Been playing
Better Than Starting Manned mod. It's a nice take on hardmode for KSP. It's supposed to be played with
Deadly Reentry. Because if you're going to make something hard you'd best make it flaming explosion of death hard.
Science transmitting is changed so that you only need to transmit once to get 100% but Goo has to be brought back to get science from it. The science from Kerbin's ground/sea is removed. The science parts are put towards the beginning (thermometer is unlocked at very start).
Kerbals need life support and you have to research up to pressurized cockpits. Even then they use up their life support quickly and can only spend a couple of hours in space.
Batteries, engines, and solar panels start out terrible and get better as they're farther researched.
This makes it so you're constantly starved for parts that do what you want.
Here's my current research tree.
I still don't have side parachutes or anything to hook the top mounted parachute to the side of something with.
Here's my decoupler
That's the first decoupler this mod lets you have. That's the only decoupler I can work with so far.
Here's the first SAS
That's 4th level tech for a decoupler and 5th for SAS. I still don't have the first solar panel.
They weigh a half tonne each and it would take 3 of them getting constant sun to keep my probe cores charged.
The part starvation has lead to some rather insane designs.
That's how I got the goo back from space safely.
I'm proud of this bottom booster's design.
No decouplers, it drops stages by overheating and blowing up the lower stage. It gets going fast enough to overheat the top boosters around 20km. The batteries on top of the solid boosters are to protect them from heat.
Deadly Reentry has heat shields (that have to be researched) but I found that the Modular Girder Adapter does a pretty good job of protecting things.
No fuel ducts, no struts. It can get into Kerbin orbit or direct ascent to Mun.
Still can't get a Kerbol there alive though, not enough life support for the whole trip. Probe's doing pretty good though. Having some trouble finishing up the gravity scans since some of the biomes pop up for less than 1 second before changing.