herbal space program

...So after flailing away for several more days, I still can't seem to get that tank on LKO with the required 5 Nervs and any more than 6.85 km/s of dV left. Any landable pseudo-pod that I've been able to create so far that the pilot can push on EVA seems to gain me at most 200m/s, and they are all a really serious pain to fly. I hate to give up on a challenge like this, but at this point I basically have to conclude that it's close but not doable, no matter how much heroic piloting you can bring to it, nor even if you automate everything with McJeb and Precise Node. I don't think it actually requires quite the 8+ km/s dV that OP tallied, but I don't see how to shave more than 500m/s off that estimate, and I'm still well short of that. Great edge case though, and if somebody can prove me wrong they will win my everlasting admiration, and as many likes as I can heap on them. I suspect most have already concluded the same thing, but it was fun trying!

I guess that would be true if the design involved an actual pod, but I was using an ECS when I was considering it, and those definitely don't give you a magic refill. I'm moving on from that idea anyway, because even with my stripped-down ECS/fairing/nosecone pod, the process of pushing was agonizingly slow and awkward. ....Also, I have a petition for the OP, @Lirtosiast: Since this is looking just the other side of possible the way it is now, any chance we could loosen the rules just a bit by allowing the use of whatever RCS monopropellant is provided by the various available control pods? That might just tip the balance, and it would enable the implementation of some creative strategies.

Those fairings are actually quite a bit heavier that the corresponding stock adapters/nosecones for the same areal coverage, and they provide next to no heat protection to boot.

That is indeed a key tradeoff, but if you are going to fly that thing to orbit with Rapiers, I would say that drag is the larger concern. If you have the right amount and configuration of engines and wings, you can get your rig to almost 1600m/s , 25km altitude, and ~500m/s ROC on just air at ISP=3200. With that, you can boost to orbit on a purely prograde trajectory, expending only ~550m/s after the jets stop working. When making long-range space planes, I've always used the lowest TWR of nukes that would efficiently get me to orbit from there, but of course this is a little different because of the high TWR you need to land on Tylo. Even so, the blunt front end of that tank is basically just a no-go in terms of flying to orbit. It will cap your speed well below that goal and heat up like the devil as well. If you want to see why, just use the F12 aerodynamic overlay. So you need to put some adapters/nosecones up there. On the back, you don't really need adapters. I used the 3.75m engine plate from the MH expansion (much lighter than the Mk3 engine mount), filled all slots in the 4+1 configuration, and clipped small nosecones backwards into the back ends of all the Rapier engines. With that, the drag of the main fuselage is not so bad. Of course even with all that, I still don't have quite enough dV to get the job done on LKO, so I'm thinking about other strategies. That seems pretty desperate. Couldn't you just use a smaller decoupler and offset the parts together? For my designs so far, this idea has been a nonstarter, since my control pod was attached to the front of those adaptors. I am however currently thinking about putting an ECS on the blunt front end of the tank, decoupling everything from that once on orbit, and flying my Kerbal to that seat on EVA. The original control pod would then stay in Kerbin orbit, with the idea being that the pilot of the Tylo mission could leave the main ship and rendezvous with it to de-orbit. The Mk1 pod has enough onboard MP that it could de-orbit without any fuel from the mother ship if you put RCS thrusters on it, and the free Kerbal has about 600m/s dV. Anyway, we'll see about that...

Perhaps I am beating a dead horse here, judging from the lack of any comments from others, but I do think this might actually just be doable. The notion of Kerbals pushing ships with EVA packs did not seem like it would work at first, since they can't use them while on ladders or strapped into an ECS, but I was ultimately able to contrive a crew capsule with decent heat protection, consisting of a fairing base with an ECS, some batteries, a couple of panels, a small RW unit, and a nosecone mounted on a stack of cubic octagonal struts for 0.37t, which also allowed the pilot to leave the seat and still remain contained inside the fairing so that they could lodge themselves against the front of the strut enclosure and push. Based on the weight of a single Kerbal vs. that capsule, I estimate it will have ~150m/s when it decouples from the mother ship, since an individual Kerbal, based on my past experience, has about 600m/s. It has since occurred to me that I can probably get as much as 250m/s if I use two Kerbals, with the added benefit that I can have one controlling the vessel while the other pushes, without which I think that faithfully executing maneuver nodes would be more or less impossible. As by my own calculations I am only coming a few 100m/s short of the goal with the best lifter I can make, this does not actually seem quite hopeless. So far, the best I have been able to do is 6.8km/s on LKO with a new, winged lifter, but I can probably sill improve on that. Anyway, here are some pix of what I have currently: More later!

I guess if I were going to go the ECS route, that would be a key consideration, but I'm not going there unless/until I become truly desperate! The dry weight of the tank alone is over 7T, so unless I'm ditching my lander can the weight of the chute alone won't make much difference, and I'm too lazy to make Jeb climb in over and over again. One place that I might save weight is that I'm currently using small hardpoints and structural fuselage segments to side-mount my Nervs. If I switched to radial decouplers and used my reaction wheels as engine mounts instead of having them in the main stack, I could save like 0.6t. I might try that next... BTW, I got a new Imgur account, so here's a short album of my current rig getting to LKO:

I'm getting there. My Imgur account is Borked but I will fix that soon. I put 5 Nervs + 20 decoupleable Rapiers on the MK3 LF fuselage with a Mk1 lander can and a chute and took off vertically. That config by my calculations can land ~5 km/s of fuel on Tylo, and it made LKO with ~6.5 km/s on my last attempt. I can probably get this up to 7 with enough patience. Is that going to be enough? It's close! As soon as I get to a high enough Ap taking off from Tylo, I can jettison all but one of my 5 Nervs, cutting the mass of my craft in half, so my actual dV is going to be significantly more than what I make LKO with. I will investigate this more the next time I can play.

Yes, that's the ticket. That part occurred to me after I posted last night. I have no time to try this for a couple of days, but I will as soon as I do. Without resorting to Precise Node, I think a high TWR transfer stage augmented by an extra-beefy RCS system will do a lot to increase accuracy. If you can just get to an encounter with the short initial burn, you can then focus the view on Minmus and use RCS to tweak you approach while you watch the results. If you start right at 70km circular, there should be a fair amount of time for that before hitting the 100km limit. Anyway, I'll try with this approach later in the week.

Seems like what you need to do in that case is jus eject equatorially so that you encounter Minmus right at the nodal point. I'll give that a try right now...

Does Minmus have an axial tilt? If not, then if you set up your transfer burn so that you launch into Minmus' orbital plane, i.e. so that your craft is launched from the celestial longitude of one nodal point, and then time it so that you encounter Minmus at the other nodal point, you ought to end up in an equatorial orbit. If there is an axial tilt OTOH, then I can see how it would become pretty darn hard...

Make fuel transfers work so that you can grab the fuel/Ox slider on a tank in flight and use it to move fuel to connected tanks rather than just indicate its level.

From a functional standpoint, I'll bet you could build a carrier already with stock parts. From a gameplay standpoint, I dunno. All the real-life carriers ever recovered was the capsule, and actually driving a boat in-game to some very remote landing site would be awfully tedious. Letting you just put it there OTOH would basically defeat the purpose of giving bonuses for landing close t the KSC.

This looks like a fun challenge! And although I agree that @ManEatingApe has already swept the field of low-hanging fruit, there is plenty yet to be done, especially in the return category. Those should be a whole lot harder! Naah, you can get there for way cheaper than that. @metaphor did it for only 1800m/s from LKO to reach low orbit, and I once did it for maybe 3km/s, just by using an Eve slingshot to do the plane change and get to a Moho-tangent orbit. Of course setting all that up without the maneuver node editor would be next to impossible, so I don't know how many launches it would take to unlock that...

Moreover unlike theirs, your exploit is hilarious! I had no idea at all that was possible. Is this new? I thought the days of Kraken Drive and Infiniglide were over. Anyway, so long as you're not trying to cheat on a challenge with it, I see no reason why anybody should see fit to throw shade. I do have one suggestion though: Can we call it the Von Muenchausen Drive instead? "Ladder Drive" is a bit prosaic for something so funny!

Just bought the expansion three days ago. The pre-made missions seem kind of Meh to me, although I haven't actually tried one yet, so perhaps I ought to reserve judgment. The new parts OTOH are awesome! I spent the last couple of days building a swell-looking Saturn V that actually flies. Part textures notwithstanding, without those nifty multi-engine plates you just couldn't do that before, and it's really satisfying to be able to build something that actually looks like the real thing (pic to follow soon, although I imagine everybody's looks about the same). The one I built had lots of power to spare to get to Mun and back. You hardly even needed the third stage. So I fiddled with the design a bit, and now I've got a rocket that still totally looks like a Saturn V, but could in theory make all the low-gravity bodies in the Jool system and back, with the only deviation from the original design being a couple of SLS-style side-mounted SRBs. I could probably even manage to ship a Tylo/Laythe lander with that configuration, although that would probably break the form factor of the original. I also made the third stage into an autonomous unit, so that it, the LEM, and the Service Module can all function independently and also be docked together in a row. The LEM can thus undock and redock/refuel repeatedly, filling up multiple times from the third stage. For my first tour, I'm trying to do Ike, Duna, and Minmus all in one mission ,which I expect will be pretty easy. I'm also pretty happy about the Wolfhound engine, which finally introduces the corresponding heavier but high-ISP orbital maneuvering unit from KW Rocketry into the Stock canon. Anyway, it was definitely $15 well spent!

Yes, I get that ships are all trees, although I did build this once! https://imgur.com/a/3UtXF. I'm sure that station is actually a tree too, but docking port magnetism can make structures behave mechanically as if they are in a circle. Anyway, I think in this case, it wasn't necessarily the logic of the ship that got corrupted, but just that the visual rendering engine failed to represent the way things were connected faithfully. I've long since scrapped that ship, and the rebuilt version seems to be behaving as expected. I still don't quite understand how the new tank priority system works, but I'll figure it out. I appreciate all the help though!

Yes, I think the root cause was that I tried to do unnatural things with symmetry and the editor wigged out. I think maybe if you try to close a symmetry expansion back up, i.e. if you try to go from a single stack to a quad coupler attached to a 4-fold symmetrical stack of tanks, and then back to an upside-down quad coupler, it makes some routine in there start to chase its own tail. I did that in my upper assembly, and thinking back I believe I did start to see some odd things after that. Quad couplers are a good way to interface 2.5m command parts with 1.25m stacks, which is what you have to do for this challenge, but I think you have to place each stack attached to them separately to avoid trouble. What happens in that case when you open and close a symmetry bubble is that the upper and lower connectors end up being attached to only one of the 4 tanks in between, but you can easily paper over that with struts. I think that's how I'll proceed if I stick to that approach.

That was the ticket. Even though it totally looked like everything was attached properly, the decoupler did not take anything with it when I pulled it off. Checking carefully, I can confirm that the tanks were not visually connected in any way, i.e. the VAB editor showed light through all their points of close apposition, yet still they are somehow connected. I'm pretty certain I never used the offset tool on those tanks either, so I guess it's just bad behavior by the building UI. I know for certain there was a time when this sort of side-to-side attachment of tanks did not result in automatic transfer of resources, because I've had this issue many times before in earlier versions, and while the tanks didn't separate as expected, the engines attached to them still stopped when the tanks above them were drained, and they were drained in the correct order. Since around 1.1 though, I've played almost exclusively with single-stage craft, so I guess that's why this is new to me.

So when you say "no staging" is what you actually mean "no dropping stages"? Stopping on the runway and coming back is going to be fairly tough if you can't light up a fresh booster for the return journey

Well, all I can say is those tanks sure looked like they were attached to the decouplers properly, and I did try taking them off and re-attaching them several times, but maybe they're still not on there correctly. I guess if they were, the tanks would decouple correctly, so there's that, Anyway, Like I said before I'll try rebuilding the whole assembly and see if it still doesn't work right for me. I have a feeling maybe the 4-fold symmetry of my core stack interfacing with the quad coupler above is causing some kind of "attachment issues" in the building interface. I think I'll change that configuration as well and see if that produces better behavior.

Thank you for putting so much effort into this. I think my problem must be that either my tanks were touching or they are somehow not properly mounted on their decouplers. I guess in the past, having tanks touching or marginally clipped into each other did not result in actual resource flow, so maybe this is a new thing to me. In my own defense, I did check for this sort of thing in the VAB and it didn't look like any of that was actually happening -- but maybe I just need to look harder ?. I'll get back to those who kindly replied when I figure out the truth of it.... That is what indeed I meant, so I can eliminate that possibility. Thanks!

Thanks for the input. I will try that the next time I get a chance to play. As I noted above, one other thing that is going wrong is that those side stacks aren't decoupling properly, so maybe they are clipped into each other somehow. I doesn't really look that way in the VAB, but I dunno. I can try assembling the whole stack again and see. There are also a bunch of struts going this way and that. The other thing is that everything is put together with 4-fold symmetry, with the center stack attached using 4-fold symmetry to a single quad coupler above. I think maybe that type of configuration may cause some issues too. I guess putting together a Tylo lander using only items found in Jeb's Junkyard is not going to be a easy as I had hoped!

Thanks, I'll check that the next time I get a chance to play. I also noticed that my outer stacks weren't actually separating the way they are supposed to, so maybe there was some part clipping between adjacent tanks that was allowing fuel to flow in both directions. Unless struts can now transfer fuel.... can they?

Asparagus may still work fine, but it sure as heck doesn't work the same way it used to! I have done it exactly as I did it this time about a thousand times, going all the way back to 0.19, without any problems, and now that doesn't work anymore. Anyway, here's a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/XoepB There are three side boosters connected to the central stack by a chain of radial decouplers, with a chain of fuel ducts going from the far stack to the center. It used to be that the outermost tanks would empty first in this configuration and then those engines would stop, with everything else still full. Now everything just keeps running until all the connected stacks are empty, as if the fuel ducts are not one-way anymore. As I said before, disabling crossfeed on those couplers made no difference. Anyway, I was mostly just hoping for somebody to point me to a tutorial on how to set tank priorities for asparagus staging, because there appears to be no detailed explanation of this new system anywhere on this forum, KSPedia, or the Wiki. So now there no way to make it so that a stack can feed fuel to another one in only one direction? IOW, even after I figure out how to set the priority numbers correctly, I'll still have to watch the fuel levels in those tanks to see when to jettison them? Bummer !

Hello everybody, So I spent a couple of hours yesterday building an asparagus-staged lifter for the Jeb's Junkyard challenge. When I launched it, I discovered to my dismay that all of the engines were able to reach all of the fuel equally and that each of my bundled stacks ran out of fuel at the same moment, no matter how I placed my fuel lines. Turning off crossfeed at the decouplers did not help. I then noted that there were now new right-click options for fuel management, and when I turned on the flow overlay I saw that fuel was flowing every which way, even though AFAICT the adjacent tanks were only connected via one-way fuel lines. So far, my fiddling blindly with these and my searches through this forum and the Wiki for an explanation of how all this works have been fruitless. Could somebody please point me to one if it exists?