EveMaster

I'm aware that the rules are not final yet. I'm OK with it, if you stick to your original schedule.

I'd be happy to do the mission together with you. My suggestion: You can do the surface operations on Eve in addition to the orbiter and I can build the Eve lander and do the Eve landing and ascent. So you don't only have to do the trivial parts. I already tested a pretty cheap Eve ascent craft that would be within the budget limits. You can discuss with me your ideas about bringing the lander down and bringing the science to the lander, especially science from the robotic arm that requires to be close to a surface feature. I suggest we do the planning of our mission via private messages, so we don't spoil the fun for other participants that want do do an Eve mission. Do you have the DLCs?

It's a good idea to allow two-user submissions. I suggest to remove the requirement of the orbit to be 10km above the surface or atmosphere from the rules. It adds nothing to the challenge and if someone orbits at a height where the craft crashes into the terrain or is autodeleted, it is their fault. For cases where the margins are very thin (e.g. Eve) or where there are no high mountains (e.g. Eeloo) it should be allowed to have the orbiter at a lower height. It should also be allowed that the orbiter performs the rendezvous with lander return vessel instead of the other way round. So I can do a mission to Eve for 90,000 funds for flagship as a single user if I accept a 10 point penalty for the broken 2 user rule? Alternatively is anyone interested in doing a coop submission with me and retrieving the sample from Eve orbit? I'm planning to launch from the highest point on Eve. So this person would have to build a craft that can retrieve the sample from low Eve orbit with 25° inclination.

You could do that. But any craft docked to the comet will not survive the impact. Also you can't really control the resulting trajectory after the collision. It might be a suborbital trajectory on a moon, a trajectory that ejects the comet back out of the Kerbin system, or a trajectory that leaves the trajectory of the moon but gets into an Orbit around Kerbin. Even if you are lucky and end up in a captured orbit around Kerbin, the Comet is in an orbit that will hit Mun or Minmus again. So you have to use propulsion if your goal is to put the Comet in a stable orbit around Kerbin.

The crash tolerance seems to be nearly infinite. I let a class I comet crash into Tylo at 3000 m/s and the comet survied. It even survives some times when I put it onto a retrograde Jool orbit and let it crash into Tylo straight on at 5000m/s. It seems that a comet can only be destroyed by a crash if it ends up to deep in the ground within a simulation step. It also survives being dropped from orbital height into the Mohole. It would require about 10 layers of class I comets to fill it up. Not sure what the tolerance against atmosphere is. The comets tend do break up into multiple smaller parts when the speed is to high and these parts then explode.

I turned a "class I" comet, the largest class of comet, by 180 degrees. To do this I cheated 3 craft with 84 large reaction wheels each to the comet and docked them (252 large reaction wheels in total). Turning from retrograde to prograde using SAS took 6 minutes. To completely mine this comet, a large convertotron would have run for 80 Kerbin days with level 5 Scientist and LF, Ox and LF+Ox running at the same time non stop.

When docked, unlock the connector, target the center of the comet and lock the connector again. I find that often the SAS does not a good job at targeting the center of the comet, so I target it manually and enable SAS once the connector is locked. With a locked connector the comet and all docked spacecraft are considered one craft. To turn it you need a lot of reaction wheels or RCS thrusters. Shorter rockets make it easier to push the comet. You might also try to pull a comet with a frame that has rockets attached on the sides. The frame must be larger than the comet, so that the rockets fire to the sides of the comet and not against it.

The asteroids collided like Billard balls and did not explode when I collided them at 221.7 m/s. Both of them changed course. For the second collision the smaller dresoid was pushed forward by the larger one and both dresoids moved at nearly the same speed after the collision as in an inelastic collsion. Also no explosion for the second collsion. I think though that a collision can break them up into multiple pieces if the speed is higher. I don't know what the condition for this is and if this only applies to comets or if there is a minimum required size. The score seems to be correct for me.

I completed my submission for round 3. My space craft, the CometChaser goes to 5 asteroids 4 dresoids 4 periodic comets 1 interstellar comet I collided two asteroids and two dresoids at speeds > 30m/s. The ion stage lands back on Kerbin intact after having visited all space objects. This was a long mission so I split up the mission report into 4 parts: Asteroids: https://imgur.com/gallery/GshjGm7 Dresoids: https://imgur.com/gallery/brEdgQt Periodic Comets: https://imgur.com/gallery/Ec2ETk4 Interstellar Comet and Return: https://imgur.com/gallery/tKMwVCJ The craft has 42 parts (coincidence). The craft file can be found here: https://kerbalx.com/EveMaster/CometChaser Edit: Some information about the interstellar comet Vikritz 2 I visited: class G (interstellar comets are G - I) mass: 18.65 kilotons resources: 93% inclination: 31.6° (This is randomly between -180° and 180°) eccentricity: 1.3366 (above 1.0 is interstellar. This is randomly between 1.01 and 1.4 for interstellar comets) perioapsis: 4.545 Gm The way from Dres orbit to the interstellar orbit: 8,693 m/s burn at Dres orbit Not going around the sun because that would take too long, but going into a transfer orbit with 84.5° inclination 11,454 m/s brake burn to rendezvous with interstellar comet The solar panels only provided enough energy for the ion engine to run at around 1.5% of its power so the burn took several real time minutes even at 50-100 times physics warp. Arrived at interstellar comet when 70.675 Gm from sun (around the distance of Jool to sun) The way from the interstellar comet back to Kerbin was the most interesting part as the delta V budget was very tight: 4,004 m/s to get back into a captured orbit around the sun 119 m/s to reduce apoapsis to 1,521 Gm (13.4 times farther than Eeloo at its apoapsis) 57 m/s to raise periapsis to height of Eve 320 m/s to get an Eve encounter First Eve encounter has a speed at Eve periapsis of 9.85 km/s and an inclination of 114° 236 years,13 gravity assists (5x Eve - 2xJool - Mun - Kerbin - 2xEve - Kerbin - Mun) and only 40m/s in total later reaching Kerbin 196 m/s capture burn at Kerbin (no aerocapture) 53 m/s burn to avoid unhelpful mun assist Aerobraking down to low Kerbin orbit over around 20 passes 11 m/s to raise apoapsis out of the atmosphere and reach a 70kmx75km orbit 36 m/s deorbit burn 157 m/s burn at 40km to slow rentry. (pointing between retrograde and antiradial)

I posted in the wrong thread. This post should go in this thread:

I performed a mission to an interstellar comet (and other space objects) and back. From a waiting orbit at Dres to the insterstellar comet an back to Kerbin it took me 27.5 km/s with a lot of gravity assists on the way back. I guess redirecting an interstellar comet to an orbit is really hard. You have to be really quick, if you want to reach it with all your equipment before the comet is beyond the reach of the antenna.

Thats true. But the number of found comets seems to go up slower than the number of found asteroids. If there are already comets around the comet spawn chance is reduced. If you have dozens of Sentinels running you end up having over 1000 untracked asteroids and the game becomes very slow. So I advise you to disable the tracking for the sentinels once you have found the comets you searched for. If you disable the sentinels the number of untracked asteroids goes down with time and the game runs fast again.

Thanks for doing the math. What distance to the sun did you assume for the Solar panels calculation? After reaching the periapsis, the comet will move quickly away from the sun. Will the total power generated by covering the whole comet with solar panels be enough to extract and convert all ore to fuel assuming you start to mine at periapsis? For capturing an interstellar comet you only have one try. Fuel cells might be an option if the solar power is not enough. Comets will always spawn between Duna and Dres. In CometDefs.cfg the spawn distance from the sun is defined as 1.5-2.5 semi major axis of Kerbin. Duna has an orbit of around 1.5 Kerbin SMAs and Dres about 3.0. For an interstellar comet the chances are very slim that it might come close to a planet on its path so that a aerocapture or gravity assist might not be an option. For a normal comet or an interstellar comet that has already been captured it might work. Smaller comets will be easier to capture though. The mass of a comet increases with the cube of the radius. The cross-sectional area increases only with the square of the radius. The drag is proportional to the cross-sectional area so the larger comets have a smaller drag to weight ratio, making them harder to capture. A comet that has been mined of all its ore will also be easier to aerocapture. If the comet breaks apart during the aerocapture, the remaining parts will also be smaller and easier to handle.

Is it allowed to change the relative spawn probability for interstellar comets by editing game files? By looking at the CometDefs.cfg it seems that in version 1.10.1 when a comet spawns, its probability of being interstellar is just 1%, and comets already have a very low spawn chance compared to asteroids. In 1.10 it seemed to be different and the release note of 1.10.1 indicates this: "Fix spawn probabilities for comet types.". Of 3 comets I found in 1.10 all three were interstellar. I cannot get an interstellar comet to spawn in 1.10.1 even with reloading.

Comets are class E - I according to the CometDefs.cfg in the GameData/Squad/Resources folder. So the class E overlaps for comets and asteroids. There are 4 types of comets: short (class E-F) intermediate (class F-H) long (class G-H) interstellar (class G-I) The short, intermediate and long seems to refer to the period of the comet. The smallest comet I've seen so far was 1.622 kilotons (class E), the largest was 763.089 kilotons (class I). A class I comet cheated onto the KSC:

@The Doodling Astronaut I have two questions: Are resource converters and mining drills allowed? I guess not because then you could visit arbitrarily many asteroids. Is it required to have a commnet connection to the KSC when landing for the celestial body to count? Suppose I land on an insterstellar comet but I'm out of reach of the antenna range when I land on it. That is possible because you still have reduced control with the standard settings (you can only use only full throttle and pointing to the directions supported by the sas module).

You can try to quickly spin the ship along the axis of travel when you enter the atmosphere retrogradely. This way your ship is spin-stabilized and you might slow down fast enough without flipping over.

I don't know why your parachute did not work. But you can try entering the atmosphere at a shallower angle to slow down more. You could also try turning your craft 180 degrees before entering the atmosphere if it is also stable in that direction. With the pointy end first you will slow down less than with the flat end first.

I found a peak of eternal light. I no longer think that they are overpowered. "Launch zones" and "landing zones" are also hard to find near the poles. You're right. Ike can be seen from near the poles but is lower than the sun on the horizon. The position I found is the following:

You described the scoring system very precisely and well structured. You rarely see that in the first post for a challenge. Well done! I especially like that you put the reasoning for the scoring in spoiler tags. I think the scoring is well balanced, if anything I'd say that the eternal peaks of lights are overpowered especially since they will also get the polar bonus. If such points exist I think they will score the highest. You could also make clear if you have to consider Ike eclipses for the eternal peaks of light.

I have done mission profiles like this. I think 'reusable' describes this concept best. I know of no special terms such as SSTO. I also like spacecraft that are completly reusable. With two stages I managed to do a grand tour while leaving a stage on Eve. In total I used 4 stages on the grand tour mission and 5 stages on the 100 Kerbals to Eve mission getting all stages back to Kerbin even all the Eve stages. The extra stages are because I did not intially plan to recover the grand tour lower stage from Eve and because I had to launch an additional adapter for the 100 Kerbals mission due to a design mistake. But in principle these two missions could be performed with three stages. The trick with Eve was to launch from the highest point and to do a suborbital catching maneuver. Without that it is just barely possible to do an SSTO on Eve.

One tip: In the newest version 1.9.1 you can set your position on the surface using the Alt + F12 cheat menu. HyperEdit is no longer needed for that.

I think if you switch off the motor in the settings of the rover wheels, they would be allowed.

I have designed a new Laythe lander that has 3 stages. It can be launched in two parts and can be assembled in orbit. I The bottom part also comes with some RCS fuel and thrusters for deorbiting in Laythe orbit. With this Laythe lander getting to orbit is faster and easier than with the previous version. I marked with yellow lines how the staging works. The ascent vehicle for the lower stage can be used to dock the parts together. The craft files on KerbalX: Laythe-Lander-Part-1 and Laythe-Lander-Part-2.

I disabled the Kraken drive by placing the solar panels slightly further apart and uploaded the crafts on KerbalX: https://kerbalx.com/EveMaster/Caveman-Tylo-Lander https://kerbalx.com/EveMaster/Caveman-Laythe-Lander I agree with this. I would also wait until 1.10 is released.