Ultimate Steve

Magic heat shield propellers and dragless fairings would probably allow this challenge to be completed. If propellers and aerodynamic exploits are not allowed, then I would say this challenge is probably impossible with a conventional craft. It is possible to do an ion powered Kerbin ascent without aero exploits (Stratz or Bradley or someone did it I believe) but that relies on a high mountain increasing the isp of the ion engines. The tallest mountain on Eve likely wouldn't boost the isp enough to allow the ion engine to produce much, if any thrust. Even then you still have to get a giant fragile frankenglider through Eve's atmosphere and off of Kerbin, which would require thousands if not tens of thousands of parts.

I might give this a go. I have some scoring questions, though. The 1E9 comes from the 1 billion, the 1E8 comes from the days and funds. 1+1+0.5+0.33 is from Jeb and his 3 friends. I am confused as to why it is getting multiplied by 3, and I'm confused as to why there are 2 +1s in there instead of 3. Shouldn't that be a +4 total? Jeb reached Jool, 1 point for a landing, 1 point for Laythe, and 1 point for a KSC landing. And wouldn't that multiply stuff by 2 instead of 3? From what I'm getting, the score for the example should be: 1E9*(1+1+1+1+(2*(1+1+0.5+0.33)))/1E8 Very interesting challenge idea, just slightly confused on the scoring.

Right fair. I was more thinking about the second stage which has to keep its propellants at a good temperature for longer. First stage has to fly again, likely many more times, and some customers may not favor a memey paint job, so I had kind of discounted it forgetting about the soot.

Unfortunately might mess with the thermals if it's on anything other than the fairing but cool idea!

I can also vouch for Shotcut.

The saddest thing about Starship is that, if it succeeds, we won't see that many Falcon Heavy launches.

Oh, sooner or later. I specifically chose my new year's resolutions to include only things I'd have to severely mess up to not accomplish, and finishing Voyage is on that list. As long as I don't get hit by a bus, Voyage should be done this year. Now, of course it won't because I said it out loud...

Cleaned up version:

So message 6 did not end on the end of a line, there is the problem. Accounting for that: Will fix up in a few moments.

I have tried to decode it but it is not working, I keep ending up with a number of ticks that is not a multiple of 23. Trying a third time now with a fresh recording.

The other two arches are normal, and I crashed into the anomalous one, it didn't do anything. I was only going 300m/s with a near Empty Kerbal X though, so more momentum may be required if it is destructable. It appears to go left-right-left-right in planetary order, but about half of it is cut off. It is possible that this is because they are saving some for later. according to this theory it would go Eeloo-Dres-Kerbin-Moho-Sun-Eve-Duna-Jool. Now as to why Duna is yellow... Perhaps it used to be habitable and instead of green plants they had yellow plants? Entire planet of sunflowers? This is most likely very a very ancient piece of (technology? art?). Withholding theories on what exactly it is until we see more of it. Has anyone cracked the code at the end of the video yet? I'll give it a go but I would have to learn how the previous ones were done before starting.

Got it, NET May.

Adding to the Mars inclination discussion, you will generally not correct your inclination with respect to Mars to zero midcourse, rather, you will alter your Earth ejection to place the ascending or descending node at the intersection point. You can do this by including a normal or anti normal component to the ejection burn (likely accomplished by launching into an inclined orbit to save on fuel) or by burning prograde a bit more to increase the aphelion so that a node lines up with the intersection point, although in the latter case you have to spend more fuel to capture. The orbit will still be inclined but you can combine the plane change burn and your capture burn that way, and because of Pythagoras and possibly oberth it ends up cheaper than doing it in the middle of nowhere.

Man, you guys are going too fast, I'm not even halfway through the first one!

So, I'm working on a low mass mission. A great deal of that mission was planned on me being able to disassemble and reassemble craft at will with the stock EVA construction tool. I launched the mission, and then detached several parts. Using these parts, I assembled an ion lander based off of a small reaction wheel. This small reaction wheel is the root part of the ion lander, but all of the parts were originally parts of the main craft, and none of them were the root part. I went off, landed on the Mun and Minmus, returned to the main ship, and attempted to reattach all of the parts. Everything went ok until I attempted to reattach the small reaction wheel. (The seat was detached before I did anything else) However, when I try to pick up the small reaction wheel, which now has nothing attached to it, despite being highlighted green, it will not let me pick it up and move it. Reaction wheel is highlighted green. When I press the center of mass button it shows the centers of mass of the main ship and the small reaction wheel and none of the other standalone parts which are floating around. I can freely pick up and move all of the other parts, just not the small reaction wheel. This issue persists through quickloading, leaving to the tracking station, and reloading the game. I have found a workaround: Go to the tracking station and rename the part to the class of debris instead of the class of whatever it is. I think this occurs because the EVA tool thinks that because the vessel type is not debris, it won't let you move it for some reason. It is possible that this is intended behavior but that would be strange intent in my opinion. I believe this is a stock issue, as none of the mods I have installed seem like they would affect the EVA construction tool. Mods: ClickThroughBlocker Toolbar controller B9 Part Switch Better Time Warp EVE BoulderCo City Lights Kerbal Engineer Redux KSP TOT Connect Scatterer Waterfall Stock Waterfall Effects ZeroMiniAVC Module Manager If you know of an alternate workaround please let me know, but I can manage with the current workaround. While I technically don't need an answer I think its a good idea to post about it in case someone has the same issue later and goes googling.

In Scott Manley's video he brings up a good point, the station has been in constant sunlight for a few days now and that could have lead to above average stresses.

Wow, I just noticed this, its amazing! I didn't know it was possible to do Eve that light. I've been a bit obsessed with low mass missions lately. A few weeks ago I did a low-ish mass conventionally fueled mission to Moho and back to prove to a reddit commenter it could be done with a reasonably sized rocket without resorting to minimalism... But that just made me want to go minimalist. I spent a bunch of time continuing to pare that down and I got it pretty small into the single digit tons, my stumbling block was the Kerbin ascent, low margin atmospheric ascents are the bane of my existence. It ended up though that I had accidentally optimized the vacuum segment to pretty much the world record. Unfortunately there isn't usually that much room for innovation in low mass records these days, but as you have so proven, the low mass grand tour is the exception! I messed around with a lot of designs earlier today for a low mass grand tour, and I was coming in significantly under my goal of 100 tons (vehicle is not finalized yet), so I decided to see what the record was, and I saw this, and it has given me some ideas. Seeing as until now I've stubbornly refused to learn gravity assists, I don't think I will beat 14.4 tons, but I've decided to give it a go and see how low I can go. Any secret to those basic fins not exploding on the way down on Eve other than lots of gentle aerobraking and physics warp? Also I never have seen anyone use Magic Hand before, that's a good name for it. I don't think I'll be relying on it, but I wonder how else this could be exploited.

It's also possible that for ferry trips like these they fit the additional three seats. I'm not sure how difficult that would be this late in development though, and iirc there was some constraint they were up against, maybe splashdown g forces or something.

Dear Moon crew has been announced! Notably, Tim Dodd is going! There are 8 primary crew and 2 backup crew. No timeline update. My biggest hope was that we would get at least one musician, and we appear to have gotten at least 3! (2 of them are not listed as musicians but are also musicians) Full list: DJ & producer Steve Aoki Youtube creator Tim Dodd Artist Yemi A.D. Photographer Karim Iliya Photographer Rhiannon Adam Filmmaker Brendan Hall Actor Dev Joshi Musician T.O.P. Backup crew: Dancer Miyu Snowboarder Kaitlyn Farrington Would be interesting to see dancing in zero g. There was some talk a while back about having one or two professional astronauts along as well, if that is still the plan, they have not been announced yet.

I tried, but if I remember right there was something not right about the displayed telemetry or something, I don't remember what exactly.

Yes, but if you orbit around the terminator you never go into shadow. Obviously you have to balance this with getting to the correct inclination, but every extra minute of sunlight you can get by getting closer to the terminator translates into being able to become operational earlier, and being less susceptible to upper atmospheric fluctuations of the type that killed most of a whole batch of starlinks earlier.

If my assumption is correct, they are launching at sunrise or sunset to enter an orbit with more time in the sun so they can run the ion engines for a larger chunk of the orbit.

Breaking news: NASA has successfully turned an asteroid into a comet.

Chapter 33 - Hoard The Dust

If the center of mass was exactly halfway up the ship and the landing legs did not protrude outside of the 9m diameter, the maximum tilt would be about 10 degrees, although the actual safe level would be set lower. The steepest Apollo landing was about 11 degrees (Apollo 15). I believe the center of mass will be significantly lower due to the ascent propellant, and, of course, the landing gear is not set in stone. It will definitely be easier to tip than Apollo, but I don't think it will be prohibitively so.