sevenperforce

Stock please.

Does Tweakscale count as a minor part mod or a major one?

Nah, submit away.

Spotted something VERY kerbal -- the first stage started the flip for the boostback burn using its cold gas nitrogen thrusters, but the engine ignition happened before the stage had stopped rotating. So they used the engine gimbal to stop the rotation rather than waiting a few extra seconds for the nitrogen thrusters to arrest. I've done that so many times; just wait until the RCS has my rocket pointed in generally the right direction and then let gimbal + SAS do the rest.

Fair enough. Another way to do something like a Jool-5 would be to pack a drop-tank SSTO full of tanks coupled with docking ports rather than decouplers, and leave them in orbit between landings.

Well, that's not quite the spirit of the challenge; I said no refueling because I wanted people to use only the fuel they could get off the ground in a single launch. But don't let that stop you from making it!

High-altitude winds are pretty difficult to avoid or counter. Shear will rip a rocket apart. You can do something like Stratolaunch to get above the wind, but then takeoff conditions become problematic.

Because you want to have the same craft come back and refuel using engineless tankers "launched" onto the runway? That wouldn't be allowed, no. That's why I said no refueling or ISRU. The point is to get as far as you can with only the fuel you can lift using a single engine.

Absolutely. Any stock engine is fine. If you can get something off the ground with an ion engine, more power to you.

Honestly, you'd need some kind of shielded launch facility. Like, kilometer-high evacuated tube, or somesuch.

Escape automatically beats a high-apogee orbit, so increased velocity at escape is a pretty good metric. Wow, very nice! Top of the leaderboard, you are. What was your escape velocity? I really should come up with a way to add a multiplier or alternate scoring mechanism for landings on other worlds. I wonder what a Twin Boar could do for a horizontal-launch-with-staging, like I used.

Highest velocity at escape, I suppose. But remember that you've got to actually return to Kerbin, so.... Here's my entry, just for fun. Obviously this could be way better. 256 kilometers!

On a single engine, sure.

Ah. Shoot. That sucks. On a related note, does anyone know of ANY objects in the current game that have ANY collision frame with other objects in the same vessel? I want to attach an engine to the AGU, free the pivot, and then use something like the airbrakes to push it between two positions so I can make a single-engine stock VTOL.

No ISRU or fuel transfer. One launch.

I'm playing Sandbox. The Action Groups UI is available and works just fine, but when I click the AGU, the only options are "Release Grapple", "Decouple Node", and "Toggle Arming", none of which I want. I need to be able to Free and Lock pivoting with an action group.

No, you cannot cluster engines. You can only use one engine, and it must be stock. As I stated above, sepratrons and RCS thrusters are fine as long as they aren't used to thrust prograde. They can be used to thrust retrograde for your final deorbit burn if needed (for example, if you've jettisoned your engine for independent re-entry and you need to deorbit your capsule).

I did the maths. Achieving relativistic velocities with chemical propellant is not a possibility. Even if we have infinite money, that doesn't mean we have infinite fuel. Nor does it make the rocket equation any less punishing. If all of the oceans were drained, cracked into liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, placed into orbit with a space elevator, and used to launch a one-gram payload, that one-gram payload would achieve a whopping 247 km/s. This is eight hundredths of one percent of the speed of light.

Yes. If it pushes the craft in a prograde direction, it's an engine. You can use sepratrons to help with stage separation if you want, as long as they don't produce prograde acceleration on the main vehicle. I will edit the OP to note that RCS thrusters are fine as long as they aren't used for prograde acceleration at any time. They can be used for retrograde acceleration (e.g., deorbit burns).

Even if such a stack could exceed 10x solar escape velocity, this would be nowhere near lightspeed. Like, not even remotely close. Even 1,000x solar escape velocity is closer to the speed of a major league baseball pitch than it is to lightspeed.

A recent trade embargo has caused a surge in prices for engine components. As a result, the Kerbal Space Program management has created a new rule: vehicles may use no more than a single engine, and it must be recovered intact. Your goal is to get at least one Kerbal as far from home as possible, and return, on a single stock engine. This single engine must be your only means of propulsion. No ISRU or refueling is permitted (since any single-engine SSTO would then have an infinite score). No decoupler launching, cheats, infinite fuel, or anything gimmicky. Staging is fine; you can use drop tanks as desired. You only have to recover the Kerbal and the engine, and you can do so separately if desired. RCS can be used as long as it produces no prograde acceleration at any point (e.g., it can be used for attitude control and deorbiting but not for anything prograde). After several entries, there will be one leaderboard organized into three levels: Atmospheric, Orbital, and Escape. In Atmospheric, your score is total distance traveled; in Orbital, your score is your apoapsis (with periapse over 70 km); in Escape, your score is your velocity at the edge of Kerbin's SOI. For all levels, you get a 150% multiplier for each additional Kerbal; for the latter two levels, you get a 2x multiplier for each world you land on. LEADERBOARD Level 3: Escape @Jouni (escape velocity unknown) @zeta function (honorable mention; burned up on re-entry) Level 2: Orbital @Dman0829 (83,553 km * 1.5^14 = 24,391,566 km) @Aetharan (83,555 km) sevenperforce (256 km * 1.5^1 = 384 km) Level 3: Atmospheric (no entries yet)

Maybe he wants a biaxial VTOL.

Eh, I'm sure you can build a 3-stage ICBM and play around with the launch angle until you can hit a defined target! That's level 1, anyway. Given my penchant for discussing nuclear weapon design, I'm probably already on a lot of them.

More likely that they were captures than primordial.

Fine for a lunar base but not feasible for a mobile ISRU unit. That was my gripe with the one linked above.