Torquemadus

This may be an exploit, or it may not. However, most players don't seem to know about it one way or the other and it has game balance implications. I first noticed this method in 0.25 and took some pics, which are shown below. This method makes it much easier to complete test contracts for a wide variety of engines, including solid rockets. I accepted a contract to test the LFB in flight. The LFB has to be activated via the staging sequence. After launching, I edited the staging sequence in flight to add an extra stage event. This allowed me to "activate" the LFB by pressing the spacebar when I reached the required conditions. This allowed me to complete the contract using nothing but the LFB for propulsion. I then recovered the LFB close to the KSC, meaning that I got most of the cost of the craft back. I was playing on custom difficulty, but it was still a huge payday for my programme. Here's another example from a later save. The contract asked me to test the LFB on a Mun escape trajectory. Most of the propulsion needed to complete the contract came from the LFB itself. Note that I was doing some other contracts on the same flight, which is why the ion engine and decoupler are attached to the nose. I completed the contract and recovered the craft to the runway. Since 0.90 was released, a lot of players have been commenting that they had to abandon contracts like these because they couldn't afford the cost of the enormous rocket they think they need to launch the part to meet the conditions. The question is whether editing the staging sequence is a legitimate method or an exploit. If it's not an exploit, then players should be made aware that this technique is available, as it makes a huge difference to the profitability of test contracts and has game balance implications.

I would like to be able to use ISRU in a similar way to Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct mission plan. Mars Direct is a way to do a manned mission to Mars with existing technology, using launch vehicles no bigger than the Saturn 5. No on orbit assembly or giant interplanetary cruisers are required.

This kind of problem will go away as you play more and more hours of KSP. Eventually, everything phallic shaped that you see starts to look like a rocket, rather than the other way round.

Today I collected some EVA reports from Kerbin Orbit!

This is my BACC based Mun orbital rocket.

I use solids for all of my first stage needs. In the early game I cluster them as a first stage for conventional rocket stacks, while later on I strap bunches of them to my winged fly-back boosters. I use thrust limiting to increase the burn time of the solids. This means that they give their best TWR when I'm well into the upper atmosphere and free of any worries about terminal velocity. The solids get me comfortably into sub-orbit and are then dropped. Empty "trash bins full of boom" are worth very little once empty. I then use liquid engines to circularise. The liquid stage is recovered by either by parachute or a runway landing depending on available tech. I use the RT-10 at the very start of the game, replacing it with the BACC as soon as it becomes available. In turn, the BACC gets replaced by the SRB. I could definitely do with a bigger solid for large payloads in the late game.

I decided to start a new 0.90 save with the same difficulty settings I used in 0.25. I make good progress in the early contracts, but I was still a long way from earning enough money to upgrade the launch pad. I wondered whether it might be possible to do a Mun flyby with a rocket small enough to be launched from the starter level launch pad. To do this, I needed the rocket to weigh no more than 18 tonnes. After getting into orbit with a reasonable amount of fuel left, my next task was to get to the Mun using only the starter level tracking centre. After entering the Mun's SOI, I still had some fuel remaining, so I decided to go into orbit. I made a quick visit to the Mission Control bunker to grab the science from space contract. It looks like I need to upgrade the Astronaut Complex as well. All I had to do now was get back to Kerbin without knowing what orbit I'd end up in after I left the Mun's SOI.

Today, I sent my 17.9t rocket to Mun orbit.

Activate the BACC normally through staging at launch and use it to fly to the required speed and altitude. You can edit the staging sequence in flight, so you can keep adding more steps below the BACC, allowing you to "activate " it as many times as you want through the staging sequence. The pics below are from an old 0.25 save. They show me testing an LFB in flight by adding an extra step to the staging sequence after launch.

The part testing contracts are very random at the moment. I play on custom difficulty, so I get even less rewards for completing them. It would seem that the test contracts have not been balanced to ensure they are always profitable. I pick and choose which contracts to accept based on cost versus reward. Some parts are small enough that I can take them along on a trip to somewhere I was going to go anyway, and thus get myself some extra income by bringing it along. The viability of testing larger parts depends on what I'm supposed to do with them. If you are supposed to test a part by activating it through the test sequence, you can modify the test sequence in flight to "activate" the part as many times as you need to, even if you have already been using it. This makes it a lot easier to test big engines. It also makes a big difference if you can recover the parts after the test.

An important point to note is you can use the BACC to reach the required speed and altitude. You can then "activate" it again through the staging system by editing the staging sequence in flight.

With the new Upgradeable Buildings feature, it's now possible to fail completely at Career Mode from the very beginning!

The possible directions you could take this in depend on what you intend to use stations for. You could make a permanent station with one or more docking ports so the crew can visit it and then return home. Alternatively, you could make a re-useable ship that hauls the crew and lab up from the surface for each mission. I built a number of stations for fun in Sandbox so I could practice sending crews to rendezvous and dock with them.

I've been testing the current implementation of Career Mode on progressively harder difficulty. I wanted to see how game balance and progression worked, and establish whether there was a point of no return, beyond which the game was too hard to be playable. It turns out that with careful ship design and mission planning, even a 10% rewards career is playable in 0.25. In 0.25, the game starts out hard, but gets massively easier after the first Mun landing. When 0.90 is released, I'll be comparing how the difficulty curve is affected by the new features.

I recently abandoned my custom difficulty career save on 20% contract rewards, as it was getting too easy and I felt I wasn't pushing myself hard enough. I started a new save on 10% contract rewards. Note that I leave quickloading and reverting turned on in case I need to recover from bugs! I normally try to be cost effective by making all liquid fuelled stages re-useable and performing secondary contracts along the way. For example, I usually try to recover the second stage and perform other contracts such as rescuing a stranded kerbal. The example below is from an earlier save on 20% rewards. Current career mode balance presents the player with an uphill struggle to complete the Explore The Mun contract, and becomes massively easier thereafter. I did some contract grinding to get enough money to build the rocket pictured below. Note the use of an all solid first stage to minimise cost. This time, I needed to go all out to complete the Explore The Mun contract. Funds saved through doing secondary contracts along the way, or through recovery, are worth nothing if I don't complete the primary mission. In addition, I have barely enough money to build the rocket, so I have nothing to spare to pay for any extra parts. I performed a minimum fuel landing by aiming for a Mun periapsis that grazes the Mun's surface from my injection burn in LKO. This means that I don't really know which part of the Mun I'm going to end up landing on. As it turned out, I ended up landing in an area that was in sunset, but not yet in full darkness, so I was able to land safely. At this point, all that remains is to return home safely and recover my data to complete the contracts. From this point onwards, I can easily earn enough resources to perform whatever missions I want to undertake. I wanted to prove to myself that I could crack Career Mode on 10% rewards before 0.90 was released. Job done!

Career Mode is a long way from being fully implemented at the moment. However, it does offer a good way to understand the economics of rocket construction in KSP. The rockets I fly in Career Mode bear no resemblance to the rockets I used to fly in Sandbox. The launch vehicles I use now are not as "efficient" in terms of the sheer size of payload they can lift, but they are vastly more efficient in terms of cost. As I progress through increasingly hardcore custom difficulty settings, the launch vehicles I use get smaller and cheaper. I'm getting better at designing them and planning their missions.

My current method for departure burns it to stage part way through the burn. The stage used to begin the burn is left behind in a highly elliptical orbit around Kerbin, I then aerobrake it back into LKO.

I recently abandoned my 20% rewards save, because it was getting too easy. I'm in the early stages of a new save on 10% rewards. I've had some nasty encounters with bugs recently so reverts and quick saves are staying turned on.

My solution is to use a two stage launch vehicle. The first stage consists entirely of solids and is used to reach sub-orbit. Solid "trash bins full of boom" are worth very little when empty, so I don't worry about recovering them. The second stage is a liquid fuelled winged fly-back stage. It is used to circularise into Kerbin orbit and also performs most of the transfer burn. After separating, the payload finishes the remainder of the transfer burn, while the fly-back stage is left in a highly elliptical orbit around Kerbin. This allows the fly-back stage to aerobrake back into LKO. From there, it deorbits and returns to the runway at the KSC.

This seems to be a definite balance issue in 0.25. I've managed to get round the problems in the early game by getting really good at building efficient ships, and making best possible use of the early contracts to squeeze out the resources I need. As soon as I land on the Mun, the game gets massively easier. I can only assume this is happening because Career Mode is unfinished and/or because of a lack of balancing in the current contracts. Playing on very low rewards requires careful planning when it comes to choosing part test contracts. Some of them are very lucrative, while some are simply not financially viable at all and are best declined.

Since 0.25 released, I've played a series of career saves on custom difficulty, gradually lowering the rewards I get from contracts as I went along. Each time, I had to learn new lessons about how to get by with less money and less science. I recently abandoned my most recent save at 20% rewards, as it was becoming too easy. I'm now in the early stages of my new save on 10% rewards. Approaching Career Mode in this way probably isn't for everyone, but it does at least make resources scarce enough to make them actually meaningful. It's worth noting by the way, that the apparently OP Admin Building becomes a lot more interesting if you don't have enough resources to abuse it. You can tell a lot about the current implementation of Career Mode by looking at the challenge offered by the difficulty settings. The hardest non-custom difficulty is set to 60% contract rewards. At 60%, the game absolutely throws resources at the player. This suggests that the game is supposed to be much harder, but some of the features intended to provide challenge are not in place yet.

Solids for the first stage. Liquid engines for the fly-back stage.

One of the biggest difficulties in discussing the Moon landings is establishing exactly what NASA is being accused of faking in the first place. If this were clearly defined, we could look at what evidence is supposed to have been falsified, who is supposed to have lied, and what their motive was supposed to have been. Conspiracy theorists claim that NASA faked the TV coverage, still photos and film camera footage. Of course, this claim has to cover all of the landings, not just Apollo 11. On the later J Class missions (15, 16 and 17), a good quality TV camera was mounted on the rover and was remotely controlled from Earth, allowing geology experts at mission control to watch the EVAs in real time. Excellent film camera footage was also shot from the rover while it was in motion across a vast landscape with beautiful mountainous terrain. Film cameras were also used to film the view from the LEM window during landing and take off. Footage was also shot from the Command Module of the LEM, showing the LEM in flight both after undocking and during rendezvous and docking manoeuvers. There was also a lot of footage shot while in space. For example showing the extraction of the LEM from the S4B upper stage. Lots of footage of the Moon was shot from orbit. Also, lots of footage was shot of the crew inside the spacecraft in zero-gravity. It also goes without saying that there's also a heck of a lot of footage of hardware fabrication, vehicle assembly, rollout, pad operations, crew ingress, launch, splashdown and crew egress. (I have loads of footage on DVD and Blu-Ray. Yes, I'm a nerd! ) We also know that lots of people worked on Project Apollo both as part of NASA and for the various aerospace companies that were contracted to build the hardware. So, we need to establish exactly which part of the missions is supposed to have been faked. The bigger the portion of the mission that was faked, the more evidence needs to have been somehow falsified and the more people who would have to have been in on it. In other words: if there was a lie, how big was the lie? Let's speculate. Let's say that the accusation is that the entire programme was for real, but that one of the crews found something that needed to be covered up, such as evidence of aliens or something. Others might claim that the landings were a front for some kind of covert mission. Either way, this would require the entirety of the Manned Spaceflight Centre in Houston to be in on the conspiracy, along with any ground stations that handled relay of TV signals and voice communications. Bear in mind that most conspiracy theorists aren't claiming this, they're claiming that the landings never happened at all. Claiming that the landings never happened at all requires the conspiracy to be HUGE. This would require the entire programme including the whole of NASA and all the aerospace contractors to be in on it, both in the past and in the present. The conspiracy theorists are the ones who need to prove their claims, not NASA.

I managed to snap a few pics on a recent aerobraking pass.

Buzz Aldrin has since published his book Mission To Mars, which was the source I was using. His book mentions colonisation plans from groups such as the Mars Society and SpaceX, but doesn't mention a marooning strategy. It does mention base building and permanent settlements, but those are accepted by most as long term goals anyway. The idea he seeks to emphasise is that we shouldn't be going just to do a zero capability "flags and footprints" mission.