Bluejayek

Screenshot? Also, what sort of ascent profile did you use? Very good job either way. Also, as I stated, the ASAS is a modded one with 0.01 mass, so minimal handicap. Just used because I have issues doing small corrections without it on such a tiny craft. Hmm. With halftank on top, once it is dry you are carrying 4.2 mass. With the fulltank on top at half dry, you are carrying 4.15 mass units. You are correct, it seems it would make a minor difference.

I want asteroids with giant tunnels that have space slugs living in them like star wars. That would be awesome.

Interesting design. Is there a reason for the stack decouples on the bottom? As per allowed in the challenge, people are welcome to post their minimal designs. I\'m just trying to see what the absolute minimum is that can achieve orbit. On that criteria, the deisgn I posted seems to be the best (Since duck was able to orbit it), as it has 4 fewer parts then yours, and a takeoff mass of 2.2 less. That being said, yours is a MUCH more practical design, being able to deorbit and land safely. Very impressive.

The point is to do with as little as possible Cutting out the decoupler and extra engine is better! The idea of this is to top Kosmo\'s approach.

One tip in case you didnt know, you have to tilt your rocket and point it at the horizon to get into orbit. Going straight up will get your nowhere unless you happen to airm at the moon by luck or reach escape velocity Other then that, welcome to KSP! You\'ll be on the mun in no time.

My hypothesis involves Notepad++ or similar.

Sign me up for the unmodded mun base. I have a rocket I can get there whenever.

Yeah, it would. I think I\'ll sign up, and maybe get to fly it there in a month ;D Dropping the second as a payload doesn\'t entirely work. Apparently, the drop of 2 meters or so on the mun is enough to make the RCS tank explode. Somebody needs to build the thing better. However, the decoupler on top stays intact, so there is some payload delivery! I may try putting landing legs on the RCS tank and see if that helps. The extra weight might be a problem though.

What foamy did was the absolute minimum with that engine. This is half a tank less.

Those two engines are too heavy. They add 1.5 mass to the orbiter, and considering the dry mass of this is only 2, thats almost double. One other thing to consider is dropping the second half tank entirely. It reduces the dry mass by 0.2, and also increases the TWR by a significant ammount. I have gotten to around 50km/2000m/s with that setup, but I don\'t think it has quite enough juice to make it all the way.

My recomendations are a) don\'t run the day before you race (Looks like you already did that!) watch what you eat before the race, stomach cramps are awful. c) Have fun! Good luck tommorow A time of 25 minutes is hardly terrible. In a race I was in last spring, 25 minutes would put you 35th out of 600 runners, hardly terrible.

Put this craft into a stable orbit above the atmosphere. The craft consists of a (nonstock) 0.01 mass ASAS (because I\'m a bad pilot and have no joystick), a half tank of fuel, a full tank of fuel, and a lander engine. This is the closest I have come: If you want to take off the ASAS because you\'re actually a good pilot, go ahead, bonus points Without the ASAS, this would be, as far as I know, the smallest craft capable of making orbit. The ASAS module is attached. Mainly, I am posting this because I am convinced it is possible to orbit with this, but I have been trying for a couple hours and havent managed it. Edit: One final note. This will not take off immediatly, it is too heavy. You have to throttle to full, and wait for about 20% of the top tank to burn off before it leaves the ground. Congratulations to Romfarer for the first successful manual orbit of this craft. Also to The_Duck for the first orbit of any type (Mechjeb assisted). Bluejayek (myself) has also been successful in orbiting this craft manually. The new challenge is to put this into a stable orbit above the atmosphere, complete at least one orbit, and return the kerbals SAFELY to the surface. This will require a fully powered landing as there is no parachute available. Congrats Romfarer for succesfully returning his Kerman to solid ground!

This ship is capable of achieving munar orbit, launching a small satellite (full RCS tank + decoupler), landing accurately on the mun, dropping a small payload (another RCS tank and decoupler) and returning safely to Kerbin. Landing accuracy of course depends on your piloting skills, but there is plenty of fuel to adjust your orbit as needed. I can easily touch down craft within 100m of each other, and can probably do better if I try. The way I have flown this, there is not a whole lot of fuel left in the tanks for the kerbin landing. You need to make a semi-powered landing, as the innermost \'abort\' stage has about a 50% chance of exploding if you try to parachute down with it. 24 tanks, 12 solid boosters. Nowhere near as minimal as some of the amazing designs others have made, but I find it reasonable for what it can do.

Very impressive either way... I cant imagine how you were able to control your descent enough to not explode your capsule on landing....

Forget mars. What I really cant wait for is the jupiter system. Setting up massive fuel depots in orbit, staging multiple missions to the 4 galilean moons... Attempting to land on the tiny moons (try landing on something with 1/10th or less munar gravity!). However, there are a lot of things that need to be done before this. I would much rather see docking, fuel transfer, complete multibody flight trajectories, and all of the other goodies that are being worked on complete and functional before they jump ahead and work on new planets. A lot of what I would want new planets for would be useless without those features anyways. Getting all, or most, of the planetary bodies at once will be a lot of fun as well. There is so much that can be done that it will be more fun failing trying to do all 1000 possible missions at once, rather then mastering them one at a time when they become available. One thing I would really like to see when the solar system gets implemented is the asteroid belt. There are a lot of opertunities there, and I would hate for them to be left out. Clearly having all of the countless tiny asteroids is a) pointless and prohibitively time and processor consuming to do, but a reasonable number of the larger ones would be nice.

Definitely.... One thing that I think would also be nice is a way to select a specific snap point on a fuel tank or such that you are attaching. Then, while selected, it would only snap to corresponding snap to points nearby. This should also make it much easier to build fuel tank stacks, as you could drag that blue point directly over the other, rather then trying to get it right draging the center of the tank.

So... The argument is 'We know the atmosphere on mars is really thin because of the rovers we put on mars. Therefore, its impossible for rovers to land on mars since they all used parachutes! The rovers are a hoax!' I see a logic fail. As per the other comment... Martian surface atmospheric pressure is 6mbar as per nasa (http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.html). While this is less then 1/100th of earths surface pressure of ~1000mbar, it still is very significant. At surface, this would be like kerbin at 20km altitude. Not massive, but 20km is around where serious braking starts to occur when in kerbin re-entry, to put it in perspective. (I refer you to the challenge on maximum g force, pulling around -40g\'s at 20km in atmosphere) I suppose it really depends what you mean by 'Almost a vacuum'. It is much lower, but still for atmospheric drag it is very significant. Not enough to do a full parachute landing with the small parachutes we have now, but enough to slow down a lot.

On my machine it loads, but when I go to take off it lags so much during the initial burn while all of the solid boosters are sitting on the pad falling over and exploding, that it makes me turn, and sometimes makes my ship do backflips and crashes. The addition of the absurd number of RCS thrusters seems to fix this mostly however.... Not a particularly practical craft, but in theory, the higher you start out, the less distance you have to climb ;D

Taking your idea of a launch gantry to the limits, I present the kerbal tower. This will break apart and detonate on the launch pad about 50% of the time, but the other 50% of the time it is capable of launching (leaving the solid booster stacks behind) and can make it to the mun. The giant white jets you see are the RCS thrusters... They seem to grow to massive proportions with large ships.

First two pictures seem to be missing?

When I am assembling reasonable sized rocket I often run into the problem that peices just wont snap to what I want them to. I imagine this is mainly a result of using semi 2d controls to assemble a 3d ship but it feels like there has to be an easier way, considering some of the monstrosities people on this forum have put together. My main issue is adding fuel tanks to the top of a stack... once I have a number of parts on, they just do not want to snap to that attachment point. When I drag them overtop they decide they want to attach to something behind, or do nothing at all. Basically, I was wondering if anybody had any tips to help me out.

My experience seems to be that the g force reading caps out. If you are going 6000+ when you hit atmosphere, you decelerate too fast and the system just doesn\'t read it at all.

Further on the measurement errors... I did another flight and took screenshots about every half second during the major deceleration. I then took the values off of these screenshots for altitude, velocity, and time. From these values, I calculated accelerations and compared it to the maximum g force quoted in the flight logs, assuming 1g = 9.8m/s/s as quoted on earth. Note that I had to aproximate the time as kerbal only shows to the nearest second. To do this, I simply took the number of screenshots showing a given time and devided by that number. Eg, if I had two screenshots at 18s, the first is 18.0, and the second 18.5. Some of the deceleration screenshots The spreadsheet Graphs These show an average acceleration over the period 16s-18s of -120+/-15g\'s and a maximum acceleration at 16.3s of -157+/-75.54g\'s. The flight log below shows a max g of 58 g\'s which is clearly low. Therefore... Either kerbal is not using a value of 9.8m/s/s as a measure of gforce (Possible, but unlikely as that is the surface gravity of kerbin...) or there are errors in the calculations. Hence, I submit this result of 105g\'s as the lower bound on my calculated average maximum acceleration. Add it or not as you please, I was just bored and decided to figure this out.

There seems to be some problems with the recording system for the g-force. I made an attempt where I was going 5700+ (downwards) and accelerating at 38km in the atmosphere when I cut engines. Clearly, I must have been pulling some serious g\'s to avoid splatting, and yet it recorded my max gforce as 4.2. With a similar ship (incidentally, accidentally dropping the first stage before launch) I managed a respectable 80gs for the bill challenge.

I was rather unclear! What I meant was a continuous burn, rather then a munar transfer burn, and then a landing burn. You\'d accelerate from takeoff until the halfway point, at which point youd be going like a bat out of hell, and then you\'d flip over, start decelerating, and hope you did your calculations correctly When I said 'Ballistic' what I merely meant was that you are going for a straight shot, rather then doing orbital maneurvers. Butchering of terminology, I know, I\'ll try harder.