Reverie Planetarian

Actually hadn't thought about a scoring system, as I figured it was pretty freeform, but I think I'd be willing to group it into some general categories: the best-looking, the one with the most features, the one that can house the most employees and the tallest.

I haven't yet attempted it myself yet, and as you can see nobody else has tried it yet. I know Munar bases are possible and all that, I just wanted to see if anyone wanted to tackle this kind of style. You're welcome to, I'm just awaiting applications.

The Kerbal Space Program has come a long way, and so has one of its very first suppliers, Jebediah Kerman's Junkyard and Spaceship Parts Co. With more and more missions being launched each day (everyone's still working on the "and coming back home" part) Jeb's little ragtag enterprise has blossomed into a huge, slightly less ragtag enterprise. They're so huge, in fact, they're opening up a brand new office! In order to...uh...reasons, they're planning to open one up on the Mun! They've pledged to make it the biggest, most magnificent office complex ever built, probably because by now there's so much scrap on the Mun they might as well move right in! Unfortunately their lead architect was also a kerbonaut and got stuck on Minmus during a mission, so they've resorted to calling you in. This is a stock part challenge, as the title suggests, concerned with building a very particular type of Mun base: an office complex. Using whatever stock parts you can, build a Munar habitat that can house as many Kerbals as it possibly can, looks as good as possible, and because this is an office skyscraper, is as tall as possible. It can have no engines of its own, and must be a module made for permanent usage on the Mun. For extra challenges, try some of the following: Construct a special office somewhere for Jeb, Bob and Bill (or just Jeb) and put them in it. Put other things that an office complex would have, like a company parking lot for ships and/or rovers, a shuttle service, a private communications line with Kerbin, etc. Once you've got your employees on the Mun, think of the most creative thing to do with them. I dunno, one of those team exercises HR guys talk about or something. Take at least one screenshot of the finished product, and feel free to take any other photos of the complex you made at any other times-during its construction, if you took on any of the other challenges here, whatever. That's about it. From there, everything's up to you. Happy building!

Infinigliders are nothing new, and they aren't going away if version 0.21 is any indicator. I didn't think there could be any way to make them interesting or entertaining, at least until I saw this video from KSP YouTuber Danny2462: That's it. Right there. A rocket sled, a probe body, two canards, and a decoupler. It's so simple...and so very, very hard to control, but look at that performance. It accelerates incredibly fast, and demands a delicate touch from a pilot. Oh, this seems like a fun way to make infinigliders entertaining again. Welcome to Formula I, an infiniglider racing challenge with a few design rules-it wouldn't be much of a formula series without having a formula to follow, after all. Having a bazillion canards surrounding a capsule is right out in here. Here's how a Formula I racer may be constructed: Every Formula I racer must be unmanned for reasons that will become obvious in this inaugural event. A Formula I racer may only be constructed with a maximum of four flight surfaces and four control surfaces. For the sake of Formula I, canards and fins are counted as flight surfaces. You may use any amount of struts or girders necessary to move things around to optimize the behavior of your racer. Only stock parts may be used, and only their stock values may be used. Jet/rocket sleds may to be used to launch your Formula I racer. They may have no flight surfaces of their own and may not take off from the runway with you attached. If they lift off, you must decouple from them immediately. Use whatever launch methods you deem necessary-just don't let them leave the ground with you! Your Formula I racer may have no thrusters of its own, nor may it have any pilot aids aside from ASAS. I'm not sure they'd help you go as fast as possible, either. Here's how a Formula I race works: it's a pure time trial. Your time is measured by your mission clock, just about nothing else, from start to finish, and the best time wins. There isn't even any landing-that's why there's no manned entrants allowed. You finish as fast as possible: by smacking into the goal area. For a first event to try the concept out, I have lined up one that's really simple, and very short. I've tried it and finished it in a shade under one minute and 36 seconds. This is simple: take off from the Space Center's runway, fly all the way over the island containing the airfield, then turn around, fly back to the Space Center, then crash land in it or as near to it as possible. Whacking it into any building or structure in the Space Center will shave ten seconds off your time, and crash landing on the runway will take fifteen seconds off your time. I want photographic proof that you flew over and past the island at some point, then mission details where and when you made impact. The rule of thumb is that you should hit somewhere inside the Space Center or as reasonably near to its middle as possible. All entrants will be ranked by time adjusted for accuracy bonuses. That's it, really. Good luck, and go fast!

MR4Y: It has to be manned. Darren9: In fact, there is no rule that prohibits you from going to the pole, and I would've gone there myself but I'm no good with save editing or shipping vehicles there so I just worked with what I had. Actually, I expected more people who were more savvy with the game than I to do that sooner. If downforce increasing speed has to do with the infiniglide bug, I suppose that doesn't make this challenge any less valid. It's still an engineering challenge, after a fashion-you want to make the lightest, strongest, fastest and hopefully most controllable vehicle you can, it's just that now we're trying to exploit a more concentrated set of advantages. Let's keep going and see what crazy speeds we can reach!

I'll admit I didn't find any other ones myself.

Whatever works, so long as you use it as-is. It's not restricted to TT's wheels or anyone else's.

<double post, sorry>

Well, I'm looking for speed record benchmarks, irrespective of if they were thrust or wheel-powered. That and so far Thrust is the holder of the absolute speed record. Damn. So much for me and my flap about power-weight ratios, you may have me beat. What's all that stuff on the back? Or, uh, the front? I was looking at it the wrong way.

Ah, good. The more entrants and exotic designs, the better.

That sounds so incredibly odd. And since it fits the spirit of something wheel-driven, since ostensibly that will become your drive wheel, let's see what you come up with.

Inspired by Scott Manley's playing with stack separators, see how high you can fling a probe body with nothing but stack separators.

What's an infiniglide turbine? Here's a shot of the car as I made it. As you can see, those canards ahead of the drive wheels provide downforce and the vertical surfaces are for stability. I expected this vehicle to remain a sort of developmental vehicle. I didn't expect to hit the speeds I did. This car loves to veer around. Originally it didn't have the vertical surfaces, but the sliding and skidding got so bad, even with fixed vert stabs that I added canards and an avionics package so I didn't have to keep steering the thing myself. My idea was to go for an optimal power-weight ratio, which probably went south around the time I covered the thing with reinforcing struts to keep parts of it from splattering into the ground. It will actually glide for a bit if it hits disturbances in the ground. It's even got an escape system, but the ejection system only really assumes I can punch out before the thing starts tumbling during a crash, and it never does go out in a nice eject-friendly manner. I died and restarted several times just trying to demo this car once. I actually managed to break my own record on this demonstration run I just did, and not only that, I broke the sound barrier! Trying to rein in this thing requires all my concentration, and it's not very comfortable trying to keep driving when imagining it will suddenly snap into bits at speed. It may be time to retire this design for something less scary.

Well, make an official run and let's see it. I'm looking forward to seeing that. 337 was where I quit because I kept wiping out when I went any faster. Would anyone like to see the offending automobile?

They can, or at least TT wheels can-it required some clever design and messing around with downforce using canards as active aerodynamics. I'm mystified by how downforce can so increase speed and am thinking about what parts of the engine must be working together to allow wheel-driven cars to hit such high speeds and see what the limits of this stuff really are. It's just so fascinating. All wheels must be used as-is. It's no fun if we edit parts. Everything has to be as it was downloaded from the Spaceport, basically-the only wheels I knew of were the TT or Robaus ones.