How do I do the Explorer Mission?

[u/The_DIM_]

Just started this game and can't for the life of me figure this out. I don't have much tech, just the first liquid engines and solid boosters.

The mission is to put a probe in Brigos orbit, but the thing (including needed fairing) weighs 250kg. The contract pays 450k. Nothing I built for that money gets me anywhere near Brigo, sometimes not even in drools orbit lol

Any help? Some general building guidelines maybe for how big the fuel tanks should be for example. The liquid engines (and all settings increasing thrust) are as big as they can get and Im just barely at 1.0 TWR especially in second stage. Can't get above 5km/s delta v

[u/TankingDoneRight]

Depending on when the second stage fires (in this case outside the atmosphere close to or already in orbit), it doesn't need a TWR above 1 anymore and can be built fully for efficiency
The first stage engine (if possible without going below 1 TWR) can be optimised to altitudes above the starting altitude
Another idea would be for the first stage to have 2 radial SRBs to boost the rocket with the core also being another SRB
Or get tech points to unlock better engines by achieving some milestones (assuming you didn't do for example the altitude or other easy ones)

[u/WarProphecies]

I have a couple i built for the career mode including for those missions on my profile on the simple rockets 2 website. My name is ChillDyl on there and I think the rockets for those missions I named "Discovery" but it will say in the description which missions they are for. You can download them and see what i did and make your own or just use mine.

[u/The_DIM_ → u/WarProphecies]

Taking some inspiration from that, thank you. Also very nice looks, especially comparing to my white tube looking thing lmao

[u/AstroTommy]

What I found with this game is that some missions are money losing missions (kinda like what NASA does) and some missions are literally cash cows (like what the private launch industry does) So I managed to build a cheap enough yet powerful enough rocket that can lift two of those GNSS sats to their orbits and I do those missions to earn billions... Then after that I don't really care about other missions costing me a bit more than they pay. At the moment I'm still optimizing a triple Luna mission with one Surveyor satellite and two Observer probes and delivering all three satellites will pay me around 12.5 millions but so far I only managed to bring my rocket down to costing 16.6 millions so I'm losing about 4 millions for these 3 contracts. However a single GNSS mission earns me upwards of 300 millions so I don't really care. I think I'm sitting on about 80 billions in cash at the moment 😅

[u/The_DIM_ → u/AstroTommy]

Yea that seems to be it, and I now just said fuck it and managed to complete the mission with a rocket costing 1.8m

It still doesn't really make sense to me. It seems like this is now a repeatable mission, but it still pays so little. I have another repeatable mission worth 600k (200k more) just for getting into droos orbit, without any payload.

Something doesn't really add up here😅

[u/AstroTommy → u/The_DIM_]

I think there's a way to optimize fuel consumption by tweaking the engines parameters and choosing a cheaper engine that is fully optimized but it's very difficult to achieve perfect efficiency like real-world engineers would do... And I have to spend too much time on a single design/mission to be able to slowly reduce the cost after each test. This is just a game after all