Zeroignite

Here's my submission MET: 37:24 MODS: MechJeb (Bill 9000 part), Deadly Reentry My approach here was to use a high TWR launch vehicle into a 70km orbit, not limiting myself to any kind of efficient ascent. Orbit was pure ballistic eastward, no shenanigans there. For descent, I did a steep deorbit burn, then thrusted downward/forward to get through the atmosphere faster while still hitting KSC. Deadly Reentry did me no favors on either ascent or reentry, since I had to limit acceleration on the former, and some of my parts burned up on the latter. In the end I was aiming for a powered descent w/ parachute for retrograde-pointing and an extra layer of safety. Most of the ship burned up on reentry, including the parachute and two of the landing legs. In the end I lithobraked pretty hard at the end of my descent burn, but was slow enough and had enough fueltank crumple zone for the capsule to survive. Good enough

New Challenge here! How fast can you complete one lap around Kerbin? Using a completely boring MechJeb ascent path and parachute landing, a full orbit of Kerbin takes about 39 minutes. We're Kerbonauts. We can do better. What does it take, in terms of piloting, rocket design, and creativity to reduce that time? RULES: "Circumnavigation" consists of taking off from either the runway or the launchpad, going completely around Kerbin, and landing on the KSC terrain (the brownish, flat grassy area). The vessel must contain a crew member, and that crew member must be alive on landing. There is no requirement for landing intact. A valid submission consists of an image of the Flight Results screen [F3] taken upon landing, plus mod notes below. Photos of the mission and launch vehicles are nice but not required. MODS: I don't want to enforce any strict mod requirements. Similar to the old Bobcat Colonization Challenge, feel free to use whatever you feel is reasonably balanced against stock. However, there will be a few different categories since some people want to play purely stock, and scoring that alongside mod parts might be considered unfair. Please declare what mods you're running for your challenge submission. Leaderboard categories are: Purist (no mods except background plugins/navigational aids or mods that make the game objectively harder); Extended (full part mods, but again try to keep things balanced against stock); FAR (any entry with Ferram Aerodynamics Research enabled, since that drastically changes the drag model). LEADERBOARDS Purist: 1: 23:03 zarakon --- (Rocket, LV-N cruise, orbit west) [Flight Engineer] 2: 35:31 SaturnVee --- (Rocket) [sTOCK] 3: 35:37 Cal'Mihe --- (Jet w/ LV-N cruise) [Flight Engineer] 4: 37:04 Octagon --- (Jet) [sTOCK] 5: 37:24 Zeroignite --- (Rocket) [MechJeb, Deadly Reentry] Extended: 1: 35:28 joshblake --- (Jet, SRB assist takeoff) [MechJeb, Procedural Wings, Fuel Balancer] FAR: 1: [MET] [username] --- [relevant mods] SPECIAL: numberosis in 11:40 using inf fuel as a mathematical proof-of-concept. I'm really looking forward to seeing what people come up with to shave off MET. You'll need to pack a lot of delta-v above and beyond what's required to get into orbit. I am also really curious to see if any high-altitude superjets can contend, since there are some of those which can exceed orbital velocity.

Oh dear, latest release of Kethane seems to have made my Smelter no longer convert ore to metal...

I find that "less is more" is pretty much always true in KSP. Mass ratios are everything (even with planes), and Tsiolkovsky's Rocket Equation is unforgiving. Back around v0.15, I decided to see how much I could take off my Mun lander and still have it functional. The thing just kept getting smaller and smaller to the point of being ludicrous --- and making my delta-v budget narrower and narrower made me a better pilot/navigator.

Awesome, dunno how I managed to miss that post. Y'know what, I don't know why I haven't thought to give you lots of +rep earlier... you've been incredibly helpful <3

I just killed one on on a mission to KSC2... botched the landing That's my second fatality since 0.21 --- both in aircraft accidents. I think planes are a lot more dangerous than rockets.

Blergh, now my launchpad isn't detecting LF/O properly (dock-connected via KAS). I'm using the "runway" part since that is easiest to drive rovers off of (after trying for about 30min to force my kethane rover to stop humping the launchpad, I made the switch using bootstrap/recycling shennanigans). I kind of don't want to manually plug and transfer fuel into every ship.

Agreed, especially since I haven't been able to change an ore container to rocketparts in my save. Regarding regenerating deposit quantities, is there a scalar value I could multiply existing deposits by?

Ok, I'll accept the challenge of fluffy rocketparts. Two things though: 1) Can I get a large half-spherical tank? 2) Can I change quantities of already-discovered ore deposits to deal with the density nerf?

It'd be fine if I were able to build containers so I could bootstrap resource storage, but as-is shipping up dozens of hexcans isn't exactly feasible. Oh, note for anyone who uses both ELP and Orbital Construction, if you change the desnity definition of rocketparts, you may need to modify the storage capacities of the OC parts to accommodate for the density change.

What bugs are those, so I know whether grabbing the dev stream would be worth it? The old densities were totally broken. In my game, I changed the density of rocketparts to 0.0470588, which makes one Large Hexcan 10 tons. That's still super-dense, but feels about right to me in terms of gameplay.

Do you mean rover engines that consume liquid fuel rather than electricity?

Action group 1 here as well...

I buffed the density of Rocketparts. Question though, is it possible to spawn ships which include rocketparts containers? When I try from the build menu, ships fail to load. Also, on ships I do spawn, they now end up totally off the sides of the HL Launchpad.

In v3, does the Kethane scanner still detect ore?

Nope. 10chars

You might wanna grab MechJeb. All the orbital info you'll ever want

By default, lost kerbals are marked as MIA, and re-appear after a long time. In the settings file, there's a permadeath line, which if sets true makes Kerbals go KIA and never re-appear. I've only lost one in my space program so far, thankfully.

I skycraned a rover down to Mun, and located the Armstrong Memorial. The terrain around there is ridiculous --- I drove over to what I'll name "Apollo Cliff" south of the Anomaly, and EVA'd to the top... it's almost 2km tall, nearly vertical. Unfortunately I didn't pack enough delta-v for the rescue ship, so now I have to pluck Landas and Jebidiah off of Mun.

skycooler, hope to not be obnoxious, but what's the status of the "ships spawn full of fuel even with debug off" bug regarding the next release?

That's a lot closer than Earth and Luna are:

Hmm, what accounts for the jaggyness of the graphs? Discontinuous available fueltank sizes? Honestly I'm pretty surprised at how good aerospikes are rated... I'd be interested to figure out what the breakeven altitude between an aerospike and an LV-T30 is. Also, the paucity of Mainsail representation is about what I expected due to high mass and not-great ISP. Do the Skipper and Poodle not even fit on the chart? I like using the former for central mid-ascent stages, or outer asparagus-ing where I can't be bothered to make a cluster.

Upper stages? I make sure to drop them before raising my periapsis above the surface of Kerbin, or else slap on enough seperatrons to make 'em deorbit. I like my LKO nice and clean.

I am in agreement.

This is an excellent suggestion.