Ultimate Steve

I think that may be skewed by the fact that dragon got cut down to four seats instead of seven because IIRC they couldn't get touchdown forces within acceptable levels or something like that. Granted NASA wouldn't have used all seven anyway but there is also some cargo in there in place of the 3 seats, so the cost per seat also includes some cargo. And all space projects grow in cost. Most Americans would probably agree that even if the costs were equal, it is better to have that money spent domestically than abroad in a country we haven't tended to have great relations with.

It is over 1000. I do space battles from time to time and that can easily get to over 1000 debris fairly quickly.

I think the end point of SpaceX obligations would be after everything has been unloaded from the capsule, and if that unloading happens in a NASA facility, when the capsule is back in SpaceX's possession.

So! I should have known something was wrong! The first thing that went wrong was I was off by like 7 degrees, so I did a correction that involved some guesswork, bringing me back onto my predicted course. I then eyeballed a plane change burn. But then something *really* went wrong. It was a classic unit conversion mistake. Always write down your units, people! I had calculated that Minmus moved 1.2 degrees per hour, which was correct. However I then took my 9 day travel time, and I forgot to convert 1.2 degrees per hour to 7.2 degrees per day (Kerbin days are 6 hours). As a result, my calculated phase angle was off by a factor of 6. I then tried delving into actual orbital mechanics math (the stuff I had been using involved an ideal trajectory with an encounter at apoapsis, which is much easier to calculate, because angular position as a function of time is a very hard calculation to do. Time to apoapsis is just period divided by 2, which is a very easy equation to solve). I attempted to solve for the needed eccentricity needed to encounter Minmus at a certain time and angle (true anomaly) obtained by a protractor and some estimation, with the periapsis and a few other things known. However, no matter how hard I bashed it with a hammer, I always ended up with one more equation than unknown so I couldn't solve it at my current level of understanding. I ended up just time warping until I got a Minmus encounter (about 200 days) as I was on an orbit that loitered at Minmus altitude a lot and was at vaguely the correct inclination. I thought it would take a long time until I was aligned at the ~65 degrees required, and was prepared to estimate a correction if I came close to that value, but I got a perfect encounter without having to do anything a few orbits later. Val got to Minmus and back safely! Although, it was not because of my math, it was in spite of it!

The more the merrier, if there's empty space that's not going to be used anyway, why not?

I've tried a new gimmick to help me procrastinate less on stuff. I've made a list of the things I need to do and I've tied a fund value to each one, and I'm trying to run a KSP career mode using only rewards from completing items on that list. It's a bit more complicated than that, with chains, streaks, and milestone multipliers, but that's the core of it. It has been pretty effective so far. I spent today designing a Minmus mission after completing a successful Mun mission. However, even though I have divided all building upgrade costs by 10, it's still a lot of money, and usually I would need a level 2 tracking station for this. I decided to try doing it without this upgrade using math. I did the math for a Minmus transfer from a 100x100km orbit. Assuming I can eyeball the inclination close enough, I need to hit a window about 5.5 degrees wide (although it's a bit more than that since I only checked if the apoapsis intersects Minmus, and not the rest of the trajectory). Should be doable. I have acquired the funds to undertake this mission, although the rocket isn't the most safe thing in the world. I'm going to bed now and I will fly the mission tomorrow. I will update you tomorrow with if I did the math right or not. I don't know if I will sleep well, pre launch jitters certainly hit different when you have put hours of work into obtaining the necessary funds, and can't revert if something goes wrong!

Its probably over, but I can't say for certain. I intend to write up a summary of what I had planned for it but I keep putting it off. It might come back some day but I doubt it. I still have the save and such.

Is there a limit to this? One could conceivably program the KAL controllers in a way that would essentially be controlling the rocket directly to some extent.

Good job everyone! Sorry for the large delay, I got into a big slump and didn't really want to do anything for a while. Leaderboards are now updated!

After many tries, I have found that it is very difficult to get above 50m/s with conventional wheels made out of structural parts like girders and panels, as they have a tendancy to break, so my idea was to use wheels with brakes on as super grippy wheel segments. However, when brakes are on, rotors will not start to turn even if their brake values are set to zero, so I settled on turning the wheels sideways and turning their friction control values to maximum. However, this means that the wheels behave like omni wheels: And as such, the entire assembly is incredibly difficult to steer. The two normal wheels at the back keep it at least directionally constrained, but changing that direction is tough even with all those reaction wheels. Getting the spring/damper combo on the forward gear correct was also a challenge, and there ended up being a lot of jittering. Velocity spiked above 71 a few times but 70ish was the highest I got in a screenshot. Slowing down is done by rear brakes, as if any of the front wheel or rotor brakes were used, the entire thing would flip over due to the angular momentum transfer. This was also a problem during testing. Initially I used rear wheel drive (or even four wheel drive) in early tests (mostly with structural wheels) but I found that the torque from the wheels, not just in acceleration, but in steady state (torque counteracting friction) above a certain speed would be enough to flip the craft no matter how many spoilers and weights I added, it seemed. This was mostly fixed by using front wheel drive. There are two large rotors driving each wheel (coupled with docking ports) for a total of four. Power comes from batteries, and the big ore tank is used to provide more normal force, and therefore more grip/friction force. Each forward wheel has 12 spokes/segments.

Tweet contains profanity, so I won't post it directly but there is something in this video that looks at least somewhat shockwave-like: [snip] Volume warning.

I will write when I feel like it, and not an instant before nor an instant after.

Granted, rockets would be skewed due to the long distances of each journey, but if it can come within spitting distance of a motorcycle in any statistic that will be groundbreaking.

They have also managed to eliminate the torch igniters for the main chamber. How they ignite the engine now is "secret sauce."

I would be okay with the model if the plume filled the nozzle in the slightest. It's like they took the swivel plume and copy pasted it.

Inspired by the Dude Perfect series of the same name, here is short construction/optimization challenge: Fly as high as possible with only a small solid rocket engine. To prevent the designs from being brain dead obvious, there are some restrictions: The only two allowed control inputs are the ignition of the rocket engine and the deployment of the parachute, no moving of fins, no RCS, no SAS, etc. These rockets should be unguided. The rocket must return to the surface of Kerbin intact with no damage The rocket must carry a Kerbal The only allowed source of propulsion is the listed solid rocket booster (adjusting fuel content and thrust limiter is allowed) There are 3 classes: Class 1: One Sepratron Allowed @swjr-swis, 1469m @HB Stratos, 1318m Class 2: One Mite Allowed @HB Stratos, 26102m @camacju, 14236m @swjr-swis, 9728m @Ultimate Steve, 2341m Class 3: One Shrimp Allowed @HB Stratos, 75635m @swjr-swis, 52148m @Jack Joseph Kerman, 38315m DLCs are allowed, and the standard reasonable mod restrictions and no cheating boilerplate applies. Altitude is measured above sea level, and launch from the launch pad without launch clamps. If the couple meter height of the rockets ends up mattering, I'll be very surprised. Here is my first class 2 entry: Highest point, 2341 meters largely due to improper balance Parachute deployment And successful recovery! Good luck!

Here is 620kg: A small nose cone, an OKTO 2, 2 Oscar Bs, with one of them having one tick of fuel drained, a Spark, and another small nose cone on the back to reduce drag, clipped upwards so it doesn't obstruct the engine. Liftoff! Ascent profile is very aggressive due to the high TWR, we hit 45 degrees of pitch at around 2.5km altitude. From there, SAS prograde is chosen, and when the apoapsis nears space, the engine is throttled down but kept just barely on to maintain SAS prograde. This is done because in an earlier attempt, I just cut off the engine and due to the drag losses of tumbling around, I didn't make orbit. Throttling down. Complete cutoff. The probe core is placed in hibernation mode during the coast to the apoapsis. Nearing apoapsis. Due to concentration and the short burn I forgot to take a screenshot during the burn, but due to burning slightly too early/off prograde, we are not in orbit, but we have 15m/s left to try to circularize at apoapsis. Hibernation is turned on again. And, successfully in orbit with just a hint of electric charge left!

They could have the loops raised slightly up off the ground with specially designed posts to minimize heat transfer.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC Artemis plans to land at places where the nights are either short or non existent. Depending on how short, they might be able to get away with burning some of their propellant for heat (and power) although that may not be trivial to plumb.

While I'm here, I may as well post an update. The station has 3 modules now, the core, a science module, and a single use craft that will take one crew down to a 40-50x50Mm orbit. No pictures right now as I'm away from my computer. I was keeping the next craft a secret until now because I thought I was the first person to do so, but at least two people have done it so there's no point now. The third craft will utilize a oversight in the thermodynamics model to obtain atmospheric science from the sun. This will not be a super low orbit, just a low periapsis, the orbit will be 199x0.6Mm. This was previously done with an exploit involving fairings, but I independently discovered a similar exploit involving service bays. Then the next craft will take the crew. They will take the two sundivers out, and then they will head home.

1km above the atmosphere that starts at ~600km or 1km above the surface? If the surface, how did you deal with the atmosphere? In my experience radiator spam stops working for me below about 40 megameters, I'd love to see your design.

My goodness, I checked ebay and they are selling for thousands!

I did some more tests because I was curious: These are all by that test craft high above the sun. TWR varies slightly over the burn so this isn't 100% accurate, but it is an 0.7% difference. Assuming these results hold for all craft, I should be able to use 50x time warp on anything with less than about 0.029 TWR without any underperformance, as that is the "critical TWR" number where the graph changes from something asymptotic into more or less a vertical line. However, they don't hold for all craft, because the station core has a peak TWR of about 0.12 and it functions just fine. Odd. While the graph does look very cool, I guess it does not show the whole picture. The critical TWR theory is either wrong or varies based on some other factor. Part count might have an effect, making the game lag differently, but since the Stratzenblits results showing that fuel flow is to blame for most of the part count lag, it would be hard to make a model for... So I'm probably going to end my analysis here and do this sort of test for every craft I add to the station going forward, to make sure it doesn't over or underperform significantly at the expected time warp levels.

I did some testing on this, with 2 ships, the first being a very simple ion powered probe with like 5 parts and 10% xenon in the smallest tank, and one being the station core itself. All tests were performed with infinite electricity and the tests near the sun were performed with ignore max temperature on. I set up the small ship in a very high solar orbit, and then set a maneuver with 0m/s delta-V. I then burned prograde with various time warp levels on. The craft had 291m/s of Delta-V shown by the ingame calculations, and at the end of the burn, these were how much the maneuver registered as having been exerted: 1x - 291.4 4x - 291.5 12x - 237.5 50x - 167.9 50x was the time warp setting I most often used to pilot the station core. I redid that test with the station core itself. The first set of drop tanks held 1755m/s according to the game, and at 50x time warp they did indeed exert 1755m/s. So given that, I thought it might have something to do with TWR. I redid that test again with the station core, but on its final stage, which held 7861m/s, and sure enough, it exerted 7861m/s. This was the highest TWR that craft could manage, but it was still miniscule compared to the test craft. So I ran the test again with the small test craft, but at 50% thrust limiter. 12x - 291.5 50x - 189.8 Again with 25% thrust limiter: 50x - 234.0 (I skipped the other tests as they would take forever) So it appears that craft with high TWR underperform with better time warp under those conditions, and the station core is low TWR enough to have no significant deviations under 50x time warp. However, gravity wells might affect this, and maybe going retrograde might also affect this. I took the test craft at 100% thrust limiter and put it in very low solar orbit. At 50x time warp, on consecutive prograde and retrograde tests, it exerted 167.9m/s or very close to it whatever I did to it. I also performed this test in the original orbit, both prograde and retrograde, to similar results. I tested the station core at a 200Mm orbit under 50x time warp, which was listed as having 7861m/s: Prograde but I forgot to set SAS to prograde so it drifted over the course of the burn - 7686 Prograde - 7519 Retrograde - 7674 An underperformance in all cases, but since the burn took place over at least 1-2 hours, and therefore over a significant angular distance, underperformance is expected for the same reason that people do multiple periapsis kicks. I could do it at 1x time warp to test how much of this is time warp and how much of it is due to duration effects, but I don't want to. The only overperformances ever measured were during the first test, where the ion probe did 0.1m/s better under 4x warp, and during a 50% thrust limiter test where the ion probe also performed 0.1m/s better during 12x warp. However this could easily be due to not performing each test perfectly, and a 0.03% overperformance isn't significant. TLDR, at least in the regimes I tested, higher TWR craft tend to underperform, sometimes very significantly with high time warp. The station core (and therefore probably similar craft based on it) are low TWR enough that no underperformance was measured in high orbit. Tests with a high TWR craft showed no significant difference going prograde or retrograde, deep in a gravity well, or on the edge of a gravity well. Tests with the station core showed no prograde/retrograde difference, but deep in gravity well tests were inconclusive due to other factors causing underperformance (burns took a significant time and angular diameter). Even shorter TLDR: Higher TWR craft tend to underperform at high time warp. The station core is low TWR enough that no underperformance was measured at the time warp value used most commonly (50x). No statistically significant overperformance was ever measured in any tests.

Thank you, good to know. I did plan out the delta v budget with maneuvers beforehand and added a few km/s extra, and I didn't notice anything too out of the ordinary, but I will keep better track of what is required vs what is expended when I send the crew.