samiamthelaw

Put my first rocket of a new career on the pad and had Jeb EVA briefly for the report. Re-boarded and ... Jeb was still outside the capsule. He was inside the capsule, too. Weird. Launched and clone-Jeb fell off the side (he survived), did some experiments and landed safely. Designed my second rocket, hit go, and ... KSC and Kerbin have vanished. All aboard the hype train for 1.0.6, I guess.

Eeloo Return I brought my Eeloo team of 3 home, though they took the long way about it. I tried a direct reentry from Eeloo into Kerbin-- exploded at 50km from overheating. So I reloaded and made that a gravity brake around Kerbin, new apoapsis between Dres and Jool. Next reentry-- exploded at 47km from overheating. So I made that a gravity brake too, new apoapsis between Duna and Dres. Next reentry-- exploded around 40km from overheating. So I took a detour to Eve, which was a much better gravity brake than Kerbin. My next reentry heated to 98% before cooling off and landing calmly in a pretty field. Three-ish years to get to Eeloo and 25 years to get home. Overheating In the previous mission (an Ike lander), I ran in to a strange heat bug. When I landed on Ike, one of my parts --I suspect the Science Jr.-- began producing heat fast. From steady-state 20% to explosions in two seconds. Confident that the mission involved no real thermal challenges, I considered it fair to disable max-temperature checks in debug and I went on with the mission. But the part kept pumping out heat. The heat was conducted to neighboring parts, which conducted heat back in a feedback loop. After one minute, the whole ship was glowing. By the time I got back in orbit around Ike, floating-point precision on the Kerbal Engineer temperature gauges was breaking down-- billions of billions of billions of degrees. I ended up editing the heat down to zero out of fear that the game would crash. The bug hasn't reappeared since.

1) Trying to build anything involving a cargo bay is infuriating.

Do I need to use a lander everywhere? That is, can I visit Pol/Bop just using jetpack power?

If we didn't care at all how other people played, we wouldn't be on the forum.

About 1.7 TWR for a jetpack on Eeloo. Probably a lot less delta v, though.

This one is heavily clipped.

One big mod, or five little mods. It would be more, except for this very relevant and underpowered part of your system specs:

Good point-- you could anchor the thing to the back side of a large asteroid and use that as a heat shield.

Original Planned Feature Set 1. Rockets 2. Snacks ... 54. Reentry Heat 55. No heat shields for spaceplanes

It pops up on the Challenges board now and again.

Aphobius knocked this one out of the park.

Plus, OP didn't say we can't hyperedit them into place, drastically lower gravity, or alter the orbits of Mun and Minmus so that KSC is already between them, negating the need for launching at all.

Sounds fun. I'm a fan of SRB challenges. You might also want to specify no editing of stages once in-flight.

This thread confuses me. I always thought that subjecting kerbals to tremendous acceleration was my reward for completing a mission to Eeloo.

Once the atmosphere had slowed the module down to about 110 m/s, I fired two of the smallest SRBs (sepratrons). I still hit the ground at near 50 m/s, but the landing legs graciously exploded to slow me down the rest of the way. You can use bigger SRBs for landing (e.g. an RT-10) if they're thrust-limited or if you decouple them before they've burned out. (fireworks!)

Tricky, but not as bad as I had imagined. 11 hours, 19 minutes, 16 seconds (just about two Kerbin days). The only mod I have installed is Kerbal Engineer. Some tips: You won't have alternators, so remember to bring a decent battery or a solar panel. Two sepratrons on a lander capsule are enough to decelerate from terminal velocity on Kerbin reentry. You can fire balanced sepratron pairs to fine-tune maneuvers and landings (I didn't have RCS). A single RT-10 is enough to get from Mun's surface back to Kerbin.

I have a rough time reconciling "Where is your successful attempt?" with "you don't have to be successful". I don't think this is the sort of challenge that'd be confused for impossible (just challenging), even without a boilerplate "it is possible" marking at the top. Anyhow, this challenge is one I've tried a few times, though I never got the timing quite right. Hopefully I'll have better luck with the new SRBs and the quicksave change! Good luck to you as well.

It sounds tough, but not impossible. Since 0.23.5 added quicksave-whenever, it got a lot easier. Anyhow, the rules do not say that you must have done it (successfully) already.

Unless I'm missing something, you can score an arbitrary number of points by repeatedly launching craft with 2+ kerbals into Mun orbits. Is this the intent of the challenge?

I've tried this. I had about 20 reaction wheels attached to an E-class asteroid, but it was still very difficult to turn or steer the thing. The approach that worked for me was to mount engines on each side of the thing (an FL-T800 with LV-909's on each end). They make turning my E around pretty easy.

Fly a squadron of simple planes? Today, I finally landed on Tylo (& returned home). Still haven't come back from Eve.

Seems fine, really. It's possible, not duplicative, easily understood. The leaderboard can just be who's made it to what celestial body & back without leaving debris in space. It might help to clarify whether mods are allowable.

I recently went to Eeloo for the first time. My transfer stage wasn't empty yet, so I kept burning it against my orbital velocity, but an LV-909 burns slow. My TWR wasn't quite what it should have been (but then I wasn't planning on landing like this) and the ground was coming up faster than I would've liked. I deployed the lander legs--lander still atop the transfer stage--and burned the very last drop of fuel from the LV-909 just in time to hit the surface at 30 m/s. The transfer stage exploded, engine, tank, and even the decoupler above, leaving only the lander perfectly undamaged and stable on the surface of Eeloo. The return trip was uneventful, if long. I flew by Jool and Duna for gravity brakes, perhaps unnecessarily, before a powered landing near the edge of Kerbin's northern tundra.

Regarding realism, it makes sense that some experiments are much more valuable if you return them home. This is pretty well reflected with transmission efficiency, though I don't understand why things like temperature readings wouldn't transmit at 100% value. I disagree with this. For the ~2500 delta v it'd take (from LKO) to land on the Mun and return, you could instead send a probe to Eve or Duna or Dres, or with some decent maneuvering and aerobraking you could manage a swing by most of the Joolian moons. Maybe people do opt for repeated Mun missions, gathering samples from every biome,* but you can get a decent way up the tech tree without going that route. * - The sheer amount of science available from the Mun is a balance issue. It might make sense to scale back some of the Mun experiments from per-biome to global, if the Mun is going to have quite so many biomes.