camacju

Bill pulls out his standard issue laser welder and wonders why they never read the cargo manifest before?

I completely forgot to post this here! A collaboration between myself and @Ultimate Steve, trying to build and fly the lowest mass stock+DLC grand tour possible. While we didn't quite hit that goal, as there is still quite a bit of mass to be saved, we did take a lot of mass off the previous record.

1.447 ton to Moho by JeDoesStuff

You can also change the vessel type to Debris or DroppedPart and pick it up that way

Here's a challenge for exactly this. People have gone way beyond just one lap of Kerbin. Here's another for flying all the way around Earth. This took me 59 hours but luckily I could put on time warp and let autopilot fly while I did something else in the background.

Eve in 4 tons. 3996 kg without pilot or cargo, 4061 kg by this thread's rules. @Alpaca Z The central trick of this mission is the use of a ladder to effectively ignore a kerbal's mass and drag. By the rules of this thread as they are now, this should be legal, but an official ruling on this specific trick would be nice.

What are the rules for drag reduction techniques? It's possible to SSTO on Jupiter with stock parts and all the aero tricks in the book, but I don't think it fits with what you're thinking.

The issue was that it wasn't a simple grand tour. Even something like designing the structure connecting the landers to the main craft was a puzzle that required several days, and we still didn't get the optimal end point as we stopped on something that would be relatively user friendly.

At the core it's really similar to the low mass Jool 5 that I already did, I guess it's up to you to decide where it fits better (you're the challenge manager after all) but please remember to also credit Ultimate Steve (: about that... There's actually a fair amount of improvement in the mission. Once we got it below 8 tons the primary focus was to preserve our sanity while flying it. We possibly could have gotten it below 7 tons but this already took nine months and I'm unsure if the maximally optimized version would ever be finished.

For the past nine months I've been working with @Ultimate Steve on a grand tour mission: This doesn't quite make it on the low mass leaderboard, but I think it's pretty cool regardless.

I think launch clamp trickery should be banned because someone is going to just start in interplanetary space and that isn't really fun. You could have the rules say the craft has to start stationary and in contact with the surface of Kerbin, which does allow mountain launches but that's a bit more interesting than just sticking a 1 million km long launch clamp on the craft.

If you're going for a spot on the table then the crafts are gonna be light enough to not need KJR. Autostrut is perfectly fine for anything here. Actually, a lot of the time, you will want to not use autostrut, for example with DLC propellers. Yes, at least that's what I've been using

For the record, you don't need to use craft file editing to align the Spider engine thrust and the kerbal. All you need to do is get close enough with angle snap turned off, and use the engine gimbal to compensate for any imbalance. Edit: I'm pretty sure we cannot allow all forms of craft file editing, because you can get negative fuel in a fuel tank and that makes a mockery of this whole challenge. I would err on the side of no craft editing, and if there's any doubt, have a requirement to show the in-game construction method that was used.

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Nice work!