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?

I really wonder now: will anyone try this with MechJeb to see how it does against our humans (who really want to be Kerbals anyway)...

New record 86.0kg - no MechJeb 75.8 x 75.6 km I did almost the same: at 110 m/s I did a small turn, left it flying without SAS. But now I switched to 'orbit speed mode indication' and with several presses on \'D\' (every few seconds) I moved my direction closer to the yellow circle until I was in the middle of it. Then stopped the enigines when apo reached 75 km, and circularized my orbit just before reaching apo. Had to retro burn a tiny bit, but it cost almost no fuel.

New personal best 82.8kg - no MechJeb 76.1 x 76.3 km I also think that it is not the height that really matters at which point you do you initial turn, but much more the rate at which you turn. And I think it\'s best to start turning as soon as you can, but at exactly the right rate. This is tricky: the lower you are the harder it is to make the exact right turn. I found that if I am at 80 degrees (I mean the white circles in the blue ball) I should be at around 200 m/s and at 70 degrees I should be at around 300 m/s (surface speed that is). This is close to the right rate, but this is the part I am experimenting with. Tricky, since you can\'t really reliably set your rate. And you shouldn\'t adjust it too much later on, because that doesn\'t really work, and costs fuel. So I think the question is: at what angle are you at what (surface) speed? I also want to try the oribital indicator in the beginning, maybe that will help a bit.

I was thinking. In those 10 seconds of straight up travel, you lose 100 m/s due to gravity losses (or what is the gravity on Kerbin?). So a angled or horizontal ascent should be faster... In theory... (I tried, a lot of kabooms) Still. Should be possible to beat the 350 m/s.

NUTS! ;D

My new personal record: 81.2kg - no MechJeb 75.4 x 75.3 km What I did: I went straight up (with SAS on) until reaching 110 m/s. Then I turned off the SAS and hit the D key very shortly and when my heading 'hit' the right side of the yellow circle, I turned on SAS again (this all happens in like less than a second). Waited until I was in the middle of the yellow circle again, and turned off SAS. So just a tiny turn. Did almost nothing after that steering wise (this is key I think): Newton at the steering wheel... just made sure I kept right in the middle of the yellow circle (which it does naturally with the fins attached in atmoshpere). When looking at the Map view, I stopped the engines (with X) at the moment my apogee hit 75km. Then did a burn just before apogee until had a mostly circular orbit. PS. actually I had 82.6kg, but I overshot and had to do a small retrograde burn. PPS. I do use the normal surface speed indicator in the beginning

My best attempt so far (75.4kg) - no MechJeb

For those who are interested. I first tried a rocket with one rocket engine center, but dual (fuel) 'weights'. Which is really hard. I figured out this could be done by switching on/off the fuel from a certain tank to the engine during the launch, because otheswise the small fuel tank (on the right) would be emptied far too quickly and the whole structure would go out of control because of imbalance ). But while it is possible to stop a fueltank to stop/start once during a mission, it cannot be done many times. So it\'s a bug that prevented me doing this really cool thing... Here you have the design though...

Why a maze is space? Because space is amazing...

This time a real asymetric rocket: first and second stage...