ralanboyle

This on is simple: Put this lightest ship you can into orbit without shedding parts. No need to land. Weight is shown in the VAB including fuel. Orbit is PE above 70km. You can use the stage button to trigger events but you cannot detach any parts. Super simple but not super easy!

Thanks!

Moving onto the Panther. I got 104km high and fell at 1139m/s with my single engine design. I found that multi engines had a lot of trouble with consistent airflow at high altitude. I think maybe bigger is not better with the panther.

Ah yes, that certainly is glitch exploitation! While it would be good to explicitly outlaw it, I think its generally assumed. Alright. I repeated the numbers without engine clipping.

Alright, here is my Whiplash run. Using 10 engines she got up to 1618m/s in a dive and up to 158km high. I'm sure she can go faster but not sure about higher.

I have not found the number of engines to be the biggest factor in jet top speed. I might be wrong but I doubt the winning ships will be enormous.

Game on... I haven't made videos yet because there will be a lot of iterative improvement but so far I'm getting about 150km and 1450m/s with the Whiplash. So there is a starting point for that one. I'd love to get a good competition going on this one.

I can't tell if landing at Dawn helped or not but I got it done. I had to persevere through a pretty big range of glitches, but in the end I believe I got every biome on Laythe. This mission was fun aside from the glitches, so maybe I'll run it again somewhere else. Myabe... Poles, Hills, Shores, Shallows, Ocean, Mealoficious Rex.

Weird, I'll try a dawn landing.

Welp, I made a ship that can get to Laythe, land, and then circumnavigate the planet in airplane mode before returning to orbit and then coming home. It works on water and land so I should be able to complete this challenge. Unfortunately, the game is having trouble recognizing where the ground is on Laythe, so when I land 9/10 times it slightly clips into the ground and crashes. The other 1/10 times I can land but then the Kerbal cant move around in EVA because they are floating above the ground. Then the plane clips into the ground again when the Kerbal boards. I can get around most of this by landing in the water and then driving to land but the landing gear immediately clips into the sand and causes a crash. Frustrating, but I guess I'm gonna have to wait to run the challenge.

I like this idea a lot. My issue is that biome maps aren't available yet (that I know of). The smaller moons are fairly easy without maps but that's no fun. I'd like to try Laythe but I can't plan the trip without having a good list of landing locations.

@astrobond is correct. I used small radial decouplers attached to the fuel tank. Then long strusses. At the end I attached the heat shields and rotated them. I placed them at a point where the strusses would be protected by the lower heat shields and angled them so that the drag they create would increase positive stability in the craft, just like dihedral on an airplane.

Alright, I went for 8. Come Fly with Me. I decided to make a super simple plane that would work well on both Kerbin and Duna and fly it back using an interstage for the transfers to and from Duna. Since I don't trust the dV read outs in the VAB I massively overbuilt most of the stages. Oh well. Here is an uncut 10x video of my flight, including the mistakes. Enjoy.

Alright Bois (and Grls?) I recently finished the built-in KSP2 missions by completing the "Under Pressure" mission. Now I'm feeling disheartened with the lack of direction. What else can we add? What game style challenges could lay beyond? Following the style of missions provided in game; What missions do you imagine following "Under Pressure?"

I just completed this mission. I did not get any kerbals out of their chairs. Mission still completed.

I'll go ahead and pile on with my own "Under Pressure" mission report. My decent stage ended up looking pretty similar since I also used drag petals! The biggest hardship was keeping my part count low enough to stave off the kraken. I got away with only a few glitches.

So then I figured, why not just strap a missile to my SSTO and knock out Jeb and Val in one flight? At first it was a tiny missile, but that's no fun, so I gave her a big-ass rocket.

While Val doesn't specifically call for an SSTO, I decided to play it as an SSTO challenge. In the history of plans for SSTOs, one word has characterized them above all others: Biplane.

Hey @Aeolica, That's a great looking plane. I love the radial engine design, I'll have to try that on one of my own. Unfortunately, crash landing in the hills disqualifies the flight from this challenge. Keep flying, and if you can get it back to KSC in reusable condition, It'll take the current top spot.

Alright, I got my bird up to 90Ts of payload. That's about as big as I can go in Mid Landing gear and the bigger ones keep glitching. I am happy that it is controllable all the way down instead of spinning on reentry.

Ahh, my bad.

That's a pretty epic plane! I'll have to try a big plane, though I have had problems with the large landing gear being glitched. Cool plane, let's see it fly!

Cargo Spaceplanes! How much mass can you deliver to orbit using a Single Stage Spaceplane? The Rules: Your craft must take off and land on the KSC runways. It must return as a reusable spaceplane, which means it can't leave stages/droptanks/etc behind. Ablative heat shields, and SRBs are considered reusable resources and are acceptable as long as they remain attached. Use of fairings is also acceptable. You must deploy your payload in orbit. Scoring: Your score is equal to your payload mass delivered to orbit. Get a shot of the payload in the VAB, showing its mass. Show it being unloaded in orbit, and show your bird back at KSC. There will be grace for those who aren't great at landing. Go ahead and submit even if you miss the runway or break a part. For those new to HTOL SSTOs, I've done a baseline run with a 1T payload in order to show the basic process.

Man, @Audaylon, That's a great looking run and I love that bird. Question; Where do you store your fuel? The cooler doesn't hold enough for this run and I don't see any tanks, though it is hard to tell. Do you have a couple tiny ones clipped inside? No rule against it, I'm just curious since I haven't figured out hot to make a ship as sleek as that.

After quite a bit of tinkering I discovered that the cockpit @Audaylon used is faster than the shock cone/probe core I was using even though it is heavier. I guess it has less drag. So, I switched to that and shed some weight. No doubt, his bird is faster than mine but I optimized my flight path pretty well and shot a 1:56. (I was a second or two faster but I forgot to change the timer to MET until the end!)