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What was your biggest overkill?


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I finished my new kethane scanner probe. It was time to get it over to kerbin's orbit.

This is what i came with as lifter:

ike5.png

The probe weighted about 0,5 tons. But just to make sure... :D

Notice the acceleration and thrust. I used the same rocket to pull my 10 tons orbital station. i used KW rocketry, kethane and MechJeb to build this.

What was your biggest overkill?

P.S. The boldest measures are the safest :cool:

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Well on my 2nd journey to Duna, I had about 10k m/s at the start (early career mode) for emergency. I calculated I needed about 8k m/s, I am sure it can be done in less but I am still learning the game. A little help from kerbal alarm clock and a phase angle calculator for my ejection angle should help keep me well within my total dV.

My first attempt did not end well just before the holidays, now I am back at my gaming rig its time to give it another go (previously I used a protractor and "guessed" 45*) and burnt on the dark side. It did not end well...

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I have a stable of launch vehicles for those moments where i'm too lazy to design a customised one specific to the payload.

Worst overkill was probably my keosynch satellite launch (for RT2). I was really quite drunk and put a 140t rated launcher behind a 1t sat. Thrust was below 30% all the way to about 20km and I ended up trying to insert into keosynch with 6 mainsails. That kind of thrust is not your friend when going for such highly accurate burns.

To make it all worse I didnt add any kind of propulsion to the sat itself (my keostationary sats should never move), yet the decoupler that released it from the launcher was mounted the wrong way around, so when I triggered it the satellite gained several m/s and was no long synchronous, and therefore useless. Memo to self, push the launcher away from the sat, not visa-versa.

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I end up taking too little fuel that poor Bob suffers an impact with the mun because I ran out once I'm on a collision course. Next I try to compensate an end with my launch stage still attached when I land. Though my first ever rocket I attempt to get into orbit was basically 1 large cluster of rockets stacked on to an even LARGER cluster to get 3 Kerbals into orbit, still didn't make it though.

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My first interplanetary mission from a month or so after I started playing this game... The first pic is my original lifter and transfer ship design. The second two show what happened every time I tried to launch the thing. Then the pics after it show the unholy creation I conjured that ultimately landed me on Duna for the first time.

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I have to say that ship is still one of my favorite things I've designed even if I'm far better and more efficient nowadays. lol

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Well, I do not have pics, but if I remember my biggest overkill is using a giant launcher I found on the forums somewhere that was able to carry like 300 tons to orbit, with fuel to spare, to take a really small probe to duna. (Or was it a rover?) I do know that I still had pretty much half of the launcher when I reached duna! And.... I did this before I knew about "efficient" planetary transfers and just stuck a rocket up there and forced the intercept :o! I used that launcher a lot though, so it is probable that I had even more insane overkill.

Also, I tend to overbuild everything, like making a multistage asparagus rockomax launcher to take a 5 ton kethane scanner to minmus!

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when I started with the demoversion, I built rockets without knowing anything about their design. I managed to get them bigger and bigger and finally I made it to mün. that rocket was so ridiculously overengineered and yet it was just capable of bringing one kerbal to mün, and leave him there stranded.

I needed all that fuel, because I did not know anything about how to fly it. I just knew: I'm here on kerbin and mün is up there, so I can go there by pointing my rocket at mün.

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Well, I do not have pics, but if I remember my biggest overkill is using a giant launcher I found on the forums somewhere that was able to carry like 300 tons to orbit, with fuel to spare, to take a really small probe to duna. (Or was it a rover?) I do know that I still had pretty much half of the launcher when I reached duna! And.... I did this before I knew about "efficient" planetary transfers and just stuck a rocket up there and forced the intercept :o! I used that launcher a lot though, so it is probable that I had even more insane overkill.

Also, I tend to overbuild everything, like making a multistage asparagus rockomax launcher to take a 5 ton kethane scanner to minmus!

You beat me to it! I too have sent a mission to Duna with the launch stage. I got into orbit with a lot of fuel and thought, I can take advantage of this and when I finish drop it back into Kerbin. It was still going once I got an escape, and made it all the way to Duna. In the end I did drop the stage into Duna.

Virtually all of my launches are overkill. I use a launcher that can put about 50t into orbit, and often launch much less.

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I made a heavy lifter and added it as a subassembly; now I use that lifter for everything.

12 mainsails are not required to get very small payloads to orbit, but it works (almost) every time and several times objects aimed for Kerbin orbit have ended up on or around the Mun because of 'why the hell not' moments :P

It's only 8 mainsails, stage, 4 mainsails, stage, skipper, which isn't particularly efficient or even reliable.

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