sevenperforce

Ditto this. I could basically just make any vehicle as small as I want.

The only thing I would ever want MJ for would be plotting pesky transfers and executing the burns. It's tiresome and I'm not sure I'll ever be good at it. Personally, I like flying gravity turns by hand. Timed ignition of solid-fuel stages would be pretty easy to implement, really. Just add an advanced tweakable to each SRB called "Ignition Delay" and allow players to either move a slider or input a number of seconds manually. Then when you stage that part, it waits the predetermined number of seconds before actually igniting. It's identical to what is available in real life. Same tweakable for decouplers. It would make it way, way more straightforward (but still just as challenging/rewarding) to build a "fire-and-forget" solid-fueled rocket, either for orbit or no. Would also help with designing optimal gravity turns because you could replicate a launch sequence perfectly.

I remember to enable crossfeed on stack decouplers but I always forget that you can enable crossfeed on radial decouplers. The terminal stage of your launch vehicle can complete the rendezvous using its main engine(s), then provide attitude and roll control during docking, but it cannot provide RCS translation. The Falcon 9 upper stage can provide roll and attitude to its payload prior to decoupling, for example. Whoops, I forgot to add the 4% bonus for ladders. Adding now... And yes, you can transfer crew from the ascent vehicle if you like. Kerbals don't weigh anything in capsules, so it wouldn't make much of a difference either way.

My four modules:

Large rockets have a higher cross-sectional density than small rockets for a given fineness ratio. That's just geometry.

Flying hundreds of millions of turbofan jet planes with the rotation of the hurricane would cause the hurricane to stop its rotation, simply by the engine exhaust pushing the air behind itself, before supersonic shockwaves would have any measurable effect.

Objects don't just pull on each other. Time is generally understood to be the fourth dimension of space, forming something we call spacetime. The difference between time and the three spatial dimensions, one would assume, is that time is constantly in motion, while space is not. But that's not actually true. In completely empty space, the three spatial dimensions move through time at a constant "rate", but once you introduce localized sources of energy, the dimensions decrease down their motion through time and begin moving relative to each other. Each dimension moves perpendicular to the other two spatial dimensions. All three dimensions moving perpendicular to each other produces what can be regarded as the "curvature of space", simply because when you move toward something that is perpendicular to you, you curve. Gravitational time dilation is caused by the decrease in moving-through-time you experience when space is moving. Same with relativistic time dilation, except you're moving through space. Why does energy cause the spacetime fabric to decrease its movement through time and start moving through space itself? Now THAT'S a good question.

The titanium ones are also significantly thicker.

My own entry is a work in progress. Brute Force. Here's what I think the Duna Transfer Vehicle will look like once it is assembled in LKO. Capsule up at the top with a heat shield, a tank and engine, a small round monoprop tank, chutes, and some thrusters. Probe core with parallel-staged Duna landing-and-ascent module; 3.5-meter heat shield underneath for aerocapture and entry at Duna. Nuclear transfer injection stage with drop tanks underneath. Of course, I have to break it up into pieces. I'll launch the Duna ascent module (with heat shield) first, followed by the parallel stages for the descent and partial ascent, then the nuke stage. Finally, I'll send up the crew module to dock.

Sure, go for it. Since most of the maneuvering and planning deals with on-orbit assembly, it's not going to make much of a difference in scoring.

Very nice plan! This is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to see -- lots of different paths and plans to try and get to Duna and back. Elon Style doesn't allow nukes, which complicates things. Also, note that if you do have nuclear engines on your mothership, you cannot use them for a capture burn at Duna or once you come back to Kerbin; they may only be used before leaving LKO. Real-life NERVAs are not generally considered to be low-maintenance affairs, and the likelihood of restarting a NERVA after a lengthy cruise is very low. Of course, if your mothership can aerobrake and use chemical propulsion for the return transfer, that's fine! It's fine to have just two seats on the glider if it is fully reusable and lands at KSC since it could always (in theory) be refueled and head back up to get the third Kerbal. The reason I only gave a 9% reward for Stayin' Alive is that it will push entrants to do a Duna Orbit Rendezvous, which is more efficient to begin with. It would not. I intentionally made several of the bonuses exclude each other so that people would have to choose. Entries are judged based on the highest single launch payload, just like real-life mission plans are limited by the capabilities of the chosen launch vehicle. So your first "payload" would be your glider's dry mass (or total mass with remaining fuel when orbit is reached, if it uses its own engines for the final push into orbit). Your second payload would be the mass of the first part of the mothership, your third payload would be the mass of the second part of the mothership, and each subsequent payload would be the mass of whatever fuel is transferred to the mothership in a single launch. No part mods, for obvious reasons, but anything else is fine.

The only thing I could get behind would be a function for timed ignition of solid fuel stages.

Well, alternately, something like the SpaceX Interplanetary Transportation System doesn't ever have fuel "on top of" the LV, so that wouldn't work.

Ooh, impressive! Smallest piece of hardware is 5 tonnes...what's your largest piece of payload? Yeah, target-orbit rendezvous is much different for Duna than it is for the Mun. With the Mun, you need to carry propellant for capture, downward journey, upward journey, and return, making Direct Ascent twice as fuel-expensive. With Direct Ascent from Duna, you can aerobrake both for capture and for entry, meaning that you only need to carry propellant for the upward journey and the return. Direct Ascent saves the fuel that would be required for an orbiter's capture burn, too. Of course, if you're using a separate transfer hab, this makes Duna Orbit Rendezvous more attractive, because the fuel to capture-burn that hab is probably less than the fuel to reorbit it. The lowest-mass solution, assuming you use a separate transhab, is to stow your solar panels, aerocapture using your lander's heat shield, lower your apoapsis gently with successive passes, and then allow your lander to break away and drop to the surface while your transhab raises its periapsis to await return. Oh, absolutely. My current plan is to have a probe core and RCS on my Duna-to-Kerbin transfer stage, use it to dock serially to each of the lower modules (Duna launch, Duna Entry, and Kerbin Escape), and then send the crew capsule up to dock on top of everything else. The only trouble with this approach is that some people (cough, cough, myself) will want to dock the orbiting modules directly to each new module before decoupling from the LV's upper stage, thus saving the mass of an extra probe core and reaction wheels on successive modules.

Good scoring system. I'll try to give it a go.

Bringing crew up last makes it trickier for sure! You have to worry about making sure each of your probes can dock together properly, and they have to have solar power or some other persistent source of electricity. I had considered making a disposable ion-powered tug one of my launches, just to do it all. I think I have my Brute Force version down to under 8 tonnes payload per launch but it's going to be tight. And I won't get any other bonuses. I just added a category that rewards semi-reusability, Loop The Loop. EDIT: Paging the usual suspects to see if they'd be interested in this challenge: @DAL59 @Bottle Rocketeer 500 @eloquentJane @GoSlash27 @Nucleartaxi @Nik75 @mk1980 @53miner53

I'll say LV-Ns can be used as long as you're still in Kerbin's SOI. I was thinking of NERVA-to-Mars plans which were set up like asparagus staging but only fired a pair at a time. But I don't want to make it too hard. You definitely still need a drill, etc. for ISRU. I was just saying that if you bring your own liquid fuel and only manufacture liquid oxidizer, then you can have it in your manned lander; if you manufacture both, you need to land your ISRU unit ahead of time. Current Mars Ascent Vehicle plans with ISRU typically require the MAV to go ahead of time because digging up soil and cracking water for hydrogen/methane is risky and time-consuming.

The Red Planet has captured the imaginations of space pioneers ever since the first days of high-powered rocketry. There's a long and auspicious list of proposed Mars missions, dating all the way back to Werner Von Braun's wildly optimistic plan to use over 400 launches to construct a massive artificial-gravity space station for Mars colonization transport. Any of us who have played KSP for a while can probably put a single-launch mission of arbitrary size on Duna easily enough, because Moar Boosters. However, the real world doesn't work like that. You can't just add more boosters; typically, mission planners have to work within the capabilities of existing (or planned) launch vehicles, which can only throw a certain amount of mass into orbit at once. As a result, most of the proposed Mars mission plans involved some degree of in-orbit assembly. The challenge is to design and execute a flags-and-footprints Mars mission with the lowest-massing payload per launch. You can assemble your mission using up to five separate launches; the goal is to make each of those orbital payloads as small as possible. There is no bonus for using fewer than five launches. For example, if you use four orbital payloads massing 8 tonnes, 12 tonnes, 6 tonnes, and 9 tonnes, then your score is 12 tonnes. If you use three orbital payloads massing 4 tonnes, 7 tonnes, and 14 tonnes, then your score is 14 tonnes, even though you did it in fewer launches with lower total mass. Obviously, lowest score wins. Thus, the incentive is to make all the launches roughly the same size in order to maximize the amount of mass you get into orbit while minimizing the size of any one launch, just like real-life mission planning requires you to work within the payload capacities of existing launch vehicles. This will require clever planning, so think ahead! A few rules to keep things more true-to-life: You can use whatever mission architecture you want, but it needs to have at least three Kerbals delivered to Duna orbit and at least two delivered to the surface. Crew must be sent up in the final launch from Kerbin. The transfer and lander (or whatever you use) must have actual crew space. It's fine to use command seats for rovers or for a separately-landed ascent vehicle. On-orbit payload is anything that goes with you toward Duna. If your upper stage is jettisoned after reaching LKO, then it's part of your launch vehicle, not your payload. If you refuel the upper stage to use for your transfer burn, then it's part of your payload. Assembly in LKO means assembly between 70 and 200 km. No ions except for unmanned probes, and then only for orbital adjustments (e.g., no spiraling out over the course of months). If you want to use nukes, you can do so, but only before leaving Kerbin's SOI. NERVAs can't be reliably restarted after a long period of time. ISRU can be used, but with some restrictions: Astronauts can't wait forever for ISRU, so if you manufacture your own fuel and oxidizer, you'll need to send an unmanned ISRU unit ahead of time. If you bring your own liquid fuel and only want to manufacture oxidizer, it's fine to have the ISRU unit on the manned lander (it's considered feasible to do this for Mars missions since cracking LOX out of the Martian atmosphere is straightforward). If you take this route, you can turn on infinite fuel when you activate your Convert-O-Tron (no need to use a drill). If the ascent vehicle lands on Duna separately from the landing craft, then you must bring a rover or other vehicle to take your crew from the lander to the ascent vehicle; no hundred-mile treks. You can earn bonuses to improve your score: On Tongues of Fire. Use no chutes; propulsive landings on both Duna and Kerbin. 10% decrease in highest payload mass. Conflicts with Wing It. Wing It. Winged, rolling landings on Duna and Kerbin. 5% decrease in highest payload mass. Conflicts with On Tongues of Fire. Old School. No nukes or ions. 3% decrease in highest payload mass. Brute Force. Assemble a Direct Ascent vehicle in LKO; no ISRU, no propellant transfer, no Duna orbit rendezvous. 12% decrease in highest payload mass. Conflicts with Loop the Loop & Justin Case. Slow Climb. Put ladders on your vehicles, if necessary, so you don't have to jetpack around on the Duna surface. 4% decrease in highest payload mass. Elon Style. Make the whole system fully reusable without using nukes, ions, or airbreathers. 25% decrease in highest payload mass. Conflicts with Justin Case & A Solid Plan. Stayin' Alive. Bring extra living space (at least one extra seat per Kerbal) for the transfer to and from Duna. 18% decrease in highest payload mass. Loop The Loop. Make your transfer vehicle a fully-reusable solution that can brake back into Kerbin orbit and be used again for the next trip. 15% decrease in highest payload mass. Conflicts with Brute Force. Consistency, Good Sir. Make all of your launches with the exact same launch vehicle. 6% decrease in highest payload mass. Justin Case. (NEW) Provide your crew with a separately-landed ascent vehicle as a reliable way to get off Duna (inspired by The Martian). 18% decrease in highest payload mass. Conflicts with Brute Force & Elon Style. A Solid Plan. (NEW) Make the Duna Ascent Vehicle (whether separately-landed or not) solid-fueled to orbit. 9% decrease in highest payload mass. Conflicts with Elon Style. They See Me Rollin'. (NEW) Bring a rover for your crew to get around Duna. 15% decrease in highest payload mass. If you find you need more than five launches, that's fine, but you'll have to assess a 15% penalty for each additional launch to represent the added real-life cost of adding an additional launch contract. There is not, however, a bonus for doing it in fewer than five launches. No part mods for the actual Duna package, although you can use part mods for your launch vehicle if you like. I may continue to add additional bonuses to enable increasingly-lower scores as the challenge goes on. Good luck! Smallcraft Leaderboard: Largecraft Leaderboard (20+ kerbals): Differences: Entries must have 20 or more kerbals. At least 2/3 of your crew must land on Duna. Stayin' Alive only requires that you have one extra seat for every 2 kerbals. You divide your total score (after bonuses) by half the total number of kerbals you take.

Oh, nice! I didn't know about that. Anyway, here's a direct-ascent EOR. May be close to the minimum possible part count for a direct-ascent EOR...and it even has a rover(ish)! Jeb to orbit: Earth Orbit Rendezvous and TMI: Capture, landing, and return: Score is 200 - 16 parts - 20 parts = 164, +10 for the two-stage lander, x2 for the rover, comes to 348. Also note that I am very, very low on the tech tree, for what it's worth.

Off-topic, but I just had the thought of two co-orbiting black holes rotating perpendicular to their orbital plane, creating an omnidirectional relativistic slingshot for anyone brave enough to plummet into their ergospheres. Never mind the frame-dragging yuck that would happen. I second the idea of antimatter orions, especially if you do antimatter-catalyzed fusion bombs. Those are super lightweight and require far less antimatter than the various alternatives. For fine adjustments you could consider something like a fission fragment drive.

All right, here you go. First launch: Val takes flight: Cismunar activity and landing: EVA and return: What's my score? 200 to start, minus 52 parts used, +10 for a two-stage lander, x2 for the rover. Should come to 316 points, minus whatever tech tree deductions you want to make (I'm not sure how you're doing this). Question: the original Earth Orbit Rendezvous plan was actually EOR to Direct Ascent and would have required ten launches: If I fly the EOR version, can I do it this way instead? This has higher dV requirements because there's no redocking in Mun orbit; you take everything down to the Mun surface with you. Also, you should consider adding some kind of bonus for LES that would make it worth the part count.

I've often thought that two expendable Falcon Heavys and a rebuilt Dragon 2 could pull off a Joint Lunar Orbit Rendezvous with landing, if the Falcon 9 second stage could be equipped for extended restarts. Anyway, the Mun in KSP is much closer, so I'll do this with two single-stick launchers.

I've been working through a long-duration challenge that replicates the development of the Falcon 9 family by requiring thrust-limiting of the first-stage engines to make the dV requirements more challenging. It's very neat to see how the ascent profile has to change depending on TWR and throttling capability.

According to wikipedia its max loaded mass is about 5 tonnes.

More on the science side than the spaceflight side, but still entirely without political discussion.... Here's the purported physics package claimed to be a hydrogen bomb: From a pure physics perspective: what the heck is that? Are they trying to do a Teller-Ullam device with two primaries on either end to squeeze together a dry-fuel fusion core? Is the pipe on the back end a tritium supply hose to make one of the primaries a gas-boosted fission device?