herbal space program

Well I think I can offer a a few observations here. The reason you are flipping out on takeoff is that you are missing an engine on the back side of your craft! You can clearly see it in the indicator on the staging sidebar as well. If you set the thrust limiter on the opposite engine to zero, you should be able to take off more or less vertically. That's because you also have really excessive TWR with all those Vectors on such a small lander. Also, your total dV indicator on the sidebar reads only 2.7 km, which is not enough if it's true, and if it's not it means something in your staging sequence is out of whack. I'm inclined to believe it's more or less true, because you are apparently taking off like a shot with a missing engine and the others set to half power. An efficiently designed Eve lifter will take off in a stately fashion at full throttle, gaining speed at only around 2-3 m/s/s right at the start. I was going to make that comment as well, but on closer inspection I saw that he had circular intakes on top of his stacks, which actually mitigate drag pretty effectively.

As @steve_v said, this is not about the size of the wheel, it's about the bizarre way that the spring/damper code generates phantom forces. Like I said, when I turned both of those settings way down, the craft drove like an old Buick with blown-out shock absorbers, but it didn't dance around on its own (much), and the wheels didn't break every two seconds. That's good enough for me, but its still kind of an embarrassment that they can't make this work better out-of-the-box.

So I spent a little time working on this problem today, since it is a major issue for me as well, and what I discovered, against all intuition, is that lowering rather than raising the spring/damper strength on the wheels is what prevents them from bugging out in high gravity. At first I kept taking them off "auto" and raising one or the other, and my ship would just do the phantom force jumping bean dance until it flipped and blew up or enough wheels broke that it was stuck to the ground. Finally I tried going the other way and presto! All the buggy forces are gone and the wheels behave more or less reasonably, although the loping gait of the resulting suspension is a bit comical. I do hope you'll give that a try before you give up after doing so much great work! PS: In the wake of all this testing, I am also coming to the conclusion that there is no terrestrial brake more powerful than a broken rover wheel! I am going to have to try that some time when I need to make a short landing of some kind...

This is it: https://imgur.com/a/KitmHbn I do appreciate what you said, but in this case I would say that the behavior was well out of proportion to the increased load. With default settings, this ship blew all its wheels as soon as I tweaked gravity to 1.5+. As it turns out though, I've found that against my intuition, lowering rather than raising spring/damper strength is what seems to prevent the buggy behavior. At 0.2/0.3 spring/damper, this 25-ton vehicle seems to do fine on Eve, although it lopes and bounces along in a sort of Beverly Hillbillies way. So for my purposes I guess we can call this ticket closed, but I still think it's pretty clear they need to call in an exterminator on this bug-infested little corner of this otherwise awesome game.

Alas I'm not having much luck with those. I just thought there might be some formula that I haven't stumbled upon yet.

Hello everybody, I'm hosting a challenge that for most entrants will involve driving on Eve, and to my chagrin it appears that for the most part rover wheels just self-destruct when you subject them to >1.5g gravity. They just start hopping all around out of nowhere until they break. Is there some way to adjust the settings so that this won't happen? It seems totally at odds with any rational interpretation of the physics.

So here's my stranded craft, performing a Stupid Craft Trick that will be required to link up with the lifter: https://imgur.com/a/KuVkeaK

Wow, it looks like you've gotten pretty far on this! I'm actually at very close to the same stage with my entry, which has components fairly similar to yours. I have a working lifter, a stranded ship that actually has its own wheels, and an amphibious rescue vehicle. The wheeled vehicles all seem to work fine driving around Kerbin, but I had not actually gotten around to testing them on Eve yet. I hope that doesn't turn out to be a showstopper! The next size of wheels up is going to be pretty, well, unwieldy. If as I suspect I'm going to have the same problem, I might see if I can use some number of passive landing gears to mitigate the overall wheel stress. I guess at least I know now what to expect in terms of my next design hurdle.... PS: Your lifter is indeed pretty big! Mine is a fair bit smaller, but it won't make orbit from anywhere near that low, which is an idea that could end up on the scrap heap if wheels just won't work at all...

Awesome! I hope to spend a good portion of this cold, rainy weekend the same way. Since you are jumping right in, please note that upon some reflection I updated the rules to disallow solar panels, ore converters, and RTGs from the craft to be rescued, to prevent people from just tagging it with a tiny token rescue vessel and then having it ISRU its way to the mountaintop under its own power. Without that rule it seems like it would not be much of a Triathlon.

1. You are right that there is a bit of ambiguity/loopholes here, so I tried to clarify it at the top. I changed to "a dry wight of no less than 10 tons" so that people must deal with returning at least that much mass back to Kerbin, and a "total wight of no more than 20 tons" so that people can't drop entire lifters in the drink or make their craft into an ore barge. IOW, ore may be part of the total weight but not the dry weight.* So the bottom line is you can have up to 10 tons of ore aboard that you may convert to fuel upon rescue, or else you can use that weight to add fuel tanks to your vessel that you may later fill using ISRU at some other site. I hope I get to see which strategy will prove more economical! 2. Just to be completely clear, you may use the rescued vessel any way you want, so long as you return it to Kerbin completely intact. What you may not do is ballast a 5-ton ship with 15 tons of ore and then burn that all up so that you're only lifting 5 tons to orbit. Anyway, I hope that's now clear to everyone. Coming up with clear and balanced rules is always a challenge with these kinds of challenges! * I have now further refined this to say that if people want to use the ore just as ballast they may, but it must be lifted to Eve orbit and returned to Kerbin unconverted.

Howdy and welcome to the challenge! The answer to both of your questions is yes. You may make your craft out of whatever parts you want excluding solar panels, ore converters, and RTGs, provided it includes the three required ones and is empty of all fuel/monoprop/xenon, and has either no electrical charge or all reaction wheels disabled. That is, it must be completely dead in the water at the time of rescue. If you can successfully dock your rescue ship to it while it is in that state, you may refuel it with whatever resources you brought with you, and then have it do whatever it is capable of doing under its own power thereafter, including processing whatever ore it may have had on board at the time of rescue, although I am going to update the rules at the top to clarify that the total weight of the craft on rescue must be between 10 and 20 tons rather than the dry weight, so that Valentina's historic pod is not reduced to a fuel barge. The upper weight limit is also there to insure that cheeky contestants don't trivialize the cost/parts challenges by dropping an entire unfueled Eve lifter into the water for free and then just tagging it with a token rescue ship. Anyway, definitely included in all that is ultimately using the rescued craft as an upper stage/Kerbin re-entry vehicle, provided you don't stage/break/explode anything off of it in the process. That is, it must make it back to the ground on Kerbin in one piece, as found on rescue, regardless of whether that is in a cargo bay or under its own power. Within those rules you can devise and use it any way you want, and I'm hoping that this will lead to some creative entries. Happy flying!

Intrepid Kerbals are in distress! Flash: During Valentina's 78th attempt to land her Mk3 capsule-based Eve 3000 Challenge lifter from orbit, engineer copilot Bill finally fell asleep and spilled his coffee all over the console! The resulting short circuit caused every action group to go off simultaneously, instantly jettisoning all but their uppermost stage! Legendary pilot that she is, Valentina was able to safely re-enter her historically significant, record-setting command/service module "Jeb" under power, but it required every resource she had, and left her and the now wide awake Bill bobbing in the Drink, totally helpless, and miles from shore. In light of this emergency, your mission, fellow Kerbonauts, is to Rescue Valentina, Bill, and Their Historic Ship from the Eve Ocean and return them to Kerbin! The debate in Mission Control on how to accomplish this was lively, and unfortunately no consensus on the best approach was reached. Some argued that getting the rescue accomplished ASAP was the highest priority, while others reasoned that Valentina and Bill still had plenty of snacks according to the ship manifest, and moreover that since they had just blown the most incredible amount of funds jettisoning their massive Eve lifter, their rescue should cost as little as possible. In the end, Werner couldn't really make up his mind either, so he decided to fund both projects... So! While your mission in either case is to return both ship and occupants to Kerbin, there are two ways to play: You can get it done either as quickly or as cheaply as possible. For the "quickly" challenge, money/mass is no object and you just need to do it in the shortest time possible, from launch to recovery on Kerbin. For the "cheaply" challenge, there are two three sub-categories: lowest launch cost, lowest total cost, and lowest launch weight. The rules: What is required: You must return both the stranded Kerbals (alive), as well as their ship (in one piece, without staging, burning, or breaking anything off) from some location at least 10km offshore in any of the major seas of Eve to the ground on Kerbin. The ship to be rescued must include a MK3 capsule and two Large Ore Holding Tanks, and have a dry weight of at least 10 tons and a total weight at the time of rescue of not more than 20 tons. The cost of this vessel will not be charged against your overall mission cost. Pretty much anything within those constraints is allowed, with the proviso that it must not have any resources on board that are consumables for control or locomotion, nor can it have the intrinsic capability to create those without docking to another craft. That means all on-board fuel/RCS tanks must be empty, and all reaction wheels must be either deactivated or without power. You may furthermore not have any solar panels, RTGs, or ore converters on board the vessel to be rescued. Having said that, you may place ore in the tanks of the vessel to be rescued, but any ore that you actually convert after docking to the rescue craft cannot be counted as part of the "dry" weight of the craft to be rescued. The point here is that the rescue craft must actually bring the capability with it to create these resources, and that no matter what you start with, you must lift to orbit and deliver to Kerbin a craft that weighs at least 10 tons during all phases of this process. As long as you obey that rule, you may actually use unconverted ore purely as ballast. What is not allowed: For me, the goal of this challenge is to elicit the broadest variety of competitive solutions possible, so the rules are pretty loose. However, having said that please don't cheat. I define cheating as anything that violates the intended physics of Stock KSP. This obviously includes exploiting any and all clear bugs in the vein of Infiniglide, Ladder Drive, Kraken Drive, etc. This also includes non-Stock parts that violate the basic Stock parameters in terms of mass, TWR, ISP, etc, as well as any part clipping into non-hollow structures that significantly cheats the drag model. That is, you can clip batteries, reaction wheels, etc. into hollow adapters and nosecones, so long as they are not clipped into each other, but not into fuel tanks or other non-hollow parts, nor can you clip non-hollow parts into each other. If you want to clip backwards intakes into engines to reduce back-end drag, I guess that's OK with me. As to Alt-F12/Hyperedit, that is totally OK for testing, but for submission I expect all key phases to be fully flown and/or driven by the submitter and duly documented. That means that using MechJeb, etc. to fly the hard parts for you is expressly forbidden. Having said that, if your mission depends on some repetitive resource extraction/conversion/refueling process that would take an eternity to execute by hand, you may demonstrate just the first cycle of that explicitly and then refuel your craft fully using Hyperedit, etc. Lastly, ore extraction/processing can only be carried out by any particular launch package after it reaches LKO. What is allowed: You can place the vessel to be rescued any way you want, so long as it is floating at least 10 km offshore. Any and all purely informational mods such as KER are also fine. You may use any strategy within the constraints spelled out above to get the mission accomplished. This includes all sorts of detachable rovers/ships, reaction wheel-powered copters/ships, etc. Any way you can transport the vessel to be rescued back to Kerbin in one piece is OK, provided it does not violate Stock physics. You may use whatever engines/tanks/wheels/etc are present on your rescued module to get back home, provided that all the consumables required are brought/created by the rescue craft. The Categories: At this point, I am scoring four categories: Lowest Launch Cost: The lowest cost on the VAB indicator right before you launch, combined for all the separate modules you may launch. Lowest Total Cost: the lowest total net expenditure of funds, meaning that whatever parts and/or resources you may recover on Kerbin at the end can be deducted from your total launch cost as defined in the previous section. Lowest Launch Weight: Smallest combined mass of all modules launched from Kerbin, at the time of launch. Fastest Rescue: The shortest time elapsed from the first Kerbin launch to touchdown of the rescued craft on Kerbin, regardless of any other parameter. Note that the vehicle to be rescued itself does not count towards any of these measures. My submission: Since AFAICT this challenge is clearly possible given past challenges, I will not be submitting my own entry immediately. I will instead work on my entry in parallel with (hopefully) those of the other contestants. If there is any clear objection about feasibility based on the posted rules, please post it to this thread and I will address it as warranted. Leader boards will be created as appropriate when submission are received.... One more thing: Given that this contest will (in most cases) require at least three major design exercises, please feel free to post any intermediate steps that you're willing to share!

OK, I'm going to take a stab at it this evening. I agree that with well-contrived rules and sub-challenges it could appeal to a fair number of people, even though it's a pretty tall order all around. I think I'll have categories for both lowest launch cost and lowest launch weight, with the stipulation that you must at least reach LKO before you can mine any resources. I might throw in fastest recovery time as well, since that would be a completely different sort of challenge and might generate some entertaining craft. If you guys can think of any other categories that seem viable, please let me know!

I guess it hinges on whether or not you consider driving your several hundred ton lifter up a mountain under its own power "launching" it. Anyway you gave me the answer I expected on that score, but I still thought it was worth asking

What comes to mind for me is an out-of-fuel Mk3 capsule/uppermost stage combo with a docking port, that is splashed down somewhere in the ocean at least 10 km from land. There would be no rule about the elevation from which you can ultimately ascend back to orbit, but of course you have to devise a way to get your cargo to the launch site from the sea. It would be like an Eve Triathlon -- swim, drive, fly. I guess I would have separate leader boards for lowest launch weight, lowest mission launch cost, and maybe lowest part count. I think that is a challenge that would not necessarily converge to one winning solution so quickly, but like you I don't know if I'm up for organizing it. The last time I did one, there were some initial positive reactions and then no entries at all, and it was a way quicker and easier mission than this one would be. I'll give it some thought anyway....

I want to say that even though this challenge has already been thoroughly plastered by the usual suspects, I still find it intriguing, as one of the few common challenges I had never done before in this game was to mount an Eve sample return mission. After 20-odd hours of work I ended up with a craft that bristles with ugly struts and costs $400,000 and change, but it can survive a ballistic Eve re-entry at 500 tons and then make orbit again with 2000 m/s dV to spare, which for me is an achievement, even though my original version was not carrying anywhere near 15 tons of dead weight to orbit. Having gotten that far, I was scrolling through the challenges forum looking for Eve Rocks when I found this thread. Of course what I have now does not constitute a valid entry for this challenge, nor do I think that I could outdo @ManEatingApe's excellent submission based on straight-up, one-piece sea level lifter, even if I redesigned it to purpose. However, more devious approaches occur to me, and I wonder if OP @Laie might entertain them to keep this challenge alive a bit longer. It occurs to me that you could in theory land a wheeled craft near sea level, use it to extract the required ore, and then drive it to a higher elevation for takeoff. You could also land a mother ship at high elevation, detach said rover from it to retrieve the ore from near sea level, then dock up the ore tank and take off from the higher site. Anyway, would you consider such a submission? It's the only way I can see of significantly beating what's there now, and I'd love to give it a shot.

I only know about space, but in space another ship will start getting its physics calculated when it is right about 2km away. When it happens the lag is really obvious if the part counts on either ship are high. I guess that would make the physics bubble 4km across rather than 2km, but I'm pretty sure it's not 15.

Just wondering if anybody has ever tried to build something on orbit that's so big it won't fit inside the standard 2km physics envelope, and what happens if you do. Tempted to try if the answer is no...

Not sure where else you can get to going around Duna, but in all seriousness, once you have enough juice to get to Eve with a little dV to spare you can go pretty much anywhere.

I think this is a great idea, but some of the definitions and scoring criteria are not really clear to me. So before cook up an entry I have a couple questions for the OP, @Fraston: Are wings, wheels, and control surfaces allowed? Also, I'm not clear on exactly what constitutes a hoverslam or lithobraking under the rules. Perhaps more importantly, I'm not sure exactly how "boosters" and "payloads" are defined. These questions are kind of related to the first question about the wings, as I'm wondering how you would envisage scoring a spaceplane, with a large cargo bay full of 0.625m autonomous Oscar/Spark first stages, that takes off and lands horizontally on the runway and discharges say twenty of those little "boosters" to land from orbit in various ways. If that plane were to land from orbit successfully without power, would that constitute lithobraking? Anyway, I imagine you would probably want to put the kibosh on any such cheeky nonsense, so just a bit more explanation of your definitions might be in order . I only offer these suggestions because I believe that with a somewhat tighter set of rules/definitions and perhaps a more open-ended scoring system of some kind, this challenge could get a really killer response!

Ahh, clever! You jettisoned everything from the front so you could keep the same engine. So I guess the answer is the Mun is doable, but you have to come up with one kind of workaround or another for the stock parts. I'm tempted to take what I've learned from these rockets and try to apply it to my copter design, to see if I can squeeze even more dV out that way...

Well done! I think the key was probably clipping that Ant stage all the way down into the lower one. I had mine just sort of sitting on top, and I think that for these tiny rockets that creates excessive drag.

FWIW, I've always aimed for a TWR of at least 0.3 for my orbital maneuvering platform. Less than that and it can get pretty tedious. If you asparagus your nukes to keep your TWR between there and around 0.6, you can get quite a bit of dV and still be able to get around without falling asleep at the keyboard. As to the question of insertion/ejection burns getting too smeared out, I'd say the only places that might be a real problem are Tylo insertion, depending on how you get there, and ejection from Kerbin. For most ejections, you can break it up into a number of short kicks at your PE, but for that first burn going to Jool you're still looking at 900m/s if you're going straight there. However in general I use some combination of gravity assists to get up to Jool such that I only require a few hundred m/s above the speed at PE of a 70km PE/ edge of SOI AP orbit. You can also knock a good 600m/s off what it takes to get to Jool that way, making your dV budget quite a bit less tight. If you're not up for that though, I would make sure to have a TWR of at least 0.6 for the last burn ejecting from Kerbin, and then jettison engines down to around 0.3 after completing it. As to Tylo insertion, if you start from Vall you're only looking at a couple hundred m/s to get captured, but inbound or from other bodies it can get pretty expensive. My general strategy has been to come into the Jool system on a trajectory tangent to Tylo's orbit such that I encounter it going in the same direction. You can scrub a whole lot of speed that way and send yourself to Laythe, where you can lose even more by gravity assists and/or aerobraking. Aerobraking directly to a Laythe capture from there can be pretty tough, but you can get an initial assist on the first encounter that allows you to re-encounter Laythe going quite a bit slower. After you complete your Laythe landing, you can then boost yourself to Vall pretty cheaply, and thence back to Tylo. From there, Pol and Bop can require more dV than you'd think because of the plane change, but their gravity is so weak you can use ion-based landers to get there. I did the Jool 5 challenge way back in 0.90 but then never got around to submitting my entry. I think I might just try it again now! Those Saturn V parts will probably make the ship quite a bit less complex than what I had to use before! Anyway, good luck!

I think there may be some difference in the air between 1.2 and 1.4, because that doesn't work that well for me with that rocket. I can get to LKO with some dV to spare, but no way to the Mun.

I heartily agree! So far, I've managed to get a ship with a thermometer, antenna, battery pack and solar panels to LKO with just under 450 m/s, but the only way I could manage that was by making the first stage a reaction wheel copter: With that battery, two panels, a small RW unit, and those wings, I was able to twirl my way up to 12km, which significantly improves the ISP of the middle 2-tank Spark stage. It also reduces drag quite a bit, which is a really big issue for these tiny rockets. By burning my second stage just right, I was able to finish the trip to orbit with a partially full Oscar and an Ant engine, but boy did I have to try a bunch of times! I had held out hope that with this configuration I could get to orbit with the ~830m/s required for a minimal Munar injection orbit, but after hours and hours of trying I finally gave up. So I would definitely concur that in the stock/Kerbin world this doesn't need to be made harder!