Cunjo Carl

The Booster lifted a 200ton transfer stage to LKO - The transfer stage hauled the Main Relay to Kerbol escape - The Main Relay pushed its Clusterships to escape our local cluster - The 8 Clusterships sped still faster and diverged. - And the 48 probes scattered to the wind! Who knows what they'll find? (Hint, it's Krakens)

If nothing pops out of the woodwork, we might have to bring this question to the challenge forums. @tseitsei89 posed exactly your question as a challenge for version 1.1 about a year ago, and it feels like a fine time for a reboot for version 1.2. In the challenge, the non-recoverable systems were typically dominated by Kick Backs and Twin Boars. As for the cost efficiency I usually get, it's in the in the 700/ton to LKO range. In v1.2, 700/ton mega lifters can be made without much fuss using Mamoths and bundles of SRBs. I am hugely curious about your 500/ton craft. Mind posting some pictures?

One small piece to add, I've noticed that clipping is much more common on planes than on rockets. Moderate clipping is almost necessary to make a space plane look and function well, but with rockets you can get by without it. This is reflected in the challenge forums, people often ask before using moderate clipping on their rockets, whereas it's considered a given for planes.

Oh! Sounds like @eloquentJane and @steuben have you covered, but if you need even larger payloads delivered in the future let me know. Stock heavy lifters are my thing, and v1.2 has made them a total treat.

I suppose I always do things a little strange, it keeps life interesting! It is indeed a tricky challenge, but very rewarding to work towards and exciting to actually run. I hope it makes for an interesting read. Yep, here we count Moho as an easy one, along with Eeloo, Duna, Ike and Dres. Just for the record, it definitely wasn't easy the first time I went there! No, you're definitely not the only one it'll show up like that for, but I am concerned it won't let you scroll! I'll take it the horizontal scroll bar in your screenshot doesn't work? So a bit of why it looks like that, since Imgur stopped working I've had my heart set on presenting something a news letter format. I've always liked the look, and I feel like it works well. Unfortunately in this forum you need to size tables in terms of pixels, not em or (getting fancy) frame %, which makes them hang off the edge on many resolutions. I knew this in advance, and just figured scrolling could suffice despite the funny look. Given it doesn't in your case, could I ask you to try one other thing? Simply pressing Ctrl - (zoom out) a couple times should make it display correctly, though on most browsers you'll need to zoom back to normal afterwards. If even that doesn't work, please let me know, and I'll just edit it back to a normal format. In any case, thanks for giving it a look and letting me know the troubles you had!

I'm kicking myself for forgetting where I saw it, but I once heard the devs were originally intending to make Laythe a volcano infested terror planet. Hm... the only problem is if there's volcanoes around we might expect them to form in rings around tectonic plates, or have tell-tale craters in the middle of their land masses..... Hey wait a minute! (Biome image from KSP wiki) @Mikki That is a cool looking lander!

Ohhhh.... Thanks for the explanation, @Streetwind, that makes a lot more sense. Just as a side note for interest sake, it's actually pretty tricky to get capacitors to do that IRL. Superconductors, on the other hand, work exactly that way! I like that for all the different options we have, folk are shooting for excess in different departments and all getting where they're going. Excess dV, excess TWR (or in my case, excess cost). Hm... Smacks of a well balanced game! Along those lines, I just saw this impressive mission from @Jetski which made nice use of ion and LFO landers alike. 1 Huge battery + 2 ions made a quite convenient looking little ion lander. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/154147-grand-tour-no-nukes/ Nah, I'm right there with you, I typically do a pair of small burns a couple weeks away to put myself on whichever plane and keep it that way. I can't imagine it's the most efficient, but it's easy to eyeball and certainly convenient. On the other hand, if you've got the dV to plane-change in orbit why not use it?

Just noticed this- I'm super impressed, @Jetski! No nukes is impressive, but it's the no 3.5m that gets me. Getting orange tanks off Kerbin in v1.1 was a serious challenge! 120dV capture to Moho seems outrageous to me. I normally have to spend a couple km/s! Nice. Those Jool landers were *so* tiny! I'll stick to my megalanders, but it's nice to see just how small you can go. It's funny for me to think of a mothership as a 2ton thing with ion engines. It seemed to work a treat around Eeloo, though. Finishing with 0dV is super climactic! Nice choice of 'landing pad', and thanks for getting Bill out and about for some well needed excitement.

For sure! Looks like rovers and landers are in order for the moment. If you add your craft files to the zip, I can get them out to Laythe orbit if you'll take it from there. @BXWRX Sweet plane! If you toss a copy into the save we can bring a couple along. Alternatively, there's a ludicrous amount of fuel in LKO if you want to use it from the Xfer Stage X probes. No monoprop, though! I like the V-wing tail design visually, but it looks like the standard version might have been more effective? Along those lines, I mixed up which craft was which, and hauled out a couple copies of everything but the multi-docking-port core @53miner53 made which was the main point of the trip . I'll get it on the next trip along with my own addition to the station. Even without these, Laythe orbit is starting to get busy! An open call If anyone has a craft they'd like hauled out to Laythe orbit, I'd be happy to. Just make sure it can be attached to from the bottom. Fairings aren't necessary because I do vertical launches (*Gasp!*) so the aero forces during launch are fairly gentle. Even things like planes aren't a problem that way. For weight, 40 tons is a cinch, but anything under 250 is possible. Once your payload gets to Laythe, it'll be sitting on a maneuverable tug, but we'll be counting on you to land it, dock it, deploy it, whichever does the job! The latest file is now in a shareable google folder: LINKLINKLINK. Let's try using this as a repository from here. Thanks to @53miner53 for the suggestion, and we might bug you for help if we can't figure it out! Latest Haul:

I like the idea, but capacitors are heavy! Even the really good ones only store ~1/3 the energy of the same weight of cheapo lead-acid car batteries. What they lack in lasting energy though they make up for with an insane ability to push sudden power. They're a very kerbal power source.

Real-time All-flags Speedrun v1.2 (WIP) ** Sorry in advance if it's not displaying properly. Try zooming out by pressing Ctrl - until it looks right! One year ago I staked blood sweat and tears on a wager that you could plant flags on everything in a single sitting of KSP career mode. Though I had to claw my way to the finish line (curse you Laythe) I proved it was possible in only 8 hours. Now we have version 1.2 with its wonderful conveniences. Flow priority! Rigid Joints! Loadmetas!! It's time to relight that torch and get back in the fighting ring. I hear a sub-6hour calling. Join me on my epic quest to reinvent the run for v1.2 and hammer down that time. And I do mean epic quest, I'm expecting nothing less than skeletons and harpies. Rules: • Plant a flag on everything and return • No serious clipping • 255 part max • No glitches (update 5/5/17) Broad overview: Part 1: The Shallows Gathering resources in the Kerbin system Part 2: Misc. Planting flags on all the easy planets Part 3. Eve The unfair last boss of KSP Part 4. Jool Jool 5 challenge on the clock Comments and suggestions are heartily welcomed! I'll be sharing this journey using the power of gifs! Go ahead, click the spoiler box to see a show of the flags from the previous run plus gifs, pure and distilled, from the World Wide Web of 1999. Part 1: The Shallows What's going on: We have a lot to accomplish while still on the shallow side of the shoal! Most pressing is we need about 2M credits and 2K science. This is easy enough if we gobble up story contracts and the delicious Minmus science, but how to do it quick? Ideally we'll be able collect all the goodies we'll need within the first hour, and I think that's still in reach! Saddly, the immolative staging that gave the v1.0 run its incredible early speed has been removed. To make matters worse, the invaluable materials bay is now locked behind a couple layers of science. Finally, the previous megaload of 5 Minmus biomes has been spread out in an unfortunately sensible way. To our advantage is rigid joints, a higher available part count and the experiment storage unit. Not really a fair trade, but it's a long speedrun, we can spend a few minutes unfurling our sails. Goal: First let's get access to the terrier and science bays, while drumming up enough cash to upgrade the launch pad. The Fancy First Flier: A Charming Dead-end We could make our first stride towards this goal by using the first launch to its fullest abilities. Using some charming tricks, we can lift 4 mystery goo containers up to space, and land far enough away from KSC to break every record all in one shot! How can we do this without any decouplers for staging? It turns out the truss struts make excellent decouplers when rocket fire is applied to them. By sticking a truss strut between stages, the bottom stage will blow off when the top stage fires. Handy! The problem is they're very draggy, so we can only really use this trick for the first set of stages. Above that, we'll rely on the lower stages to eventually just blow away on their own. We have enough mass for 11 'Flea' SRBs, which we need to divvy into stages quite carfeully. Too few rockets and we lose to gravity, too many and we lose to drag! We'll use a big cluster to burst up to 300m/s, then a few thrust-limitted rockets to steadily maintain this speed up to 8km, and finally, and finally a series of single staged rockets to push faster and faster all the way up to space! Along the way, we'll gobble up science. Nomnomnom. Once we get to space though, we'll need to come back, and a pod with an empty SRB attached will just nose-dive and hit the ground at 500m/s- way too fast for the little parachute to do any good. We can use the basic fins as wings to save us though! They'll decelerate our reentry, and guide our decent. They work so well that the final stage can actually fly like a glider on its way back down. It's fun! I suppose we shouldn't dally though. Only trouble is, if we put fins on our pod we'll need fins at several key places throughout the rocket to keep it stable on the way up. This setup is far from optimized, but it does the job consistently enough. The setup nets us 170k funds and 61 science in only 5 minutes! The Fancy First Flier Pictures: 1. "Thanks, I've got it." 2. (VAB) Carefully balanced thrust 3. Burst off the launch pad! 4. Toodle out of the soup 5. Single rockets push us to space! 6. Woh, space is high 7. Basic fins for decelerating 8. Basic fins for flying 9. Enjoying gliding 10. Empty SRB provides 'crumple zone' 11. Success! 12. +61 Science, +170k funds .... So... Why am I not jumping for joy? Well, 5 minutes is actually a long time for 60 science. We'll be needing it by the truckload soon! I think this ship is a little dead-end, and that's ok. There'll be lots of hits and misses while striving for that final goal. It's fun to learn from and enjoy all the little detours along the way. Science marches on! These are the first steps of a very long journey- I'm looking forward to it!

... And just like anything feminine, if I come at it from an interplanetary trajectory I'll get burned to a crisp by the compressive shockwave heating.... Wait a minute... I just realized thanks to your post that Eve has craters. How have they not eroded/reflowed out of existence by now?

I like to keep my transfer stage TWR between 1-1.5, but hey that's just me! One unsung super power of the aerospike is to attach radially to tanks. This comes in super handy sometimes (landers), and is often the reason I choose it over alternatives in v1.2.

Wow. Anyways, I'm happy you're putting together a handy information repository, @Scoutman1121 and I suddenly wish I'd mentioned that sooner! Something I've been looking for in a KSP planet encyclopedia but haven't found yet is the velocities for a craft in low circular orbit around the listed planets. If you're putting together an encyclopedia of handy values, I'd like to ask it as a request! The information can be found theoretically (math) or experimentally (Hyperedit), but I think it'd be super handy to just have in one place. Let me know what you think! Finally, and this is just opinion, more encyclopedias should include values like 90,000ish! Totally the way.

I haven't seen our OP @Krog34 in a little while, so we might need to wait to get an official weigh in. That said, it's certainly in the spirit of the challenge and there's nothing in the rules is against it. I certainly wouldn't mind checking out some stock space weapons!

Yep! Too true. I've been burning the candle at both ends lately and my brain must have rescaled it without me noticing. Purely for amusement-sake I went ahead and made a model actually using a goliath As far as called shots go, I think this one can just about manage "Somewhere on Kerbin!"

The only consistent kraken drive I know of at this point is the ladder drive. It's a bit trickier to use than rockets, but I'll put this link to an old thread here in case you find it useful/entertaining. The only one in this thread capable of interstellar flight would be the one in this post: It's an older post, so you'll see the broken Imgur galleries. Just click the imgur icon on the top left of these to go to a still working version on the imgur web page. Alternatively, if you want to throw some pictures of your craft my way, I could give a shot at helping you get the explosions out of it. No guarantee though, I'm still awash in exploding craft myself! Ever onwards.

Cool fact about Iapetus! Somewhat corroborating this is a material bay quote that one of the samples evaporates in the Dressian environment.... perhaps sympathetic to the sublime surroundings? If we're talking brass tacks, I suspect any collision with enough force to fuse two bodies together would probably also have enough force to fling/redeposit rather huge amounts of material in a much more even fashion. I like my explanation though, much more Romeo and Juliet!

Yeah, my humors were set to full silly when I made this one! As for the wisdom of a 5-stage plane... well? I like KSP.

That's totally what I'm talking about! When making a deltaV monster that spans 3.5m-0.5m this decision is something people have to make a lot (or have their design rules make for them). What I love about it is there's good choices right across the board, but all for different reasons. Thanks for taking a look!

Desperate to get in all of her flight hours before the deadline in 2 weeks, Sadie Kerman boards the Fortnight Flier, a 5 stage plane. Able to stay aloft for a Kerbal fortnight, she can rack up the hours in no time. Now if only she had brought some snacks! Each stage is a fully functioning plane, and piggybacks the one above with ease. Parts: 695, sorry! Because of particular symmetries it doesn't lag *that* bad for a 695 part ship... *ahem* Cost: ♫ If I had a million dollars! ♪ Justification: KSP May I present, the: Fortnight Flier Link: Direct download through google

@53miner53. I wound up trying that and found the only thing I was able to edit was the name of the folder. Did you have better luck?

@BXWRX, Sweet! Hey, anything you'd like to throw at Laythe will be a nice addition to the pile. Here's a repost of the latest file: http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=22363988612199114035 and here's the calendar: https://teamup.com/ksb741ac350809af50 Just check the calendar to make sure the file's not in use when you're getting started, and put your name in as a reservation whenever you're working. It's how we keep from stepping on eachothers' toes. Also, @53miner53's computer has a thing against tinyupload, so if you know of any other reputable file hosting places that don't require an account to download, it'd do well. I think I'll be using my gmail account to host from here, but not everyone has one of those as an option... Worse comes to worse, just use tinyupload and I'll repost through gmail. Anyway, have fun!

I think your hypothesis is the canonical one. If I remember right, collecting a sample on Dres describes it as a mix of lots of disparate things with little bits of glass in, and a surface accelerometer scan mentions the planet is still ringing from old impacts (like our moon). It also mentions (though I can't remember which experiment) that Dres isn't differentiated so it's super low density, like Callisto. As for the calico colors of our favorite planetoid to forget? Well, when a carbonaceous asteroid and a silicate asteroid love each other very much....

This style of analysis is pretty convenient, and it's nice to have an updated one for v.1.2. Thanks for the work! Like you, I've found in practice that by the time I get enough energy collection on a Dawn it's not worth its weight. I think the way people typically get around the problem is by doing their burns in little spurts using (lighter) batteries to store just enough energy to move a bit, and then recollect the energy over a long period using with a less extensive solar panel array. Sounds tough! Also, once you add in your payload things get even harder for the little Dawn! For many people it's the ideal engine though. It can certainly be used to push some impressive extremes for deltaV... Here's a thing from Turbo Pumped that makes a nice case and point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zolEcd2VzAY Also, I think a big impetus for Dawns is that they're much smaller (so work well for probes). A nice analysis technique that shows this (from a much older version) can be found here: http://imgur.com/a/OS6bk#5 I'm with you though. Heavy lifters are fun!