Excalibur

OP, have you tried the KSP Interstellar mod? http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/43839-0-23-5-KSP-Interstellar-(Toolbar-Integration-New-Models-New-Tech)-Version-0-11 This mod has it's own Alcubierre drive and it's mechanics illustrate how such a drive would potentially work reasonably well. You are creating a space-time warp bubble around your ship; your ship does not move relative to the space-time which it is resting upon, rather the space-time itself is 'moved' (an over-simplification). Imagine a toy car driving along a massive tablecloth. It has a velocity of 1m/s North. You can simulate the principle of a warp drive by moving the table cloth and whatever direction you move the tablecloth 'spacetime' in the car will still be doing 1m/s North. In other words, momentum is conserved. Applying this reasoning to your scenario we can see that what happens to your spacecraft depends really on how far you move it using the Alcubierre drive. The important thing to consider is it's velocity vector relative to the star will not change, only it's distance. Warp a small distance retrograde as you describe and you will end up in an eccentric orbit, warping much further away retrograde and you'll likely be in a hyperbolic escape orbit upon warp exit. As I initially pointed out KSP Interstellar illustrates this beautifully. With skillful warping you can actually perform planetary rendezvous with barely any delta-v expenditure, simply warp as close to the planet as possible (without actually hitting it - that's a bad day) and as long as your velocity vector upon leaving warp is directly away from the planet the planet's gravity will slow you down. Rinse and repeat as needed.

Who am I kidding..? It's only a title! My point is though that this challenge is a great idea - something to help push intermediate players away from the Kerbin system. I imagine there must be some players out there who've mastered travel to the Mun and Minmus, maybe Duna too but who may find the other destinations a bit daunting (I'm looking at you Eeloo and Moho!).

Those MFDs are fantastic - are they your own work?

I wonder where Zekes has gone - I've completed the challenge but no Grandmaster title for me

Firstly Nova, I'd like to say how great this mod is - the icing on the cake for me is the removal of the ambient light. It feels so much more realistic and moody, plus it gives me an excuse to light up my ships with navigation lights! If you are able to release this aspect separately you will make not only myself, but many others happy I'm sure. I don't have the fastest machine but I swear you've vastly improved the frame-rate for me compared to a stock build. Bravo! Secondly, I'm really struggling with getting my head around Tylo - can you please confirm if you've managed to land there and/or complete a return? I'd really like to see how you did it! I just sent a small X-37B - type spaceplane there. Flies great in Kerbin's atmosphere - flies like a neutronium brick on Tylo! I can't even begin to imagine what dv you would need to attain orbit - care to give us some numbers as a guideline?

Already mentioned that one buddy!

Send me a few free spacecraft and I won't sue you... okay?

katateochi - that SR-71 looks incredible! That paint job! It's very humbling to see some of the amazing creations here!

Very cool when you first pull off a complete rendezvous and docking isn't it! I actually found it fairly straight-forward, mainly because I'd been playing KSP for quite some time before docking was implemented and thus already had the requisite knowledge of orbital mechanics. To be honest with you I find manual landings much more difficult (efficient landings that is), more often than not I start my final descent burn too early and end up wasting fuel. With docking at least everything happens nice and slowly and there are a lot of visual cues to help you.

Thanks dude! As a reward another oldie of mine;

I remember it vividly. He'd already made a perfect(ish) touchdown on the newly discovered Mun; Kerbol was low on the horizon casting long, eerie drawn-out shadows which made everyone but Jeb on edge. As Kerbol rose further the shadows seemed to slither and creep along the Munar surface - as if they were stealthily stalking the freshly deposited landing module. Bill and Bob were desperate to leave; Jeb however did not share their sense of trepidation and foreboding. Before they could leave there was one more thing that must be done. Reminding his shipmates of the perilous nature of their chosen profession Jeb raised the following question; 'Though we may have enough fuel to get home now - what if we didn't?' Thus he radioed the Great Keyboard Controller in the sky to send another mission to the Mun - a full dress-rehearsal of a rescue mission. Energised by this new goal the GKC flashed into action, sending another craft into Munar orbit within hours of the call. Now only one challenge remained - a precision manual landing, something the GKC had never attempted before. Since the GKC's grasp of mathematics left something to be desired, he made his best guess and made a full retro burn a couple of hundred clicks uprange of the target at an altitude of around sixty clicks. Withdrawing to the map room, he could see the orbital trajectory decay until it graced the great grey body and fell right through it. Slowly but surely the turquoise arc crept towards the target, the GKC's anticipation building. Once the ballistic arc was a couple of clicks downrange of the target the burn was halted and the 'rescue' craft allowed to fall under the infinite grasp of gravity. He decided to let the universe move along at it's usual pace and go prepare himself a steaming cup of Yorkshire Tea in preparation for his anticipated celebrations. Upon return and switching back to reality the GKC once again took manual control of the ship and could see quite clearly that his initial estimations were somewhat off - he'd left it too long! Still going hell for leather at only ten clicks up! Burn burn BURN - full throttle! The velocity began to sharply drop off, 500m/s.....400....300; the altimeter was also reeling at speed that seemed utterly ridiculous.... The target was in sight! Only a couple of hundred metres downrange and a couple of clicks below; a rush of adrenaline and renewed optimism gripped the GKC. Pitch, roll, yaw - easy does it - keep your cool GKC! Realisation struck; this can be done! Sure enough - the craft had a high enough thrust-to-weight ratio to halt it's suicidal descent, levelling off a mere one hundred metres above the target and only a dozen metres to the side. Reining in the throttle gently, the GKC balanced the controls just so and the 'rescue' craft made a perfect soft-landing thirty metres or so from the intrepid trio in their Artemis lander. Bill, Bob and of course Jeb rejoiced in this shining example of manual piloting before the realisation set in that their capsule's design did not yet include a hatch. If this had been a real rescue scenario the rescue ship may as well have been still sat on the pad at KSC, eleven thousand kilometres away. The only regret the GKC had was that his tea was now cold. 'Better not mess up the next landing eh guys?' For me this is probably my greatest personal achievement in KSP - the realisation that I could manually fly over such a distance, perform the complex maneuvers necessary using just the Mk1 Eyeball and thus land within a hundred feet of my target was intoxicating. Shame that it took me three attempts - but the story wouldn't be the same if I'd included that! I've since repeated the same feat with every body in the Kerbol system - but I've never quite replicated the satisfaction of that first 'Munar Surface Rendezvous'. Please share what you feel to be your greatest personal achievement - and leave a little anecdote describing it if you feel so inclined. Edit: Post removed in error by moderation team - reposted and fixed formatting.

Here's an old one of mine, using modified DR Rotatrons. It needed an insane amount of modded strength struts to prevent the torque from the counter-rotating rotor from ripping the whole thing apart (it very nearly does at 1:23). Shame about the Z-fighting on the launchpad! Also see if you can spot the two camera vehicles!

Despite it being so many moons ago I do remember attaining orbit for the first time in 0.8.0. Since we didn't have a map view back then, or much of anything else I wasn't actually sure I'd made it - so there were a few minutes of tension as I Alt-Tabbed to Google Chrome to check my orbital velocity against the figure someone had quoted here. Once I realised my velocity and vector were correct I quietly congratulated myself and probably shared this fella's expression... I know for a fact however that I wasn't half as restrained when I first landed on the Mun in 0.12 (the ooooold Mun). I jumped out of my chair and danced around the room for a little while I think. Perhaps that's how the Ascent Engine Circuit breaker broke on Eagle? EDIT: Spelling

I tried doing this with .cfg-modded parts when Eve first came on the scene. I changed the drag of each part to 5 times normal, and mass by 1.7 times to account for the different atmospheric density and gravity respectively. The idea was then to launch the test flight from KSC. However I soon learned that physics doesn't work like that. Put as simply as possible, by increasing the mass by 1.7 times I also increased inertia by the same factor IIRC. This would not simulate Eve ascent properly, as the 'Eve Simulation Parts' would have greater mass than the actual rocket (and thus a much lower delta-v budget). Increasing drag by a factor of 5 was also fruitless, as Eve's atmosphere is larger than Kerbin's anyway. So unfortunately I can't give you the answer you're after, but I can add something that doesn't work. EDIT: As others say, HyperEdit is probably the easiest way for you to do this. Then just use trial and error. KER is also an invaluable tool.

These 'effects' have put me into a rage more often than I care to imagine. Rather serendipitously I found an elegant solution. Make sure that the decoupler below your LV-N is not in the same staging group as the engine. Once you've jettisoned the preceding stage DO NOT activate the LV-N (this will jettison the fairings with the expected unpleasant result). Instead make a quick-save (obviously you must be out of atmo/throttled down). When you quick-load the aforementioned save the fairing will have magically disappeared! So you can build your nuclear-powered craft any way that you like, even so that the LV-N fairing is completely enclosed by other structures. No need for awkward VAB-based workarounds!

A great idea. For extra realism you could go one step further. If an engine has failed to ignite and continues to vent propellant until ignition is achieved, why not still have a small propulsive force. I could be wrong but didn't NASA maneuver jettisoned S-IVB stages around by venting remaining propellant? If you felt adventurous you could change the flame effect of the engine to something that looked more like fuel/oxidiser dispersing into vacuum (whatever that looks like). You'd have to look up a realistic value for the thrust provided by simply venting propellant however; I had a quick look out of interest and turned up nothing.

Saw this challenge the day before yesterday and realised I'd never had a craft on all of the celestial bodies at the same time. Decided to rectify this. Only mods used were Kerbal Alarm Clock and Enhanced Navball. Juggling all of those flights would have been much more awkward without the alarm clock. Eve and Gilly had bespoke landers, as did Ike and Duna. The Moho Lander design was copied for Dres and Eeloo, albeit with RTGs for those two missions. The Jool System required something altogether more ambitious. Four generic multiprobes (for Pol, Bop, Vall and Laythe) were launched together in a supporting gantry to rendezvous with the Jool Bus transfer vehicle in LKO. The bespoke Tylo Lander joined them shortly after. Once at the Jool system the Jool Bus aerobraked so that it's Apoapsis intersected the orbit of Pol, the Pol Lander then undocked. Quickly, Apoapsis was reduced to intersect Bop's orbit. Here the Bop Lander was released. Moving inwards, for each successive moon in turn the Jool Bus would change Apoapsis as required to enable a particular lander to reach it's target. The exception was Tylo which was rendezvoused with last, due to it's large gravity well - thus the Jool Bus ended up being left in Tylo orbit. I aimed for the soonest, optimal launch window in each case and thus managed the Grand Tour in under two years.

Haha! I've often thought of using that same 'novel way' to stop people snoring in the past. As an aside, I don't snore!

Slightly off-topic but still a gravitational question and probably a more plausible scenario; You have a rogue rocky planet (say 1-5 Earth masses) in interstellar space, well away from any other significant gravitational influences. Orbiting a sufficient distance away (say 5 million km) is our spacecraft. What would happen to the spacecraft's orbit if a relatively low-mass bolide struck the planet at such a high velocity that the rogue planet broke apart into a debris-cloud of mountain-sized fragments? Would the spacecraft continue to orbit the CoM of the debris cloud? Or would the presumably now 'bumpy' gravitational field perturb the craft's orbit or even eject it away from the debris cloud? I imagine that such an impact would probably disperse the fragments considerably, thus complicating the scenario...

I guess I'll just never know. I always try to be open-minded, and agree that being on the edge of sleep can produce some interesting experiences, however I've never once had a pronounced physical effect from what may have been a 'sensory hallucination'. If I get a cataract in the near future in that eye then I may have a suspect...

Something I've been meaning to ask the forums for a while; I recently was on a long haul flight, cruising at FL410. I was quite happily snoozing, eyes closed but not yet asleep when I was startled by a large orange/yellow flash in my right eye. Immediately following this my eye started watering like crazy and felt rather warmer than it should do. My first thought was I'd just managed to poke myself in the eye whilst half asleep. I did however consider another possibility - cosmic rays. So what do you think - did I just subconsciously punch myself in the retina (something like a dog running in it's sleep) or was my left eyeball pummeled by a high-energy cosmic ray in a million-to-one happenstance? Answers and discussion below please!

Not sure if it's my favourite but it's one I definitely have a chequered history with; Oxygen. About six years ago I had a SCUBA diving accident caused primarily by having too much O2. Due to a mix-up at the filling station my air cylinder was actually filled with around 80% O2 - I subsequently took this tank on a dive to 33 metres depth. Now, at 33 metres depth you're inhaling your breathing gas at a pressure of 4.3 bar (1 bar for the atmosphere, 3.3bar for the water column), meaning I was breathing O2 at a partial pressure of approximately 3.44bar (ppO2 = 0.8*4.3). The US Navy recommends a maximum safe ppO2 of 1.8bar - I exceeded that by just a little... I ended up having an oxygen toxicity fit at depth before becoming unconscious. Luckily I was diving with a very experienced diver (my father) whom kindly took it upon himself to rescue me whilst putting himself at risk. Top man. All of this resulted in a seven hour visit to a re-compression chamber (as despite breathing such a high proportion of O2 I'd still been down deep and long enough to take in enough nitrogen to give me a nice case of the bends) and being banned from diving for 12 months. What I still find hard to believe is the readout that the doctors retrieved from my dive computer; from when I passed out til when I regained the surface was fifteen minutes - I wasn't breathing for a single second of that time. The extreme amount of oxygen in my system may have caused the whole incident, but it also kept my brain alive during those critical minutes.... So oxygen! So ubiquitous, the giver of life yes? However as with anything, only in moderation please! In case you're interested in further reading; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_pressure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathing_gas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_operating_depth

I keep all of the KSP installs I've ever had archived. Some gems below; My 'Moar Lander' mission (circa who knows... 0.14?) Replica Concorde from a while back (circa 0.15). Even has a working droop nose! Someone challenged me to make a rover. Why not a Land Rover? Edit: Removed the broken imgur album embed. I thought the forums supported embedded imgur albums now?

You should read the Ringworld novels by Larry Niven. He was derided after the release of the first novel as the ring he portrayed in 'orbit' around a neighbouring star was physically impossible. Because of this he retconned; in subsequent books the the Ringworld had an automatic RCS-type (albeit RCS on a titanic scale) system to keep the ring's centre of mass at the centre of the star, thus preventing the ring colliding with the star's photosphere. Basically as the ring is a rigid object it isn't actually in orbit around the star - it's this that causes all of the issues. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld#Errors As previously stated by others the limitations of KSP would stop you from even completing a fraction of such a ring anyway.

There's a way to get around this particular problem, saving you quite a bit of time so you're not at low warp waiting for your transfer window. Firstly MechJeb will still calculate an accurate time-to your transfer window if you ask it to set up a transfer while you're still on the pad. Since you're stationary on the pad you can use full-speed time warp; simply stop the warp roughly an orbit before the slated transfer window (say 40 minutes). You can then launch to orbit and you're practically at the transfer time point. Just make sure you delete the old node and re-calculate the transfer. All should be well and no lengthy warps in low orbit.