Plur303

Sorry guys, looks like you might have to learn how to actually play the game... In order to rendevous with a ship in the same orbit as you make your orbit lower in order to speed up and catch your target or make your orbit higher in order to slow down and let it catch up to you. Then just time accelerate for a few orbits until you are close. You can easily use the maneuver node system to plan rendevous with even more precision. It's not hard. You might even learn a thing or two by playing the game without mechjeb. I suggest getting rid of the training wheels and playing the game manually. It can be difficult at first but soon you will be rendezvousing and docking like a pro. You will laugh at how much fuel mechjeb wastes on its ascents and how much RCS fuel it wastes when docking.

I dislike mechjeb because it fills the community up with people who can't even play the game properly. They go around making suggestions to the developers and participating in challenges when they probably can't even land on the Mun without using mechjeb. It lowers the skill required to play the game too much. The one thing I really like about this game is that it requires a semi-intelligent person to build a rocket that can make it to the Mun and return to Kerbin. The stock version of KSP requires a willingness to learn in order to be successful.

In my opinion the official forums here are already saturated with "noobs". So much as slightly suggest that mechjeb is cheaty and people freak out. I do most of my discussion about this game on another forum that shall not be mentioned. If you so much as post a picture of a ship with mechjeb there you will get flamed by 20 comments. In my opinion this is how it should be. Mechjeb is what allows noobs to play this game in the first place. I'm willing to bet that 75% of mechjeb users are incapable of even landing on the Mun without it.

The new Falcon Heavy from SapceX is using fuel crossfeeding to pump fuel to the center stage and expend the outer 2 stages first.

Infinite RCS is pretty ridiculous. I highly suggest removing that from the rules.

Now that is an interesting ship. I will allow it because it appears to follow the rules. I'm also curious how you plan to flip it around and use the rocket while still in the atmosphere. I consider that stacking. Placing an intake so that there is a part mounted to the front of it is stacking.

I took this station up in 1 launch. I even had a probe body on those engine in the last picture. They had enough fuel to burn retrograde for a few seconds and de-orbit so that I didn't put any debris in space. It has 4 ion engines for adjusting orbits. Also, notice my sweet launch pad lighting system.

I'm hoping that career mode will add a tech tree you unlock by investing money in research and mining materials. For instance, maybe you can't build nuclear engines or RTGs until you have mined some blutonium and brought it back to Kerbin.

Better (realistic) aerodynamics will change everything. I'm afraid that real aerodynamics will be too difficult for most people and that the devs are going to keep the game EZ mode to avoid pissing people off. If aerodynamics were realistic making huge asparagus staged rockets with 12 columns of tanks will be a terrible idea. The frontal area of that rocket would be horribly inefficient. The way aerodynamics are currently calculated adding nosecones to your rockets actually hurts their performance because of the added weight. They offer no aerodynamic benefit. Reentry heat completely changes the game. I've messed around with the deadly reentry heat mod and while it is fun it needs a lot of optimization. But it's a fun preview of things that might come in the future. I would really like the intake air resource for jet engines to be redone. The way most people build spaceplanes right now is beyond silly. They just stick intake after intake after intake on the aircraft until it can fly to 30,000 meters or more and reach what are essentially orbital speeds on jets alone. This simply isn't realistic. The SR-71 is the fastest jet engined aircraft ever and it only flew to about 24,000 meters and only about 1,000 meters/second. And lets not forget the totally goofy physics involved with control surfaces. You can fly as fast as a SR-71 in a glider... The glider in this picture took off from the ground and never had an engine. That is 100% glider power. So in short I think aerodynamics are totally broken and goofy in this game and desperately need to be remodeled.

I don't mean to belittle the work you put into the spreadsheet, but the Kerbal Engineer mod will show you the thrust to weight ratio of your rocket, its delta V, and burn time for all stages, on any planet or moon. It also gives you all sorts of data in flight. And unlike mechjeb, it does not have any sort of autopilot. It just gives you loads of helpful information. http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/0-18-1-kerbal-engineer-redux-v0-5/

I just did a clean install and it is 31 seconds from the time I click the icon to open it to the main menu being loaded. I'm running the game on a SSD. With mods installed it is about 1 minute 6 seconds. I have a ton of mods. My system specs are: i7-950 overclocked to 4.0 GHz 6 GB of RAM at 1600 MHz 6-8-6-24 timings HD-6870 GPU Game is running on a Samsung 256 GB SATA 3 SSD

The way aerodynamics are currently implemented the area of your rocket does not matter. Nose cones also slow you down and do no good. They are just dead weight. The developers have said they are going to update the aerodynamics some day but it is not happening any time soon. For the time being there is no aerodynamic penalty for having a wide rocket with flat tops on the tanks. Here is a detailed test I did of the same rocket using different staging methods. Sorry if the size is too big. I wanted to fit everything in 1 frame so I could post this on other forums and discussions about the game, not just here. I used mechjeb to remove human error. It flies the exact same ascent program for all the flights. As you can see, asparagus staging greatly increases the performance of the exact same rocket. Link to full size. Small text is visible in full size http://i.imgur.com/XDlDujR.jpg This is very true. The exact same generic asparagus lifter might not be better in all situations. However, I still believe that with a little tweaking and playing around with thrust to weight ratios of the different stages asparagus is always going to be superior. I highly recommend the Kerbal Engineer mod for everybody. http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/0-18-1-kerbal-engineer-redux-v0-5/ It shows you the thrust to weight ratios of every stage and also shows their thrust to weight ratios on other planets/moons. This helps you design landers for other places and saves you from carrying too much fuel to a place like minmus. If you make your lander smaller and more efficient then you can also make your boosters smaller. Using Kerbal engineer you can tell if your 3rd asparagus stage is going to be too weak. So to sum it all up. There is no generic "asparagus" design that is automatically better. What it really comes down to is the thrust to weight ratio of each individual stage. If you manage the thrust to weight ratio and keep it around 2 to 3 for launch stages then you will be fine. You don't want to go too fast at low altitudes so anything above about 2.5 is getting wasteful for low altitudes because of air resistance. You will need to throttle back.

FYI I am going out of town until Sunday and will probably not be checking this thread. So do no be offended if you submit your mission to the thread and I don't respond for a couple days. I have been exploring this concept and although it works great I don't like it just because it is so ridiculous... The sad thing is that this plane flys amazing. With ASAS on it is silky smooth, no shaking at all. I have a feeling this plane can beat my original submission.

I completely disagree on every level. "Stacking" does not require any design ingenuity and one can simply spam as many intakes as they want with no effort given to incorporate those intakes into the design. It's ridiculous. Putting multiple intakes one behind the other doesn't even make sense. As I stated in a previous comment I honestly wish the game forced us to have the intakes in a realistic position in relation to the jet with a clear flow path for the air to travel between the two. I personally like to make planes that are as realistic as posible. This one is a personal favorite of mine but since it only has 1 Ram and 2 scoops per engine it is very "low performace" compared to the spam fest SSTOs on this forum. I posted a "CHALLENGE". In this challenge I made the rules to be somewhat challenging. Shocking concept, I know... I do not like that you have a Nerva clipped inside a fuel tank and a jet. Even if you did it without using the debug menu it goes without saying this is an exploit and unfair. I'm not going to score that splaceplane in that configuration. Also, Mechjeb...

Stinky-P was rebuilt into Stinky-P-ants in honor of the LV-1 ant engine added to it. It achieved an altitude of 17,153,493 meters with 0.02 fuel remaining after 1:31:27 of burning at 100%. At no point were the engines off or below 100%. The staging allowed me to have the engines on the entire time. Album with more shots at different stages of the mision: http://imgur.com/a/DhSEM At this point I activated the LV-1 engine on the top of my rocket, deactivated the nuke engine, decoupled the nuke engine, and flipped my rocket retrograde so that the LV-1 was now burning prograde. And finally, after leaving the room to do laundry and have a snack, even on 4X time acceleration, I'm finished...

Ok I just notice it wasn't highest apoapsis. Tweaking my rocket and trying again.

I removed this entry because I did not get a clear screenshot of the moment I ran out of fuel.

So just to clarify, the fuel limit is 1800 liquid fuel, 2200 oxidizer? I'm working on my ship now.

You did the equation backwards. It is remaining/starting so 279/1572 which = 0.1520 x1000 = 152 +250 for no damage and no runway landing bonus = 402 You would be the score leader if you could land on the runway. But it does appear that you use clipping to place some of your parts, which violates rule #3, no use of the debug menu. This is going to have to fall into the honorable mentions category. I also think I see a stacked intake just in front of your jet engines, behind the outermost bicoupler. That is not allowed. Thanks for participating!

Nice Job. I calculate your score as 787 points. You might be able to improve your score if you time your launch so that you don't have to go into a Kerbin orbit before burning to the Mun. That's what I did. My ascent burn and injection burn to the Mun were all one continuous burn. You save a little bit of fuel that way by not spending energy raising your periapsis on Kerbin. The burn is also more fuel efficient that way because you are doing your Mun injection burn at a lower altitude and exploiting the Oberth effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect And bsalis I'm also giving you an honorable mention.

I have to agree with this. I have a feeling this is going to get very ridiculous very quickly. With hyperedit you can just teleport your ship to whatever distance you want from the sun or instantly make your velocity many times the speed of light. I have flown past Jool in a matter of seconds messing around with hyperedit. I think at least hyperedit should be banned. Also there is nothing keeping somebody from making a rocket with 100,000 thrust and 0.0001 mass. But I'm sure there will be some entertaining posts.

First of all, I would like to thank everybody for completely derailing my challenge... I agree with him 100% on this point. In my opinion stacking intakes is a blatant exploit of a broken game mechanic and is clearly cheating. Honestly I wish the devs would just increase the weight of ram and circular intakes so they are similar to the radial scoop intakes. They weigh about 1/10th as much as a radial scoop. The aerodynamic drag model calculates drag from part mass. So increasing the mass will not only increase drag but also the amount of delta V required to haul them around in space as well as making more lift required to carry them.

That is exactly my logic. If you read my rules I do not limit the number of intakes. You can have 10 per engine, you are just going to have to get a little more creative in your design and there might be a weight penalty (a challenge, shock!!!!) Ummmmm, I thought that is what I did... Are you arguing against yourself? Um, Thanks? Mounting intakes with bi or tri couplers or even quad (3X bicouplers) is fine, there is a weight penalty. Mounting rockets with cubic struts is OK. Rockets are heavy and clipping 20 of them on to your rocket is not an advantage. I mounted the 2 jets on the back of my fuselage using struts. Having more jets is not an advantage, they are heavy.

I'm not sure if you noticed, but this challenge is about SSTO space planes, not bicycles... That is a great red herring argument though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring Putting 50 intakes on a plane so that it can fly to the very edge of space or even achieve a apoapsis above 70,000 meters and reach orbital velocities on turbojets alone is an exploit. I stand firmly by that decision. If they add ramjets to the game later I will change my mind. But the idea that a turbojet can operate at those altitudes is just silly. I'm sorry that I don't allow blatant exploiting of a glitched intake air resource bug... Wait a minute, I'm not sorry at all. I consider intake spamming to be equivalent to the RCS bugs of 0.18.1 that allowed people to travel to every single planet in the system on less than 1 tank of RCS fuel. RCS was never intended to be a primary source of propulsion and I'm pretty sure the devs never intended people to be cramming as much intakes as physically possible on to the ship. If I was a Dev I would force intakes to be located in line with the jet engine and not even allow fuel tanks between the intake and the jet. There would have to be an actual path for the air to follow from the intake to the jet engine.

My SSTO, the Nuke SSTO MK III, capable of traveling to the Mun or Minmus and back. Returns from the Mun with plenty of fuel remaining. Also has the Delta V for a 1 way Duna trip. In these pics I safely landed back at KSC with no damage. No ions or intake exploiting either. 1 intake per tank. None mounted with cube struts. gallery of more pics http://imgur.com/a/9dxfw