Superfluous J

Okay I reworked my rocket when I realized that the biggest SRBs were 3x the size of the mid sized ones, and not 2x as I mistakenly thought. The entire rocket. It took quite a bit of finagling to get it under $10k. [defunct site link removed by moderator] Most of the finagling involved using the translate tool and cubic octagonal struts, something impossible in 0.25 and before. [defunct site link removed by moderator] Note the lack of struts here. I'm as surprised as you that this thing flew, and flew quite well. It got the payload into a sub-30k mun orbit with over 200m/s to spare. In other words, it could have done about half of the landing burn. [defunct site link removed by moderator] But the much nicer, redesigned rocket is so much cooler. I call it "The Pencil" and it's as simple as it gets. The hardest part is actually falling East but it's pretty forgiving in the first 200m/s or so, so you can wrestle it into place so long as you don't let it wander too far. And you can't argue with the $9322 price tag (Including payload!) [defunct site link removed by moderator] I've filmed the 2nd ship but won't be able to post it today. Rest assured, it got into a 28x25km orbit with (again) over 200m/s to spare, even though I screwed up the ejection bur and had to turn around and slow down a bit. Then I overshot THAT and had to speed up a little again. Probably 10-15 m/s total though so no bigs. I may have had 300m/s in the tank when all was said and done, which is actually better than the above monstrosity.

Impressive. I did not think you could get it that low in cost, though admittedly I never tried this in FAR and as you said, this would never work in stock. I can't try it right now but hopefully in a few hours I should be able to. Mine is not as elegant looking as yours and has multiple stages. Though looking at yours makes me wonder if I can make something similar, but even cheaper. I'll put the $10k ship up as soon as I've flown it in .90 with FAR, and then try a remake. I don't have a pic, and can't play for a few hours. The trick is to never turn more than about 10 degrees off of prograde. If you turn at the exact right time, you barely ever need to wander from prograde, and because you're never going crazy fast the ship doesn't spin like crazy.

I was stabbing in the dark We can add that, no prob. FTR I didn't use it, and am not sure how much benefit it would be considering you have to burn up to Mun's SOI before you can get one and by then you're basically where you want to be for the encounter. Coming back to Kerbin, though, you could just burn enough to get out of Mun's SOI and tweak yourself into a Kerbin collision landing with very little further expenditure. Which is against the spirit of this discussion as it would confuse the core issue of orbit vs straight up.

Because the actual lander doesn't matter except to be the payload we take to Mun. Tweaking it's efficiency isn't the challenge. Getting it to Mun orbit with the cheapest lifter is.

I don't think we stated it, but I also didn't use the lander's engine. Felt cheaty to me.

Which assertion, that cost is a valid way to judge two rockets' efficiencies or that you can always build a rocket that goes to orbit first for cheaper? Cost efficiency is a very important part of this game (and life in general) so sure, that can be my dogma. And as far as the other is concerned, I'll happily make an orbital lifter to prove my point. I only ask that we give it some beef so the gains are more obvious. Say, lift a full orange tank off of the Mun and land it - still full - on Kerbin*. As soon as we finish the other challenge, make a ship that can do this and then I will too. Bonus: We don't even need to have FAR installed. I'd add "without entering another SOI after leaving Mun's for the first time" just so this is more about the ship and the lifting strategy than any tricks with multiple gravity assists.

Totally agree. I've been playing a single save since 90 dropped and I have a great pilot in Jeb but have barely used Bill or Bob. This is partially the fault of us not having the "Barn" tier available, which would have given us 4 tiers total. When we have 5 full tiers for all buildings I expect things to be more smooth.

The cost of the Mun return vehicle is as relevant as the cost of the Kerbin lifter (which I only bring up as reference! Don't worry!). Which is to say it's extremely relevant because it's the easiest way we can judge two ships' relative efficiencies. If two ships can do the exact same thing but one costs twice as much, you'd use the other one so you can either save money or do more. Much like with the Kerbin lifter, this boils down to: If you build a ship that can get off of Mun and return to Kerbin by lifting straight up, I can build a ship that can also get back to Kerbin but by burning horizontally, for cheaper. Always.

This is correct, with the addition that the final orbit must be less than 30x30km (aka the apoapsis must be under 30km) and you cannot use the lander itself during the lifting/transfer/orbit. I've done this with a ship that (in 0.25) costs just under $10k. It uses lots of SRBs and a little bit of regular fuel/oxy for more fine tuned maneuvers, and frankly I'm surprised it flies as well as it does.

No, not really. You need the dV to get up to whatever speed, plus the dV to get up to whatever altitude in the atmosphere, which is very dependant on flight path. A vertical flight path is easier to calculate, estimate, and is cheaper to boot, but then you have to hit the exact right speed at the exact right time (while you're screaming upward through the goldilocks zone at the target velocity). A horizontal, leveling off flight path is easier to achieve, but you need more fuel and thrust and drag and gravity losses are more fluid depending on your flight path. That's why I suggest, if you're going to do a lot of in-atmo tests, to build a plane. Unlock the basic plane parts and make one. You won't get landing gear (which flummoxes me as well) but just start it on its tail and land with parachutes and you'll be fine. 90 science well spent IMO. If you don't want to make a plane, I would suggest instead just ignoring the in-atmo tests.

You know you can test an SRB on the launch pad for *free* right? Pod, SRB under it, empty the fuel, launch, spacebar, recover. Bam. You just earned 46 bucks and people like you a little more. This is infinitely cheaper than testing ANYTHING in space, even a tiny little sepratron.

You're missing that the Advanced Inline Stabalizer isn't a SAS module. SAS modules include (exclusively as far as I know) probe cores. SAS is not the reaction wheels, which the Stabalizer provides. SAS is the computer that controls the ship and holds it steady without a pilot present, and that's where the probe cores come in.

Several notes: $10k is the total cost of the rocket to lift the payload arkie87 specified. Note: That payload costs more than $2,000. That $10k rocket (actually closer to $7k if you don't incude the payload) is designed to take that payload from the launchpad to a 30km (max) Munar orbit. Perhaps you misunderstood the goal as launching the vessel from the Mun to orbit? It's understandable considering how many different bodies we've discussed launching from. I would love to see a $2k rocket (Total $5k, let's say, counting the payload) that could get the specified payload into the desired location. It would literally change the way I play the game from now on.

Nope. It's not just you. Now that the game's in Beta I fully expect the tech tree to eventually get another pass. Hopefully at that time they'll make custom tech trees much easier to make, and will also fix some glaring problems (like the fact that the "basic plane" package node doesn't including landing gear.

Wow I'm dense. I literally did not notice that even though I was looking for it. Dang trees getting in the way of my forest view. I'd still like the tooltip to read what you need to do. "Surface Sample" or "EVA report" or "Crew report" or whatnot.

I will wait for you to make a craft that can get the payload into a 30km orbit of Mun before I do any more work on this. I've made a ship without knowing exactly what your ship would be. It's your turn.

Not true. On an airless body you should, pre-launch, switch to "Orbit" mode because the moment you lift off the ground "surface" mode is irrelevant. "Prograde" at launch is always directly east, as all bodies in KSP rotate east. Therefore, for a perfect launch you should thrust directly east on takeoff though that's impossible for several reasons, not the least of which being that you will almost assuredly die in a fiery crash. Regarding the rest, why would you burn vertical 10km and then turn? I frequenly take off from Mun at about a 5-10 degree angle off of horizontal. Works like a charm in 99% of the cases. For those rare instances where a crater wall will ruin my day, I go up a little more.

Never thought of myself as "elite" before but I'll take the compliment as I absolutely LOVE career mode now. There's no shame in knocking the difficulty down or giving yourself extra staring funds or science or rep. It's not cheating to tweak a single player game so it's fun for you. In 0.25 I tweaked the game super hard for a playthrough. Had a blast but it was quite a chore to just get anything done. If 0.90 hadn't come out I'd have started my next career on "Easy" mode just to get through that early grind quicker. It never occurred to me to think that this was somehow "wrong."

Awesome stuff, man. Loving the changes and playing your contracts in stock. I've already got a satellite in orbit of Mun and a survey plane capable of getting all the nearby surveys (and I can even attach a part to it to get a test in on the way). A few comments/suggestions on your massive list of features. When entering trigger zones for surveys, there is now a more visible message, and the navigation icon on the navball will blink while you are inside the zone. Any chance of adding an alert tone? Maybe a higher pitched "bing" when entering and a lower pitched "bong" when exiting? Maybe only for the targeted zone though zones are never (for me yet) so crowded I'd find that annoying. Unless it is your first flag on a planet, flag contracts will no longer appear for planets that have Kerbals on them already. Once the kerbals move off of the planet, they will appear again. So now we'll have to get our guy in orbit around Minmus (and any moons less massive than Minmus) and then re-land them. Gotcha No, this is a good check and I never abused the old system because I thought it was cheaty. Waypoints now display tooltips with the agency of the relevant contract, this is to make correlating the waypoint to a contract on the board easier. Could the tooltip also show if you've accepted the contract or not, and what you need to do there? I know the icon says it but I can't see dark red lines on black (which seems common for the waypoints) so can't at a glance tell what the contract wants me to do, or even see if I need to do it. Maybe 2 colors for the outline of the waypoint, white if you've accepted the contract and black if you've not? Modified how site clustering works. Surveys can spawn a mixture of ground and aerial waypoints. If a survey spawns waypoints that are all on the ground, they will be designated alpha, beta, gamma, etc. If the survey is mixed, but there is more than one ground waypoint, they will form a designated cluster as well. I'm not sure if this is intended, but I had a contract with an Alpha and Beta site that were close enough to each other that I landed my plane between them and did one eva report and goto both contracts.

I still like my idea of it being a Fine Print contract that is hard coded. "Put a probe very loosely close to this polar orbit here around the planet and unlock the ability to see its biomes in map mode."

Actually I won't argue that. That was an early test and right after posting I instantly realized that 5 SRBs at 60% thrust wastes dV. I redesigned the rocket to use 3 SRBs at 100%, drop them, and then use 2 others at 100%. Almost the same TWR with extra dV and a longer burn time. (And I'm still curious to see your sub-$10k craft)

Two ways: 1) Some engines have the option to right click and "test" them. Check them on the launchpad though because not all engines do and there isn't a pattern. 2) For others, you MUST do it in staging, meaning you MUST bring a different engine to use to take your engine wherever you want to test it. And regarding how to get there, you have 2 more options 1) Use, overuse, and blatantly abuse "Revert to VAB" to keep redesigning your rocket. 2) Make a testing plane. Even the lowest tier plane should be able to test pretty much any part at pretty much any altitude up to about 22km, at pretty much any speed under say 600m/s. If you add an emergency SRB you can go higher and/or faster if necessary.

You can place parts inline with symmetry enabled. Maybe if you have symmetry enabled, they remember if they're radial or mirror, screwing up the stuff you attach to them. That would be easy to test. I'm not running the game right now so can't but if nobody does by the time I do, I'll try it.

What reading gives you shores? EVA on the ladder? That's normal, I think, as there's no "flying over the launchpad" biome.

Hmmm, I don't know for sure but my guess is that the wings were put on with "VAB" symmetry. I'd put the engine on the wing, then pick up the whole wing and put it back on with "SPH" symmetry.