Jool Spaceplane

[The Raging Sandwich]

My last challenge (Kerbin Atlantis) didn't go so well but I have another idea. In this one, you have to launch a spaceplane to Jool and circumnavigate its atmosphere with it. (I'm not sure if someone has already made a challenge like this or not. Keep in mind that I am relatively new to the site.) The spaceplane can be launched by a rocket or takeoff from the runway. Refueling is allowed on any difficulty. 

Easy: launch a spaceplane and enter Jool's atmosphere. Minimum crew: 1

Medium: launch a spaceplane to circumnavigate Jool's atmosphere and return to Kerbin alive. Minimum crew: 2

Hard: launch a spaceplane to circumnavigate Jool's atmosphere, land on Laythe, and return to Kerbin alive. Minimum crew: 4

IMPOSSIBLE: launch an SSTO from the runway to circumnavigate Jool's atmosphere, land on Laythe, land on Duna to refuel, and return to Kerbin alive. Minimum crew: 6

Scoring System

The scoring will be based on the mass of the spacecraft. There will be a winner for every difficulty mode. Make sure you show me evidence on doing this by showing me pictures ora video. Make sure to include the mass of the ship in your submission. The only mods banned are the Alcubierre Drive mod and HyperEdit.

The due date for submissions is 7:00 pm US Central Time on June 24. Any craft submitted after the due date and time will not be scored and will not be able to win.

Good luck and happy travels!  -The Raging Sandwich  

 

Edit: I am extending the time limit to the end of July. Now that I look back at it, it was really short to begin with.

Leaderboards:

Easy: N/A

Medium: Teilnehmer- 11.962 T

Hard: N/A

Impossible: N/A

Edited July 12, 2016 by The Raging Sandwich
Leaderboards

[Jetski]

@The Raging Sandwich I like the idea here (and I liked the Atlantis one as well), but it's hard for some of us to submit an entry within a short time limit.  I, for one, can check forums daily on mobile, but my chances to actually play KSP are far fewer. Many excellent challenges run for months, or longer (Kprize, jool5, etc).  Try leaving them running a bit longer and you may see more entries

 

[Mycroft]

I'm not entirely clear on one point: are mods allowed?

Edit: This looks like an awesome challenge, especially because I'm launching a Jool mission with two spaceplanes in it. They are made with OPT Spaceplane Parts, tho, so I'd like to see if I can enter. I would also respectfully request a longer time period.

Edited June 19, 2016 by Mycroft

[The Raging Sandwich]

On 6/19/2016 at 2:09 AM, Mycroft said:

I'm not entirely clear on one point: are mods allowed?

Edit: This looks like an awesome challenge, especially because I'm launching a Jool mission with two spaceplanes in it. They are made with OPT Spaceplane Parts, tho, so I'd like to see if I can enter. I would also respectfully request a longer time period.

Any mod is allowed except the Alcubierre Drive mod and HyperEdit. It would be interesting to see a plane using propellors from the KAX or Firespitter mod! I will also lift the short time period (now that I look back at it the time limit does seem really short.) 

Edited June 20, 2016 by The Raging Sandwich

[Mycroft]

I would also recommend banning HyperEdit

[SpaceplaneAddict]

Easy mode = Deal.

*Determination.

[Teilnehmer]

Medium level.

Runway mass: 20.846
LKO mass: 11.962

 

[Gojira1000]

Well, other than we hit Duna first and didn't bother refuelling on the way back. And we only took the trio, And I landed on everything but Tylo. OK not the challenge at all. But 29 tons off the runway, stock.

 

[Teilnehmer]

6 hours ago, Gojira1000 said:

Well, other than we hit Duna first and didn't bother refuelling on the way back. And we only took the trio, And I landed on everything but Tylo.

Hm… You don’t touch Jool’s atmosphere in this video.

[herbal space program]

On ‎6‎/‎18‎/‎2016 at 6:55 PM, The Raging Sandwich said:

In this one, you have to launch a spaceplane to Jool and circumnavigate its atmosphere with it. (I'm not sure if someone has already made a challenge like this or not. Keep in mind that I am relatively new to the site.) The spaceplane can be launched by a rocket or takeoff from the runway. Refueling is allowed on any difficulty.

Do you mean fly all the way around Jool INSIDE its atmosphere or just above its atmosphere? If the former is not completely impossible in stock, they really must have thinned out Jool's upper atmosphere

 

...OK, so looking t the post above and the Wiki, it does actually seem possible now. I'm so glad they re-scaled Jool's atmo so that touching it is no longer instant death. I think I might give this a try, since I have a ship that ought to be able to do it pretty much ready to go. I would like one clarification however before I start:  When you say refueling is allowed on any difficulty, do you mean that I can place a fuel depot anywhere I want, so long as I actually fly it, and leave it there? For example, if I choose to do "impossible", would it be allowed for me to send separate refueling drone ships to Duna and Laythe orbit and then dock my plane with them along the way to refuel?  And when you say "land on Duna to refuel" do you mean I HAVE to bring some ISRU capability and do that or do you just mean I have to land there and come back as part of my tour? This challenge sounds real fun and doable, but I don't want to get burned after working on it for days on end because I didn't clearly understand the rules...

Edited June 22, 2016 by herbal space program

[The Raging Sandwich]

On 6/22/2016 at 11:20 AM, herbal space program said:

Do you mean fly all the way around Jool INSIDE its atmosphere or just above its atmosphere? If the former is not completely impossible in stock, they really must have thinned out Jool's upper atmosphere

 

...OK, so looking t the post above and the Wiki, it does actually seem possible now. I'm so glad they re-scaled Jool's atmo so that touching it is no longer instant death. I think I might give this a try, since I have a ship that ought to be able to do it pretty much ready to go. I would like one clarification however before I start:  When you say refueling is allowed on any difficulty, do you mean that I can place a fuel depot anywhere I want, so long as I actually fly it, and leave it there? For example, if I choose to do "impossible", would it be allowed for me to send separate refueling drone ships to Duna and Laythe orbit and then dock my plane with them along the way to refuel?  And when you say "land on Duna to refuel" do you mean I HAVE to bring some ISRU capability and do that or do you just mean I have to land there and come back as part of my tour? This challenge sounds real fun and doable, but I don't want to get burned after working on it for days on end because I didn't clearly understand the rules...

Concerning your questions, yes you do have to fly around inside the atmosphere. When it says refueling is allowed on any difficulty, I meant that you can refuel anywhere in the Jool system. Sorry I did not clarify about that. If you do "Impossible," you can send seperate drones to Duna and Laythe. In "Impossible" when you land on Duna, you have the choice to either land on Duna or land on it and refuel. You also have the choice to land something that's not your spaceplane on Duna, come back into orbit, and let your spaceplane dock to it and refuel. If you do land on Duna and refuel, than you can use the ISRU or you can land at a seperate base to refuel there. 

[herbal space program]

1 hour ago, The Raging Sandwich said:

Concerning your questions, yes you do have to fly around inside the atmosphere. When it says refueling is allowed on any difficulty, I meant that you can refuel anywhere in the Jool system. Sorry I did not clarify about that. If you do "Impossible," you can send seperate drones to Duna and Laythe. In "Impossible" when you land on Duna, you have the choice to either land on Duna or land on it and refuel. You also have the choice to land something that's not your spaceplane on Duna, come back into orbit, and let your spaceplane dock to it and refuel. If you do land on Duna and refuel, than you can use the ISRU or you can land at a seperate base to refuel there. 

Thanks for the clarifications. Based on all of that, my "impossible" plan will be as follows: I will take off from the runway with the 6-Kerbal space plane and at the same time launch an uncrewed  refueling ship. Each will fly on its own to the Jool system. The refueling ship will park itself in Laythe orbit while the space plane does the whole Jool-diver thing. Spaceplane then does a rendezvous with the refueling ship in Laythe orbit, refuels, lands on Laythe, returns to orbit, and if needed refuels again. Both ships will then head for Duna separately. Once there, the space plane will top up its tank, land on Duna, return to orbit, refuel one more time if needed, and then everybody goes back to LKO. The space plane will then land back at the KSC, while the refueling drone stays in orbit. The space plane will not jettison anything anywhere along the journey, but the refueling drone will drop booster stages on its initial ascent as well as empty tanks and spent stages on its Jool-Duna-Kerbin journey. Refueling of the plane will happen only in Laythe orbit or Duna orbit, not on LKO or anywhere else. I will not use ISRU.  So, given all of that, I have two final questions before I start: 1) If I execute that plan, will it count as completion of the "impossible" challenge? and 2) when my score is determined, will it be based on just the lowest possible mass for the space plane, or on the mass of both the space plane and the refueling drone? Lastly, if the refueling ship counts towards the mass score, will you calculate based on its mass at launch or only the mass of what leaves LKO? Sorry to be so particular about this, but your answer to question 2 strongly affects my design goals. Again, this sounds like a really cool challenge, with lots of different strategies and design criteria to optimize, and I want to make sure I'm doing it right.

[Goody1981]

On 22/06/2016 at 6:21 AM, Teilnehmer said:

Medium level.

Runway mass: 20.846
LKO mass: 11.962

*snip*

That is awesome

On your Jool exit, when you used Laythe and Tylo to escape - your map mode looks really neat. Mine doesn't look like that. What conics mode thingy* do you need to get it to look like that? And what conic patch limit thingy* number do you set it to?

*I don't know the names of these things

[The Raging Sandwich]

6 hours ago, herbal space program said:

Thanks for the clarifications. Based on all of that, my "impossible" plan will be as follows: I will take off from the runway with the 6-Kerbal space plane and at the same time launch an uncrewed  refueling ship. Each will fly on its own to the Jool system. The refueling ship will park itself in Laythe orbit while the space plane does the whole Jool-diver thing. Spaceplane then does a rendezvous with the refueling ship in Laythe orbit, refuels, lands on Laythe, returns to orbit, and if needed refuels again. Both ships will then head for Duna separately. Once there, the space plane will top up its tank, land on Duna, return to orbit, refuel one more time if needed, and then everybody goes back to LKO. The space plane will then land back at the KSC, while the refueling drone stays in orbit. The space plane will not jettison anything anywhere along the journey, but the refueling drone will drop booster stages on its initial ascent as well as empty tanks and spent stages on its Jool-Duna-Kerbin journey. Refueling of the plane will happen only in Laythe orbit or Duna orbit, not on LKO or anywhere else. I will not use ISRU.  So, given all of that, I have two final questions before I start: 1) If I execute that plan, will it count as completion of the "impossible" challenge? and 2) when my score is determined, will it be based on just the lowest possible mass for the space plane, or on the mass of both the space plane and the refueling drone? Lastly, if the refueling ship counts towards the mass score, will you calculate based on its mass at launch or only the mass of what leaves LKO? Sorry to be so particular about this, but your answer to question 2 strongly affects my design goals. Again, this sounds like a really cool challenge, with lots of different strategies and design criteria to optimize, and I want to make sure I'm doing it right.

1)Your plan will count as completion for impossible.

2)The scoring will be based on the lowest mass of the spaceplane alone. What I'll base the score on is the lowest mass experienced in the entire mission.

3)The refueling drone will have no affect on your score. I'm trying to make this as easy as possible for it to be (in my opinion) more fun for everybody.

Keep doing what you're doing!  

[Teilnehmer]

1 hour ago, Goody1981 said:

On your Jool exit, when you used Laythe and Tylo to escape - your map mode looks really neat. Mine doesn't look like that. What conics mode thingy* do you need to get it to look like that? And what conic patch limit thingy* number do you set it to?

CONIC_PATCH_DRAW_MODE = 3
CONIC_PATCH_LIMIT = 5

[herbal space program]

12 hours ago, The Raging Sandwich said:

Keep doing what you're doing!  

That I will! I spent a couple of hours working on the plane last night and came up with this:

 

 

It carries 6 Kerbals, has a dry mass of 24t (a bit hefty I'll admit), and positively screams its way to LKO, making Mach 4 in just over 2 minutes and requiring hardly any oxidizer. It gets to LKO with around 4.3km/s of dV left, which is plenty to get to pretty much anywhere in the Jool system and maybe even back if I were to get fancy with the navigation. It can also go from the KSC to the surface of Duna with almost half of its LF remaining. That's the good news. Unfortunately, it became clear to me pretty quickly that  the first version did not have enough wing area to land on Duna as a plane, so I had to go back to the drawing board to add more lift to the design, as well as a drogue chute to help in slowing down from what will no doubt be a very high stall speed on Duna. That version is en route to Duna now and I'll see how it fares tonight. I have a feeling even more wings will ultimately be required.

 I know it's not even a requirement based on your rules, but for me the challenge of building a plane that can do all those other things and also land and re-orbit as a plane on Duna is really very interesting. It will require balancing low mass, low drag, high TWR, low stall speed, robust construction, heat resistance, and  long range to produce a plane that can go through all the hoops successfully. Good planetary navigation skills will also be crucial. I find this type of challenge far more rewarding and interesting to work on than some of the more one-dimensional ones out there, because those always seem to end up producing  planes that are lousy for anything but winning the challenge. This one should require a good all around plane,  especially if like me you will not depend on MechJeb to fly it for you. I hope you'll get a good response, and I think it might be well worth keeping open longer if you are so inclined. I'm guessing the landing on Duna part will be the hardest, but we'll see.... 

Edited June 24, 2016 by herbal space program

[The Raging Sandwich]

10 hours ago, herbal space program said:

It carries 6 Kerbals, has a dry mass of 24t (a bit hefty I'll admit), and positively screams its way to LKO, making Mach 4 in just over 2 minutes and requiring hardly any oxidizer. It gets to LKO with around 4.3km/s of dV left, which is plenty to get to pretty much anywhere in the Jool system and maybe even back if I were to get fancy with the navigation. It can also go from the KSC to the surface of Duna with almost half of its LF remaining. That's the good news. Unfortunately, it became clear to me pretty quickly that  the first version did not have enough wing area to land on Duna as a plane, so I had to go back to the drawing board to add more lift to the design, as well as a drogue chute to help in slowing down from what will no doubt be a very high stall speed on Duna. That version is en route to Duna now and I'll see how it fares tonight. I have a feeling even more wings will ultimately be required.

 I know it's not even a requirement based on your rules, but for me the challenge of building a plane that can do all those other things and also land and re-orbit as a plane on Duna is really very interesting. It will require balancing low mass, low drag, high TWR, low stall speed, robust construction, heat resistance, and  long range to produce a plane that can go through all the hoops successfully. Good planetary navigation skills will also be crucial. I find this type of challenge far more rewarding and interesting to work on than some of the more one-dimensional ones out there, because those always seem to end up producing  planes that are lousy for anything but winning the challenge. This one should require a good all around plane,  especially if like me you will not depend on MechJeb to fly it for you. I hope you'll get a good response, and I think it might be well worth keeping open longer if you are so inclined. I'm guessing the landing on Duna part will be the hardest, but we'll see.... 

Great job! With that robust machine I have no doubt you can do the challenge. Great design, too.

[The Raging Sandwich]

Not that as of the next couple days I may not be able to look at my challenge and respond to any questions. 

[herbal space program]

1 hour ago, The Raging Sandwich said:

Not that as of the next couple days I may not be able to look at my challenge and respond to any questions. 

Happy camping!  I'm staying home for a change, so I might actually get some time to work on this thing.

[The Raging Sandwich]

I now have time to reply to any submissions. I couldn't check the forums the last three days because I was coming home from vacation on Saturday, my birthday was on Sunday, and I was out and about on Monday (Independence Day.)

[herbal space program]

Still working on it.  The plane has changed quite a bit. Even the second one I posted above still had way too little relative wing area to have an acceptable stall speed on Duna. The plane below was just able to make it to the surface of Duna and back from the runway:

Actually, it was a slightly up-fuelled version of that plane, which I have not uploaded to Imgur yet. Although I scrubbed it, I think this one would have made it also, because the other one made it home with >150 units of fuel even though I had to do a big fly-around because I overshot the KSC. On an optimal approach, I would have had probably 300 units left, which is more than I added to the version above. With refueling allowed at Jool, I'm certain this plane could do the whole "impossible" challenge here, but then I got interested in the "Ultimate Challenge", posted by @Just Jim in a  thread from the beginning of the year that just  bubbled up again recently. The goal is to visit every single landable body in the game with a single command pod, based on a contract that was at some point generated by the Career contract engine. The (relatively speaking) trivial solution to this problem would be to make the smallest self-contained, dockable command core possible and pass that from ship to ship specialized for each body, but the one person who has completed it thus far ( @Kergarin ) actually used an ISRU-based SSTE (single stage to everywhere) approach. One ISRU space plane went to every body except Tylo and Eve, for which purpose-built landers shipped by the plane were docked to the minimal modular command core, and the rest of the plane was left on orbit. I now want to do a similar strategy to this for that challenge, working from the plane above and using this challenge as practice. I've accordingly now scaled the plane up a bit to ship ISRU, and I'm currently still testing it. I'm also spending a fair bit of time mapping out all the resources in a sandbox game, since I didn't see any obvious cheats for this in the Alt-f12 menu. Anyway, I'm pretty sure my current plane can now do this without any external refueling, but I still have a ways to go before I can do the whole mission...

Edited July 6, 2016 by herbal space program

[The Raging Sandwich]

It's cool how you had to cram so much wing area into that spaceplane and still make it look awesome! @herbal space program

[Jovus]

I might take this up, though I won't be going for a 'win' or anything. I have grand visions of Mk3 parts.

A couple questions about mods: what's your feeling on FAR? Also, Modular Fuel Tanks?

[The Raging Sandwich]

5 hours ago, Jovus said:

I might take this up, though I won't be going for a 'win' or anything. I have grand visions of Mk3 parts.

A couple questions about mods: what's your feeling on FAR? Also, Modular Fuel Tanks?

I have no problem with either of those, thanks for trying this out!