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.

So, I recently got this mod by the awesome TouhouTorpedo, and it contains wheels. These wheels are wonderful things and I love them because they have quite a bit of grunt and they're durable. They don't blow out, nor do the ones capable of propelling themselves require a power source at the time this post was made. They're wheels you don't have to worry about one bit for your rover, hauling or general driving needs. This is good. Very good, in fact, because it means I can do this incredibly frivolous challenge and share it with you all. Everyone's aware of the absolute land speed record. Currently it belongs to Thrust SSC, which used two jet engines to reach a top speed of about 763 MPH. Teams in the UK, USA and Australia are now attempting to develop and drive cars powered by thrust to be the first to break 1000 MPH. That, however, takes a lot of careful planning and the kind of resources that can earn access to jet engines and/or powerful rockets for the express purpose of going as fast as humanly possible. There's another kind of speed record racing that gathers a lot of entrants due to how relatively easy it is to develop cars for the job: the wheel-driven land speed record. These are cars that have to transfer their power from their engine to the wheels for forward motion-you can't do it on pure thrust. With Torpedo's wheels, it's possible to hit very high speeds safely, as long as you have the right car for the job. I've experimented with numerous setups to see how fast I can go, and now it's become a research project of mine to figure out how downforce works in Kerbal Space Program when applied to cars, since it seems to alter and greatly improve their driving capabilities, and thus make driving around on Kerbin and any other bodies in the system with atmospheres much more fun and efficient. The challenge here is very simple: create a land speed record car driven solely by its wheels, with preference given to Torpedo's wheels to help you in this task since they're nice, big, and powerful, and drive it along the surface of Kerbin as fast as you can. Outside of using anything with thrusters or any kind of propulsive source that relies on the engines, you are allowed to use whatever mod parts you see fit to do this job, so long as you use all of them as coded. I'll say that again: nothing with thrust. If you want to put thrusters on your car, you will only be allowed to use them for the means of some sort of fancy ejection system. Why add an ejection system? Your car must be manned: no land speed record anyone's willing to remember was set by something unmanned. Your whole car or at least an ejected, intact cockpit must survive the run for it to be valid. It's preferable that you have an intact car, as you shall see below. Now, traditional land speed record attempts here on Earth have the driver doing one run over a mile after a flying start in one direction, then a return run in the other direction and the average of that speed is taken. As we're talking about setting Kerbal wheel-driven speed records here, you can quietly forget that rule. For a run to be valid here, you simply need to make one run however long you wish, driving as fast as you possibly can before coming to a (relatively, this is KSP after all) safe stop. You must make a recording or take a screencap of your vehicle and your flight record after finishing your drive to prove you've done a run. So then, what will you be playing for? I have a selection of titles here, which you can put into your signatures or something...uh, well, I just thought I'd share this personal quest of mine with the KSP forums on a bit of a whim, so I'm kind of making it up as I go along. Still though, here's some challenge targets for you all to hit for bragging rights around these parts. After reaching a speed above these titles according to the following parameters, pick the one you like best and hang onto it: Ultimate Challenge: Best Of The Best Congratulations, you're the official wheel-driven land speed record holder! Not only that, but you've been able to preserve your car throughout the whole attempt. Bravo! Now you can...I don't know, make a version of your car that's up on a plinth or bronzed or made of solid gold or something. Shut up, I just make the challenges, I don't write the history books. Current holder: Darren9 Penultimate Challenge: Fastest or Bust! You're the driver of the fastest thing powered by wheels officially recognized by Reverie Planetarian and, in turn, the KSP forums! You pushed the limits of engineering and physics and came out on the other side! Your car didn't, but you did, and that's what counts! Platinum Challenges I Beat The MiG-21: You have punched all the way past 1000 MPH and gone to Mach 2: you have traveled at 680 meters per second or a hefty 1521 MPH, faster than the Russian Mikoyan Gurevich MiG-21 fighter. Jeb Kerman would share his waffle fries with you. - Darren9 I Beat Them All To 1000 MPH: You have managed to get a maximum speed of 447 meters per second, which translates into 1000 MPH! It takes jet engines, rockets, a lot of engineering and a little luck to do this in the real world, and in the wacky world of KSP, it took...those four things without the jet engines-okay, that's three things-the last three things-NO WAIT, the last two things since you're not using rockets-a lot of engineering and a lot of luck to do the same thing without all those thrusters! Pat yourself on the back-you did great! Reached By: - 1096bimu - MR4Y, - Weatherman159 - jtyotJOTJIPAEFVJ Gold Challenges I Kinda Beat The Bloodhound: The Bloodhound SSC is a British land speed record car engineered to reach and/or exceed 1000 MPH. You did...or at least you did and your cockpit survived the attempt. Try it again and this time, preserve your car. I Beat Thrust SSC: You have managed to exceed a speed of 341.1 meters per second, which is 763 MPH. You've beaten the Thrust SSC, the first car to officially break the sound barrier. All those years of research and world record attempts, beaten by some plucky guy at a computer. Virtually. Nice! I Beat Reverie Planetarian: The Gold Challenges are attainable, at least. I know this because I got really, really close to breaking the sound barrier myself. Take this title if you've exceeded 337 meters per second-a tantalizingly-close 753.8 MPH. If I got here and you got past me, keep going! The Donald Campbell Consolation Prize: Good news first: you're the fastest driver we've seen. Now the bad news: you didn't actually survive the attempt. You're down a Kerbal but you've furthered the quest for speed-that's got to count for something, right? Silver Challenges I Almost Beat Thrust SSC: You bailed out and survived a speed record run that went south. You exceeded the sound barrier, at about 760 MPH, and then crashed but you at least survived. Go back out there and try it again! I Beat The Turbinator II: The Vesco Turbinator II is a turboshaft-powered streamliner trying to reach 500 MPH, or 223.5 meters per second, and you just did. Nicely done! Reached By: - dracklen I Beat The Turbinator: The Turbinator II had to start somewhere, and started with the Vesco Turbinator, the current world record holder for the fastest speed reached by a wheel-driven car. You have exceeded 210.3 meters per second or 470.444 MPH and are now officially faster than the fastest thing powered by wheels in the real world. If you're an engineering talent, try matching this in real life! We on the forum will be watching. From way, way over that-a-way. We brought popcorn. Bronze Challenges(is this bronze enough? I'm working with a limited palette here) I Sort Of Beat The Turbinator: You exceeded 210.3 meters per second...then crashed. But you at least survived. Tune up your car, alter your approach, and take another shot. I Beat The NHRA: The world's fastest drag racing pass was recorded by a top fuel dragster, completing a quarter-mile at a maximum speed of 336 MPH or 150.2 meters per second. I Beat The Veyron: It lost its title once, but then had it reinstated-the Bugatti Veyron can reach a recorded maximum speed of 267 MPH, equating to 119.4 meters per second. You're now chasing the big wheel-driven boys. How's it feel? To help you out, here's some extra things to aid you in chasing world speed records: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/racing-slicks-0-19-robaus-warehouse/ Alternate wheels which are good for up to 350 meters per second. If these help, go ahead and use them. http://www.convert-me.com/en/convert/speed/ A handy speed converter. NOTE: Just because this challenge started with the wheels I pointed out doesn't mean it ends there. So long as your design has no thrusters for propulsion, if you can figure out how to make a wheel that drives your design, it works and it's in. Go wild and see how fast you can drive and survive the attempt. Good luck out there-and good driving!

Right then. So far that's Surface Tension, Intercontinental Ballistic Miss, Pow, To The Mun, Kerb Icarus, Missile with a Kerbal In It and-whoa, hold on a tic, you crashed into the Mun? Hmmm... But you've proven it's possible, so this one I'll give a pass. There's your bar, everyone. Now try to clear...erm, go under...over? Whatever. You want to take the Gold? Beat this!

B was my intent, honestly. But I wanted to see if this could be done at all first, so I didn't specify... At first I did think that it was possible to do it entirely ballistically though.

This was a challenge borne of something that occurred to me as I was making an orbit in one of my ships one day. Orbiting a planet is all about flying so fast that you can throw yourself at the planet or other heavenly body and miss. It seemed like you could do that as close to the surface as you dared in the orbits of the Mun and Minmus, but could you do that around Kerbin? The wheels in my mind turned: more than messing around with gliders, this is a challenge worth finding out about, just to see if it's even possible: is it possible to approach fast enough to pull off an orbital dive into and out of Kerbin without flying apart or being unable to return by way of atmospheric drag? I want to find out, and I invite you to find out with me. The rules of this challenge are simple: get into an elliptical orbit around Kerbin, put your periapsis as close to the surface of the planet as you dare, and hang on tight. Dive out of the heavens, into the planet's atmosphere, then tear back into space. You have to pull off an orbit after this move to prove you've survived. If you fly apart, cannot return or otherwise can't continue into an orbit from which you can land your ship, it doesn't qualify. You have to launch, do your diving orbit, climb back out of the atmosphere, then land safely. No parts of the craft may decouple during the dive orbit, nor the second exit unless it's specifically for landing later. Record photos of your ship, the more the better. Please try to record your flight at apogee, in the dive, afterwards and at landing. Anyone who can record a video is free to do so. The goal is to see how close to the ground or the water's surface you can get without crashing, and how fast you can do your flyby, becoming the fastest atmospheric vehicle to ever cut the air of Kerbin. I'll keep the score for two different classes: spaceplanes and rockets, obviously. These classes will be further split into two other classes: Stock (all stock parts) and Modified (mod pack parts are allowed). At no point is it permissible to modify any parts' values. Now as I'm something of a WipEout fan (and since PC games don't really have a gamerscore, per se), I'll be keeping track of Achievements and ranking them using Medals. I'll be giving accolades to pilots who can do the following: Gold Medals Surface Tension: Get the lowest dive altitude out of all entrants without crashing. Intercontinental Ballistic Miss: Get the lowest dive altitude out of all entrants' rockets. Firebird: Get the lowest dive altitude out of all entrants' spaceplanes. Double Dip: Do two successful dives in succession before landing safely. Sky's The Limit: Have the lowest possible altitude at apogee while still exiting Kerbin atmosphere fully, then complete a successful atmosphere dive and return. Kerb Icarus: Gain the highest possible altitude at apogee without entering solar orbit, then complete a successful atmosphere dive and return. Going Ballistic: Exit the atmosphere after diving without using engines. Bulls-Eye!: Land on the runway at the Kerbal Space Center. Silver Medals The World's Biggest Immelmann: Perform your dive upside-down at all points during atmospheric entry and exit. Tot Rod: Have the lowest-mass possible craft to successfully dive and land in succeed at the mission. Great Big Whiff: Have the highest-mass possible craft to successfully dive and land in succeed at the mission. One Shot, One Thrill: Complete the atmosphere dive challenge with a single stage. Diving Stick: Perform the atmosphere dive without using any SAS or MechJeb. Bronze Medals Pass Gas: Perform a dive without using RCS. Missile With A Kerbal In It: Complete an atmosphere dive with a single-occupant craft. Triple Swoop: Complete an atmosphere dive with a three-occupant craft. Pow, To The Mun: Perform your dive with your apogee past the Mun, but not past Minmus. Cold Shot: Perform your dive with your apogee past Minmus. As one last note, feel free to share your craft files in posts, should you be successful. Good luck, and good flying!

Still though, pics and the like are always welcome. Me, I'm still super-traditional: use launch stage, jettison launch stage, glide, no flapping. ...soaring and going around in circles to gain momentum to fly fast, sure, but no flapping.

Gliders. There may be bugs and there may be glitches that make flying them and anything else with wings in Kerbal Space Program easier, but that doesn't erase the fact that making gliders in KSP is fun. At least, it's fun for me. I've made a few designs that started as gliders for practicing proper spaceplane landings that I eventually realized made really good fliers in most respects, and could, thanks to the physics models for flight in KSP, do some pretty preposterous things-like breaking 400 m/s without a single engine or climbing over 10 klicks above the surface of Kerbin. That's me, though, but I don't know about my fellow players here on this forum. So, I present something I hope nobody's done before, the Glider Challenge. The rules are simple: make a spaceplane glider which must be capable of sustained flight without thrusters of some sort, and must take off horizontally. All engine parts must be jettisoned during the takeoff procedures and the craft must be able to do level flight for at least two minutes for it to count. You must, some way or another, get the highest altitude and airspeed that you can before bringing the aircraft to a safe, preferrably non-parachute-assisted landing, all without an engine. Sticking with stock parts is encouraged, but not required: I've never downloaded any mods and I'm curious as to what others could do with them. Of course, that said, all parts must be used as-is: no editing their values. Extra points for seeing how little you can tack on; I'm aware of how the flight modeling engine makes it really easy to just put wings atop wings and glitch your way into the air. Be sure to take photos of your craft in flight, landing, doing whatever-show off what you can do without needing thrust to do it.

The name's Reverie Planetarian, after the main character of one of my favorite visual novels (and one with an infatuation for the stars which may strike some chords with fellow KSP players). When it comes to playing Kerbal Space Program itself, I guess you could call me a long-time lurker, but a new pilot. I played the demo a while ago, and only recently bought the full version. Luckily I'm a fast learner, and I'm honing my craft trying to do Mun and Minmus shots after learning to circularize my orbits and manipulate them to reach the Mun, Minmus and other nice things. Like overshooting both satellites entirely and screaming into solar orbit. How Kerbal is that, huh?