JeDoesStuff

Case and point. Kraken drives are wholly unimpressive to make, and thus making them will not be counted on competitive lists as they completely trivialize the entire game.

I've beaten the record for lightest mission to duna. Here is the video: https://youtu.be/0Mr9A6ujuu0?si=x0ybzZ9eezMU1AZH

I don't know about trojan, but malwarebytes flagged it as malware when I ran a check today. Not entirely sure what this is about but it's weird that at least two people have had this happen

I should really make a video on the caveman challenge, or at least my version, which is setting all the difficulty settings to max. I feel like with what I know now I could get to R&D tier 2 more efficiently, but it's probably just hundreds upon hundreds of contracts.

Current record for this is Bradley Whistance's ancient 7.737 ton submission from 7 years ago, which is incredibly beatable. Please give me some missions to add to this list lol https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1n8eY4omh_zHhwIawUMQayXYKfIoeIkssJcgpl7PPFP0/edit?gid=112104819#gid=112104819

Using the Mun, it is possible to get to anywhere you want using only 850m/s and whatever more you need in corrections. Once you reach Jool, escape trajectory is trivial. Obviously, time is of the essence here, so what would most likely be better is using one Mun assist on the way to eve, then assisting off of eve with slightly more relative velocity than usual, which should allow you to skip one of the Kerbin assists in the usual KEKKJ route. as for escaping from that point, I believe a Tylo assist should be enough, though I think you might need to do more than one Jool assist to properly escape. As for challenge 2, there's a lot of interesting possibilities here. I've had occasions where in the process of setting up an assist, I get some miracle encounter with a different moon I wasn't aiming for. I think what would be best is setting up a gravity assist chain that forces contact with all of the bodies before getting to where you're going, so like passing by Gilly whilst flying by eve. As for time, I doubt this one can be done very quickly, but less than 20 years seems reasonable enough. If you were really dedicated and put some planning in I estimate less than 15 years might be doable. The route for this, I think, would be to use the Mun and Minmus to get to Eve, where you assist (and hopefully grab a Gilly encounter) to get to Moho. Then, by way of Eve again, you assist back up and swing by Kerbin to bring apoapsis closer to Dres. A flyby of Duna and Ike could get you there, and the resultant encounter can set up an assist with Kerbin the next time around to reach Jool. Jool seems like the hardest part to optimize here, since theoretically you could encounter all of the moons in sequence one after another if you're lucky, but more likely than not you're going to need to capture. Lucky, once in the Jool system, it shouldn't take very long to encounter all the moons thanks to shorter orbital periods. Lastly, a direct course to Eeloo can be set up to take at the very most a year and boom all done. Obviously, I assumed a lot of assists that might be flat out impossible to set up or plan for with transfer windows. The initial assist off of Eve will mess up your AoP, which means it will necessarily take longer than a year to get another Kerbin encounter. Still, the fact that you need all these planets and moons to be in precise positions is an issue, and honestly it makes me wonder if you can modify the game files to just put them in ideal locations to start with. Not doing this would require you to wait thousands of years for the perfect transfer window, which is relatively unattractive.

This isn't today, but I didn't realize the forums were back up so ig its fair game lol https://youtu.be/osRjfheAwwA?si=CG3Qspwj3c7PS-HP

It is not possible. With tricks, one engine was not able to break 800m/s. Anyway, here's my records with about as optimized as I could get the craft to be without resorting to extreme part clipping or asymmetrical wings.

@swjr-swis So I took a close look at yours and my crafts, and I realized I had made some very dumb mistakes in the construction of my design, which leads to your craft being more optimal than mine in 3 ways: You flew at 2m above sea level, whereas I flew at over 800m. I had both the doughnut fuel tank and the nose cone occluding the Yp face of the cargo bay's drag cube, so I had an extra surface creating drag. I didn't occlude the reaction wheel, so that was one more addition of drag to the craft Congratulations on being more optimized

Suboptimal Choices here: too much wing area landing gear draggy part choices Heres my attempt at following the rules: note this is too many wings, I just dont want to deal with asymmetrical wings rn

90% of the things in ksp wouldnt make since irl anyway, and theres a lot of tricks that you can stumble into accidentally and not know that its an exploit, such as the root fairing tricks. Anyway, I did all my tricks in defiance of the rules (forgot to add a kerbal too lmao) and got to 810 m/s with two juno engines Obviously, without exploits this wouldnt be possible, but you could def get to like 500-600m/s without those tricks

ah yeah so I didnt have that stuff unlocked yet, i dont think i had unlocked the terrier yet. This is what I used once I had unlocked the terrier: As for the lowest tech possible, I managed to get to minmus with tier 3 tech only, which i found the craft for: This needed two mun assists to get back to kerbin, which i had to do without patched connics. I might make a video on this challenge sometime.

I did a max difficulty career mode a little while ago. To get to Minmus, I clipped fuel tanks into service bays to reduce drag, and used gravity assists (without patched connics mind you, quickloads though) to reduce delta v requirements. With those, you can get to Minmus with tier 3-4 tech and for less than 18 tons and 30 parts.

I would make minor adjustments to the scale of each body to make them more unique. Moho, Gilly, Mun, Minmus, Ike, Dres, Bop, Pol, Eeloo all can be landed on with very similar landers. For the minimalist, all you need is an ion engine, 1000 ec and a solar panel and you can do it easily for less than a ton. Here are the adjustments I would make: Moho: Slightly denser, roughly the surface gravity of Duna This discourages the use of ion engines, which are OP on Moho Eve: No Changes Gilly: No Changes Mun: No Changes Minmus: No Changes Duna: Slightly larger, same surface gravity This raises the orbital velocity slightly, making the margins a little tighter Ike: No Changes Dres: Slightly larger, orbital velocity of 410m/s This is to help differentiate it more from Ike Jool: No Changes Laythe: fix the atmosphere model so the upper atmosphere isnt so dense I hate 45-50km Vall: No Changes Tylo: No Changes Bop: No Changes Pol: Slightly smaller and denser This increases gravity losses slightly, but its more just to differentiate it from Minmus Eeloo: Larger, similar to Vall, but significantly less dense This help differentiate it more from the Mun, but also makes landing on it with an ion engine no longer worth it in a grand tour setting Additionally, I would add the Quack Pack, since it adds a lot more variety to the game. As for unique bodies, heres a couple ideas: Ike sized trans-joolian object, on a highly inclined orbit (~30 degrees) Far enough away that Ion engines require batteries, but large enough that you need a significant amount of them Double Jools SMA, making it very difficult to reach M-class asteroid moon, Slightly smaller than gilly Very low density, requiring much more delta V due to higher orbital velocity compared to its gravity Gilly sized Commet I know unoriginal but it would provide an interesting challenge for a minimalist Pol sized object within the orbit of Moho due to the reduced potency of Messenger assists, it would be interesting to balance practicality and delta V required Alternis Tylo Im a masochist so I think it would be cool Thats all I got for now

The highest Payload fraction I've ever achieved with a conventional SSTO (Regular wings, everything else in a fairing) is close to 70%. In terms of just mass deposited in orbit, this is 82% of the launch mass in orbit. Assuming everything else is ion engine and fuel, you could easily get upwards of 30km/s of delta V, but your twr will be too low to be useful (asides from Gilly).