jqhullekes

I made a Nuclear SSTO Only 12 parts!

I had a crazy idea which I had to try... And it worked! With 5 parts to orbit!! Here is the design: Here is the video: As you can see, the last stage is put up side down. That way it will thrust from start to finish, and it can even get out of orbit that way. As you can see in the video I prevented that this time (by rotating the rocket when orbit was reached) so I get a nice orbit around kerbin. Very nice. I don't think 4 parts is possible though... or is it?

I've accepted this challenge! After trying many designs, and having many failures, I reached orbit using only 6 parts!! This is the design: Here is the video: I first did it with 7 parts, and thought 6 wasn't possible. But it is! Without mods. And it looks so simple.

I\'m actually quite unsure what the optimal heights are. I think there is a bit of room for improvement still. Although 100kg feels impossible. You never know though...

Fraps. But my files got too large, so had to do it over again, with a lower fps when recording, and then use VirtualDub to reencode the video, to make it smaller. Ah well. A bit of a hassle, but it kinda works. Sound recording didn\'t work, but I got the music from youtube featured music. So it\'s a nice video.

There you go: This is a video from a ascent with 88.4kg left (at 75.1 x 75.8 ). So quite a good one. I\'ve added some annotations to the video, at crucial points. And I recommend to watch it in 720p. Added some music.

After your response, I\'ve tried to make a video with Windows Media Encoder. I had all kinds of difficulties, crashes, hanging, slow game, really really bad quality video, no audio, until I gave up. I had a 'video' of a 88.3kg run, but it was soo low quality, I wouldn\'t show it my dog. Has anybody got any suggestion for a free and fairly good video encoder for KSP? My PC isn\'t that good, so it has to be lightweight. The game doesn\'t run well on 1680x1050, so I usually run it on 1024x768. Thanks in advance. Otherwise I could simply do some screenshots along the way (but I\'m really focused during the flight, making F1\'s continuously a bit distracting...)

New record 89.5kg! - no MechJeb 75.0 x 75.2 km Did it much more on feeling this time,

Getting closer: new personal record: 87.9kg - no MechJeb 75.1 x 75.1 km Just finetuning. Experimenting a little bit here and there.

My new personal record: 87.2kg - no MechJeb 75.2 x 75.1 km I\'m now starting to turn at around 8000m (to 60 degrees) and when I reach 45 degrees I start slowly turning towards the horizon. That seems to work a little better for me.

New record 86.3kg - no MechJeb 75.0 x 75.2 km I did pretty much the same as last time.

03:58:02 I\'m not using MechJeb. I like this challenge.

Cool data. Thanks.

I would be really interested in the 2,4 and 6 km turn start. Since this is what I do myself manually. And I think a steep profile would work best in such cases. Because going 12km straight up and then shallow is actually almost equivalent with a 2km straight up and then steep.

Pretty interesting though jqhullekes and PackledHostage proved that it isn\'t quite the most efficient path. Very interesting indeed. Have you tried other profiles?