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You can build multiple craft, The ATV, sky crane, spacecraft, orbital assistant. That's all fine, the ATV just has to perform on the surface or in orbit for docking, it doesn't really matter how many craft you build to get it there. If you have to build something to help get it back into orbit or off a planet, then that's fine. You just have to achieve orbit with the vertical take off engines with no assistant craft to complete one of the bonus challenges. Doing so on Mun is possible even with a lightweight craft.

Good design, thanks for sharing these. I was going with bigger engines and the pod on the top was attached to solid booster.

Ok. So if the craft has enough fuel to get through the majority of Eve's atmosphere, then the orbital engine should handle the rest after I get the craft above 90,000 meters. The problem I'm having is finding the right amount of fuel and thrust required to get into orbit. Everything can work fine on Kerban, but Eve is something entirely different. So what would be the perfect gravity turn for Eve? How much fuel would I need to land in order to achieve orbit again?

Not really, you can load any sized texture you want for a planet up to 4k and over. Kerban with a texture resolution of 1024 x 1024 is the same as an Earth texture of 1024 x 1024. And since there is only one planet loaded into a scene at one time aside from the sun and background galaxy, you could have an extremely large texture resolution for the planet because you're only projecting the texture and normal map to a standard resolution sphere.

So I landed on Eve and put up a flag, but I couldn't get off the darn planet. I can do a lot in KSP, but Eve is really difficult for me to master. Landing isn't the hard part, it's getting off the planet. Jeb was stuck on Eve for over 14 years and eventually I landed my best attempt of a rescue craft and launched it and it just couldn't make it into orbit. I had to default to the debug menu and use infinite fuel to establish an orbit and rescue Jeb. My main problem was that my craft that I used had enough power to get to Jool on a straight shot from Kerban so I thought that that had enough power, but on Eve I only got up to about 40,000 meters at 450 m/s. What kinds of craft have you guys used to escape Eve without the use of any mods? What tips do you have for attacking Eve for a lander and transfer vehicle that can make the journey there and back to Kerban? What do you guys think of my current lander design below? The pod isn't part of the craft, only for testing purposes. The tank in the middle feeds fuel to all of the other engines and adds support. I also have a ladder attached to it.

In all honesty, I think it boils down to time constraints and gameplay reasons. Computer processing power doesn't really factor into scale because scale in space is relative. I'm not sure what game engine Squad is using, but this looks similar to Unity. Unity doesn't support Hyperthreading on processors so things like water and large terrain can run very slow. I think that this is a custom engine that was inspired by Unity or perhaps Unity pro. My PC is a beast and it's hard to get anything better without thousands of dollars invested into it because I'm a game designer and 3D artist. Scaling things down improves on time for travel, texture size, engine performance, poly count, and animation. When you add up all of the things necessary to run a game, this game wouldn't be able to run on any computer using a single processor core for all of the calculations. As far as programming goes, an engine like this isn't anywhere near as effective as something like Unreal Engine 4 or even Unreal Engine 3, but again I think that this is some sort or Unity clone engine.

Yeah, it can be done for sure, and I have the video evidence to prove it. I think that the most effective way of doing it is to first build the ship you want to dock things to. Then build the attachment ship in the same room as the main ship. Separate the ship from the main ship and save it as a subassembly. Then if you make an unmanned ship and load the subassembly into the scene and attach it, you should have the correct spacing required because it should have been built and measured in the same room as the main vessel. I found that attaching ships with large mass to two docking ports is easier than attaching a lighter ship to two docking ports because the magnetic attraction bumping that happens when you go to dock. A heavy ship won't bounce around and should attach as one, while a lighter ship might bounce off slightly and not attach properly. 1. Both docking ports have to attach at the same time in order for this to work. 2. Both docking ports have to be aligned to within a few centimeters or each other in order for them to dock. 3. If both of the docking ports don't dock, then you might have to undock and then fly about 50 - 100 meters away and then try docking again in order to get all of the docking clamps to engage. Even with my design that worked, some of the docking attempts took 2 - 4 tries before I got both of the docking clamps to work. Now that we have subassemblies, you should be able to make the docking craft and save it as a separate part and not have to fiddle with the alignment like I did with my Moho rescue station. As a side note: if you're using up to 4 docking ports for a craft, it can be very difficult to dock them all properly because you have to rotate all of the ports to the perfect alignment and the S.A.S. system can cause trouble with this. If you use pure R.C.S. then you have to make sure to align everything perfectly and kill all velocity before moving in for docking otherwise the docking ports will be off and won't dock.

You want to balance the thrust of the rear of the plane to the thrust of the front of the plane so that you get equal thrust distribution. It's a very careful balancing act between the engines and where your lift is too. You'll need more engines wherever there is the most mass, usually the rear. I also angled my engines in the front a little to help push the plane forward slightly so it doesn't flip over. Here's my version,

If you build a sky crane or a landing assistant for Duna and manage to get it back into orbit, then that would be impressive. However, you don't have to take off from a body with atmosphere to complete any of the challenges.

I use parachutes and landing rockets because my rover is it's own heat shield.

They can be useful on really light weight craft, otherwise you need a lot of them like this, This is my Armadillo APC. The Ion engines on the back can get it up to a good land speed on Mun, but you also have to add a lot of solar arrays and generators to power this many.

First of all, this is possible, but it's a real pain to do right and sometimes this issue will happen and then you have to try again. If one of your docking ports placement is off by even an inch, then it won't work. You just have to keep tweaking and messing with it until it works. The easiest way to get it to work is to use a ruler of sorts. Make pieces that you can build to measure out the spacing of the docking ports like the metal plates. Shown here on my docking station, I used this model for a Moho rescue mission and had multi-port docking engines to the four sides of this thing. Here is the station being used in my Moho rescue mission: You can see that the engines on the side of this thing have two docking ports that are attached to the two docking ports on the station.

You should be able to just right click on the door and choose board. At least you can with the external command seats. Your problem is the large fuel can under the lander can. What you might want to try is putting an external command seat on it and using that to get back on the ship, or use it to ride up into orbit and then do an EVA to the lander door.

Here is my interplanetary ship of choice, the Papa Dragon. It's been to Moho, Eve, Gilly, Minmus, Mun, Duna, and returned back to Kerban from all of those missions. It's also a SSTO rocket, minus the boosters. This means that you only get rid of the spent boosters on the launch and then the entire craft can be fully refueled in orbit. Then you can take it and land basically anywhere and return back to Kerban. You can see the mission here:

Check this out: and this: So, I usually mount the rovers on the top of my ship or if I have a docking station, I can mount multiples on the sides.

Traveling at such a low orbit isn't ideal if you want to land though. 3k minimum around the equator.

There's really nothing to it once you get a feel for it. The very first thing you want to do is adjust your inclination to your target so that it's 0.0 Next you need to figure out how to approach your target. If your target is outside of your orbit and in front of you, then you're going to catch up to it. If your target is outside of your orbit and behind you, then you need to grow your orbit to be larger than your targets orbit so it catches up to you. You want your intercept nodes to overlap so that there's only two of them. Once you get as close to your target as possible without overtaking it, you need to burn towards your target. If you burn fast like 50 m/s then aim retrograde and try to keep the retrograde marker on top of the retrotarget marker. Once you close to within 200 meters, start slowing down to 10 m/s or less. Once you're within 100 meters you want to kill all velocity. If you're docking, then you want your target to be pointed towards Normal or North on the nav ball. That way it won't move as it orbits. Then you can approach for docking using RCS and the docking controls. You have the option of switching to docking mode or you can use the RCS translation controls H, N, J, K, L, I. Here is a video of when I docked the last engine to my Duna Command Center. The first 25 minutes is a good tutorial.

If you're referring to turbo jets in KSP, I've gotten an SSTO plane up to Mach 5 on just the turbo jets alone for sustained flight. SSTO going at 1716.0 m/s

Yeah, but I hope your computer can handle it, looking at 1500 + parts. I'll make a thread for it in the space craft exchange called Big H.O.S.S. I'll also make a youtube showcase video for it and have that as well as the download link. Probably won't be up there until 11/2/13

Kerbals can repack parachutes, repair broken rover wheels, repair landing struts, and manually use other parts of your ship by right clicking them when the Kerbal is doing EVA. Thanks for the feedback guys, I think I'll just go for using action groups from now on with the parachutes. I know action groups can be used to activate all parts of a stage without needing to hit the space bar so as long as all the parachutes are at the top of my staging, this should work.

So, I know how to repack parachutes, but whenever you use the parachutes through staging they get stuck in that stage. When I put repacked parachutes into a new stage from the in-flight staging on the left and hit space bar, it doesn't deploy them again. Should it deploy them again if I do this? Is it better to set up an action group for the parachutes instead? Will action grouped parachutes redeploy under another press of their action group hot key after they've been deployed once?

Here's my base that I put on Duna, although it can land anywhere, moon or planet. On the bottom I used a large fuel tank with radial landing engines. The smaller legs sat really nicely on the ground and nothing broke. So if you make a base with landing engines, make sure it can leave the ground or at least hover on Kerban before you take it anywhere else. If you're trying to make a tube base like the one in the picture, then you build the entire base vertically and then flip it horizontally when you put the legs on. Alternatively you can build your base in the space plane hangar and then save it as a sub-assembly and import it into the VAB.

Yeah, the new image that I posted under the first one shows the plane I have now, I'm going to do a test flight to Duna and test it. This idea comes from docking tugs. A docking tug needs to have rockets that point in both directions to stop heavy payloads quickly because turning around isn't an option. I also have mini docking ports on the top and bottom of the plane. The top port is for orbital refuel and the bottom port is for surface refuel. Ideally, I'd like to have a rover on the ground that can slide an arm under the plane and dock to the port on the bottom and then refuel it. I still need to develop this rover though. All of the rockets need to be controlled with action groups for quick use when it comes time to land.

I think my way is a lot simpler because there is not need for fuel lines to be rigged up, one stage for the couplers, it's more compact, if you use fuel from one tank only then it's only three parts per engine, uses less fuel, has less weight, can be used more effectively with larger craft. I came up with it because I needed to get my Duna Command Center into orbit in all one piece and that's a heavy payload. I figured, why not use air powered engines to get up through the atmosphere and then save the rockets for the orbital burn. It worked on the first try so I started using it for other craft and so far it hasn't failed to lift anything into orbit. This is the largest object I've lifted into orbit with this method. Big H.O.S.S. (Helios Orbital Solar Station) 1015 Parts 248.96 tons This is the heaviest object I've lifted into orbit with this method. Kerban Fuel Depot. 398 Parts 923.56 tons.

I didn't post this to argue the real world physics or counter parts. I posted this to get opinions of the usefulness of the system compared to other methods that are used in this game. There are other threads to discuss physics and what should or shouldn't be possible. If you find this method useful and easy, great. If you prefer to use asparagus, that's fine too. I find this to be useful for lifting heavy payloads into orbit with a lot less rockets and setup. I can deploy this system a lot easier than rigging up sets of rockets and boosters. There is more here than just the air lift. Here are the other parts of the system that I haven't seen anyone address yet: 1. Air lift 2. Orbital burn rocket 3. Engine refit system The orbital burn rocket could be made even lighter if I chose to asparagus it instead of not. The engine refit with the docking ports is my key element of this system next to the air lift. I can attach a full fuel engine of any size and configuration in orbit without having to launch the whole thing from the ground. This allows me to fit the ship with the right amount of fuel and engines for it's mission without having to reconstruct everything. Thoughts on that?