Most Science in a single Launch -Updated Rules-

[Jetski]

Bob Kerman has decided that he wants to demonstrate the ultimate science gathering recovery mission to an excited public.  Unfortunately, he only has permission to launch a single ship, and all the radio equipment at KSC is currently tuned to the Kerbin Kup final match.  How will he make the most of this opportunity?  What is highest possible science gathering score that he can manage in a single launch?  Will it be more effective to try a Grand Tour of the planets, or can he hoover up local science for insane bonuses?  Only you can decide!

Challenge can be conducted any way you want - only scoring metric is how much science is recovered on Kerbin

• Transmissions don't count, so don't bother with the MPL or antennas).
• The launch should be done on Normal difficulty, in Career mode.  
• Feel free to edit your savegame to max the tech tree and buildings, or use an existing savegame as long as no other ships are involved in the mission in any way (no refueling, no passing off science from an old ship, etc).
• Recovered Science is the only thing that counts, you don't have to bring the whole ship back as long as you get the science home.
• Pics of recovery screen are mandatory, also any pics you have of the mission are helpful as well.
• Of course no F12, Hyperedit, or mods which add parts or change physics.  Visual mods, KER, Mechjeb, Transfer Planner, etc. are fine. Planet mods like New Horizons or Outer Planets will be listed separately.
• No active strategies in the Admin building (would make this impossible to score)
• New! No ISRU permitted.  This is to keep this form becoming a potential infinite grind on science.  You are stuck with what you bring up in your single launch.  Plan accordingly.

Here's the first part of my attempt.  It's a very ambitious attempt at a Grand Tour but I didn't bring along any Materials Bay or Goo pod for weight reasons. No score yet as it is still in progress, but we've visited the Kerbin moons, Eve, Gilly, and Moho so far.  Interested to see how this compares to a smaller effort with more equipment.

 

Also, a badge will be forthcoming when we start to see completed attempts.

Leaderboard:

1. michelcolman 38330.6
2. Jetski 9352 (incomplete mission, science not yet recovered)
3.  

Edited March 30, 2016 by Jetski

[LordKael]

Within Kerbin's SOI, there's several thousand science points. A well made ship with ISRU should be able to get all of them, without every needing to leave. Grand tour seems rather unneeded.

[Bluegillbronco2]

I guess a Jool 5 ship would be perfect for this. You could do science from Kerbin, Kerbol, Jool, and all of Jool's moons... That would be the way to go to complete this mission. Just an idea...

[SpaceplaneAddict]

Even better, an infinite range SSTO with ISRU and a pair of wings.... yes... grand tour science...

[Jetski]

Of course a science grind inside Kerbin's SOI would work, but will it collect more points?  Prove it.  I'm at 9352 right now, and I just made it to Jool and did an atmosphere dip there.  I've always been curious if it was more efficient to munch local sci or to go on walkabout - hoping this challenge will provide some insight.  Last I checked there were something like 39000 possible points, but I'm unclear if that's counting transmissions, repeat experiments, or what difficulty level.

Note this isn't about finishing the tech tree.  It's possible to finish the tech tree, even on Hard, without ever leaving Kerbin's SOI.  It's about SCIENCE in its purest form - unnecessary and beautiful.

Edited February 18, 2016 by Jetski

[Laie]

Well, obviously this isn't about doing this or that -- it's about doing both, and everything else besides. You want to visit every single biome in the whole system, including flying high and low on those bodies that have an atmosphere. You also want to return the results in triplicate (at least those that don't return their full science on a single measurement). Only returning two soil samples leaves a whole five percent of the available science points on the floor.

If you have a ISRU Grand Tourer with either a lab or three+ crew modules, you can do this. So basically this is The Ultimate Challenge with even more landings (and a single launch requirement).

But just as with the ultimate challenge, once you've touched Eve-Laythe-Tylo, all further landings are merely points to tick off. Putting more items on the list doesn't make the challenge any harder, only more time-consuming. Sorry if I'm the party pooper, but that's just how it is.

Edit to add: three soil samples will add up to 99.6 percent of the science points for "soil sample from $biome". If you do that, expect to be blown out of the water by someone with even more time at their hands who returns four.

Edited February 18, 2016 by Laie

[EvermoreAlpaca]

I did an ISRU grand tour with all the science experiments a while back.  It was done in a campaign that wasn't fresh, and I lacked the patience to take the rover to other biomes when planetside.  That all said, I still collected 43,382 science.  One could without a doubt start a fresh game with no biomes already researched, actually take their landers around the surface, and get a lot higher score.  It would be a test of patience more than anything else.

https://gyazo.com/d861a08a1285c5a75a3e958d6e90ada7

 

 

Edited February 18, 2016 by EvermoreAlpaca

[Jetski]

The main item I would be interested in is efficiency - how much time IRL vs. How many science points. I'm at least 7 hrs into this mission, with that much left to go I expect, so i would expect a high return. The scoring would make more sense as a science points / hours spent ratio, disregarding anything less than 10 mins let's say. I couldn't figure out how to measure that though, allowing for different play styles etc. Other than a video I guess, but not everyone can do that and cuts are easy.  Open to suggestions to make this better/less of a grind

[Laie]

2 hours ago, Jetski said:

Open to suggestions to make this better/less of a grind

The only suggestion I have to offer would alter the challenge beyond recognition: drastically reduce the scope of this challenge. Limit it to Eve-Laythe-Tylo, these three are the most demanding and whoever can handle them can handle everything else with ease. Maybe toss Jool in as well, though seriously a short atmospheric dip is all it takes and there's probably more than enough dV to go around.

Another possible candidate would be Moho, for being so remote and not having a convenient moon -- it's probably the highest-G environment where one would have to refuel if one was to complete the full challenge.

[Jetski]

2 hours ago, Laie said:

The only suggestion I have to offer would alter the challenge beyond recognition: drastically reduce the scope of this challenge. Limit it to Eve-Laythe-Tylo, these three are the most demanding and whoever can handle them can handle everything else with ease. Maybe toss Jool in as well, though seriously a short atmospheric dip is all it takes and there's probably more than enough dV to go around.

Another possible candidate would be Moho, for being so remote and not having a convenient moon -- it's probably the highest-G environment where one would have to refuel if one was to complete the full challenge.

I considered this, but I think it would force people to play this a certain way, and I'm hoping to learn something new   Rules edited to remove ISRU option altogether, this should prevent it from turning into the infinite science grind, at least to a certain extent.  Might even produce some interesting rovers or something like that.

 

Edit: in case I didn't mention this before, that is a seriously badS mission @EvermoreAlpaca.  Do you think it would still be possible with the new aero in 1.05?  Or maybe with Vectors to lose some weight?

Edited February 19, 2016 by Jetski

[EvermoreAlpaca]

I honestly did that mission when I was still learning the game.  You could do it with much less overall mass, particularly if you ditched the single stage paradigm and used an air breathing stage to LKO.  Gravity assists also could vastly reduce the necessary dV.  One could easily hit every biome in the game with a single launch, it would merely be a question of patience.  

For the amount of extra room available, consider that the eve lander I used on that was something like 35 tons empty.  The eve lander I use now is 3 tons empty.

Edited February 20, 2016 by EvermoreAlpaca

[Nefrums]

No isru, that makes this challenge alot more intresting

[DoctorDavinci]

Did something like this 5 months back as part of a challenge I started

SHIP STATS
Name : CANUK 787
Parts : 787
Mass : 2513.2 tons
Height : 74.2m
Width : 28.2m
Length : 28.2m
Payload : 4 Low Grav Automated Rover Lander/Return Modules each with a Scientist onboard
Time from Launch to recovery: 18d, 02:03:39 ..... 108 hours in game time
Science Collected : 5510.1
SCIENCE PER HOUR : 51.02

 

 

Edited February 20, 2016 by DoctorDavinci

[michelcolman]

This challenge thread seems to have gone quiet for a while, so I think I'll go ahead and grab first place while I can :-)

At least temporarily, because I'm sure somebody will beat it given enough patience and time. I could have gotten a lot more with better planning and more patience.

I got a grand total of 38330.6 from a single vessel, without any docking. And: this was during an actual career game, without editing the save file! A lot of science had already been done and was no longer available, making the challenge a little bit harder.

I used Mechjeb for its delta-v display, orbital info, setting up some of the Hohmann transfers (out of laziness), but especially for manually editing maneuvers to high precision. I love how you can tweak maneuver nodes with 0.01 m/s precision, and sometimes even less than that! I also installed VOID later on during the mission just to see which biomes I was passing over. I didn't initially because I felt it was cheating, but at some point I really felt "this is ridiculous, incessantly clicking that little button to get the last elusive biome and doing it over and over again, why am I wasting my time with this?" and got VOID.

The mission didn't start out as a challenge mission, in fact I just wanted to fulfill a few contracts on a mission to Eve and Gilly: put a satellite into Eve orbit (the whole rocket was the satellite, which explains the cupola, hitchhiker's cabin and unused docking port), gather science around Eve, land in four places on Gilly. And while doing all that, I also wanted to get as much science as I could to finish the tech tree.

The rocket in a nutshell: fourteen of the biggest fuel tanks with seven Mammoths underneath, 18 solid fuel boosters, 13 brown tanks with nukes (no oxidizer in those tanks), a few reaction wheels, 12 cheap solar panels, a hitchhiker module, a cupola (because of the Eve satellite contract), a small docking port (also for that contract), some parachutes, a Science Jr., and a service bay containing Goo, atmosphere analysis, gravity monitor, pressure monitor, seismic thingy, and a battery. Oh, and a thermometer of course, and probably some more stuff I forgot to mention here. I made a mistake placing the ladder, so the goo was just a tiny a bit too far away for a scientist to reset. That meant I had to EVA from the ladder to the goo and back every single time. That's a mistake I won't make again :-)

I took Bob, Bill and Jeb but I might as well have left Bill home since he didn't do anything during the entire mission.

Launch took a bit of babying because of collisions with the boosters during staging. I had to cut the engine, stage, wait a few seconds for the boosters to clear, then throttle up again. Took a few attempts to get it right. I didn't bother with asparagus staging (which would not be very realistic anyway, no pump can transfer that amount of fuel that quickly)

Anyway, so I went to Eve, got into orbit, went through all biomes in high space, low space and upper atmosphere (getting lucky on some of the rarer biomes like impact ejecta since I didn't have VOID yet), then went to Gilly, got science for all biomes high and low, landed in the four required locations for the contract, then landed in the remaining two biomes for some extra science. No need for a landing gear, I could just balance on the middle engine using the reaction wheels and smartASS while Bob gathered the science.

When that was all done, I still had an enormous amount of delta-v left over thanks to the highly efficient nuclear engines, much more than I had initially expected. So I thought I might as well pop over to Jool and play some ping pong there until I ran low on fuel. I remembered getting 6000 science points there during an earlier science game without even trying hard, and it sounded like fun.

To get from Gilly to Jool, I left Gilly's sphere of influence, had MechJeb set up a transfer to Kerbin and tweaked that into a beautiful textbook gravity assist (150 degrees or so course reversal), then manually set up another one at Duna (after a few years of orbiting Kerbol), which got me to an orbit about the size of Duna's but intersecting it in two places. I got some more science while passing Duna, but I already had most of it from an earlier mission. From there I just made a normal burn for Jool, losing much of what I gained from the gravity assists since I was burning less efficiently from Kerbol orbit, but on the whole I must have saved somewhere between 500 and 1000 m/s compared to a straight Hohmann transfer from Eve orbit. And the Jool entry was easier with less speed to bleed off.

The pingponging around Jool went much better than I expected. Starting from the interplanetary halfway point, I used a total of only 18 m/s to:

- Get captured by Jool using a gravity assist from Laythe

- Get all science from Jool, high, low and upper atmosphere

- Get science from all non-polar biomes on the three inner moons, low and high. I didn't go for the Laythe atmosphere because that would have required entering orbit (passing through the atmosphere on an escape trajectory is considered in space low by the game) and I didn't feel like spending that much delta-v for that.

The gravity assists during this part were quite a lot of fun, really. I used MechJeb's maneuver editor (not the planner) to set up the flybys as accurately as possible so the outbound trajectory was always in the orbital plane and I went low enough to get all the science, while keeping the resulting Jool orbit useful for further bouncing around. I let MechJeb execute the first part of most maneuvers but then did the last m/s or so by hand with just a tiny bit of engine power to kill the engine when the trajectory was exactly where I wanted it. This way, I could really execute them to 0.01 m/s precision.

The last pass over Tylo is when I installed VOID. Those craters were just taking forever to catch and, even though I could do it by repeatedly quickloading and flying the same trajectory over and over again while incessantly clicking the gravity scan button and noting when the biome changed, I figured I had better things to do with my time.

During the mission I picked up a few extra contracts. Always fun to see a "return science from Tylo" come up while you're in the neighbourhood anyway. Ka-ching!

OK, so now all the low hanging fruit around Jool was picked, and I still had lots of delta-v left. So I went for Pol, which is a bit further out than Bop but closer to the orbital plane of the other moons. With the low speed so far away from Jool, I decided to enter a polar orbit to get all biomes high and low. Then I thought, well, with still so much delta-v left and plenty of power from the four active nuclear engines, I might as well see if I can land there. It took a couple of attempts but actually wasn't that hard: as long as I touched down really, really gently and perfectly upright, the reaction wheels were strong enough to balance the rocket on its middle engine on a slope. If I touched down a little too hard or got a couple of degrees off vertical, the rocket tipped over and I had to quickload to start over. Funny thing, at one point the rocket started sliding down a hill but somehow the SAS managed to keep it upright, so I could let Bob go down, get science from the surface, and chase the sliding rocket to get back in :-)

Hey, a new contract just popped up for landing on Pol... Yep, can do, in fact I'm already there! :-)

OK, when Pol was done (landed in all biomes), I went for Bop. I didn't land there since it has more gravity and I had now staged the four outer nukes. I did get all the high and low biomes from a polar orbit.

So, what's next? Still plenty of delta-v, those nukes are incredible! I could have gone back to Laythe to get its atmosphere, and maybe the polar biomes that I skipped on Laythe and Vall, but then I had a look on Alex Moon's KSP Launch Window Planner website and saw to my surprise that Eelo was just about a thousand m/s away, with a transfer window coming up in a few years! That would be a much better use of my remaining fuel.

So I had MechJeb set up a transfer (which didn't really match the Launch Window Planner but was good enough, and I didn't feel like trying to find a better solution manually) and then tweaked it to arrive in a polar orbit. Got most of the biomes relatively quickly, then spent ages getting the craters. Just two little craters on the whole planet, seriously?! They're easy to get from an equatorial orbit but a lot harder from a polar one... Fortunately at least they are clearly visible, so I finally managed to pass right over one of them twice, high and low.

So now what? By now I was frankly getting really bored of all the science hunting. I briefly considered a chain of slingshots all the way down to Moho, it looked like I might have enough delta-v left over if I played it right, but finally I decided I had had enough and just went home. I could always revisit the quicksave file later if I changed my mind. Kerbin entry was uneventful.

Phew... glad to be home again, that's not the kind of mission I'm likely to ever do again. And I'm not just saying that to keep others from breaking my record ;-)

Edit: the mission started during year 4 and ended in year 57. Good thing Kerbals don't need much food. Real life time 20 days but not playing every day of course. No idea how many hours I spent on this. I had about 800,000 funds left when I took off, and more than 5 million when I got back, even after I upgraded a bunch of buildings during the mission. If you ever do a long mission like this, make sure to regularly pay a visit to the space center to see if any new contracts popped up that you can fulfill right away.

Edited March 30, 2016 by michelcolman
Typos, added mission time and some info about the extra contracts I picked up during the mission. And a note about the crew.

[Jetski]

Great job! Well executed mission all around, I'll put you on the OP

[parzr]

Here is my .23.5 Jool 5 with 20500-ish science. pre-ISRU.  http://imgur.com/a/JxgjP#105

There where a few that beat me if memory serves.

That said, Ima go for it again anyway, but if it matters it should be an addon to the rules that we be 1.~

Edited March 30, 2016 by parzr