hoioh

Thanks for the compliments, Kulebron. I'll put future albums inside spoiler tags to make it more browsable on a mobile. It's an I7 4770 with 12 gigs of ram and a 780ti (the ultraclocked one from gigabyte) it works a charm, but I have to restart KSP every 2-3 hours because it crashes after a while. Also, it's running like 40 mods or so, but I'm only using the B9 parts for this challenge. (The mods don't even add to the crashing, except for hyperedit, that helps it crash within the hour, but running 100% stock I experience the exact same problem. Relaunching 100 times also makes it crash, never fails!)

There's a familiar feeling, I spent all weekend on the laythe capitalism challenge only to get halfway through it. I've just got the nervous way back to go now.

As always, Nicky: nice designwork! In regards to the accident: use F5 and F9 sometime, that way you could correct your error and try again without having to fly back up all the way there. Nice speed though, wasn't your previous record the exact same speed? EDIT: nope, you were 2m/s short for that...

Third leg completed, got to take a bit of a rest now before the return trip is scheduled. One can only sit for so long. Do you know that joke about 64 Kerbals on a beach?

Leg 2 completed, though I'm seriously starting to doubt if I have enough for the return trip... but we'll see, I won't have to return perfectly, so long as it doesn't crash and burn, though it would help reduce the cost to land at the KSC pad. Here's part 2 of the journey, the transfer to laythe:

And here's the attempt, because it appears to malfuntion in the previous post for some reason and just show the whole text instead of the album.

I'll admit, that's a nice way of transporting the kerbals to their destination. Looks good too! The thing with "real" spaceplanes is that the wings add drag and weight, thus adding to your total cost. They may allow you to take off with too little thrust though, so they may cut you an engine's worth of weight, which would make it worthwhile. If you're having trouble with interplanetary travel, use MechJeb for the planning and/or execution. I admire the guys that do things without it, but I find it just too easy and realiable to go and do it all by hand. So I tried that, but it didn't seem to work in the preview, but I may have used a couple characters too many. Here's another attempt:

Sheesh! That's got to be a real loss after so much work and waiting. As a product designer I know something about that feeling, just haven't failed as miserably as that though...

passengers don't add that much weight, the engine is heavier as another mk2 crew pod (which definitely has the lowest mass per kerbal of all the pods.) So basically it's about finding the right blance between power and weight per kerbal. I'm a good way going with the modded entry, but outside of the engines and the transparent struts I used all stock items.

So, attempt launched. Made it to orbit with enough fuel to manage the trip: http://imgur.com/a/kCUQS#0 It looks like I'm going to have to adjust pricing to $39.50 per ticket for groups of 64 Kerbals per trip. But we'll see how much it really costs once the trip is finished. Can someone explain how to add an Imgur album in here? I'ts not the FAQ, I got the imgur tag, but when I paste the URL into it it doesn't work, pasting only the number doesn't work either... Any tips?

Built some ships, did some math. Transporting 64 kerbals on a single trip using B9's Sabre engines for ascent, a single Nuke for transfer and more sabres on laythe, I should be able to do it for as little as $27.76 per Kerbal. The only problem I'm really facing is that I suck at landing on Laythe without damaging my vessel... So piloting skills aside, there's definitely room for improvement on Kulebron's score of $66,- all I have to do is manage to actualy do it at least once. The KSE (Kerbal Space Elevator) MK3 (MK1 and 2 failed to live up to expectations) The KJB (Kerbin-Jool Bus) MK3 (to match the KSE MK3) The LSE MK3 (Laythe Space Elevator) is still in the making.

Maybe with a lot more passengers?

That is the single most frustrating thing about KSP, isn't it? That you've been working on something for 3-4 hours just have it fail on the launchpad, or worse, landing on Laythe without success 10 times in a row, meaning your design is flawed in my case yesterday...

I normally bring at least 1 RTG just to make sure I don't lose power when I don't have sunlight and loose control of the craft.

nice try thoug, Nicky! Just wondering, buit those intakes on the sides, those are clipped in ways that should be impossible without F12, no?

Nice contraption, Nicky, love the wings! I don't really get your description of the intake clipping, maybe you can show me a couple pictures? Currently I'm just placing a cubic strut and attaching an intake to the attached end (I use alt-F12 clipping, easier that way). Then I copy-paste that strut-intake combinationall over the place without stacking it onto any other parts but the structual ones. The moment I'm placing one on top of another the physics break and it just vibrates into pieces. I managed to build a new plane with about 30 intake air last night, but didn't manage a speed above 2325 m/s even using the same craft as before, just with more intakes didn't help to increase my speed. So maybe instead of adding more I should actualy remove some to get a better thrust to weight ratio, or maybe I had the perfect ratio to begin with, considering your amazement at my speed achievement, who knows eh? Also tried the no-wings thing, but that I really can't fly. It becomes uncontrollably unstable once I try to drop my nose after about 12k altitude. This basically happened all the time, no matter how I tried. Without the wings, I'm basically lost.

I tried with one engine, but didn't manage to get over 2300 m/s with that, that's why I went for 2 on that attempt, hopig it would get the thing to go faster. Twice the thrust and all that, but it turns out that the engines just start to crap out after a certain speed, or maybe I just tend to fly too high. I tried moar intakes, but I get clipping issues like below. The intakes tend to attach to each other and function like one of them springs that walks down stairs. Eventualy the physics .... up and itn tears it to shreds... https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2935674/Kerbal/2014-11-28_00090.jpg I'll try it withou wings, curious how that turns out though, I'm just managing to fly planes barely. Too much hassle to build a spaceplane and land it, so I tend to lean towards single use rockets. Smaller fuel tank is definitely an option! About the apoapsis and periapsis, on the first run I got up to 240K, but the highest I got thusfar was well over 300K with lower speeds. I figured that meant I was wasting energy on going up rather than forward and tried to reduce my vertical velocity to as close as I can to 0 (which is a lot easier with MechJeb than without.) And then I managed to squeeze this speed out of it. So maybe if you attempted a similar strategy with your craft you'd be able to break 2400 m/s. You never know, right?

I just had to try this! Got up to 2342m/s upon reentering the atmosphere: http://imgur.com/a/jzm4c#0 100% Stock btw. From this experience I did think of a new challenge and I wonder if that's possible/tried before: would it be possible to obtain so much speed in atmosphere that you can create and maintain an orbital trajectory? Or in other words: can you put a craft in LKO with just jet engines? That should definitely not be possible in the real world, but I'm not that good and just trying this challenge got me a apoapsis of 240k and a periapsis of of 42K that's pretty close, isn't it? I'm certain one of the die-hards could pull it off without using infinigliding or somesuch "cheat", right?

great idea, i like it civ-5 menu style where under the esc menu theres options to quit to main menu as well as to quit to desktop.

Thanks for the tips guys, when I'm back on my feet I'll see if I can add another tank to the converter and relaunch it. The big tank was the hard bit to put down there as it was a little iout of balance making the retroburn really difficult, it tended to twist onto it's side, but the smaller ones were a cakewalk with mechjeb only. So it's not that bad of an issue.

Got a small issue causing Kethane to be non functional for me: The large convertor basically doesn't do anything at all. I know that there are absolutely no parts in the train that don't allow the fuel through, a simple test took care of that: So that's not the issue. Here's some images of the train I put on the Mun to make rocketfuel with on location: Anybody got any ideas on how to fix this? I am running quite a bunch of other mods at the moment, but so far everything appears to work fine together up until now that is...

Just slingshot around the sun and try to hit Duna, should get you up to a very nice 10K + velocity. (I can't do it myself, but I've seen people here that definitely can do this).

doesn't work quite as well without FAR, after some alterations I got it up to just over 10K:

Took a little time to get it under control, but after some attempts I think to have figured out how to get it to the highest possible point in space. I'm running FAR by the way, will try it without FAR tomorrow. The trick, with FAR anyway, is to angle the first couple of wings up just to the middle of the total wing length and then to angle the rest of them down so their lowest point matches the origin. Effectively creating spider legs on it. The stability comes from the control surface attached to the outer wing part. It performed beautifully up to about 16K after which the air simply became too thin to produce any lift, it stalled at 16290 in the end: Didn't manage to land it though on behalf of accidentally pushing the spacebar again and detaching the little lander I hung under it... Better luck next time. Didn't manage to land it though on behalf of pushing the spacebar once too many... Better luck next time.