One life - how far can you get?

[sevenperforce]

Also, since I'm using ions and solar for my return stage, Dres and Jool are probably out of the question. Maybe Ike too; I don't know.

 

[Ultimate Steve]

14 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Also, since I'm using ions and solar for my return stage, Dres and Jool are probably out of the question. Maybe Ike too; I don't know.

 

Moho on ions might present TWR problems (I tried it once with ions) and Delta-V problems. Moho is a hard planet to go to... Without TWR stats in front of me, I'd say you should be great doing at least Gilly, Minmus, a near Kerbin asteroid, and at least orbiting Duna/Ike. Duna landing is probably a no go, but Ike is iffy.

[sevenperforce]

34 minutes ago, Ultimate Steve said:

Moho on ions might present TWR problems (I tried it once with ions) and Delta-V problems. Moho is a hard planet to go to... Without TWR stats in front of me, I'd say you should be great doing at least Gilly, Minmus, a near Kerbin asteroid, and at least orbiting Duna/Ike. Duna landing is probably a no go, but Ike is iffy.

I'm 2.33 tonnes in orbit around Gilly (my Kerbal is EVA'd down to the surface) and I have a single Dawn. Moho should have plenty of power but the Dawn still peaks at 2 kN, so with Moho's 1/3 gee gravity, I would have to be under 0.74 tonnes to get a TWR>1, so that's a non-starter.

Of course, I could get really clever and do a suborbital catch using EVA as my descent/ascent stage, but that's too tricky for a "just one try" approach.

Running a single SP-W 3x2, which gets 3.4 EC/s at Gilly, so it will get a maximum of 0.8 EC/s at Ike. This limits the effective continuous thrust of the Dawn to 0.43 kN, meaning I'd need to be  down to 0.4 tonnes to get a TWR>1. So that won't work either.

Minmus, of course, is easy enough.

Should at least be able to make Moho orbit before coming back. Without good TWR I don't want to risk the Jool system.

[MarvinKitFox]

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?

Edited January 7, 2018 by MarvinKitFox

[MarvinKitFox]

On 1/3/2018 at 9:16 PM, macktruck6666 said:

Well, the kraken keeps striking. Got all the way from Mun, Minmus, Duna (lost some solar panels) then when I was time warping on Ike to refine fuel. the landing gear glitched in the ground and everything explodes. Anyone know how to overcome landing legs glitching into the ground. I heard airbreaks might be better "landing gear" for time warping.

 

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.

[macktruck6666]

1 hour ago, MarvinKitFox said:

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.

Well, how would you design a refiner. Your highness....

[CrazyJebGuy]

On 1/7/2018 at 12:10 AM, sevenperforce said:

Simply getting to Eve's surface and back, successfully, would earn...let's see...1520 points.

That's what I tried to do. I built a ship I was pretty sure could do it, but on launch the SAS betrayed me and caused me to waste loads of fuel. I did make Kerbin orbit though before I realized I had been lied to about where to burn to get Eve encounter. (None of the maneuver nodes even got a closest approach)

[Matuchkin]

2 minutes ago, CrazyJebGuy said:

That's what I tried to do. I built a ship I was pretty sure could do it, but on launch the SAS betrayed me and caused me to waste loads of fuel. I did make Kerbin orbit though before I realized I had been lied to about where to burn to get Eve encounter. (None of the maneuver nodes even got a closest approach)

Wow, you really got spun off there. Jeez.

[CrazyJebGuy]

Hey, my rocket is still in orbit and I didn't quicksave or anything, it would probably be legal to continue the mission now I fixed the SAS....

Edit: No I haven't fixed the SAS, it's still got less intelligence than a nail.

Edited January 8, 2018 by CrazyJebGuy

[sevenperforce]

Let's see...I have 7100 m/s of dV left, and I'm in Gilly orbit.

Is that enough to transfer, orbit, and return from Moho, and still have reserves for Kerbin orbital insertion and a Minmus landing?

If not, I'd get more points for simply going straight back to Kerbin and hitting Minmus and a Mun orbit.

[Thor Wotansen]

I have finished the design phase of the KSS Ummmm.......  so named because Gene's wife Ginny forgot what it was supposed to be named at the naming ceremony and couldn't think fast enough to come up with something better.  The ship will be maned by Dudman and Patsy, who were totally not chosen because their manes make them sound useless.

Edited January 8, 2018 by Thor Wotansen

[CrazyJebGuy]

This is my rocket that causes SAS to stand for Stability Assistance Spastic.

[Ultimate Steve]

14 minutes ago, CrazyJebGuy said:

This is my rocket that causes SAS to stand for Stability Assistance Spastic.

I'd turn the gimbal range on the vectors down. You shouldn't need that much, and it should stop SAS from freaking out.

[sevenperforce]

2 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

Let's see...I have 7100 m/s of dV left, and I'm in Gilly orbit.

Is that enough to transfer, orbit, and return from Moho, and still have reserves for Kerbin orbital insertion and a Minmus landing?

If not, I'd get more points for simply going straight back to Kerbin and hitting Minmus and a Mun orbit.

Another thought: what about leaving Gilly for a Kerbin gravity assist to Duna/Ike orbit, then back for a Minmus landing and Mun orbit? What kind of dV would that take?

1 hour ago, CrazyJebGuy said:

This is my rocket that causes SAS to stand for Stability Assistance Spastic.

The SAS assumes all engines point roughly through the CoM and gimbals accordingly. With a tight cluster, this is a sufficient approximation, but with a really wide cluster like that one, it causes problems. An engine on one side will have a different gimbal-induced vehicle torque than its opposite, since there's a brief instant where the moments of torque are in opposition.

So yeah, turn down the gimbal range on the outer engines. The center one can have full gimbal range. Or, if you really want to get fancy, go into the advanced tweakables and turn off pitch authority for the dorsal and ventral engines (relative to your control module's navball), and turn off yaw authority for the port and starboard engines. Keep roll authority on, of course, as the core engine has no roll authority at all, simply by physics.

Pitch and yaw in a cluster is better (more efficiently/reliably) controlled by differential throttling than by gimbal, but unfortunately KSP can't do that.

[sevenperforce]

Made it.

Eve, Gilly, Minmus, and orbits around Kerbin, Kerbol, and the Mun.

98 parts at launch.

Partial album below.

Spoiler

Mammoth and Twin Boars to get up and out of the atmosphere, Rhino to push into orbit. Here's the initial orbit. Having good residuals in the orbital insertion stage really helped with that initial kick to get into the Eve transfer...otherwise I would have had a LOT more kicks on the single-NERV transfer stage.

Burning to capture at Eve. I'd planned to use up the whole transfer stage for the transfer itself and then aerocapture at Eve with my inflatable heat shield, decouple and circularize the orbiter, and then enter, but this proved to be much less hairy.

Final entry went as planned, with Tanbal riding merrily along in a command seat.

Went sparse on chutes to save part count, so I had to do a propulsively-assisted landing.

Takeoff took...a lot of planning. I turned down the gimbal on the Vectors and set the decouplers to crossfeed so I could decide exactly when to stage. Also throttled down early, in order to avoid flipping with those draggy fuel tank endcaps and my heavy engines down below.

Had a TWR<1 at staging, but that was (mostly) by design.

Once Mach effects disappeared, I blew the fairing and launched Tanbal and his command seat out of the neat little fuel tank cylinder. Using Oscar-Bs took up a LOT of parts, but it was the most compact way I could think of doing it.

SAS doesn't really work when your CoM isn't very straight, so I had to fly this part of the ascent essentially by hand. Probably the hairest part.

Once the Spark burned out, Tanbal jumped free and started burning away EVA propellant.

Made it back to the ship (which, to be fair, did the rendezvous on a probe core) with fumes to spare.

Thus begins a long series of periapsis kicks to get up to Gilly.

Once in Gilly's orbit, Tanbal hopped out once more.

After landing, he returned. Rendezvous in Gilly orbit is funny; you basically just burn in the direction of your target because the orbital velocities are negligible.

The nice thing about being up in Gilly's orbit is that it only takes a single burn to get onto the Kerbin transfer Hohmann, even on ions.

Mild aerobrake-assisted capture burn.

Swung out to the Mun for an orbit.

Then on to Minmus!

TWR was really, really low here, so the landing burn started very early. Could have done it on EVA but I'd hate to mess that up.

Landed, planted a flag, and back to Kerbin.

Blowing off the engine -- a different sort of explosive decoupling.

Turns out I really didn't need the heat shield.

Chutes out and home free!

Let's see. That should be good for, what...1820 points?

@Ultimate Steve@Earthlinger

[Piatzin]

5 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Let's see. That should be good for, what...1820 points?

Aaaaannnndd I'm out of likes

But wow. That was impressive

Edited January 8, 2018 by Earthlinger

[sevenperforce]

32 minutes ago, Earthlinger said:

Aaaaannnndd I'm out of likes

But wow. That was impressive

Thanks!

Trying to figure out where I could or couldn't land got me thinking...would anyone be interested in a Future SSTO competition, where the goal is to land on as many bodies as possible, in a single stage, without refueling, but with free transfers?

In other words, you are only designing the lander, not the transfer vehicle, and you don't have to worry about the transfer or capture burns. Alt-F12 the vehicle into each desired orbit in turn.

Interesting?

[Piatzin]

20 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Trying to figure out where I could or couldn't land got me thinking...would anyone be interested in a Future SSTO competition, where the goal is to land on as many bodies as possible, in a single stage, without refueling, but with free transfers?

In other words, you are only designing the lander, not the transfer vehicle, and you don't have to worry about the transfer or capture burns. Alt-F12 the vehicle into each desired orbit in turn.

Interesting?

That does sound interesting, yah

So mining would be disallowed?

[sevenperforce]

2 minutes ago, Earthlinger said:

That does sound interesting, yah

So mining would be disallowed?

Right. From orbit to surface and back, as many worlds as possible, no docking/staging, no ISRU, jumps between orbits are free.

The rules don't apply to getting off Kerbin in the first place, of course. 

(One could imagine a future in which cheap, lightweight, reactionless warp drives permit rapid transit between planetary orbits, but can only be used in a stable orbit due to gravitational effects or somesuch. In such a world, you'd want your Everywhere Ship to be able to visit multiple planets in a single trip.)

[sevenperforce]

By my count, you would need 17.2 km/s of dV to visit every single world (excluding Kerbin, Jool, and Eve), assuming that you use aerobraking for free EDL at Duna and Laythe. The inherent tankage mass ratio in KSP means that an infinitely large ship powered by nukes cannot exceed 18 km/s of total onboard dV, but since you could conceivably use ions for landing on some of the smallest worlds and you can use jet engines on Laythe, it MIGHT be possible to hit them all.

[CrazyJebGuy]

6 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

-snip-

Wait - did you put a fairing inside a fairing?

[sevenperforce]

39 minutes ago, CrazyJebGuy said:

Wait - did you put a fairing inside a fairing?

Every time.

[michal.don]

@Ultimate Steve, this looks like a brilliant challenge, and I'll probably try it very soon. I just have a short question though - the rules specify that you have to launch just one ship, but they don't specify if it has to stay one ship while in orbit. I know that landers are allowed, but what about splitting into two "motherships" - one going to for example Jool and the other one to Duna/Eve from LKO? Would this approach be acceptable?

Thanks,

Michal.don

[sevenperforce]

11 minutes ago, michal.don said:

@Ultimate Steve, this looks like a brilliant challenge, and I'll probably try it very soon. I just have a short question though - the rules specify that you have to launch just one ship, but they don't specify if it has to stay one ship while in orbit. I know that landers are allowed, but what about splitting into two "motherships" - one going to for example Jool and the other one to Duna/Eve from LKO? Would this approach be acceptable?

Thanks,

Michal.don

Pretty sure it is allowed; I think several people have done that.

[michal.don]

1 hour ago, sevenperforce said:

Pretty sure it is allowed; I think several people have done that.

Thanks. I did not go through all the reports, but I did not notice this kind of mission. Many landers, sure, but not two separate motherships.

To the drawing board then, it won't be easy, since I am so used to KJR I don't even know how to place struts anymore