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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.

My process was to first build a 2 stage vehicle with approximately equal dv for both stages (which came to about 20 - 22 tons if I remember correctly), and then to experiment with adding a third stage. For me it's very little science and a lot of trial and error. That said, I think the best way to save mass in your launch vehicle is to build your payload (i.e., in this case your spacecraft / Mun lander) as light as possible.

Really? I've tried many times, but never successfully. And getting back from the Mun, no less! How did you do it, if you are willing to share your secrets with us?

Thank you! My earlier experiments with angling the Puff seemed to indicate that it does not matter, so I did not look into it any further. However, your comment has made me check again, and it turns out you can increase dv by about 1.5% by optimizing the Puff angle. That said, I did not go overboard with optimizing my launch vehicle: the bulk of the mass savings came from optimizing my spacecraft and lander. For instance, I suspect that there is quite a bit of mass to be saved by optimizing the staging sequence. Or find a way to not need a heatshield (which makes up 10% of the overall spacecraft mass in LKO) or use a single stage Mun lander (which saves a command chair, which makes up 5% of the spacecraft mass).

My submission: 15.888 tons. Only monoprop, no electrics used at all. Full report: https://imgur.com/a/Y5fxohp On the launchpad (sorry for cutting of the borders. Nothing went as planned with KSP today, including the fact that it is supposed to run in 1920 x 1080 and not in 1920 x 1200 as it did today). My spacecraft. I used Munar orbit rendezvous with both lander and command module based on a command chair. Getting from one chair to the other was more than a bit stressful as Valentina was not wearing her EMU to save weight. Landed on the Mun, flag planted Kerbin landing Edit: slightly different overall mass. My earlier reported mass was 15.803 tons, the corrected mass is 15.88 tons, including Valentina. Due to my optimization process I have a lot of different versions of the same launcher, and I inadvertently used an old one. Main difference between the versions is that the new version has a more optimized payload fairing, which made it a bit lighter, and one extra Puff engine as the old version was slightly underpowered.

I just completed a test flight of my own Easter Kerbal challenge: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/207791-easter-kerbal-challenge/. I delivered all 5 Kerbals to the helipad in 8 minutes 19, which gives me a score of 401 according to the rules of the challenge. There's definitely room for improvement as I am not a very good helo driver. So why not give it a try yourself and see if you can do better? I haven't been flying many helicopters in KSP but I started to appreciate their versatility when doing the Chernobyl challenge recently, which turned out to be a lot of fun: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/186284-breaking-ground-chernobyl-liquidation-challenge/

It's time for the Kerbal Space Center annual Easter Hunt! Rather than eggs, the objective is to collect all the Easter Kerbal volunteers who have positioned themselves in various places around the KSC. You must deliver them to the helipad on the roof of the administration building in time for the annual KSC Easter Brunch. Each Easter Kerbal delivered to the helipad gains you a number of points: The first Easter Kerbal delivered is worth 60 points; The second Easter Kerbal delivered is worth 120 points; The third Easter Kerbal delivered is worth 180 points; The fourth Easter Kerbal delivered is worth 240 points; The fifth Easter Kerbal delivered is worth 300 points. These points are cumulative, so if you, e.g., deliver 4 Easter Kerbals, you gain 60 + 120 + 180 + 240 points = 600 points. Each second of challenge time loses you one point. We will be using universal time (UT) to determine this: note the UT at the start of your craft's takeoff run and the UT when the last Kerbal delivered steps onto the helipad. The difference between the two counts as the challenge time. Most points wins! It's up to you how many Easter Kerbals you deliver. Choosing not to deliver all Easter Kerbals may even be a good strategy, if collecting one takes more time than the number of points you gain from them. Notes: You may, if you so wish, use more than one craft to deliver your Kerbals. In that case, the starting time is the UT at the start of your first craft's takeoff run. The Easter Kerbals may walk around (to, e.g., walk towards your craft landed nearby) but they may only leave the building they started on via your craft. No dropping to the ground or using their parachutes. What type of craft you use is entirely up to you. I tested the challenge with a helicopter but any craft or combination of crafts is fine. To enter the challenge, download the save game with the Easter Kerbals in position at the following link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1QsAufkCKMIKspyg-bcrFfmCeduz0N2qX?usp=sharing Rules: To keep the playing field as level as possible, please limit yourself to Stock + DLC parts only. Visual mods are fine, as are mods that only add information such as KER and MechJeb. No excessive parts clipping, cheats (this includes mods like HyperEdit or Vessel Mover) or Kraken drives. Submissions: Either post a video of your flight, or a series of screenshots. Please show at least the following: Each of your craft at takeoff, with the universal time (UT) at takeoff Your craft picking up each Easter Kerbal All Easter Kerbals delivered to the helipad, standing on the helipad. To avoid confusion, don't show any Kerbals except the Easter Kerbals. Also show the universal time the moment you deliver your final Easter Kerbal.

I've finished the mission with a score of 1469 points, which I calculated as follows: I reached a distance of 150 meters from the reactor at 01:39 mission time. This gives me ceil((300 - 99) / 2) = 101 points for the first phase. I delivered the rover to the roof at 02:04, and cleared the reactor by 150 meters at 02:17. I therefore spent 38 seconds in the vicinity of the reactor, giving me (120 - 38) * 4 = 328 points for the second phase. I landed my helicopter on the KSC runway, for 40 points. I cleared the entire roof of debris for 10 * 100 = 1000 points. My rover is fully stock, with no DLC parts used. I used an elevon as a front scoop and operated it using its deployment controls. The maximum deploy angle of the part is 30 degrees but by alternating the Deploy direction the effective range can be doubled to 60 degrees. My helicopter uses Breaking Ground parts for the rotor; otherwise it is stock. @AkagiThank you for bringing this challenge to my attention! The OP hasn't logged in on the forum since 2020, but don't let that stop you from completing the challenge, which I found very interesting (albeit a bit difficult, probably because of changes to the physics engine). If you want to I'm willing to review your submission for you.

I've tried: does not seem to be compatible with the current version of the game. It's very easy to break one or more of your wheels or to get stuck with your rover somewhere, and the Oskar-B tanks tend to get stuck at the boundaries between roof parts. A pity, really, because I quite like the idea behind this challenge. Edit: No, it is possible after all. You have to be careful to keep your wheels in one piece but it can be done! Will post my attempt when my delivery plane is ready.

I think the OP wants you to fly through the other tunnel. From the OP: The tunnel that you flew through is much bigger than that.

One thing I found is that a straight in landing (i.e., fly straight to the runway and land) can be difficult, as it is hard to control the energy (speed and altitude) of your craft. What I often do when flying Shuttles is fly parallel to the runway (at speeds of 400 - 600 m/s or so) then turn around and land from the other side. This has two advantages: 1. A high-g turn is an excellent way of losing speed 2. You can go a bit farther or turn a bit earlier depending on your speed and altitude. The higher your speed and / or altitude, the further past the runway you can fly before making your turn. This is a standard maneuver in aviation, where it is called flying the pattern (or circuit). Here's me, landing my Gemini shuttle in this fashion (and please disregard the booster landing - I had to land it upside down due to a design error):

My submission. Craft is a variant of my submission for the Windrider challenge. Speed inside the tunnel: 97.4 m/s. Craft size: 2.9 m long, 2.5 m wide, 1.0 m tall. Bonus clip (probably a gatecrasher entry as this is not a craft): Speed through tunnel: 35.9 m/s

Thanks! To be fair I was a bit lucky with this run - earlier test runs had shown that 0 meters altitude was virtually impossible without damaging the bottom fins. The VTOL idea came about because after designing the craft I had no idea where and how to attach the landing gear; doing a vertical takeoff took care of the problem quite effectively.

Fun little challenge! My submission: Lowest altitude reached: 0 meters above the water.

Does this qualify? I did use some wing panels as lift elements, but it does not have wings protruding from the body. Part clipping was kept to a minimum.

I think you might be trying to get more precision than necessary. For the stability of your constellation the orbital period is much more important than the exact AP en PE. If AP and PE are not exactly the same the satellite will be seen to wobble back and forth a little bit as seen from Kerbin, but if the orbital period is off, your satellite will slowly drift out of position. That being said, a trick to get a nice circular orbit is to first get the period right with AP and PE perhaps a couple of 100 meters from each other, and then burn in the radial direction exactly between AP and PE. If you burn radial in when moving from PE to AP or radial out when going from AP to PE the result will be an orbit with the same period but lower eccentricity. It is adviced though to do these small adjustment burns with RCS. If you look closely at my April Fools video, just before deploying the payload you'll see me burn radial in with the RCS system for exactly this reason. Are you aware that you can put the RCS system in a more precise mode? If you press Caps Lock (assuming you're playing on PC) you'll notice that the little pitch, yaw and roll indicators turn blue rather than orange, and each "puff" of the RCS system results in a much smaller adjustment.

That was me, thank you! Are you willing to tell us what you're struggling with? If you want, perhaps I can give you some tips.

You showed me some of your prototypes a while back, and that was one of the reasons I started experimenting with rotating nacelles. It took me a lot of experimentation to get my shuttle to work right. There's a bit of an alignment issue, but I've found that locking the hinges helps quite a bit. You can see the nacelles on my Shuttle bounce around a bit during the runway landing - I was flying with unlocked hinges at that point. Other than that, I've found that the G11 hinge, clipped inside the pod at the pod's center of gravity and aligned with the thurst vector of the pod works best. I've seen youtube videos of craft with Vector engines on hinges, but I don't have much experience with pods with that much thrust.

Thank you! The only reason I went west is that this is for the April Fools badge, and doing so would be sufficiently foolish. It also served as a demonstration that this shuttle can do a roll program - my Gemini shuttle with which I originally did this challenge loses control if you try. For a retrograde mission it is much easier to rotate your craft on the pad so that it is heading the other way from the start. You're right that going west takes more dv (some 400 m/s if I am not mistaken). And you're also right that I should have reduced thrust from the main engines near the end of the ascent. I think the best way to do this would be to bind the thrust limiter of the engines to a custom control axis. That way you have a separate throttle for these engines, making them easier to control. I used that for the orientation of the propulsion pods - their orientation is bound to right control / right shift, just like the main throttle is bound to left control / left shift.

Here's my April Fool's Shuttle mission. Flown according to the provisional flight plan laid out in my previous post. Space Jester is a variant of my hitherto unpublished Osprey Shuttle project, which had the aim of building a Shuttle suitable for landing safely on Duna. Like its real-world namesake that I used as inspiration, it has two rotating propulsion pods to combine VTOL and normal atmospheric flight. It is much easier to operate on Duna than any other spaceplane design I've tested. Some flight notes: Being a Buran type Shutle design with main engines attached to the external tank it is a handful to fly, especially when the external tank is almost empty. I was unable to plan my free return trajectory ahead of time because MechJeb's landing indicator was acting up. As a result I've had to fly the Munar flyby, re-entry and landing half a dozen times before I was able to land at the KSC. During re-entry I had to rotate the pods engine-first to prevent the nose cones on these pods from burning up. My plan was to keep the pod rotation a secret until the landing but that was not to be, unfortunately.

Consider me inspired! I will do the STS-1b mission on the commander level with my new Shuttle design, Space Jester. Space Jester is a Buran-type Shuttle design with some additional features from various American programs. To honour the occasion, some rather silly, unnecessarily challenging and most unwise maneuvers will be performed on the way. Here's the provisional flight plan: Lift off and do an 180 degree roll program Enter retrograde equatorial LKO and deploy fuel pod Do a free return trajectory around the Mun timed so that the Shuttle will re-enter near the KSC Land on the VAB roof Take off from the VAB roof Land on the runway

The rules of what constitutes a valid Shuttle are pretty relaxed. I've made 2 different inline Shuttles (i.e., Shuttles on top of the launcher) and one that is hard to describe other than "wraparound". You might want to have a look at what others have built: there have been some pretty creative designs. Please be aware, though, that most Shuttle missions require you to deploy a payload of some sort, and those are generally easier with a bigger cargo bay. I'm not saying the missions are impossible with a Mk2 craft but you'll have to get creative to make your payloads small enough to fit. I'll leave it to @sturmhauke to judge whether a Shuttle inside a payload fairing such as the real world Atlas V / X-37B counts as a valid Shuttle design. My "wraparound" Gemini Shuttle design. Foreground: Gemini Shuttle; background, Gemini Shuttle plus launch vehicle. One of my inline designs: Solid Rocket Shuttle, powered solely by solid rocket motors.

Are you aware of the long-running Space Shuttle challenge on this very forum? See Variants of all missions you propose are part of that challenge.

A relay antenna with a power equivalent or better than the RA-2 relay antenna from the stock game A way of controlling their attitude that does not consume propellants, in order to prolong its useful life A way of generating its own power An RCS system for fine attitude and orbit control A liquid fuel engine for bigger orbit adjustments Systems 5 & 6 should have a combined delta-v of 200 m/s or better In addition to the 200 m/s maneuvering delta-v, satellites should have enough propellant reserves to dispose of the satellite in a graveyard orbit at least 100 km above keostationary orbit at the end of its useful life Cost per satellite should not exceed $5000, while the cost of the launch vehicle - excluding satellites - should not exceed $10000. Please be aware that we are also looking at other launch providers, as well as the possibility of developing the satellites and launch vehicle in-house. Of course, we will take into consideration your quoted price as well as any additional services you can offer us in our decision whether to grant you the contract.

Qlink, my telecom business, wants you to put some relay satellites in keostationary orbit. Since I don't know which difficulty level you're aiming for, here's three missions for you, in increasing order of difficulty: 1. Put a single satellite in keostationary orbit. 2. Put a constellation of satellites in keostationary orbit. The constellation should consist of at least three satellites that are equidistant around Kerbin. To reduce costs all satellites should be launched on a single rocket. 3. Do 2, but using nothing but solid rocket motors. As to the accuracy of your orbits: inclination should at most be 0.1 degree, PE and AP should be within 1 km of each other and the orbital period T should be within 10 seconds of Kerbin's sidereal rotation period. You'll receive a bonus if inclination is exactly 0 and deviations of PE, AP and T are within 100 meters and 1 second, respectively.