ggPeti

But can you efficiently lift off with it on the lowest possible trust? That is the question. @OP: 25% trust means not 12.5, but 6.125% fuel consumption.

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/16520-Reach-the-Speed-of-Light%21-%28Read-desc%29 It's on the first page on this forum. Read before you post. Btw it's nigh impossible even with modified parts.

Never mind, it landed. Got 6.3 million meters, which is mindblowing. Should I upload pictures, or does such a lucky flight not count?

I blew up a launch but a single advanced canard got shot out to outerspace, now it seems to be bouncing on atmosphere forever. What is the circumference of Kerbin along a straight line?

How are things developing, EndlessWaves?

The most efficient way is to never lift off. You're already orbiting the Sun

It's not a requirement to have a manned vessel, so here's my entry. It was an accident, but hey, I was following The Path of Jeb: more boosters. 523,5 m/s at 47m, so 429,5 is my score.

I didn't invent this craft by the way, here's the post I copied it from: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/12266-Get-a-plane-into-space?p=181462&viewfull=1#post181462 But I did find out how to push it over 1800 m/s, which is not trivial

you never even showed the slightest sign of trying your own challenge yourself, so that\'s not very hard to believe. also, 'couldn\'t of' means naught.

That is completely false. This is not how you calculate delta-v. Stop spreading misinformation please.

I\'m pretty sure it has a surface, I crashed into it several times. It\'s just not visible.

How does sundiving help escaping in the first place?

But it is very irregular, its almost spherical shape is due to ice filling up the deep parts. And whatever kind of ice it is, it\'s very amorphous so it relaxes into a sphere easily.

(also worth mentioning that you\'d have to imagine some serious life support mechanism aboard the ship and a habitable destination if you\'d want interstellar flight to qualify as survivable, but it\'s still a whole lot more credible that they can survive it than crashing into the surface of a giant thermonuclear sphere at several kilometers a second)

Mun->Minmus slingshot is very possible, there\'s a separate challenge thread for it actually. I\'m also using Mun\'s gravity assist regularly for escaping Kerbin\'s SoI, with a bit of practice and really low periapses you can get a lot of delta-v. Especially if you line up the resulting trajectory with Kerbin\'s orbit around the Sun you can get considerable orbit changes. (You might want to set your CONIC_PATCH_LIMIT in the settings.cfg file to 5 or 6 to see your resulting orbits further ahead. It\'s very useful.) If you don\'t like the idea of sundiving, a similar challenge in the opposite direction is interstellar flight, i.e. escaping the Sun. (Somewhat easier though, because you just have to do a continuous prograde burn and have an optimal burn profile, whereas in sundiving you can do it with a big retrograde burn but it\'s actually more fuel efficient if you do a bi-elliptic transfer.)

I\'d also like to suggest sundiving as a very enjoyable and basic mission. Just crash something into the Sun. Another nice mission is to try using gravity assist. Basically you\'re transferring to the Mun in a way that you\'ll have a low periapsis over it, and observe the resulting trajectory when you escape its gravity.

You have been warned, Stevenator. Don\'t take this lightly.

Felix, does MechJeb count as heavily modding the game? Because with the orbital transfer function and a bit of hand correcting it\'s really easy.

Which, by the way, would only work on one of the poles anyway.

If you think again carefully, you\'ll find that is true.

That depends. The Kerbal scientists in this case seemed to have decided on not installing a telecommunication antenna and the solar panels powering it, but getting it back to the planet. Maybe they\'re also analyzing some stellar material collected by the probe

With this trick, I just broke 1800 m/s in atmosphere without engines, awesome! Got up to almost 100km too. Guess it doesn\'t qualify though...

Thanks!

I would like to 'check out the infiniti craft', but I found no such thing on the first 20 pages of the spacecraft exchange section. Mind linking?