Furthest from the Sun in one year[stock]

[goduranus]

This might be a fun challenge, see how far you can get from the Kerbin sun the end of one Kerbin year, which is a bit over 426 Kerbin days. There are varied considerations which could make this interesting, such as how you build your craft, whether you wait for an orbital refuel, whether you spend slow down to refine fuel at an asteroid, what combination of gravity assists you perform, and your final solar ejection vector.

How to perform this challenge:

1. Start a new Sandbox game on normal difficulty
2. Build and launch whatever rockets you need, can be more than one
3. Perform whatever maneuvers you need, including gravity assists, orbital refuel, IR scan for near Jool asteroids or asteroid refining
4. Time accelerate while watching the "Universal Time" clock(the clock on the top left of KSC screen, or craft screen when you click on MET to switch to UT")
5. When it says Year 1 Day 426 stop time accelerating and check the craft's altitude, record the altitude any time during Year 2 Day 1
6. Entry should include a description of your craft(s) construction, and what maneuvers you performed.

Hard mode:

• Do the above in Campaign normal difficulty, and you'll have to consider how much time to spend on technologies and KSC upgrades before you launch, better tech and more upgrades = less time to actually travel the distance

Additional Rules

• The final craft for clocking altitude needs to have a probe core
• [new]Weight per vehicle launch should be under 1000 tons, to make it fair for people who don't have a good computer
• [new]Due to concern that the optimal strategy may be a long nuke or ion engine burn, which is boring to wait through, nuke or ion drive will be disallowed, but will still receive honorable mention for people willing to wait theough the burn.
• No mods, only stock and whatever DLCs come pre-installed with KSP
• No using exploits or glitches like kraken drives or fuel transfer propulsion
• All crafts needs to be built or edited in VAB or SPH, no building or editing them with external programs or text editor
• No using the Alt-F12 menu or saved file editing

Discussion, maybe ban nuclear engine and ion engine? cuz waiting for those to perform maneuvers is boring. Also maybe a launch size limit would be a good idea, cuz theorectically infinite deltaV is possible, given an infinite sized rocket then it becomes a competition of how many parts your PC can handle.

Leaderboard:

Sandbox Leaderboard

1. @sevenperforce240,416,763,013m Asparagus staged single rocket.
2. goduranus 12,408 Megameters
3.  
4.  
5.  

Campaign Leaderboard

1. You belong here!
2.  
3.  
4.  

Honorable Mention:

1. @Marschig 503,002,934075m Ion Drive
2. @MarvinKitFox 386,628,029,271m Ion drive Kerbol Gravity Assist craft submitted before rule change.

My attempt:

• Failed to even get into solar escape orbit, for a feeble 12408 Megameters

Edited January 18, 2018 by goduranus

[sevenperforce]

My concern is that this would definitely end up going to whoever's PC is biggest.

So are nukes and ions out or not?

[linuxgurugamer]

I would say to allow nukes and ions, and also to allow the two timewarp mods if desired, TimeControl and BetterTimeWarp, to shorten the actual time for the burns

Create separate categories for nukes, ions and LFO, since they do have different parameters.

 

[goduranus]

Ok no nukes and ions plz, cuz it would involves mods which not everyone is willing to download. I also fear it might turn into "who can wait through the longest ion drive burn".  Though submissions with nukes and ions will still be recorded.

Also, how about a max weight per launch limiy? What would be a good number here? 200tons? 1000tons? Or less?

Edited January 18, 2018 by goduranus

[linuxgurugamer]

1 minute ago, goduranus said:

Ok no nukes and ions plz, cuz I fear it might turn into "who can wait through the longest ion drive burn". Also, how about a max weight per launch limiy? What would be a good number here? 200tons? 1000tons? Or less?

See my comment above yours

[goduranus]

I made an edit, what do you think? Still don't want to involve mods though, cuz not everyone wants to go get mods for a forum challenge, but a nuke burn without would be boring, and would take the fun out of the challenge for some people.

Edited January 18, 2018 by goduranus

[Marschig]

With no limitations it looks like this:

Spoiler

 

[goduranus]

Optimal strategy is definitely solar escape orbit. Although, how far does your craft get in one year? And how heavy was your launch?

Edited January 18, 2018 by goduranus

[sevenperforce]

12 minutes ago, goduranus said:

I made an edit, what do you think? Still don't want to involve mods though, cuz not everyone wants to go get mods for a forum challenge, but a nuke burn without would be boring, and would take the fun out of the challenge for some people.

Not necessarily the case. I don't mind doing a 4x timewarp and leaving it to blow through a bunch of LF or xenon.

A launch mass limit would be a good idea, but it would be somewhat arbitrary. Guess that's not necessarily a problem.

The easy limitation would be to have it done in the career version, but it's a substantial investment of time and puts people who usually play sandbox at a disadvantage.

[Marschig]

I think no one wants to start a new career just for the challenge. It consumes too much time. Perhaps, the limitation of the technology level will be better?

And what do you think about this restriction: no debris in orbit?

Edited January 18, 2018 by Marschig

[MarvinKitFox]

Entry withdrawn in protest.

Edited January 21, 2018 by MarvinKitFox

[goduranus]

1 hour ago, Marschig said:

And what do you think about this restriction: no debris in orbit?

Most of the debris will dumped in sun orbit anyways, not really a risk of collision there.

@MarvinKitFox Thanks for the submission, I know you put work into it, waited through the long ion drive burn and then saw the rule change. It would go the the honorable mention cuz don't want the first entry to dominate the leaderboard.

[Marschig]

https://imgur.com/a/anvn9 I did it just as an example of the need for limitations 

No originality, simple brute force.

[sevenperforce]

Here's an LFO-only, direct ascent entry with a launch mass under 1000 tonnes. 2.4e11 meters.

Spoiler

 

Will be hard to beat without gravity assists, nukes, or ions.

[goduranus]

Orbital docking to refuel is allowed, so there's still opportunity to improve.

[sevenperforce]

46 minutes ago, goduranus said:

Orbital docking to refuel is allowed, so there's still opportunity to improve.

Wait, weight per vehicle launch is 1000 tonnes?

So I can launch, like, fifty ginormous drop-tank spaceplanes, dock them all together, and asparagus-stage the hell out of them?

This could become...prodigious.

[goduranus]

1 minute ago, sevenperforce said:

Wait, weight per vehicle launch is 1000 tonnes?

So I can launch, like, fifty ginormous drop-tank spaceplanes, dock them all together, and asparagus-stage the hell out of them?

This could become...prodigious.

Is refuelling a good idea or no? since no one has done it there we could still disable it for the challenge.

[sevenperforce]

14 minutes ago, goduranus said:

Is refuelling a good idea or no? since no one has done it there we could still disable it for the challenge.

I think refueling is fine, since there are definitely some inventive things that could be done with it, but I think we should say you need to send it all up in a single launch at no more than 1000 tonnes (or, at the very least, put a hard limit on the number of launches, like 2 or 3).

I could also significantly increase my dV out of Kerbin SOI by using a drop-tank spaceplane for the launch. That quick-and-dirty asparagus rocket got about 200 tonnes to LKO, or around 20% of launch mass, but I could easily get over 40% of launch mass to orbit if I used horizontal takeoff and Rapiers.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone were to do ISRU at Eeloo. Potentially much higher dV, but time spent getting to Eeloo and doing ISRU is time you're not spending on your coast out of Kerbol SOI. Might be wiser to refuel at Minmus, if one were to go that route; you can get there quickly, you don't spend much dV getting off, and you have a good bit of solar power for the ISRU project so that's less mass to worry about.

[Marschig]

If the craft can weigh 1000 t, it will weigh 1000 t. Only weight distribution between stages can be tuned.

https://imgur.com/a/LQSrY

Spoiler

 

Edited January 20, 2018 by Marschig

[DAL59]

At 10,000 petameters, there is a second SSTV signal, that no one has deciphered yet.  

[JK_Kerbineer]

5 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

At 10,000 petameters, there is a second SSTV signal, that no one has deciphered yet.  

NovaSilsko confirmed this to be a glitch, and only  few people were able to hear it. It most likely has been since removed.

[qzgy]

On 1/18/2018 at 3:43 AM, goduranus said:

[new]Due to concern that the optimal strategy may be a long nuke or ion engine burn, which is boring to wait through, nuke or ion drive will be disallowed, but will still receive honorable mention for people willing to wait theough the burn.

Wait why ban this? Like really? If the penalty is super long boring burn times, why does that matter? We're not making videos of it nor are we actually, you know, sitting in the room with you making you watch.

[0something0]

I think instead of limiting launch mass to 1000t per launch, the score should be based off Altitude/TotalMass

And nukes/ions should be allowed and timewarp mods too.

[goduranus]

But then the best strategy may be to burn for hours of real time with ions. Nukes may be better but not by much.

I realize that this is removing one of the ideal strategies, of burning ions during solar gravity assist where solar panels are highly efficient. But I cringe at the thought of an hour long burn.

Ok, since multiple launches is a really big advantage without enough drawback, let's do single 1000ton launch instead.

Edited January 21, 2018 by goduranus

[OPBL]

Well, i could try...