raygundan

That's a bit extreme. The "kerbal universe" should contain more possible science points than it takes to unlock the full (current) tree. Not everyone is going to get everywhere, particularly if they're limited in the parts they have to do it. I can't count the number of attempts I made to land on Eve and return before I succeeded-- if I had been limited to only part of the tree because all the Eve science was required to get the last unlocks, I'm not sure I ever would have made it. What might work, to go along with some other things you suggested like "better nuke engines further in the tech tree," is putting some seriously ultra-high-tech Kerbal rockets that don't currently exist further on as "completist unlocks." But I don't think making the current tech tree require all science on every body is going to do much besides raise a frustrating barrier for people who aren't ultra-hardcore that drives them away from using career mode at all. In addition, there's very little point in having a tech tree that is only fully unlocked upon total completion even for the hardcore. What are you going to do with your newly-unlocked whizbang engines if they only appear after you've already been everywhere and done everything? If a part is going to be used, it needs to be in your hands before you've finished the game.

At long last, success! My first working Eve return mission took two launches, each in the 700t ballpark-- one for the giant rover/lander/ascent vehicle, and one for a huge transit pusher stage to get it to Eve and back. Landed, drove up a mountain, and safely got Jeb back to Kerbin. As is usually the case, though, once you've actually succeeded, suddenly all sorts of optimizations become obvious. The second attempt used a similar design-- but the rover assembly weight was cut in half, room for a tiny Gilly lander was found, and the entire assembly was able to cram into a single launch with a weight of 590t. Jeb made a second trip to Eve, drove up a different mountain, and returned to orbit where he made a daring spacewalk from the remains of his lifter to the main ship. A side trip was made to Gilly so that Bill had a chance to stick a flag in something as well, and then everybody returned home safely. Or at least that was the plan... thanks to a bit of over-engineering, the two actually ignored orders and stopped for tea at Minmus on the way back as well. The drive-up launcher concept definitely seems to be the way to go, though. Through a bit of luck, I decided to try it out shortly before .22, so I managed to accidentally replace legs with wheels at just about the exact moment when legs become problematic on Eve. The tires are almost always all flat on landing, but that's one of the few things a Kerbal can fix in-flight. In theory, a vehicle like this should be more than capable of a sea-level landing and return, but the cross-country uphill drive would take a while. Pictures of the adventure later. One more quick flight to make to plant a flag on Ike, and I can finally say I've landed (and returned) a Kerbal on everything, in career mode.

I got really close, but fell just a bit shy on ascent Delta-V. But I just noticed that that little tiny high-TWR engine I used got a 50% thrust increase in .22, meaning I can take something like a third of the lift engines (and their weight) off my lander and try again.

I'd add a "do you like piloting or building?" decision block as well. For me, the piloting is dullsville... but I'm all about building rockets. MechJeb made the game amazing for me. And it turns out, it's not a half-bad teacher. I had done almost nothing without MechJeb in the driver's seat since my first suborbital rockets... but when career mode arrived, I was able to get myself to the moon via manual piloting on the first try with a rocket I built after unlocking only the first tier. Which brings up another thing. The question "do you care how you achieve your goals?" might need a wording tweak. I cared, which is why I chose to use MechJeb-- it's just that for me "I care" means "I'd rather not steer for 45 minutes," so a yes answer means I'm off to install a mod. Either way, the other poster who summed it up as a single "do you like the mod?" question has the right idea. Do what's fun. And seriously, those of you who do it all flying by hand are awesome. You should be proud of it! But dammit, Jim... I'm an engineer, not a pilot! Heck, now I'm imagining a co-op mode where I can build absurdly optimized interplanetary craft and let somebody else fly them and provide feedback. I'm sure there's at least one Chuck Yeager for every Von Braun, and not that many who are both.

That seemed strange to me. It produces some really weird early-game progression. It's easier to immediately launch manned craft everywhere than it is to do something more reasonable, like send probes to get the hang of things. Probes are nearly impossible until much later in the tree, due to the lack of batteries and solar panels combined with the extremely high power draw of the antennas. That seemed really backwards to me. Manned flight feels like it shouldn't even be present at the first couple of tech levels, let alone actually easier to use. You can get a Kerbal to the Mun with five research points... but you don't have a probe body until after closer to 100 points, no batteries without another 45, and no solar panels to get your battery life up to a point where you could probe something besides LKO without hundreds more points on top of it. It would be like if Apollo was the first thing we tried, but it took us two more decades of research to build Sputnik.

I'm fairly surprised at how far out in the tree *ladders* are. My poor scientists are forced to leap from their capsules to take soil samples, and can only get back in by jetpack on low-gravity worlds. The guys doing sample work on Kerbin can't even do that, since their jetpacks aren't strong enough. I get by, but how is a new player going to get any practice with return landers before leaving Kerbin?

I'd like to second the request for ladders earlier, even if it's just the heavy, simple rungs-on-the-side version. There's no way to re-enter a lander on Kerbin without building some really absurd capsule-on-bottom arrangements. At the very least, it would be nice to have a ladder available at the same point that landing legs become available.

Well. And here I was just gonna skip Eve. Looks like it's back to the drawing board! I hadn't realized how much smaller an Eve return lander could be if you took off from altitude. My only previous Eve-return lander must be two orders of magnitude larger.

For that matter... do kerbals all have to be along for the whole interplanetary ride, or can crewed landers "stay behind" on the ground or in orbit for later pickup? Or even fly themselves back to kerbin?

Does every kerbal need to go on every landing for them to count? Or can the mission have, say, a three-man crew with a one-man lander they take turns in?

Does that work now? I've never been able to successfully remove landing gear from the default key. It looks like it works when you look at the configuration in the VAB, but then all the legs deploy anyway when I press "G". It's not a huge thing, but it means mechjeb-assisted landings with complex payloads will hilariously tear themselves apart when all the neatly packed-away landing gear go off at once. It also means even if you don't use mechjeb, and forget to use your custom-key-mapped landing gear and press "G", the same thing occurs. My self-righting rover explosively disassembles the lander carrying it.

I ran into the same problem. Built a compact multi-part payload that has some landing legs in the middle of the stack that should remain stowed. MechJeb deploys *all* the landing legs, though, which causes premature explosion. A simple checkbox to disable landing gear auto-deploy would be more than sufficient. I can assign the ones needed for landing to a group and trigger them manually. There does not, unfortunately, appear to be a way to change which parts are associated with the default landing gear action group, or at least it doesn't work. There is a "gear" group, but removing the unwanted legs from it doesn't stop them from deploying. So, add my vote to yours, along with a pretty-please to the developer and a heaping amount of thanks for the amazing MechJeb mod.