Ultra Hardcore: KSP, but made as difficult as possible

[RealKerbal3x]

It's been a while since I've done this sort of thing, so bear with me...

Welcome to Ultra Hardcore, a KSP career save played with punishingly difficult settings and mods. No quicksaves, life support, part failures, a 2.5x system rescale, the works. I've wanted to try something like this for a long time.

Don't take the flashy banner as an indication of any real story, this will mostly be your standard garden-variety mission report.

Mod list:

Spoiler

Still need to work a few mods out here, so this is Soon^TM for now

Settings:

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With that out of the way, time to get started!

Part 1: Sine

Spoiler

First off the pile of dirt launchpad was Sine I, aiming to boldly go to around 13km, gather some science, and, thanks to the current lack of parachutes, hit the ground very hard.

Despite its sacrifice, Sine I gathered enough science for a few more parts to be researched (this save is using the Unkerballed Start tech tree, by the way) and broke many records.

On to Sine II, this time including a state-of-the-art barometer! Sine II's flight was almost identical to Sine I's, so we'll gloss over it here.

Next, the engineers were handed a contract to send a craft to the upper atmosphere, a limit rather unnecessarily precisely defined as 21.857142578125km. Lacking any stack decouplers, they instead used two radially-attached solid motors. Unfortunately, as they were basing the core of Sine III off of blueprints of Sine II, they forgot a thermometer.

With the total success of the Sine program so far, it was time for this space program to actually set its sights on space. This would require an almost completely new vehicle design.

While Sine IV still relied on the spin-stabilisation that kept its predecessors on course, it used an entirely new propulsion system - a liquid-fuelled engine. Four of them, in fact.

To the surprise of everyone at KASA, this immensely complex and high risk craft lifted off successfully and became the first object to fly in a vacuum.

Everyone was even more surprised when it was confirmed that Sine IV re-entered the atmosphere with no damage. Spurred on by this success, the engineers strapped two parachutes to Sine V and launched it.

But Sine V didn't reach space. Not even close.  It must have been the mass of the parachutes, the engineers thought. So they stretched Sine VI's tanks.

No dice.

This is where you usually resort to 'moar boosters' so that's exactly what they did. Sine VII was equipped with a fifth engine, and this time made it to space... and back!

The Sine program had paved the way to space. But suborbital hops were not the future - it was time for Kerbals to put a satellite into orbit for the first time.

Enter Cosine.

(I already have the screenshots for a couple more parts taken and ready to go, but I didn't want to put all of them in one post, because that would be huge. Expect those soon-ish, I guess)

[Maria Sirona]

Hello