cheapest way to get a kerbal to a space staion

[billythemenace2]

so i managed to get a kerbal to my space station at 150,000km for 5865 funds with less than 1 propelent left in the eva pack. so can you do better than 5865 funds?

here is the video of my craft

 

The idea was when using my career mode i could get food or kerbals to the spacestaion for cheap. i probably end up stealing some ideas if anyone has ago at it

sorry about some of the confusion guys, it was my first post but i wont make the same mistake twice!

leader board:

1st - Cunjo Carl - 502 funds per kerbal (2nd try)

2nd - Cunjo Carl - 745 funds per kerbal (1st try)

3rd - tseitsei89 - 1908 funds per kerbal

4th - 5thHorseman - 3665 funds per kerbal

Edited June 4, 2016 by billythemenace2
leader board

[tseitsei89]

Questions:

1. Do you mean 150,000m instead of km?

2. Cab I use a reusable design and get refunds if I land it at ksc? If yes then reusable spaceplanes are a way to go since you only pay for the fuel and can use efficient jets most of the way...

3. Can I do a design that transports several kerbals there simultaneously and then calculate my price/kerbal or do you only want crafts that ship only one kerbal? So for example if have a craft that ships 10 kerbals for 10,000 funds would it be as good as having a craft that ships 1 kerbal for 1000 funds?

[billythemenace2]

1 hour ago, tseitsei89 said:

Questions:

1. Do you mean 150,000m instead of km?

2. Cab I use a reusable design and get refunds if I land it at ksc? If yes then reusable spaceplanes are a way to go since you only pay for the fuel and can use efficient jets most of the way...

3. Can I do a design that transports several kerbals there simultaneously and then calculate my price/kerbal or do you only want crafts that ship only one kerbal? So for example if have a craft that ships 10 kerbals for 10,000 funds would it be as good as having a craft that ships 1 kerbal for 1000 funds?

sorry first time on the forums.

1. yes i mean meters

2. no im looking for the cost of the ship

3. yes i dont see why not. only reason i did not is because i only had 2 spaces for kerbals i think

[tseitsei89]

Ok.

Will probably try this at some point.

 

Best results can probably be achieved by stacking command chairs in cargo bays. That way you can transport a s**tload of kerbals for minimal payload mass but I dont have patience to load all the chairs with kerbals so I'll probably just use actual crew parts for transportation...

Edited May 30, 2016 by tseitsei89

[billythemenace2]

35 minutes ago, tseitsei89 said:

Ok.

Will probably try this at some point.

 

Best results can probably be achieved by stacking command chairs in cargo bays. That way you can transport a s**tload of kerbals for minimal payload mass but I dont have patience to load all the chairs with kerbals so I'll probably just use actual crew parts for transportation...

There is a mod that lets you put Kerbals in command seats from the assembly area. I think its called take command

[tseitsei89]

Oh yeah. That is one more important question!

What mods are allowed for this challenge?

[Jhawk1099]

No SSTOs?

[tseitsei89]

4 minutes ago, Jhawk1099 said:

No SSTOs?

I understand that SSTOs (Single-stage-to-orbit) are perfectly allowed but you won't get refunds for them (the price of the craft is what you see in VAB. No money back from recoveries). So disposable 2-3 stage crafts will obviously be better for this challenge.

[Superfluous J]

This little guy got me into an approximate 150km/0km orbit around Kerbin. From your vid, it looks like the ship itself doesn't need to make it, just the Kerbal. So I'm assuming this is cool.

I had to turn angle lock off while tweaking the launch angle. It's under 5º rotated.

To launch it, you hit the spacebar (SAS OFF!) and wait for the BACC to run out. Then you wait until your angle off the horizon is about 35 degrees, turn on SAS, hit space again, and crank the aim down to the horizon. You should end up in an orbit that is about 150x0km.

It has a single solar panel. I didn't test without it but suspect it isn't needed. If it is, you need to launch in the day time

 

Edited May 31, 2016 by 5thHorseman
I had % but wanted º

[Jhawk1099]

Just now, 5thHorseman said:

This little guy got me into an approximate 150km/0km orbit around Kerbin. From your vid, it looks like the ship itself doesn't need to make it, just the Kerbal. So I'm assuming this is cool.

I had to turn angle lock off while tweaking the launch angle. It's under 5% rotated.

To launch it, you hit the spacebar (SAS OFF!) and wait for the BACC to run out. Then you wait until your angle off the horizon is about 35 degrees, turn on SAS, hit space again, and crank the aim down to the horizon. You should end up in an orbit that is about 150x0km.

It has a single solar panel. I didn't test without it but suspect it isn't needed. If it is, you need to launch in the day time

 

Blast! this was the design idea I had!

[tseitsei89]

7 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

This little guy got me into an approximate 150km/0km orbit around Kerbin. From your vid, it looks like the ship itself doesn't need to make it, just the Kerbal. So I'm assuming this is cool.

I had to turn angle lock off while tweaking the launch angle. It's under 5º rotated.

To launch it, you hit the spacebar (SAS OFF!) and wait for the BACC to run out. Then you wait until your angle off the horizon is about 35 degrees, turn on SAS, hit space again, and crank the aim down to the horizon. You should end up in an orbit that is about 150x0km.

It has a single solar panel. I didn't test without it but suspect it isn't needed. If it is, you need to launch in the day time

 

Nice. But can you actually circularize and rendezvous with the station from that 150km/0km "orbit" by using just eva-fuel? Not necessarily that easy...

[Superfluous J]

12 minutes ago, tseitsei89 said:

Nice. But can you actually circularize and rendezvous with the station from that 150km/0km "orbit" by using just eva-fuel? Not necessarily that easy...

I didn't try, but am positive I can. That amount of dV is likely in the "dozens" range, and EVA packs have something like 600.

Maybe when I get home this morning I'll record it.

[tseitsei89]

Just now, 5thHorseman said:

I didn't try, but am positive I can. That amount of dV is likely in the "dozens" range, and EVA packs have something like 600.

Maybe when I get home this morning I'll record it.

Wow... didn't know eva packs have such a huge amount of dv... But then again that is something I have never played with properly

[Superfluous J]

5 minutes ago, tseitsei89 said:

Wow... didn't know eva packs have such a huge amount of dv... But then again that is something I have never played with properly

Yeah you can land on Minmus and get back to your orbiting ship if you're careful

[Superfluous J]

I just tried it (and tried also removing the solar panel) and Bob got into a 150x150 orbit with 3.62 units of fuel left The ship sans solar panel was $3,665.

It actually took a bit more EVA fuel than I thought it would. It was 11 "dozens" of meters per second to bring the orbit up but obviously he had plenty of fuel for that.

Still no video, maybe in a few hours.

Edited May 31, 2016 by 5thHorseman

[Superfluous J]

Done! And of course even though I had no troubles both times I tried it without recording, I had really weird UI problems DURING recording. But I still nailed it.

Spoiler

 

 

[tseitsei89]

Done! That was quite hard!! EVA propellant was insufficient on several tries but finally succeeded with 0.02 EVA propellant left

Here you go. 1 kerbal delivered to a "station" at 150km circular orbit. Cost of the ship 1908 funds:

EDIT: Okay bigger is definitely better here. Quick attempts with more kerbals give me 372 funds/kerbal to the station. And there is still much room for improvement. However my current craft carries 225 kerbals and reaches stable orbit of about 100km/100km and I would have to individually EVA each kerbal individually to the station (trivial but takes wayyyyyy too long)... And as I said I executed this by putting huge amounts of external command seats inside cargo bays.

Either way an entertaining challenge  I think my single kerbal design is quite close to optimal actually (always happy to be proven wrong here  ) but I think I'll leave the multiple kerbal transportation for other people since it's basically just same as my 1.1 economy challenge with an extra effort of EVAing all kerbals from LKO to the station...

Edited May 31, 2016 by tseitsei89

[Superfluous J]

1 hour ago, tseitsei89 said:

Here you go. 1 kerbal delivered to a "station" at 150km circular orbit. Cost of the ship 1908 funds

Wow! I didn't think my ship was the cheapest possible ever, but NEVER expected to be undercut by almost half! Well done!

I tried 3 Hammers inline, but never though to mount them radially. If I recall, it was too heavy for the bottom Hammer by itself.

[tseitsei89]

1 hour ago, 5thHorseman said:

Wow! I didn't think my ship was the cheapest possible ever, but NEVER expected to be undercut by almost half! Well done!

I tried 3 Hammers inline, but never though to mount them radially. If I recall, it was too heavy for the bottom Hammer by itself.

Yep. Inline they don't work but radially it's just enough  Also using small hardpoints as radial decouplers enables cheaper radial decoupling than inline decoupling (something I came up with during the 1.1 economy challenge)

[Cunjo Carl]

Because of an internet outage I wound up with two missions to show! I'll edit on the next one later tonight or some time tomorrow.

For the first mission, I test out a new cheap Kerbal carrier bound for Billy's space station. It was a resounding success, but because my KER's not working, I packed way (WAY!) too much fuel, and wound up sojourning to Minmus as an afterthought. The 12 Kerbals on Minmus pic is definitely a keeper.

This ship carries 12 Kerbals to permit a kickback for launch stage and a terrier for achieving orbit. Both are cheap and very well suited to their tasks. After all that careful design though, I dumped 1200 funds into elevons for controlling the launch stage. It was overly pricey, but I didn't want a tricky launch. To recoup a bit, instead of inline decouplers, this rocket uses immolative decoupling (my favorite!). Octagonal struts create just enough space to let upper stages toast the lower ones away. Without the spacers, the lower stage would fall in to a 'damage offset' region and be curiously invulnerable.

 

Rundown:
12 Kerbals
8945 Funds
745 Funds/Kerbal
1 Bonus Minmus feild trip
 

Edit: Thinking on it, though it's much cheaper, the second mission is pretty similar to the first. I'll just summarize the differences and put a short album into a spoiler tab. Mission 2 runs a mondo load of 24 Kerbals for 12045 funds- making 502 funds per Kerbal. The flea is swapped out for a more appropriate 'hammer', and we still have way too much fuel. No field trip for these Kerbals, though- It's bed time.

Edit Edit: Apparently imgur albums don't go in spoiler tabs. Sorry for the long post!

 

 

Thanks for the challenge! Economy class travel has been fun.

Edited June 4, 2016 by Cunjo Carl
Apparently imgur albums don't go in spoiler tabs.