Brotoro

IMMMMpressive! Have some kerbal snacks.

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You don't need to use a Hohmann transfer to get from the Sun to Alpha Centauri. Both stars are at almost the same location in their very large, very similar orbits... so just aim straight at the point where Alpha Centauri will be, accounting for the stars' relative motions during the time it takes your ship to travel there (the relative motion is small compared to their orbital speeds around the Galaxy). Preferably use a ship that goes as fast as possible.

Rescue missions.

Lots of launching. Lots of rendezvous. Lots of docking. And then even more.

I never had the impression that they were dampening inertia...just dampening the unfortunate effects that would result from your inertia if you sat unprotected in a very rapidly accelerating ship. For people who have the technology to make artificial gravity, combatting the detrimental effects of high acceleration would be easy, since you just have to generate an opposing gravitational field within the ship that balances the forces caused by the acceleration on the objects in the ship.

I can't see the point of a manned planetary flyby. You put the crew at risk on a long-duration mission, and all the good data are going to come from instruments that could have been sent by themselves. It's not like having a geologist on the ground of a planet who could dig around and do a rover's work a thousand times faster.

Take a fission bomb capable of knocking over a small city. Use the x-ray output of that "primary" (redirected in clever ways) to compress and heat deuterium/tritium/lithium (the lithium makes more tritium when bombarded with neutrons) so you get fusion reactions. Extra oomph can be had if you use the high-speed neutrons from the fusion reactions to fission U238. A lot of extra oomph in many H-bomb designs. The result knocks over a large city. Do not do this at home, kiddies.

I land on The Mün. Although not recently, really.

I submitted five entries. Seems like enough.

Yes, the camera pods were ejected shortly after second stage ignition and recovered in the ocean. Or some of them were recovered, anyway.

I made a couple.

Yeah. Apollo was scrimping for payload capacity as it was. They couldn't afford to add recovery systems to the booster.

Well… Putting humans aside, the next big crisis life on Earth is certainly going to face in the inevitable warming of the Earth as the Sun gets more luminous. So we're going to need adaptions for high temperatures. Not the kind for hot, dry temperatures you find in the desert nowadays…because it should be quite humid as you heat up the oceans, too. Animals should prefer smaller body sizes, in general, since they shed heat faster. Flaps of skin that evolve into radiators. Even flapping flaps of skin to move air for cooling since evaporation won't be as effective in a humid world. Mammals may go hairless. Changes in biochemistry that let you run around at higher temperatures and eat all the sluggish animals that are taking siestas during the hottest part of the day. More animals taking the whale/dolphin route of evolving back into the sea where temperatures aren't as extreme. Plants will eventually have to rely more on the red end of the cooler solar spectrum for photosynthesis, so plants may change color. Plants may be white or shiny on top to reflect sunlight, and dark underneath to be better radiators. And their seeds will be sticky-burrs located on the undersides of the lower leaves because those are what the animals who hide out under the plants for shade are going to spread around more. Oh…but if the animals go hairless, the seeds may be sticky with sap, instead. Or the plants will grow their fruits down there so the animals hiding underneath can have a comfy lunch and then go spread the seeds along with fertilizer. Plus, dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria.

Alfvén waves.

I don't think direct is more fuel efficient than Munar Orbit Rendezvous. Although if you ignore the "realities" of reentry back at Kerbin and just land your guys in a lander can instead of a properly heat-shielded capsule, maybe you could do something direct that's more fuel efficient. Otherwise, I can't see how it would be more fuel efficient to carry you heavy return capsule and fuel down to the Mün. Direct is certainly EASIER to do, so people use it a lot in KSP.

I've never added reaction wheels to an aircraft, but I certainly use the torque from and cockpits or crew pods it has. I know some people like to disable that torque to just fly with aerodynamic controls.

It would really be nice if Squad accounted for aerobraking effects in their trajectory predictions. It's one of the things I do use MechJeb for (since the f5/f9 alternative I used previously was just silly).

Congratulations!

Does "humans do not interfere" mean we are going to stop messing with the environment and animal habitats? Because what natural selection "chooses" is going to depend on what the Earth's environment is going to be like...and so I can't speculate unless I know what we are up to (be it taking away habitats, protecting the planet from asteroid impacts, tossing around interesting chemicals, etc.).

To be sure you are going to get into orbit around a planet in the correct direction, use conics mode 0 (zero) instead of the usual conics mode 3. You can edit the conics patch draw mode in the setting.cfg file (that's the hard and inconvenient way), or you can install the Precise Node mod (it lets you change the conics mode on the fly, along with its other uses). In the image below, I am tweaking that maneuver node that's far off in the background while I'm focused in on the Jool system where conics mode 0 is showing my trajectory as it will be relative to Jool. Come in counterclockwise. Adjust the radial component of your maneuver node to change what side the trajectory comes in on, and adjust the normal component to make sure it is in the equatorial plane. Precise Node also has the oh-so-nice feature that pressing the "o" key will reopen your maneuver node when it annoyingly collapses closed. You can also tweak the burn component values directly instead of pulling on the maneuver node thingies. I SOOOOO love the Precise Node mod… and I hope Squad implements something like it in the stock game.

No offense taken. This mission was originally part of my series of plans to set up a transportation system for routinely moving kerbals around so they could explore the Kerbol system in detail. So, as much as possible, I wanted to do things with reusable vehicles (including the somewhat tedious need to send tugs home for re-use, rather than just popping a new ship up on the screen every time). I wanted to do things on a reasonably small scale (not just build a gigantic beastie of a ship and immediately haul out tons and tons of anything you might want). So my kerbals made do with a little equipment at first (they drove as much as possible rather than flew, because that's cheaper; they had to make do without backup vehicles at first, so they had to be slow and careful about what they tried to accomplish). I wanted them to do things in a reasonable timeline. So there would be no, "Oops, Bill got stranded…well, let's place everything into suspended animation while we send a rescue ship out from Kerbin," kind of thing). The plan was to build up the infrastructure over time, sending out as many kinds of ships as I could think of that would be useful on Laythe (the exception being a VTOL airplane for landing on water, since I have a bad habit of breaking those when I try to land/takeoff from water…and I wanted ships I could use reliably). I also wanted to explore all of the islands, at least minimally (which I have basically done by now). And I wanted to do it in a way that would be justifiable in the context of the storyline (so, for example, while I always wanted to send someone to North Fredoly to look for Fredoly Kerman's landing site, I waited until I had a good reason to do so in the game. I did jump the gun with a dream excursion to Bsalis Island to do the Leap of Laythe, but I also got there 'legitimately' eventually). When I started this mission back in version 0.18, it was also my expectation that I would be exploiting indigenous resources, and having this first group of kerbals set up that infrastructure as well. I expected this would require missions to Vall and other of the Joolian moons to get what was needed, depending on how Squad's resource system worked. But that never materialized, so I did without (which mostly involved sending more fuel, and making sure the ships were designed with the notion that their fuel supply was in orbit). I also liked the challenge of keeping the mission running through multiple versions of KSP. This involved finding workarounds to various problems (like the original upgraded landing legs). It also involved thinking up ways to incorporate new parts and perhaps retrofit them to existing hardware (and while I enjoyed finding a way to put Goo on the BirdDogs, I'm not particularly interested in doing the missions I probably should with them, like sending Nelemy to the North pole with his Goo buddies, or sending Kurt to the top of a mountain with the materials bay…and I expect you would agree that would be just more flying around). And when we got cool new toys like RAPIER engines to play with, I wanted to try a comparison between ramjet and RAPIER powered SSTO spaceplanes…so why not do it on Laythe with my kerbals there? Certainly those are items on the list of potentially useful hardware that should be on Laythe. Even though there was no need to go there for resources, I did the Vall exploration mission anyway. And I used female kerbals because some people on the forum seemed to think female kerbals would be a pox upon the kerbal universe and should never be added to the game…and I wanted to show that they can be competent, entertaining little kerbals just like the boys. The solar flare was added as a mechanism to get Hellou and Emilynn to Laythe, and to stretch out the mission in general to appease the people who were enjoying the antics of my band of explorers. And once you have a geologist on Laythe, it makes sense to put her to good use for a while. But anyway... Sending replacements and rotating the old crew out has always been part of the plan. And although I intend to increase the number of kerbals on Laythe (and elsewhere in the Joolian system), I don't think we're anywhere near the point where we try to make a colony, yet. There need to be some serious experiments done with growing plants on Laythe before that's possible…but I expect future crews on Laythe will include focusing on that (but I really don't intend to follow the future crews in detail). The exit strategy for the current crew will involve going out via the outer moons. I've been working on the necessary ships, but Tylo has been giving me some problems. The Tylo lander/ascent ship I used during my initial Kerbol system exploration program was bigger and clumsier than need be…but trying to make a reusable Tylo SSTO is difficult to justify if one can send out an additional small disposable lander/ascent ship for the weight of extra fuel a big SSTO would require (it would be a different story if we had exploitable resources, of course). And I find it much harder to land on Tylo than on Laythe (with is very safe and easy in comparison). I need to develop a system where I have a good chance of success without killing my happy little kerbals. And, yes, Scotius… if all the kerbalnauts who are anxious to go on long space missions all pile into the Joolian system when that opportunity arises (after an all-clear from the threat of more solar flares), then when the mission to set up an exploration infrastructure on Duna comes along, who might be available as crew? (This is why I mentioned the lack of much having been done on Duna...yet...because of the kerbal's fixation on the Joolian system.)

Do you want to start from the surface of the Earth, or from some other orbit? I wouldn't expect continuous thrusting to be an optimal way of doing this…although it would certainly be doable with a low thrust engine if you just wanted to transfer between orbits.

An unprotected body in space wouldn't decompose (at least not like it does on Earth, since that requires the action of other organisms). An unprotected body in space would basically freeze-dry. Then over a long period of time I suspect it would get eroded away by micrometeorite impacts, cosmic ray sputtering, and ultraviolet from stars breaking down the organic molecules.

Your probes look fine. So when you separate them from the mothership, you can't switch to them using the bracket keys, and they show up in the Tracking Station as debris instead of ships?