psyper

The contract doesn't say you have to use a rocket to test these parts and I use my ssto for a lot of the testing which is a close as I can get to a helicopter. For spash-down its not to hard to design a vessel which can go out in the the sea and try the landing gear out over there and with a few mods under your belt you can construct a chopper with a winch and test things that way too. But we have to use rockets as its the kerbal way. SRB's in space, its not nasa but it certainly kerbal - I've seem planes on Mun land successfully - nasa would not be doing that so why would they need to test jet landing gear on the moon - in ksp however, its almost required. I've seen sepatrons being used as thrusters for space station escape pods (scott manley even used them) - so kerbal scientists want to know the exact isp of solid fuel out of the atmosphere - why not send a tonne up there and kick it off and see what happens. Perhaps Mr Engineer Kermin wants to have a firework display in orbit for Mrs Engineer Kermin's birthday... who knows!

as Gravaar stated its taken from your launch height - although I'm very interested in seeing what a rover launcher would look like - perhaps another board for the most distance travelled between landing and launching... I'm looking forward in what you are going to do for the challenge

Bang! (at least 10 characters)

before SOI change your orbit will show it in relation to the planet your orbiting (say you're going from kerbin to mun this will be kerbin). When your SOI switches to the mun your obital path will switch in to relation to mun too - so it will seem like it flips 90 degrees to the right but there is no change to where your orbit is going to end up.

This is my first challenge of this type so if you have any suggestions to changes of anything below please let me know. Let the games begin! So anyway - we all know that a SSTO (Single Stage To Orbit) craft is pretty much impossible for Eve without cheating or exploiting loop holes so I was wondering whether it would be possible for a DSTO (Dual Stage To Orbit) craft to get from the surface to Eve orbit using no cheats. I posted in the forums asking if it was possible and a few ideas cropped up and then GoSlash27 suggested that a challenge should be posted and that got me thinking. So here it is. The Challenge. 1) starting point is from 110km orbit above Eve. (Atmosphere starts at 96.7 so I figured 110 is as low as you can get). 2) land your craft on Eve using whatever means you feel (rockets, 'chutes etc). Craft must carry at least a single Kerbal to the surface and back to orbit again. 3) you can land at any elevation you like but extra kudos for deep atmosphere launches (there will be a leader-board) 4) you are allowed a launch stage - which is basically a lander craft which you can leave behind - you must stage/undock this before lift-off - your height above sea-level is taken from after you stage so no point in building 2.2km tall launch stages! (ideally you want this to be your landing gear, 'chutes and any extra fuel tanks that were used to de-orbit). 5) At any point in your ascent you are allowed to drop a single stage - you can have multiple parts decoupling or undock the ship in half with multiple docks but it needs to be all completed within 2 seconds. For the love of god your kerbal needs to be onboard the stage that reaches orbit - no ditching kerbals as ballast! (can't believe that popped in to my head!) 6) Remaining craft needs to reach an orbit of at least 110km ASL ready for an interplanetary transfer craft to rendezvous with the lander where it can either dock with the craft or your kerbal can eva to it. (transfer craft not required to complete this challenge). 7) Craft must not use any physics cheats such as kraken drives etc. and must be stock. FAR/NEAR is allowed but please point out that you are using these and I will mark your entry as such. 8) You will need to post a video of your attempt or screenshots of your orbit in map mode, your craft in orbit, its descent, it landed on the surface, its separation from the launch stage (to take your height above sea-level), before and after stage separation, back in orbit, the map screen view of your final orbit. Any other screenshots are more than welcome of course 9) Send me your craft file pretty please - I will be adding them all in to a dropbox/google drive and link them here. just pm me and we'll sort something out. 10) May the odds be ever in your favour. Scoreboards Smallest to Largest Massed Craft (after launch stage) - depending on what way around you look at it the highest and lowest craft on this scoreboard are both awesome! 1) Lowest Height Above Sea-Level (after launch stage) 1) Most Prettiest\Awesome Ship (Just for the heck of it!) 1)

Thats what I'm thinking - drop tanks with wings attached to them so when it reaches a certain height you can kick those off and reach for the stars. A challenge is a good idea...

I've used kethane quite a lot before as a means to supply my operations off-world so to speak and have recently switched to karbonite which I'm quite a fan of at the moment so an SSTO using karbonite would be awesome!! Something to think about when I start getting contracts there...

I thought I was a space nut until I started playing KSP. I've watched documentaries, visited Kennedy Space Centre a few times, study the stars and even got a cheap telescope. Since playing KSP I can't stop looking up at the night sky, I see the alignment of the planets to the point where I can work out the inclination of the earth, I've visited every shuttle that I'm in the same State as - 3 so far (being in the UK that is pretty good going), I have subscribed to every half decent facebook page on iss, space, astronomy etc and have watched the iss flyby countless times, watch esa launches live and even streamed nasa tv during eva's. I've never been more hooked than ever. When I read about cassini and rosetta I think - what the heck was younger me doing missing all these awesome launches etc!

I've seen a lot of discussions lately on working out if a craft can get off of Eve using only a single stage (SSTO) and I think the conclusion is pretty much no, not without exploits. So I was wondering. Would a double-stage to orbit (is that even a thing?) would work. IE have drop tanks that you can stage half way up. I'm thinking of a space plane that could ditch some tanks and engines once they are used up?

"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -HHGTTG

locating where your manoeuvre node marker is was a nightmare - now you get a little arrow telling you where to turn - great for large ships and station that take an age to get moving! I have been tempted to install enhanced navball mod but don't need to now!

I haven't had this problem until version .25 where when on eva on the ladder my kerbal will 'drift' off the top of it. Only time I've had a kerbal eject from a ship was when I had something attached to the capsule close to the hatch and if the kerbal was still on the ladder he would clip the object. Redesigning my craft resolved the issue so I didn't think it to be a bug but more of a design feature..

If we started out with this version of the navball right from the start I wonder if someone would be requesting a mod that only shows your pro and retrograde markers for added difficulty...

most of mine are similar to these - first successful launch where the rocket didn't disintegrate on the pad at the first stage, first time in space, first sunrise, first eclipse etc. recently though: I've had my first ssto in to space - launched late at night and reached the jets flight ceiling just as the sun come up - watching the ssto glow in sunlight on a clear crisp morning as I switched to nukes was amazing. First and only encounter with another planet. One of my old saves I finally got a launch window for duna (I'm one of those people who don't timewarp a lot and generally play around between mum, minmus and kerbin until a transfer window comes up). I sent out a 7 ship armada to duna and ike to set up a mining colony. When they finally left kerbal's soi I focused on the crew ship to see if I could see any of the others markers- although they were in a tight formation on the map screen they were hundreds of km away from each other - it was just a small crew, the sun and the stars - couldn't even see kerbin or duna. actually felt very alone and very small. Finally landing on duna was such a complicated procedure it took me a full day to get there successfully from duna orbit - it was exhilarating to finally land - and I have astronomers pack installed so when I when in the first rover mission I got stuck in a dust storm and had to gun it back to base and just sat in iva view watching the dust roll in - I could actually hear the dust hitting the hab even though the sound wasn't being generated it was that immersive. having a lander in a very low mun orbit and just zooming out so its a tiny craft against the huge craters of mun rolling by Creating a huge minmus base (this thing was big!) and then zooming out and realising how small it is against the hills and valleys of minmus and how much land there is out there to explore.

I was a little bit miffed at the parts contracts when they first come out and then I read this post (interestingly the example pics are planes LethalDose) and it occurred to me that we do silly tests in very strange situations irl - testing a part outside of its normal use window may sound strange at first but then when you realise they want to see how the part tests outside of its use margins it becomes realistic - I've seen a few people post silly tests like testing solids in high atmosphere and testing aircraft undercarrages at splashdown. Perhaps the kerbal engineers want to see what the isp of a solid fuel rocket is at different altitudes or they want to test how a landing gear reacts to the salt in the water when being used - I'm sure I saw some videos of people creating seaplanes so having it tested out in the ocean isn't a silly suggestion. Now I see all these part testing contracts as testing the limits of the parts themselves - what happens if the explosive bolt on the decoupler don't work in Duna's atmosphere - best go and check it out... Most of the smaller contracts like testing a decoupler while landed I do when I'm sending cargo up anyway - its basically reducing the cost or even making a profit in some cases for a mission I'm already undertaking - if they need an engine test on mun and I've got a supply run pencilled in for the mun I take the engine on a docking port with me and once the test is done I undock it while taking off to reduce debris. If I can I try and group several contracts together to get the most money out of a single flight - my highest has been 11 contracts in 1 mission! I've also been creating a thread where I post all of my contract solutions and if you have any of your own please feel free to add them to the thread - I'm trying to build up a few ideas for anyone who is a bit lost on how to solve any of them. Theres a few posts here regarding the lack of contracts that make you explore or actually have a mission like objective - I cant recommend the FinePrint mod enough for this. It includes missions like create moon and planetary bases, space stations, asteroid deflections, and includes some of the 'investigate anomaly in this location on the mun' contracts that were requested on this thread. The rover missions on kerbin are awesome - I never knew the level of detail outside KSC until I installed this mod - little streams, mountain ranges, lagoons and tidal pools, I even visited the meteor crater island and went for a swim after the mission was completed! Lastly, one thing I think is really silly about the contracts is the one to rescue a kerbal in lko. I realised from this thread that its really there to teach you to rendezvous and I've had a couple of these where I've now built an ssto specifically for rescuing kerbals in lko and bringing them back to the runway which has been a lot of fun but squad - wouldn't it seem better if the kerbal was in a mk1 capsule... at least that way we can say that his ship was involved in an accident and his capsule has no parachute or deltav to get in to the atmosphere and land safely.. just sayin'

what about Kredits

This is during normal science gathering. Maybe I've misunderstood as I usually do contracts while on a mission and bring back a load of science. Is it the science gained from just the contract that gets reduced by the strategy or is it all science I bring back?

I've been watching a few live twitch sessions that squad have been doing or manley and was tempted to do something too. This got me thinking though - how about a masterclass - have a few twitch sessions at different times - you can play kerbal and answer peoples questions at the same time - it also then allows several people to follow you - i think teamviewer will only allow one to one connections?

IMC - Interplanetary Mining Corporation I used the Kerthane mod heavily in my game before Kerbonite came along - which I've recently switched to in .24 - .25 . Flag is the old space lego logo

They normally state in the contract whether the test needs to be "stage the engine when all the criteria are met" or "select run test" - the former you need to have the engine in a stage which you active when all the ticks are green. In the latter you need to right click on the part and choose run test in the option.

Oh how I wished I had that problem!! I have about 5 pages on one section!!

When I start out a save I give myself loads of science, max out the tech tree, and then set what is left to zero. This way I'm playing ksp from a space-x point of view - all the technology is there, I just have to design and test the craft I use to fulfil contracts. As such I've set up the strategy to convert a portion of science I get from contract in to cash (basically selling data to 3rd parties). This works okay when I recover craft but doesn't seem to be working when I transmit the science. I basically want to collect science to sell as an extra income. How do I go about doing this?

Forgive me if I'm wrong (as I'm not at my home pc at the moment to confirm) but I could have sworn you can cancel the strategies - I'm sure I noticed a cancel button when you clicked on an active one ... :/

The whole point of the contracts is to work out how to build a craft or rocket that'll get you the speed you need at the height required. I've had a thread kicking around just for people solutions on various contracts - its a little thin on the ground but I'll keep adding to it until someone notices http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/92717-Contract-Solutions-%28stock-plus-Fine-Print-Mod%29 and I managed 11 contracts in one mission (not blowing my own trumpet!) it took a lot of planning and quite a few attempts but I managed to achieve it and had lots of fun doing it too: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/95364-All-The-Contracts!-11-contracts-1-mission

I can go one step further in this inception-esque situation - Squad is very much dependant on Unity which is the game engine which drives KSP. The 64-bit version of Unity is very buggy at the moment and a lot of people are waiting for unity to come out with a more stable version. I think squad's hand was forced a bit as everyone wanted 64-bit despite squads reservations that this would cause crashes which is why they put Unstable across all their Windows 64-bit offerings. Hopefully either Unity comes out with a better version or Squad manages to iron out all the unity bugs to make it playable with no issues. I believe there is a ksp reddit community out there assisting them with this endeavour.