IncongruousGoat

1.3 is fine, yes.

@Just Jim @qzgy @kerbalstar @JacobJHC The new Ultimate Challenge thread is up. If there are any things you all would like to see added/changed about it, just let me know.

Link to the original Ultimate Challenge thread Link to the first continuation thread This is a continuation of the Ultimate Challenge, originally by Just Jim, for KSP 1.0 and up, as well as Making History and Breaking Ground. Challenge Rules & Clarifications: 1. You can do as much orbital assembly as you want in LKO, but you can't launch any new vessels after any part of the mission leaves Kerbin's SOI, or (equivalently) after you conduct any landing. Additionally, after the last assembly mission you should only have 1 active vessel (i.e. you need to start off the mission with one big ship in LKO). The sole exception is launching a crew transport to retrieve your crew from LKO (and only LKO!) at the end of the mission. 2. No cheating (ladder drives, cheat menu, HyperEdit, etc). Using these for testing is fine, just so long as they don't show up in the mission. 3. There isn't a hard list of which mods are okay to use and which aren't, but try to stick to mods that are balanced against stock. If you're wondering if a mod is considered balanced, just ask. 4. You can have a crew of any size, but there must be at least one Kerbal that's landed on every body at the end of the mission. 5. You can use whatever planet packs you like so long as they don't modify the bodies of the stock system. If you do use any planet packs, put their names somewhere in your submission. 6. All of these rules are flexible. If you have something that you think warrants rule-bending, just run it by me first. There aren't any points to be earned, nor are there tiers to the challenge. However, submissions will be labeled based on whether and which mods/planet packs/DLC were installed. The official challenge badge, suitable for mounting in your signature: Hall of Fame: 1.2.2: Kergarin - A fully re-usable mission, using an ISRU-equipped single-stage Eve lander docked to an arch-shaped transfer stage. No nukes or ion engines needed. 1.4.4/Making History: Mephisto81 - Used an ISRU spaceplane carrying an expendable Eve lander. Razor-thin fuel and TWR margins make for an exciting mission. 1.4.5: jinnantonix - Cage-like mothership around a reusable single-stage lander, with a separate asparagus lander for Eve. Lots of ISRU all around. 1.4.5/Making History/OPM/Apollo/More Gas Giants/Spud: JacobJHC - No-ISRU xenon-heavy tour of the stock system, plus planets and moons from 4 planet packs with much reserve fuel to spare. Overall excellent in both scope and execution. Also contains 3 Eeloo landings. 1.4.5: Xurkitree - Non-ISRU, monolithic, modular, centered around component re-use, planned to a tee, and executed with style. A tour de force of KSP mega-mission planning. 1.4.1: iAMtheWALRUS - Disposable landers for Tylo and Eve, and a very capable ISRU spaceplane for everything else. Completed the contract using a common capsule for the landers, and through clever navigation completed the mission in under 10 in-game years. 1.7/Making History/Anziephus/Tekcate/Trans Keptunian/Salus/Kronos Planet Expansion: GRS - Non-ISRU monolithic design centered around compact landers and a highly modular transfer stage. Notable for flexibility and generality of design, as demonstrated by the dozens of additional landings. 1.7/Making History/Anziephus/Tekcate/Trans Keptunian/Salus/Kronos Planet Expansion/Plod/Vulkan: GRS - Non-ISRU monolithic design once again centered around compact landers and a highly modular transfer stage. Bigger, better, more flexible, more general, and with even more landings than the last one. 1.10.1: camacju - Single launch, no ISRU, and no ion engines, using a highly parallelized divide-and-conquer mission profile to work around the delta-V and payload limits imposed by being stuck with nuclear and chemical rockets and a limited fuel supply. 1.11/Kerbalism: king of nowhere - Radiation, solar storms, mental breakdowns, component failures, and limited life support turn an otherwise fairly standard modular ISRU approach into a tense mission whose plan had to be re-evaluated several times over as ships broke down and Kerbal health declined. 1.11/Kerbalism: king of nowhere - A fitting follow-up to the previous Kerbalism entry, this time with less ISRU, more radiation, and by far the most long-distance rover driving of any entry to date.

F4 or F12? The only use of F4 I know of is using Alt-F4 as the world's least controllable save revert.

I'll make sure to do that. I don't know if I'll include the screenshots of the contract, though. @HoloYolo didn't actually require submissions to complete the contract, as long as they visited every planet in one mission (the contract is slightly more restrictive), and I think I'm going to stick to that on the grounds that it allows more interesting submissions. As such, I don't know if it makes sense to keep the screenshots of the contract.

Ah. That may be a problem. At the very tail end of my NCD run, I cheat menu-ed the Duna/Ike ship into LKO in a test save a couple times in order to A: make sure there weren't any catastrophic flaws in the design, and B: teach myself to fly Caveman Duna transfers. There's no technical reason I couldn't have built a lifter capable of putting the whole assembly in orbit - it's stable under acceleration, and this was a test save so pad and VAB upgrades weren't a problem. I just didn't think of doing it that way. @The Dunatian, if you feel this disqualifies my run, feel free to take it off the leaderboard. I probably won't be making another go - it was too much work the first time around.

I'm considering doing it. Normally, I wouldn't put up a re-host of the challenge without @HoloYolo's consent, but (as you said) they haven't been around for more than half a year. The problem is that there are a couple things I disagree with in the way the Ultimate Challenge was hosted back when I did my submission, so it wouldn't be exactly the same. If I were to re-host it, I'd probably add a few basic rules for clarification purposes, and probably ditch the dedicated save. If people think that's fine, then I'll go ahead, but if you all feel that I should try and preserve the original challenge as much as possible I might have to leave it to someone else.

@dvader Now this is what I came here to see! Riding a ladder to the Mun or Minmus is something I considered doing if I ran out of science, but I never thought of it as a serious source of science. It would seem my evaluation was mistaken. The question is how to proceed from here (other than sending Bob to the Mun, of course). You could grind the Mun and Minmus for science, or you could start doing orbital assembly and going interplanetary. In fact, you might end up having to do both (I would work out the math, except I'm sick and tired of science return calculations at this point). Either way, I'm sure it'll be interesting. Anyone who thinks farming the Mun is all boredom and no excitement has never tried to land in the Polar Lowlands. Also, it's good to see that your choice to prioritize the OKTO over docking ports paid off. It's a bit of a risky move, but you seem to have made it work.

It's okay. Real life happens to all of us from time to time. As a point of book-keeping, though, you may want to update the Order of the Trilobite section of the cave wall. Also, you *may* have misspelled my username.

Ah, but you're forgetting the two really big problems with a high-altitude Venus colony. A: it would be completely useless, and B: once you get there, there's no way back. Not through the kinds of winds you get in Venus's upper atmosphere. There's no way it could ever be self-sustaining. That's the big reason I advocate Mars above all else - it's got the potential to be self-sustaining, using reasonable technology. It can grow to be something more than a small outpost that needs constant resupply. If we want progress a more difficult to reach, more difficult to supply equivalent of the ISS is not the way to go. So yes, I buy into the existential argument for colonization. To quote Larry Niven: "The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!" And yes, if given the chance I would move to Mars.

What canyon would this be, exactly? The Mun's canyons are easily avoidable or traversable lengthwise. Ditto with the Dres canyon. Kerbin's rivers are fordable if you find the right spot to cross, and I can't think of any other noteworthy canyons. Generally, though, I would say that your rover needs a re-design if it can't cross the terrain it needs to cross. Either that, or find a route that doesn't take you across a canyon. Polar circumnavigations are, after all, acceptable.

Per rule 3 ( Stay on the ground or on/below the surface of any water present ), rocket-jumping over canyons is expressly forbidden. Small hops unpowered hops on low-gravity bodies are permitted, but rocket-assisted takeoff definitely is not. I can't see a reason why you wouldn't be allowed a rover that can fly to orbit after it finishes, so long as that capability is NOT used during the Elcano itself. Remember, this is a challenge about long-distance land and/or sea navigation. Traveling via air or via rocket hop kinda defeats the point of the challenge.

No, Mars is definitely the place to go. The problem with the Moon is that the only thing (and I do really mean the only thing) it has going for it is proximity. It's a completely terrible place in all other regards. Abysmal rotation period, hazardous and highly abrasive regolith, a serious deficiency of the resources we need to survive, unhealthily low gravity, little to no possibility of terraforming... I'm of the view that we're likely never going to see a serious population on the Moon, just because of how darn inhospitable it is. Mostly automated mining settlements that depend on constant supply shipments? Yes. There's a historical precedent for that kind of thing (gold mining in the Sahara). But full-on settlement? Not a chance. Again, think the Sahara. Mars, on the other hand, is as nice a colony site as we could hope for short of a straight up habitable planet. Sure, it's not a terribly nice place, but it's a much more forgiving destination than anywhere else in the solar system, and it's also the second-closest of the reasonable colony targets. Furthermore, tech developed for the Moon is not going to be terribly applicable to Mars given the possibilities for ISRU on the latter, so there's no real advantage to settling the one before the other.

I'm off interning on the Virginia side of the DC area. So far, my conclusions are that A: my job is pretty good, all things considered, and B: I do not like summer weather in Virginia at all.

But reporting by general media won't really matter, especially in the beginning. There are more than enough people in the world do understand the technology and the risks, and who will be willing to make the journey regardless. Remember, we don't need to get everyone to think it's safe, or even most people. Just enough people to start the colony going. It's not like buying a one-way ticket to Mars is illegal, especially if SpaceX are operating their own launch site and range. In any case, SpaceX will be highly motivated to make the trip as safe as possible, so I don't see this becoming a problem in the first place. Additionally, humans have shown the ability to fix things if stuff starts breaking - case in point, Apollo 13. As long as SpaceX builds a modicum of redundancy into the BFS (which they seem to be doing), things should be just fine. Space travel is hard, but by no means impossible, and engineers have proven really, really good at doing hard things.

Hmmm. Riding a ladder to orbit did take some testing when I went and did it, but I didn't have too hard a time getting my design to work. The trickiest part was figuring out an ascent profile that would leave Bob un-cooked. Keeping the ladder-naut behind some part (I used a capsule) and applying judicious and careful throttling seemed to work pretty well. You can make some compromises on aerodynamics, efficiency, and delta-V, since you only need to make it to a polar orbit (you can use the EVA's Kerbal's jetpack to de-orbit if you run out of fuel on insertion).

It's a real good thing that all versions are accepted. I've been sitting on the screenshots of a Kerbin Elcano I did back in May of 2017, in version 1.2.2. I had this whole plan to write a story around them, but that didn't really happen. Better late than never, I suppose. Album is here: https://imgur.com/a/KhHFty6 I tried to put descriptions on the images as best I could remember my mental state at the time, but this is more than a year after I actually did it, so the reconstruction isn't perfect.

Well, I wouldn't go quite that far. You could very easily run into heating and plumbing problems if, say, you tried to feed ammonia into an engine designed to take hydrogen. It might (in principle) be possible to design an engine that could take anything that will flow as a propellant, but the cooling and pump mechanisms would have to operate on a separate cycle from the fuel (so no turbopumps or regenerative cooling), and engineering such a thing would be tricky, to say the least. Not impossible, but not trivial either.

Or the Moon, for that matter. In-situ methane synthesis is only really practicable on Earth (duh), on Mars, in the asteroid belt (carbonaceous chondrites provide everything you need), and on Titan. For now, though, Musk only cares about Mars, and methane synthesis makes sense for Mars. Colonization efforts directed at other bodies will almost certainly use a different, and presumably more sophisticated, transport infrastructure. Who knows, by then we might have enough infrastructure in place to permit fully non-atmospheric transfer craft. Now that would be something.

Somewhere between rational and Scott. I don't fly a mission till I've tested every lander and atmospheric craft and completely mapped out the delta-V budget for the mission. Also, everything has to look like an actual rocket/spacecraft to the extent possible, all the way from the fineness ratio of the booster to the positioning of antennae and fuel tanks, which I mostly attribute to RSS/RO/RP-0. Then again, this doesn't stop me from trying to then do completely nuts, non-realistic things. Like a no-ISRU, no-refueling single-launch grand tour. Or a Duna/Ike manned landing and return mission with a completely tier 1 space center. My rockets may have to be well-planned and look realistic, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go do realistic things with them.

So you did decide to do this! Hooray! I wish you the best of luck and look forward to seeing how you proceed from here. As far as the survey contracts go, you're right in that Kerbin spins too fast for comfort. I just kind of stuck my survey craft in an orbit and waited around for it to fly right over the survey site. Often took ~7 in-game days per flight. Not a fast method at all, but a heck of a lot easier than doing anything else. Also, 0.65 range modifier on antennae? That's... probably still going to be okay, although you're probably going to have to be a bit less sloppy with the comms network than I was (I more or less eyeballed all the altitudes). Interplanetary comms are still off the table, of course, but Minmus should still be in range of the DSN.

I'm human, I swear! But, seriously, there's a reason I decided to farm the Mun using single-launch probes. Trying to do it with two-launch crewed missions would have driven me off the edge with the tedium. If you take the approach @Muetdhiver took in his recent Diamond run and do lots of interplanetary stuff it might not be quite so bad, but that approach requires some intense cavemannery and is quite risky. I do encourage you to give this a shot, if you have the time. It would be a sad thing indeed if this ends up being the only successful attempt. Thank you! To be honest, it's going to be a while before I'm in the mood to play KSP again. Doing this has burnt me out pretty thoroughly.

Well, sure, but now you're stuck hauling hydrogen all the way out to Mars, which is pretty tricky very difficult (as in, we don't have a good way to do it). If you're going that route it would be easier to go the Andy Weir route and bring hydrazine, which you then decompose to get hydrogen out. But then you're stuck hauling hydrazine out to Mars. Bringing the hydrogen as methane is problematic, since methane pyrolysis isn't the cleanest process ever, and bringing it as water is very mass-inefficient.

It's finally done. Ladies and gentlemen, Nanocrystalline Diamond has officially been completed. Mission thread is here: It took over 7 in-game years and nearly 2 IRL months to complete, but it's done. Let it be known. The challenge is possible. I wish the best of luck to anyone else who undertakes this.

Well, this is it. The last chapter, and she's a doozy. Chapter 9: The Home Stretch Holy cow. I can't believe that it's finally complete. It took two years of this challenge being up for someone to make it all the way, but finally it's been proven possible. I wonder how long it's going to be before the next submission shows up? Not too long, I hope. I want to see all the things people do to do this challenge in a more clever way than I did.