IncongruousGoat

Could this thread be locked? The challenge has been moved to a new maintainer:

The new thread can be found here, courtesy of @Stamp20:

There's no real good way to say this, but: I'm looking for someone to take over maintenance of this challenge. My ability to keep up with this forum and with developments in the KSP community has been decreasing steadily for a while now, with time increasingly consumed by work and my other hobbies, and I've come to feel that I'm no longer capable of doing this challenge justice as its maintainer. If you're interested in taking the challenge over, please let me know. Otherwise, it's been a sincere pleasure to see the amazing things people have come up with for this challenge, and I wish all of those with submissions in the works the best of luck. This thread will stay open until the next one is up and running, but I'd ask that people not post any submissions here - instead, hold them for the new thread.

@king of nowhere Congratulations on completing the Ultimate Challenge for a second time! Grand tours with Kerbalism are hard, and grand tours that don't use ISRU are hard, but one that does both, plus long-distance rover driving, at hard difficulty, is in a category all its own. Well done indeed! The hall of fame has been updated to include your latest entry .

Don't worry about it - I was intending to waive the rule in this case, since (given the radiation exposure constraints imposed by Jool) I'm not sure it's actually possible to follow with Kerbalism installed. Besides, that rule is designed to prevent submissions consisting of a whole bunch of independent interplanetary missions all launched at the same time, which is not what you did. Speaking of which... Congratulations on completing the Ultimate Challenge! Completing the challenge at all is a noteworthy accomplishment all on its own, but you went ahead and did it under the constraints of Kerbalism. I didn't even think it was possible, going in, but I'm glad to say you proved me wrong. The hall of fame has been updated, and you may pick up the badge at your leisure.

In my experience the Reliant is far more useful than the Swivel, even though it lacks gimbal. The Reliant is .25t lighter and has markedly better Isp, which really makes the difference when trying for something like a Mun flyby. The lack of gimbal does hurt, but I've found it's possible to get away with just capsule reaction wheels if you're careful about aerodynamic stability on ascent. Funding is less of a problem in NCD than it might initially seem, actually. Before orbit, you're spending a lot less money than you'd think, since rockets are cheap and science is so scarce that you're not spending a lot of money on unlocking parts. Then, once you can get into orbit, it's possible to generate infinite money by farming survey contracts, which makes the whole problem moot. NCD is pretty grindy, but it's not quite that bad. If you look at existing submissions the most anyone has done is 19 Mun landings, one per biome (and that was me, doing things in a stupid and brute-force way). It's possible to get enough science/tech to land on Minmus just from Kerbin & low/high orbit science, and being able to land on Minmus opens up enough science to either let you clean out a Mun biome in a single mission, or to go interplanetary and get science that way.

They're fine if they start off as part of the original ship.

As a further reminder, the challenge rules are flexible. In this case, I'm willing to waive the "one Kerbal lands everywhere" requirement, since it's near-impossible to fulfill when using Kerbalism.

There's a couple of semi-sneaky things I did to get as much science as possible out of science rollers. Here's the full procedure I used: 1. Very carefully roll the science roller over to the target biome 2. Collect 1 crew report and 1 Mystery Goo 3. Have Bob go on EVA & collect EVA science 4. Have Bob retrieve the science from every container and store it into one of the capsules 5. Collect the other Goo 6. Have Bob take the science from that Goo experiment and store it in the other capsule 7. Use Bob's scientist powers to restore both Goo experiments 8. Get Bob back in his capsule 9. Go to step 1 One additional thing to note is that, if you get rolling fast enough while traveling between biomes, you can sometimes get "flying over <insert space center biome here>" science, which is worth more than ground science.

I'm fine with it, as long as that's the only thing you bring over and the only thing you use it for is science messages.

Given that you're working under the constraints of Kerbalism (!), I'm more than willing to consider it. I've been thinking about adding an honorable mention section to the hall of fame for a while now, for submissions that don't quite follow the rules but are still worth looking at.

Yep, looks like this thread is still locked. *click*

The surefire thing to do here is to put it (and any other small science you bring along) inside a service bay. Those have a really high heat tolerance, to the point of working as substitute heat shield, and as a bonus work as a great airbrake if you open the bay doors. You still need a parachute to land safely, but the airbrake effect is nice for those times when the capsule ends up pointed the wrong way during descent.

Advanced Construction, for fairings. After that the best choice is probably Propulsion Systems, for good probe and lander engines & tanks, but you need fairings to take full advantage of those.

For reference, there is actually a reason to want to launch east instead of west from the KSC. Launching east, you gain about 100 m/s of dV from Kerbin's rotation, while you lose the same amount if you launch west. It's not a huge amount but it does make a difference, especially when you're trying to maximize payload to LKO.

It's definitely possible for cavemen to use probes - they just need to be designed such that they're aerodynamically stable on the way up. Basically, make the probe as smooth and pointy as you can via use of fairings, nosecones, or structural adapters, and if possible put some fins on the bottom of the booster. The idea here is to get the center of drag of your rocket behind the center of mass by keeping the front low-drag and putting (relatively) high-drag fins at the back.

It's worth noting here that manual fuel transfer isn't available to cavemen (it requires an R&D upgrade to unlock), so a conventional refueling station won't work like it would in a normal career. Refueling can still be done in some sense by swapping entire fuel tanks out, but it'll be interesting to see if this is a viable approach given the relatively hard 2.5 tons per launch payload limit.

It's (at least) the third. Both @zanie420 and I flew crewed Mun return missions during our NCD runs. Still very impressive, though. Caveman crewed Mun is no mean feat.

@camacju Congratulations on completing the Ultimate Challenge! And very skillfully done, too - it's always good to see a submission using the divided-ship approach because of the precision, forethought, and attention to detail it requires in both planning and execution. The fact that you did it without ion engines on top of all that makes this easily the most impressive submission I've seen yet. You may claim the badge at your leisure - you've more than earned it. Also, many apologies for not reviewing this earlier. I've been crazy-busy with work this past week. EDIT: Before I write up the hall of fame entry, I do have one question: What version of KSP did you use?

It's totally possible to get EVA science in a caveman run - you just need to be slightly more creative about how you do it than you would normally. The trick here is that Kerbals can still exit vehicles while on the surface of Kerbin, and there's nothing stopping you from having a Kerbal ride a ladder on the side of your rocket into space. Heck, @dvader once took an EVA Kerbal all the way to Bop, riding on the outside of the ship the whole way. In practice it's more complicated than "just ride a ladder", of course, but if you look back through this thread there are plenty of working designs you can examine. EDIT: For NCD in general, my best advice is to look at the entries that already exist. There's no shame in learning from and improving on previous attempts, successful and unsuccessful, and this thread is a gold mine of lateral thinking and creative solutions.

Merits of the proposal aside, increasing physical time warp any further is likely impossible for technical reasons. "Regular" (non-physical) time warp can run the game at millions of times normal speed because it doesn't bother simulating most of the physics - it reduces the simulation to some basic power/thermal calculations, plus moving objects along fixed patched-conic trajectories. It's not really accelerating time, from a game physics perspective. Instead, what it does is more like freezing time, moving a whole bunch of stuff around, and then incrementing the in-game clock by some amount. Among other things, this means the game can dispense with doing all of the rigid-body physics it would otherwise have to do to simulate the currently loaded ship, which is why it's computationally feasible to have a time warp mechanic in the first place. Physical time warp, on the other hand, is a literal acceleration of the in-game physics simulation. To achieve 4x time warp, the game has to either A: run its physics engine at 4x speed, or B: run its physics engine at some speed between 1 and 4x normal, and make up the difference by increasing the time step between iterations. Basically, to achieve 4x warp, the computer running KSP needs to either to 4x as much work as normal, or do somewhat less than 4x more work, but let the quality of the simulation suffer as a result. Given that KSP has trouble running the physics engine at 1x speed once part count gets above a certain point, it's hard to see how physics warp above 4x is doable on currently available hardware.

Always a sucker for poetic lyrics...

Scrubbed due to weather

It's... less exciting than you'd think, actually. From what we can see of the nozzle, it doesn't look like they played with the nozzle geometry to try and reduce flow separation (as was done on the RS-25), and from the shape of the plume, the engine is very over-expanded at sea level. It looks like they just worked out the size of the biggest nozzle they could mount on Raptor's combustion chamber that wouldn't tear itself to pieces when fired at sea level, and went with that. It's a compromise design, sacrificing some tens of seconds of specific impulse in vacuum for the ability to fire the engine at sea level, probably for abort capability and landing redundancy reasons. It's only the biggest if you don't count the M-1 (http://astronautix.com/m/m-1.html). Which, to be fair, never got as far as an all-up test, but it seems like it was at least put together at some point. None of which is to say the test isn't exciting. It's very exciting. It's another piece of SS/SH in action, and the fact that they went with a relatively short nozzle helps answer a lot of open questions about low-altitude abort scenarios and landing contingency plans. Also, it's Raptor, and Raptor is an amazing engine. So yes, hype.