sevenperforce

Honestly, you'd need some kind of shielded launch facility. Like, kilometer-high evacuated tube, or somesuch.

Escape automatically beats a high-apogee orbit, so increased velocity at escape is a pretty good metric. Wow, very nice! Top of the leaderboard, you are. What was your escape velocity? I really should come up with a way to add a multiplier or alternate scoring mechanism for landings on other worlds. I wonder what a Twin Boar could do for a horizontal-launch-with-staging, like I used.

Highest velocity at escape, I suppose. But remember that you've got to actually return to Kerbin, so.... Here's my entry, just for fun. Obviously this could be way better. 256 kilometers!

On a single engine, sure.

Ah. Shoot. That sucks. On a related note, does anyone know of ANY objects in the current game that have ANY collision frame with other objects in the same vessel? I want to attach an engine to the AGU, free the pivot, and then use something like the airbrakes to push it between two positions so I can make a single-engine stock VTOL.

No ISRU or fuel transfer. One launch.

I'm playing Sandbox. The Action Groups UI is available and works just fine, but when I click the AGU, the only options are "Release Grapple", "Decouple Node", and "Toggle Arming", none of which I want. I need to be able to Free and Lock pivoting with an action group.

No, you cannot cluster engines. You can only use one engine, and it must be stock. As I stated above, sepratrons and RCS thrusters are fine as long as they aren't used to thrust prograde. They can be used to thrust retrograde for your final deorbit burn if needed (for example, if you've jettisoned your engine for independent re-entry and you need to deorbit your capsule).

I did the maths. Achieving relativistic velocities with chemical propellant is not a possibility. Even if we have infinite money, that doesn't mean we have infinite fuel. Nor does it make the rocket equation any less punishing. If all of the oceans were drained, cracked into liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, placed into orbit with a space elevator, and used to launch a one-gram payload, that one-gram payload would achieve a whopping 247 km/s. This is eight hundredths of one percent of the speed of light.

Yes. If it pushes the craft in a prograde direction, it's an engine. You can use sepratrons to help with stage separation if you want, as long as they don't produce prograde acceleration on the main vehicle. I will edit the OP to note that RCS thrusters are fine as long as they aren't used for prograde acceleration at any time. They can be used for retrograde acceleration (e.g., deorbit burns).

Even if such a stack could exceed 10x solar escape velocity, this would be nowhere near lightspeed. Like, not even remotely close. Even 1,000x solar escape velocity is closer to the speed of a major league baseball pitch than it is to lightspeed.

A recent trade embargo has caused a surge in prices for engine components. As a result, the Kerbal Space Program management has created a new rule: vehicles may use no more than a single engine, and it must be recovered intact. Your goal is to get at least one Kerbal as far from home as possible, and return, on a single stock engine. This single engine must be your only means of propulsion. No ISRU or refueling is permitted (since any single-engine SSTO would then have an infinite score). No decoupler launching, cheats, infinite fuel, or anything gimmicky. Staging is fine; you can use drop tanks as desired. You only have to recover the Kerbal and the engine, and you can do so separately if desired. RCS can be used as long as it produces no prograde acceleration at any point (e.g., it can be used for attitude control and deorbiting but not for anything prograde). After several entries, there will be one leaderboard organized into three levels: Atmospheric, Orbital, and Escape. In Atmospheric, your score is total distance traveled; in Orbital, your score is your apoapsis (with periapse over 70 km); in Escape, your score is your velocity at the edge of Kerbin's SOI. For all levels, you get a 150% multiplier for each additional Kerbal; for the latter two levels, you get a 2x multiplier for each world you land on. LEADERBOARD Level 3: Escape @Jouni (escape velocity unknown) @zeta function (honorable mention; burned up on re-entry) Level 2: Orbital @Dman0829 (83,553 km * 1.5^14 = 24,391,566 km) @Aetharan (83,555 km) sevenperforce (256 km * 1.5^1 = 384 km) Level 3: Atmospheric (no entries yet)

Maybe he wants a biaxial VTOL.

Eh, I'm sure you can build a 3-stage ICBM and play around with the launch angle until you can hit a defined target! That's level 1, anyway. Given my penchant for discussing nuclear weapon design, I'm probably already on a lot of them.

More likely that they were captures than primordial.

Fine for a lunar base but not feasible for a mobile ISRU unit. That was my gripe with the one linked above.

The difficulty, I think, is in the whole "packing aluminum into your cylinder" aspect.

I need to set an action group to control the "free pivot" tweakable/toggle on the AGU, but it's not showing up. Any idea why?

Eh, I don't like it. It's not really realistic to mine aluminum to refuel a solid rocket; you can't refuel a solid. Better to have a hybrid rocket full of solid reducer that uses oxidizer from attached tanks as a resource. You can mine for more oxidizer if you want.

This is unclear. Are you talking about a carrier aircraft, like stratolauncher, or an SSTO with drop tanks?

Yes, but I'll interpret that loosely.

The ICBM is suborbital so it needs to be intercepted outside of the atmosphere. Or you can use a persistence mod if you want to do the interception inside the atmosphere. This makes it more tricky (but also a lot closer to the real thing).

You can launch from anywhere you want; it just has to cross 70 km and re-enter. But launching from farther away, or from a higher latitude, will get you bonus points. I'll accept proximity interceptors for Level 3, but the point of Level 4 is to match the GMD system used by the Pentagon, so it needs to be a kinetic kill. If your level-3 proximity interceptors don't actually kill the ICBM you can still get points for trying (or for demonstrating that a payload the same size as yours could have rendered a nuclear device inert). Also note additional edits above.

Yes! Once we have submissions, I'll create a leaderboard, and I'll be ranking submissions within each level based on difficulty. If you make your vehicle identical to an actual launch vehicle or if you can do something crazy like a sub launch, that'll put you on top in your level!

Kerbal Space Center is home to nine structures: Astronaut Complex Flag Pole Launch Pad Runway Spaceplane Hanger Tracking Station VAB Administration Building Research & Development Center You are a rogue agent who has infiltrated the KSC with a mission to sabotage the Space Program. Your plan is to wheel out a launch vehicle under cover of darkness, then fire it...sideways. Your goal is to take out as many of Kerbal Space Center's structures as possible in a single launch. You only have one shot before you will likely be caught, so you've got to make it count. Scoring will be based on the number of structures you successfully destroy, with scoring within each bloc based on launch vehicle weight. I'm expecting people to simply put everything on the launch pad at angles and stage once to fire it all, with the angles preplanned, but if you want to launch a platform into space and use MIRVs to do your dirty work, that's fine too!