Jason Patterson

With stock parts I managed to get 8 of them above the atmosphere.

I know that I just learned how to actually do this yesterday after playing for a couple of months. In order to adjust those wheels when you're attaching them, find the spot you want to put them then hold the shift key and hit the QWEASD buttons to make small adjustments to their orientation. You can tweak the direction that they attach until they are properly aligned.

The decouplers do separate the tanks from one another, but in order to get the fuel lines around the decouplers, which are slightly thicker than the tanks, I had to use the fuel crossfeed from the structural pylons in order to get some extra distance out from the fuel tanks. It introduces aerodynamic problems if not done carefully, as you might imagine. Just so you know, separating the tanks with decouplers is not a particularly effective way to separate the fuel tanks for disposal in flight. They tend not to move at all if your ship is under acceleration.

One good thing about orbiting Minmus is that even if you wind up in an ugly orbit, the velocity required to stay in orbit around it is very small for all but the tightest paths around it. It's easy to make big changes in the shape/orientation of that path as a result.

Like an idiot, I forgot to save a copy of The Crab, and then I tinkered with it and destroyed it. Haven't been able to reproduce the thing yet. I did try paring it down substantially to drop mass, and I wound up with something similar to your ship, pebble_garden, though without the winglet and with a slightly different layout. I can get 160-something km with it but it is basically a ballistic trajectory, there's no glide at the end. It stinks, because the glider aspect of it works quite well, but I have yet to get it to reenter the atmosphere in any way other than wild tumbling. If I add a tailfin, it stays upright, but that just seemed to be too much of a copy.

It's nowhere near the lead, but here is my entry for the spaceplane challenge. My farthest launch so far has been to the east, a distance of 86942m.

Thanks for the info. It's awfully strange to see the ship go from smooth controls to wild movement and reversed controls (or similar.) I'm hoping to redo this challenge with a ship that stays giant as it goes. I don't think I quite met the spirit of the challenge now that I consider it.

I think I'm going to give this another go with a bigger ship.

I took up the challenge with Flaming Stick 2, a 14 stage rocket using only stock parts that I, at least, think looks cool, in a very this-thing-was-built-in-my-garage-by-me-and-my-toothless-brother-in-law kind of way. It was piloted by brave captain Dangel Kerbin, who ultimately did not survive the trip. After launching into orbit around Kerbin, Dangel went on his way, flying past Minmus as he left my home world. Using the close pass of Kerbin as a gravity slingshot, Dangel boosted into orbit around Kerbol and arranged for a close pass of the star itself, reaching speeds greater than 30 km/s! Having realized that he forgot his sunglasses back in his car at the Vehicle Assembly Building, Dangel headed back to Kerbin. Dangel moved the ship into a 140km orbit around his home world, flying right above the parking lot where his glasses lay. He attempted to land at the launch site itself, but having failed to take Kerbin's rotation into account, wound up approximately 4 degrees away. After landing safely with his parachute, Dangel then began the long trek to the Vehicle Assembly Building where he had left his sunglasses in his parked car five years earlier. He walked for most of a day to reach the building. Unfortunately, in his absence, additional security measures had been enacted, and he was killed by an electrified fence at the Vehicle Assembly Building. I'm not entirely sure how you would score it. I'd give it at least 215 of the points. The one I'm uncertain about is non-exploding parts, I did not get stranded, and though I landed on Kerbin, it was a controlled landing rather than a crash (except for fatally walking into the VAB...) The weirdest and most disappointing thing was that after having Dangel walk for the better part of a day, real time, to the base was that as soon as I bumped into the VAB, he disappeared and I got a message saying that he had collided with Kerbin and died. I had hoped for a nice picture of him looking for his car, which had been towed. I'm also kicking myself for not getting a screenshot of him walking. It was pretty epic. Additionally, I'm new to the game. Can anyone tell me why I'm having so much trouble with controls once I escape Kerbin? Once I'm in Kerbol orbit the controls go to pieces; there are regions of the navball that are ridiculously difficult to reach.

In my case, the little jiggles completely tore the ship apart. I wanted to see how fast perihelion actually looked, switched to 1x warp and almost instantly was destroyed by wild spinning. I'm using a much much smaller ship, not entirely sure I can make it back to Kerbin as is. I also should probably put a parachute on the thing... Pictures forthcoming if I succeed.