QF9E

Is kOS allowed?

The Big-S wing strake. It has the same ratio between surface area and mass as most other wings, and it has built-in fuel tanks. Out of all the wings with internal fuel tanks, the Big-S wing strake has the best dry mass to wet mass ratio. Moreover, it attaches beautifully to itself and lends itself to making very elegantly curved wing designs. On top of that, it is also able to withstand entry heat very well. Very useful if you're in the business of building heavily optimized space planes. Interesting! That might just be what my Jool-5 mission needs.

Those are brilliant! I honestly never gave the KAL-1000 much thought and I never even considered linking multiple KAL-1000s together, let alone to make them into a calculator.

@imcute You will stop telling others that they are playing the game in the wrong way. I've been trying to be patient with you and take a constructive stance. But my patience is coming to an end. Everyone knows that bringing a small plane to Laythe is easier and more practical with a Mk3 Shuttle. But that is the entire point: to see if you can complete the mission without doing the obvious thing. If you do so, you even risk becoming a better KSP player.

You can't, not directly. But there is a way to make it work, which I'll leave for you to discover. Consider that part of the current challenge.

The current spate of replies by user @imcute where they complete various challenges by abusing the KAL-1000 not checking parameter limits got me thinking: what legitimate, cool things can you do with a KAL-1000? I'm by no means an expert, having just the bare minimum of experience with the KAL-1000, so the current challenge is quite open-ended: Build something in the game that is automated in a legitimate manner by the use of one or more KAL-1000s. By "legitimate" I mean that your entry should not be using the KAL-1000 to set any game parameter to a value outside the limits for that parameter that are enforced by other parts of the game. For instance, if you use a KAL-1000 to control the thrust of an engine, that thrust must stay between 0 and 100 percent of rated thrust. Movement of robotic parts must stay within the limits set for those parts. Using a KAL-1000 to have an SRB respond to throttle input from the user while in flight is forbidden. If you want to fly an SRB powered craft with a pre-programmed, non-constant thrust profile (as was done in real life with, e.g., the Space Shuttle), go right ahead. And so on. I hope this rule makes it clear what I mean by legitimate use of the KAL-1000. But I realize this rule is not 100% watertight, so please don't rules lawyer the challenge and, when in doubt if something is allowed, please ask. The challenge is aimed at @imcute in particular, who, in a different thread, stated that they thought the only reason for the KAL-1000 existing in the game was to exceed parameter limits. But other people can join as well. If you have an older craft that uses the KAL-1000 in an interesting way, feel free to post that as well. Other challenge rules: To keep a level playing field, please only use parts from the base game and DLCs. Informational and visual mods allowed Autopilots other than the stock SAS, as well as other mods that automate parts of the game, such as kOS, are not allowed. The idea is to use only the KAL-1000 to automate your craft. No Kraken drives, cheating, editing of game files (which amounts to writing your own mod) or otherwise exploiting the game engine in unreasonable ways. Using the Alt-F12 menus to set the location of your craft is allowed, as is using the informational displays that can be found there, such as the AeroGUI or the thermal data for parts. Please document any such use, though. Don't use the Alt-F12 menu to modify standard game physics, though. Submissions to the challenge preferably as a short video showcasing your craft.

Never tried to build a walking robot? The KAL-1000 comes in pretty handy when you want have multiple parts moving in unison. In my opinion the KAL-1000 not checking for limits is a pretty big oversight of the game designers. KSP is supposed to be a somewhat realistic spaceflight simulator. You cannot run real-life engines at negative thrust to produce fuel, nor can you run real-life engines at, say, 10x their rated thrust. And besides, using the KAL-1000 in that fashion removes almost all difficulty from the game. While it is not up to me to tell you that how you play this game is wrong, you won't earn my respect by exploiting loopholes. But I'm ending this discussion here. I don't want to derail @boolybooly's excellent SSTO challenge any more than we have done already. That exactly mirrors my experience when I was setting the record. My current record is about at the limit of what the game engine allows. To get back your saves: delete the "persistent" save file in the campaign where you attempted the record. Your other saves are still there, it's just that the menu loading screen where you can choose which campaign you want to continue breaks if one of the save files is corrupted.

What they mean is abusing the KAL-1000 to change the thrust limiter to below 0. If you do that, the engine will start generating fuel. In case you're unaware, the KAL-1000 does not check limits, so you can set parameters like the thrust limiter to values outside the range allowed in the context menu.

Alt-F12 indeed. Given the orbital speed that close to the Sun it will be a major challenge to circularize your orbit. My craft reached about 74 km/s, and you'll need to lose most of that speed. You could use some gravity assists to your advantage, but that won't bring your apoapse much below Moho's.

For a challenge on this forum I recently did a mission where a probe got to within 100 Mm, but that one was on a highly elliptical orbit. However, I did test the spacecraft I used for that in low circular orbits, and it survived (including at timewarp) to about 80 Mm. Lower than that and even the inflatable heatshield burns up in the heat. You might be able to go lower if you include an extensive thermal control system.

With a bit of help from @camacju and the extra dv that my second attempt had gained me, I have been able to bring back the Galaksy to Low Kerbin Orbit without having to launch a refueling mission. In the end I decided to limit the number of gravity assists, as I still don't have a lot of confidence in doing them. So I gave my ship a bigger boost to get a favourable encounter with Laythe immediately, which ejected my ship from the Joolian system with a PE near that of Kerbin. Two gravity assists from Kerbin lowered my AP to within Duna's orbit, and a final Eve gravity assist lowered AP to Kerbin's orbit. I then aerocaptured at Kerbin, which almost succeeded: I was about 50 m/s short and one landing strut burned off. Fortunately I had enough dv left for a 50 m/s capture burn. I then did numerous aerobraking passes to reach Low Kerbin Orbit. And finally, here's the hero of this story, Chief Engineer Hanbrett Kerman, back on Kerbin. I recently learned that it is possible to land a Kerbal on their own from low Kerbin orbit. I put Hanbrett on EVA, lowered his PE to 68 km and waited for his temperature to rise enough for a temperature bar to show. I then performed a re-entry burn by burning all remaining EVA fuel retrograde. This brought his speed down to about 1300 m/s, low enough that heating isn't an issue anymore. I then landed Hanbrett using his personal parachute. In conclusion: I did the entire challenge without launching a rescue mission from Kerbin. I won't say it was easy (it very much was not) but I enjoyed it a lot. Thank you, @EpicRaisin for posting this unique challenge!

Well, I gave it a try, but no luck. Any help is appreciated. I got a similar trajectory to yours, with a Laythe assist followed by a Tylo encounter: (BTW: I have more dv to spend in low Vall orbit because i re-did the mission. This time I took the fuel in the cockpit section with me. I also fixed the broken dv indicator at lower left: it seems that the game gets confused when the active craft is formally classified as debris) Which led to a collision course with Tylo. Which I could avoid with a course correction, which had the added effect that Tylo gave me an assist to a much higher orbit, still inside the Jool SOI: A second Tylo assist got me into an even wider orbit, halfway to the edge of the Jool SOI: A third Tylo assist ejected me from the Jool system: You'd say I'm on the right path but I ended up in an orbit halfway between Duna and Dres: And I'm stumped as to how to get from there to the inner solar system and gravity assists with Kerbin and / or Eve. The only option I see is to try to get a Jool assist, which would be 10s if not 100s of years in the future. But by this point I was thoroughly frustrated with my apparent lack of progress. This took me a couple of hours of game time and 12 years of mission time, both of which seem excessive to me. I've tried many, many times before, and it is always the same - lack of progress, frustration and very, very long game sessions with little to show for it. I think something about gravity assists simply does not click with me, Any help or tips are greatly appreciated, as I've been wrestling with this for years.

Interesting, thanks for the tip! Gravity assists are not my strong suit, but I might give it a go. There is also a way to get more dv: using EVA construction it is possible to move fuel from one ship to another: first attach an empty fuel tank to one ship, pump fuel into it, attach it to the other ship, pump the fuel out, repeat. In this fashion you can make use of the fuel still in the forward part of the ship that has broken off. I did not bother with that as I thought I would not have enough dv anyway and it is a bit of a hassle, but your post makes me reconsider.

Video of my entire mission. I left in some bits that I would ordinarily edit out to comply with the "minimal editing" rule for this challenge.

Thanks, I'll wear it with pride! Wouldn't it have been possible to spawn a capsule with a Kerbal inside on the launchpad, have the Kerbal go on EVA and then use the cheat menu to place just the Kerbal on Vall? I think you can also terminate the lander in the Tracking window. I don't see how it would be possible to orbit the ship without the parts provided by the lander. I may even do the challenge a second time without that tiny lander. I've got a few other ideas to get the Kerbals off the surface without landing. Yup, I did find them. But it turns out to be virtually impossible to strut the ship back together on the ground in a more or less symmetric shape, as the unstrutted parts are sagging so much. Yes, I still have to launch a fueler from Kerbin to get the ship home. That said, I do not expect any major problems with that phase of the mission. I've flown to the Jool system numerous times.

I think I may have beaten your challenge: I've got all Kerbals off the surface of Vall (+1500) With ZERO descents (-0) Without landing on the ship (+200) One rescue launch (provisionally). All they need is more fuel so that they can go back to Kerbin on their own. (+150) Rescued every Kerbal (+201) For a grand total of 2051. You may be wondering how I did it. Well, there's a couple of Engineer Kerbals on the ship, so I made heavy use of EVA construction. I noticed that the ship has plenty of fuel and a working propulsion system, indicating to me that it, in principle, should be able to lift off of the Vallian surface. However, there's three major problems: It does not have any means of control, as its cockpit has broken off; Its TWR is way lower than 1, so it cannot take off under rocket power. It has no way to raise itself to a vertical position. I solved the control problem by breaking down the tiny lander into parts and attaching its lander can to the front of the Galaksy. I then mounted the lander engine to the Galaksy, pointing upwards and burned off most of its fuel, in order to reach an acceptable TWR of about 1.3. This took a while: I needed to lose about 13000 units of oxidizer and a corresponding amount of fuel, and I only had a single Terrier engine to do it. In all it took about 25 minutes of game time to burn off all the necessary fuel and oxidizer. To raise the ship into a vertical position, I then removed the Terrier engine from its temporary mount and refitted it to the nose of the ship, pointing downwards. Liftoff was by no means easy, mainly due to the fact that most of the struts holding the rear of the ship together had gone, so the ship has a tendency to sag at the back. But in the end I managed to reach low Vall orbit, as indicated by the screenshot above. I'll post a video later. This was an epic challenge, and it left me thoroughly exhausted.

And another question: if I were to salvage the entire ship, would that please the aliens? I'd have to touch the ship with a Klaw, does that count as landing on it, even if no other part of my rescue vessel were to touch the ship?

Sounds like fun, I'm in! Question about the "no cuts in the video" rule: If I screw up halfway into the mission and have to go back to a quicksave from, say, 30 minutes earlier, do you really want to see those 30 minutes with the failed attempt? When I make a video of a challenge mission, I usually only keep the successful bits, cutting any footage that ended in me reverting to an earlier save file. I also usually cut out bits where I go to the menu (say, to pause the game for a bathroom break). Would that level of editing be allowed?

Today I touched the Sun! Well, almost, I got to within about 100 thousand kilometers. Much closer and my craft would have burned up.

The altitude limits for the various modes aside, I had never done a mission to the vicinity of the Sun before. It turns out that from up close the Sun is quite impressive! I managed to get to within about 100 000 kilometers. Which is more than close enough to complete the challenge in God mode. Please excuse my using the Precise Maneuver mod. It does exactly the same as the maneuver tab in the gizmo at lower left, only much more user-friendly. I am so used to this mod that I did not even notice I had been using it until I was editing the video. Due to the extreme caution necessary when time-warping in the vicinity of the Sun, completing this mission took quite a lot of time, and I rather not have to do it again just because I used this particular mod that has no bearing whatsoever on my craft or the game physics.

Here's my submission on Hard mode. I know it's not a video, but that is hardly necessary as the mission took only about 1 second: FYI: the distance from Kerbin to the Sun is only 13.6 million km. Please keep in mind that the KSP solar system is much smaller than the real one.

I found that the link in the top post does not work anymore, but another user reposted it, and that link does still work for me:

The easiest way to find out the duration of a mission is the mission clock in the top left corner. It shows the amount of time elapsed since takeoff. At 0:20 in the video, with 1 minutes 29 on the mission clock, I crossed the 983 m/s boundary while accelerating; at 3:00 in the video, 14 minutes 46 on the mission clock I crossed the boundary while decelerating. The entire time in between, 13 minutes 17 seconds, I flew at above 983 m/s, which does fulfil the requirements for Impossible mode. If the mission clock moves faster than 1 second per second, physical time warp has been engaged and / or the footage has been sped up. I did not use physical time warp but the video is sped up by a factor of 5. If the mission clock is yellow or red, this means that the game engine cannot keep up and mission time moves slower than real time. If you want to be precise, you can scroll through a YT video one frame at a time: after pausing the video you can go to the next frame by pressing the "." key, Pressing the "," key moves you one frame back. I just used this method to find the exact frames where I crossed the 983 m/s boundary.

So, you didn't even bother watching a 4 minute long video? If you're not interested in the results, why post these challenges at all? I might have been using physical time warp. I might have sped up the footage to spare my viewers 20 minutes of me flying in straight lines. You don't know because you did not watch it. Next time, before you start throwing stones, make sure you are actually correct, will you? Please point me to the passage in your original post with the rule that you get your flight time multiplied by 3. I based my score on the following rule, from your own OP: No mention of any points multiplier there. If this is not what you meant, please update your top post. For the record: I will not participate in any of your future challenges. You've made it abundantly clear that you do not appreciate my submissions.

My submission: It's a variant of the craft from my screenshot. I launched my craft vertically from the launchpad and took Valentina and two tourists on a flight with a speed of about 1500 m/s. Halfway through the flight I turned around and flew back to the KSC where I landed vertically on the runway. This is an Impossible mode submission; from 01:31 to 14:40 my craft was faster than an SR-71. Points: Kerballed (+5) Tourists (+10) Landed intact (+15) VTOL craft (+30) 3 minutes extra fast flight (+3) Total: 63 points.