gchristopher

That doesn't sound right to me. If you attach SRBs that just fall into the ocean, that's not reuse. Those big refueling tanks never leave the ground as part of any launch system. The game just doesn't provide fuel trucks, so we have to make them. I think the point of the challenge was pretty clearly to land and reuse absolutely every bit of mass that goes into ascent. Allowing spawning new disposable SRBs invites trivial abuses like having your launch vehicle just being a pod sitting on top of 100 boosters that are "reused." I agree with Keldaria, hyperedit refueling of solid rocket boosters that somehow make it back to the launch pad sounds like a reasonable way to treat it as reusable, but it has to be the exact SAME booster that goes up each flight. That's the same restriction that applies to every engine, fuel tank, coupler and strut that comprise the rest of the vehicles.

Would it be okay to have a Kerbal take the data out of a cockpit, recover the Kerbal from EVA carrying all the data, then refuel the plane and send it off again? Or have the kerbal climb into a spare command pod, and recover that. You'd have to pay for the fuel and whatever it cost to have a refueling apparatus. plus the crew cost of a Kerbal from a command pod?

What was motivating that rule? Would the hassle of re-launching reflect how NASA and others are trying to save money with reusable vehicles and be a good aspect of the challenge? (Assuming it saves any money at all.)

The odd shape of SporkLift has meant a custom gantry for each payload, until I figure out a generic one. Yeah, not totally sure this is a great idea.

Thanks all! Definitely! As soon as I get the space station parts up, I'll post a full writeup and all the .craft files. I probably still made tons of beginner mistakes, though. Yes, that's probably way smarter, too, but I was dead set on strapping wings on a rocket in space, darn it! I guess having to only perform one landing is nicer than having to land a plane and VTOL component separately, maybe? The plane has two sets of landing gear, one pointed forwards and one (slightly shorter) pointed sideways. There's a single sideways powered rover wheel under each wing half. After landing and separation, the forward-facing gear are raised and the sideways ones are lowered. That lowers the plane enough for the rover wheel to touch down, and now it drives around (sideways) like a very badly designed rover! So the wings each drive sideways away from the rocket, then the rocket drives away under its own power (one small rocket), then the plane halves drive sideways to re-dock. That part turned out surprisingly robust and easy. Ooh, oooh, or it could take off VTOL from between the wings and land nearby or, or... everything I do of that nature crashes. I tried. You could launch like that, but loading the payload would be a pain and you'd still have to re-dock the wings. Others probably know better than me, but I just cut down on throttle and switch to the main rocket early-ish, instead of trying to milk every last bit out of the jet engines. After I've done the flight at least once by hand to prove to myself that I can, I hand it off to MechJeb. One part that still has the potential to be absolutely horrid is getting all three docking clamps to mesh simultaneously. With MechJeb autodock flying one half, and me manually adjusting the orientation of the other half, it mostly works. One consequence of using MJ autodock is my RCS placement is pathetic. If I get into another repeated docking/undocking situation, I'm fully prepared to try cheating as described here: http://youtu.be/YsEHIn_ucIA It's too bad that there's no way to tell a docking port to "Just attach to the other docking port that you're clearly in perfect contact with."

They should have also specified "no sass."

(Please tell me if this is getting off topic and I should move it to another thread.) My project hit a snag. Jeb got back from Minmus, and had some things to say about our reusable space fleet. (Starting with "REUSABLE!?!?") So we told him: "Okay, Jeb, how about if you fly a plane to space that splits in HALF right down the middle? Does that sound fun?" We eventually talked him into it, but we also had to promise to increase the payload capacity to more than the "wussy" 23 tons. We also had to promise to stop messing around so much with boring gantries. So anyway, the Up Chuck and Unladen Swallow are now parked at a physics-safe distance from KSC so we can start launching with a totally new, even crazier reusable SSTO lift system! (The more I learn about this game, the dumber my designs look.) So, here's the plan: Much like before, a rocket/jet lifts the payload, and the spaceplane rendezvous with the rocket for deorbit. But this time the spaceplane is perfectly symmetric, so it can split down the middle and attach to each side of the rocket. The early failures on this one were GREAT. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to screenshot the debris fields. I was too busy laughing. Here's a new 100% reusable launch system! - The SporkLift rocket/jet lifter. - The Hot Dog Bun modular space plane. This system has a bunch of advantages over the earlier Up Chuck/Unladen Swallow system: - 40 ton max single payload capacity. - More flexible payload, because the rocket is brick shaped, and the payload doesn't have to slot into a narrow area. - The rocket lands upright! It can just drive itself back to the launch pad after landing. No messing around with righting a rocket. - Pretty Stock, so far it's not intrinsically reliant on any mod. (Though I wouldn't want to fly it without automatic fuel balancing. That'd be a lot of clicking.) - Killed Jeb at least twice. The big disadvantage is the use of multiple docking ports to get a secure joint between the rocket and the half-spaceplane wings. You have to be extremely careful to get all three to dock, and it seems like it either works on the first try, or else you're in for 30 minutes of tedious re-docking. I'm 5 for 6 docking a wing on the first try. Okay, I should probably get back to building the station, since now I have two reusable lift systems to choose from! Sorry it's taking so long to actually finish the challenge, but coming up with the reusable systems has been super fun. (And hard)

You guys were right. That was challenging and tedious. But, it's completed a full refueling and relaunch sequence! Werner kicked us off the launch pad, so we're launching from the R&D campus. The second picture is a spectator's view of the full ground operations fleet. Top left, the rocket/payload gantry is bringing in the science/escape pod cluster module. The Up Chuck rocket is connected to a support gantry (which was more trouble than it's worth). A fuel truck connects to the support gantry. 23.066t payload this time. I think it's pushing very close to the max liftoff weight, though. The full space station will take a while. The ground operations could still use some tweaking. Would you like a copy of the Infernal Machines-based one I'm using? It's pretty tedious to use, but better than nothing.

"Roller Derby" Low-Gravity Science Exploration vessel for people with short attention spans who've gotten sick of paying attention to where their rover is driving. It's just a mobile processing lab with a command pod and one of each science instrument, plus two large SAS. Mounted radially are struts and impact resistant landing gear. No motors, rockets or RCS. It moves by reaction wheel spinning. Just turn on SAS, set something heavy on the Q or E keys and let it roll off across the Mun. It sorta mostly goes in the same-ish direction. Go make a sandwich. Check every once in a while and maybe it'll have reached a new biome. Repeat until you forget that KSP is running and you leave the little guys spinning up and down craters. The crew of this thing drew the short straw, naturally.

Haha, yeah, wow. Given how many times I failed at the "easy" part, I'd hate to see what you consider "hard". I'm going back to Minmus until I have enough Science to unlock all the solar panels and batteries and whatnot that go on a station... In fairness, I'm curious how I'll do it too!

Thanks for the feedback. It landed successfully! Turns out my problem was this: Pilot error. Jeb insisted that any landing slower than 120 m/s is "for wimps." I think he's against the whole reusable ship concept, as the launches of Oops Sats 1-6 were highly profitable for his junkyard business. Anyway, Jeb was MIA after Oops Sat 6, so I put Bob in the cockpit, added a little lift, and he landed it at a sedate 54 m/s. It probably doesn't need half the structural reinforcement that were added trying to get it to land at higher speeds. Not a hint of damage, so I'm going to go back and remove a lot of struts to lower the part count. Yep, the rocket comes close to righting itself when decoupled, and could probably be stood up just with landing gear. Or I've fiddled with rounded gantries to roll it upright, etc, etc. Went through all that making a modular rover-based stock launch gantry for an earlier project. It was kinda dumb. But really, I'm sick of wrestling with the wobbly physics engine and stock Kerbals not having invented the hinge yet. I'll use Infernal Machines mod for the ground support, which will make docking/aligning the vehicles reasonably easy. Anyway, yay for learning to land! The space station engineers refused to hand over any modules until we'd demonstrated that we could actually land the vehicles. So during the learning process, we just kept launching one Oops Sat refueling station after another. (The first landing was after deploying Oops Sat 7.) So, as a side bonus, there's now 150+ tons of fuel in low Kerbin orbit for use in this or other projects.

Hi, I'm new to KSP, and thought I'd try a challenge. Boy, either this one is hard, or I suck, or both! But I think I'm extremely close to a working system, so I thought I'd post progress. I have a few additional personal requirements in addition to the challenge rules: - It has to be fun, or I won't keep at it. - A payload restriction under 20t isn't very fun; too limiting. - After the first several times, maneuvers are boring. Try to use as much autopilot as possible. - I tried to minimize internet research to avoid copying people. This is pretty much me experimenting. So, here's what I came up with: launch a rocket that can just barely get the payload to 75x75 LKO, then deploy the payload with the rocket running on fumes. Then launch a space plane to rendezvous with the rocket and bring it back to KSC. The theory is that if the space plane burns about as much fuel as the dry weight of the rocket, then with careful center of gravity management, it'll weigh about the same on landing as when it took off and have similar flight characteristics. Here's the fleet from the last test run: "Up Chuck Mark XX" Medium Lift SSTO Rocket Jet: ~65.5t launch weight, ~25t dry weight, 20t design payload to 75x75 LKO, tested up to 22.5 tons. "Unladen Swallow Mark XI" SSTO Space Plane retrieval vehicle: Also about 65t. "Oops Sat 1" Orbital fuel depot. (I'll probably end up needing it.) The last test had: Successful: - Launch and deployment of the payload to LKO - Launch of the retrieval spaceplane - Docking the spaceplane to the rocket. (2/3 clamps, which seems good enough) - Reentry and adequate flight to the runway Failure: - Structural failure on the payload, which only has one landing gear. It flexed enough to clip the runway and got torn off the back of the plane. - Then I over-braked in frustration and also crashed the plane. Not worried about that part. Pictures: Anyway, I think it's very likely I can resolve the landing issue by adding another landing gear or two and some structural reinforcement to the rocket. (Argh, that weight comes directly out of payload capacity, though.) If it works, it'll get 20 tons to orbit per refueling cycle without ever having a vehicle over 90 tons in flight at once. That should be cool.