Carsogen

Hi there everyone, Today I made the [thread=95573]Single Thruster Challenge[/thread] and wanted to show people what it's about and how I went. Basically the goal is to get a Kerbal to the Mun and back using only a single engine (thrust producing part). Other than that one rule anything goes! This album is my completion of it: Only just had enough fuel to get back, but made it in the end. Hope you all get inspired to give it a try and let me know what you think of the challenge! Cas.

The Scenario: Due to a terrible oversight at Kerbal Shipping and Cakes Co. the engineers at the KSC have only received one item in their monthly thruster order! Oh no! While a great man-hunt ensues at S&C to find the one responsible the Kerbonauts must make do with only a single thruster for their upcoming manned Munar mission... The Challenge: Take a ship carrying one (or more!) Kerbal to the Mun and back (returning safely) using only one thrust producing part, this includes: - Liquid Fuel Engines (including jets, rockets and Vernor engine) - Solid Fuel Engines (boosters or sepatrons) - Mono-propellent Engines (including RCS ports and O-10 Mono-propellent Engine) - Any other thrust producing part such as Ion Drive or modded parts or anything really. As this isn't so much of a competition, more like a showcase of the solutions everyone comes up with to this problem, any and all designs are welcome!!! (within reason, no parts modded to have >9000 Isp etc.) Wanna go with a Rapier like I did? Great! Want to chuck on a Mainsail and ride that headwind to victory? All the power to you! Infiniglide or Kerbal-Ladder-Glitch Device? Fantastic! Another idea I came up with was to ferry a ship in parts to orbit using a reusable SSTO and then dock the engine or something and it would be great if someone could try that and show us! Really anything is allowed as long as it only uses one thrust producing part. Please post pictures of your ship 'n' trip and let us know which engine you used and how your craft works so we can all admire it! Hope you guys give this challenge a go and have some fun! Here's the post of me [thread=95574]completing the challenge[/thread]. Cas.

Thanks everyone for your help! I have decided to use lv-n's for my jool-5 laythe lander. Cas.

Hi there, does anyone happen to know what the specific impulse of the atomic rocket motor is at sea level on Laythe? Thanks Cas.

Yes but the fastest trip between earth and the moon was the New Horizins Pluto probe, which still took over 8 hours of powered flight. It would have taken them much more than 10 minutes to fall to Earth.

Hi everyone, I made this table as a sort of quick-reference guide for my interplanetary missions (while deciding on fuel capacities and TWR for landers), and thought it might be useful. All the info on here is straight from the wiki, but in one handy little package! http://imgur.com/Smy1MDb It has the surface gravity and g's for each body, as well as the minimum delta-v required to get from low orbit of the parent body to the surface and back to low orbit again. This means that aerobraking is always used. eg. The value for Duna is from low Duna orbit to Duna surface and back to low Duna orbit, and the Ike value includes transfer from low Duna orbit to Ike, landing on Ike and return to low Duna orbit. Values that include aerobraking are bold, and places where jets can be used are underlined. eg. Moho is neither as it has no atmosphere, but Laythe is both. Let me know if anything is wrong or anything, or if this is just a repeat post (I couldn't find anything like this, doesn't mean it doesn't already exist ). Also please feel free to suggest any updates/additions you might think are useful. Sources: Wiki pages for each body: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Category:Celestials Delta-v map: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Cheat_sheet Cheers, Cas.

Thanks Monk! I'm making an even smaller version to be serviced by a mothership around Duna Stay tuned! Cas.

Not sure if this helps but if you reduce the symmetry (Shift+X) and then increase it back again (X) without moving the part it should allow the mirrored part to connect, although if you'd rather just enable part clipping cause it's easier I believe it stays on once activated.

Haha yeah I made sure of that, got a few pictures of Bill jamming himself into the ship to retrieve the materials and goo science Wow, yeah that would be cool! I am actually in the process of sending an ion price to Gilly to check it out, maybe Peters Junior could go next? Cas.

Part 2: Electric Boogaloo (The Landings) As we left our brave heroes in part one of CARLSON AND PETERS(!) A Voyage to Duna and Ike!, they had just arrived in the Duna system, and were preparing for a very risky (my first) aerobrake maneuver in the Dunaian atmosphere... About to get hot... SUCCESS!!! Carlson and Peters are on their way to a very fortunate Ike intercept, and we are ready to undock and prepare Carlson for a second aerobrake... Bill moving across to Peters for the Ike trip. Carlson detaching and using RCS to move away Peters heads off to Duna, and somehow Carlson gets caught by Ike... I decided to just go straight in for a Duna landing at this point, because my whole 'achieve stable orbit' plan was thrown out the window by Ike and its annoyingly in-the-way SOI. First though we need to detach the interplanetary tank even though it still has some fuel in it, seeing as how we can't land with it on. Incidently this was actually the one design flaw of either ship: I had to lower Carlson's gear to decouple the tank becasue otherwise it got stuck So now it's time for the descent, I actually haven't ever landed on Duna before, so I'm hoping my 8 total parachutes will do the job and sruvive... Woohoo! Not a single part lost! And landed... Obligatory flag shot... Jeb, get down from there! Very pleased with my first ever successful Duna landing! I actually tried sending a spaceplane to Duna once before but fell victim to the whole 'jet engines need oxygen' problem. Now for Ike: Peters begins deorbit burn and heads down to the surface... This was actually the first of my quickload mountain goat moments, I overestimated the TWR of Peters on Ike and was worried about fuel so left my slowing-down too late and well, didn't. But eventuall Bill makes it onto the surface of Ike! A true accomplishment for Kerbalkind! Damn it Bill, not you too! Those roofs aren't for standing! Part 3: The Return of the Kerbals And sadly our brave explorers must return to their homeworld of science and dense oceans! Unfortunately I left infinite fuel on after testing a new secret project unimportant side activity (coming soon!) on the mun, so I performed my second quickload (thank god for named saves! Alt+F5) and reorbited both ships for rendezvous around Duna. I chose to return to Duna and perform the transfer back to Kerbin from there because I had plenty of fuel to spare and couldn't be bothered with complicated phase angles and such. And after some last group photos in front of the joined ships (who took the photo? it's a conspiracy!) Peters is abandoned left behind to continue surveying Duna, while Carlson burns for home... Kerbin reentry: And back home at last! Jeb still feels the urge to plant a flag everywhere he goes... Look at all that science! And that's my tech tree for this career done! (yay!) Don't worry, I'll still be sending Kerbals to their doom space for science(!), but now I won't have to take hefty experiments Hope everyone enjoyed this journey as much as I did! Please let me know what you thought of the mission and the post so that I know what to do next time. Longer, shorter, less pictures, more text etc? Thanks for reading! Cas.

Hi there everybody! I've been playing KSP for almost a year now, but this is my first big post in the forums! I figured it was about time I started actually exploring instead of just messing around on Kerbin orbit (more on that later), so here is the epic tale of CARLSON AND PETERS(!) A Voyage to Duna and Ike! (10 points for the Beyond Good and Evil reference ;P) If all you want to see is the ship 'n' trip that's cool! Just scroll on down, this first stuff is just a bit of rambling, all the juicy pictures and info/tips are still to come! Still here? Awesome! Let the (short) ramble begin: OK so recently I've just been (mostly) messing around with stuff in the Kerbin system trying new things and what-not, like my assemble-on-orbit modular spaceplane (docking practice!). Unfortunately though most of that work and other stuff like it was lost in the great computer (not forum ) catastrophe of a couple of months ago, and having to be on my laptop has sort of put a dampener on my KSPing due to it having a heart attack whenever I even think about mods. That's one of the reasons that everything I build is all stock. So I got a bit bored but then came back to KSP with a new passion: to put Kerbals on as much stuff as I can! Not very original I know, but it leads to this: The Mission: (This is in a 0.24.2 Career) 1. Send a 2-manned ship to land on and return from Duna. 2. Send a smaller manned lander to Ike For Science! The main section underlined in blue on the left is 'Carlson", the main Duna lander with the interplanetary fuel tank attached. This ship will perform the landing, re-orbit and return of the mission. The red section is 'Peters', a one-manned science-laden glorified scooter that performs a transfer to Ike from Duna orbit, lands on Ike and returns to Duna orbit to rendezvous with Carlson for crew and science transfer before it will be left to circle the red planet forever. The attached fuel tank is only for the ~1200-1550 m/s transfer to Duna, where it will be jettisoned before landing. Carlson has 2000m/s delta V and Peters can manage about 1200. So, on with the show: First off I need to grab my two pioneering crew members (Bill for his piloting skills and Jeb for style) from their thrones by the runway (they're totally not there just so I don't accidentally kill them ). (Bob is in the middle one). After the team is assembled, the next stage is liftoff!!! (If anyone has any detailed questions about the ship(s) please post a comment or send me a message, I'm more than happy to share, I'm just not sure what I should/shouldn't include! Also the craft is all stock so if you guys want I can post the file ) Anyway on with the show: Here she is ready for launch: BOOM!!! Gravity turn And finally apoapsis at 100km After a loooong wait for a transfer window (I happened to just miss one ), we burn for Duna and get a very nice encounter And just for a treat, Jeb collecting some science And as we approach Duna (and a flukey Ike encounter ) that about wraps up part 1 of CARLSON AND PETERS(!) A Voyage to Duna and Ike! If anyone has any comments, questions, love or hate please post them in the comments! I'd love to know what everyone thinks should or shouldn't be in this thread, and I will very shortly be posting part 2: the landings. DUN DUN DUUUUUNNNN. Will Jeb and Bill make it back alive? Or will they run out of fuel and be forced to burn the snacks to get home? Find out soon! Cas.

Hi there, welcome to the community! The best thing I do is orient the ships so one is facing North, one South (North is zero degrees red line on navball, South is opposite). In an equatorial orbit these directions won't rotate with your orbit, so you don't have to worry about alignment as well as translation! Is there anything in particular you're having trouble with? ie. Unbalanced RCS, colliding etc? Edit: Not that colliding isn't fun! Also docking takes some getting used to, I remember the first time I managed it was my greatest moment, just keep at it and I'm sure you'll have a space station before you know it!

It is in fact 3km This was the fate of my recent Ike lander

Hi there, this depends alot on the mass and configuration of your craft. For example nukes are really heavy (compared to other engines) but if your ssto is really heavy anyway this might not affect you too much. On the other hand if your craft is heavy then nukes may be too weak, or the layout of your ship may limit your engine configuration. I generally find that rapiers are a great option unless you're going on a long trip, because the weight saving you get by combining your engines (engines are heavy) can outweigh the extra fuel they need. You're right though in that there's a balance, half my ssto's never even get through design stage , you just have to keep on trying different things and learning along the way! Hope this helped

Yeah that happens to me too, and I assume everyone, you'll just keep getting the same (or very similar) contacts from different 'companies', and then eventually maybe it'll change to something else. The thing is though that if there's a new or important contact (like the explore ones) then it'll take priority, so it's not like the repetitive ones are blocking you from getting a good contact. Squad are still tweaking the contract system so I don't know if there's any changes planned.

Yeah I normally do that to find out my acceleration on a stage to test my twr but I'd rather go review the results of a previous mission than go to a wiki for other info doesn't make much difference I know but still. Thanks for the reply!

Is it possible to see actual data of completed experiments in the science archives? Eg. Atmospheric pressure on Duna = x atmospheres (or kPa), or Surface gravity on Ike = y m/s^2. I know I can get all this stuff from the wiki etc. but it just seems like something that could be (or maybe is?) implemented and would be a neat little way of incorporating the science experiments in a way that actually helps and reflects how and why these kinds of experiments are used in real life. Thanks in advance!