Science!

[Glockenspiel Hero]

I'm a new player as of .23, and I've been playing career mode rather than sandbox, so for me every mission is about the science return. While I'm a noob, let me know what you think of this idea for a challenge

Challenge: Jebadiah Kerman's long lost, ultra rich Warren Kerman uncle desperately needs a tax break and has decided to take advantage of an obscure loophole in the Kerbal tax code that allows a 100% tax credit for personal research and development. As such, he's decided to fund a mission to the planets to write off as much as he can, but he can only manage to save as much as he can return in science value

Rules:

0) 0.23 stock parts only. No mods that allow performance improvements, extra science or similar. Mechjeb, Engineer and the like are ok. No console cheats

1) One launch only: Warren doesn't have time to build multiple ships before the tax man cometh. The ship may come apart into pieces such as landers after launch.

2) Jebadian Kerman must be on the mission. You may bring as many Kerbals beyond him as you wish

Scoring: +1 point for every science point the mission brings home, either by recovering the ship on Kerbin or transmission. (screenshot for instrument transmission+ screenshot of recovery as proof)

+1000 for each unique planet (including Kerbin) scanned with at least one instrument from space

+1000 for each unique planet (including Kerbin) scanned with at least one landed instrument. Instrument must return non-zero science to count. (A crashed unmanned lander without antenna would not count even if instruments were working, for example)

+500 for each unique moon scanned with at least one instrument from space

+500 for each unique moon scanned with at least one landed instrument, same non-zero science requirement

-1000 for each Kerbal stranded on a planet/moon/in orbit

-5000 for each Kerbal KIA

Difficulty: since science only works in career mode, this might take some time to plan. To get enough science to manage serious missions you have to burn through most of the "easy" stuff like Kerbin orbit, Mun and Minimus landings and so forth. There will be a balance past that point- to get some of the goodies like the higher tech instruments or the Mainsail engine requires a lot of science, so you might have to do this without a lot of tech higher up the tree.

Feel free to criticize or offer suggestion; I've been having fun trying to work my way through the tree from scratch as a player and I've enjoyed reading the challenges. I'm curious if anyone thinks this one interesting.

[Sirine]

Welcome to the forum. Your 1st post here and you create a challenge?

You might want to take a look. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/62814-Tutorial-Beginner-Science

[Glockenspiel Hero]

Welcome to the forum. Your 1st post here and you create a challenge?

You might want to take a look. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/62814-Tutorial-Beginner-Science

Actually, I'm a bit beyond that- I've got unmanned probes to every planet and manned missions headed for Duna and Eve (orbital only), and about 70% of the tech tree unlocked. Once I get some of them back I'm going to give this a try- my biggest challenge right now is not having the Mainsail and some of the advanced construction parts, so my heavy lifters are pretty awful and under the rules I can't use my refueling stations.

As far as the challenge, I'm interested in the trade off between easy science and maxing out the tech tree, as well as the challenge of building a large, multipurpose ship. (My current ships aren't much more than minimal setups with a nuke engine and as many experiments as I can fit/power) If it doesn't work feel free to let me know

[Alicelewis]

I want to say Thanks sharing such a nice link.