Mister Dilsby

I agree, those aesthetics are worth a little lag. Loving the look of those lights and the openness of the space defined by the struts.

Two landings, some night driving for Tedgee, and this mission is all done except for the hard part. Next up, ascent!

That's a very good practice. Problem for me is I ran out of room on the chart: 1,2,3-jet engine sets (I fly a lot of big multiengine spaceplanes and shut off groups to conserve air at high altitude w/o throttling) 4-air intakes 5-main rockets 6-auxiliary rockets 7,8,9,0--everything else

Thanks Commander! Yeah, the boom was clearly chosen for looks over function. In operation it tends to twist as well as pitch/yaw. I disabled all the gyros on the lander to avoid excessive bounce when maneuvering, and as noted in the images ended up firing two lander aerospikes along with the Wasabi's two outriggers to prevent a "pogo-ing" oscillation mode. Really, I SHOULD have known better on those LV-Ns. I've towed class-E asteroids, and on those ships I make the boom twice as long for just this reason. Somehow, I thought the exhaust would pass between the parts of the lander...oh well, lesson learned, and it's always a good feeling to pull off a workaround. Another error I made is overlap of action groups. The Wasabi Maru's solar panels are '8', the cargo bay door/interior light combo is '9', and the science package is '0'. If I pressed those keys in sequence right now it would also trigger the XL parachutes on the lander, followed by the radial clusters, and finally fire the separatrons and blow the descent fuel tanks/parachute stacks into space. So I'm doing everything with right-click as long as the ships are docked.

That is really strange! So is it the case that the front and rear wheels now spin in opposite directions? Generally unless wheels are upside-down they all spin the same way, and "forward" is determined by the POV of the controlling seat or probe. (I can't tell you how many times I've put an OKTO on upside-down and had the darn thing drive the wrong way) Do you have Hyperedit installed? http://www.kerbaltek.com/hyperedit This is a really useful debug tool. If it were me, I would try the following: --make a new instance of the rover directly from your SPH or VAB craft, and drive it around the space center to confirm it works there. --use Hyperedit to put a clean ship on the mun (perhaps in a sandbox save, or a copy of your persistent.sfs) and see what happens If all else fails and you can't figure out why the wheels are backwards, then maybe hyperedit a 'clean' copy of the rover up to Mun to replace the glitchy one. Working around a glitch is not cheating

11/10 because a rock explosion is one louder.

When I was 5 I didn't know I was a nerd. I only knew that I liked rockets, and when I was older I was going to fly Apollo LVII to space with my little brother. When I was 15 I knew something was up. Girls weren't interested, guys didn't think I was funny and sometimes they hit me. I played Traveler and D&D with the other outcasts. When I was 25 I had an engineering degree and a pretty good job. I wasn't in the "in" group at work, so having acted a bit in college I hung out with theater nerds. When I was 35 I had been married to a book nerd (librarian) for 6 years. All the preschool moms and dads we knew were nerds of various types, technical and otherwise. All of them had a similar story to tell. I'll be 45 this month. My daughter is in middle school. She wants to be a biologist. Some days she comes home super-excited because something cool happened in robotics club, or they talked about something in science class that she already knew from playing KSP. Some days she mopes in her room reading dystopian YA novels because one of the three "friends" she has put her down to make points with the cool kids. My son is 10 and somehow manages to bridge the nerd- and not-nerd social worlds. We'll see how that holds up when he starts getting more interested in girls. It gets better. A LOT better. The rest of your world just needs a little time to catch up with you. I like who I am now, and I like who my kids are even more.

Thank you! Here's hoping it proves to be more than just a pretty face...

Lol--I believe that gif is well worth turning a gray bar green. Have some rep! Embed an imgur album like this: [imjur]qwert[/imjur] but spell "imgur" correctly and use the 5-character code in the Imgur album url, for example mWbY8 from http://imgur.com/gallery/mWbY8

I don't always block my solar panels, but when I do it's with a tight lattice of PB-NUK radioisotope generators.

Mine is a shot of a Christmas tree ornament I made myself, with colored modeling clay. I know it's not the greatest, but I have Jeb on my tree and you probably don't

Careful now--I believe it does rotate, but its rotation period is the same as its orbital period such that it always points the same face to Jool as it goes.

Sanity is a good thing. When I do it (and I'm almost there! See latest update) I will post a summary here so other interested designers can see how I did it. If my peers review it and award me rep and badges, of course I'll be pleased. I plan to make a concise list of mission parameters including disclosure of any cheats, clips, and shortcuts to make the review easier. And I'll be patient. My grandfather fought in WWII and did not get his Pacific Theater Campaign Ribbon in the mail until the mid-1990s. If he can wait for that, I can wait for this.

Here's the outbound interplanetary part of the voyage, with one major fail, recovery, and a nice shot of Eve with EVE at the end (which is now my .sig background) Really I should have known better about the exhaust impingement, I've certainly towed enough asteroids. I know, rather than going to auxiliary engines I could also have separated the ships and at least gotten the cruiser to Eve on LV-Ns. I just didn't want to bother with multiple aerocaptures, docking etc. Next phase is landing, and recovery from the surface! Was very hard to go to bed last night and work this morning knowing I am this close.

Oh goodness, happened to me too. I just now got Jeb in an orbit around Moho; I had launched him thinking he would be back in time to lead a mission to Duna. That mission has come and gone, and he also missed being on the Eve crew now in LEO. I think I made the same mistakes as others. First, I didn't pay attention to inclination at launch. I should have gotten into LKO in Moho's plane, not in Kerbin's equatorial plane. Correcting later was very expensive. Second, I should have paid attention to the velocity at intercept rather than just thrust until I got an encounter. That first encounter was at ludicrous speed, and while plotting the maneuver node I realized I would never have time to decelerate for capture on 60kN of thrust. So I let that one go, and a Kerbal year or two later managed to get an orbit using the reserve fuel in the lander. I think i have enough to get home, but a landing is off unless I can send a refueling ship.

Well I owe both Zoom and Perry Apsis some apologies--in my ham-handed attempt at peacemaking I looked at Perry's submission (the giant pipe organ, which landed in the ocean and launched from underwater) and confused it with Zoom's. Hence my comment about being "more proud of persistence", which is something Perry Apsis said. Commander Zoom: I'm sorry for not paying sufficient attention to sort out whose post was whose, and for undeservedly calling your ship 'inelegant'. Perry Apsis: Sorry for calling YOUR ship 'inelegant'! Again, I used the word thinking it was a summary of your own assessment, but it was improper none the less. OK, I'm done with trying to sort this out. As it is written, "It is easier to achieve Eve orbit with LV-Ns than it is to mediate an argument on an internet forum." ETA-- but now that we've dealt with my transgressions, I still still hope that both Zoom and Laie will press that [F9] and let bygones be.

Another, more civil interpretation of Fengist's post is that he is following your Rule 5 to the letter... This is a really interesting challenge and I think it'll be fun for those who still have those save files (I don't) or can remember enough to reconstruct that first ship. It got me reminiscing about my trip to the Mun in the free demo. First I crash-landed, stranding Jeb. I slapped two Mk1 capsules onto a rescue ship (there being no Mk1-2 in demo) and sent Bill to get him. Success! But I ran the ship out of fuel in Mun orbit. Following the rule of 'leave no Kerbal behind' even in demo, I sent Bob with with THREE Mk1 capsules (stacked in line, with the middle one upside-down) and made the rendezvous in a crazy elliptical Mun orbit without benefit of navball markers. Jeb and Bill had to EVA 10km to get to the rescue ship, and all splashed down safely on Kerbin. I learned a lot about KSP that day, and I bought the full game immediately afterwards. Thanks Kaboom for reminding me of that

En effet, oui, nous sommes seul dans l'univers du jeu. Il y a un mod "DarkMultiPlayer", mais c'est limité, et je crois que tout les serveurs sont en anglais. Mais dans le Forum on n'est jamais seul. Bienvenue! *svp pardonnez mon français mauvais, je suis americain

I can empathize with both sides of this discussion; I've posted things hoping for praise, and I've managed a challenge--though not one as important or high-profile as this one, as IMO there IS no harder single feat in the game than designing a ship that can return from Eve surface. I suppose that's why emotions are so high here. Laie and Zoom, maybe let's step back from the edge a bit. Longer term I think the best thing to do is have more than one volunteer reviewer on the thread, just as with the other elite-level challenge Jool-5. Short term, maybe taking back some words typed in haste, the facts seem to be that: (1)CDR Zoom did indeed return a Kerbal from what looks like BELOW sea level on Eve. (2)The design used is...inelegant (Zoom himself admits to being more proud of his persistence than the results). (3)Laie reviewed the mission and awarded the coveted Badge, with reservations not specified but possibly related to item (2). So, maybe let's imagine that [F5] was pressed several posts ago...now hold down [F9], start again from the facts, and get back to the fun like nothing happened.

Exactly. I guess I'm thinking this direction because of my still-in-progress Eve Rocks attempt. (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/115007-Operation-Big-Purple-just-ONE-more-v0-90-mission-to-Eve) My ascender should work just fine, but what if it just doesn't deliver enough thrust/deltaV? Imagine if it can't do better than lob the capsule out of atmosphere, in a suborbital trajectory. Could I decelerate the orbiting mothership to intercept the capsule, catch it in the cargo bay, and then blast back to a stable orbit before all 150 tons of KSS Wasabi Maru ends up scattered across the purple fruitless plains of Eve? Probably not--but OMG that would be an epic save.

Extreme Madness Level could be to dive a ship into Eve atmosphere and refuel an ascending lander, giving the latter just enough dV to orbit.

Agreed. I'll likely bring my workhorse Mk1 and Mk2 planes into the new save just to see how they work/don't work, and re-optimize from those starting points--then rebuild my Mk3 ships with the new parts deck and what I learned from the Mk1/Mk2 experience. As for rockets, the classical ones I expect to work fine but those take 5 minutes to build, and I know I'm going to want to put fairings on for appearance anyway Big complicated ships like my class E asteroid hauler are going to need fairings and shields at the least, and possibly a complete redesign for orbital assembly.

No count from me, but am VERY happy to have given a newbie his first rep a little while ago, on his 4th post. It's a good feeling to turn a gray bar green

Good idea!- - - Updated - - - I hear that. Just now trying to squeeze in an Eve landing/return.- - - Updated - - - Can't wait to see how the new aero model affects flying asteroids...

If you want to show him teh awesomeness but have concerns about violating distribution terms, then give him the free demo and some forum links to outstanding spacecraft images/Mission Reports.