700NitroXpress

Typo: 2 stage lander with separate ascent stage (descent stage stays on Duna) +20 Change Duna to Moho Challenge Accepted So Ion engines are Ok to use?

Rescuing Jeb from the surface of Eve. I hadn't had a successful ship launch off of Eve and get something all the way back into orbit at this point in my game, then one design finally did it and Jeb was saved. After a 4 year vacation on an island, he finally returns to active duty.

Finally, my mission 3 is ready to launch. Not sure how stable this thing is going to be, but hopefully I have enough fuel and nothing flies apart. Note to self: update personal scores. This is the worst flexing I've ever seen and the vessel still holds it together, it makes me uncomfortable just looking at it go back and forth like this. Ever time I'm expecting it to snap.

The LRS-X went around the planet once, glided in for a landing on the runway with no fuel left. Luckily this plane glides and lands really well. All stock game no mods.

Before attempting Eve, look at what others have done for the mission. Seni's is on page 49 and mine is on page 48. A manned Eve lander can really push your designs and your computer to the limits.

4 or 5 large blue parachutes then.

You need 0 parachutes because the asteroid won't break or be destroyed from impact, so you can just send it in. But if you really want to use parachutes anyway, 4 or 5 of the big blue ones should be enough.

Yeah, it looks like you should have enough because of that extra large fuel tank in the middle. More than one of the orange jumbo's. You're right, should loose 50% or more mass from all of the rovers and things being dropped and that will really help the return burn. I'm still preparing for mission 3, I like Moho, but it takes a lot of fuel to get there and back. When I docked 9 large docking ports all at the same time, I didn't have a fuel gauge for some reason, so I'm rebuilding now.

Oh man... 2 hours, I feel your pain. Got enough fuel to get back?

It's an SSTS (Single Stage To Space)

Plan A: Attach rockets onto all 4 sides the best that you can, you can then attach one command pod on the top and control it from there. Once all this is done, you should be able to pilot the rock just like a ship and you can activate all of the engines at once. If you also attach a bunch of the large SAS modules, the combined SAS strength should be enough to keep it stable during flight. You're only moving it a short distance so you don't need much fuel or much power to the engines. Plan B: If you don't want to bother with doing it the normal way, you could turn on hack gravity, attach a small ship to it and then push it over to your base.

I'd say Duna would be the next best place to go. The inclination is about the same as Kerbin's, so you don't have to worry about extra fuel for an inclination burn. Also, If you go at the right time, you can get an intercept with really low fuel usage. Then you could an aerobrake with Duna's atmosphere. If you set your incoming periapsis to about 25k above Duna, you should have enough for an aerobrake, you might need a little burn going retrograde to assist with the first pass, but after that you should be good and then just circularize around 60k for an orbit. Duna is an excellent place to drop a rover and go exploring if you want to try that first and do a manned ground landing later. Use the atmosphere to your advantage and put parachutes on your landers. After you're done with Duna, try landing on Ike.

Ok Quiana your ship looks good to go for missions. Finwen that thing looks like it would wobble a lot. Good luck, as soon as mission 5 has been completed by someone, I'll release mission 6.

Look at reference images of what others have done or some cool sci fi concept art and try to adapt those designs into your own style. You'll find cool and useful combinations the more you build. Try rotating things at different angles and don't be afraid to build big.

Try using a jpeg file. Even though all of the others are png, jpeg still works and it's what I used for mine. Also, make sure you're selecting you flag either from the flag pole or when you make a new game. If it still doesn't appear, try a reinstall.

You get a gold star, well done. Yeah, I don't think there's any achievement or anything. You might get a steam trading card or something for it, not sure.

It's used in both hard surface and organic equally. It just depends on what your making. As for this case, your right, all he needs to do is toggle a smoothing option or apply a shader.

It depends on what you're doing, if you just want the cylinder to be smooth in general, then just applying a material to it is fine and it should look like the bottom image by default. If you have a high poly mesh and want it to look that way on the low poly mesh, then you need a normal map. What I did here in the program was just change the material option from hard faces to smooth faces. If you're using blender, then I think you press F9. In Maya, you need to apply a basic material to the mesh, or go under normals and select soften edge. Not sure what it is for Max.

Your low poly mesh should be a cut down version of the high poly mesh. So both of them should have the same general geometry. Your just projecting the high poly mesh onto the low poly mesh as a normal map. So if you have something like rivets on a panel and those rivets are made from spheres, you can still have a square panel without having to make any additional mesh and you can project those rivets onto the low poly mesh with the normal map. However, if you're doing something crazy, then you should post pictures to show what you're trying to achieve.

You need a normal map for smooth faces. If you have no normal map, then it's going to show all of the hard edges in the 3d modeling program and in the game engine. When you apply a normal map with smooth faces you get this result. The poly count is the same, but the normal map applies a smoothing effect to the model. Depending on what software you're using, the process for this will be different. You then need to export your normal map and make sure to apply it to the material that is applied to your model in the game engine in order for it to look right.

Launch a rescue mission and transfer all of the data to the kerbal so that he'll keep it with him as he goes to the new pod. Use parachutes as well on the landers, Duna has atmosphere, even though it's thin, it still assists a little with safe landings and lets you use less fuel for a soft landing.

I think you do, you would just have to wait for the opportune time to burn and go directly retrograde in relation to the Mun's orbit. Trying to get in impact trajectory into Kerbin. You would just launch straight up and keep going until you run out of fuel.

Yes it is, If you make a claw unit with a parachute attached to it, you can attach multiple claw units to an asteroid and all of the parachutes will be active in one stage. The same thing works for engines. I'm working with a larger asteroid and have 15 parachutes attached to it, 5 orange and 10 blue. Now I'm just attaching engines to it so I can pilot it accurately down to the KSC and land it. The asteroids act like ships with unlimited docking ports for the claw. So everything that you attach to them can be activated in stages and controlled the same way.

Do like sciguyCO stated with the crew reports. If you did another crew report then you override the existing report in place of the one you just created. So you replaced one of your experiments. As long as you have a transmission dish and solar panels, you should be able to always transmit your crew reports for 100% science value and that allows you to do many of them in one mission without having to transfer the data to the kerbals. Other than that, I believe that all other experiments that are stored in the command pod should always be there and there's no actual limit to them.

The orange tanks were launched up two at a time with an RCS unit and unmanned module on the bottom, attached to that adapter block. Aligning the tanks to the docking ports was easy enough, then once they were docked, I ejected the RCS at the end and the left over engine and unmanned pod. This station doesn't turn too well because the connection just above the fuel pod is a little weak. Also all of the center of mass is at the bottom, almost a kiloton of fuel. If you did anything like this, the best way would be to just have the bottom section only and none of the top stuff that I have there. I'll mainly use this as a refueling station. It was meant to go to Jool, but right now it seems a little unstable. If those were all single tanks, then it would be just fine. As shown with a variation here on my Eve escape ship, full load for transfer, land, and return. This version with the single tanks worked very well and it was stable throughout the entire mission, engines running at full power.