Eidahlil

The other day I was experimenting with low tech spaceplanes, and ended up with something that I hope qualifies. Barely. It has no delta-V once in orbit, and reentry took a couple of tries because the intake is very melty. But it flies with only minimal tech and facilities (6578 funds, 7.869t, 23 parts).

For those times when lawn chairs are a needless frivolity, we bring you the standing-places-only escape pod for only 1830 (including the decoupler). If you have ten kerbals, that's only 183 funds per Kerbal! If you have more Kerbals, it's even cheaper! Fits at least 10 Kerbals and is certified safe and reliable. Can survive steep reentry, power loss during deorbit burn and more. Just don't time warp with Kerbals inside. And don't keep them inside when landed, the trip down is uncomfortable enough to induce... drastic behavior in some.

Sounds like a great (aka my kind of) challenge. I have some bad news, and some good news The bad news is that the dev version of MechJeb (or KER) doesn't think the NERV can get fuel from radially attached tanks (spoiler: it can in 1.2). It's not a major difference in your design, but I'm guessing you do have some LF in those BigS wing strakes. The good news is that for an SSTO it's easy to calculate manually using Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. Which in the case of NERV is dV = 800 * 9.80665 * ln( mass / ( mass - 0.005 * LF )). So in your spaceplane case (the third screenshot) the dV would be 7056 = 800 * 9.80665 * ln( 82.333 / ( 82.333 - 0.005 * 9768 )). The good for you and bad for me news is that my SSTO has only 6618 (and is a very clear example of the above problem). I'll be back with another design though.

Since the original Kreditor did not truly fulfill the 340 m/s speed requirement, it's loaded cruising speed was only 330 m/s, the Kreditor Prefekt drone was developed: 89% faster, with a cruising speed of 2.1 Mach 15% cheaper, at the low low price tag of 2052 (batteries and fuel included). Just as deadly (same armament, same low low accuracy) 19% lighter 46% more fuel efficient Supersonic strike capable The score: 826 / 708 * 50 + 11494 / 60209 * 30 + 96617 / 2052 * 20 = 58.3 + 5.7 + 941.7 = 1006

For those times when it does not matter if the target is destroyed in 5 minutes or in 20, presenting you with the (barely) supersonic Kreditor drone. Armed with a single BDA TOW missile and the perils of a hyperbolic scoring formula, it costs 2420 funds. The low low part count of 9 (including the missile) makes maintenance a breeze, though, considering it has only one wheel for landing and takeoff, there will be lots of maintenance. The Kreditor has a cruise speed of 1.1 Mach fully loaded (cruising altitude 12km), and slightly faster empty. During the showcase strike against the KSTE HVT, the time from launch to impact was 21:42, or 1302s. Due to experimental targeting heuristics, the drone fired at the center of the Crawler, but the Crawler has a hole there, and the missile flew right through, hitting the ground behind the crawler, and only the edge of the explosion hit the target. So the maximum heat was only 2000K. However as during tests the highest recorded temperature from the TOW missile was 12000K, which would be a difference of 5 points. management decided the difference is too marginal to perform another run. So the score would be 826 / 1302 * 50 + 2013 / 60209 * 30 + 96617 / 2420 * 20 = 31.7 + 1 + 798.5 = 831 If KER Mach number readout tells the truth, KSP pretty much matches the real world, 1 Mach is about 340 m/s at sea level, and somewhere near 300 m/s 10 km up.

So I tried and tried and couldn't make a workable ramp for my 0.5t craft. The wheels are just too small and clip into the ramp at any reasonable speed. I suspect you did not actually meant a 0.5t craft, as two Oscar-B and a Spark are already 0.55t, and 4 M1 wheels are 0.3t without anything else. But I decided to just roll with it and use the edge of the runway as the ramp. I never said it was a good decision. I cannot hit it at more than about 35 m/s without exploding, and that's too low to 'jump' over anything, but that 'Spark' engine is a beast, I could probably make orbit with it. So I kind of ended up flying over the SPH, not jumping. Anyway, to at least comply with the FUN rule, here's a video with explosions.

Well, no arguing with that, I just managed a normal LKO launch (after 10 or so tries), and it ended up being 750 m/s dV cheaper. The TWR is really not excessive on this thing, so the straight launch is very expensive. I was mostly trading dV for my sanity though. With that part count (and recording on top) it takes 15 real life minutes just to get out of atmosphere on my laptop. More with a gravity turn. And the stages are long, gaps relatively narrow, and the sepratrons only barely adequate. What it all means, is that if I have any sort of noticeable angular momentum during staging, the stage ends up colliding into something. So I have to babysit it for at least the first 15 km, trying to squeeze in just the right amount of rotation between the stages and the lag. And I'm more often staging than not (I counted, I have three staging events before hitting 1km ASL already). That launch is accelerated 20 times in the video, after all. So there we have it. Well, and it's fun to do something ridiculous once in a while. Thanks!

I think it was within the rules, so sure, we want it on the scoreboard. Also, @AeroGav is probably within the challenge requirements too. His score was 1276 + 290 + 5 for a twin engine plane if I read it correctly. That's good for third place. Thanks!

Ooh, I'd like to sumbit my Jool 5 as well. I don't have any real struts either, it's all held together by yellow plastic pipes. Well, yeah, and autostruts on maybe 70% of the parts.

That is a lot of Gs. I had to have a go at this G goodness myself, but couldn't pull quite that many. Got quite close though - max speed 1776 m/s, 267.5 G, on my old Screamy retrofitted with more wings, now dubbed Screamy 4. Lost a nose cone in the process, but with wings that is, somehow, a lot less painful.

After management decided that xenon is too expensive... Ahem, actually, I just wanted to build myself a giant asparagus. Nostalgia and all. And when you have a hammer, you want to solve a problem with it, right? Jool 5 is a really good problem. The whole thing carried Jeb on a solo mission. It's a single launch, no refueling, chemical beast, with a price tag of 4.25 million and a launch mass of 12.15 kt, of which 9 kt are rocket fuel and 1.15 t is sepratron fuel, all contained in 724 parts. It does not really take any cargo larger than a banana, however even said banana would have to ride in the same breadbox/heatshield as the PB-NUK leg warmer. MechJeb says it has 22.1 - 22.4 km/s dV, depending on engine utilization (the lower isp Skippers are in an action group). I had 256 m/s left on Kerbin reentry. Landed with the ship on all the moons and used three gravity assists - a Tylo-Laythe for Jool capture, Tylo for Vall->Bop transfer and (Tylo-)Laythe for Jool ejection (Laythe, but Tylo tried to help, aka got in the way). KSP 1.2.1, using MechJeb and not using KER and TCA, but having them on standby. New game on normal difficulty. It was a fairly straightforward linear mission, so I hope everything is clear from the video, the only thing I cut out is me fiddling with maneuver nodes (the black fadeouts). I have 4 hours of footage of that and half of the time cannot follow it myself, and I'm supposed to know what is going on. Well, that, and all the quickloads. There were quite a few of those. EDIT: Bonus screenies of the more interesting transfers, the rest were pretty much straight Hohmann transfers: http://imgur.com/a/DsA8L

Just to see how much things actually changed, I went ahead and also redid my launch. Ended up with 42.1 units of fuel remaining in an 80.4x80.0 orbit. I think that's close enough to say that the changes really ain't major, the difference could easily be due to user imprecision. I used MechJeb for this one, the initial tilt, the hold to prograde, the staging and the circularization. I did not start a new save for it though, could that make a difference? Video of the launch, nowhere near @Gordon Fecyk's level of coolness though

I modified my plane, and managed to get a slightly better result of 38:35. The rapiers cut out at about 1751 m/s at that altitude (21km), and to get even 5 more m/s I think I'd need to go at least 3 km lower. And at 18 km I cannot even reach 1751 m/s with this particular plane, because the drag is higher. Parts start exploding after a couple of minutes too. So the only improvement I can think of is putting some airbrakes onto the thing, to land faster. Some other time. You can actually achieve a somewhat similar effect mechanically, though not cosmetically. The sensible way is to make your wings out of control surfaces, and then "deploy" them. When deployed, the effective angle of attack increases, dramatically increasing lift (and drag). When not deployed, they generate very little lift and drag. Just make sure they are close to your CoM, or the shifting CoL will flip your craft over. The not sensible way is to cram a bunch of wings into a cargo bay, and open the cargo bay when you want those wings active. That open cargo bay will generate quite a bit of drag though, but since you are moving slowly for takeoff and landing, it's not a big problem. I've actually built both types of craft before, and it does work, but the drag savings are low enough that it's usually not very worthwhile.

Due to a few flaws in the initial Erre 1 design (like spontaneous disassembly on 100G turns, parts not melting during flight and in general looking kind of like a plane), the engineering team came up with a new iteration (and another one, and another, and so on, until finally), the Erre 21. It's ugly and fast but Diesel & Jeans had a blast. What with 110G turns and all. And I finally completed the flight (kind of, there was one quick load). Used MechJeb to help a bit with the flying, no other mods. The first one was "Erre 1", but it did not complete the flight. Or are you planning to go all the way, and also have gatecrasher entries, a la K Prize? On every post there's a "share this post" button at the top right. That's the link, so just right click it, click copy link location (or something similar, depending on your browser), and then make a link in the post (chain button, second one on the second row) by just pasting it into the URL. I wish so much every challenge did this. EDIT: Also finally vindicated my VTOL spree and conquered that tower which has vexed me so. This one was also assisted by TCA.

I attempted to participate with my VTOL jet, but ran into a curious problem on the island. I'll make another attempt as soon as I stop laughing. But since everyone loves crash videos: I'd have a guest list of all participants and their crafts in the OP, with possible special awards (yes, idea shamelessly stolen from the K Prize thread), like:

Completely unrelated to the above statement, I'd like to submit my entry for consideration in the velocity circumnavigation category. Complete stop on the runway was reached 39:25 after starting the mission timer, with an 8 rapier craft called Flir B. I'm fairly sure that time could be improved with better ascent and landing, but probably not by me. Here's the craft file if someone other than me wants to try, though. Used MechJeb and PilotAssistant for assistance with flying. The Mk2 inline cockpit and its internal heat tolerance of up to 1400K holds up just fine for me. But yeah, Mk1 planes probably won't be able to compete.

My Vall Colony, named "Vall Colony", is finally on the ground and running. http://imgur.com/a/MSfv4 (Sorry, the imgur image sorting is completely broken, so the order is off.) The planetary base was shipped all in one piece and has hanging skyways as a core design point, to take advantage of the low gravity of Vall. It is staffed by 30 KSC personnel, but it's long-term life support is rated for up to 32.5, to allow for visitors. It also has proper planetary habitats for 32 kerbals, though more can fit for short periods in the various planetary observation cupolas. It has two planetary docking ports and can be extended with planetary modules, but currently no such extension is planned. The support modules include 16 greenhouse containers, 6 algae farms, a water drill, 4 elektrons and 4 hydrogen fuel cells. It also has 3 ore drills and an ISRU unit, to allow replenishing the greenhouse soil and making fuel for the shuttle and any other spaceships. It has two garages containing one 16 seat rover each. The base also has a lab unit and a full suite of the stock experiments. The orbital station can accommodate 32 kerbals but has no long term life support. However, it's supplies module can be detached and carried to the planetary base by the shuttle for replenishment (usually using those 2.5 extra kerbal capacity). The station also has a 800G rated communications array and can support orbital and ground operations throughout Kerbal space. Due to the low efficiency of solar panels, electricity is provided by 4 RTG generators, rated for one eternity each. The orbital station also has fuel storage and can be used to refuel spacecraft, though the fuel has to be brought up from the surface by the shuttle. It also has a sports area in the form of a repurposed Mk3 cargo bay, complete with a Stayputnik brand smart ball. Just don't forget to dock the ball back in place before warping. Travel between the two is facilitated by an orbital shuttle with a capacity of one pilot and 32 passengers (remote control autopilot available). The shuttle usually hails between the planetary base and orbital station, but, after refuellng at the orbital station, it has a range of 2.8km/s dV and can be used for expeditions within Jool SOI. It also has powerful RCS to allow aggressive maneuvers and translation in non-zero-G environments, such as when landing back on the elevated pad in the planetary base. The shuttle can also be used for an emergency return to Kerbin. It only has passenger seats, which are rather uncomfortable, but our surveys show 80% of kerbals would choose sitting in super-economy class for 2 years over certain death. After refuelling at the orbital station and docking with a sealed emergency supplies module, it has over 2km/s dV, which should be enough to get back to Kerbin with a gravity assist from Tylo or Laythe and some aerobraking in Kerbin. The supplies module would be jettisoned before landing, and the shuttle was tested to require only about 100m/s dV to perform a hot landing on Kerbin. Communications is provided by two Communotron 88-88 dishes on the planetary base and a relay satellite in geosynchronous orbit. The relay satellite can sometimes be blocked from direct sight to Kerbin by Jool, but most of the time it will see another satellite within the Kerbol system and can establish a link. However, as the communication satellite ring between Duna and Dres is yet to be completed, an outage is possible, if unlikely. In all fairness, this was initially planned as a Gilly base, however, upon deeper inspection Gilly was found to lack water in any sort of shape, so it was quickly redesignated as a Vall base instead. Bonus that I have not done a Jool mission in a long while. Gus quickly slapped on a few more boosters for the launch, switched the Terriers on the shuttle for Aerospikes, Gene declared that this is sufficient, as the base will use aerocapture when within Jool SOI, and the base was launched. A few weeks later Linus sheepishly entered the mission control, and admitted to doing the math on that aerocapture maneuver. Turns out the craft would be entering Jool at 8km/s, which is too fast for anything but the space gym to survive. We would have a choice of not slowing down at all, being on fire, or both. So, after a year of panic, it was determined that using a gravity assist to get captured is, indeed, possible. Also, turns out that, while using an Elektron and a Fuel Cell at the same time produces oxygen and electricity at the expense of tiny amounts of water, the Fuel Cells don't actually like working. If you are in space, and want to turn that hydrogen back into water, the fuel cells won't work because your electricity is full. If you are on the ground, and want to turn that hydrogen into electricity, the fuel cells won't work because the water drill has filled up the water containers. So, in short, they work practically never. A local engineer ended up modding them with a script he calls "dumpExcess = true" to fix that, but only after two weeks of sending gravity experiments home to use up electricity to get some water to drink and make oxygen out of. Ah, the scoring, I think the mission fulfills all the requirements, if ~99.95% DSN coverage is good enough, and has a (not fully tested) way to return home. Lovely challenge and mods, I instantly fell in love with the bigger 6 way PBS connector, and, as you can see, used it everywhere. Also, the PBS life support guide is really nice and helped a lot.

Actually, I'm not sure if we can use chutes, but since the "pure altitude" category threw out the penalty for dead parts and kerbals, you can just crash straight into the ground if you want, as far as I understand, so long as you reached your altitude. Maybe @TheEpicSquared can clarify that point for us though. The rule regarding chutes is: 9. CHUTES FOR SLOWING DOWN ON THE GROUND ARE OK, BUT THEY CANNOT BE USED SOLELY FOR LANDING - Basically, you can use drogue chutes to slow you down once you're on the ground, but you can't use them to land like a space capsule. I thought that since I was flying low and parallel to the water the chute was OK, but now that you mention, it probably is not by a strict interpretation of the rules. (It only slowed me down to about 35m/s though, about as much as a drogue would be expected to). I'm fairly sure I could have survived without the chute, water landings are remarkably forgiving, might have taken a few tries though.

You're welcome! I think on the second leaderboard the fifth place should be taken by swjr-swis with 205056m / 2E * 1K = 102528 points. Not 100% sure, there are a lot of entries with scores slightly above 100k. Meanwhile, while looking at @tseitsei89's entry, I realized that those "wings" are actually just really aerodynamic airbrakes, and are completely superfluous to a good design. After failing to land for the fifth time, a somewhat similar epiphany was reached in regards to wheels - if they are going to explode anyway, they might as well explode on the way up. Thus an altitude of 242 336 m was reached, with only minor bruising on our brave pilot. Used pretty much the same plane as previously, just leaner and meaner. P.S. I think it would be only fair to be limited to one entry per leaderboard, and, if this score is accepted, I request the removal of my old one. EDIT: This is a pure altitude entry.

The part not hitting the water was mostly dumb luck while trying to stabilize the roll, and the off center airbrake giving some extra force pitching up. The part hitting the water was just how ditching in water works, I suppose. I hit it at about 42 m/s vertical velocity (you can almost see it in the KER readout just under the MechJeb tab pullout), but the precooler went in first and must have slowed me down enough that the cockpit's 40 m/s tolerance was enough to survive. (If this part does not match your experience, I have this rocket car made for a different test. Just launch it at full throttle on the runway, it will hit the water at 120-220 m/s, and you'll see most of the Mk2 parts survive). In all honesty, I was not expecting it to survive when it hit, and when it emerged intact from the splash I had the same reaction. it was just a test flight to see how the airbrake behaves, but I got lucky, I suppose. Honestly, I do not have a proper answer to that question. They could have been 10 degrees away from exploding and it looked like full, but I do not know for sure, I was not monitoring their temperature. During prior flights I've had different parts fail first. Sometimes it's the nose cones, sometimes it's the cockpit, I think I had the engine explode first once too. The nosecones exploding are probably the easiest to recover from, though. If you look at the log at the end of the video, you can see the parts exploded at significantly more than their failure temperature. One of the tail connectors exploded at 692 degrees over it's limit. So, I suppose, they can survive for a few frames while over the temperature limit. Also, I'm not even sure how I could prevent them from exploding while over the limit. You can see the ignore max temperature cheat is off, and other parts exploded just fine. And if I edited the .cfg to increase the max temp, or reduced air drag, or changed the thermodynamic ratios, or I don't know what else, they would still explode when the bar was full, it would just fill up slower. Probably the only answer/defense I can provide, is that the speed was not a fluke, and if you download the craft, and fly it horizontally close to the water, about 1 in 3 tries should have it exceed 1800 m/s before something fails. Recovery is something else though.

That's only fair. After retrofitting the Screamy 1 with an AIRBRAKE (and calling it the Screamy 2), Jeb managed to survive the aftermath of a violent thermal failure, also known as the front of the airplane melting off. It did require some graceful aerial maneuvers on his part. Managed to reach 1834 m/s before losing the nose. The end screen shows a lot of G, but it all comes from the nose melting off and the plane suddenly decelerating due to increased drag. The actual maneuverability is negligible at high speed. No cheats used. Twin-engine plane. If someone wants to give it a spin or double check something, here's the craft file.

Sorry for that paragraph if it's confusing. I did not touch the thrust limiters in any way, as specified above, only locked the gimbals, as rule 6 allows. What I did, was wonder WHY would anyone put them there. But I left them in place. If you watch closely, you can actually see the thrust limiters are still in place when I'm locking the gimbals at the start of the video.

I have two related questions: How much of the plane has to survive, and does the G-force from exploding counts? Because if the rules ain't too strict about that, I have an entry:

For comparison I decided to do a tried and true "lock SAS to Prograde, 45 degrees pitch at 12km altitude" approach. Craft unmodified (gimbals were locked though), KSP version 1.2, new sandbox game on normal, used MechJeb to stage and circularize, otherwise just good old SAS. In fact, I'm pretty sure I did not touch the controls at all between 2km and 50km. 42.23 (corrected number) LF remaining after getting to 80x80km. (80.083x80.014km to be precise, you can see it in the KER readout to the left of the altitude.) I don't think I saw any heat bars, but Jeb found a brick under the throttle pedal. He was too busy trying to crush it with his foot to think of throwing it out the window (though opening the window might have caused some heating issues, assuming he would open it before throwing the brick out), so no impact on the test. It was later determined that procurement acquired a large batch of discount throttle limiters, and an overzealous intern applied them everywhere liberally. (I'm just trying to invent a somewhat reasonable explanation for having thrust limiters on everything in this ship.) Here's a more detailed account of the launch, for those interested: EDIT: looked at the wrong number for the score :)), thanks @Rodhern !