JeDoesStuff

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).

I'll have to come back to this later, but mach 1 for the juno engine is very unoptimized. What does this mean? Am I not allowed to use a fairing as a root part (negating the drag of the fairing body)? Am I not allowed to use structural parts to occlude the interstage nodes and thus reduce the drag of the craft? What about attaching the small intake backwards to reduce drag? Am I allowed to occlude the juno engine but let it stick out slightly so that its occluded from drag but still producing thrust (which is possible without part clipping)? I will assume no part clipping for now, but I'd like to know which techniques aren't allowed before I throw something together.

The maximum spee you can achieve with a rapier engine is 2100m/s at sea level, but you need a very specific craft for that and it wont be very useful. Conventional SSTOs get to around 1600m/s, and ones that use special drag reduction techniques with part clipping and fairings can get to 1700m/s+. note that the speed of sound changes depending on altitude and temperature. If you are optimizing purely for top speed, use a engine plate occluded fairing to achieve 0 drag and no wings, clip everything into the fairing, and fly very close to sea level. Without hyper optimization, 1800m/s+ should be achievable. If you're looking for a more practical design that isnt as glitchy and more aesthetic, here's a few tips: Root Fairing: A root fairing does not apply the drag of the fairing body, and if you occluded all the nodes of the fairing it will produce very little drag. If you make sure everything is in the fairing except for wings, it will minimize drag. If you don't do this, you wont be able to go as fast, but you can still achieve very fast speeds. Wing Area: In my testing, the optimal amount of wings for high speed is 1 wing area per 8 tons of craft. Altitude vs Heating: Obviously, sea level has the highest speed of sound, but heating at that altitude will prevent high speeds. The optimal altitude to fly at is 17600m above sea level Minimize Intakes: I've seen some differing statements on this, but I've personally been able to fuel up to 8 Rapiers with one shock cone. I would recommend not doing this, as 4 Rapiers per shock cone is the most convenient. Wing Incidence: If you aren't occluding everything on your craft, add a little bit of inflection to your wings. What this does is minimize the surface area of the craft that is pointed into drag, and thus reduces the drag of the craft. Ideally, you'd want to angle them 3.5 degrees, but that isn't easy with stock tools, so the smallest locked increment whilst holding shift works well enough. Use Rapiers: Rapiers are the only engine in the game that produce significant thrust at Mach 5, so its a must for this. Hope this helps!

the only time i use maneuver nodes for circularization is to just find a rough estimate of when to start the circularization burn, but normally what I do is pay attention to the time until apoapsis and keep that close to 0 while circularizing so that when Ap and Pe are the same and I cut thrust my vertical speed is close to 0 too. Maneuver nodes for circularization was something i did recently while testing a micro eve orbiter, since i could test if an eva pack could make the final circularization without actually needing to deal with bringing the kerbal (just trust the process)

This wasn't today, but rather the past couple days. I've been working on optimizing the landers for every body in the game to eventually lower the mass for a minimalist grand tour. The goal is to get the mass under 6 tons, which seems very likely! Laythe, Tylo, Eve, Vall, and Duna are the only planets that aren't done using an ion engine, and all of the other bodies can be down with a craft that only weighs 0.7 tons. the Laythe lander is 0.37 tons, Tylo is 0.33 Tons (though more testing needs to be done), Eve is 0.7 tons, though I am exploring another potential optimization that is also used on Tylo. The Duna lander is completely reused from Laythe, and then is also reused for Vall: it weighs 0.15 tons. Wish me luck!

So first thing first: Fuel crossfeed will generate more lag than just having the parts, so a craft with 500 parts in wings will lag far less than 500 parts in asparagus staging. Additionally, CPU is a lot more important for KSP than you might, so I'm hesitant to think that it really is the GPU causing that big of an issue. But, if you want to reduce part count, the best thing you can do is learn how to get more out of the parts you have. This is best done through reduction in dry mass wherever possible. It is also important that you select the right part for the job at hand. Here's a few suggestions: Ion Engine: The Dawn engine can land on most of the bodies in the game, so it works great as a small lander. However, it will only be able to with the use of a command chair, which is not a particularly low lag option. Because it also gets tremendous Delta - V, you only need a few components to make it work. My 1.447 ton Moho mission, despite not being part count optimized, was sill only 19 parts. If you optimized it for part count (and for more reasonable margins, you can very easily get the part count down to 11 parts if you replace the Jet engine and Twitch stages with a single Twin Boar (and removing the fairing optimization part as they aren't necessary. TL;DR, a small ion chair will have stupendous delta v and can land on most bodies with only needing 9-11 parts AND can be put into orbit using only a Twin Boar. NERVA: The Nerv can land on basically everything except Laythe and Eve, so you can use it very extensively. Like the Ion engine, it is very efficient, so it can optimize part count the same way. The issue is that you will need more stages to get the most out of it, even if you optimize the dry mass out. Twin Boar: As I've mentioned earlier, the Twin Boar can deliver a small payload into LKO all on its own, so it is incredibly useful as an SSTO booster stage. Fairings: Fairings are the quintessential device for optimization in this game. They allow you to have any payload you want for almost no drag, making Kerbin ascent dramatically cheaper ISRU: You probably knew this was coming anyway, but ISRU saves tremendous amounts of effort on all sides of optimizing pat count. If you have a craft with ISRU that can land on Minmus, it can make it anywhere in the Kerbol system. The way this saves parts is that you can have high thrust, low ISP engines and not have to worry about the spiders web of asparagus staged fuel tanks. Note that in order to get to somewhere like Tylo, you will need to test more than just reaching Minmus, but I'm assuming you do some testing for any of these anyway. And ISRU setup can be done in just 5 parts, being the Converter, Ore Tank, Drill, Radiator, and Elecrical Production. If you have a Command Pod, you wont need any batteries. Lastly, I want to point you to Bradley Whistance's 10 part grand tour. This is an extreme example of what can be done for minimum parts, and he proved that the answer as to what you can do is everything. I don't expect anyone to be able to replicate what he has done here, since the difficulty of piloting that mission, as he described it, sounds not worth the effort of saving just a couple parts. This should solve your FPS problem, and although I doubt that you will be able to achieve much higher than 40-50 FPS based on what you've described, these techniques will absolutely help make your general KSP gaming experience much more enjoyable. Let me know if you have any more questions

I managed to fill this out (save for a few nodes) with all of the sliders in the difficulty settings set to max (Minimum starting funds, reputation, 10% funds and science earnings, 1000% penalties). Without that hellish setting you just need one mission to minmus and it will fill that out just fine (visiting all biomes) .

The reason i didnt use jetpack was because I did this for the minimalist missions list, where using the jetpack would only add mass. Also, I consider using the jetpack as a lander not to be an SSTO so I couldn't use it even if it saved mass You are correct that clipping was to limit drag, but it wasn't actually required for this kind of mission, it just kept the mass low as i didn't need to extend the fairing to fit everything inside without clipping

Yes, I started with the tanks mostly empty, when full on fuel it weighs around 18 tons. Here is a screenshot of the craft in the SPH with mass and resources on display: This is the craft on the runway, with fuel guages visible: Note the mass in the Kerbal Engineer info is 12.265. This is because 1: mass in the SPH does not include Kerbal and 2: For some reason It's reporting the mass 5kg heavier than in the SPH, as shown in the following image This last image is all of the parts expanded so you can see all thats going on on the inside. All of the parts are as follows: RAPIER NERVA 1.25m Fairing 13 Mk0 Fuel Tanks RTG Z-100 Battery Radial Ore Tank 3 FL-T400 LfOx tanks Big-S Wing Strake 3 Small Landing Gear Drill-O-Matic Junior Thermal Control System (Small) Command Chair 1P2 Hydraulic Cylinder Cubic Strut Shock Cone Intake Convert-O-Tron 125 Elevon 4 Small Inline Reaction Wheel This is the sum for all the dry mass: Part Count Mass (t) Total Mass RAPIER 1 2 2 NERVA 1 3 3 1.25m Fairing 1 0.197 0.197 Mk0 tank 13 0.025 0.325 RTG 1 0.08 0.08 Z-100 Battery 1 0.005 0.005 Radial Ore Tank 1 0.125 0.125 FL-T400 LfOx tanks 3 0.25 0.75 Big-S Wing Strake 1 0.1 0.1 Small Landing Gear 3 0.045 0.135 Drill-O-Matic Junior 1 0.25 0.25 Thermal Control System (Small) 1 0.05 0.05 Command Chair 1 0.05 0.05 1P2 Hydraulic Cylinder 1 0.052 0.052 Cubic Strut 1 0.001 0.001 Shock Cone Intake 1 0.13 0.13 Convert-O-Tron 125 1 1.25 1.25 Elevon 4 1 0.04 0.04 Small Inline Reaction Wheel 1 0.05 0.05 TOTAL 35 7.7 8.59 The fuel contained has a mass of 2.625 tons, so 8.59 + 2.625 = 11.215 And, just to make sure I'm being 100% transparent, here is the craft file: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1146567987776733205/1278501450481139832/J5-S12_Mk2.craft?ex=66d108c3&is=66cfb743&hm=f4dd173f3d8527fdfec31f825043b8af6ee08f27eae729e4a9be8b8f109f6750& It says discordapp because I used that to convert the file, feel free not to download if you don't trust it, I understand if you don't. Please let me know if you have any more questions, I'd be happy to oblige.

As requested, here is the post I had mistakenly made on the old thread: So I thought I had sent this before, but I have bested my 30 ton SSTO with an 11.215 ton SSTO

So I thought I had sent this before, but I have bested my 30 ton SSTO with an 11.215 ton SSTO Note: part clipping was used here, but iirc there arent any other exploits used besides needed to go to the tracking station because for some reason the ISRU was trying to radiate through the kerbal

I made a Jool Aircraft Carrier!

Here's some challenges I fall back on: - Minimalist Mass / Part count / engine count - SSTO (ISRU or not) - Gravity multipliers (I recommend using SigmaDimensions if you plan on going somewhere) - Career mode with 10% Science or funds (If you do max difficulty then you kinda end up softlocked at tier 5 tech) - doing the above with different planet packs

I've beaten the record for the low mass Eeloo category, here is the video:

Working on a new world record for lightest mass mission to Eeloo With the discovery of magic ladder, far less electric charge is required to land on Eeloo with an Ion engine. This is as far as I've guaranteed mass savings, but as i continue to test I should be able to significantly lower the record, especially since magic ladder can be used all throughout the mission to make small reductions in the xenon I need to use. I am hopeful that with enough work O can get the mass under 1.6 tons