glacierre

For me the worst of all is uploading a ten-minute video for a challenge that by definition takes 3 minutes to complete. Talk talk talk talk talk, some people really do love their own voice.

I'm piqued by this one, but it will take me a while to make a complete attempt.

That's golden!

Surely you could program mechjeb to burn+steer so you follow such trajectory. The question is... why?

@Dinjoralo I am reasonably confident that a plane like you show in the first post will never get to orbit. The total thrust must be aligned with the center of mass, and by the looks of it, you have placed a couple of engines well over it. This is not a problem at low height, where you have plenty of authority because of dense air (or maybe not, since you neither have canards...), but when you go higher (+20 km or so) you will not be able to compensate the torque any more and (in this case) nose will go down no matter what you do. IMHO, for a craft that size, 2-3 jets should be enough. The... 5? 7? you have are way, way too much. More jets -> more fuel -> more weight -> more problems. If you are new to space-planes start small.

Seems quite difficult problem, mostly for the athmospheric part, you will lose speed differently depending on your trayectory/Pe, not to mention if your craft has some parts generating lift (then you get extra corrections depending on the angle of your craft respect to prograde). And add some rounding errors here and there for extra fun. Most predictable is probably a head-on slam (but with the thin atmosphere of Duna you may not survive that), there you can pretty much use Radiokopf basic calculation and the aerobraking part is well defined (and minimized, too, ahem), the more shallow you enter, the more difficult it gets to predict. Keep in mind, too, that predicting is not controlling. Depending on your ETA and the rotation period of the planet there are some points (on the back hemisphere) that will simply not be reachable by any direct aerobraking maneuver because you would need a Pe too high to even be captured (with enough dV anything is possible, of course). Safest (but by far not fastest) way of predicting and controlling is to split it in aerobraking-capture into an orbit and then land from it (at least you can work out an approximate rule of thumb if you keep your orbit radius and deorbit burns similar).

I see no need to lawyer-proof every challenge description. If there was the possibility of misinterpretation, the example picture was very clear, common sense also helped a lot (where is the challenge in sitting your kerbal outside a rocket?). In the eventuality that you lack both eyes and common sense, you could still ask.

Beam me UP, Scotty

If those are boosters and they are solid, then it would not be even completely refuellable. SSTO for flight number 1, and over. Title of the K prize says 100% reusable...

I would need more than just word to believe that that is stock AND can make orbit by itself. I remember a purely nuclear SSTO by Stochasty some time ago and it needed way more tanks and lift than just that. (And since I don't see a single air intake...)

This. Add more lift, so you can still glide at lower speeds. If the problem is the slowdown taking too long, you can use ram intakes (activate them just for the drag) or drogue chutes.

Long time I did not make a challenge (I was one of the erased in "The Massacre") I went for the minimalistic design, with very good results. I have no mechjeb so no accurate way to measure where the north pole is, between 9:25 and 9:40 the north point was escaping from me, so I assume I passed nearby around that time. By 10:18 I was already on the other side of the ice cap, so comfortably faster than 11 minutes in any case. The album http://imgur.com/a/n7vsP#0

Easter egg, or maybe numerical artifact from the procedurally generated map (for the suspiciously exact coordinates).

On the vanilla game, yeah, but some mods such as kethane provide a solid reason to have a land base.

They continue development because they want to sell more copies, which in turn will keep adding money to their accounts to buy things like.. food.

Yes, but technically you could build the apollo program, not launch it (or it could have exploded on the launchpad) and still all the derivative knowledge would be kept. The main gain (and aim) from the program and the human landings was political, which is the prominent reason why more than 30 years have passed without another landing.

Fine, but has nothing to do with what I said. Somebody was surprised that an alpha (although I personally think KSP qualifies amply for beta in most categories) would deserve a review. And my point is that to play this alpha you need to pay money, so it makes perfect sense to have reviews that help you decide whether you should or shouldn't cash out. (other point is how much reviews actually help for any of that)

I tend to agree, although you can climb a bit faster (20 km maybe) if you have enough lift to support it.

This is the reason why you see things like this http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/diablo-iii Professional reviewer score 88/100, user score 3.8/10 Do not trust 100% user reviews (beware the hype), but review pages... simply skip them, you are never going to see a bad review of an AAA title, and then the get an indie game (10000 times closer to finished than... sim city 5, codemasters formula 1 dontcaretheyear, etc) and they suddenly get the sharp eye. However: If the game is (supposed) good enough to charge money for it, why should it not be judged? My 20 eur when I bought KSP were not "in development" euros, they were real money. Not that I have any complaint from KSP, best game of 2012 easily.

Some nice challenges, but right now there is a plane rescue one and... , half an hour later one of the contestants did not launch yet once and another is completely clueless about how to build a plane. So much for a speed challenge.

The "what happens to the original" has been brushed away rather quickly in my opinion. Say, you can go to sleep with a helmet and then your mind is uploaded to a computer, then your body dies and "you" live forever. OK. But, you wake up still in your body and you ask "did the upload fail?". And they tell _you_: "no, we just forgot to kill you, please wait a minute while we find a gun..." Would _you_ sit peacefully and dismiss the question as "philosofical"? Sci fi novel for the topic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_Moon

You don't need Ferram's mod for that, trust me

I believe we got to over 300 m/s in the kerbal regatta. The best performing crafts where as light as possible (running on jets), and they could have been lighter but it was a 30 km run. I wonder where J Patterson and Nao are...