Ninety-Three

Is there a rule on how far our launcher has to get the payload before separating, or is it just "Land that payload on another body and get it back, using as few extra launcher parts as possible"?

I'm also on 19.1.54. The first time around, I copied the entire save file in as a new save, it rejected it. I tried copying in quicksave and persistence to an existing save, and that worked fine. Weird.

What version of KSP is that save? I'm on 19.1 and it tells me the save is incompatible.

Oh yes, I'm definitely planning to turn it on and leave it on in the background, but why MechJeb? Do heavily docked stations oscillate too much for ASAS?

What makes you say that?

Double post due to html submit weirdness.

I'm putting something together, but it involves a whole lot of docking, which I'm not good at, so it'll be a while. To give you an idea, here's a shot including my station core over on the left. I'm making my plan up as I go, which is why I went with the highly modular core there. I'm going to try to fill all of those slots, get bored around six, and send the thing to Jool on a massive ion drive (the liquid fuel is saved for refueling landers). I'm planning two rovers with one-way landing, a land-and-return crew delivery ship that can pick up rovers, and a whole bunch of ion satelites. If I was any good with planes, I'd work one in somehow. Rover planes?

I've been doing a bunch of docking, and it gets extremely annoying being limited to 50x warp when you're only at 90 km. Is there a way to remove the restriction and warp a bit faster?

Yep. So, not really. Though there's probably some flex in the rules depending on whether you mean "Get the last 100 m/s of orbit circularization off my payload" vs "Reach 50k altitude, switch to payload". However, the rules do allow you to put fuel in the payload, and burn that fuel with the launcher (there's an achievement for not doing so), so you can extend it somewhat. I'm more curious about how you plan to get them -up- there. There's no ladders on the launchers, and it's technically outside the rules to add them (though I bet that could be waived, given the circumstances). You will be awesome if you drop your extra pilots off with a flying rover, though.

If you wanted to avoid the no orbital decay cheesiness, I'm fairly certain that you could set a station on an orbit that dips into the atmosphere, and then dock with it on the first or second go around, avoiding the "It should have fallen out of the sky by now" bit. I'm of the opinion that you should leave the definition of that achievement as is: if anyone does it, even the way I described, that's pretty much the most impressive bit of KSP skill I'd've seen. Now that you've confirmed that most of the shenanigans I suggested are outside the spirit of the challenge, I can offer a rule that prevents them: "No fuel from the payload stage may be consumed until the craft is in a stable orbit." If you'd like, you can append "And docked with the thing you're assembling in orbit, where applicable". Anyway, I'll definitely be doing this challenge. One last problem I've found though. When you deorbit the launcher, it doesn't exactly... land. Putting it down in the water is even more hilarious, as the orange tank is destroyed, causing all of the RCS thrusters to splash down in a wonderfully cartoony way.

I'm curious about how you plan to get four Kerbals in one launch.

Actually, I can think of a realistic (read: not "throw yourself into space and hope to hit") way to do this. It still involves some excellent timing and piloting, but it's theoretically sound. Since I'm not a spaceplane person, I'll describe it, in case some other lunatic wants to earn baked goods. Step 1: Put your station in orbit Step 2: Lower your PE until it's dipping into the atmosphere (Unless the station is loaded, ie, within 2.5 km of a ship you're controlling, it won't experience air friction and orbital decay, so take your time with the next step) Step 3: Figure out the timing required, and fly a plane to atmospheric intercept with your semi-orbital station Step 4: Apply piloting skills and perform a thin-atmosphere docking.

Are we allowed to have a final stage consisting of say, a decent engine and an ion drive? Long after the engine burns out, we'll have ion power to make fine adjustments.

Also, I've realized that the GORP rocket can have several tons added to its lift capacity by simply burning off all that dead weight monopropellant on the launch pad.

By a strict reading of the rules, it seems as though one could stick a 200 ton launcher atop one of the provided ships, use the provided ship to get to all of 1000 meters, then release the real launcher and take an arbitrarily large payload into space (even given a fairly conservative interpretation of "You must use the provided craft as the means for lifting your payload", I can imagine carrying up 10 tons of fuel and using the magic of alt-clicking to transfer some back into the launcher). I assume both of those things are against the spirit of the challenge? Edit: I've given the thing a test flight, and it seems the "carry 10 tons of fuel and alt-click it to the main tanks to get significantly more into orbit" shenanigan isn't even necessary. The entire GORP Rocket is crossfed, if you stick a docking port and fuel tank on top of it, the mainsail will draw from the payload tank before touching the tanks that are part of the actual rocket. Trying to carry fuel up automatically takes advantage of this, making it impossible to run a fuel tanker within the presumed spirit of the challenge (unless we're to just fly the ship itself up with no extra fuel, and use whatever fumes it has left as the most painfully small fuel tanker ever).

I found the edge of the universe. And in zero seconds too! Note the docking clamp: All I had to do was make that clamp attached very high up. Very, very high.

I did some experimenting with dense separatrons for this challenge: overheating is only relevant if you stick too many 'trons on the probe core. So long as they're mounted on octo-struts they'll be fine. I encountered the clipping thing too, but my testing showed that it was a matter of the separatron clipbox being really weird, as opposed to a matter of quantity. Certain configurations will shake you apart, some are safe.

Without the use of infiniglide silliness, I don't think an air breathing craft can work up enough velocity in Kerbin's atmosphere to reach the Mun's SOI.

Actually, infinite fuel would be extremely simple. Cover a probe core in as many separatrons (Empty TWR: 145, far surpassing the next-best SRB at 51, and the Mainsail at 25), use clamps to empty them on the launchpad. Engage infinite fuel, disengage clamps, spend 30 seconds at ~145 TWR. The only engineering to do would be in using cubic struts to earn more attachment points for separatrons and slightly improving your TWR by building strut-assemblies with a better weight-separatron ratio than your base core.

I'm building a rather bizarre craft for a challenge, and I want the staging to look something like this: "Ignite stage 1. Wait 6 seconds. Ignite stage 2. Wait 6 seconds. Ignite stage 3. Drop stage 1 when it runs of fuel." I've never used MechJeb because I prefer to pilot things myself, but this is an area where machine precision could really help me out. Rather than diving into the massive function library of MechJeb, I thought I'd ask the forums: Can MechJeb do what I want?

I thought I'd post the following ship to give people starting off a benchmark to beat. A simple probe core and one solid fuel (and a little strut to prevent the engine from overheating the core) can achieve 14337.

I'm going to work on a partially dry solid-based ship in the morning, so I'll sign off for the night with this piece of technically stock cheesiness. 50000! And with time to spare, too!

With perfect timing, I can see how partially burnt solids are strictly better than my mainsail ultrasparagus. The thing had a minimum TWR of 14.5, so solids have 11.5 seconds where they outdo it. You'd only need three layers of solids (start burns at T-22, T-11, T-0, stage at T+8, T+19) to start putting out better numbers, and unlike my mainsail build which was already getting close to its limits (carrying 4T of fuel with 6T engines), there's plenty of room to push solids, as the 11 seconds figure has them carrying 1.25 T of fuel to 0.5 dry mass.

I'm not sure what you're doing there Jason, but that has made me realize that, in the last 4.6 seconds of its life, a solid booster actually outperforms a Mainsail on an infinitesimal tank. I'll have to work that into the next version of mine.

It actually launches pretty well (trust me, I've done some 5-1 lag time dilation launches), and load times, while noticeable, aren't too bad. It's only around 400 parts: 80 assemblies of engine, fuel tank, decoupler and fuel line, plus some number of struts.