herbal space program

There was a challenge to do this back in 1.0.5, although not with so many categories. Remembering back to it, I've got one word for you all: Sepratrons.

Oy, things sure have changed since I went to bed last night. Don't you people ever sleep? . Anyway, when I went to bed last night this ship, the MiniKerman Mk2 Hybrid Eco-orbiter, was winning the "manned recoverable" contest by a hair, with 3.696t uncrewed, 3.789 with Kerbal, but that was so long ago: This rig made orbit very easily, getting to a 110km Ap on this (not particularly optimal) run with fuel to spare. Re-entry was also a cinch, and it can land just about anywhere in one piece . Anyway, I'm sure I could make this significantly lighter by dropping more fuel and optimizing my ascent profile, but I doubt I could get it below ~3.4t without losing either the Rapier or re-configuring the upper stage. Rather than do that in a futile attempt to try to beat you or @foamyesque, I will leave it at this and move on to other challenges, because I think my little lander is CUTE! .

Thanks! Glad to hear it. I think we can still shave a bitt off of what we have now so long as we have some latitude about how we get the Kerbal aboard. I had gotten down to ~3.9t using a Rapier and my previous upper stage, but it seems that's not quite good enough anymore .....

Dang. Looks like you went to school on my command pod before I could go to school on your launcher. OK, So what if we put the disposable pod off to side of the pad and walk the Kerbal up to the ship, using a ladder to climb aboard? If that pod counts too, then you're basically irrevocably making all the existing command seat-based designs non-competitive. I understand it's your challenge, but I just wanted to make sure you were aware of that possible consequence of this rule. Nevermind, OP said it was a typo.

D'ohh! I knew I should have revisited the jet engines once I got above 4 tons. Two can play at that game....

Thanks for the responses. I can see how for most purposes the heat shield would be the best thing, but for me as it turns out the service bay is better, because it only weigh 0.1t vs. 0.3t for the heat shield.

Well it looks like the "unmanned" category is pretty well plastered, so I'll stick my toe into the "manned and recoverable" category with this, the Mini Kerman Personal Orbiter: It weighs 6.261t uncrewed and 6.354t with Kerbal aboard. As you can see from the album, it can de-orbit without roasting its pilot and land on the ground on its itty bitty feet..

I didn't try the heat shield, but it seems the service bay works significantly better. Oddly, it seemed that the pilot was still heating up when going up, but was now insulated when going back down.

I've been trying and trying to build the smallest possible recoverable Kerballed orbiter by mounting an EAS control seat on top of a fairing base and (supposedly) using the fairing to protect the pilot from heat: Even though the pilot is fully enclosed by the fairing, it appears as though he is being heated as if fully exposed to the airstream, and he inevitably explodes even though no other part on the craft even has a heat indicator lit up. Is this just a quirk of the control seat or am I using the fairings wrong? I tried building it out a bit further, and other than making it heavier and draggier, it seemed to make no difference.

Thanks for filling me in and thanks for the dispensation to use the rocket equation if properly documented. I did not notice how old the OP was, and I'm not sure I have the patience to try to beat what you posted using a combination of your KEKKJ route and Vector's strategy either, but I may try to submit something in the vein of "simpler but not quite as cheap" as part of my Ultimate Challenge planning. I recently managed to get from LKO to Jool for just under 1300m/s using nothing but DSMs and Kerbin assists except for the initial ejection, for which I used Mun. This is of course no great shakes in the "lowest dV" category, but it has the distinct advantage of requiring only the correct Jool-Kerbin phase angle at the outset: You basically eject prograde then use retrograde burns at Ap to set up oblique Kerbin re-enconters which boost you to first a 3:2 and then a 2:1 resonant orbit. I never tried to use Mun on any of those subsequent Kerbin encounters, but I have a hunch that if I used it to bend my orbit inward as I swing around Kerbin, I might be able to eliminate or greatly reduce the dV I'll need for my solar Ap DSMs. Those basically consisted of pulling in my PE at solar Ap so that I'd be coming at Kerbin from the inside on the next pass, so I guess I could in principle use Mun to do some or all of that for me. I have already independently worked out how to use Mun to initially eject inward and prograde so that I can gain energy when re-encountering Kerbin from the inside a bit more than one year later and a bit further along its orbit, but what I found was that I got exactly as much energy back as I would have gotten ejecting prograde around Mun in the first place. This cooled my enthusiasm for the idea, but it never occurred to me at the time that I could use Mun again on the second encounter. It seems to me now that if I set it up so that my initial ejection is prograde and inward, I can re-encounter Kerbin one year plus a few days later, and instead of harvesting all that energy to eject prograde, I can add just a little prograde velocity and relatively more inward velocity, so that I'll encounter Kerbin again a little more than a year later a little further on its orbit. I can repeat this cycle multiple times, increasing my radial velocity significantly but my orbital period only slightly until I accumulate enough radial velocity relative to Kerbin that I can eventually hop up to the 3:2 orbit by swinging close around it rather than the Mun. If I can do that for the first resonant level, I should be able to do it again for the next one, and then finally to get to a Jool transfer orbit. I'm pretty certain I won't be able to get to Jool for 941m/s that way, but I might be able to do almost as well as your KEKKJ route without having to use Eve at all, which would be a worthwhile accomplishment in itself since it greatly increases the frequency of usable transfer windows. Anyway, hopefully it won't take me so long to get around to trying this that I'll be necro-posting the result again....

I kind of need to work on this for my Ultimate Challenge goal, so I might participate (although you guys have pretty much plastered this one already IMO). However, I was also hoping I could show calculated dV based on screenshots of dry mass and resource levels, as @GoSlash27 suggested, rather than needing to install MechJeb. Would you consider a well-documented submission of that nature?

There's already a currently active challenge to do exactly this: Why don't you post your craft there instead of trying to start a competing one?

Thank you for taking the time to make that reassuring reply. I will accordingly take the time to see what I can do with a fully compliant craft...

Oops. I overlooked that one, sorry. My thrust was below 75%, so you should remove me from the leaderboard. Sorry I messed up your challenge. I really didn't mean to subvert your intent.

Don't forget the Kerbal! He/she's almost 0.1 tons. Anyway, 1:8 or 1:9 may not be so good IRL, but in this game I think it's darn close to the optimal glide slope of perfectly balanced pure wing. My submission, which had a much higher wing area (and only reached 4km), had maybe a 10-11:1 glide slope. What I think your craft demonstrates is that the extra mass of shipping reaction wheels is offset by the necessary drag losses incurred by using control surfaces to set your attitude. I tried to avoid these by making my glider as balanced as I possibly could, but In the end I think the reaction wheels still win out. I think the need to weigh all these considerations makes this an especially interesting challenge.

I think staging the sepratrons is definitely of significant benefit, because your inertia is so low with this sort of craft that any excessive speeds will be dissipated in drag if you go too fast, so the longer you can burn to maintain roughly terminal velocity (~110m/s?) going more or less straight up, the better. Also, you're so light that losing the mass of those spent sepratrons and the extra launch clamp mid-burn helps significantly. Anyway, I hope that's allowed, because that's what I did... Looking at your craft, I'm amazed you were able to get such a good glide slope with so little wing area. I tested designs like that and got them more or less as high as you did, but I never managed better than ~40km with any of them. You've clearly pared down the control surfaces to the absolute minimum, so perhaps that's what gave you the edge.

When you get just a little too aggressive with that gravity turn and it becomes more of a swan dive When you hit the staging button just a quarter of a second too soon and your asparagus boosters instantly obliterate everything above them, leaving Jebediah inexplicably still grinning as his capsule tumbles out of control.

This is an interesting idea, but I think the rules still need a little work. First off, do we need to land the rocket safely or not? Are you saying that it can crash land but that nothing can explode on re-entry? The way you worded that is a bit ambiguous. Also, when you say distance from the KSC, do you mean just that, or do you mean total horizontal distance traveled after launch? If it really is the former, then outlawing "long gliding" does not rule out the most trivial solution possible, which would be to launch your rocket into a barely sub-orbital trajectory with Ap on the opposite side of the planet and Pe a few hundred Km short of the KSC after one go-round. Your catcher could then have a very low-speed rendezvous with the rocket near its Ap, and then have plenty of time to re-orbit while the other rocket re-enters and lands right back at the KSC doorstep. If what you really mean though is total horizontal distance, then both that solution and trying to fly back to the KSC with a plane automatically does more harm than good, but measurement becomes considerably more tricky. You might resolve this difficulty by keeping the rule as distance from KSC but state as an additional ground rule that no rocket may travel horizontally further than half way around Kerbin or whatever other body you do this on. I would also make one more comment abut the bonuses for other bodies. While stetting up your mission on Duna might be a bit more of a hassle than using HyperEdit on Kerbin, it's clear to me right off the bat that pulling this off there would be far, far easier. Between the much lower orbital velocity at 80km on Duna, the 3-fold longer hang time at Ap, and the much higher margin of error wrt the atmosphere, I would say like ten times easier to be honest. In fact, I wouldn't even consider trying to do this on Kerbin if I could get a better score for the same distance doing it on Duna. If you want to bring other bodies into it, I would therefore suggest giving penalties rather than bonuses for bodies with less atmo/lower gravity than Kerbin, because those things will really make it a lot easier. Anyway, I think with a few small tweaks this could turn out to be pretty fun.

Well, that didn't last long. Well done! You clearly confirm one thing I suspected was true but didn't really act on -- that boosting straight up from the pad is the thing to do. The less air you have to push through to gain altitude in the boost phase the better. Now I feel like I should try to recalibrate my ascent with the ship I posted before and see if I can edge you out...

Thanks! I believe this is the first time I've ever actually been on top of the leaderboard in one of these. I've also been trying for a while, but I have not yet been able to beat that run.

*cough* Ahem?.....

After getting rid of the probe core, I was able to get to 44.5km with this ship : I think ultimately this can probably be beaten pretty easily, but I'll stand pat for now . I feel this was a fun challenge because you have to balance optimal lift/mass with the drag and weight of adding more wings. At first I was trying to design it to ship SAS, panels, batteries, a probe core, etc, but once I realized all it needed was the boosters, the wings, one Kerbal, a couple of cubic struts, and the seat, it occurred to me you don't really need that much wing area to make your glide profile essentially like that of a pure wing. In fact, I'll bet I could drop some wing area from what I have now and do significantly better. Once you have your optimal relative wing area worked out., the central question becomes how high can you boost your ship on those Sepratrons. I tried to maximize that by splitting them into two stages (10 in the first, 6 in the second) by mounting one decoupler on top of the other crosswise, and also by limiting their thrust to a TWR of about 1.5 (~20% thrust), to minimize losses to drag and to maximize burn time. I boosted at close to 45 degrees with that setup, for a total of ~100 seconds. I think all of these parameters could still be optimized a fair bit more, so I'm guessing that around 60km will be the ultimate maximum. but (I hope) we'll see ....

Yes I've got it now, thanks, per the exchange just above. That's actually how I got my Kerbal on board as well, I just wasn't aware that you could use a cubic strut as the root part, so it wasn't clear to me how to build it without any kind of a command pod on board. I'm better off without one anyway.

That's all there is to it? D'oh! If I can ditch that pod, I'm almost sure I can make 40km....

After spending another evening on it, I think 40km is totally crackable in this challenge, but I've got another question: is there some way to build this thing without at least an OKTO-2 command pod in it? Command pods are also not on the list, but I can't see how to make this ship without one, since the ECS can't be selected as the root part, and I only seem to be able to get the launch clamps to attach properly to something that has one. So the craft I have currently contains a completely useless OKTO2 command pod just so that I can put it together in the SPH. I suppose I could also put the pod on a decoupler and eject it before launch. How is everybody else handling this?