king of nowhere

oh. i thought you had at least enough ignitions to reach a parking orbit, then launch for the moon. this complicates matters. I still see a couple of possibilities; 1) if your last stage has many ignitions, you can just eject into a high elliptic orbit - any high elliptic orbit - and once there, use your extra deltaV (you have some 500 m/s more than strictly needed) to fix. take advantage of inclination being cheap to adjust in a slow, high apoapsis. I show an example on how to reach Gilly from high elliptic eve orbit, because it's a very similar condition - reaching a moon with high inclination and eccentricity from a constrained orbit you can see on the bottom left I visualized the components of the maneuver. it's made in the high, slow part of the orbit because it's got a lot of radial and normal component, which are cheaper to do when the vessel is moving slow, close to apoapsis. the point is, just fling your vessel in the right direction as the moon is passing by, and use radial/normal components liberally to adjust the encounter. the whole point of this maneuver is that you can use those components and they're relatively cheap when close to apoapsis. in this case I got a gilly intercept with 160 m/s, in rss things are roughly 3 times more expensive, meaning you should be able to get your moon flyby with your 500 m/s. 2) the second option is a lot more professional, but perhaps more boring. it basically involves trial and error. launch many times, at different times, trying to get a repeatable ascent profile to always get into the same inclination. do it until you manage to find the right time to launch to meet the moon at a planar node. then check how long it would take for the moon to pass there. say you see that your lunar injection trajectory takes 3 days; time warp forward, see that the moon passes at the node 6 days later, then reload the game and launch three days later. you have enough freedom with your trans lunar injection that you can fix a difference of a few hours. once you manage to hit a moon planar node at apoapsis, you can also drift for a few orbits until you pass sufficiently close to the moon.

as far as getting into the same plane, you can easily just reach the moon when it passes through the orbital node. just wait in earth orbit until the moon is in the right place to reach by burning on a node. like this as you can see, i'm in an equatorial orbit, I'm just reaching the moon while it crosses the equator. you'll be coming to it with a high inclination, meaning higher intercept speed, but the moon is in high orbit, so fixing inclination is going to be cheap - and it is included in the intercept deltaV. I got 150 m/s intercept speed, so it wasn't expensive. and it doesn't require any additional ignition that you wouldn't have to perform already. it's not the most elegant solution, but it does work.

Circumnavigation of OPM Hale. A tiny moonlet, there isn't much technical side to it. But the view is astounding

Part 3: Through sleet and Hale Having just circumnavigated Ovok, I can't skip Hale. The terrain is a lot harder, but the view is even better.

Part 3: Small, boring missions launching missions to all the other targets is fairly straightforward and not very interesting, but it must be done The Eve mission

on eve you can use the terrain glitches of the poles to go below ground. but on eve you have water at sea level, including underground. as far as i know, in all other planets you instantly die

italy

right now, I have 4 missions I'm playing. the first is my rss+kerbalism grand tour. it's still my main mission. the second is an elcano on wal. the third is this one the fourth is a bunch of elcanos on minor planets. so, my time is split there, and progress is slow. additionally, next monday the school starts; being a teacher, I will have a lot less free time. updates will be slow. but they will come

four of those ion engines will be dropped before eeloo, since rtgs alone won't have enough electricity to power more than 1. I did put those extra ions, with the gigantors solar arrays that power them, on the first tanks that will be discarded. but the burn will start well outside of eeloo's SoI. days before, if needed. It's not like I can get any meaningful Oberth effect anyway, except in the few minutes I'll be close to Eeloo, so burning in solar orbit really makes no difference.

Part 10: Make Jupiter small again: the other moons After Io, the remaining three moons do not present particular problems. Cylinder then returns to refuel on Iapetus. 10.1) More Europa 10.2) Ganymede and Callisto 10.3) Iapetus the convenient Bugs compilation updated

they should not cost that crapton of money. 275k for an upgrade of a part costing 4000 by itself? maybe it's supposed to be a one-off cost to purchase the upgrade, but for some reason it's being counted incorrectly

I have many instances of nervs displaying deltaV correctly. sometimes the game gets it right, sometimes not. I never figured out how and why. So I just do the calculation manually. Really, the rocket equation is not difficult to use. It takes a minute to check total mass, propellant mass, and calculate a deltaV. It's a lot faster and more reliable than trying to get the game to work properly.

the report is my attempt at playing this challenge. how else would I report my results otherwise? first post also includes a link to your thread.

caveman challenge. at high difficulty levels, it takes a while before you get wheels, and you desperately need any science you can get.

Part 2: Money is time The Eeloo and Jool missions are launched, using a lot of xenon to make faster trips. Eeloo mission

I started a report for my attempt

Part 1: Time is money Farming money and science, to unlock half the tech tree and earn a few millions in a week To this purpose, launch a dozen Mun missions simultaneously in day 1

It's my fault, I admit it. I already have 3 long challenges running, but I stumbled over the speedrun challenge and couldn't resist picking it up. As the name says, the purpose is to complete all objectives in career as fast as possible That's quite a lot of stuff to do, but most of that is irrelevant because it can be done simultaneously. The slowest thing is the mission to Eeloo. Now, I know from having done it in my DREAM BIG mission, it is possible to make the Eeloo-Kerbin trip in one year with 10 km/s deltaV. So I figured, a fast ship with lots of xenon can have 30 km/s. 10 km/s to eject from Kerbin, 10 km/s to capture around Eeloo because that kind of trajectory will have a tremendous intercept speed, then 10 km/s to return to Kerbin followed by hard aerocapture, it is possible to make this mission in less than 2 years. Similar considerations go for Jool; Jool is a bit closer than Eeloo, but it requires more stuff to do once you're there. Everything else can be done while waiting for the two years of those missions. As for farming the science required - which includes ion engines and rtgs - it can be accomplished by biome-mining Mun. I bet it can be done in a week. So here's the objective. Starting career, land everywhere and return in two years.

it's certainly a bug, but i don't know anything more

you got the wrong title. you are not asking about ascent profile. you are asking about inclination. and for inclination, you've got to launch when your launch site is crossing the plane of moon's orbit, and you have to keep your rocket in that plane. which is almost impossible to do without autopilot.

oberth effect. yes, I was also surprised when i learned just how strong oberth effect can be

really, how many people can be expected to participate in any of those categories? there's just no point to having all those leaderboards. a single one for any nonstandard setting is fine

it cures stress. it reduces stress, by a tiny tiny amount. the planner in the VAB/SPH isn't always reliable. but the effect is so tiny, if you have a minimalistic ship you probably won't even notice it. the TV works if you have a luxury ship with all comforts. in those conditions, an average kerbal will accumulate roughly 3% stress per kerbal year. Which is more or less what the TV cures. individual kerbals have different levels of stress resistance, within some random variability. If a kerbal is above average, he can stay indefinitely on a ship with best comfort and TV without ever getting stress. a kerbal below average will still grow stress over time, even with TV. So, it's very unlikely to make a difference in most missions. Still, it consumes very little power and it costs nothing to leave it on, so unless you have limited fuel supply, you should still use it

the mun alone is enough for science farming if you get most biomes. i got early science by farming the ksc, in less than one hour. then i got some early money with some fast contracts, like test on the launchpad or run an eva near the ksc. then i took a dozen rescue contracts for kerbals stranded in low orbit. I sent mun landers to collect them, so each kerbal collected was immediately sent to mun. this way, i had seven or eight mun missions on their way by the end of day one. by day 3 most of them were returned, each returned vehicle gave 500 science and a big cash influx for the rescue mission. by day 5 I had farmed enough science to get ion engines and rtgs, and enough money to send a xenon-heavy eeloo mission with 30 km/s deltaV.

I think kraken drives being banned does not even need to be specified. it's a general assumption for any kind of competitive challenge. I started this, aiming to make it in less than 2 years. the trick is getting enough xenon to launch an eeloo mission on a high energy trajectory. actually, i've done that too - science and money farmed in 5 days, could have been as little as 3 had I optimized better -, and the main issue is that the game does not recognize intercept when you're on a kerbol escape trajectory. other potential issue is that with many missions simultaneously, some long ion engine burns may overlap. well, that just require some planning. I'm sure one and a half years would also be feasible enough, but some limits I'm just not interested in pushing