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So, you didn't even bother watching a 4 minute long video? If you're not interested in the results, why post these challenges at all? I might have been using physical time warp. I might have sped up the footage to spare my viewers 20 minutes of me flying in straight lines. You don't know because you did not watch it. Next time, before you start throwing stones, make sure you are actually correct, will you? Please point me to the passage in your original post with the rule that you get your flight time multiplied by 3. I based my score on the following rule, from your own OP: No mention of any points multiplier there. If this is not what you meant, please update your top post. For the record: I will not participate in any of your future challenges. You've made it abundantly clear that you do not appreciate my submissions.

My submission: It's a variant of the craft from my screenshot. I launched my craft vertically from the launchpad and took Valentina and two tourists on a flight with a speed of about 1500 m/s. Halfway through the flight I turned around and flew back to the KSC where I landed vertically on the runway. This is an Impossible mode submission; from 01:31 to 14:40 my craft was faster than an SR-71. Points: Kerballed (+5) Tourists (+10) Landed intact (+15) VTOL craft (+30) 3 minutes extra fast flight (+3) Total: 63 points.

That's fair. Thanks for the clarification. Not using any mods or AeroGUI (which can be found under the Alt-F12 menu) does not impact the performance of my craft: And a suggestion: you could add another mode to your list of modes, by referring to the X-15. Its top speed was about 2000 m/s. That might be a better fit for Impossible mode.

I've only just completed this mission, and I found it one of the hardest things I've ever done in KSP, even with DLC parts. The problem with not using ISRU is that Eve atmospheric entry is much harder as your craft is very heavy fully fueled. I've seen a few videos of fully reusable Eve landers that did not use DLC, but I don't know if there are any out there that do not use ISRU.

I agree with the general point that "no mods" can be a reasonable condition for a challenge. At the same time, if a mod demonstrably does not have any bearing on the challenge, I believe it is unreasonable to forbid it. I also maintain that "not using a mod" is different from "not having a mod installed". If I do not use, say, Hyperedit or MechJeb even though I have it installed, it does not influence my submission for the challenge in any way. I'm willing to work with the OP to resolve the issue. However, I am not going to uninstall my mods, nor am I willing to create an entire unmodded install just for this challenge. I'd like to ask the OP to reconsider their "no mods" rule and replace it by something like "no use of mods that enable cheating. Use of mods that only display information allowed".

Today I planted a flag on Eve, using a fully recoverable lander and without using ISRU. This flight was part of my "Leave Nothing but Bootprints" campaign, that aims to plant a flag everywhere in the stock Kerbol system while recovering all craft and not using ISRU. After landing on, and lifting off from, Eve, I then landed my lander back at the KSC. In support of this mission I also sent a tanker to Eve to refuel my lander, which only carried just enough fuel to go from low Eve orbit to Eve's surface and back to low Eve orbit. Due to a design error I've yet to land my tanker: it carries an excess of oxidizer in a tank that shifts the center of gravity so far forward that the craft is unflyable inside Kerbin's atmosphere. The tanker is equipped with fuel drains, the idea being to use them to drain the oxidizer, but I put these drains in the wrong place. For the moment, the tanker has been parked in Low Kerbin Orbit, waiting for a repair mission to install the missing fuel drains. More pictures here: https://imgur.com/a/1AD3u40.

As @camacju said, I'm not going to delete my mods for this challenge. It's not as if this is the Caveman challenge, where running completely stock actually matters. Besides, I only used KER, and that only to display temperatures.

I don't really have the patience to fly for 10+ minutes in a straight line, but this craft can easily complete the challenge on Impossible mode:

That's a great idea for a challenge! I've done IVA Mun and Duna missions before, with a stock cockpit and the GUI on. With GUI off it's an entirely new level of difficulty. I'm tempted to try it, but I'm currently heavily invested in a different and very difficult KSP challenge (plant a flag at sea level on Eve with a fully reusable craft and no ISRU) so I don't know if I have the motivation to play even more KSP than I've been doing already for the past couple of days. For an extra challenge, you could try an SRB only Mun landing from IVA. although I'm not sure that is even feasible.

Thanks for the clarification! The only ruling on this that I could find was the following, from your top post: "All engines must fire at liftoff; no thrust limiter funny business. " Perhaps this is because I am not a native English speaker, but I wasn't quite sure how to interpret "funny business". I think that in some cases, adjusting the thrust limiter in flight should be allowed, such as to throttle down only the center engine in a Delta IV Heavy recreation.

Agreed. The only mission where Rapiers are actually useful is a Laythe landing. Everywhere else the Rapier is just so much dead weight. SSTOs are cool and challenging to build but they are by no means practical.

Yeah, I thought of (ab)using xenon as well. I might look into that, just to see how far you can go that way. What is your stance on using a high ISP engine such as the NERV as sustainer and burn it at 1% thrust at liftoff? Since its efficiency at sea level is very low running it at full thrust would just be a waste of fuel.

This sounds like fun! I'm off work tomorrow and I might give this challenge a go. Just to clarify (I guess the answer will be "no" as it would make the challenge trivial): Is a craft that uses engine parts that include propellant allowed to drop these parts? In particular, SRBs and the Twin Boar, can they be used and dropped?

My unpopular opinion: MechJeb is overrated. Occasionally I use its CoM / CoL indicators to troubleshoot an airplane that decides to stop being an airplane but that's about it. As to going to Minmus: getting an encounter with Minmus is easy if your initial LKO orbit is in the same orbital plane as Minmus' orbit. The easy way to reach such an orbit is to launch into equatorial LKO, select Minmus as the target and burn anti-normal at the ascending node (or normal at the descending node) until the inclination of your orbit with respect to Minmus' is zero. After that, planning your trans-Minmus trajectory works exactly the same as planning a trans-Munar trajectory.

I've landed on every planet and moon that you can stand on in the stock game and returned to Kerbin. I also did a grand tour and a Jool-5. I've also "landed" on Jool itself, by which I mean descend a probe into the atmosphere under parachute until it reaches an altitude of -250m and explodes. My goal is to one day also "land" on Jool with a Kerballed craft and return to Kerbin but I haven't managed to do that yet. A while ago I started a new campaign I call "Leave Nothing but Bootprints", with the aim of planting a flag on every planet and moon and return to Kerbin, only using fully reusable craft and no ISRU. In that campaign I have since landed on and returned from the Mün, Minmus, Gilly, Ike, Duna, Dres, Laythe, Bop and Poll with SSTO spaceplanes, and on Vall and Eeloo using space shuttles with flyback boosters. For this campaign I'm currently in the final stages of designing an Eve SSTO. I've got hardware for Moho and ideas on how to tackle Tylo, but no landings as of yet.

That's from the current version, 1.12.3. It uses 16 propellers driven by electric motors (they're inside the payload bays in front of the NERV engines) to get out of the lower atmosphere. The wings are there for precisely the reason @EpicSpaceTroll139 provides: wings have a lift over drag ratio substantially greater than 1, which implies you can get airborne with engines that have TWR substantially lower than 1. The reason being that lift counteracts gravity but thrust only has to be greater than drag. For reference, the forces acting on an airplane in flight. As you can see, lift counteracts the force af gravity while thrust counteracts drag. My craft (which, incidentally, has a mass of 320 tons) cannot ascend at much more than about 15 degrees above the horizontal at Eve sea level under prop power. Moreover, Eve has a much denser atmosphere than Kerbin, so a wing will generate a lot more lift on Eve than on Kerbin. In fact, this craft is only barely able to fly in Kerbin's atmosphere. The Big-S delta wing (and the Big-S wing strake even more so) also have internal fuel tanks, so you're saving on fuel tanks as well. Both these wings have the same ratio of mass to wing area (and hence lift) as most other wings in the game, so the added fuel tanks have effectively zero mass.

After many, many, MANY failed attempts I finally succeeded in building an SSTO on Eve. This craft is able to reach Low Eve Orbit from Eve sea level without dropping any stages. It's a pig to fly, and there's definitely room for improvement, but I finally DID IT! Some digging in my archives unearthed this picture from 2 years ago, which was one of my first attempts at building an Eve SSTO. Back then I naively believed that I could easily do this with a slightly modified Space Shuttle. How wrong I was!

I made a low tier SSTO during my lunch break, just to see if I could make the Cessna landing gear work on an SSTO. The result: it is possible, by doing the re-entry upside down, so that the craft shields the landing gear from entry heating.

Question: how many points do I get if I use both wings and parachutes to land my boosters? The idea is to fly the boosters to the droneship as a glider, then open the parachutes when flying over the droneship and land under parachutes. Would this count as a parachute (droneship) landing for 175 points?

Correction: I forgot to subtract the cost of the payload from the cost of the rocket. The payload cost $9450 (three 2.5m ore tanks + 2.5m nose cone), so the revised score is 230 * 1000 / (80005 - 9450) = 3.260.

I don't think this will gain me the top spot in the challenge as SRBs don't lend themselves to pin-point landings, but I like flying solids, so here goes. The Clydesdale Heavy: A Clydesdale core and two Clydesdale boosters. The configuration was studied in real life by Boeing as the SRB-X. Cost of the rocket: $80 005. Points: 2 booster parachute landings on land: 2 x 60 = 120 points Core parachute landing in the ocean: 30 points Upper stage parachute landing on land: 80 points. Total: 230 points. With @swjr-swis's scoring system, my total score becomes 230 * 1000 / 80005 = 2.875.

I'm not sure I fully understand the scoring. First off, there's two different scores for "1st stage parachute (launchpad)", at 125 and 175 points. I suspect the second of these should read "1st stage parachute (droneship)". Secondly, I don't quite understand the score of the OP example mission. The OP mentions that their mission is worth 50 points, and it lands both boosters, the core and the upper stage in the ocean. Did you perhaps forget to count points for one of the stages, or is the intent of the challenge that you do not score any points for landing the boosters, as both Falcon Heavy and Delta IV Heavy count the core stage as their 1st stage? Thirdly, and assuming you do get points for landing the boosters, do you get points for each booster separately, or for both boosters at once? If the latter, what if I simulate being one dronship short and land one booster on a droneship and the other one in the ocean? And finally, since you score points for every stage (except possibly the boosters, as discussed above), could you simply build a rocket with lots of stages to optimize your score? One other question: is it allowed to save the game at stage separation, and load that savegame afterwards to switch to the discarded stage and land it?

Anything that produces electricity is a power source, including underclocked ion engines. Since power sources other than the single Z-400 battery are not allowed, your idea is not allowed under the current rules, and no rules update is necessary. That said, using the KAL-1000 to run components outside their rated performance is a well-known exploit. You can simply choose to not use such an underhanded technique, even in challenges where the rules as written would allow it.

573 kg for the lander + Jeb with parachute: Command chair (50 kg) Two cilindrical tanks (2 x 230 kg) One cubic Octagonal Strut to act as root part (1 kg) 10 Place Anywhere 1 Linear RCS ports (1.3 kg each) 1 Kerbal (45 kg) 1 Personal parachute (4 kg) From test flights I know that this lander is able to go from LKO to Munar surface and back to Kerbin. However, on my actual flight I had some 100 m/s dv to spare in my upper stage so I used that to save a bit of lander fuel. When I returned to Kerbin the lander had 19kg of fuel remaining, which amounts to 340 m/s of vacuum dv. In all, I could have optimized my rocket a little bit further, but at some point it becomes too frustrating to fly because every tiny mistake means the mission is over. So I prefer a bit of margin, if only for my own sanity.

An improvement on my previous attempt, at 10.929 tons including Jeb. Full report: https://imgur.com/a/aWo9A16 Some highlights: My craft in the VAB. Overall design is the same as my previous submission, with a 3 stage launch vehicle. Landed on the Mun. I used a single stage lander, as I found that two of these cylindrical tanks, a command chair and a handful of RCS thrusters have sufficient dv to land on the Mun from Low Kerbin Orbit and make it back to Kerbin. Back in orbit, on the way back to Kerbin. I ran my craft at less than 100% thrust; that way my attitude control thrusters (one on each corner of the craft) could generate thrust and still have room for attitude adjustment. In all, my craft used 10 of the smallest RCS thrusters in the game: 6 clustered together in the center and 4 on the corners of the craft. Landing under parachute. I also experimented with landings without parachute. That turns out to be survivable, if you land in the water. But my craft had sufficient dv to take a parachute with me, so I opted to do so as it would make landing easier.