Kadrian

Hi folks, As promised, here is the proof of concept for the challenge. The plane reached a stable orbit with around 100 m/s delta-v left, although I didn't finish the landing since version 0.24 was released around that time and I started a new career with different saves. I will maybe do some score calculations in the near future, but since this thread is pretty much abandoned, I guess it's not worth the effort. The craft file can be found here (I hope). Enjoy the slideshow.

nice (filler to get to 10 characters)

As you probably guessed, this challenge should not be taken too seriously, although I think it is well balanced for people who know how to build space planes, and might even be a bit on the difficult side for beginners. Your objective is to send Poland into space (aka orbit with both apoapsis and periapsis > 70000m) with the materials available. You have the following parts at your disposal: MANDATORY (Poland has spent copious amounts of time and money finding these, so there is only one each available): - One red tank (Rockomax Jumbo-64) - One manned pod (The external command seat is NOT an option; I advise using the MK 1 Lander capsule) - One R.A.P.I.E.R. engine, toggled as you like, you might even want to use an action group OPTIONAL (These parts just happen to lie around, you may use as many as you please): - Structural wings (aka Wing connectors; you know, the rectangular ones that look like painted plywood) - Standard control surfaces (you know, the rectangular ones that look like painted plywood sawn in half) - Small gear bay (I just can't make you save on these, it would be cruel) - Ox-Stat photovoltaic panels (weight- and dragless part, afaik, so make sure you have power) PENALIZED (Poland only has a limited amount of euromonies, so spend it wisely. The economic system of KSP v0.23.5 applies, so use them now and pay for them later) - Any Rockomax Brand adapter (Don't know why these cost money? You will find out.) 100 € - EAS-4 strut connectors (This is just the raw metal price) 5 € each - XM-G50 radial air intake (Made from pressure cookers, and those are not cheap) 20€ each FORBIDDEN (Just unavailable. If you use these parts, you are a ... spy for the enemies of Poland or something). - EVERYTHING not mentioned above. I am open for suggestions, provided they keep the spirit of the competition or lead to extremely funny results Since Poland also has a gambling problem, the following bets have been placed: - You will receive 1000 € for completing the mission - You will receive 500 € for bringing back the pilot alive after a successful mission ->-> + 200 € for keeping the vessel intact ->-> + 100 € for landing on either the KSC or island runway - You will be deducted 100 € if you kill the pilot (so just show a screenshot of Jebediah in orbit before making him crash in front of our eyes) - You will receive 100 € for starting the mission with a completely full tank - You will receive a varying amount of € (max 100) based on how much your vessel resembles the polish winged Hussars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_hussars) - You will receive a varying amount of € (max 100) based on how much your vessel resembles the polish red brick - You will be deducted your parts count in € (The mandatory and optional parts will be deducted as well, to keep things simple. Yes, I know, how come free stuff isn't free... just google TANSTAAFL). - You will be deducted 10 € for using informational mods (KER, MechJeb) - You will be deducted 500 € for using physics-altering mods (FAR etc., although it might even be more difficult...) - You will be deducted 2000 € for using anything that follows Alt+F12. Debts are to be paid to my PayPal-account. Since I do not have the time to visit the forum hourly or sometimes even daily, this challenge will be peer-reviewed: Please make sure to document your attempt sufficiently to be reproducible by someone who has nothing but your report and your vessel. YOU WILL SCORE YOURSELF, so everyone else is invited to check for discrepancies between what people claim and what seems plausible based on the record. Everyone who has finished the challenge will have editor status and can veto submissions from being accepted until the author has proven that his claims are valid. I will be the first editor, after a while we will maybe get to the standard overzealous sausage-fest we all love and cherish. The challenge can of course be beaten, I will post a mission log in about 2 weeks (for suspense and to support different approaches) or mail it to anyone interested / in doubt. The SHA256-hash of the craft that made it is $ cat Poland_release.craft | sha256sum b7384d5cef496c668799de969806d66643a3a93243d52d1683c4161fe6c35938 I will try not to edit this post so hopefully grammar and spelling are not too bad. I will reserve the post below for a scoreboard. Again: If I don't answer within a few day's time, it probably means I have a lot of work to do. It doesn't mean I have lost interest. - - - Updated - - - <reserved>

Thanks for moderating the challenge and accepting the entry. Good job spotting the upside down Laythe lander , shows you really put in the effort. Triple symmetry is no fun with staged parachutes, so I used the small "breaking" chutes at 2500m (lower tanks) and the big ones at 300m (upper tanks). If I had mounted the big ones on the bottom tanks, the ship would have gone down nicely and then turned on the last 300m. Once all of them were deployed, I had enough time to spend some monopropellant and "real" fuel to keep the nose pointing up. Real fun part was Bop though, I basically practiced rocket skiing down the mountain, still glad the struts held. They are the better landing legs. And you might be right, the mission was anything but fuel efficient. Could have done with half the weight in science packages, probably would have kept the whole design below 10 kT Next time (should there be one) I will definitely land 3 Kerbals per moon. I think those surface samples can make the difference.

Sitting here and watching the parts file I don't know exactly how this craft will handle. But if (these are estimates) it reaches about 1700 m/s at 30km on the Turbojets before flameout, all you need to do is fire the booster on 10° inclination you will have an apoapsis far beyond the "usual" aesthetically pleasing 100km orbit. Out there you might just use RCS to push the periapsis to > 70km and call it a day. So I need to know if "stable" is sufficient or if there are points for "nice".

Please define orbit. Any kind of scoring system? Will try this tonight if I find the time. Solid fuel booster could make the plane difficult, but if it manages to punch you the last (or first?) 200 m/s, anything could be possible.

Jool 5 Run - writeup: Hi folks, this is my attempt. I can confirm that this challenge is everything but trivial, but challenges are ... well ... meant to be challenging. The basics: Version 0.23.5, single launch, basic Launcher-Traveler-Lander-Setup with no refueling (unless you count docking the lander and transferring fuel from the traveler). Science was stored in six modules that were exchanged between moons, crew- and EVA-reports were stored in a science module. Different pilot for each moon, so I guess this is the Jebediah-class. I scored 17271 Points, which pisses me off since I wanted the high-score... I used KER for info (mainly delta-v, surface speed and terrain height during landing) and Kerbal alarm clock, the rest is stock. I used hyperedit to test the lander, but of course not during the run. I tried to keep the resources window open, but with all the docking and switching between ships I might have missed it in a few shots. I anticipated some small hiccups and was prepared to do my Kerbin-return on ion engines with nothing but the science modules and the Kerbals, but I had enough delta-v left to return with the last stage of the lander, although I am not sure if I received any science points for that, since it was docked to the traveler stage during landing. All at all, the ship could have saved some mass on the science modules, but I am a symmetry freak since it makes flying those 40 min burns a lot less troublesome. Mission was fairly straight-forward: Get into orbit above Kerbin, fly to Jool, aerobreake, get in orbit around the moons, do science and drop as much weight as possible early on. This meant going in the order of Tylo (drop first lander stage during descent), Vall, Laythe (drop second lander stage during ascent), Pol and Bop (not the other way around because of increasing inclination). Problems: The ship is huge. My PC isn't a racecar but it's fairly decent. Still, the vast amount of struts (which all get modeled as Newtonian springs) slowed down my launch to about 1/3rd realtime and the rest of the flight to about one half (until the lander was first undocked). The ship spins during launch because of some deformation in the upper engine stage, but it's nothing that can't be controlled. I had to land twice on Bop because the lander can still contained the crew report from Pol, so I got two surface samples from there. Should have done the same on Pol... Other than that, I am willing to answer questions, but I am pretty sure the Imgur-Gallery is pretty self-explanatory. Be aware that it contains about 200 images. Cheers

Starting this challenge. this probably has been answered before, but will there be penalties if you do the Jebediah challenge and have been to the moons before? Science points decrease for double takes, so a fresh careerer has the advantage there... Kind regards

Wow. I was going to make a remark about someone being a megalomaniac, then I took a look at my current 5 kiloton Eve and Back ship. I had noticed the internal routing of intake air based on build order, but I didn't finish the thought. Thaks for the tip!

So here is my attempt. Let's see if the imgur embed works: It's a Shuttle very similar to Kasuha's. The two engines pointing in opposite directions on the same tank are a nice touch and solve a lot of problems that appear when using more than one Turbojet at high altitudes (if one of them flames out, the shuttle gets pulled to the side by the non-central thrust - impossible to fly...). The mission itself uses a Jool Slingshot to get a very high elliptical orbit around the sun. On the apoapsis breaking to a terminal course uses only 700 m/s delta-v, which means that the 4000 m/s I started with in low Kerbin Orbit are quite enough (basically the budget just consists a Jool transit, the breaking maneuver, the burn at Kerbol periapsis to avoid the crash and some minor course corrections. Way less than retrograde burns outside of Kerbin and speeding up again to get back home, which I estimate at about 20,000 m/s). Only downside is that this high orbit takes quite some time to run through, so the whole mission took about 90 years. At 500,000 m above Kerbol, the bomb goes away and I fire radial to get a safe periapsis and retrograde to reduce the orbit to about 3 years. After that, it's just some minor corrections to get back to Kerbin, although aerobreaking from 12.000 m/s has the nice effect of bouncing me off the atmosphere and pushing me back into a medium orbit. That turns out to be a good thing, because the landing strip is on the other side of the planet and I have to wait a few days for the position to synchronize. After that it's smooth gliding. I also watched the movie (what a turd), should have done that before because I could have killed one of my Kerbals for authenticity (and weight loss...). A reference to another movie this reminds me of: The pictures don't show it, but the mission was called "Dark Star" and the bomb had the name "Bomb 20".

Thanks NavalLacrosse, think it was my newbie status that blocked advanced embeds. Will try the [imgUR] commands, that schould keep things simple in the future. Much apprechiated.

Noted. How is the radio contact requirement checked? I'm playing all stock, so to my knowledge you don't need line of sight or big antennas to transmit science back to Kerbin (yet). And blowing things up sounds most scientific to me. Cheers Adrian

Interesting challenge. It should be possible with some creative maneuvering. Will try some designs this evening. Does the "bomb" have to be completely passive or can I strap some engines onto it?

Thanks for the scoring and all the work involved. The challenge is well balanced and leaves a lot of room for different approaches, which is usually a good thing in this kind of games. On a side note: How do imgur embeds work? HTML always gets rewritten... Kind regards Adrian

Kerbin - Minmus - Duna - Kerbin - run Hi there, this is my entry for this challenge. Let's see if the Imgur upload is done before I finish my writeup... As mentioned before, this is more of a space-plane than a shuttle, mostly because I like the recoverable Single Stage idea, and the only way to do this is by using light and economical engines. This leaves Xenon and Turbojets. And 80 kN of 24-77 for when there is neither atmosphere nor time. So in short, this craft should be able to get to about 30.000 m @ about 1600 m/s before having to use any "real" rocket engines. After that, it's smooth sailing with the ion engines, although some of the burns tend to get rather long (+ 20 min), especially when the craft is still full... Let's get to the challenge: To make the design fit for the challenge, I used 2x S1 SRB-KD25k as boosters for a vertical launch. One would have been enough, but the center of lift was too far off. I instead decreased the amount of fuel to 2000 kg each and started a horizontal acceleration on the Turbojet when these were jettisoned at about 13.000 m. At 27.000 m and about 1200 m/s surface velocity (when the Turbojet still outputs about 100 kN), I start the 24-77 stage to get an apoapsis around 75.000 m, after that I switch to ion engines and try to get a stable LKO by only adding short bursts from the liquid fuel engines. I use up about two thirds of my fuel, which is less than planned. Some other details: It's an unmanned probe because of reasons. I used flight engineer during construction for some delta-v-calculations and forgot to take it off. I don't consider it a mod, but I realize that a purist might say that the shuttle is now both modded and non-stock. Please don't put me in that category, I'd rather do the run again. Anyway, enjoy the additional info you now have. I used 2 x 505 kg rovers as payload. The first one was to be tested on Minmus, which is also a quite cheap (about 400 m/s delta-v) stop before exiting the solar system, so why not. Two accelerations at the periapsis lead me there. Breaking to a somewhat stable orbit to find a nice landing spot on the sunny side (Xenon-engines) in one of the basins. The rover, although mounted with a bit of part clipping (ahem), decouples smoothly and flies nicely on RCS-thrusters. All systems go for Duna. We are out of phase, but probes don't get impatient. I use the available time to correct the immense 0,1° inclination and find a cheap hop to duna orbit close to the periapsis. Once in Duna system, I use aerobraking (radial burns shortly after the system entry to get the periapsis from transfer orbit at about 13.500 m usually does the trick) and immediately regret the last quicksave when I remember that I was planning to dock to one of my freight trains in orbit for refueling. I end up with a 120° inclination to my target at a circular 80.000 m Duna orbit, which means delta-v of roughly 1200 m/s. So when I reach the apoapsis of my freshly aerobreaked orbit, I get the periapsis close to the ascending node and at about 80.000 m with some maneuvering node magic (basically just a normal burn) and then decide to risk an Ike encounter by pushing the apoapsis up by 100 m/s (burning on the periapisis, of course...). This makes me slow enough on the far out apoapsis to tilt my orbit by 120° for about 100 m/s delta-v. Ike already wants to capture me on my way back, but I don't let him. Instead I break during the periapsises of 3 orbits and find a 0,4 km encounter with my "Eve or bust"-ship. After that it's standard docking, even though the delta-v between me and "target" require using the 24-77s again. Money well spent. I decouple my ram-air-intakes and leave them floating around, then it's standard docking (although a bit high angled). I refuel both my liquid fuel tanks to 100 %, leave a surplus of 50 units jet fuel for landing on Kerbin and steal about 2000 Units of Xenon gas for the return trip. Before I land, i have to catch my ship's nose, otherwise i will not have anything to breath with. Pun intended. It snaps on at an awkward angle, so I have to decouple again and tilt my ship. Next time, it will get a computer brain as well. But let's try landing first (still with the crooked nose). I come in over duna on the poles and try to use aerodynamics for breaking, which leads to my first crash. F9. Correct the nose alignment. The second landing works better because I treat my ship like a rocket and start breaking early, although I use up more fuel than intended. Uncoupling of the probe works fine, but it ends up with busted tires for some reason. Maybe it has something to do with dropping it 5 m. F9, F9, F9, there we go. I drive around for about 500 m until the power is depleted, then I get bored. I wait until morning to have power for my engines, lift off using my mini-rockets until there is hardly any fuel left (30 ox for emergencies...), the rest works fine with ion engines. I leave duna using the first Ike slingshot I can find, which leads me to a not really ideal orbit around Kerbol (considering I want to go back to Kerbin), but it doesn't matter, since there is plenty of Xenon left. It's about 2:00 in the morning, so I decide to call it a day. When I start the next session, Danoroy Kerbin plants a homing beacon on the landing strip and shows that he has 100 % stupidity by making a stupid joke about the spelling of bacon. I break for Kerbin and correct the approach for direct entry once I am in the SOI. I try to come in over the equator and set the periapsis to about 30.000 m. The numbers look nice, but the ship is nearly uncontrollable. I start spinning a few times until, after some F9-ing, I decide to pump the remaining fuel to the front tank. This helps some, I can fly somewhat stable when going Mach 3 at 20.000 m, so I stay there for the time it takes me to reach the landing strip. The decline is possible (F9 F9 F9) by keeping the nose directly on the prograde vector and using the thrust vectoring of the jet engine. This eats up fuel fast. Once I am below 5000 m and going about 300 m/s, I try to do some gliding and it works without major instabilities. KSC here I come. 1 L of fuel left, activate RCS, touchdown. I think about driving to the hangers, but my tanks are empty. That could have been planned better, but is not about bringing fuel back home, right? Feels good to be home, even though I'm just the drone operator. Here are some pictures. <iframe class="imgur-album" width="100%" height="550" frameborder="0" src="http://imgur.com/a/ONw3T/embed"></iframe> Things to be learned: Will take even more Xenon with me next time. Will test dry plane for flight characteristics next time. Will add ram-air to better spots and leave docking ports open. Will send out refuelling stations to all the major places. They are pretty neat.