KSP Caveman Evolved Challenge

[Superfluous J]

10 hours ago, Jetski said:

Eve return has been completed

Wonderful job! And congrats on your permanent residence at the top of the leaderboard! Unless I split it between participants and winners, in which case you'll be at the top of the winner list.

5 hours ago, Tattiebogle said:

I'm out....Without reverts it's just too much for me

Ouch. If you want to continue you could edit your save file and enable reverts. I'll have to remove that "H" tag but at least you'll still be able to play! In any case, thanks for giving my little challenge a try and thanks for bringing a bit of an extra challenge to it. I'll keep you on the list until someone shoves you off the bottom.

Edited July 3, 2017 by 5thHorseman

[IncongruousGoat]

Here's the start of my submission, on Moderate difficulty.

Mission album here: http://imgur.com/a/ud6W4

 

The basic Caveman Challenge is done, with only a few mishaps. Now it's time to move on to the Duna system. A docked together conglomeration of a vessel has been designed. I just have to Voltron it together in orbit and actually fly the mission. Hopefully everything goes well, and we don't run out of fuel in low Ike orbit...

The mods I'm using are:

Distant Object Enhancement
Environmental Visual Enhancements
Kopernicus
Modular Flight Integrator
PlanetShine
RealPlume
Scatterer
SmokeScreen
Stock Visual Enhancements

So, all visual stuff.

Edited July 15, 2017 by IncongruousGoat
Dangit imgur

[Superfluous J]

2 hours ago, IncongruousGoat said:

Here's the start of my submission, on Moderate difficulty.

The basic Caveman Challenge is done, with only a few mishaps. Now it's time to move on to the Duna system. A docked together conglomeration of a vessel has been designed. I just have to Voltron it together in orbit and actually fly the mission. Hopefully everything goes well, and we don't run out of fuel in low Ike orbit...

The mods I'm using are:

Distant Object Enhancement
Environmental Visual Enhancements
Kopernicus
Modular Flight Integrator
PlanetShine
RealPlume
Scatterer
SmokeScreen
Stock Visual Enhancements

So, all visual stuff.

Welcome to the group! What are Kopernicus and Modular Flight Integrator for? They look like they themselves don't alter gameplay, but allow you to potentially alter gameplay with them.

[Tattiebogle]

10 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

 

Ouch. If you want to continue you could edit your save file and enable reverts. I'll have to remove that "H" tag but at least you'll still be able to play! In any case, thanks for giving my little challenge a try and thanks for bringing a bit of an extra challenge to it. I'll keep you on the list until someone shoves you off the bottom

If I could only get my probe to hit Eve atmosphere heat shield first. Lost count how many times I've tried. The very first one worked perfectly but i forgot parachutes. Duh!!!

All 5 of my Kerbal are stranded and can't EVA. 

Will try again tomorrow.

 

[Human Person]

The Moho rescue was a success! The miner worked great.

When delivered, it has just enough fuel to land. Mining takes a few Kerbin-days, but much less than a Moho-day. It then launches and rendezvouses with the main Ship, delivering exactly 800 units of Lf before landing back again. 

All with a reasonable margin of error.

I only did 3 Landings because of laziness. If I had fueled the main Ship up completely, I may have been able to capture it back into a Kerbin-Orbit for later reuse. I just got bored of landing on Moho repeatedly so I decided to let that nuclear booster burn up in the atmosphere.

 

3 Parts stayed at Moho: The 3 Kerbal lander, The mining lander, and the nuclear tug/relay wich was the transfer stage of the mining lander. If it may be needed in the future, the miner can refuel it as well.

 

Back to the Eve Contract. Some footage of the journey is missing (sorry), but I managed to land 2700 units of Gilly-Ore on Eve. The Test of my Eve entry design was very promising! Also, these contracts made me rich. 

 

Normal difficulty is way too easy for me. I'm rich and the tectree is nearly finished. I didn't even bother doing science on Moho.

Edited July 3, 2017 by Physics Student

[IncongruousGoat]

2 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

Welcome to the group! What are Kopernicus and Modular Flight Integrator for? They look like they themselves don't alter gameplay, but allow you to potentially alter gameplay with them.

Kopernicus is only there to make the Jool ring shaders added by SVE work properly. Modular Flight Integrator, it would appear, was automatically installed by CKAN. I've removed it, since I don't think it actually does anything in my current install.

EDIT: I figured out what it does. Something I have installed (SVE, probably) causes solar panels to not work unless Modular Flight Integrator is installed.

Edited July 4, 2017 by IncongruousGoat

[Superfluous J]

1 hour ago, Physics Student said:

Normal difficulty is way too easy for me. I'm rich and the tectree is nearly finished. I didn't even bother doing science on Moho.

I'm feeling the same. I've stopped taking contracts and am just raking in the World First cash and science. If I feel I need any science, I'll set up a lab around Minmus but this challenge doesn't actually mention the tech tree at all, so if I don't fill it out no bigs.

I had you down for an Eve landing already, and also for the Moho return though I think that was just my poor bookkeeping because that would have been 7 points and I had you down for 6 points. So I think you got 1 more point here, for the Moho return. If I'm wrong let me know.

1 hour ago, IncongruousGoat said:

Kopernicus is only there to make the Jool ring shaders added by SVE work properly. Modular Flight Integrator, it would appear, was automatically installed by CKAN. I've removed it, since I don't think it actually does anything in my current install.

Cool beans. Thanks for confirming

[Jetski]

Agreed Normal mode is easy, that's why I stretched a little to do Jool5/Dres/Eeloo in one launch. Funds and tech were a non issue by the time the inner planet's were done

Remember you still have to pull off an Eve return.  All the funds in the world couldn't get my first attempt landed without exploding 

I may try again on hard. This was a fun challenge

Edited July 4, 2017 by Jetski

[Tattiebogle]

Today we landed a small probe on Eve.. Thank God!!! Took so many attempts.

I choose to upgrade the VAB and try to bring Jeb home from Minmus after sitting in his capsule for 100 odd years.

Then send him immediately on another voyage of uncertainty

Things to do.

                   Too many to list.

 

[Superfluous J]

1 hour ago, Tattiebogle said:

Today we landed a small probe on Eve.. Thank God!!! Took so many attempts.

Welcome back and well done! It's nice to remove that "A" from your flags list.

[Human Person]

My Eve lander in LKO. It's gonna be a lot of launches to refuel this thing, I think I'm gonna build a miner for Gilly, so the lander can be refueled once we're there.

Edit: Loading the craft in orbit caused the Kraken to strike. A cloud of 50 to 60 pieces of debris in LKO is the result.

 

Edited July 4, 2017 by Physics Student

[jonny]

I made decent progress:

I finished my first ever mission to Dres SOI. Valentina successfully landed on Dres and returned to Kerbin with a mission time of 12 years and 213 days.

Mission Report:

Spoiler

The album is here

One launch consisting of exactly 30 parts

The inclination was at Ap corrected

Just like my Duna mission but without a spreadsheet I got a nice encounter.

In low Dres orbit I started to worry about dV

Back in low Dres orbit I figured out, that I have something around 1600m/s left. According to the dV-map i need a absolute minimum of 1290 m/s

And why is there Ablation in the resource tab???? I did check that a heat shield without ablation is fine.

The easy part of is done and there is some fuel left.

Unfortunately the Close approach marker was useless -- Spreadsheet Time

There we go!! I had to reload some times to get the Kerbin Pe down.

I totally forgot that I could get myself some shiny maneuver nodes.

the reentry was a pretty firework.

Spin to win! - somehow the capsule started to overheat...

 

I added Better Time Warp Continued to my mod list

[Human Person]

There's just no way of putting my new Eve lander in LKO wit the Launchpad Mk2, so I did a Duna-Return to upgrade it.

Jeb paid a visit to our first interplanetary probe, the "Duna Crasher"

Next up will be Eve, I promise!

 

 

Edit: My 2nd Eve Lander did just the same as the 1st one: Launch went smooth, but the kraken tore it apart when I loaded the craft in LKO. Got some serious Kessler Syndrome here. Why doesn't it explode emediately on the Launchpad?

There's always a few seconds of lag when loading it, as if the Kraken thinks about destroying it, but then decides to let me launch it to orbit first. I got the suspicion it has something to do with the undeployed 3.75m fairing. The kraken wants to see what's inside!

Edited July 5, 2017 by Physics Student

[jonny]

Today I spent the whole evening designing the craft for my upcoming Moho mission:

The craft will be assembled in orbit, consisting of 4 Launches with 30 parts each.

For the Dres landing and return I did upgrade the R&D and the Astronaut complex, to get those valuable surface samples and a command seat.

[Superfluous J]

On 7/4/2017 at 11:56 AM, Physics Student said:

My Eve lander in LKO.

Edit: Loading the craft in orbit caused the Kraken to strike. A cloud of 50 to 60 pieces of debris in LKO is the result

Ouch!

22 hours ago, Physics Student said:

There's just no way of putting my new Eve lander in LKO wit the Launchpad Mk2, so I did a Duna-Return to upgrade it.

Also, tied you for 2nd place!

22 hours ago, Physics Student said:

My 2nd Eve Lander did just the same as the 1st one: Launch went smooth, but the kraken tore it apart when I loaded the craft in LKO. Got some serious Kessler Syndrome here. Why doesn't it explode emediately on the Launchpad?

Because that would cause you less work.

On 7/4/2017 at 0:15 PM, jonny said:

I made decent progress:

I finished my first ever mission to Dres SOI. Valentina successfully landed on Dres and returned to Kerbin with a mission time of 12 years and 213 days.

See? It DOES exist!

12 minutes ago, jonny said:

Today I spent the whole evening designing the craft for my upcoming Moho mission

The craft will be assembled in orbit, consisting of 4 Launches with 30 parts each.

I don't envy you that, but hope roving Moho will make the effort worth it!

[jonny]

7 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

See? It DOES exist!

I don't envy you that, but hope roving Moho will make the effort worth it!

To be honest, I only landed on Eve, Laythe, Mun and Minmus before (didn't return from Eve). All my previous career saves ended with a station on the way to Duna or Eve, due to the lack of a real goal. Even my gravity assists (which I made plenty) only got me in Eve and Jool SOI.

I really like that this challenge it gives a very good reason to visit all of the bodies, and I have a lot of fun.

I will send a rover to Moho, because I will need a lot of science, to research all the tech needed for a Eve return and hopefully a Jool-5 mission. And why should I bother visiting a body twice? And somehow all the time a Kerbal comes around and wants to land on a new planet or moon. You may guessed it, I am planning to go manned for every new landing.

[Human Person]

6 minutes ago, jonny said:

To be honest, I only landed on Eve, Laythe, Mun and Minmus before (didn't return from Eve). All my previous career saves ended with a station on the way to Duna or Eve, due to the lack of a real goal. Even my gravity assists (which I made plenty) only got me in Eve and Jool SOI

Places I have never been at before this Challenge: Gilly, Ike, Laythe, Vall, Pol.

Ohh, and Dres.

I want to do my Eve return now and then a Jool-5 with Eeloo.

[Superfluous J]

39 minutes ago, jonny said:

I really like that this challenge it gives a very good reason to visit all of the bodies, and I have a lot of fun.

This makes me happy.

24 minutes ago, Physics Student said:

Places I have never been at before this Challenge: Gilly, Ike, Laythe, Vall, Pol.

Ohh, and Dres.

I finally got to all worlds during my Kerpollo series on YouTube. Like @jonny, I always got caught up in the running of a space program and never got around to playing the game In Kerpollo, I set the goal to land on and return from every single world I could, and I refused to quit until I had done it.

Part of the reason I started this challenge is because I wanted a reason to do that again

[Tattiebogle]

Mission Update.

                    Jeb gets rescued

                    Jeb goes to Duna

                   Jeb comes home.

Well! That the Duna SOI completed

               I choose to upgrade the Launch Pad.

http://imgur.com/a/sdmBN

 

[Superfluous J]

3 hours ago, Tattiebogle said:

Duna SOI completed

Well done!

My only recent update is that I installed Kopernicus so I could delete Moho, not just from this save but from the game entirely and forever.

No, not really, but I did realize that I do truly hate playing without the mods that I just thought I hated playing the game without. Nice to know I was right.

I'm installing KER again, for dV in flight. I'm also installing KAC, Precise Node, NavHud, and the Transfer Window Planner. And maybe even a few others that I happen to notice along the way.

And yes, I'm going to keep playing this from my "KSP_Stockish" directory and pretend this is stock.

ish.

Edited July 7, 2017 by 5thHorseman

[IncongruousGoat]

After one heck of a mission, the Duna system is officially complete. I've decided to put the details of vehicle assembly into a spoiler, since the process was rather involved.

Spoiler

The vehicle I used, named Viking, weighs 14.4 tons in LKO. Which means I had to assemble it in LKO over the course of 6 launches. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be too bad, but a slight complication came up. It turns out the propulsion module weighs a bit more like 3 tons, and furthermore is shaped a bit like a pancake. So, to get it into orbit I had to do a bit of pad assembly. As you can imagine, this made things... interesting.

Here's the crane I used:

Assembly, once I got all the docking ports aligned, went relatively well. The cranes were readily able to both cart boosters around, and attach them to the main rocket. Despite having a top practical speed of 6 m/s, absolutely no ability to climb hills, and an alarming tendency towards the wheels breaking. And let's not even mention the launchpad/crawlerway terrain seam.

But, in the end, the rocket was successfully assembled. Ish. See, KSP's docking does some strange things to the part hierarchy. Specifically, it made one of the solid boosters the root part. As you can imagine, this was a bit of a problem.

RealPlume has a bit of a bug whereby engines don't display their plumes properly if they're the root part. But this was the least of the problems. This thing was aerodynamically unstable. Really aerodynamically unstable. The only successful strategy I found was to try and fly as straight vertically as possible until the boosters burnt out. But, eventually, the second stage limped its way into orbit, and I could move on to the other launches.

Next up was the crew cabin/return stage module, with Valentina aboard:

And then four fuel tank modules, two of which had parachutes on decouplers:

And that's it. The ship is together. Now all we have to do is fly it out to Duna, to Ike, and then back, all without maneuver nodes.

The actual trip to Duna and Ike was unremarkable, other than some clever Oberth Effect exploitation off of the Ike escape burn. Screenshots have been added to the full album. It turns out that eyeballing things really isn't that hard once you have patched conics.

 

[Human Person]

Eve Return done!

 

New Mod: Mechjeb

 

- I removed the payload fairing around my Eve Lander Mk.2 and voila: No Kraken Issues anymore. The lifter is very ugly because of the large wings I had to add to make it aerodynamically stable.

- The Return Vehicle is launched separately.

- The Lander's fuel is used for the transfer (made possible by a fuel duct you can see in some of the pictures) and refilled on Gilly before getting dropped into Eve's atmosphere.

- Eve Orbit was achieved despite a big staging mishap (I forgot to disable the crossfeed on the decoupler of the last stage and the 2nd last stage drained fuel out of it. Orbit was achieved with the 2nd last stage attached (I thought it was hugely overengineered until I saw that the Upper Stage was nearly empty. It still was overengineered, I call that margin of error: Eve is hard after all))

 

Lander to Eve:

Spoiler

 

Eve Ascent:

Spoiler

 

Return:

Spoiler

 

In the end, an extremely smooth mission. I didn't have to quickload a single time. Only the delta v budget from LKO to the surface of Gilly was a bit tight. Every other stage in this mission had a good margin for error build into it. The landing spot was at 1600 m above sea level, but the ascent could have easily been done from sea level. 

 

Full Album: http://imgur.com/a/tbaY3

 

PS: I didn't point that out previously, but I also completed the Caveman before doing my first upgrade.

 

Edited July 7, 2017 by Physics Student

[jonny]

today I learned one thing: Moho is the wrong place for a rover

however, in an alternative reality the rover is survived the downhill trip from highlands to midlands, and Bob is on his way home again.

I will upload the mission report tomorrow.

 

[Superfluous J]

18 hours ago, IncongruousGoat said:

After one heck of a mission, the Duna system is officially complete.

And impressive! Amazing work there.

10 hours ago, Physics Student said:

Eve Return done!

Also impressive! Any trip to Eve where you come back is a win in book, but you actually made it look ... well no it still looks hard. Also, you're in 2nd place all-time and leading the pack of people who have not finished. And you are also the 2nd to ever get the coveted "To Do" list in the leaderboard, because it's shorter to list what you have NOT done, than what you HAVE done.

10 hours ago, Physics Student said:

PS: I didn't point that out previously, but I also completed the Caveman before doing my first upgrade.

Did you do it unmodded? I've marked you as that for now but if you were modded, you won't count as Caveman, because you couldn't submit that save to the Caveman thread.

[Human Person]

18 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

Did you do it unmodded? I've marked you as that for now but if you were modded, you won't count as Caveman, because you couldn't submit that save to the Caveman thread.

Ahh, no. Modded.