Death Engineering

Hello nightingale.. I missed the 'add note' part in PayPal this morning but wanted to say that your contract packs in my last play-through of KSP were the most fun I've had since I started playing (dare I admit >10k hours?). I also had Station Science and USI-LS mods installed and flying massive and busy tourism/science missions out to Jool was a great challenge. Thanks! Best, Chuck Death - DeathEngineering

I've just gone to OpenGL and the memory savings are dramatic. Loaded a stock game with defaults (no command line switch) and >1500MB. The same game loaded with OpenGL was just over 1000MB. Using OpenGL however caused me to initially lose anti-aliasing which looked horrible but I was able to override that by setting the nVidia driver with specific KSP settings. Frame rate seems unchanged and image quality is great still.

But all that whitespace is modern so it must be good.

Breaking old links without redirects in place is hackish and LAZY.

[quote name='GregroxMun']Alright. Multiplies your score by 2 times Sqrt 10. (about 6.32)[/QUOTE] This will definitely come in handy: [url]http://apod.nasa.gov/htmltest/gifcity/sqrt10.1mil[/url]

I would release updates half as often and QA twice as long.

I don't even know if a radiator was needed, TBH. I just slapped it on there because the first time I launched the pod got a little toasty, but eventually cooled. Will update with test results l8r.... edit: 1) Same rocket, jettisoned fairing once it was nice and toasty: stayed hot/got hotter - did not cool down. 2) Same rocket, moved the radiators several parts away from the fairing root-part: radiators still over-heated. I'm not sure what's up, but I don't think it's working as planned.

Interesting.. eager to try later. If that is the case, and what you're saying makes sense, how does one get a radiator into space? Only outside of a fairing?

Could what you're experiencing be related to what I've noticed here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/139218-Fairing-not-protecting-contents-during-asecnt

This simple, early career rocket has a 1.25m fairing over the pod and instruments. During ascent on 1.0.4, the radiators are fully chill. No problem. With 1.0.5, they get to full heat-bar very early, as if they were not aero-occluded.

As mentioned, LS; tried several, but keep coming back to RoverDude's USI Life Support. It's balanced, the math is easy and some really interesting things for the future are in the works for this mod. Lately, I've been playing a career with contract packs for tourism and extra science (namely Kerbin Space Station, Tourism and Station Science). I've also added the Stockalike Station Parts Expansion to add some flair to the Space Station contracts. I've found that for the first time, I'm building stations in orbit and on the surface (to a lesser extent) that I expand on and continue to use later in the game when more complex science contracts come up. The science contracts in Station Science add a lot of depth to the game and along with life support needs, makes for some interesting missions. For example, I just finished a Jool 5-moon flyby tourist mission with a stop at Vall's science lab to complete a research contract. The tourism contracts are fun as well, with the 'Space Casino' being the only time I really bling'ed up a space station. The requirement included the asteroids, requiring a total of 10 launches to build.

Gravity braking into Jool orbit passing over Vall at less than 23km and 2.3km/s!

Hotblack Desiato? Is that you?

Crewed Eeloo Mission 6 years 393 days This obviously can be done a lot faster, but I wanted to get a feel for the ÃŽâ€v needs and rough times for a round trip mission for my career save. It was a real "treat" not having to deal with life-support requirements for a change! In retrospect, I guess I should have taken three crew.. oh well. The original design for the command pod was to separate the crew from the orbiter and land the primary command pod on the surface then re-dock back to the orbiter and heat shield. For mass reasons, I selected the Mk 2 Lander Can but ran into problems at the very end of the mission (re-entry): I wasn't able to aerocapture around Kerbin without exploding first. This version is more traditional with a dedicated lander that stays in Eeloo orbit. This challenge was a good motivator to get back out to Eeloo which I rarely do now since round trips are so long.. thanks Souper for the challenge and I may be back with a real speed-based competitor.

Kinda torn.. I like the idea of reworking this challenge with attention to in-game costs and science achievements, but I'm not into RSS and undecided on whether Laythe would make for a better goal. There's this challenge, as an option: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/115535-From-Duna-to-Mars-Realism-Challenge If I were to author a re-worked "Permanent Outpost" challenge, I'd be more inclined to stick with stock SS/Duna..

Definitely! Does it get more Kerbal than this?

While we haven't seen OP in quite some time, this challenge is as close to immortal as they come. You might not get on the leaderboard, but there are a few of us still participating and encourage new attempts. Regarding my own latest attempt... it was all a bad dream! Whew.. it was getting silly trying to complete this challenge under the restrictions of the BTSM mod. Will still be entering another submission, but going to be more of an extension of the AAP Challenge.

Dres is one of my fave planets to visit! There's some challenge in vessel design, a little harder to hit than other planets and all-propulsive braking when you get there. Landing on the bottom of the 'scar' valley is also interesting and highlights lander versatility (and side-bottom lighting ).

This is a rule I can get behind. Challenge added to KSP todo list.

Cool idea.. After the 52 kerb' flight, I started something just a bit bigger.

All in real time, yep. And it wasn't the first attempt, either....

Went twice around in this quad Turbofan plane. Circumnavigations: 2 Time: 3h 14m 0s

Brown.

52 Kerbal Circumnavigation Not sure if any other entries going for head-count on the mission, but this quad ramjet passenger jet made it once around. Time to scale it up, now.. Total kerbs on board: 52 (48 passengers + 4 crew) Flight time: 1:32:12 Circumnavigations: 1 Flight path: Prograde equatorial

Over the Impact Crater This is a great challenge because it encourages experimenting with 1.x's aero and stock parts. On this non-challenge flight came to the conclusion before landing that I had built a heavier craft, using one more engine and one more crew member, and more fuel, to achieve the same result. That's..well, science! I kinda like that. Working on a real speed-entry now. I support this.