Kerbonaut Archery

[Gargamel]

Kerbonaut Archery Challenge!

(Updated: May 13 2018)

 

The Challenge:  

"Launch"  a vessel from the surface a body (without atmosphere), travel around the body, and "land" as close as possible to the launch pad.  Either the "arrow" must complete one orbit, or the launcher one rotation of the moon. 

Rules:

1)The vessel shall be uncontrolled, aside from SAS (No RCS).  No orbital maneuvering engines of any sort. 

2) It gets one burn initiated at launch, and no corrections of any sort, no throttling either.  Burn starts, burn ends, nothing else.     

3) No changing the direction or Angle of Attack of the arrow once it has been launched.  The burn must take place along one vector.  

4) If an entry is of the "straight up" variety, to keep pedants out of the game, the launcher must complete a day/night cycle to count as having completed a rotation.

5) All mods are allowed that do not violate the spirit of this challenge.   Hyperedit and Vessel Mover are practically encouraged.  No editing of the craft or pad once the 'arrow' has been fired. 

Basically it has to act like an arrow shot from a bow, as in the picture.   Questionable entries will be debated by the masses, disqualified entrants will be fed to the Kraken. 

Scoring:  

Distance from Launch point upon first landing, in meters.  Hitting the pad counts as a perfect score (0).  

Scoring Modifiers:

• Mass drivers will receive a .25 multiplier bonus. 
• Manned Arrows will receive a .9 multiplier bonus.  
• Vessels that do not use any positional editing (launched from Kerbin, landed, and then fired), will receive a .5 multiplier bonus. 
• Launching from the pole of a body will incur a 2x penalty. 

All modifiers are cumulative, so a non edited, manned, mass driver would receive a .1125 multiplier to their score.  (These multipliers are subject to change as true difficulty becomes more apparent).

 

Since the "landing" will be more of "Extreme Lithobraking", try to grab a screen shot right before or during impact.  Only the first impact will count, and distances in the screen shot after the impact will not, so spam that F1 key.    It is encouraged to have an altitude over terrain indicator visible in the screen shots so we can confirm the validity of the claim.    Near miss fly bys will get lots of oohs and ahhs, but no bonus points.  Only impacts count for scoring. 

SCORE BOARD:

1) @DoctorDavinci 5900

Edited May 14, 2018 by Gargamel

[Jetpackmaniac]

Sounds interesting! Might try it sometime.

[Gargamel]

HOLY FLYING JEB, IT WORKS!

First Attempt!  1500+ meters!   But I'm not going to count my score, as the hyper edit orbit glitch struck, and shifted the arrow from it's initial trajectory, to one farther around the moon, so initially I was going to fall short.  But as a proof of concept, it's totally do-able!!  With some tweaks, it should be a very close shot!

That's a bunch of parts from mods, just to make the base easier to assemble.   The tip of the arrow is an NRAP adjustable mass payload.  Only needed 3 sepatrons.

Launch!

Un-glitched initial orbit:

Just cleared the mountains after launch:

Here I come!

Flyby!

"Landing"  just over 1500 meters away:

 

 

Now I'm looking for someone to help me draw a badge.  Perhaps a target with a ship crashing through it?   Thinking about giving it away to anybody who can hit within 500 meters!

 

 

 

 

[Gargamel]

Of course this is do-able.  I've just invented suicide by ICBM.  Laughing at myself now, thinking this was a novel idea.    Still a fun idea for a challenge. 

[MarvinKitFox]

Gargamel.....

Are you seriously saying you launched a ballistic orbit from one of the flats of minmus, headed *east* (in the direction of MinMus rotation), that managed to orbit all the way around and impact 1500m east of the launch point, *at the same altitude* as the launch?

As the launch altitude cannot possibly be lower than your perigee, it must be at or above perigee.

Thus, the perigee position must be at or to the west of your launch point.

.

Which point, due to the rotation of MinMus, is 20.9km+1.5km east of where you started?

YOU HAVE DISCOVERED A WAY TO ROTATE PERIGEE BY 22.5KM WITHOUT PROPULSION!!!!

.

.

I.E.

I claim you are a cheating skunk that hyperedited your projectile for a closer fit.

 

 

 

 

The ONLY way to actually achieve this challenge with a launch towards rotation is to have the launch point on a mountain, allowing the initial launch angle to be very very slightly below horizontal, yet clear terrain on first pass while slamming into your mountain after one orbit.

Edited May 2, 2018 by MarvinKitFox

[Piatzin]

[Gargamel]

2 hours ago, MarvinKitFox said:

I claim you are a cheating skunk that hyperedited your projectile for a closer fit.

Errr....  If you actually read the post, It says that

1) I did use hyper edit, to place the launcher, and

2) When you time warp after hyper editing a vessel, sometimes it gets hit with a glitch that shifts it's orbit somewhat, and I stated that happened and that I was supposed to land to the west of my location, and because of such I am not scoring that entry, but using it as a "proof" of concept.   Hell, before the glitch hit, you can see in the pics I posted my orbit was going to slam me into the side of a mountain, way short of the target. 

 

Perhaps you should read first, accuse second. 

Edited May 2, 2018 by Gargamel

[Gargamel]

But, @MarvinKitFox, You do bring up a good point in one aspect.  I never did account for rotation in my initial Challenge.  

I think I might amend the challenge to include setting up a target within, say, 50 km of the launch platform.    But I also have some ideas that may pan out for hitting the launcher.  

Of course, I also think shooting straight up, and waiting for the launcher/target to complete one rotation is also a valid score. 

 

But please, next time, before you accuse somebody of being a cheat, which I take very seriously, consider their motives.  What could I possibly gain from cheating in the initial attempt at a challenge?  Let alone my own challenge? 

[Jetpackmaniac]

If you slow the burn down and point raidial in several kilometers down rang from the launch sight, you might be able to move the periapses enough to hit the target. Because of my poor piloting in my attempt I was on an escape trajectory far before I would have been close to the target. 

Edited May 8, 2018 by a_space_oddity

[Not Sure]

8 hours ago, a_space_oddity said:

If you slow the burn down and point raidial in several kilometers down rang from the launch sight, you might be able to move the periapses enough to hit the target. Because of my poor piloting in my attempt I was on an escape trajectory far before I would have been close to the target. 

But, according to the rules, you can’t do that.

i think doing it on a tidally Locked body will lower the body rotation speed the most. Also, I wonder if I could, on a non tidally locked body, could launch straight up and have my trajectory from start to finish be the same time as the rotation of the body. The body would do one full rotation and I would hit the ground right where I started, one day later.

questioning if the above falls under the rules.

[Jetpackmaniac]

4 hours ago, Not Sure said:

But, according to the rules, you can’t do that.

 

What I meant was to do one long burn at low throttle, rather than a short full throttle burn.

[sevenperforce]

What I'm trying is launching retrograde and letting the rotation bring me back in range.

[DoctorDavinci]

So it took a few tries but I managed a respectable 5.9km

 

[Gargamel]

If it wasn't for that dang mountain.... 5.9k it is!  

I'm going to redo my attempt here, and then redo the first post. 

On 5/8/2018 at 9:02 PM, a_space_oddity said:

What I meant was to do one long burn at low throttle, rather than a short full throttle burn. 

As long as it's a single burn, initiated at launch, with no flight control added, then it's valid.    So you can aim, enable SAS to keep it stable, and then fire.  Changing the angle of the burn during the flight is not allowed.     This needs to mimic an arrow as closely as possible, not a guided missile. 

[Gargamel]

So far It looks very promising.  I'm just having issues finding the correct launch location, and then when I do, the Hyperedit orbit glitch kicks in and screws up the whole process.  Usually, reloading a quicksave to switching to the KSC and back fixes it, but then I'm getting the dreaded "bouncing on load" bug, which is forcing me to use HE to gently land the launcher again, rinse and repeat.    Going to have to install the mod to fix that. 

My theory:  Find a cliff overlooking a large low lying area on each side to the east and west.  Launch so my periapsis is to the east of the launch location, so when the body's rotation brings the launcher to the east some, the arrow will come down in that spot.  

[FleshJeb]

I'd pay to see someone do a roughly polar shot on Eeloo.

Pol would be the easiest.

[Gargamel]

15 minutes ago, FleshJeb said:

I'd pay to see someone do a roughly polar shot on Eeloo.

Pol would be the easiest.

I've considered adding a multiplier for polar orbits, but we'll see how the entries pan out.  If there's interest, I'll add one.

 

One scoring method I've considered is instead of straight up meters from target, adding a modifier for moon size, relative to minmus.    So it would be Distance x (Minmus diameter / Body Diameter), where body is the body you actually launched from.  Larger bodies requiring more dV would get a bonus multiplier, and smaller bodies a penalty multiplier. 

Added @DoctorDavinci to the score board. 

[Jetpackmaniac]

3 hours ago, Gargamel said:

As long as it's a single burn, initiated at launch, with no flight control added, then it's valid.    So you can aim, enable SAS to keep it stable, and then fire.  Changing the angle of the burn during the flight is not allowed.     This needs to mimic an arrow as closely as possible, not a guided missile. 

Ok,looks like I didn’t read the rules good enough, sorry. 

[EnderKid2]

If you launch into a polar orbit, from the pole, the rotation of the body shouldn't matter, right?

[DoctorDavinci]

So using hyper edit screws the pooch for your accuracy so why not use Vessel Mover instead .... this is what I did for my entry:

1- build a basic small rocket that has control and enough fuel to land on minmus

2- use the stock cheat menu to put the craft into minmus orbit

3- deorbit craft and land it on minmus

4- use the spawn craft feature in VM to spawn your arrow launcher

5- use VM to move the launcher to wherever you want it to be on mimus

6- line up your aim and place your launcher

7- profit

Hope this helps 

[Gargamel]

11 hours ago, a_space_oddity said:

Ok,looks like I didn’t read the rules good enough, sorry. 

I edited the rules around when I posted my response, so it wasn't spelled out clear enough.  But your post helped me write the clarification :D. 

9 hours ago, EnderKid2 said:

If you launch into a polar orbit, from the pole, the rotation of the body shouldn't matter, right?

Well, my first inclination would be a smack on the side of the head.  Then I realized the genius of this.   I'll add this as a scoring modifier, a penalty.

[FleshJeb]

On 5/13/2018 at 6:10 PM, Gargamel said:

Well, my first inclination would be a smack on the side of the head.

Your first inclination would be +/- 90

[Gargamel]

10 hours ago, FleshJeb said:

Your first inclination would be +/- 90

 

On 5/13/2018 at 9:10 PM, Gargamel said:

Well, my first inclination would be a smack on the side of the head.

 

On 5/13/2018 at 9:10 PM, Gargamel said:

Then I realized the genius of this.