Bluejayek

Specific impulse is basically the thrust / fuel burn rate. Therefore, if you had two craft that both had 1000 thrust, but one used 50L/s of fuel and the other 100L/s of fuel, the first would have twice the specific impulse. This represents the efficiency of the engine, and gives you the relative amount of delta V you can get out of the engine for a given amount of fuel, as compared to other engines. For example, if you take one engine with an ISP of 390, and one with an ISP of 350, you will get ~11% more delta V out of the first engine for a given amount of fuel. This is typically most important for orbital maneurvers, where you don't need a lot of thrust, and can do long period burns instead (thick of the probes with ion engines). Therefore, for orbital transfer maneurvers such as trans munar injection burns, or later on burns between planetary orbits, you want to use a high ISP engine, not a high thrust engine. In atmosphere, or when taking/off and landing this is slightly more complicated, as you need a certain amount of thrust to take off, so the low thrust high ISP engines cannot help you. Hope this helped. PS: ISP = specific impulse.

I turn the front whel forwards like this, as it makes a wider base for my plane to take off from. Generally my planes are horribly unbalanaced contraptions, that are not very long, and hence fall over on the pad if I line up both wheels the same way. As a result of my horrible plane design skills, I have not had the opportunity to test the relitive landing merits of the two orientations.

Hmm, so basically a speed challenge? Interesting. By the way, you can use f1 to take screenshots of only the KSP window that appear in your KSP folder and avoid showing us all the secrets on your desktop/taskbar.

You can't lift off at the lowest possible thrust, but you can do so at around 10-15%, which is already very efficienct. Further, you can do an effective TMI burn at about 1% thrust (or however low the lowest possible is), which uses aproximately 0 fuel. Finally, you can land on the mun at very, very close to the minimum possible throttle, so the landing takes tiny amounts of fuel.

The fuel bug! So many challenges now require full throttle to avoid this bug, but where are the challenges taking advantage of it! It is a glorious opportunity! Hence, I present you the Fuel Bug Munar Lander Challenge! The challenge is simple. Launch the smallest single stage craft possible to land on the Mun, while abusing the fuel bug as much as you desire. Entries will be ranked on weight on takeoff, and for tiebreakers, fuel remaining after landing (So take a screenshot of this!) To enter, please provide: Screenshot on the launchpad. Screenshot in Kerbin orbit with the fuel remaining displayed. Screenshot on the lunar surface with fuel remaining displayed. Evne though I didn't take all the required screenshots, I'll kick this off with my entry, coming in at 10.5 tons on the launchpad, with something like 80kg of fuel remaining. Leaderboard: 1) Soralin, 2.3 tons, 1.4L of fuel remaining. 2) wired2thenet 20.4 tons, 0 fuel remaining. It all blew up on landing. 3) Modded Leaderboard: 1) wired2thenet 2.4tons, 92.1L of fuel remaining. 2) 3) PS: For those of you who do not yet know, the fuel bug is this. Thrust scales linearly with throttle, while fuel consumption scales quadratically. For example, at 25% throttle I get 25% of the thrust, but use 6.25% fuel. At 1% throttle I get 1% thrust, but use 1/100th of a % of the fuel.

Apo, I'd say abuse of the fuel bug should not be allowed. It is absurd what you can land through abuse of it, as my post showed. I expect that using the bug it may well be possible to land on the mun with a capsule, LFT400, and the largest engine... simply because you have enough thrust sitting at 1% throttle, which is 0.01% fuel consumption and hence 100x efficiency. Edit: Confirmed. I landed on the Mun with about 80kg of fuel to spare, however I fell over and thus wasn't able to make the return trip. Just to clarify, that is my entire ship as it was on the launch pad, no ascent stage.

Through blatant and unforgivable abuse of the fuel bug, I managed a lunar landing with 8 parts, 5 of which were uneccesary (Nonfunctional landing legs x4 and ASAS). I did return to kerbin, however I fracked up my descent and crashed nose first at 150m/s. http://imgur.com/a/tMYMj#4

Any chance the old wiki could be deleted or something? It is annoying in that it comes up first when searching on google for the kerbal wiki.

Nice lander Apotheosist. darkwolf: In the future, please at least attempt to use proper English, grammar, and punctuation. I understand there are people on these forums who do not natively speak English, but by this post, you do not seem to be one of those; you seem to just not give a damn whether people can understand your post or not. In particular: Capitilize words that should be capitilized... Such as "I", and words that start sentences. Also, actually use sentences and punctuation such as periods. It makes your post much easier to understand. Finally, when you are making a challenge, make it specific and intelligible. Rather then making a wall of text, make a list of requirements, restrictions, and the like, and make it clear what you want. For example, instead of your post above, something such as: Your challenge is to make the smallest Munar and return lander possible using the larger stock rocket parts such as the LFT-3200. Entries will be ranked on the number of parts attached to the ship at takeoff. In order to qualify for this challenge you must provide the following: A screenshot of the craft on the launchpad. A screenshot of the craft in transit to the Mun A screenshot of the craft landed on the Mun. A screenshot of the craft landed back on Kerbin. The only addons allowed are the cart and unmanned pod addons. Modded parts are allowed. Scoreboard: 1) Apotheosist - 22 parts Dishonourable Mentions: 1) Bluejayek - 8 parts

The meter requires it to be sustained over a certain time, or somewhat stable over that time. While doing the maximum mgforce challenge, I got a reading of something like 60g's. However, taking the velocity data from my flight, my actual maximum deceleration was closer to 100 or 120g's.

Its definately possible on minimus. On minimus you have plenty of fuel to leave an orbiting spacecraft, do an EVA RCS landing, Take off, rendezvous with the orbiting ship, and get back in.

I imagine this is planned by the devs for some point in the future, as most games have some sort of ingame menu for mods. However, since the forum works well enough, this should be low priority.

I think nasa's going to sue you for patent infringement over this. Nice job

One stage is the only difference I can see, which honestly just makes things a bit irritating. Prior challenges allowed a single 'taxi' stage to get in position prior to accelerating (e.g. turning around to head backwards off the runway).

How did you get jeb up to the cockpit? I don't see any laders leading up there off the bottom of the engines, nor cross ladders to go around your rocket. Either way, basket of ladders is neat idea

That first video.... I can't even make a minimus rendezvous on the first orbit WITH instruments and mapview. This thread is the answer to people who say "I've completed everything in KSP, what do I do now?". People like this are the ones who solve the problems when others say "It can't be done." +1 awesomeness.

http://xkcd.com/927/

YURI can you post a craft file for that mission profile?

Have you done as close to an Apollo mission profile as you can without official docking? The way I did this was rendezvousing two ships in lunar orbit with a total of 3 kerbonauts, landing one of them, taking off again, rendezvousing and transfering over to the 'command' ship for the voyage home. Also check out some of the great threads in the challenge forum. I reccomend the ARC Kerbonaut Recovery mission, its fun. Also, for a real challenge, try this. Take off from kerbin, leave its SOI. Circularize an orbit at 25Mm from Kerbol. Return to Kerbin. Land. Take off. Recircularize at 25Mm. Return to kerbin. Land. All with a single craft. That should keep you busy for some time

I had even more ladders on the ship at first, it really was coating every surface. However, it appeared that I had too many parts on my ship and the physics ground to a screeching halt, so I had to cut back Continue making the fun challenges!

I would do this except that you are comitting the sacrilege of using mechjeb, so I can't load the file.

It would appear that the majority of the forum users are not using the reputation system. It would be good if we could get this going, as it would be more obvious to newcomers who to trust, rather then just seeing everybody at 1 gray or green bar. I suggest that all of you who get help from people in the forums, or find that somebody created a challenge that you like, +1 rep that person! It will make the community a better place. To rep those folks, you just have to click the little star below an active post.

1 Small parachute into orbit. Actually, to the moon and back, but anyways. [/spoiler=Images] I think I put too many parachutes on my splashdown stage though. Descending at 2m/s from 600m is a bit slow. The trick I found to this was to throttle back in the lower atmosphere. If I exceeded about 80m/s in thick atmosphere, as happened with full throttle, my parachute would tear off and the craft would break apart, leaving the command pod alive.

You really don't need to use all that math, unless you want time critical rendezvous. I don't bother, and instead this is my rendezvous plan: I get into an orbit that is in the same inclination, with aproximately the same periapsis and apoapsis as my target. Then, if I am behind in the orbit I lower my periapsis so that I orbit more quickly and wait to catch up. Once I get close, you bring your periapsis closer up so you don't overshoot. Then, when you are within 1-5km (your choice really), burn towards the target as you see it and slowly do the fine rendezvous. If you are in front of the target in the orbit, just raise your periapsis instead to go slower. This works for any orbit. It can take a large number of orbits to complete though, so be patient

It is a very cool sim, I agree. However, we are already getting new planet and we would need other solar systems before getting a galaxy! Further, even if the makers of that sim allowed it, I imagine there would be nothing simple about merging them together.