gm537

@Xeldrak: This part of the challenge I could do without. While Sirine might have been trolling because you were a bit curt to him when he asked for more specific rules his design honestly seems quite a bit more appropriate for this challenge than some of the others submitted. Yet he's the one who gets yelled at. At least he had the thought to be funny in submitting a non-optimal plane, others have simply thrown up hugely fast, high altitude, air-hogging fighters. @Sirine: I get the feeling that English is not your first language if so bravo for sticking around such a subjective challenge. Might I suggest posting what objective criteria you will give your vote based upon. Then you could build the best design to those criteria, test all the others to that criteria and then award your vote to the best. Yes others might vote differently but everyone submitting a design would have at least one objective goal to try for in order to win your vote! Try not to hassle Xeldrak he is doing a great, and time consuming, job running these challenges and we want to keep it fun for him! @gm537: I know I might be sticking my nose where it don't belongs so know that I only mean to help keep this challenge fun for everyone involved and this snafu seemed to be endangering that. Hopefully this helps you consider the other's point of view a bit and encourages you to keep building Better Stock Craft!

Okay the more I see of this challenge the more I like it! The best part is getting to test all the crazy designs, so much fun. For example earlier today I made a comment about how hard (impossible) it is to build something that will survive 4x time warp especially if you start giving it control input, but the Klobal Flyer does amazingly well!!! I did eventually get it to break but at 8km altitude and 4x time warp I had to wail on it to break it. It was super impressive! Hope you guys are having as much fun with mine!

@mhoram Dude this plane is amazing!!! Ok so I've been flying a bunch of planes today and yours is the first (possibly ever) to be yaw stable!!! This is the easiest to control in flight plane I have ever flown! (take off and landing aren't perfect but totally acceptable) I'll test it to near fuel empty and at altitude but holy cow!

No side effects?!? Um no fault to you here but I flew it at 4x and pressing ANY control button for more than a millisecond causes one of the two rear wings to break off and the whole thing to nose dive. Now given it does not immediately dissingetrate upon hitting 4x but that's not 'no negative impacts'. Again more of just a weakness of the current build of the game but still the claim is a bit outrageous. Now even with that said I love the design! I've flown a few of the designs so far and this is my favorite so far! Good job Whistlehead!

Haha Ooops. Yeah it wasn't a stock install so I guess I just mistook that for the tail fins. Thanks for the catch! I will edit the post with the new .craft ASAP. Edit: It's done. Unfortunately the changes do make braking a bit less stable. Though still not nearly as bad as the Albatross 3 and I (and Bob) still love how the design looks!

Oh man look at all these awesome designs! This competition definitely brings out the best designs from people. I am a bit confused on the Vampire though since the only thing we've consistently said as a guideline for what the Albatross should be is 'long-range' and probably not very high altitude/ very fast; which is not to say that plane is anything other than awesome!!! Just maybe a better Aeris 3A replacement. Hopefully you guys all understood what Bob was talking about regarding the Kalbatross. Overall I must say it's one of my favorite designs I've ever done. It's not perfect but is a marked improvement over the Albatross while retaining most of it's unique design that makes it look just amazing and really interesting. In fact back when I first got the full game in 0.18 the first stock plane I flew was the Albatross because it was just so interesting looking. Even back then I realized it was pretty bad so I immediately tried to make an improved design while retaining the character. So thank you for a competition that finally inspired me to go back and finish that dream!

Excerpt from Bob Kerman's Diary: "I must say am very happy with the Kalbatross. While I was very worried about building some new contraption I had gotten quite fed up with almost dying every time I flew that 'Albatross 3' that Jeb designed. This new one has only one engine to make it slower, so that Jeb won't want to steal it, and the engineers say it will still fly all the way around Kerbin. Of course such a feat would be most terrifying so I don't think I will attempt it soon. Those silly scientists did require that it have a number of 'sensors' on it, but they also agreed to add a remote control unit so that on days when my vertigo is acting up I can just fly it from the ground. Neat! Having flown it a bunch, and even getting in once, I really appreciate the increased maenuever... turniness, and the amazing brakes! Now on to scrap-booking the photos I took." Pictures from Bob's scrapbook: Sitting in the SPH with my new baby. It flies! Of course I'm not in it yet. "Wow it really can go far!" Me conquering my fear of flying! It even stops safe when I smash the breaks from 50m/s. Hey Bill you can fly it too if you want. But please don't let Jeb near it... He'll add more engines. http://www./view/ss5zk83dw6sa8z0/Kalbatross.craft

Mostly Xeldrak's which has some similarities to Hejnfelt, basically a wide base with lander legs coming of a set of 1.25m tanks with 909's underneath with a central 2.5m stack. Mine is designed to have a very low COM and be land-able just about everywhere. I landed on the Mun on a slope of nearly 40 degrees as in my Navball was pointing at the 50 degree line.

Alrighty here is my submission. Just to prove it could be done I decided to make an interstellar LV-1 rocket. Here we are in the VAB as you can see I've got 1 Rockomax 32, 3 T400's, and 5 Oscars a total of 2,009 units of Liquid Fuel Lift-Off!!! With approximately 2 crap tons of engines. (Jeb Would be Proud) A scenic shot in orbit over Kerbin My final interstellar orbit After 1 year of MET we have made it well beyond Jool and will never stop. Well not sure how many points that's worth or what altitude to call it but it does prove the power of the even the tiniest of engines. Very enjoyable challenge.

Fun challenge. What is the point of the points? I mean I guess they are only for interplanetary but wouldn't a 'rocket' that flies nowhere but uses zero fuel get a very good score. Additionally what counts as a 'unit of fuel' is it just LF or LF+OX? (since ratios are constant it doesn't matter too much but it does dictate if one should use more fuel or visit more planets) and what counts as visiting a planet? Just SOI, or stable orbit, or landing? (The latter seems a bit challenging to accomplish on an amount of fuel which is worth while) Thanks for helping explain!

Saw this competition a while back and it didn't catch my eye, but I must say lately I've really been looking for a good "Heavy-Lander" and the designs here are all pretty dang good. It's funny to see that what I eventually came up with for personal use is pretty similar to the finalists but with a little missing functionality that I will be adding ASAP.

@1greywind: Yeah I'm sure a more 'complex' method could definitely be used to complete the mission but I'm lazy and it seemed straight forward enough. My math also says that my ship used had about 2km/s too much dV but for a first attempt I was pretty happy. As mentioned this is a very fun (and well organized) challenge and I hope it doesn't get lost in the .22 hoo-ha I also haven't check out the XL version but I think that 53 tons is gonna be quite the challenge.

Just completed a Brute Force attempt. Pretty much the exact same profile as before but with a much larger ship (and Mechjeb) and more screen shots. They're all in the imgur album. http://imgur.com/a/nXXrW The final orbit altitude was a PE of 368,053 km and AP 368,065 km.

Haha yeah unfortunately I had already completed most of the mission when I read this. But I will upload the screenshots I have and describe my mission profile which was actually super simple. Thanks for being understanding! This submission is for "The Patience Way" (although it didn't use any flybys so it could count for "The Brute Force"). You can see in the VAB that I have only stock parts and at launch that my launch mass was 200.13 tons (or 200,130kg). After this I flew into orbit using a standard ascent profile to put me in an equatorial orbit around Kerbin. From there I simply made a long burn to bring my Kerbol apoapsis out to over 10 times the orbit distance of Jool. I then time accelerated for a very long time, eventually I decided I didn't want to wait another 12 years to hit AP and burned retrograde to bring it down to about 5 years. At AP I made the change from equatorial orbit to polar orbit and brought my PE down under 4,000,000 km. This next screenshot shows my ship after that burn. Notice how far I am from Kerbol and that my orbital speed is only about 200 m/s. Once I was down at PE it was just a matter of circularizing! The picture that highlights my orbital parameters had the AN shown on the right as it appears that you can't click AN/DN to show them. (Just AP and PE) As a final point with the AP and PE shown in the 4th picture I calculate my eccentricity to be 0.000042 < 0.001. Like I said it's a pretty straightforward entry with a launch mass of 200.13 tons and a flight profile that doesn't technically use any gravity assists. When I try Brute Force I will be sure to highlight more of my maneuvers.

This challenge looks like tons of fun!!! Especially since there are three categories each judged on a different criteria! Also I think for "The Kerbal Way" you may want to specify a few mods that can't be used, HyperEdit for example. (Sorry if you said this and I missed it) I'm working on "The Patience Way" right now, and it is indeed taking patience. Haha Also what screen shots do you need for the attempt to count? I have one in the VAB, one at launch (to show mass), and was planning one once complete. I also didn't initially read that info mods are allowed so I'm doing 'hard mode'. Oh well...

Respawn (and others) you have the right idea, but bad maths as his current formula can't give more than 1000 (unless you bring a crap ton of Kerbals) you got the ratio inverted. The scoring suggestion was also my first thought but that is actually just Orbit Mass, as the Pad Masses cancel, and thus a heavy lifting challenge and lord knows we've seen a bunch of those. I would instead suggest something like: Pad Mass * Accomplishment. These accomplishments could be anything but I'm thinking of it as what you did with your huge rocket. The multipliers don't have to be large or even that diverse. Ex. Getting to Orbit is a x8 multiplier while a land and return from Eve is a x16 multiplier. The goals make it fun and the Pad mass driving multiplier makes people make large rockets!!! (Not just efficient ones)

I will second that request. I think it would work best to show both a green icon and a blue one showing that the mission has been completed at least once and that it can still be completed. And second how do you save a file as a (dot)mpkg? I saw the guide Nobody made for making mission packages (which is super helpful!!!) and thought I would just try editing an existing pack, but when I save it from the text editor it saves as a txt file. I'm sure this is just some lack of knowledge on what a good text editor would be or a trick I don't know. Thanks for the info! Overall been loving this mod! Thanks for the work you've put into it!

Well I guess wings by default allow part clipping. Which is silly but appologies about that (though it's a set of three wings and I don't think a tri-plane would by default be disallowed) my bad on the pre-Kethane flag plant but it was empty. I actually specifically sent a second ship to Eve cause the first had been a tester pre-loaded with fuel. And while it is perhaps possible to have infi-glided the plane (which I didn't do and frankly upon trying was unable to do), but I'd like to point out that ALL aerodynamic surfaces in KSP are currently flawed. Any plane at all technically violates physics. It's just a question of how much you allow it to be violated. So that then is the question: how many flaps / aerodynamic surfaces am I allowed? Is it by plane mass?

Whew. I gotta say this is quite the challenge! But I have succeeded! My craft was stock except for mechjeb on the launcher. The plane itself was totally stock. I was able to do the flight with only one fuel stop too. Sorry for all the pics at one time. The full ship on the launch pad Arriving at Eve Landed on Eve Flag is planted we're all fueled up and ready to go In flight headed west. It took much longer than expected to reach a reasonable cruising altitude and speed. My first landing but Kethane is no where in site. I only stopped to avoid my next landing being in the dark. Epic shot after taking off in the morning My first and only refueling stop. From here the nearest Kethane deposit in the desired direction is almost 2,000 km away. My Eve is very one sided... Another epic shot of Eve's large ocean My first flag is within 100km. Victory!!! Lemsted has landed safe and sound and planted another flag to commemorate the event My take off and landing site located at 40' N and 229deg 52' W My refueling stop at 17deg 44' N and 3deg 40' W All in all that was indeed quite a bit of work but very fulfilling. It reminded me of the time when I circumnavigated Kerbin back in .17 before air intakes, oxidiser, and when Eve had an 11,000m plateau to land on. Thanks for the challenge!

Wow I'm quite impressed with all the people who have done this!!! I generally love Eve and have often tried to build land and return missions with only occasional success. But I hadn't put much thought to flying around it! I am working on my craft right now! Does anyone have any tips on how flying around Kerbin compares to Eve? Like if I build a craft which is capable of circumnavigating Kerbin on one tank will I need one stop on Eve? Two stops?

Does version .19 (or .19.2) give the reward payout for optional parts of missions? So far I have done two missions with "optional" parts which claim to have a payout bonus for completion but have not gotten any bonus. The two missions I've done are the Duna I from Stock package, and 01 Launch Communications Satellite from the Civilian Space Program. Thanks for the info!

Here is my entry with a Kerbin to Mun landing time of 1:35:57 and back to Kerbin in time for dinner with a time of 2:37:38. The ship's name is Hermes II. On the launch pad At the Mun Back at Kerbin For the challenge are we only supposed to land on the Mun? Or return to Kerbin? It seems like the Kerbin to Mun is the part being timed.

In the speed submission I came up with the following: I'm sure the 2,810 won't last but it's nice to be in first for a while!

Hey man I feel like this isn't really a challenge. It's just you asking us to test a mod you made. Not trying to be offensive here but you probabbly aren't gonna get a lot of interest in this.

Well I have finally finished my massive Mun colony. My first site with Gas Guzzler and Site to Behold Looking South you can see all the sites: Site 3 which is representative of Sites 3 through 8 (Site 2 is same design as 1) The capital ship Site 9 The album is here for some point checking. http://imgur.com/a/qqd5l My calculation of total points: Site 1 Enzo: Site to Behold: 50 Gas Guzzler: 50 7 HOME Habitats: 105 3 HOME Recons w/ ANT: 30 HOME Power Plant: 15 Resident Kerbals: 42 Sub-Total: 292 Site 2 Modena: 7 HOME Habitats: 105 3 HOME Recons w/ ANT: 30 HOME Power Plant: 15 Resident Kerbals: 42 Sub-Total: 192 Site 3 Maranello: 8 HOME Habitats: 120 3 HOME Recons w/ ANT: 30 HOME Power Plant: 15 Resident Kerbals: 46 Sub-Total: 211 Site 4 Testarossa: Identical to Site 3 Sub-Total: 211 Site 5 Dino: Identical to Site 3 Sub-Total: 211 Site 6 GTO: Identical to Site 3 Sub-Total: 211 Site 7 California: Identical to Site 3 Sub-Total: 211 Site 8 Italia: Identical to Site 3 Sub-Total: 211 Site 9 LaFerrari: Site to Behold: 50 20 HOME Habitats: 300 6 HOME Recons w/ ANT: 60 HOME Power Plant: 15 Charlie's Deli and Shoe Store: 5 Resident Kerbals: 118 Sub-Total: 548 Colony Total with 90 point site bonus and 10 point Mun bonus: 2,398 points