SofusRud

Got this to the Mun, landed, and got back yesterday. Trick to getting it under 30 parts was those big SRBs to get me out of the atmosphere.

I did my first Mun landing in the new career save that I started after 1.0 dropped. I went though a number of designs that didn't work, what with the unupgraded VAB only allowing me 30 parts, but I eventually managed it. The trick to saving the parts was having the first stage consist entirely of the biggest SRBs. The SRBs could get me out of the atmosphere, at a good velocity, which is a big improvement on the previous attemts, which had to have the final stage do circularization. The previous ones could land on the moon, but couldn't get back.

have you considered less xenon and a lighter cockpit?

I downloaded and installed it

For the first little fighter, you could replace the reaction wheel with a big RCS tank and remove the small ones. As for the RCS thrusters, just put an inline thruster on the top and bottom, using the offset tool to get it as close to the 4-directional ones.

... for fun.

What makes you think that the orbits of the other planets would have to change to accomodate a second gas giant?

looks neat, but how many parts, and how much clipping was involved?

or, you could, you'know, disallow the fuel in the tank by right clicking.

Nope, no mods. If it helps, here's a picture of my options menu: Also, it turns out that setting Shadow Cascades to 40 causes the game to crash immediately after I start it up, so I had to reset it to ten manually through the CFG file.

That's the problem with replica's, isn't it. You gotta decide what to sacrifice and what to replicate, stats, aesthetics, concept, whether to build to account for things that KSP doesn't model, etc. For example, the eLISA up there is (according to the Wikipedia page) a zero-drag satellite (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-drag_satellite), which means that it is built to compensate for the drag, light-presssure, and other things that aren't included in KSP. Also, based on the description of zero-drag satellites I think it would be impossible to do. But I guess just putting a few satellites in formation orbits trailing Kerbin wouldn't look as cool. And BTW OP, it does look cool, so kudos.

well I had that set to ten. cranking it up to forty changed nothing so I assumed it was something else.

for some reason I've been without shadows for a while now, which gets problematic when landing a booster on its flames. So my question is, which thing in the options menu do I need to fiddle with to bring back shadows?

While i don't object to the rest of the stuff you said I will dispute that the current restrictions of early career mode don't generate "fun". The craft below was built and perfected as a direct result of having to work with mass and part-count restrictions, and getting it to work as it needed to was many hours of fun. Personally I would balance this aspect of career mode by adding more building tiers. Sorry for the digression

I landed this one on Duna back in .25 Drove it to my other lander, about 24km Then returned it orbit docked it to the mothership and returned to Kerbin

I agree and have previously suggested something similar. How about an event that triggers when a transfer window open up, giving you a mission with a penalty/penalty modifiers for not accepting. This event, and others, could also be contextual with regards to what strategies you have in play.

This is an idea that came to me whilst playing Europa Universalis 4, which I feel would a cool new dimension to the management part of career mode. Basically, in EU4 what happens is that at seemingly random times, a pop-up will appear. It will usually cause be a modifier and have some flavor text. It might tell of an event and give you a choice between a number of ways to respond, with various modifiers depending on your choice. Sometimes a particular choice will cause another event to happen and so on. Something along these lines might be cool to apply to KSP's career mode. These would trigger, some at random, some when certain conditions are met. For example you might get an event that a manufacturer has had an industrial accident, which causes certain parts to become unavailable for a certain amount of time. Not so bad you might think, seeing as how you can just fast forwards. But it just so happens that due to a combination of an enabled strategy and transfer window opening up another event has popped up and you given a choice accepting a contract with strict time parameters to that planet or suffer a massive penalty. That's just one example I came up with. Others might include temporary price hikes, a manufacturer might have production problems causing new parts to be have a negative modifyer for thrust of ISP, and so on. They might be timed or only expire if you complete an objective. I've seen suggestions before for random failures of parts and that sort of stuff, and I'm with SQUAD on this issue, in that if a mission is gonna fail then it had better be my fault. This on the other hand, would allow a more dynamic career mode I feel, and keep the player on its toes. And as it would ideally scale with both difficulty settings and how far the player has gotten, we might not end up with situations where we have to kneecap ourselves or install certain mods to keep the challenge up.

Personally I would love to see a second or even a third gas giant, provided it/they have enough interesting moons/features. Also, I've been thinking that another gas giant would, provided that the delta-v requirements to get there were high enough, be a good solution to some of the balancing issues that I feel the current career mode has. Even before the SLS parts, you could go to Jool relatively easily IMO, and so now by the time you start reaching the end of the tech tree progression becomes less urgent. You've already got all the parts to go anywhere, so having a tougher and worthwhile target that necessitates the late-tech to reach would be cool.

today I broke 1000 hours according to Steam! I also got 2 kerbals killed trying to land on the Mun for a joint flag planting and training mission.

wait, I was under the impression that certain mission types only became available at certain levels of reputation.

yeah but the kerbal universe is about 1/10th scale, so you don't need that much

KSS Non-Threatening KSS Unarmed KSS Friendship Express KSS Love And Peace 'Cause, you wanna lull your opponent into a false sense of security

Here's a thought regarding the satellites that don't have to remain there problem: make it a mission parameter that they can't have any propulsion, besides besides maybe RCS.

Having started a new career yesterday, on a custom hard mode (reduce cash and science), I found myself at the bottom of the tech tree and in need of some cash. So I took a contract that seemed easy. Basically I had to get surface EVA reports from two spots close to each other to the north of KSC, and a crew report from above 18,200m just east of the mountains near KSC. Seemed simple, deceptively so, as it turned. I had no ladders, so my first design had the capsule at the very back of the craft, which was also a tailsitter that used chutes to land, because I not yet unlocked landing gear, It was a pain to balance, I basically had to add fuel tank as no more than ballast in order to shift COM forwards, because I also had to be careful that the wing parts didn't hit the ground. I also had to contend with the fact that I could only use 30 parts in total. It was a total failure. The ballast tanks meant that it was inefficient and had severe difficulties reaching the target 18,200m altitude. It was constantly trying to flip wrong-way forwards, possibly due to the way the rudders were in the front. Due to parts restrictions it had too few chutes per required landing (3) and so it often bounced, fell over or just broke on landing. In short: not very successful. I was broken but not beaten, so I tried again. With the help of the magic that is our new building Gizmos I built a new plane, this time with a cockpit angled down. This way, my pilot could just stand on the craft, and it would count as doing EVA reports from the surface. I also shifted to only one engine, although the craft necessarily had to be a tailsitter that landed with cutes. Results were better this time around. Because the controlling part was angled it produced odd responses when I tried to change orientation with anything but pitch controls, but i eventually got the hang of it. It no longer spun out and was all in all a better craft. Unfortunately however, it still suffered from mission wrecking tip-overs and falls and such. I tried to correct it with more landing legs on the wings to increase size of the base, but it didn't help. It was a this point that I realized that my problems were mass related and could be solved by simply removing half the fuel and re-positioning the other stuff. I did and got this: Finally it worked perfectly and I completed my contract. Took a lot longer than most contracts normally do, but I really appreciate the variety and new mission parameters that I have to design for now that FinePrint has been implemented. Also note that in the last three pictures, the fuel tank on the aircraft has shrunk for some reason. I don't know when it happened, it didn't affect the mission, but it does look weird. I thought this bug had been fixed by now.

Aren't you basically blocking the thrust of all but the last two jet engines?