SRV Ron

Actually, with a lot of docking experience, use of a large ship, good SAS stabilization, lots of tweaked seperatrons pairs to bring their thrust down to behave as a thruster, and tons of patience, the challenge appears possible.

On this modified Jool rocket are eight probes connected with stack separators. You launch the probes separately either with action groups or by right clicking on the stack separator. Then just use the [ ] keys to select the probe for control. Get too far away, go to map mode and find the probe or mothership to switch back to control. In the example below, an ion powered probe has been launched and is now under control. The Mothership is in the distance. In the second example, a rocket powered probe has been launched. The ion probe and Mothership are far away being id as distance markers. Map mode will be needed to select them for control.

For a limited parts challenge, that is what Career mode starts you out with. You unlock more parts as you earn science points. You do have enough parts in the demo to attempt a landing and return from Mun. This demo ship did the mission with fuel to spare.

Not to worry. Place a parachute on the probe and recover as normal. So long as you haven't installed a mod called Deadly Reentry, it will survive reentry. BTW, legs on probe landing are optional.

If using a joystick, RCS is the way to go. Otherwise, watch your retrograde marker on the navball and make minor corrections on the WSAD keys to bring it back to center as your drop your descent speed to under 10m/sec. Get some practice in at the launch center using just a lander with enough power to fly in Kerbal's gravity. When you can master touch and go landing there, it will be much easier on Minmus and elsewhere. This is a good design to play with with no worry about killing Kerbals and the ability to deploy parachutes if needed. A small probe lander; I even managed to land my LADEE on Mun in my first try with plenty of fuel left for takeoff, a craft not designed to do that. Note, the LADEE has no thrusters and is steered by using SAS to center to the retrograde marker on the Navball. At a touchdown speed under 4m/sec it just settled in place tipping upslope on touchdown.

Bests to test that. Not a problem in space, but they will vanish when they exceed 2.5k while in the lower atmosphere. These did in the one part challenge.

You could have the Eastern sea different from the Western sea. Also, tropical vs temperate vs arctic oceans. Something similar could be implemented on Laythe and Eve once individual biomes are added to the game.

I'll use an extra SAS on the upper stage when using probes to control flight when using non vectoring SRBs for the first stage. Otherwise, the probe core is more then capable of controlling flight during launch using engines that have vector control.

NovaPunch mods has just the items you are looking for. 4x more powerful thrusters, 3.75m RCS mono prop tank, 3.75m SAS, and 3.75 stack separators. The updated to 0.23.5 version is performing much better with the joint connections much stronger then before. A sets of normal thrusters is more then adequate to control a 3.75m stage in orbit when it is unpowered. Like the real thing, you just need a couple of minutes to turn it 180* Edit, this ship uses 3.75 and 5 meter parts from NovaPunch. It is a lot easier to build in 0.23.5

Pick up Space Engine. It lets you explore anywhere in the known and unknown universe. There is also an alpha mode where you can fly starships and lander shuttles. Best of all, the Planetarium and alpha ships are free.

It's his NASA engines overheating, not the Mainsail. Two fixes for the liquid fueled engines; 1. use the Mainsail trick of placing a pancake fuel can between the engine and big fuel can. 2. Throttle back 10% after launch once overheating starts. For the SRB, tweak the thrust back to 90% in the VAB.

The nuke, in reality, is a mono propellant engine. It gets its efficiency from heating that propellant, usually hydrogen, to extremely high temperature. That provides a much higher thrust then just burning hydrogen with oxygen. That extra energy is provided by the nuclear fuel. While limited in reality, KSP assumes unlimited nuclear fuel in its engine and treats the engine as burning conventional fuel in the extra heat of the nuke at over twice the efficiency. As far as using them in an atmosphere, their efficiency drops way down. Just role play the engine as you see fit. I use them for interplanetary flight but don't use them for landing and return as an LV-909 or smaller is far more efficient for that task due to their much lighter mass.

As this is the day NASA has scheduled to deorbit LADEE, the contest now ends. First place goes to ThisIsTurtle. After submitting a heavy design, he went ahead and designed a Kerbal solution that resulted in a LADEE weighing in at 0.07 tons. His key, dumping the power unit into Mun with a Sepratron leaving only the bare bone satellite with a Sepratron containing just enough fuel to deorbit his LADEE. Second place to UpsilconAerospace. Conventional design weighing in at 0.1 tons. Third place FCISuperguy. Inexpensive but much heavier with the dual monoprop system. The best looking LADEE, not really a category, Donterro. His LADEE looks like the real thing. A big thank you to everyone that took up this challenge. Everyone placing was able to obtain the goal of using the required parts, left no debris in space, and was able to deorbit the LADEE as required. Cost were very close to each other as well. Good work, designers for KSP. My apologies if I missed anyone that posted an entry.

This demo ship will do a Mun orbit and return. RCS had to be used to return. This demo ship, using dual can boosters and asparagus staging, easily goes to mun, lands there, and returns.

These examples are based upon NovaPunch mods in career. This is the basic orbiter sent to Mun and Minmus, then returned for science. A lander designed for Mun and Minmus that is Duna capable with return. Notice how much extra fuel is left after entering Mun orbit. Similar can be designed using stock only. This lander is from the demo. As you can see, tons of fuel available for landing and return. Just design something and give it a try.

Plan on recovering the probe for the most science points. Both of these manned designs did fly by and orbits of Mun and Minmus returning science before solar panels were unlocked.

My first designs, in 0.21 looked like model rockets.

The KW Rocketry and Novapunch mods have tanks that look like modern rockets. The Stock ones just add to the flavor of using junkyard item that is so Kerbal. (Rocomax fuel cans all look like they were made from riveted 10,000 gal rail tank cars of the 50s.)

Do some orbital flyby with return trajectory. Then, go for orbit and return. The same ship should be able to do both for Mun and Minmus. With the orbits and flyby, you should have obtained enough science tech to build unmanned probes with solar panels. Then design and do a landing and return using probes before committing Kerbals to the mission.

Impossible, chutes or none. There is no surface to land on. Bill suffered the same fate as the probe above soon after going through the surface.

One should see how far they can go, preferring return, without leaving debris in space. It is even possible to do a Voyager escape mission with Jeb using a 10 part two stage rocket, or a probe SSTE; (These don't count as they are one way trips.) The orange tank booster came up short of a SSTO and lands back on Kerbal. A probe with ant engine should work in place of the manned capsule for returning It also did one way to Duna, Eve, and Laythe.

The two really bad things about the nose cone; 1. You need a separate antenna. The one modeled doesn't work. 2. Power consumption during transmission of date is insane making the nose cone totally useless for gathering atmospheric data from a probe heading into Lathe, Duna, Eve, or Jool. It seems to draw far more power then several ion engine doing a 5 minute burn for one date transmission session. Which is too bad considering how valuable recovering atmospheric science from a suicide Jool probe would be. Ran a test. Two gigi solar panels, those that easily power an ion engine at full throttle, could barely keep up with the 30 second power demand of the nosecone probe for transmitting. Data transfer sucked down about 60 units of power even with the panels open in full sun. The use of any foldout panels during a flight in the atmosphere, parachute or none, is, of course, fatal.

It's in how it is being rendered using the placeholder from the much older version. Eventually, that will get fixed where your ship will probably be vaporized at a point where Kerbal quits getting larger and not at 1300 meters.

While not eligible for that challenge, your combo with solar panel, battery and comm, made Mun orbit.

You will find that many of the KSP parts have handling damage on them. It is par for recycled parts.