Bluejayek

Thank you for clarifying.

I agree spinning the pilot is a terrible idea, but that doesn't seem related to the comment about lift physics. Also, can you explain why (apart from the pilot thing) a principle of a spinning top with wings wouldn't actually lift in real life? (This is what a helicoptor has for its rotor after all...) I might just be a bit confused as to the magic turbine phenomena.

These aren't magic turbines. Magic turbines are where you are lifting with just the pods SAS or nothing.. these all have serious engine power. How is your ship able to pivot those rotors anyways with stock parts? I didnt know that was possible. Finally, please use spoilers

I've got this screenshot that was taken a few minutes before the rendezvous. Not perfect for leaderboard, but it should be pretty close. 23:08 hours, 4855km. Seems I cut it pretty tight. Full stock by the way, with the exception of the asteroid. Getting it earlier then that is going to take a lot more delta-V.. Because it seems to me you need to race out to it on an escape trajectory, then decelerate all the way down.. Some thousands of extra delta V. Of courase, you could do a straight on impact trajectory... That would take incredible accuracy though.

Well, assume they took enough supplies to get home again, which you could say would take just as long, give yourself another 2 and a half days!

Well, I managed this first try, more or less. I originally intended to toss an asas module at it and then dodge the asteroid, but unfortunately I missed. Therefore Bill met a rather unfortunate end for the survival of Kerbals everywhere. He will be remembered. Supra-orbital rendezvous are really a lot different then orbital ones... To hit it I just went into a parabolic trajectory up in its direction, to around the right height that I thought it would be at when I got there. I then burned at kerbin to catch up with it, and when i got within visible range just aimed straight at it.

Same here maxed, and I want to see it

Try coming down in the middle of one of the large craters, the surface is closer to 0 there making it less likely that you will crash at full speed.

There are some mods that give the altimeter height. In 0.15 I was using the FPS pod mod, although I'm not sure if it is still around.

This isn't stupidification through modern technology; calculators use the order of operations that was established to make writing equations clear for all, and especially to make one standard that everybody uses. As to your second point, this isn't about commutativity, since what you want to do is divide, not multiply. A/B*C is what you wrote, which is NOT the same as A/(B*C) or A/B/C, which is what is correct, and in fact what you actually did. And vexx, it isnt interpretable both ways! It is most clearly interpretable only in the one way, F/I*g = (F/I)*g. That is the accepted notation.

Well, the circumfence of kerbin is ~ 3,769,000m, at 200m/s this would take 5 hours. Especially since the OP does not allow any sort of autopilot, I really doubt anybody is going to undertake this challenge. Perhaps you could repost it when we have the 5 or 10x physical time warp that harvestor is working on. Also, I don't see anything in that about it acually being a hovercraft? Just a low flight.

If you pop timewarp to 5x for half a second and then put it back down all rotation of the ship should stop.

Further on wht cobra said, a much more meaningful measure would be calculations per second, not a clock rate. Different processors can do different number of operations per clock cycle, which is why you cant compare aPentium IV at 3GHz and an i7 at 3GHz and say they do the same job.

As per the impossibility of rendezvousing with a fuelless kerbal: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/18201-ARC-Kerbalnaut-Recovery-Rocket-HARD

Theres still a lot of bugs that need ironing out though. And well before 'release' it will need to have a lot of efficiency coding done. So enjoy the ride!

Nice ship shpaget, but the challenge was KerbOL oorbit (sun) not kerbin

You know what really bugs me? When people say "No cfg edits, but modded parts are allowed!". What do you think modded parts are...? They definately have modified cfg values... And there is nothing to say they are any more balanced in general then a given stock part thats been cfg edited. If you want it to be fairer, you should specificy specific mod parts that you think are reasonable. Eg: Only stock parts and the novapunch mod pack allowed. Also, it really is easy with stock parts.

This is classic kraken right here, in an autoorbit 100km circular orbit. http://imgur.com/a/myyAD#0

Launching a rocket that is capable of getting to one of the planets is easy, and doesn't take a large rocket. The problem occurs when you want to build one that is capable of getting home again. This requires a rocket that can deliver at least the entire payload of the first rocket to the surface, which results in rather large rockets...

One thing that I believe would help with this is to make four extra fuel tanks. These would be double and triple the length of the LFT-400 and LFT-3200. So therefore we would have the following tanks LFT-200 LFT-400 LFT-800 LFT-1200 LFT-1600 LFT-3200 LFT-6400 LFT-9600 I often use three tank stacks on top of engines, and adding these parts would let me do this with 1 part instead of three. This would cut down significantly on the number of parts that need to be simulated (as I understand it is part number, not part size that cause problems), which would make the game run faster. Further, I believe this would be something that would be easier to implement then an efficiency overhaul of the game code, and something a modder could do for us instead. For example, the ship below currently has 174 fuel tanks in 3 tank stats. With this addition, 174 tanks would be reduced to 58, leaving 116 less objects for the physics engine to render. This is the first ship I have built that has the capability of interplanetary return trips (As tested by flying out to 20Gm, landing on kerbin, back out to 20Gm, and relanding). A final thing that I believe the devs are doing in this update is to fix the weakness of the connections on some of the larger parts. This will cut down on the number of struts required on these ships, further dropping the number of parts required on ships, easing the physics load. That being said, adding a stronger version of the strut might also be helpful.

Well, I tested my rocket on a simulated eve and return mission. For this I burned out to a 20Gm apoapsis, recircularized on kerbin and landed, took off again and repeated. The album below isnt particularly complete, but you get the idea. The astute observer will notice that the engine on my second last stage morphed. I realized hours into this mission that I had accidentally swapped that engine to the lander engine yesterday for a different mission profile, so I had to edit my persistence file to swap it back. The mass difference of 0.75 means I wouldn't have had quite as much fuel if it had been there the entire way, but I believe the krakens attacks on my craft make up for this gain. Other comments. I didn't technically land on the first landing. I slowed to a stop and then burned out at about 500m from the surface as I was coming in on the water. I don't think this makes any significant difference in delta V requirements or anything. Also, my last landing was a lithobraked 20m/s+ landing with about 0.5kg of fuel left. Luckily my pod survived. http://imgur.com/a/KJrr9#15

So... The idea is to turn the kerbals into green paste smeared against the inside of the rocket so that they can no longer worry about whether the mission is long enough or not? It would seem the G-forces requested here are... extreme.

Overclocking is your friend! I just overclocked my cpu from 3.2GHz up to 3.6, and my FPS with my most massive rocket design went from like 0.7FPS up to 0.75 fps!