Bobnova

I suspect landing will be even more difficult.

Installed RSS and all the required/recommended mods. Made it to orbit. Barely. Burnt most of the craft up on reentry, the rest was destroyed when it hit the water. Built a redstone-ish suborbital thing that I actually recovered. RSS makes things hard! I love it!

Make a lifter that'll put it in orbit and you're set.

That's a frightening concept. Do it!

Assembling in orbit is more annoying for me than the delicate launch process for a monster. It's easy enough to turn it around too In my opinion assembling something in orbit with multiple launches is much more of a pain in the rear and takes far longer than doing it in a single launch.

I know a few people with setups like that. They're very nice, if you use multithreaded programs that work well in SLI. If you could still buy it, this and SB-E CPUs would outperform it: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188119 Your setup will be good for a number of years, but it's already outperformed. That's the wrong way to look at it IMO.

I've taken a month or two off before. Then I come back and love it all over again.

Well, yes. The CPU doesn't have to do much of anything for shadows. The CPU is what is doing all the things you listed. The GPU has to deal with shadows. On a laptop odds are that the GPU is already tapped out by the existing polygon count. Adding shadows and other graphical effects would make things significantly worse.

My go to probe setup has all the various science things, including two goo pods and a materials bay, is FAR compatible (looks roughly like a rocket), and is about 17k vacuum dV on the pad. I initially built it for moho (still haven't made orbit around moho...), but it's gone everywhere in the system now. Even landed a few places. You only get one landing though, and good luck keeping the engine alive during said landing! It's not really built for that.

3770k, stock clocks. 16GB of ram running way slower than I thought it was (oops), it's at 1333-9-9-9, should be 1600-8-8-8. Vertex 3 MIOPS 240GB SSD. Reference GTX580 at stock speeds. Poor abused liquid electrical tape coated vaseline smeared TZ77XE4 motherboard. It and the CPU have spent a fair amount of time on dry ice and liquid nitrogen cooling. 7-64-ultimate. 5830 has a lot more memory bandwidth than the 5770. Like a lot. Which benchmark you look at changes how much faster than the 5770 it is pretty significantly. You're looking at a significantly faster core on the 5830 (more shaders), and twice the memory bandwidth. Short version: 5770 is the best of the meh 5xxx cards. 5830 is the slowest of the good 5xxx cards.

I've had a few near misses, but only near in the space sense. A number in the 10-20km range, a few in the 4-9km range. Only actual collision was when I staged after getting to orbit, lined up my transfer, then boosted right into my discarded stage. I'm more careful about where and in what direction my staging happens.

Better support than allowing mods run execute C? That's hard to find.

I finally got it figured out last week. Previous to that it was extremely hit or miss. Now I can do it pretty reliably with just main engines.

Mine typically end up drifting. There have been a few incidents during liftoff on kerbin, but other than those it's still pristine. I typically just use them for transfers and leave 'em in orbit around whatever they got to. I think on my 0.24 save, when it comes out, I'll take special care of them RP style, cause that sounds fun.

Apollo style is a lot of fun. Especially if you toss FAR and DE and TAC Life support in, with Proc. Fairings as well. Then you can make a Apollo Style that looks nice and smooth and apolloish. What I really like about Apollo style I think is that you can design, build, and fail a mission in half an hour. Doing anything to a planet further out takes a lot longer. Especially if you already have flights in process so you can't just timewarp wildly.

If you haven't installed anything that limits the Kerbal's lifespan on EVA, their backpacks should have enough fuel to get them into 70x70 orbits EVA'd. Then you can pick them up at your leisure. I call it the Semi Gravity Rescue strategy.

Yup here we go: You can stash a surface sample from a given biome in each cockpit and bring home two (or more, I suppose) of each. I also learned that my Mun science is not nearly as complete as I thought it was.

You could try using two cockpits, see if you can put one sample in one and a second from the same biome in a second. I'm going to try this and report back here.

Your english is excellent. I would love to see this functionality in the stock game as well. It's very, very useful. For the moment, check out "Kerbal Attachment System" (KAS), a mod which lets you do just what you're describing.

My favorite recent one was on Mun, I'd landed a one Kerbal lander on a slope (a slope? On Mun? Shock!). I'd also forgotten ladders, so the Kerbal in question had a rather unceremonious exit, promptly falling down and ragdolling. Down the hillside, on his face. He finally stood up some 200 meters later, turned his jetpack on, and flew back. Landed, grabbed a surface sample/planted a flag/eva report/etc, and fired the jetpack up again to get into the cockpit. Unfortunately he hit his head on a landing light on the way up, and back into ragdoll mode he went and back down the hill he went. 200m later, again, jetpack, again, return to lander, again. This time I got him to the same height as the door 10m away from the lander, and slowly moved towards it pulsing vertical thrust to maintain his altitude. I did this until I got the board option, hit board, and all was good! Except for one (1) small issue: I pulsed shift a little bit too long, and the engines were at 20% thrust. The engines with a Mun TWR of ~6:1. No SAS, no hand on WASD as I'd taken it off to rest my fingers, much panic. That was some quick piloting and a reeeeaaaaaally poorly inclined orbit, but I made it. Felt both very silly, and very pleased with myself for saving it. Somewhat more recently, my 4th rescue mission to retrieve a Kerbal from Duna failed due to the Duna Orbiter/returnToKerbin vehicle not having a power source. Naturally I discovered this when the lander ran out of fuel 70m/s too slow to make orbit and the Kerbal had to jetpack to orbit. This is where the orbiter was supposed to pick him up, but the engine wouldn't light. This problem was quickly traced to flat batteries and no jumper cables. Bonus noob move I realized later: no cockpit either. Lander was supposed to re-dock and provide housing. Thus did my 5th rescue attempt planning begin. All because the Kerbal in question landed on a mountain slope and destroyed most of his lander. Everything but two solar panels, the massive life support supply canister, the cockpit, and a couple sensors. He lucked out on that one, sort of. Accidentally staging has caused me issues too. I lock 'em now if I remember. Then I crashed once because I forgot to unlock them.

Sadly I didn't save the craft, so there's no craft file I can submit Guess I'll take another whack later today.

Here's the "Escaping" shot for mine. I don't seem to have saved it, so I don't have launchpad weight.

I'd go for Minmus, 1100 won't get you to the surface of Mun and back unless you land at a very high spot and do a very very good job of that and of liftoff. Even then you won't be headed back to kerbin. It'll do it for Minmus just fine though, and most likely make it back to Kerbin for bonus points. Now that Minmus has biomes you can get a ton of science there.

Kraken drive maybe? Might be worth a shot, except for that whole explode the moment you touch down bit.

Could you please read the challenge guidelines?