Nao

Uhm are we allowed to control our craft during flight? Because if yes, then I have this: The last screen at 400km is at around half max range... it even has double the power with two RTG's. And below we see other country with purple kerbals

It's a bug but what you could do is to place the node on the SOI change line with Kerbin (yellow - its very small but doable) and drag the node backward up to your ship (if you place on purple line it will stay on it while you drag). I had that problem last night returning from Jool and it helped. (And no it probably has nothing to do with power as i was flying stock with kerbals on board). Also boat is easy, build a VTOL water plane! (and strand more Kerbals on the way:P)

5-3-2, will have too short burn time and will eat up most of its Dv fighting the atmosphere. I tried partial staging (preburning one engine to half before launch) and the results are very close to the best ones (20-30m/s less). The problem is that it only works for symmetrical thrust setups, it requires 3-1 transition as it does not work on 2-1 (yet ). I tried asymmetrical thrust for last stages and it almost worked. Also having something similar to 2-1-1 as top stage would be a blessing but there are no efficient 10booster setups that can get that). Maybe ill try that later with control surfaces (are they allowed? I kind off thought they were banned until i saw some recent posts). I'm betting on 1,28 ratio (i believe in my performance , and there is no way we can beat tavert by more than 0.1-0.2 if it is at all possible). edit: as i said about 2-1-1 blessing ... 4-2-2-1-1 aaaand 2868m/s , that said it was only one try and without any mods (MJ/KER) so there is definetly room for improvement. Its actually quite surprising that we get that close results for different setups double edit: just noticed I'm twice on the leaderboards. While it's my fault for posting two entries, I think it would be fair to only use one (probably the most recent one from this post). Cheers!

Remember that gimbaled engine torque is proportional to distance of the CoM to CoT (assuming vertical thrust only). Your ship has almost no control authority from gimbals. Since we cant change thrust of each engine individually (as it is done IRL for such cases) the only other way to get control power without changing the design and dimensions of the craft, would be to angle engines inwards. It won't push the CoT shown in VAB down but the intersection of lines perpendicular to thrust vector of each engine (that the gimbal moments depend on) will go down (possibly below whole craft) increasing gimbal torques. It can also allow having CoM below CoT and without reversed controls).

Didn't tried 5-3-1-1 that looks like it woud be the best one but I'm a rebel 2856 m/s with 4-3-1-1-1 setup and 2863 m/s with 4-3-2-1 one. In the first one the kerbals started running around the ship because that would add to the speed of course, results included forcefully decoupled engine and a snack box destroyed. The jury discarded the feeble attempt (no speed gained). Now onto the main dish of the day, ze asparagus! Although tavert set the bar into geosynchronous orbit .

Yay another ascent challenge , IDK how, but i never get bored with them. Firstly a non asparagused design. 24.51 tons to 75x75 orbit, launching stage had only 13m/s Dv left (9l of fuel). The mainsail isn't actually classified as engine, but a space cannon, thus went unnoticed while Bob searched for engines after the Rockomax factory blew up. It is also disconnected form fuel tank by decoupler because it is known that black-yellow stripes makes everything look more serious and space cannons are srs-bsns! (and to block payload Dv showing up in MJ).

Now you gotta send ship twice the size to get even more of them stranded them rescued! After another 4-6 failed attempts, we could call that a Polish colony

I used the first of the best ones i have found doing research in this thread. (8-37 one) The first flight that i tied with you was done using 23m/s limit acceleration by accident, then i remedied it in the edit flight (10.55). Also honestly i don't think we can go much lower than 4333 with lower orbit as below 74km you either spend much more time in the atmosphere or have very high profile that wastes the Oberth effect. The part where most improvement can be made would be launch with more TWR but that requires another craft. edit: welp with the craft as it is a 70km orbit gives 11.02 fuel with the same profile, so the drag effect isn't as bad as i thought. Although flying other crafts that had LV-N at the last stage (underpowered) the ~73km orbit required less fuel than lower orbits.

Remember that you can transfer fuel to the front tanks to change balance. (to the rocket fuel tank and after that's full to the cockpit tank) It his should be enough. If not then you probably need a proper tail

Just a quick note that using higher thrust rocket with very sleek design, you can bring Dv to LKO below 3100m/s (starting gravity turn almost from launchpad). But other than that using rockets made with stock game in mind with FAR creates very realistic launches so its definitely worth a try Motokid600

For people wanting to experiment aero-slingshooting in KSP i have bad news that the current aerodynamic model have drag forces proportional to square of speed but lift is directly proportional to speed. That means lift is very weak in upper atmosphere and unless we gain a lot from turning our trajectory that several degrees more we will lose more to drag than gained. This would probably work quite well with Ferram mod, as there it's possible to keep great speeds at quite low altitudes. So not only we gain from lift but also from closer proximity to the planet during the pass. Cheers!

"Landed" at small runaway (could have been horizontal but i panicked and braked too hard at the end ) The trick for both deacceleration and landing is to use trim controls to control attitude, for landing i use slowed down roll controls to not start accelerating while doing corrections, and after touchdown(s) small slowed down pitch corrections are enough to start glueing to the runway. And from the same flight 247m/s below 250m alt I believe that reaching 12-13km in 5 minutes is still possible if somebody manage to fly this above 200m/s for most part of the flight Cheers edit: you could also make a proper scenario out of this, just edit (and rename) the persistent.sfs file. You can disable quick saves and SPH/VAB there, this also makes it easy to restart the challenge as it's never overwritten and F9 restarts it at the starting point. (all of that options are at the beginning of the file, you can edit it with simple notepad).

You could make a node on LKO for Mun encounter and just drag it around the LKO a desired number of degrees (15,58deg for 3100km before/after in Mun orbit. For 100km LKO its 84,7s before/after Mun transfer burn). In reality its even easier using Mun as a target we make node with transfer orbit to reach Ap of 11400km (Mun orbit) and see closest approach markers, then just rotating the burn position on LKO we can change separation to desired 3100km or something similar. And make burns according to nodes. In testing I managed to get to Mun orbit ahead of it by 3278km in just two burns from LKO.

Welp for a second i thought it was actually an infiniglide challenge. It was actually interesting/hard getting the best out of it on the supplied ship... but i guess you didn't know about it. Basically the four control surfaces you got there generate forward force whenever they are moved. Try launching the tadpole first and then hold and spam [Q] and [E], control the pitch with spam intensity and you can get quite high and fast really quickly. (or more easy version just spam and [W]) It's a long standing bug, that i think will be resolved someday. Also you should add points for safe landing since its not that hard really with [capslock]'ed controls and [alt]trim.

Am I doin it rite ? It was 5 minutes well spent on mashing buttons

Lol 10.44 at first try, using MJ with a profile i created some time ago. Unfortunately following attempts to get better results failed There seems to be some more science going on in this thread that i'll try to catch on later edit: A simple 1m/s change on a acceleration limit and we got 10.55, with some real time tinkering to MJ values. the Dv expended is 4333m/s I don't think i can do better thou as even slight changes to the way it is flown produce big fuel losses. Just for comparisons i tried flying the challenge by hand without any assists and got 10.23 ... not bad

@OP If you have CPU limitations (like me) designing for low engine (and part) numbers would be top priority. For example you can get that craft to orbit on just 3 mainsails and a lot less parts, like this: Your ship dropped me to 15-20 FPS at launch and after this modification i had 25-30. It has more Dv, uses 1/3 less parts and has only 3 engines burning at the same time. (Most of the FPS loss come from SRB's) My (actually they are not mine, i'm a dirty thief, i will not steal the shark thou! Tw1 well earned his hi5).

Lul "for some people", does that mean on your PC it has more ? Also I had serious laugh since i was fully expecting LV-909 at the second stage and then BAM, even more thrust! I lost my socks from the rapid acceleration. @1096bimu With that sleek craft you could also land on KSC and then crash on the Mun!

@PakledHostage I may have messed up something but on a fresh save UT 1year and 185days gives us Eve ~40deg before Kerbin, so after 47 days of waiting in Eve orbit, Kerbin is not even close to 47deg ahead of Eve. From Alex site it looks like if he escapes Eve immediately at an angle (173deg to Eve prograde, while standard hoffman have 163) he'll arrive at Kerbin in 83days. From 100km parking orbit it takes 1642 Dv so depending on how exactly the elliptical orbit is situated he might save the Kermans GL! Keep us updated. Or even better upload the persistence file as AmpsterMan suggested!

Guys guys! You are using the wrong engine , thrust and thus ISP increases with speed for Turbojet and decreases for standard jet engine. Turbojet cruising at 1000m/s at high altitude will have effective ISP of 38400s Tried one flight, no glitches / intake spams (one small circular intake) / time accelerations / part detachment (this would be nice to add as a rule) / and mods / lifted horizontally. Ran out of fuel at around 400km, then run out of energy before 600km(i even have a solar panel but nobody told me it need light for it. And it was such a perfect evening for launch) and started spiraling down at around 655km. (probably could go above 750km on a battery instead of the stupid blue table like thing). Also ASAS ended up being a dead weight since i used it only for vertical climb (at terminal velocity). first image flaying on no power, second one is at the official end of flight, third one right after fuel cutout and last at the runaway. (edit: "official end of the flight" screen was take before spiraling - before making more than 90deg turn, so the distance traveled was inflated very little) Unfortunately having only one control surface generates phantom forces when they are used (i think the delta deluxe winglet generates the least of them) all it comes down is ships mass to control surface amount. for example: "only" 12 small surfaces and almost 8000m/s below 1km alt. on the glitch alone with very light craft. I would say that ships that weight at least 1t for the whole flight gain little from it unless there are more than ~6-10 control surfaces and they flap constantly under ASAS.

The most fuel efficient way to land would be to make a low circular orbit first (at around 5km altitude) and then slow down before target while slowly descending, so you could stop the ship just above ground. The advantage of such method is also that if you start your burn too late you just overshoot your target instead of lithobraking on the Mun. But if you want to make a "suicide burn" or maybe just stop orbit at higher altitude and slowly descent vertically, you can use simple maths to judge how late you can start to slow down and not waste fuel hovering at high altitudes. For example: You have a ship capable of Mun TWR of 3.1 Firstly determine what is its actual acceleration capability. To switch TWR for accelaration: mun gravity 1,63 * TWR 3.1 = 5 [m/s^2]. Let's assume the ship is on Munar landing approach with 200m/s vertical velocity. To get minimum height required for safe landing we subtract mun gravity from ships acceleration (5 - 1,63 =~ 3,4 available "maneuver acceleration" [m/s^2]) (a constant that can be counted before flight) Then assuming 100% thrust: 200m/s divided by 3,4m/s^2 =~ 60s burn time to stop from 200m/s To get desired minimum altitude simply divide time by 2 and multiply by vertical speed 60/2*200 = 6000m

I went with a conservative fool proof design Jet engines+ASAS and RCS for fine control. Unfortunately due to a bug i had to land (and go to Space Center) after both picking up and dropping the cargo as the ship(s) had their attitude frozen. With ASAS+RCS the docking part was so easy i had one hand on F1 button and second on IKJLHN and did it from cockpit. Since i didn't take takeoff screenshot the first time, i went and launched it again, and started messing around (some shots of landing on buildings included). Counting it up: - 4 points for taking off vertically, - 5 points for making it to the VAB launcher without touching the ground, - 4 points for picking up the item, - 5 points for making it to the end of the runway without touching the ground, - 4 points for dropping off the item at the end of the runway, - An additional 7 points for dropping the item without touching the ground AND without it tipping over, breaking, or exploding, - 4 points for landing vertically at the start of the runway. = 33 points I maybe record a video of another run for 50points if I figure out how to prevent the rotation freeze bug. Cheers!

Great work on the mission metaphor! I 'm surprised that you didn't go with Mun slingshot as it can give more than 400m/s Dv. If it's one engine to rule them all, then it's definitely not the aerospike :P, personally i would nominate the LV-T30 Being a little tired with studying i did a small test and for the same design not only the LV-T30 carries more Dv than aerospike but takes less Dv to achieve orbit. Using design with a lot of stages, similar to the ones present in the thread, aerospike had vacDv of 8142m/s and took 5020m/s to LKO and LV-T30 had vacDv of 8906m/s (at the same 0.96 launch TWR) and took 4975m/s to LKO (same MJ profile). Thats 615m/s Dv difference in orbit (16% more Dv than aerospike) Oh and this is more like "PTW" post with a twist, as i don't want to argue or discredit anything. I'll try the challenge after my exams.

Hey i loved that feature T_T. So much engineering to do! Real need for probing the atmosphere and stress testing parts on kerbin (with engines pointing at them to simulate temperature). Fun stuff... or should i say !!FUN!!

Dres canyon is near the equator, it should be easily recognizable when it's lit up by sun. I don't think it's 10km deep thou, probably close to 4000m depending on how you base ground level. As for coordinates this might be of help: http://www.kerbalmaps.com/ (Moho craters are a glitch at the pole so they will not show properly there i think, but the Dres canyon is quite easy to spot)