Ryu Gemini

I actually thought a bit about how difficulty would work in this. Maybe "easy mode" would reduce inter-part force by half (i.e. it would require twice as much torque or sheer stress to break a connection). Or maybe such a thing would just be 50% more fuel in parts or something. Either way, I'm fine without it.

Nice. Of course, you just know something fun will come out of this from those people who like to purposely try and break the physics engine.

That reminds me. I ought to try and see if I can build the Hercules sometime (Freespace and Freespace 2)

I am pretty sure this one is old. But I just noticed that when I zoomed in on a battery pack that it is apparently a "Battman" brand battery. Like I said, an old one. Only just noticed it is all.

So basically, its a manual control challenge with the added challenge of ALSO not being able to use gyroscopes (i.e. the SAS that is present in command pods and even to a lesser extent in probes) to conveniently control your ship's turning in space (chairs don't have that handy SAS function in them after all, though I'm not sure if the kerbals themselves do)? Took a few seconds to realize that actually. At first I considered saying something along the lines of "eh, we can just throw a chair on any old ship and replace its pod with a nosecone and be done with it, then." Something tells me we will be wanting to bring along gimbaled rockets and RCS.

How has someone not done the kerbal-style pirate flag suggestion in any way yet? I like the idea of crossed SRBs in place of bones, too.

Well, you will only need to be in EVA for what, a minute? Get out, plant flag just far enough to avoid blowing it away, get back in. Its more a rule to prove you CAN get back into the design after getting out.

So its not an egg either way. Its just a feature that wasn't noticed much till now.

Now that .20 is out, am I to assume we can use control chairs to launch kerbals on the tiny ships now?

Honestly, rather then limit the number of pieces the ramp has, it would be better to limit the height it has (using some piece of your choice as the measuring stick).

Indeed, and the question was "contaminated" anyway, on account of a bunch of idiots crash landing on the planet in the past and ending up being the forerunners of humanity.

Well, I decided to give it a go. So naturally, I went with the most complicated setup I could possibly think of: make EVERYTHING with one vehicle. Also, I am pretty sure I broke the ramp limit rule, but its not a terribly huge ramp at least (basically, I made the ramp 3 blocks wide). Contains one ramp, one two-stage rocket buggy, and one center thingy with a rockomax counter-weight where jeb hangs out before he walks down a suspended railingless walkway over to the control chair of the buggy. This is the farthest one I captured in-video, but our heroic jeb did not survive it sadly. Had he been able to stay in his seat though, it would have been an entry that cleared BOTH buildings in a single jump. And arguably the tracking station too if it weren't off to the side. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUJoGvOaJX4 As you see, the general gist of the control setup I use is to rocket forward and basically cut engines and ditch stage a second or so before I hit the ramp. Less likely to crash horribly with something nice and light-weight. While I didn't get a video of a survivor that jumped that larger building, I did get a screenshot of one that WOULD have cleared the larger building, had the ramp been closer.

Close enough. I built a "wright flier" that was powered by jets. I also soon realized I built it backwards too. And humorously enough, when I cut the engines and just let it tumble around, it eventually leveled out and starting flying backwards too.

Honestly, the first thing I was gonna do is throw together a crudfully made wright flier that was powered with rockets, but eh. This is close enough.

The real life sun has no limit to its sphere of influence either. It merely gets really, really, really insignificant as you get really, really, really far away. Thus, it is at least possible to achieve solar escape velocity.

To add to that, physics are not calculated for stuff you aren't controlling at the moment or which is not feasible to be interacting with what you are controlling. It also isn't if what you are controlling is perfectly stationary on the surface of a planet (easiest to notice if you do it with a parked spaceplane, which will "snap" to its default "un-physics'd build hangar form" when you reach a high enough warp). Objects in orbit while you are not controlling them seem to just be saved as some form of "orbit data." I figured that out when I finally got around to seeing what happens if you use the "hack gravity" debug option to get something out of the atmosphere. If you look at the map while doing this, what you see is basically the orbit data you are in with that weird gravity whatnot being on. Return to space center from such an object without ending flight, then go back to that object, and you end up with a ship that is on that projected orbit with normal unhacked gravity. Put another way, the vessel's speed is increased to the point where it is now at the proper speed to be in that trajectory relative to the local planet's gravity. Point is, as long as something is in a safe stable orbit, you don't need to worry about warping time when its not being controlled.

That is true on paper. However, the physics engine is not the most forgiving thing with that sort of construct. Since all collumns would have similar thrust to their individual weights, there wouldn't be a huge amount of sheer stress (at least while the gimbals point straight down), but this vessel would be quite wide and there would be one that is slightly lower (the one with the command part). Who knows how that would affect things during the burn over a particularly wide vessel. Gimballing or not, it would also be difficult to turn this massive thing. And then of course is the question of how well it will rest on the ground without blowing itself up (setting it on launch towers would induce far too much sheer so that is out). Part of the concept is effectively that whatever you put up there can then be used for getting other places, either as a ship that needs to be refueled first, or as a bunch of fuel tanks that can do said refueling (this is not to say you can't also use them to put stations up). That is part of the reason I went with the 100km limit too, it makes a better "general purpose" benchmark orbit. Actually, considering that, I decided to modify the rules slightly. Removed the nuclear engine penalty (which no one currently has incurred yet anyway). Also, the spent stage de-orbit bonus is now 10% down from 20%, but there is a new bonus of 10% if you have ports and can refuel or be refueled. Scores up to this point will remain valid, partly due to the fact that they could effectively remain the same by sticking a few small docking ports on them. Also changed the first high-part penalty to 550, so there is a little bit of buffer room between the bonuses and penalties. Also added a lower-orbit penalty so I can properly count polecat's submission (and to make the 100km requirement a little more visible). Updated the scores section with what is currently done (m1x misinterpretted the part count penalties slightly, so I adjusted for that). There is now a pair of challenge sections for spaceplanes that follow these rules, and for the good old absolute heaviest lifter sub-challenge suggested earlier.

To nitpick though, SRB abuse isn't much different from abusing mainsails and jumbo-64s, is it? .

Correct on both accounts. Fixed that error in my math now. Getting over 700 parts means you take both the 10% and the 20% hit. To clarify another question, this is not payload-based. The mass that counts is the TOTAL VESSEL that makes it into orbit. Including any stages not yet jetisoned at that point, or any empty/partially empty tanks you are hauling along with you (naturally, the mass remaining is what matters, so it is recommended you have mechjeb or a plugin that informs you of the mass you presently have, NOT the mass the tanks would have if they were still full). As mentioned, struts are friends to many-a-rocketeer. Which makes it an engineering challenge to put enough in to keep your rig together, but no so many as to have hundreds of them cluttering your rocket's part count with. Edit: Sure, we can have a secondary side-challenge for those with good computers to see the heaviest thing they can get into orbit on a single launch. I'll make edits to the main post to start up the score area sometime in the next day or two. One more edit: Just a reminder, the orbital height being used here is 100k, not 75k. .

Ah, good to know.

That feeling when you realize ion engines are too annoying to put on an awesome looking cruiser. And when you realize you can't build a flyable aircraft to save Jeb's life (at least not for a while anyway). Speaking of. That time you discover you put the landing gear for an aircraft attached to a canard or similar fully-mobile wing surface. That one is fun. Particularly because you may well try fixing different things 3 or 4 times before realizing its those bloody canards dancing the wheels around that's causing it. And of course, there's that time when you get your mega-aircraft out and about. And then one side flames out a milisecond before the other and you enter an unrecoverable horizontal spin of death. Oh, and lets not forget the time we all tried to put wings on a Jumbo 64.

Here's something I found out. Put a pair of downward facing lamps on things you plan to land somewhere. They light up the area nicely, and additionally because the lights (unless you make minor adjustments) will point down at a slight angle, you can use them as a distance-judge if you are trying to land at night.

One way you could go for it would be to have three sets of wheels instead of two, each at a 120 degree angle from the other two. Or if you can afford a bit more weight, four sets of wheels at 90 degrees to each other. It wouldn't be so much that it can drive upside down, as it would be that it has 3 or 4 upright positions. .

Its something that does need looking at overall though. I mean, I can run my rocket at up to 4x warp when its raring up in the atmosphere, but suddenly when its actually safe and much smaller out in space, I can't warp faster then 1x while throttled up? I hope that's on the look-at-list.

I am reminded of the Pizza Delivery Challenge. Of course, the rules differed a little. .