Proterus

Here's a lighter design with more delta v in orbit, 2.886 tons still haven't tested it much but I think moving 2 of the fuel tanks from the top to the bottom might be better. That's more 200 more delta V than I had when I successfully did the mission earlier and I think I may have even done a pretty poor job of getting this thing into orbit. Also the delta v maps are telling me that this is more than enough delta v to go to the surface of Gilly from LKO and back, meaning it could probably beat Turbopump's record. I can see why one would think this is gamey, I consider Turbopump's performance to be a major feat. I do think this might actually be useful beyond challenges though. I think something similar to one of my earlier designs could be a good eve lander landing it on eve empty and filling it up, except replace the ants with a spark and add another asparagus stage and some parachutes to the convertotron. I think it could maybe be made under 4 tons considering most of my original 3 ton rocket was the mining equipment.

Actually it looks like my design was wrong, the xenon engine has more delta V in orbit than the alternative. Just got a craft weight 2.9 tons into orbit with more delta V than the one I did the mission with. I guess I was comparing empty weights and didn't factor in how much harder it would be to get into orbit.

If that's the case I'd design the craft completely differently, I'd like some clarification from the OP before I put anymore work into this design. I consider that mostly as a convenience to the challengers. You could obviously build a ladder vehicle from the SPH and have your kerbal board it that way so we just count it without it because it's pointless to do otherwise. I thought it was a clever strategy and I don't think it's too gamey considering the mining equipment ended up being 55% of the weight of the overall craft, it's not obvious that the lowest weight craft would use this strategy. I think it helps balance out the super efficient xenon and panther engines.

6.156 tons

I just finished a successful mission with a <3 ton craft. Well it was a test mission that demonstrated such a craft could complete the mission. See I was testing a vehicle that fills it's own tanks on the launch pad with a convertotron , a drill and an ore tank, so obviously the 3 ton craft includes the weight of these things. So since it was just a test I didn't actually do the tedious drilling part and I also didn't get screencaptures of it until I was already in orbit, beginning with the maneuver node to the mun. I just want to know if it would count or not before I go through the trouble of uploading all of the pictures of the mission. For now I'll just show you a picture of the craft, I call it, Juniper. That's the one I actually used, and here's a picture of it empty: If you're curious, here's the craft file: http://pastebin.com/raw/Dtp6DnSS Basically it's an asparagus build with spark engines, it starts out with all 5 of them firing, then the first staging gets rid of the bottom 3 and starts up the 2 ant engines, the next stage gets rid of the top 2 and the stage after that gets rid of the extra fuel tanks. Anyway let me know if it would count, or if I would have to redo it. I can upload the relevant parts of the mission and take some images of a recreation of it getting into orbit I have at least a dozen images of the mission.

So since when I made the falcon I didn't understand how part clipping worked and that you could rotate and translate engines around and they would work properly so now that I put 9 engines instead of 7 I just hit 29,600 meters with the upgraded version, that's on a full tank of fuel too! Edit: This time I took most of the fuel out, clipped the fuel tanks together and got up to 31.8 km!

1. Crafts must be able to safely land without parachutes. 2. Crafts must not require any building upgrades to build. 3. Crafts must be stock. Category A. Reuseable SSTO spaceplane limited to tech level 4. Bonus points if it's crewed and if it has scientific instruments on board. Category B Reuseable SSTO spaceplane limited to tech level 5. Bonus points if it's crewed and if it has scientific instruments on board. Category C Airbreathing Crewed crafts capable of reaching >20,000 meters required to have a thermometer and barometer on board. (intended to be used for contracts) Here are my entries, Category A: (okay I used a level 5 fuel tank, but I had a low enough part count that I could have replaced the fuel tanks with the shorter ones). Not even gonna share the craft file for this rather unimaginative design, this craft is capable of getting into orbit but it requires the operator to be rather precise. this one has all of the low tech science on board. Note I had to tilt it at an an angle and it was just barely short enough to fit the required 15m dimensions but upon startup if you hold the a key it will reorient itself in the right direction. (it seemed harder to get into orbit in vertical takeoff). Again, this is not optimized but it does reach orbit, not too proud of this one, here's one more to prove I landed it: Here's my Category C entry: Now this one I consider much more useful, this will enable you to complete any of the survey contracts I've seen: This thing will literally fly itself up to 22,000 meters just by hitting the prograde button. I posted this earlier now that it's a contest I will try to fly it again to post a higher height, here is the craft file: it's exactly 30 parts and doesn't even have a front wheel. http://pastebin.com/raw/eQWfQM6T

I rescind my earlier recommendation, I came up with something even better, The Falcon: you can see here it's up at 22,000 feet, this is not the ceiling of the falcon, this is what happens when you start the engines with SAS on and immediately hit the prograde button, the plane will, on it's own, climb to 22,000 feet It will then dive down screaming in at just under mach 2, pitch itself back up and go up to 25,000 - 27,000 which is near it's ceiling. It's powered by 7 juno engines. This is what I ended up designing after I was experimenting with gliders and discovered that you can actually land the mk2 cockpit by itself, without any other parts, without crashing, even from a 250,000 meter suborbital vertical hop. So this design only has those 2 steerable landing gears, and only requires that you have aviation tech. Prior to doing this I would only pick out the survey contracts that require you be below a given altitude because the ones that made you go into the upper atmosphere were too inconvenient, Not only that, you're also able to cruse at 14,000 meters at 600 m/s and then turn on 4x time acceleration. Here's the craft file: http://pastebin.com/raw/eQWfQM6T

This is a design I came up with, I was able to get it up to 42,000 meters. And it had most of its fuel when it got over 20,000. I'd expect this to be good for maybe 3 survey contracts where you dip up above 18,000-20,000 meters for the mission. I think the 4 Juno's and the Terrier are the standard configuration The cockpit is a bit heavier but it has vastly higher crash impact tolerance (40 m/s). The technique I used to fly this thing was I got it up to 10,000 meters, it was starting to slow down at that altitude so I activated the rocket, pitched up but not too much. Just enough to be gaining a reasonable height while still gaining speed if it's ticking up by whole meters that's fine if it's only ticking up by 0.1 meters, that's too slow. You might have to start at 20 degrees and move up to 30 when you've converted some of your speed into vertical speed.

This makes sense, I've programmed stuff before and had it spit out calculated numbers into the command prompt and when you use doubles and floats you get weird exponentials when you're supposed to get zero and these numbers will only approximate zero. I guess I should have thought about it more I was just thinking okay there isn't any thrust so it should just stop calculating but I guess it doesn't work that way. I do enjoy the history you guys are talking about, good stuff.

So I was sitting there getting started on some math calculating my semi major axis and stuff and my periapsis shifted a little bit from 76023 to 76018. So I looked and saw my throttle wasn't up or anything and I shutdown my engine just to be sure. So I'm going to recalculate my semi major axis and I see my apoapsis shift 7 meters from 365093 to 365100 right before my eyes and I'm out of the atmosphere completely. What the heck so much for being "on rails". No rcs or anything either. It's a very basic ship with just a single engine I'm just using to test out some orbital mechanics equations. Does anyone know what's up with this? Is it just the physics engine recalculating things or something?