run' part makes it harder for vehicles that do not escape, and impact Minmus somewhere. Even more difficult for a craft that hits Kerbin. So I am thinking the ULTIMATE ULTIMATE answer to this Challenge will be a rover that jumps from Minmus, lands on Kerbin at the KSC, and is still driveable. Anyone have the drupes to pull that off? What do you all think?

Excellent points. Let's consider unlimited 'broken', and yeah it would have been a good idea to require the flung vehicle to begin as a proper operating 'rover' -- that way I'd stil be on top! No more Unlimited entries will be judged until we sort it out. @petronator, this subtracts nothing from the awesomeness of your latest fling. We just may have to find a way to restore the 'rover spirit' to the unlimited rules.

Phenomenal! Juzeris, you go to the top with 507 m/s. Thanks for re-running this, I wonder if you're getting a whip-crack effect with the stock connection that you weren't getting with KJR.

Epic! The push from Jeb of course cannot be allowed to add to your score, which would be counted as a Minmus escape at 398 m/s. Unfortunately I do have to DQ this entry for KJR, which could give an advantage in allowing you to construct ridiculous big arms that do not fall apart. However, +rep for disclosing this yourself as no one would have detected it from the video. I hope you can do it again without KJR, and maybe get Jeb all the way home without an EVA push--I think in a lander can you might just have enough velocity to manage it!

Makes sense, and there is precedent. You can destroy any ship in flight from the Tracking Station so all ships must have a self-destruct sequence. Kerbfleet's, for example, is "Zero-Zero-Zero-Destruct-Zero". I have it on good authority that certain... other space programs have been trying to get rid of some errant probes for several years now, but can't decrypt the boss's destruct code. Of course if you're going to use this it makes sense to have a launch escape system on hotkey, and press that one first.

This is all great fun, but shouldn't we open a Kerbal Kryptography thread in the Lounge somewhere? This may be diverging significantly from the Kountdown as originally posted.

I'd use a countdown, especially if: --the start time could be adjustable --there is a 'hold' and 'resume' button I would use the time of the countdown to make my final checks, and it would go kind of like this: Staging? -- GO! Guidance? -- GO! SAS? --GO! RCS? --GO! Chargers? --GO! Payload? --GO! Nav? --GO! 3... 2... 1...

As of getting the news that there are indeed female Kerbals (and they want to go to space just as much as the boys), Kerbfleet no longer operates 'manned' craft. Our ships are either 'crewed' or 'uncrewed'.

Well done! The Unlimited leaderboard has been updated.

Argh. I'm sticking with 'f$' Let's no one get bent out of shape over this. We didn't solve it, but if we were not entertained we were at least 'diverted' from not having an official puzzle to solve--and Slashy was quite good at responding to guesses and giving hints along the way.

The longer he goes without telling us what it is, the more demands for new features he'll have for 1.1! My latest: distant planets being as visible against the star field as they are IRL, either in space or from the ground at night. (yes I know there's a mod for this)