xendelaar

I've been messing around with electric orbital slingshots and thought it would be funny to make a 'how it's made episode' out of it.. just for excrements and giggles. The actual transfer costs of the fuel is pretty cheap! It only takes around 100 m/s to get a fuel tank from Minmus to the fuel station and back! The only drawback is the immense amount of time it takes to get a FT300 fuel tank into space, hehe. Here's a small video I made of the episode (3:16). Quote

I've been messing around with orbital slingshots and thought it would be funny to make a 'how it's made episode' out of it.. just for excrementss and giggles. The actual transfer costs of the fuel is pretty cheap! It only takes around 100 m/s to get a fuel tank from Minmus to the fuel station and back! Here's a small video I made of the episode (3:16).

@GummiRevolution this is so weird. I never got a notification that anybody wrote a message on my thread! thanks for the kind reply @Single stage to oceanhaha thanks for your compassion! i also did other things while I was flying, so I didn't get too bored hehe. i love your name btw haha @king of nowhere if you put duna out of the equation, landing with a helicopter is really easy. just use the fan blades. When you want to land, tilt them all the way up to their max angle (i don't recall which angle it actually is though). The helicopter will descent.. but very slowly! Btw.. how did you find this year old thread?! yeah... I found out after a couple of hours flying manually haha.

awesome mission! enjoyed watching your video! really inspiring

my bad... i DIDN'T use steering other than "point at radial out"while flying upwards. I adjusted the text in my post.

Well.. if you can forgive me for the awful editing, cringy cinematography and obnoxious music: I did a similar mission some time ago that complies to all three rules the mission states. 1. I flew out of the souposphere at full throttle (using a helicopter and shot a cannonball into space) 2. I didn't correct my flight trajectory 3. I didn't use any thrust limiters. I built this helicopter cannon that could fire a cannon ball to the mun. It uses 30 vectors (or more?) all clipped into one vector engine. I'm guessing the helicopter thing is not in spirit of the challenge so you might want to add an extra rule to da list. edit: changed did to didn't (in bold)

I made Jeb land at 11 km/s a couple of weeks ago. I would show you the video I made, but the 'craft' isn't what is the bouncy heatshield?

I'm very impressed by all the stunning helicopters you guys made! I also made a (much less impressive) helicopter a while back. Does this count as a valid entry? I only did a equatorial circumnavigation though ... it took me around 7 hours to complete.

it was really dumb of me to do indeed. I just though about it when Jeb got stranded and I figured: what if I just send a really fast ship again to come pick him up. I think I could be able to get from and back Duna in less than 70 days if I would do it in one go. Maybe somebody else would want to try.

I'm not sure if this counts and sorry for necroing the post... But I did a speedrun to Duna and back in approximately 110 days.. It is a somewhat atypical post as I first went to Duna without thinking about ever returning. After Jeb landed, I (almost immediately) made a rescue ship and retrieved Jeb afterwards. Getting Jeb to Duna took me 20 days and getting him back took me 82 days. I didn't record the dates when I left or when I returned so this entry is not valid, but maybe it will spark others to redo this pretty sweet challenge in a better way. Here are the video clips I made of the mission. And here is my rescue mission:

hehe, I was trying to make a joke. There was this guy who survived 214 G! from wiki: The highest recorded G-force experienced by a human who survived was during the 2003 IndyCar Series finale at Texas Motor Speedway on October 12, 2003 in the 2003 Chevy 500 when the car driven by Kenny Bräck made wheel-to-wheel contact with Tomas Scheckter's car. This immediately resulted in Bräck's car impacting the catch fence that would record a peak of 214 g0.[18][19]

haha you made me laugh out loud. I wonder how much a human could handle before the hydrocarbon molecules would break down and turn into diamond

I made a cannon that could hurl a Kerbal from the Mun to Minmus with one simple push of a button. The cannon weighs around 70 tonnes and contains 13 vector engines all clipped into one. With the hinges and wheels, I'm able to pin point a trajectory fairly accurate. Although it took me a lot of time to find the sweet spot for Minmus. It launches a Kerbal at 350G into space. Landing on Minmus costs around 300 m/s delta V. I used Jeb's jetpack for that. I made a small video displaying its awesome power... please forgive the tasteless "story" ...

I made a cannon that could hurl a Kerbal from the Mun to Minmus with one simple push of a button. The cannon weighs around 70 tonnes and contains 13 vector engines all clipped into one. With the hinges and wheels, I'm able to pin point a trajectory fairly accurate. Although it took me a lot of time to find the sweet spot for Minmus. It launches a Kerbal at 350G into space. Landing on Minmus costs around 300 m/s delta V. I used Jeb's jetpack for that. I made a small video displaying its awesome power...

thanks for the reply! I will check it out, although I think this is way too complicated for me

fascinating read!

haha I guess it was a silly thing to do. thanks for watching. I bet.. after more than 9 years, most of the stuff has already been done by somebody else (and most probably better as well). I hope I didn't give you the feeling I was claiming to be the only one who has done an SRB challenge? For me, this was a ksp bucket list thing and I'm glad I succeeded.

In a previous mission, I sent Jeb to Duna in 120 hours. the mission was a great success. I just forgot about one tiny thing: Jeb didn't have a ride back home.. After getting several complaints on the matter, I decided to whip up an express rescue mission and get him back home... Since this was a rescue mission, we had to go fast! So I built a pretty large vessel (2,600 tonnes; 36 km/s delta v) and flew straight towards Duna! The rescue ship was able to pick up to Jeb in 31 day and it took another 51 day to get him back home. This is certainly not as fast as the previous mission, but that's partly because the alignment of the planets wasn't optimal when the rescue ship was sent. The mission was very fun to perform and surprisingly easier than I thought. Although I would have had a hard time doing it if I didn't have the Trajectory mod at my disposal. I made a 4 minute video of the mission, if anybody's interested.

In a previous mission, I sent Jeb to Duna in 120 hours. the mission was a great success. I just forgot about one tiny thing: Jeb didn't have a ride back home.. After getting several complaints on the matter, I decided to whip up an express rescue mission and get him back home... Since this was a rescue mission, we had to go fast! So I built a pretty large vessel (2,600 tonnes; 36 km/s delta v) and flew straight towards Duna! The rescue ship was able to pick up to Jeb in 31 day and it took another 51 day to get him back home. This is certainly not as fast as the previous mission, but that's partly because the alignment of the planets wasn't optimal when the rescue ship was sent. The mission was very fun to perform and surprisingly easier than I thought. Although I would have had a hard time doing it if I didn't have the Trajectory mod at my disposal. I hope you guys/gals like it. And thanks for giving me the idea for this mission!

yeah, you're absolutely right! In my mission, I still had 2 km/s delta v left when I stopped the engines and coasted towards Duna. I could have spent 1 km/s on going faster, and 1 km/s for decelerating near Duna to even decrease the transfer time even further. However, in this case, it wouldn't have given me any better significant transfer time.. For instance.. IF the transfer time would drop below 100 hours, I would have done the extra burn, because it's a nice number.. but in this case it wouldn't be something like 112 hours or so. so that's why I didn't do that. To Duna in less that 112 hours doesn't sound that much better than To Duna in less than 120 hours. I do believe there is a maximum velocity where heat shield brake down immediately on reentry. On kerbin, I think that's around 8 km/s? On Duna it's obviously much higher! In my experiment at 20km/s and an altitude of 5 km, the heat shield lasted a couple of seconds before braking down. So there is room for improvement if you use bigger or more heat shields! I did a similar thing in another video I posted where I did a "no time warp IVA only" mission to the Mun. It was 50% accelerating and 50% decelerating hehe. (shamelessly reposting my video again...: ) btw. you're currently keeping score with the latest Caveman challenge, am I right?! Kodus for keeping that epic challenge alive btw! Sorry... you're that crazy dude that finished the caveman challenge Diamond style (which is just insane!! haha). (If you like, you can still initiate the Duna express challenge yourself (or whatever names comes to mind :) ) ? I'm not a very good at keeping up a leaderboard. (tried it twice and failed miserably) . If you don't feel like doing it.. I will try to post something tonight. Just let me know. )

haha, I already googled my behind off trying to find a challenge like this on the forum! However, I couldn't find anything similar! perhaps I didn't use the right words? Posting it as a challenge is a great idea! I'll try to post something later today.

I wanted to see if I could make a fast, yet safe trip to Duna. A normal trip usually takes around 270 Kerbal days (which equals to 1620 human hours). I aimed to decrease the transfer time under 120 hours. For this mission, I waited ( using the extremely precise eyeball method ) until the distance between Kerbin and Duna was at a minimum and then flew in a straight line at my target. Using a 750 tonnes ship, I burnt over 18km/s of fuel along the way. The entire burn took over 2 hours to complete. I used the better time warp mod to increase physics warp in order to keep what's left of my sanity, hehe. I eventually didn't use the last 2 km/s of remaining fuel because I didn't have enough ablator to keep Jeb cool during the harsh aerobraking on Duna. The whole mission was far from perfectly planned, so I figure with some fine tuning and some extra delta v, it could be possible to reduce the transfer time even further. I made a small clip of the mission for anybody who's interested [1:00]

I wanted to see if I could make a fast, yet safe trip to Duna. A normal trip usually takes around 270 Kerbal days (which equals to 1620 human hours). I aimed to decrease the transfer time under 120 hours. For this mission, I waited ( using the extremely precise eyeball method ) until the distance between Kerbin and Duna was at a minimum and then flew in a straight line at my target. Using a 750 tonnes ship, I burnt over 18km/s of fuel along the way. The entire burn took over 2 hours to complete. I used the better time warp mod to increase physics warp in order to keep what's left of my sanity, hehe. I eventually didn't use the last 2 km/s of remaining fuel because I didn't have enough ablator to keep Jeb cool during the harsh aerobraking on Duna. The whole mission was far from perfectly planned, so I figure with some fine tuning and some extra delta v, it could be possible to reduce the transfer time even further. I made a small clip of the mission for anybody who's interested [1:00]

yeah, I really miss a storyline. this would be awesome!

maybe I was not being very clear in my rant haha. yes, these missions are clearly currently available.. but they are so random that they feel a bit silly to me. also they don't provide ANY use, whatsoever. just funds and rep. it's more about a coherent story that unfolds (or several parallel stories) where the player decides on what to do next (expand, explore, fly, drive, dip, dive, orbit, unravel mysteries, search for kraken, long extinct alien races.. etc..) . so building a new habit results in unlocking a certain part because it makes sense, story wise. or it could function for something useful. but he could also chose another mission where the player has to put a satellite in orbit for the base, which gives coordinates of a certain rock that's valuable, which you could retrieve. or not.. I don't know.. or maybe set up a ore production base to increase your max fuel consumption per launch? the possibilities could be endless. It's just limited to my meager imagination haha. there could be more scenario's one could choose from, off course. I'm currently also performing only challenges and uploading those video's in the hope that perhaps 10 people willwatch them hehe. KSP is great in many fronts.