mystifeid

Funny story ... at some point I looked at the parts page on the wiki, saw that empty sepratrons had a mass of 0.0 ... and I believed it!! I've been doing my best to believe that less is actually more but I've been feverishly fighting the feeling that I'm now gradually having less fun with each subsequent attempt at this challenge. After a few staging changes, 56 Sepratrons turned out to be easy and I made orbit on my first two attempts. So what about 54 Sepratrons? After many more staging changes, learning how to manage the upper stages a bit better and a few hundred attempts ... This rocket is called 'Dreaming'. 54 Sepratrons 72 parts 4.25 tons 14 stages

Yes, you can use a rocket. You will see two notifications on-screen: - "You are entering Sector P-PS" and - "You are leaving Sector P-PS" You must record the temperature in between these two events and you can be at any altitude below 17,700m. With a rocket you will be travelling reasonably quickly so have the thermometer window open, ready to click the button. Any rocket that you build that can reach that zone will be suitable. If at first you don't succeed you can always revert to launch and try again. And, welcome to the forums!

This is the creatively named 'Interstellar', a 7.885 ton probe capable of Kerbol escape. I seem to remember a few people being very good with these sorts of things so doubtless they will not find it hard to get under that weight - I know I was still getting the weight down but sooner or later, enough is enough...

I'm a bit paranoid about having miscounted the number of sepratrons so I've counted them about fifty times but I'll do it again anyway. There, 58 sepratrons. I'm still paranoid. (And let's be real - 58 seps? Where's the fun in that?) Below is the 'Wishful Thinking' because that's what it's largely held together by. My goal: use less than 60 seps without using a fairing. Other stats 4.52 tons 74 parts 14 stages

Good to see you're still trying. Are you clipping parts? Have you tried using launch stabilizers?

Nope, turns left but I can do things like move the CoM around a bit and then it has a right hand turn. It might be that it has more to do with the size of the engines and not the size of the blades.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that the green arrows show the amount of and direction of the torque of the engines. You've reversed the rotation of one of the engines so the green arrows should point in opposite directions. However you also reverse the deploy direction of the propeller blades on the engine with reversed rotation so that the thrust arrows (I'm assuming they're the pink ones) all point in the same direction. It looks like you might have some vibration judging by the splayed appearance of the green arrows - compare to :

Here's an attempt - just to try and kick things off. No mention made about water landings so I assume they're ok. (I think it would have made things a bit more interesting if the landing had to be at any one of the airstrips.) Also I may have overshot the end of the runway before releasing despite my best efforts not to do so but given how long it takes for each attempt...

Mine was only 15.542km/s.

Great stuff! Loved it. Maybe try using less? The thing I used above had something like 28 struts and 16 stages. But probably I think you should be able to get under 24 minutes.

Nice rocket and that's a really good tip about the fairings. Pity I'd already made another monstrosity... This is Optimus. Optimus can reach solar orbit, Mun orbit, And Minmus orbit. (Note that significant portions of this video have been removed for your viewing enjoyment - most notably, pauses during staging and the struggle to find a maneuver that required 226m/s to intercept Minmus. Also, it plays at 2x speed.) Duna and Eve fly-bys look posssible. Optimus has 2344 parts, 24 stages, 2236 Sepratrons and weighs 176.277 tons.

Couldn't really be bothered with starting from scratch so just turned the Navigator into the BF Navigator. Like I said - no style. I don't even want to know how it's possible to do this sort of time under 35km. It would, I think, be a heck of a lot harder. Anyway, the rubber's on the road at 24:20. The BF Navigator

Sheesh, there's a record? I'm guessing even if I beat that time that I won't win on style. I can drop out of the sky at supersonic speeds just fine without engines. My problems are more to do with exploding from overheating and stopping. Reverse thrust is used on approach as well as on landing. My Kerbals are not the best pilots and they can waste a lot of time landing. Probably not gonna happen. It's hard enough staying awake as it is and I sort of prefer just watching the vsi. I'm an old hang glider pilot (gave up 20 years ago) and it would be nice to bring back the old days where I could just listen to the vsi and not have to watch it all the time.

Umm yeah - sorry that I didn't see the earlier questions about Mechjeb. I should learn to read the thread. So I knocked up a plane and it landed ok in a test flight. Threw on an old heavy lifter and strapped on a couple more boosters just in case. It seemed to do the job but the climb out from launch was quite slow and I think it should be possible to make a better one. The landing gear somehow survived the abrupt vertical landing and I was moving at less than 1 m/s at 24:46. Stopped at 24:49. The Navigator.

Great. (Don't get me wrong - I love MJ).

Autopilot? Ascent Guidance?

Curious. Mechjeb adds parts. Is it still ok?

Nope.

If you want pure part count, my record is about 4400 with an asparagus ringed craft that looked something like the one below. (I made quite a few of these and I'm no longer sure which is which but they were all very high part count). No mods used. As far as the potato goes - trust me, it's nothing special. Must be five years old now. An old 4770 with 16GB ram and a (newer) GTX1060. It does have two ssd's and eight hard drives in five raid 0 arrays with the whole lot in an ancient steel Thermaltake Armor case (that weighs 17kg before you put anything inside). I love that case. If you do have a grunty computer then it will be perfectly capable of making high part count craft. You should try it. A certain amount of patience is required above about 1000 parts - for example, click and drag becomes click, wait and drag. Above about 1500 parts, any reverting or undoing will sooner or later lead to a ctd. Above about 3000 parts I can revert only once or twice before a ctd. Don't load auto-saved craft when restarting. Above about 1500 parts I need to start shutting down other processes. I use a ram drive so it's the first thing to get shut down. There is something of an art to it - example : about a third of the craft below actually fits in the VAB (and much less on the launch pad) - but you end up learning things that will help in normal situations. (Like don't make mistakes that require reverting). Launching/flying is also very slow. You saw how long it took for the engines to fire in the first video above. With only 2000 parts. So best your craft sheds parts as it goes so that things eventually speed up.

Right now I could use a few laughs too so here is me cheering myself up with a ... Mun flyby!!! Jeb was already planning where to put another couple of sepratrons on the top of the rocket that would see it able to enter into orbit around the Mun (and Minimus) until I pointed out that those few extras on top would require another three or four hundred on the other end. I reminded him of the almighty struggle he'd had this time just keeping the thing pointed vertically and if he was going to forget to use rigid attachments again it would do nothing to lessen his collection of ... strange feelings. This is Shockwave. 2147 parts. 2084 sepratrons. 160.699 tons. 26 stages. Apoapsis achieved - 12185.933km. Periapsis achieved - 701.234km. This time I've taken the liberty of removing all of the intermissions from the video so make sure to grab your popcorn before it starts. You'll need it. https://youtu.be/_HmqQjEIG4Y

Jeb was feeling bored so decided to rev up the Sepratron challenge he'd heard about. Of course, he refused to go in anything less than a Mk1 pod and thought a few creature comforts would be nice to take along - like battery, solar panels, antenna, reaction wheel - you know the drill. The first fifty tests were less than encouraging but he knew the key to overcoming almost any obstacle was to keep adding MOAR ... well ... very, very ... very tiny boosters. And finally it was ready to succeed. Meet Megatron. 2037 parts. 1992 sepratrons. 153.17 tons. 19 stages. Each band on the 2.5m parts has 72 rockets. The first 11 stages have 2 bands with the upper one angled outward so as not to fry the bottom one. Apoapsis achieved - 582.671km. Jeb says that he gets the strangest feeling sometimes - like he's died before. Many, many times before. And you may very well be dead too, before you finish watching this painfully slow video.

Only a baby. There was a challenge to impact the Mun where we were accelerating to around 23-25 km/s. I think I was getting about 2 fps with a 4000+ part rocket on launch. Mercifully this is acceleration over a much shorter period of time so the ship can be a lot smaller. It's easy to go faster. Not so easy to keep things from melting.

Is this ok? Forty-seven seconds.

If you are interested, I put Fat Boy on KerbalX here : https://kerbalx.com/mystifeid/Fat-Boy I could care less if you want to fly it or modify and fly it in this challenge. If you do try and fly the course with it I would suggest lowering the engine size at first otherwise I can guarantee you will run out of EC long before you finish.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong but I've tried using chase view and it didn't work. I've also tried using the arrow keys and bouncing from them to the prop pitch keys (I'm using "/" and "*" at the top of the number pad) is harder than using the mouse. If I was just puttering in for any old landing it wouldn't matter but, I'm not. I don't like binding anything to the main throttle because (at least in previous versions) the main throttle does not have fine control (caps-lock) and my left hand is already pretty busy flying the plane. No, I think if I was going to keep doing this mouse macros would be the easiest thing for me.