Pirke

Could you explain the rationale behind that decision?

Of course Trivial pattern. And event based: scanner modules turning on/off, ship spawn/unload, ... Shouldn't need to be much work to create this. Although I'm a professional software developer and have worked with Unity 4 in my free time, haven't tried modding KSP though.

That's what I was thinking as well... you have a list of ships, their parts etc all available. Don't put the scanning logic in the scanner, but as a separate background processing thread. Perhaps the glitches with time warp would be fixed then as well as the position of the ships is accurately updated during time warp.

Scanning planets in the background would be great... I know there's a limitation in the engine, but there must be a way to workaround that.

I just tried the Kethane mod for the first time. It looks good! I've got a mobile mining base on Minmus and Mun, that can put 48000 Kethane back in orbit for conversion to whatever is needed. No mess with rovers, the whole mining base just lands somewhere and lifts off again. Not the cheapest in fuel consumption, but hey, we've got Kethane everywhere The TWR (6 nervas) and fuel are optimized for Mun, so I can rendevous, dock, transfer fuel and go land somewhere else again. It is a complete self sufficient base as long as it has enough Kethane It even seats 2 Kerbals, because 1 would get lonely... Completely filled I could also start exploring the galaxy and see how far I would get on a round trip I might need to put on 3 extra thrusters in the bottom for the heavier planets though... this will become a cool next project I think! Too bad there is no large size generator, this small one looks a bit silly on top.

How many times can you land at the Mun and get back to land at KSC without refueling?

Opening post updated.

Terminology, the goal of the challenge is clear: no control over your trajectory after release. I updated the opening post to mention uncontrollable wings are allowed. So, back to the challenge: who can beat my score of 1092 ???

They are uncontrollable tailfins. They provide lift to glide, and the top tail ones provide some nose up to smooth the landing. I assure you, after release there is absolutely no control left It is a matter of good design to balance weight and lift. See the 4th picture: it has a glide of 8 degrees nose up while going 8 degrees down at a (final) speed of 40-50 m/s. Those are good conditions for landing on a flat surface without any control input. On the 3rd picture you see me aiming at the runway, while rolling 1 degree left. That 1 degree roll made me miss the runway big time after a 2 minute glide down... Furthermore: when releasing at high speeds it tends to go nose up to about 70-80 degrees first, then stalling to 60 degrees nose down, after restoring itself to the final glide position. If I go too fast, the nose up is too strong and it flips over or enters a spiral or something else goes wrong

It is war! The evil opponents have taken control of KSC. General Kerb wants to take it back. He orders Jebediah to do a free fall precision drop D-day thing behind enemy lines and reconquer KSC! Rules: 1. Launch a carrier (plane or rocket) that carries an uncontrollable object carrying Jebediah in a command seat (PODs have torque and are disqualified, see 3rd rule) 2. To escape enemy radar: release from at least 1000m high on a horizontal trajectory with a velocity of at least 100 m/s. 3. It must have NO control after release: no control surfaces, no thrust, no torque, nothing. Pure a ballistic/aerodynamic free fall. If Jebediah fails we don't want the enemy to get their hands on our advanced control technologies Note that uncontrollable wings are allowed to smooth the landing of Jeb. 4. No parachutes: the enemy can spot those and shoot them down... 5. Jebediah must survive to be able to do battle 6. 100% stock. No mods. Scoring: + Release altitude divided by 10 + Horizontal speed at release moment + 250 points if landing at KSC flat area + 250 points if landing on the KSC runway or hitting a KSC building + 500 points if landing without taking damage Leaderboard: 1. Pirke: 1092 2. 3. 4. 5. My attempt: http://imgur.com/a/tXkJY#0 Score: + altitude: 1761 / 10 = 176 + speed: 166 + KSC flat area: 250 + no damage: 500 Total score: 1092. Who can beat me?

This is turning into a "find all spelling errors" challenge

If there was a scramjet available I would have put that on, until that time we work with the tools we have

Nice! Can Jeb rotate around with that torque module? Or is it merely a magnificent throne?

He found the mysterious black holes around Duna! They only appear once every 500.000 years and last for 1 day... lol

Indeed... every sentence except 2 contain spelling errors...

A small and fast one It takes off and lands as a plane, so it's a plane right?

Jebediah wants to make a practical joke for Bill and Bob: the Jack in the Box Kerbal Style! Who can create the coolest Kerbal in a box? Rules: - At the start it must look like a box from the outside - Jebediah must be fixed in an external command seat so he gets a good view of the scared faces of Bill and Bob - Jebediah should survive - Single trigger mechanism (can be 1 stage, or 1 action group) - As this is a creativity challenge, mods are allowed No scoring, just fun! If you have video's instead of screenshots that would be cool! My entry (stock): http://imgur.com/a/qxSIR#0

With 3 rockets and straight up, I got to 1372 m/s in 30 seconds At this altitude you get a lot of gliding range as well, making it actually a usefull plane to go somewhere http://imgur.com/a/YTHsQ#0

I reached 800 in 27 seconds and still 0.5 seconds of mega accelleration available! see delta v I ended up close to 900, but timing the screenshot is difficult It flies very stable and can even land back. But don't expect much range though If you stick multiple of these solid rockets together to divide the weight of the wings, you can go even faster... http://imgur.com/a/YTHsQ#0

And this is the result: Requirements: 1. Rover 2. Can get into orbit 3. VTOL 4. Has a docking port easy reachable 5. Can land with full fuel: it has 4 early braking chutes, and 8 heavy duty chutes for a touchdown speed of max 16m/s. In the final second you still need to burn a little fuel, because the legs can't take that weight at that speed... but there is plenty of fuel left to get back into orbit again. 6. It can land anywhere, also on planets without atmosphere. It uses more fuel though 7. Has a nice lander pod, with a beautifull high view of the surrounding world. 8. 100% stock (flight engineer just for stats readout so I don't need the map view as often just to known the periaps) What's it got? - 8 spike thrusters - reaction torque for aiming the thrusters (plenty of torque) - lot's of fuel - docking port - 8 wheels - 8 heavy duty legs - plenty of power: 8 atomic generators, so you don't need sunlight, and don't need to turn of the wheels for the torque to work (convenient!) - 4 lights for those dark conditions - 2 power ladders Some release notes to save weight. The requirements didn't specify these, and I needed every bit of delta v I could get - no RCS, so use torque for aiming, and thrusters and/or refueling vessel for maneuvering - after landing, there is plenty of fuel to get into orbit, but that's about it - this means NO rendevous, the refueling vessel must do that part - if you go beyond a circular orbit of 80km, there is not enough fuel left to get down to Kerbal without refueling first. This was part of the use case, but not very common for my designs - due to the massive weight of 92.6t, the 8 wheels are damaged pretty quickly if driven too fast, or braking too fast. Mission report and proof: http://imgur.com/a/Ffl8S#0

I will do it for you

Nice rover Can you also do it without jet engines?

I agree on the difficulty of having a lot of mass For the High Altitude Payload Delivery Challenge I created a modular design to take big loads up in the sky using jets only. Fly higher and add a liquid engine to actually use the payload and you get a similar craft. Due to part count limitations (I may have overused the struts a bit...), I couldn't get more than 4 orange tanks up, but the runway is wide enough for 10 to 12 orange tanks payload SSTO. See this post. It doesn't look as fancy as your craft though, but it gets the job done. The first 1000m up is wobbly, then steady as a rock.

Meet Big Momma MK IV (Big Momma MK I to III failed miserably....) Big Momma uses a very modular design: each unit is a very narrow part that has 600 jet fuel, 8 turbo jets and 8 air intakes. It can carry 2 jumbo's to 10000m easily. Given enough air intakes to simulate scram jets and a liquid burner, it can go single stage into orbit and back..... The Kerbal engineers just click as many units together as they need payload to go up. In this case: 4 to beat the current record Also, when I add more units the physics engine or my pc can't handle the part count... but the runway is wide enough for 5 or 6 of these babies, giving a theoretical 10 or 12 jumbo's to 10000m. Testflights confirm that 2 units fly the same as 1 as they are simply strutted together. http://imgur.com/a/Ph6nH#0

I found the cause: the fuel lines work a bit different then I expected, the system just drew uneven because of that.