SRV Ron

Duna and Ike, easiest to reach. Try to land in a valley on Duna so you can take advantage of its thin atmosphere for parachute and aerobraking landing. Being dry, there is no liquid surface to avoid. Return is also quite easy thanks to its low gravity and thin atmosphere. Eve, easiest to land, extremely difficult to return from its surface due to the higher gravity and thicker atmosphere. Also, about 50% of its surface is liquid that should be avoided. Air breathing engines won't work on Eve.

Quick effort this morning came up just short by 28 delta V to orbit at 70+k. Two more Oscar B fuel cans should do it or possibly trying for the most efficient launch possible. It flies well. BTY, no parts are clipping into the fuel tanks.

Would be a lot easier to just hack the save file and give yourself 3,000 Science points. Actually, once cost gets added to Career, Wackjob sized ships will be impossible to construct.

Try this. One Oscar B for the core, 48-7s rocket, Probodobodine OKJO2 controller. Set symmetry to 3. Mount a cubic strut on the side of the Oscar B. Add a rotated Oscar B to the cubic strut. Add a fuel line. To reach orbit, you will need a horizontal stack of five Oscar B tanks for a total of 16 of them. Watch your thrust during flight as the drag factor is much higher then using the single FL-T200 fuel can. I was able to reach 70+k orbit with that design. While those will probably be the shortest capable of reaching orbit with a stock engine, none mounted radically, it is not a good design due to parts count, high drag, and higher mass then my three part design.

Just completed testing and flight. 3 parts stock SSTO. Probodobodyne OKTO2, FL-T200 fuel can, Rocomax 48-7s rocket. Barely had enough battery power to achieve orbit.

This was done in another attempt. The Stayputnik can be replaced with a much shorter controller and batteries eliminated.

The Logitech wireless mouse works quite fast, as fast as you can spin the wheel. You can set the sensitivity of it and the mouse in general from the mouse setting utility. You can also zoom in and out with the + and - keys from the number pad.

As promised; Nova Punch parts early tech career ship. This made Mun flyby for a bunch of tech points. With braces unlocked, a much more efficient design for Mun and Minmus orbit and return. No fuel line yet. What is on top is a thruster pack nose cone that can be used for emergency deorbiting. It is from Nova Punch along with the Nova Punch modified nose cone parachute. A probe lander to test later tonight. Note, those lander legs from Career 0.22 are no longer available. I saved the same basic launcher as a sub assembly. If you do so, always check the staging as it can get scrambled. Close up of the lander probe. Only use probes after you unlock batteries and Ox Stat panels.

Twp good Mods, Nova Punch and KW Rocketry, have a nice selection of engines and fuel systems including adapters with fuel build in. Nova Punch will integrate nicely into the 0.23 tech tree and respond to tweakables. I'll post some early Career designs soon as I save some screen shots.

The remote can provided by NovaPunch mod in Career is useless without batteries and an additional reaction wheel. Otherwise, you get a nice alternate selection of engines that will greatly speed up exploration without having to build overly complex rockets. But, really. Stick with stock for the first effort at career. make your first two flight with just the capsule on the pad and the runway. Do an EVA, collect a soil sample, and file a report. That will unlock enough tech to build a decent orbiter to explore the biomes of Kerbal, Mun and Minmus, and unlock a bunch of tech points upon return and recovery. This stock career mode ship will orbit Mun or Minmus and return with lots of valuable crew reports from EVAs.

Start out simple with a one Kerbal capsule, parachute, decoupler, FL-T800 fuel can, and a LV-30 engine. Learn how to fly it sub orbital. Then go two stage. Upper, a FL-T400 with some OX-stat panels and a LV-909, decoupler, FL-T400 and FL-T800, with LV-30 or LV-45, and learn how to orbit and return.

The ancient Chinese, after inventing rockets, attempted a manned flight. Not only were the rockets used in the military domain in the Ming Dynasty; there were also men's attempts to fly together with the rockets. The scholar Wan Hu in the Ming Dynasty, who is regarded as the originator of the manned rockets, was the trailblazer in doing experiments aimed at taking human being to space. On the basis of his research about the boosting power generated by the rockets, he made a chair with 47 rockets, the maximum number that could possibly be tied to his chair. He tied himself to the chair, and held two big kites in each of his hands. Then he asked his assistants to fire the fuses of the 47 rockets at the same time, hoping to fly in the sky with the boosting power from the rockets and the kites http://www.chinaculture.org/gb/en_madeinchina/2005-07/21/content_70826_4.htm The flight was pure early Kerbal. It didn't go well.

As the title suggest, I was testing a simple Nova Punch two stage launch design to orbit satellites and Jeb with sufficient fuel for some maneuvering such as a Mun flyby. In the first design, I started with the NovaPunch probe can but scrapped it due to its inability to hold the launch vehicle on course. That was replaced with a stock controller with sucuessful results. In the next payload, a Stayputnik was used giving even better performance due to its lighter weight. This is something that can be landed on Duna. An extra Reaction Wheel is added on the second stage since the Stayputnik on board SAS is too weak to safely control launch. The third test involved placing Jeb in orbit having the same maneuvering capability as the probes. Due to that payload being the heavist, some of the fuel on the payload was needed to achieve orbit. Modifying the rocket with three small SRBs that dropped off at burnout allowed the payload goal to be achieved. I'll continue researching small efficient launchers given the two challenges for how far a Kerbal can go on 5 parts, and cheapest probe to orbit. That turned out to be possible with a single FL-T200 fuel can with SSTO completed easily

There is already a challenge based upon a doomsday scenario. In that case, it is how many Kerbals you can relocate to other worlds before Kerbal is destroyed. Also, there is a Killer Asteroid mod out there that you can place on an intercept path. To have this as part of Career mode? no, it is not going to happen. As a mod to play with, you can download it and set it up in Sandbox..

Kerbal tech started with manned flight before unmanned probes were available. The Career Mode tech tree just continues that path of Kerbal History. Currently, only certain mode such as Nova Punch, have parts tailored for the tech tree. While a probe is available, it will be pretty useless due to lack of batteries, solar panels, and the fact that live Kerbals are needed to collect and report back data for science points needed to unlock more tech.

NASA doesn't use it because in real life, the high powered pumps and complex plumbing needed for such a setup is too expensive to design and test. The closest that was ever used was the system for the Space Shuttle. Alternatively was the early Atlas which dropped two of its heavy engines part way during flight. The Soviets used strapped on liquid boosters that dropped off when their fuel was used up before the core stage used up its fuel. However, in Kerbal engineering, which has none of those problems, asparagus staging works extremely well when you can get a perfect balance on your design. Example, 109 tons in orbit with asparagus and SRB outer ring.

You don't need tons of rocket with several stages. This simple Ten part design sent Jeb into Voyager escape. Actually, it was also done with two engines, two fuel cans, and the capsule. This one a probe in Career Mode; However, no extra tech points. Once you reach a certain distance, everything goes crazy as the Krackin strikes;

More likely, the staging using decouplers and activating second stage engine, are in the wrong order.

Your are looking for a slingshot maneuver, not going into and leaving orbit. What is tricky is setting it up where one slingshot leads to another. When you reach Jool, you set up an aerobraking to get into orbit or use a retrograde slingshot with its moons to slow down.

Drop a pancake tank under the big KW, Novapunch, and Jumbo 64 tanks. That will resolve the overheating issues.

As this from the demo can land on Mun and return, you are way overbuilt with boosters that can barely lift themselves into orbit let alone a payload to Mun.

For the long 5 minute burn when orbiting, you want to chase the prograde marker, not the maneuver marker. (Unless you have to burn radical.) That is most efficient use of fuel. Expect that prograde marker to change as your speed increases or decreases.

By itself, no. But it makes a great platform for hanging stuff on it such as parachutes, instruments, spare batteries, Ox Stat panels, and other small items to turn it into a probe lander.

If you don't know any of this, have a friend with some computer experience show you how to do basic file housekeeping.

Install this mod on a backup copy of KSP. Start fresh as it will break all existing missions. Once you get past the initial launch bug, things should work OK