TTurchan1

I agree, you've done a good job at avoiding the temptation to overbuild, something I myself struggle with. It doesn't help and it kills performance, so if you don't overbuild you'll be able to go pretty far in ksp. Here is an example of how ridiculous even a simple Mun lander can get with me, and believe me, the performance is awful: Keep up the good work man.

My suggestion is always... MOAR FUEL No, but in all seriousness, get rid of one of the layers of solar panels, because they are in a cube configuration, and will eclipse each other strangely IMO.

Well, shovels are able to move food much more quickly, and therefore would be more comparable to the NASA parts. In my opinion the orange tanks are just more classy. Also, there are no Nasa sized docking ports (or at least i haven't found them in the tech tree, because i started a new career in 23.5, and haven't played sandbox, and I enjoy pacing my career, and focusing on the kerbin system and Duna to begin with)which means that the station would look really awkward with all the adapters. Finally, I'm like 75% sure that i didn't have nasa parts when I started the station, and i'm 100% sure that i wasn't planning on having more than the 7 tanks at first, it just felt like the obvious progression after I put the first segment on.

They don't feel Kerbal to me, and they feel a bit OP.

Well, it seems jeb has been amassing stolen fuel in orbit around kerbin. So far 17 out of the 28 tanks are full. In the future I plan to add one more tank with some 1.25m docking ports and one Sr. port so that docking things to actually refuel is easier. I am also going to de-orbit the solar array, because it just jacks up the part count by ~ 100 parts, and isn't necessary. I also might de-orbit the core module and add some engines and take the thing to another planet, but maybe that plan will be saved for a slightly smaller fuel station. I'll post again when I put a similar craft around the Mun.

48-7s Batteries and Solar Struts Mainsail Using those i could go to tylo and back. personally i have a burning hatred of the nerva. It's too heavy, and its isp makes it vastly overused.

A more useful (scalable and low part count) alternative is four lv-t30's with a skipper clustered together. http://i.imgur.com/kO6GAyM.png that shows you how to do it Higher ISP (i did a lazy calculation so not sure if it's 100% accurate, but the isp in vacuum is around 361 vs the mainsail's 330) Higher Thrust (1510 vs 1500) Marginally greater mass (6 vs 9.16{this is outweighed by the bonuses}) The one major downside is when using these boosters for the radially mounted boosters on a rocket, rather than the core only. Because the higher part count coupled with symmetry greatly increases part count on just a simple engine. BTW i don't take credit for this design, the credit goes to GusTurbo.

I thought this was the case, but i strapped 200 or so 2HOT's to a capsule, had an action group set up, activated them all, kept the data, and recovered from the launchpad. It behaves the same as if you were to do it 200 seperate times, so bringing 10 goo balls to solar orbit won't benefit you. If you look at the tally at the end you can see that it doesn't actually effect the result.

Yeah, I know that second claim was false, i don't know what the **** I was smoking when i wrote that (I wasn't smoking anything, i was just tired), but i dont know what the hell is going on with my entry. All i know is that your surface velocity is ridiculously high whenever you are orbiting the sun.

Well, for one, Kerbol (the sun) has a rotational velocity of 3.8km/s, compared to kerbin's 174m/s rotational velocity, and secondly, if you are orbiting at very high altitudes, you will have a MUCH higher surface velocity.

Again, I was basing the speed off the "highest speed over land" part of the flight log, or the surface velocity. Besides, the Stock Unmanned Exploitational category on the leaderboards is meant for exploits, so i exploited the fact that your surface velocity is incredibly high when you are very far off the surface of the body you are orbiting. Also he says that you are not supposed to abuse sub-orbital hops to increase the velocity, which i did not do.

That doesn't at all imply that you can't leave Kerbin's SOI. And I was basing my highest speed off the "Highest Speed Over Land" part of the flight log.

True, true, I did have one run where I got ~10,000 speed over land in Kerbin's SOI, but there is nothing in the rules saying that you must stay in Kerbin's SOI.

Well, I lost the pictures of my legitimate entry, so I will have to do that again, but here is exploitation entry (all stock) that did fairly well imo: The craft was not named in the flight, but my name for it is the "AYKM mk1" (no quotes). It's final top speed was, 421,951m/s.

Nice challenge, I really enjoyed it, I made an attempt but the pictures are on my other computer, and I think I forgot to leave the resource tab open, so I'll probably just try again over the weekend (busy with football right now). Anyway, I think I got like 2300, and @visari, I think that that would be a good addition to the leaderboard, one section without air hogging (1-2 intakes per engine) and it would really lower the scores, might be interesting to see what designs people come up with to increase their speed.