ralanboyle

Solid work as usual. Added to board.

Okay' I have one that's about 215 points without any multipliers. I can't been able to land it yet because: 1. It's really hard to get the details right with a ship this tall in the SPH and 2. I am now completely drunk. I've been on a month long work trip flying red eyes. gonna drink and go to sleeep the be on a normal schedule. see you guys later.

Well there's no wrong way to do math as long as you end up in the right place (not true). Not gonna lie, I'm now about half drunk and just ready to move on. The run looks good to me, congratulations! Your tickets can now be purchased on the OP.

Okay cool, I'm tracking all of that except for why you are adding 4952 of fuel to your recovery value.

I am confused or I don't have enough information to know what you've done here. 58,886 can't be your refurbishment cost because it is more than half the total cost of this SSTO. Your craft uses Nukes so the value of your recovered ship gets divided by 2. We need either: the post mission page showing the recovered value of the ship. Or (since you landed on the runway) a shot of the ship empty of fuel in the hanger.) Then the value of the recovered (or empty) ship will be divided by two, then subtracted from the launch cost. The difference will then be divided by 18. Unless you are hiding a module somewhere, you have 18 paying customers, not 19.

Absolutely, I assumed this is where the challenge would go but I didn't want to give away the goose. Good run. Now I'll have to do a tailsitter. How did you overcome the instability in the tail slide to landing? Did you reverse the control surfaces, or disable them, or just descend really really slowly?

Guys, I am sorry to announce that I forgot to put ladders on Tall Boi 1! Oops, that run is disqualified. Good thing I made Tall Boi 2! It has the most ladders (by far) that I've ever put on a craft. I believe the score ends up at 77.95. I see no reason the design couldn't be extended indefinitely.

Good job @camacju, you now have the lowest price to Duna and the first trip offered to Ike. I will have to revisit this now that there is competition!

Okay, my math works out to +0.6 but I'm not sure if I am doubling the negative then adding 1 correctly. The plane is pretty fun to fly but it is really hard to land. I'm gonna have to download Hanger Extender and get stupid.

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I assume you know to perfectly line up your lift, weight and thrust while in vertical mode. After that its all about finesse! I tried to make a couple more aggressive designs that ultimately proved uncontrollable.

Looks like you need somebody to get this started. Here is an entry that ends up costing 1,349/kerbal.

I'm gonna need to see an example of this.

Okay guys, I'm not gonna take the lead but I am pretty proud of my 11:06 speedrun.

Great run @camacju! I double checked the math and you are correct, sir. Kerbals can now purchase tickets to Minmus for $1657.

If RCS thrusters are used as propulsion they will be awarded the same penalty as all other closed cycle thrusters. Also note, ion drives are listed in the same restriction above. While I appreciate your creativity, the whole point of the restriction is to limit the bias that KSP has toward large/expensive ships. The challenge is not to find loopholes in the rules, it is to get tourists to and from their destination cheaply while accounting for a reasonable spacecraft refurbishment cost. Keep in mind (IRL), to date the only manned orbital spacecraft to ever be reused is the Shuttle, which cost more to refurbish than it cost to build. I left the possibility for you to air-launch from an airbreathing plane because it can be reasonably assumed that the launch vehicle would not need to be completely refurbished after each launch (Pegasus/Virgin Orbit /WhiteKnight).

Yeah yeah, if you want to put that ship on a suborbital trajectory and never close the cycle, I'll give it to you. Once you close cycle, its a rocket.

Nice mission, unfortunately you have overlooked the refurbishment cost outlined in the rules. Both your SSTO and lander use closed cycle engines so your recovered cost must be divided by two. Since you landed both stages at KSC we can just look at your ship in the hanger to get the total cost, and again without fuel to get the cost when empty. Also, correct me if I am wrong but I believe used parachutes are less valuable, so there is cost there. I specifically made the "refurbishment" rule to balance against SSTOs.

Yeah, I made enough changes to this that the ships y'all have built for other "cheap challenges" won't work.

Okay, I sent 17 Tourists to Mun for $3,037. Come on, somebody give me a run for my money... badaboom?

Alright guys, I made two changes to the rules. They are now in the OP. 1. If you are going to refuel or repack chutes, you need to take an engineer (crew of 2). 2. You can submit a craft for multiple destinations without actually flying it to multiple locations. Just show the math. Details in the OP. To get us started, here is a baseline run to Duna. It carries 16 tourists, has a net cost of 106,584, for a single ticket price of 6,661.

Yeah, if you plan to air launch, you'll need to do it high, probably suborbital. I know that is limiting but I don't want to go down the massive mod rabbit hole. The refurbishment cost isn't necessarily supposed to encourage air launching. It is mostly to discourage massive SSTOs, which would clearly dominate.

Alright guys, thanks for the feedback. I've outlawed mined resource recovery. I have addressed the decoupling issue without making a hard rule. I really hate stifling creativity, but you are right about the exploit. If somebody wants to launch a suborbital jet, they could potentially decouple a lander outside the atmosphere and I want to leave options like that open. Or whatever other things I haven't thought of.

very nice, what kind of ascent profile did you use? Apparently i suck at this.

Perfect, I think this will be more competitive. If 20km is possible within your requirements, it'll only be achievable to a very few pilots. The Juno flames out at just over 18km, so it's all inertia after that.