Aetharan

My second attempt went slightly better, managing a successful landing after circumnavigation under the same self-imposed rules: 2 passengers, no dive-bombing for speed, and complete circumnavigation to demonstrate usefulness as a light transport. https://imgur.com/a/nhnlD9S Top speed is 630 m/s, and this time, I have a craft file if anybody wants to fly it. https://kerbalx.com/aetharan/AAC-630-Leer

Well, I know that I'm not exactly setting any records with this attempt, but here we go: https://imgur.com/a/n9Bfof5 607 m/s recorded in level flight, with a pilot and two passengers, in a quad-Juno-powered equatorial circumnavigation.

Well, @Van Disaster took some of the wind out of my sails with that last edit. I've finished a flight, largely to establish a base-line for myself. Final report: 1,386 km covered, +15 points for wingspan under 15m, +15 points for exceeding Mach 1 in level flight, for a total of 1,416 points. Imgur Album Clearly, with the differences between our flights' total times and distance covered, you pulled off a much more efficient machine than I did. What I don't get is how, given the similar ceilings and top speeds with the same engine.

Crud. I just realized that I've spent the last 45 minutes on a flight built having misread the first post, with a starting TWR of just under 1.5 instead of 0.5. Time to re-start. Edit: That limitation is killing me. Keeping a Panther limited so far that it doesn't break 0.5 TWR is preventing the plane from crossing mach 2, and it's by far most efficient above 650 m/s (at which point it's sipping fuel at less than 0.01 u/s at full throttle.) Frustrating, but I'll continue the flight and see how far I get this way. Edit 2: Having failed the landing (explosively, poor Val), I'm giving up on the current design (derived from my last plane in the thread I linked). I'll give things another shot tomorrow.

I've seen a very similar challenge to this before, but it's long enough ago that the embedded imgur albums in the posts are messed up. Might be worth making another attempt, with the new rule-set. Edit: I should ask, is MechJeb allowed for maintaining attitude over the course of long flights?

Yeah, note the 'somehow corrupted' bit. Not sure what went wrong with it, but the last time it happened I still had the .craft file, but KSP wouldn't read it any longer, either in the original save or in a clean one I started up to test. I was... annoyed.

I stand corrected. Still, next time my failure comes in the form of "firey death" instead of "game crashed when I rolled the ship out onto the launch pad, and corrupted the ship save somehow" I'll have to share. (I have, so far, lost four different ships to this particular problem. Each one of which was 2+ hours' design work.)

As a side-note, I find it highly amusing (looking at the first post again) that, thus far, the only entry in Category I is my own, and even that is an exception to the intent of the listing. We're all just trying again and again until we have victory, without sharing our failures that would count for Category I or II!

In the original save (which I used for my thus-far posted efforts), it is Burberry rather than Burbarry. Pretty sure that the use of an "a" was an error in the OP.

@linuxgurugamer A bit of advice for my direct competition: Your best bet, with enough delta-V available, is to push yourself into a prograde orbit with PE closer to Kerbol than the Goliath's. You'll burn a lot of delta-V there, and your encounter will be well over the usual 20 km/s relative velocity, but it's possible to get the encounter in under 70 days. If you can get the timing right so you actually pull up alongside him instead of missing by thousands of kilometers like I did, then I'd assume that a return to Kerbin thereafter should be doable in under 20 days after that. That's my plan for my next attempt, anyway. I'd estimated that a ship with 60 km/s of on-orbit delta-V should be able to pull off the goal of "Get him home before his abandoned ship has its first conjunction with Kerbin".

...wait a tick, guys. Are we, after all these weeks, finally starting to actually compete with one another for top slots in specific categories, instead of everybody going for his own "I topped this metric!"?

I'll be putting effort into a third round later in the week, when I have more free time. Not sure if I'm going to meet my actual goal, but I certainly intend to cut at least 40 days off of my previous run. Good luck with your venture!

On orbit, the ship had 48,548 m/s of delta-V available. I was not perfectly efficient with its use (with some of the waste going into correcting having missed the Goliath by 110 Mm, which also cost me 11 days on the rendezvous) . Having more delta-V to work with is useful, of course. Timing the burns right would have helped me quite a bit. I keep meaning to go back and try again.

Another challenger has entered the fray. I'm looking forward to this!

Although the equation, as written, would indeed present a divide-by-zero answer without chutes (which may or may not be both positive and negative infinity simultaneously depending on who you ask), the intent is pretty clearly an implied if-then-else. A reasonable interpretation would be S=M/V/if(P>0;1.5*P;1) where S is your score, M is vessel mass in kg, V is velocity in m/s at some point in the last 100m of the descent, and P is the number of parachutes present.

Real time still means under two hours for a complete flight, and most of my test-flights end around 5-8 minutes in when I hit equilibrium and have the design's cruise altitude / velocity.

If I understood what was happening, I would share that understanding. Edit: I will note that I get much better numbers on attempts during which I refuse to employ physics warp. Not sure why, but it's a data point. I've had one attempt which claimed to be in the air for over an hour at 660+ m/s, above 13.5 km, but had only covered 2.5 Mm by the half-fuel point in the flight. It made zero sense whatsoever. My current attempt, even without warping, has flown just a few hundred meters higher than my seventh entry, 1 m/s faster, but also only covered 2,538,062m ground distance by the half-fuel mark. The only reason it's still flying is that it has 9 minutes more fuel remaining than said entry at the same fuel level. Edit 2: Another flubbed water landing, but that doesn't really matter. This plane flew, on average, about 200m higher than my best entry so far. Roughly the same cruise speed. Maintained powered flight for 7:15 longer, running out of fuel at 54º 42' 17" W, having covered almost 12º more around a higher great circle than said entry. At the moment it ran out of fuel, it reported 6,413,795m ground distance covered. Over a Mm shy of that attempt. I flew higher, slightly faster, and longer. I went farther around the planet. Still I did worse. I officially give up-- none of this makes sense.

The requirement to have a pressurized command pod just makes it more of a challenge. It's certainly fun trying to beat my own score, at the very least. I'm still fighting to break 9,000.

Well, the best that I can say (given that I've been focusing on experimentation more than math) is that the fairing-based nosecone has been a core element in what success I've managed. Similarly, the degree to which the nosecone and wings are tilted against your direction of travel during cruise makes a difference. My most successful flights have kept the core of the plane straight, cruised at 0º pitch, and had the wings between 2.5º and 4º depending on the total wing-load. I've been fighting for the last week with wing configurations in an attempt to increase my cruising speed without sacrificing too much altitude to keep a Panther burning under 0.02 fuel/sec, with my biggest struggle being that most attempts start suffering momentary flame-outs every few seconds once I get under 70% fuel remaining. Edit: My experimentation has shown that a cruise speed of 650+ (preferably 660+) and a cruise altitude of 13,500+ both seriously improve efficiency with a Panther.

Don't think of it as dying in an attempt to conserve fuel. Think of it as dying in an attempt to get the absolute most out of a specific engine.

Well, my first SSTO to actually, y'know, orbit has achieved an AP of 83,554,619m and returned in one piece! Imgur Album And a suggestion for scoring wildly disparate entries: Do three brackets. 1) No orbit? Ground distance covered. 2) Kerbin orbit? Highest AP. 3) Kerbol orbit? Highest AP + PE.

Maybe.

Well, I've made another pass at it, and this time successfully circumnavigated! I also figured out what was confusing me: A difference of even a few hundred meters in cruising altitude is going to make the great circle you need to fly that much longer-- simple math, after all. The bigger the radius, the bigger the circumference. Highest altitude achieved: 15,107m. (Highest in stable flight: 14,695m). Ground Distance Covered: 7,787,611m. Score: 7,934.561 (using stable flight number.) Imgur Album This success does leave me thinking that it might not be so impossible to achieve a scouter-crushing score. (I also wouldn't be even half-surprised if @Nefrums beat me to it.)

What has me confused isn't the apparent lack of difference between my flights. It's the fact that the others are passing over KSC and reporting similar total distances traveled to my own, when I'm not even making a full circumnavigation.