Entroper

I love the new parts! The legs make landing on the Mun a breeze, the engine is nice and lightweight, and the half tank is especially awesome to give your designs that little extra tweak they need to get over the edge. So I built a ship that will land on the Mun and return, using only 7 1/2 LFTs for fuel. I didn\'t take video of this attempt, as several of my other designs failed and I was tired of deleting gigabytes of failed video. > But I\'ve attached the craft, and I\'ll take some video of the journey next time. It\'s quite close to the margin, and I think adding one more half tank to the middle stage would make the mission much easier, but I promise it\'s doable as is. Can anyone do it with only 7 tanks? 8)

Sorry if I wasn\'t clear, but this isn\'t a request, it\'s an announcement. This is what I plan to make.

Obviously there are going to be multiple people interested in developing an autopilot module. I am one of those people. I just wanted to get the ball rolling and write down some of my thoughts for what I want an autopilot to do: Actions: [li]Set throttle level[/li] [li]Activate stages (possibly individual parts)[/li] [li]Set and maintain desired heading in: [li]Absolute coordinates[/li] [li]Relative coordinates to the body whose sphere of influence you are in[/li] [li]Relative coordinates to your velocity vector and orbital plane[/li] [/li] [li]Start a timer[/li] A set of actions would be performed when a condition arises. One of the actions can be to activate or deactivate the next set of conditions. For example, you might want to automatically deploy your parachute when you reach 5 000 m of altitude, but not on the way up! Conditions: [li]Altitude reached[/li] [li]Speed reached in orbital, surface, or absolute[/li] [li]Orbital parameter reached (eccentricity, semi-major axis, what have you)[/li] [li]Timer expires[/li] [li]Fuel level reached[/li] [li]Boolean expressions combining any of the above[/li] I\'ll add to this and give more examples when I have time. And I would of course appreciate any comments or suggestions.

This is actually by design, to prevent KSP from grinding to a halt as you add more and more debris. You can increase the hard limit in the game settings, or turn it off completely.

I meant a lighter return stage. Though it now appears that returning to Kerbin is optional.

That\'s true. You can use a lighter pod than I did, though. Sadly it\'s a pain to switch out upper parts of the craft, as you currently have to go back and reconnect all your struts. But a simple RCS tank plus 2 blocks would weigh a lot less than an LFE+LFT.

This was just my first attempt, but my basic strategy was to modify one of my lift vehicles and remove the boosting SRBs, to lower the takeoff thrust. Then I added fuel until the thing would barely make it off the ground, then added payload until it barely made orbit. I could probably add another fuel tank or two and still make orbit, but it\'d be really close. I\'m fairly satisfied with this run until I see what other people can do. For my next attempt, I\'d be curious to try a much smaller design and see if I can get close to the same efficiency. Alright, screenshots attached of the rocket on the pad and the payload in orbit. I didn\'t get a screenshot of the ap/pe altitudes, but I\'m rendering a video to YouTube which should have them. Payload mass = 28 LFTs = 70 kg/tonnes/whatever the mass unit is. Liftoff thrust = 18 LFEs + 1 vectoring LFE = 3 775 N/kN/whatever the thrust unit is. Apoapsis = 407 235 m, Periapsis = 76 045 m Energy = u*(2a - R)/(2aR) = 3 560.461 * (2*841.64 - 600)/(2*841.64*600) = 3.819 km^2/s^2. Score = 3.819 km^2/s^2* 70 kg / 3 775 N = 70.8 km Cool. Score units are km. That was unexpected. For some reason, my ship really wanted to pitch down near the end of my burn. The middle vectoring engine had run out of fuel long ago, and the capsule\'s cheat-steering couldn\'t keep up. Oh well, it didn\'t drift too far from prograde. Video:

Since the recent updates, I\'ve been mostly focused on Mun landings and supply deliveries. I decided to take one of my supply delivery ships and see what she could do if I strapped some engines to the orbiting fuel tanks. The results were impressive, but I know they can easily be exceeded. The ship is attached below. With stock parts, she achieved a velocity of over 15 000 m/s relative to Kerbin, and over 22 000 m/s relative to Kerbol once she was out of Kerbin\'s sphere of influence. Her engines burned for over 40 minutes of mission time. I expect you to do better.

IV.

Tweaked a bit, made it stand up on the pad, did 35 tanks. Tried 44, but it won\'t do it. I didn\'t see how much fuel I had left, but I could maybe do a couple more tanks on this design. 2230 points. I don\'t think I\'ll get close to 48. This design is pretty much maxed out to the point where I can\'t add to it without losing efficiency, and the VAB can\'t handle adding more stages to it. I\'m looking forward to when Harv starts adding 2m and 3m diameter parts.

I did 27 just now, but I can do more with the same ship. Going to try again. And not jettison my boosters early this time. EDIT: Nope, adding more payload = rocket falls over on the pad.

Yeah, that\'s why the new design added some SRBs to the payload, to block the fuel flow. This one burns the right amount of fuel, it just takes it from the wrong tanks. :/ I\'ll put up a bigger one sometime this weekend and do it properly. Did you use SAS modules to block the flow to your lower stage?

Here\'s the ship on the pad: I\'ve made a better version, but it wasn\'t configured correctly for this challenge (had SRBs instead of LFTs as the payload). I\'d like to go even bigger.

21 tanks, 75x75 km. 6 x 10 = 60 6 x 20 = 120 6 x 50 = 300 2 x 100 = 200 + 50 bonus 730 points

Speed: 6472.7 m/s Altitude: 605.23 km Specific Orbital Energy: .5*6.4727^2 - 3530.461/(600.00 + 605.23) = 18.019

Now that\'s creative looking. I like it, it looks easier to attach more or fewer tanks.

My 'satellite' was 7 LFTs and 7 SRBs, for a mass of 30.1. My cost was 93 097 (same as my low orbit supply ship, with a smaller payload). Apoapsis 2868.4, Periapsis 2865.5. Eccentricity factor = 2.9 Score: 320.4 points

This is similar to my low orbit supply delivery challenge. The goal this time is to place your cargo stage into Keosynchronous orbit. Your score is determined by the mass of the satellite that you can deliver to Keosynchronous orbit, and the cost of putting it there and returning your Kerbals safely to Kerbin. The satellite can be anything -- a cluster of fuel tanks if you wish, or a custom part that you made -- but if you use non-stock parts to lift the satellite, or to return your Kerbals home, you must note this with your score, along with the custom parts that you used. In order to score any points: [li]You must return all three Kerbals safely to the surface of Kerbin. They can be in the ocean, they can be on land halfway around the planet from the space center, whatever, as long as they touchdown safely.[/li] [li]You must jettison a separate cargo stage to an orbit approximating Keosynchronous orbit (the more accurate you are, the higher your score), which is 2 868.4 km. No rocket engines may be attached to this stage. You can attach RCS engines and fins to this stage, but their mass will not contribute to your score, and any partially-used RCS fuel tanks will count as zero.[/li] [li]The cargo must be delivered as one unit; it can\'t be separate pieces drifting apart. If you have multiple pieces, count only the largest single piece.[/li] Scoring: [list type=decimal] [li]Your score is the mass of the satellite delivered, divided by the cost to place it into orbit, minus your eccentricity factor.[/li] [li]The mass of your satellite is the sum of the masses of all the parts that make up its stage, minus any decouplers that attached it to your rocket. Any fuel tanks that are not 100% full count as zero. One mass unit = one million points.[/li] [li]Your cost is the total cost of all ship parts, minus the cost of the satellite stage (your clients paid for that). Include any parts used in the satellite stage that have any active role in the rocket, such as fins, RCS blocks, SAS units, etc.[/li] [li]Your eccentricity factor is the difference between your apoapsis and Keosynchronous altitude, plus the difference between your periapsis and Keosynchronous altitude, just prior to jettisoning the cargo. Rounder orbits are better, and orbits closer to the target altitude of 2 868.4 km are better.[/li] [li]Final score = cargo mass / cost - eccentricity factor[/li]

If the upper stage has to run for 3 hours, it can\'t crash after a few minutes. You basically need to put it into orbit, because one little vectoring LFE isn\'t going to keep it aloft otherwise. And yeah, staging would be ideal. With fuel pumps and crossflow on LFTs, this becomes easier, as you can just throw away clusters of empty tanks every once in a while. With docking and persistence, this won\'t be all that hard. Just lift one stage at a time and dock them all together.

Yeah, I\'m really looking forward to docking. I think it\'ll enable some really interesting designs.

The smallest final stage I can imagine that fits this requirement with stock parts is 152 liquid fuel tanks and one vectoring liquid engine. This lasts 152 * 500 / 7 = 10 857 s, which is 3h00m57s. Thus far I\'ve only been able to lift 21 liquid fuel tanks to orbit. This will be an enormous challenge with stock parts only.

I decided to try to reach the Mun with my ship. I reconfigured the cargo to 7 SRBs and 7 LFTs and made it to a 25.0 x 25.6 km orbit around the Mun. Not bad! It looks like it\'s going to take an awful lot to make Mun deliveries of any significant size. My payload was only 30.1 units. 322.7 points for a delivery to the Mun. This is actually good to know. The same ship that delivered 58.4 units to low Kerbin orbit delivered 30.1 units to low Munar orbit, with just a tad more to spare. So whatever you can deliver to low Kerbin orbit, you can deliver just over half that to the Mun.

The only one of these we know for certain is that length is actually in meters, because of the altimeter and velocity readouts. I used kg and N when I wrote the parts chart on the wiki, but that was just to avoid confusing people. AFAIK, there\'s nothing official that tells us the units of mass.

Nice! Simple and straightforward often beats complex. I bet that design would lift a bit more weight, since you got to a nice high orbit.

Its radius is rather small, only 600 km compared to Earth\'s 6 378 km, so Earth is actually 113x more massive. Of course, the volume of Kerbin is even smaller in proportion to Earth\'s, so Kerbin is more dense.