Hardest or near impossible contracts, you've gotten.

[Dooz]

After being offered this contract.

Spoiler

I was curious see if anyone else has gotten impossible or extremely hard contracts. I'd like to see them.

[N_Molson]

Wow, this is a good one ! Very challenging, but very nice reward too !

On my side I had "Have 2 tourist pass out from G-forces on a sub-orbital flight on Kerbin". Meaning they have to pass out outside the atmosphere. That's certainly doable but not so easy, and the reward was completely underrated !

[Bdyer]

I had one in 1.0 that wanted 4 tourists to go suborbital on the sun  and then get returned to kerbin...

[magnemoe]

As I understand you only need one part returned, so you can have an probe core on lander then move it to Eve lander then land and retrieve it. 
its even an grand tour contract landing on all the bodies. 

[eddiew]

9 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

As I understand you only need one part returned...

Was going to suggest a pod with a docking port on the bottom - just exchange "bodies" in orbit   

35 minutes ago, Bdyer said:

I had one in 1.0 that wanted 4 tourists to go suborbital on the sun  and then get returned to kerbin...

Gravity assist off Jool to raise your AP as high as possible (beyond Eeloo ideally), then go suborbital while the sun only looks like a star. Probably not the experience the tourists wanted, but they should have been more specific  

[Kerbart]

37 minutes ago, Bdyer said:

I had one in 1.0 that wanted 4 tourists to go suborbital on the sun  and then get returned to kerbin...

That's about the same (DV wise) as a 179° inclination orbit around the sun (which I've had at least once, not sure if that has been fixed since).

[RX2000]

46 minutes ago, N_Molson said:

Wow, this is a good one ! Very challenging, but very nice reward too !

On my side I had "Have 2 tourist pass out from G-forces on a sub-orbital flight on Kerbin". Meaning they have to pass out outside the atmosphere. That's certainly doable but not so easy, and the reward was completely underrated !

I find this one to be very difficult. I guess you just have to put a crapton of SRBs on a tiny capsule & fire them off while in space, but still suborbital. I dont think the reward is worth it on that one. The one where they just have to pass out while flying on Kerbin is a lot more doable.

A lot of the contracts arent necessarily "hard," but rather just tedious & time consuming. Like all the ones to go around Kerbin taking temp data at different spots. I mean, I guess I COULD make a plane & spend hours flying all around everywhere taking temps, but do I really WANT to? No lol. Or like a lot of the "test this part" contracts, where you have to be going between 300-310 m/s from 11k - 12k meters & then stage a part. Or the ones I personally dislike the most, staging a SRB while in orbit. They are just silly contracts I dont feel like doing. I wouldnt say they are "hard" really, just not what I want to spend my time in the game doing.........

[Renegrade]

1 hour ago, Dooz said:

After being offered this contract.

  Hide contents

I was curious see if anyone else has gotten impossible or extremely hard contracts. I'd like to see them.

At first, I was like, "Piffle, cakewalk!  It doesn't say manned, and there's this thing called refueling, y'know.  Duna.. Pol.. Minmus.. meh!"

..then I saw Eve, and Eve not as the final destination.   I'm sure that's doable, and I'm sure I could do it, but there's fun, and then there's Dwarf Fortress "fun".   I'd probably have to send some test flights to Eve before starting that mission, as I haven't been to the Purple Hell since the new atmosphere/heating model was added. 

I'd probably design some sort of modular Eve lander, and leave that in Eve orbit, and complete the rest of the mission with a tiny probe before joining up and landing with the modular part.

[AndroidSub]

I once got a contract to test the launch clamps in kerbin orbit.

Beat that

[Aragosnat]

23 minutes ago, AndroidSub said:

I once got a contract to test the launch clamps in kerbin orbit.

Beat that

How about testing launch clamps on Minmus and Mün?

[Superfluous J]

Makes me think of The Ultimate Challenge. Still haven't beaten that one.

[Hodari]

I don't usually see any "impossible" contracts or even truly hard ones.  Normally the worst ones I get are some of the very early career, overly specific part testing contracts(like testing a Juno at 25315-25335m and between 240-243m/s) or rescue contracts where they start out in a high, but manageable Kerbin orbit, but by the time you've actually gotten around to trying to rescue them, they got too close to the Mun and were ejected out of the Kerbin system altogether.

[eddiew]

Out of interest, when you get a sequence of bodies to visit, do you have to do them in the order specified?

I've honestly never taken one of these because I always end up cash rich and science poor...

[Aegolius13]

I've seen a couple to mine ore on Eve and haul it to Gilly.  Maybe doable depending on the amount of ore, but.. problematic at best.

[Superfluous J]

2 hours ago, eddiew said:

Out of interest, when you get a sequence of bodies to visit, do you have to do them in the order specified?

I've honestly never taken one of these because I always end up cash rich and science poor...

You do not. In the "Ultimate Challenge" contest several people went in different orders and nobody that I know of used the order of the contract. The only thing that matters (sequence-wise) is that final clause that reads "Lastly, land your ship on Kerbin."

I personally did Eve, Gilly, Moho, Minmus, Mun, Dres, Eeloo, Bop, Pol, and then gave up at Tylo because I couldn't be bothered to send another refueler to my ISRU ship. Seriously. It needed a refueler. More than once.

Edited October 31, 2016 by 5thHorseman

[Kergarin]

Like @5thHorseman said, the hardest was the ultimate challenge, but it's doable (it just took a quarter year of all my free time  not at least because this was at times without 64bit support and long burns at high part count) 

https://youtu.be/FXAzQk01vuw

 

[septemberWaves]

When using modded planets, I've gotten contracts for long-term orbital surveys of far-off gas planets (I can't remember which ones these contracts were though). Whilst this isn't usually very difficult, the contracts that I'm referring to as being near-impossible involved a very unreasonable time limit. To complete one of them, I think I would've had to have a high-energy transfer of at least 4km/s more than the standard transfer.

[FancyMouse]

9 hours ago, eddiew said:

Gravity assist off Jool to raise your AP as high as possible (beyond Eeloo ideally), then go suborbital while the sun only looks like a star. Probably not the experience the tourists wanted, but they should have been more specific  

Well, the way I did it was to eject to a solar orbit of period exactly 5 year, so that when it goes back it automatically catches Kerbin. Being an odd number of years was just because I played with RT and I wanted a signal at apoapsis - without this extra requirement, any integer number of years could work.

I didn't bother with Jool just to save my brain from calculating flybys/transfer windows.

And of course that was a hell a lot of empty Xenon tanks thrown at Sun suborbital trajectory (you don't normally throw garbage into the Sun, and that might be actually one of the experience tourists wanted!)

[samstarman5]

14 hours ago, eddiew said:

Was going to suggest a pod with a docking port on the bottom - just exchange "bodies" in orbit   

Gravity assist off Jool to raise your AP as high as possible (beyond Eeloo ideally), then go suborbital while the sun only looks like a star. Probably not the experience the tourists wanted, but they should have been more specific  

That's one reason I love VIP and Tourist contracts. They are decent money and very open-ended. I had a couple set aside, one for a suborbital hop on Kerbin, and the other for a pass of the Mun.  I took both up in the same craft.  The one just wanting the Kerbin hop got a lot longer trip than they bargained for, but they did pay up.  Apparently tourists and VIPs also count towards body count on stations and bases when those missions require a set number of kerbals.  At least, that's what I heard but from what I have seen thus far, seems very likely. More bang for your buck.  If you can't keep them around after their contract is completed, then no reason to feel bad getting more work out of them while you have them.

[RocketBlam]

Wow. That one's pretty hardcore.

The worst I got, that I accepted, was a contract to rescue a Kerbal from the orbit of the sun. I thought "ok, sounds challenging, but not too bad. He's probably in an orbit like Duna or something." No, his orbit was past Jool. And it was retrograde. He was orbiting in the opposite direction of the planets.

I think I needed a vehicle that, by the time it got into Solar orbit, still had something like 10,000 D/V.

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, RocketBlam said:

Wow. That one's pretty hardcore.

The worst I got, that I accepted, was a contract to rescue a Kerbal from the orbit of the sun. I thought "ok, sounds challenging, but not too bad. He's probably in an orbit like Duna or something." No, his orbit was past Jool. And it was retrograde. He was orbiting in the opposite direction of the planets.

I think I needed a vehicle that, by the time it got into Solar orbit, still had something like 10,000 D/V.

I have one now, pretty close to the sun as in midway between sun and Moho. Orbital velocity is 21 km/s
And I need to return his 2.5 ton craft too so an ion engine craft is unpractical. 

Edit
Need 2.8 km/s for insertion then 6.2 km/s to match orbit, 6.2 more for the return. 
And yes he is the 3.5 ton mobile processing lab
In short its an orion pulse engine job. 

Edited November 1, 2016 by magnemoe

[Kergarin]

28 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

I have one now, pretty close to the sun as in midway between sun and Moho. Orbital velocity is 21 km/s
And I need to return his 2.5 ton craft too so an ion engine craft is unpractical. 

Edit
Need 2.8 km/s for insertion then 6.2 km/s to match orbit, 6.2 more for the return. 
And yes he is the 3.5 ton mobile processing lab
In short its an orion pulse engine job. 

I had this mission too, when I was really new to the game. Since I'm playing stock, this took all my money and several launches, it was absolutely the biggest rocket I have build so far 

[Xyrus]

Technically this doesn't really count since a) it was back in the early days of contracts and b) I was kind of messing with them a bit for potential modding purposes. But I had a contract to get a surface sample from the sun.

I stopped messing with the contracts after that. 

[Daripuff]

On 10/31/2016 at 9:34 AM, N_Molson said:

Wow, this is a good one ! Very challenging, but very nice reward too !

On my side I had "Have 2 tourist pass out from G-forces on a sub-orbital flight on Kerbin". Meaning they have to pass out outside the atmosphere. That's certainly doable but not so easy, and the reward was completely underrated !

I found an easy way to do this . 

Just have the final stage have 24 seperatrons attached directly to the capsule .  Insane TWR , and when attached directly to an mk1 capsule,   it does something like 14:1 TWR. 

Little additional mass ,  easy to haul into space ,  and will quickly and cheaply knock out any tourist . 

[Aegolius13]

12 hours ago, magnemoe said:

I have one now, pretty close to the sun as in midway between sun and Moho. Orbital velocity is 21 km/s
And I need to return his 2.5 ton craft too so an ion engine craft is unpractical. 

Edit
Need 2.8 km/s for insertion then 6.2 km/s to match orbit, 6.2 more for the return. 
And yes he is the 3.5 ton mobile processing lab
In short its an orion pulse engine job. 

Yikes.  I am working on one much like this but without the craft recovery, and it is tough enough just to get the kerbal.   Might be my highest delta v craft ever, but thankfully it's ideal ion territory.

Maybe you could use an Eve gravity assist to bring your orbit down closer?