MarvinKitFox

My first Successful Mun lander massed about 400 tons. No, not the ship. the LANDER! . Yes, one learns a simpler way of doing things, later on. Also, today's Kerbin atmosphere is NO PATCH on the original 0.24 soup-o-sphere.. Just getting to orbit used to take 4500-5000 delta-v, now it can be done in 2850.

And you need to do it in a week. So your ship needs to be able to sustain 2.1g of acceleration, for 7 days nonstop. Dead minimum. . . . Or, Maybe, the OP needs to figure out how to spell. And how to phrase a challenge that is understandable? Or how to define parameters so that they make any sense? Life support? Ok, which system? What mods are allowed? Considering that the inclusion of life support rather requires mods, which are allowed/mandatory/forbidden? Replied to by OP, with sensible parameters. Thankyou!

So, the primary goal of this "challange" is to figure out how to leave a "comemorial" message in one kilogram "1000 gm"? Alternatively, you can leave it in a 1969 model General Motors car? "1969 GM"

10 hours sounds about right. 15 to have a design that actually lands where you want it to, and manages to return to Kerbal. . . Now? New game, hard career, 20 minutes to get the money and tech, build the ship, and get there and back.

Ouf! My problem with this is: I need to tweak the throttle VERY actively. Lift off at 9g, and you go no-where Lift off at 12g, and you move too slow, gravity losses kill you Lift off at 14g, and your craft vaporizes itself against the atmosphere. My best attempt so far has 25 cores, 10 stages, each being the biggest tank and about 18 vectors. Launch speed is 23. That's measured in Seconds per Frame, y'all! It gets to 50000m, 3600m/s before disintegrating from carpet burn. If, somehow IF I can hold it together, it has enough deltav and TWR to get to orbit, and to land. Landing is via inflatable heatshield, tiny capsule, and one awful lot of parachutes. I'm beginning to suspect 10g orbit is unobtanium. Here's the Beast, on the launchpad. Sorry, once i fire the engines nothing responds, least of all the F1 key. P.S. I just checked, this thing has 666 parts. Maybe that's why it is so evil?

deja vu?

Ok, by your rules: My entry, on the runway. Single Panther engine, 400 fuel in a Mk-I tank, shock cone intake.

hmm, trying this just for the fun of it. For 5thHorseman I'm running Normal difficulty, but I do use the KER mod. Mostly because pure stock makes gathering EVA reports from all biomes a vile experience! I also use a ton of quicksaves, not to eliminate human error (if i crash & burn i accept the pain), but because my KSP crashes to desktop very very very often. (average 3 times, for one Mun landing mission) 000 Press Briefing: basic hopper on a flea. 001 Hopper I: SRB to space(not orbit) 002 base TumbleTrundle: third was a nice little tumbletrundle to run around base and collect all sciences. (stealing Blasty's design, i like it!) Upgrade kerbalnaught facility for eva ability. 003 Orbit I : One manned polar orbit, for eva & 250km. Upgrade launchpad to level 2. Institute admin policy for more reward from firsts.(at 25% commit) 004 Mun I: mission to Mun land then polar orbit, all biomes orbital eva report. return to Kerbin with a whopping 16m/s left in the tank. 005 MinMus I: Just replaced the 004's 9*medium srb with 3*giant, to allow maxx remaining delta-v at MinMus. Get orbital science & achieves. Upgrade R&D to tier2. Land, then spend the ~2000d/v i have to land as many places as i can, get as much science as i can (report,temp, pressure, eva,sample,goo and lab each.) got 3 type of flats, slope, lowland,midland, highland, poles. I missed one biome, think its a type of flats? Maybe great vs greater? Minmus was GOOD for my science Current status: maxed out research in tier1 R&D facility, 900 science left unusable. Launchpad is level2, asstronaut is level2, R&D tier2. got 5331 science to throw at tier2, that should about fill it! funds 463k. I'm still limited to 30 parts, and no space comms. But who needs that? If i'm willing to wait until planes align suitably, I can bullseye eve,duna and jool easy enough. (moho and eeloo are elusive, and that other one.. whatsisname,... dros? drek? i never bother with. Next goal: get all tier2 science. Go Jool system.

Ok, so how about I use the plugin "Notepad" and set science=100000000000 ?

Ok, so by your example, the correct way to do this challenge is to: 1) locate a mod that gives oodles and oodles of noodles worth of FREE science. what happened to: 2) claim win? Sorry, count me out!

erf? Scoring as ((top speed+distance)- mothership speed)/parts count=points so if i fly up to 69995m, at orbital speed, and use the very rare puff of propulsion from my ion engine, i could score several billion points? best stato-skimmer uses about 0.5 sec of ion drive, twice per orbit, to maintain this position There is VERY little aero drag at space-5m

Dood.... 2. The craft must have a docking port, and no command seats.

Keeping all three columns is a great idea, but yes it makes for a great many launches needed. Also, docking three at a time is *almost* impossible, the game will SO much rather just dock one, and leave the other two dangling, as the game engine massively prefers a tree-structure rather than a potentially cycling network structure. 8 launches? Impressive!

Slightly mangled your album posting, but one can get to it by slicing the url. You have there ONE picture of a vehicle on the launchpad, with 3 * 75m (each is 5 * 15m SRB) with docking ports on the end. So, you say you launched **THREE** of these, rendezvoused and docked 8 segments together, throwing the 9th one away? thus making the "600m" orbital assembly you claim? Pictures would be nice, of both the launch, orbit, rendezvous and docking, for all three vehicles. The S1 booster (when empty) is a nice long, light structural element, but stringing 40 of them together in a long spaghetti gives you a noodle with a length/diameter ratio of almost 500-to-one, linked through 24 rubbery joints and 8 joints make of silly putty.. It becomes a monster that wants to invite the Kraken.

The inclusion of a good kerbin-surface engine with great TWR and surface ISP, regardless of its miniscule size, makes this a complete non-challenge. for example: this abomination puts 45 tons in low orbit, using only Spark engines. With 45 tons up there, you can go anywhere and do anything.

Lowest cost to launch weigh ratio, for a 100km-orbit capable vehicle? Hokay... . . . Looks up single propulsive part with lowest cost per kg, assemble 17000 of them..... . . never mind.. look up **any** item with lowest cost/kg ratio, assemble 17000 of them. then decoupler on top and small efficient rocket on that.

About 200.. Put a spaceship in kerbal orbit, retrograde to MinMus's orbit, and with periapsis around Kerbin of 44750000 and apoapsis of about 49245000. (this is a slightly eccentric orbit, identical period as MinMus, just touching the MinMus SOI near apoapsis and just MISSING Minmus SOI during the periapsis encounter half an orbit later.) Make sure your Apoapsis occurs during your MinMus encounter. You will have less than 30 seconds on entry into MinMus SOI each orbit, before exiting. It takes about 200 orbits before your orbit is sufficiently perturbed to deviate away from MinMus, entering chaotic state. Not what you had in mind, of course, but it matches the criteria of your poorly worded challenge.

Entry withdrawn in protest.

That's not a problem of glitching landing gear, that is a problem of WAAAAAAY overloaded landing gear! By all rights it should have collapsed as you landed.

Status update: Land on IKE, refuel. Perfection Land on Duna: refue.... refue.... c'mon!!!! I even used every last drop of fuel, relocated some 69km to the east.. Dry well again. Guess next time i need to design in a Resource Scanner, eh?

Well, here is WAS my try. Progress so far: Kerbin,Mun,Minmus, ike, duna-stranded. Rules: Single design, single launch. No retries, no loading saved designs. I *am* saving quite often, and reloading ***only when my ksp has crashed***. My ksp install dies every 30 minutes or so, so this is unavoidable. I do not reload because i crashed my spaceship, forgot to do something, or did anything silly. Only for computer program crashes. And for sleep, as this challenge is looking to take many hours! My basic design is an interplanetary caddy running a nice efficient Nuke, and a VERY overbuilt lander than can handle absolutely any surface landing and relaunch except Kerbin and Eve. It uses ISRU to refuel itself and its interplanetary caddy. The Album of my quest, will be updated to current progress as often as I can. Current progress: Launched, Mun, Minmus, Ike, Duna. stranded on Duna. Unfortunately, my Dana landing site had no resourced to harvest. Nor did the relocation 69 km away. What a sad ending, all for lack of a resource scanner. https://imgur.com/a/x3kO4 Mods used: KER, Alarm Clock. Waypoint finder is also in there, but irrelevant. P.S. I have tested my ship afterwards, it is quite capable of all moons and planets including Eeloo and Moho except for Eve (and of course Jool). Moho has to be the *last* stop though, as I need to dump the lander after vampyring all its fuel, to get out of that nasty gravity well back to Kerbin. If only I had a resource scanner! Errors I made in my quest: try1: did not strut the modules under the Payload fairing. *fiiine* while fairing is on, but thrusting through a docking port, with a Mammoth at your rear, is like pushing Spaghetti. Lost Jeb and Bill(or was it Bob) here. try2: the entry above: * no resource scanner. * refuelling takes ~ 1.5 years, due to very weak production. Next time, 2-man the lander and take the engineer along, not just to orbit to repack 'chutes. * Serious heat issues with ISRU unit so close to landing control pod. Even after switchoff, its heat bleeds through and tries to blowup. Relocate or better heatsink. * Lander should have a Fuel-only tank, to be used to resupply the tugboat. Making fuel+oxy, then only passing the fuel to tug, leaves landed with unusable Oxy!!!!

Sad to say, but I do believe your simulation is exactly 100% right. I have a very horrid feeling that is exactly what is going to happen for real.

Maybe I'm just stupid, but the rule of " -Must be built after 31st December 2017 and before the 1st January 2018. " Is going to be very very very VERY hard to do. You are allowing basically ZERO seconds to build the ship?

Wow, that is one serious bug! That a reduction in the efficiency of your cooling has COMPLETELY stopped a ship from operating its isru *AT ALL*, would require a complete collapse of the thermal code.

Simple If this is really the first time you ever *got* anyone to the Mun, and you now have three stranded Kerbals there.... Hold a nice memorial for them, and move on. . A rescue mission is MUCH harder than the flags-n-footprints mission you just failed. A permanent colony structure is *absurdly* more difficult.