Nefrums

The rerun trip can be very cheep with the help of gravity assists. jool->kerbin can be done in less than 300 dv.

Yes. It is is the flame-out speed of the raipers. It will be hard to go faster as there is no thrust and drag offsets any effect of gravity many times over. But a few 1/10 more might be possible.

How would this work? How will it be measured? TWR at tackoff? Highest twr at any point during the flight? Average twr during the first stage? This will be a bit hard as it is limited by when the rocket overheats due to going to fast to low.

I made a very simple ship out of a mk1 cockpit, 8 precoolers, 7 turbojets and 6 fairings. I got it up to 1554.7 m/s just before it exploded.

That might have been me

1751,7 m/s.

Test Flight of "SSSP 100 - Hostess": The ship flew quite well at the start. The game was going at about 60% normal speed but fps was ok. The strange thing that i noticed was that neater cpu nor gpu was showing any significant load, so I'm really curious what is is that is making the game slow. At about 30km I started to loose control, the ship slowly started to pith up. I managed to regain control by enabling gimbal on some of the rapiers. I calculated the remaining dv in orbit to be around 1700. KER was acting up and not showing it. twr was a bit low so i needed a 10 min burn to get to minmus. I lost control of the ship on the first aerobraking pass, luckily I had been a bit cautious and only had the PE at 50km. After moving all reaming full as far forward as possible the ship flew a bit better. I had no truble controling the ship during the second aerobrake. I undershot KCS and ran out of fuel, I had to land on the other side of the mountans. Landing was very easy, the ship had a lot of lift and I touched down at less than 50 m/s. I kept the ship pointing very close the the prograde marker. 100 kerbals delivered to minmus orbit cost ~62.700

I'll might try it, it looks fun, I have been able to fly 500 part ships with playable fps before. Docking it to a large station might be a problem thou.

I guess you are only alowed to use engins in air breathing mode? Should be fairly easy to reach raipier flameout speed ~ 1750 m/s but I don't think speeds mush above that is possible. I will make an entry to demonstrate.

Well done!

The limbo challenge requires your ship to survive the decent... I had to add air brakes in order to do that.

yes, the question that needs to be put to the test is if the small increase in isp in the later stages offsets the decrease in ballistic coefficient in the earlier stages of the assent.

The aerospikes have 9 times the vac. twr of the nukes, and more importantly they work in the lower eve atmosphere, where nukes are completely useless. 8% more isp is not mush but it might be enough to squeeze out the last 100 dV. The added drag should be compensated by the added thrust of the aerospikes, to allow same amount of fuel/total mass

Becouse the lift from the wings alow the engins to burn at a lower angle to prograde.

You are getting close now astrobond. I tried to get it to work by adding nukes but that did not work. I wonder if adding aerospikes could help. The mammoth could in theory be throttled down in the later stages of the assent and the 8% higher isp of the aerospikes might do the trick.

Yes. I think the problem is the decent. the ship gets torn to pieces if it turn to quickly. so slowing down is a big problem. And I have not figured out how to ad chutes or air bakes without them burning up on the way. I wonder if even more engines is the solution..

Nice plane. Looks a bit like the plane I used for the eve ssto limbo. I think I will have to have a go at this Eve SSTO designing. What are the HE coordinates for the Eve mountain?

That is cool! are you launching from atop the highest mountain?

Yes. since the aerospike buff in 1.0.3 that engine is the best one. That is why almost all landers in this thread rely on it.

Ther is a huge difference on the thrust generated by most engines at 5km vs 1km attitude on Eve. Skippers is are not recommended. Mainsails work, but they are not as good as aerospikes or mammoths.

never mind...

There must have been something wrong with the settings of the game if you managed to get that to orbit using skipper engines, they are almost useless in the thick eve atmosphere. Are you sure you did not have mainsails instead of skippers on the ship that got to orbit?

Here is my failed attempt at the speed record. 39:22 Apparently 1740 m/s is not enough

I'm not at all sure this complies to the rules but it was fun! 100 kerbals on board. 478m up 8,5 s engine burn 1 rocket engine so 1238,3 points?

Fully understandable with the sparse documentation i made. I did not want to do a 200 images report that no one would care to look through, bur only showed the crafts and highlights from the difficult missions. And the mission with the plane was long, repetitive and boring. I should have mentioned that Bob reseted the experiments multiple times and included a pic of him doing so next to one of the KSC buildings or atop the mountains. This challenge was way more fun than I thought it would be. And When I set out for Duna I had no idea on how difficult it would be, I really missed my precision nodes.