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Why thankya kindly silent_prtoagonist You set such a fast time yourself I thought I better pull out all the stops and surprised myself a little I have to admit! But I daresay it could be done faster...

Yes if I can get it into the ethernet socket... else you might have to make do with a special credit in the ticker tape parade. 8) Personally I wouldn\'t recommend version 14x yet or even 13.2, IMHO 13.1 is the latest viable version and a KSC landing is fiddly but seems to work if you are having trouble with unexpected pyrotechnics on splashdown.

Well how does 2:39:01 sound for a return trip to the moon? Thing is this, Bob had been rebuilding his moon lander and remembering the glory days of Burger Crater. So he decided to take a few patties up on the test flight and fry them up on the main control panel heatsink like in the good old days. Only this time he added a little too much chilli to the mix and sorry to say Jeb got a touch of the old jippy tummy. So he wanted to get back to KSC pretty quick, in fact it wasnt just him as the capsule was getting a bit ripe. Bill thought maybe Bob should not have kept the patties on top of the navigation computer because it got a bit too warm there. He said to stick them to the window next time as that usually got a nice cool frosting with the capsule turned away from the sun, the better to keep them chilled. Anyway after a quick launch and arrival, (travelling at 1800m/s over the Mun down to a late retro burn,) the fry up only took a few minutes. But before they left the Munar SOI Jeb decided the journey home had to be a quick one for the reasons mentioned. So he made the usual escape vector to head out of Munar SOI and then turned the nose of the ship so it lined up on the KSC indicator to get a close bearing on Kerbin and opened the throttle. Luckily they had quite a bit of gas left in the lander tanks after the landing engines sheared off and the fuel pipes were intact for once so they had quite a long burn before leaving Munar SOI at 2500m/s. Once they left the Mun SOI and entered Kerbin SOI they saw they were on a good track for home and decided to pick up the pace a little and after jettison of the lander tanks and using all three orbiter tanks except a small reserve for manoevures they found themselves going at 5500m/s on a return trip to the day side with a very low PE, so the ship would enter at a shallow angle and decelerate as gently as possible giving ample time to deploy the chute. They were quite glad to get down and open the capsule door to enjoy the benefit of some fresh sea breezes.

IMHO orbit is both AP and PE over 70,000m. Flying the flight profiles in the 'supplied spacecraft' challenge does help make the lift more efficient. But if you want a limo ride and guaranteed safe landing of with Pod, Parachute, Decoupler, ASAS then I think 5 tanks is the minimum.

Nice videos l00. Well flown. Here is a question for moon hoppers, what is the best angle for a ballistic trajectory like the ones we do hopping between craters? Also do you want the orbit trace to be fast and low, a circular form or high and slow? Or doesnt it make any difference? I was thinking the lower you fly the faster you have to go and the higher you fly the more fuel you waste going up and then decelerating coming down, so I was guessing that if you want to go somewhere efficiently you should go as fast up as you go across ie 45°. But I cant prove it, its just intuitive, a guess. If I do a little sum in my head I see this... g=2.5 up(m/s) across(m/s) distance(m) flight time(s) 100 0 0 40 90 10 360 36 60 40 960 24 50 50 1000 20 40 60 960 16 10 90 360 4 0 100 0 0 Suggesting that a 45° initial flight trajectory is optimum. Is that right ?

good flying Packled I tried a bit today, didnt get any better but one of these days...

That\'s great work nivvydaskrl, very interesting analysis of optimum PE. Well done with completing the mission, you are already one of the few but I have honoured your accomplishment by de-italicising your name and changing the link !!1!1! I hope you can contain your excitement! btw IMHO you landed fair and square and must have reached 0m/s at some point for your parachute to have disappeared in the penultimate screeny. Also something I would like to know an answer to is how to make a rendezvous with Kerbin by increasing the apoapsis so the ship slows down and gives Kerbin a chance to catch up, if you got it right you could probably do it in just over one year. I also agree the idea of lowering apoapsis and then burning a new one to catch Kerbin is another way to do it. That was how I did my last mission in fact, only I mistimed it and got ahead of Kerbin and had to wait for it to catch up. Bedazzled, congrats in completing the mission, you are now a star pilot dude [sPD] and on the guest list of the ticker tape parade. Screenies are easy to take btw just press F1 and then visit screenshots in the KSP game folder. You can convert to JPG in MS paint simply by resaving if you want to reduce file size and can attach when posting for a direct upload to this BB and no hosting required. FYI Welcome bitbucket_[SPD] << its official. I like your ship btw, congrats on completing the mission and thanks very much for an entertaining, comprehensive, well illustrated, generally awesome write up. You are duly invited to the ticker tape parade.

Can you clarify the rules please. Does a water landing count? Do you have to land on the mun on either approach ?

Mission Report: successful rescue, emergency speed, all stock parts. Kerbal Space Center CB radio set received a distress call from the Mun at 00.00 local time. Fortunately Bob had just finished work on an extended moonlander prototype and the decision was made to launch immediately. Bill consulted the back of his favourite envelope and using a piece of string and some chewing gum he calculated the quickest intercept would be achieved by a direct ascent and overburn to escape Kerbin followed by a retroburn manoevure at some point close to the Munar sphere of influence. In this way intercept with the Mun SOI was achieved in approximately 2 hours 6 mins, the retro burn was delayed in favour of a perpendicular burn to adjust the periapsis of the Munar approach to avoid wasting time on a slow approach since speed is of the essence when rescuing stranded space Kerbals who are running out of air. The close Munar pass was finally made at speeds in excess of 1590m/s at less than 1000m and it was only then that the retro burn was applied and the rescue vehicle slowed to make a ballistic drop onto the landing zone. Here it hovered for several minutes and on exhausting the forward drop tanks performed the famous Jebediah spin-drop manoevure which has to be done in free fall to safely eject the forward drop tanks without damaging the aft drop tanks and their fuel pipes and associated landing gear (fins) essential to the rescue. After one aborted landing attempt due to an incline, the crew found the flat floor of a valley still partially illuminated by Kerbol due to the short mission elapsed time, as they passed overhead they spotted the wreckage of the space plane and after making radio contact and landing nearby (MET : 2:47:15) were able to retrieve the crew very swiftly. Liftoff was minutes later and Jeb set out for Kerbin orbital insertion. The orbit was achieved and PE adjusted to facillitate aerobraking. It just so happens that by a fluke of the incredible luck which seems to follow Jeb Kerman around like a faithful terrier, the PE was precisely over KSC on entering the atmosphere for the aerobraking manoevure, so Jeb decided to abort the orbit and go for reentry instead by pointing the ship downwards and lighting the engine. After the ship overshot KSC by a few thousand meters he decided to showboat a little by making a ballistic hop over the KSC using up the remaining fuel and detached the command module directly over the landing pad to achieve touchdown and all parties returned safely to KSC cafeteria for a coffee and donut in a time of 10:48:48. Mission accomplished!

OK following the flight plan first I equalled PackledHostage. EDIT And then I improved on that by 1 meter 33479m woot!

Thanks for calculating the list of target speeds per altitude Closette, I will try flying them later and see if it helps, they are close to the speeds I was using, though a bit lower in the middle part of the ascent. The optimal speed per atmosphere density is how I was thinking of it, it is a practical way to guide a flight as there is no readout for throttle setting or TWR so I think you have improved our flight technology here! The principles explored in this thread are useful for pilots maximising lift off fuel efficiency for high TWR capable craft. In practice I did do a couple of experiments a while back and realised that this phenomenon existed but did not nail the specifics, I just built my craft so that their acceleration curve was a bit lower. But now we have an optimal curve to shoot for! So that is useful for ship building as well, if we build them right they should fly themselves. So its a worthwhile thread and very educational

Well that\'s two illusions shattered in one afternoon! I think it was because people like HarvesteR talked about the atmosphere cutting out at a certain altitude that I assumed since it had an outer boundary it also had some kind of internal layering to account for the subjectively sudden changes in density. I had also laboured under the delusion that burning at low throttle ie <20% might be more efficient than burning at higher throttles, again subjectively. I always meant to test it and never got round to it until now, but I just have and you are right, it doesn\'t make a difference. Would prefer it did actually though that does make life simpler. Learnt something useful anyway.

Your Kerbal\'s sacrifice is not in vain witekin, they will be remembered in the ticker tape parade. Clocking 1/5th the speed of light, impressive speed! 8)

OK two questions, first if KSP applies drag using a stepwise model related to altitude, shouldn\'t we apply thrust to attain max velocities in a stepwise fashion ? Also, there is a big elephant in the room regarding engine efficiency, is it constant or does it vary at different thrust levels? My best 33,319

Funny you should ask, I found out today that it is possible to land on the KSC terrain after the Sierpinski bug has started. So I guess I completed this challenge as part of that attempt at the 'shoot for the sun' challenge linked above, which is also a solar orbit challenge but it entails orbiting with a PE half Kerbins altitude at least once. Makes returning even trickier. Here is a screeny of the stock parts ship, proof of orbit and landing as my entry for this challenge.

Using v13.1 due to the stage bug in v13.2, I built a 67 tank (6x5 + 6x5 + 1x7) stock ship for the mission (screen d) given what we know about the Kraken I figured a long single stack orbiter would be best. I figured RCS would be unecessary as I had a gimballed stock t45 engine in case it got really bad and anyway it shouldnt as the ship was a simple design... in theory. So I did my major escape and deceleration burns inside Munar orbit with a radial multistack and then ditched the outside stacks leaving me with the 7 tank orbiter. This got me below half the altitude of Kerbin as per the mission and then back up to Kerbin a little ahead. The Kraken attacked and nearly borked the mission but I managed to use the old switch-to-5x-and-back ploy to stop the ship tumbling at a useful attitude. I made a wide orbit within the 82,000,000 meter range of Kerbin SOI ie within 13,616 Mm (ie Kerbin altitude 13,534Mm + 82Mm) and waited for it to catch up which it did. I made some aerobraking passes, noticed a bug with stepwise changes in AP and PE markers when not on rails and got lucky with my final pass as the KSC terrain was on the right side of the planet for me to target so I made a shot for it and hit the mark with a landing on KSC terrain which at this point was the only flat bit of land on Kerbin. I hit it quite fast at 13.6 but got lucky again and didnt blow up. FIN

Nice ship Max. I have always found it uses less fuel to go with direct ascent in KSP. I think that the lower you are when you reach escape the faster you are going and the faster you get out of the high gravity zone the less speed you lose from trying to reach orbit inside it. You dont need to reach orbit to escape, so you dont need to spend fuel going sideways when all you want to do is go up. What I do find though with moon shots is that I have to go up and out of the atmosphere ASAP before angling the thrust to match the apoapsis to the moon orbit, this takes a lot of fuel. When it becomes possible to use the warp on the ground without all sorts of problems then it will be even easier as you can line the up the shot for the moon so you can go straight up.

I have way too much time on my hands !

A Story In Pictures... Lucky first landing sheared off the booster engines in crater one which the crew named 'Crash Crater' allowing Jeb to use the remaining booster fuel for the first ballistic hop to crater #2 thanks to Bob\'s bodacious plumbing, hence 'Plumber\'s Crater'. Bill cooked up the ship design on the back of a kornflakes packet one day while raiding the KSC kitchens. He thought it could land on three fins stuck onto the lander stage aft drop tanks, which were meant to be retained even when the tanks were empty to use as landing gear to preserve the lunar hopper\'s engine, which you can see best in screenshot 27. So the forward drop tanks were on seperate decouplers, screenshot 19. Jeb decided to jettison these (and the booster tanks) by putting the ship in a spin to make sure they got away from the craft without flipping over and colliding with the landing gear. This made Bill feel queasy, but he was a lot better after a fry up in crater three 'Burger Crater', where he became highly skilled in the art of flipping burgers in Munar gravity. Then the crew took the ship over to the dark side of the Mun, making a landing in Darth Crater though the fuel situation was getting perilous Jeb decided to stick with the landing gear and fired up for the final hop. The hopper made it to all five craters and then left Munar orbit after dropping the landing gear in 'Junkyard Crater' on the final launch. Successful insertion to Kerbin orbit allowed for an aerobraking pass and reentry close to KSC but not within sight on landing. So Grandpa Kerman had to come and get them in his fishing boat... again. Flight time 16 hrs 36 mins all stock parts...

I have tried this and it is possible with stock though I failed on the fifth crater on the first shot due to running out of juice and then when I had redesigned to provide enough juice I kept on breaking the rocket on landing. Without stock landing struts it is just very very tricky. Little bit of drift or slope and you wave bye bye to your engine. For your entertainment. ...An Heroic Failure...

Nice lean looking ship there Technical Ben. I think I need to try water landings they look a whole lot less crashy... Grats JellyCubes on the first 3 launcher with your amazing flying rocket tree.

IMHO makes sense to figure out the most efficient 2 launch craft before even looking at 3, also there is honour in efficiency. This is the smallest stock 2 launch craft that has made the round trip for me. My previous 2 launch was 120 LFTs and 31+13 LFEs, this one has just 50 LFTs and 13+1 LFEs. This design placed the ASAS in the bottom lander stage so the relaunch vehicle could leave it behind and be as light as possible while carrying a usable chute, but it has to be manual guidance only. Also it launches from on top of the lander stage. When landing you need just enough impact to break the engines but not so much that the whole thing collapses, otherwise when you launch there is a difficult moment on separation where you lose the ASAS before you get the engines on the relauncher to full throttle during which time it can tip over and if you apply throttle too early semi-broken bits of the lander stage can launch themselves at the same time as the relauncher and collide with the Kerman Bros. :\'( All this stuff has happened at least once while practicing for this mission. In fact I have spent three days crashing this thing figuring out how to fly it, picking a flat landing zone, working out how to target it, best approach orbit, best launch timings pattern and how to kill drift while in free fall at 8,000m over Kerbin, and then how to land the remaining teetering pile of junk on one tank of fuel per engine, so today was the first time it all came together and I am pretty chuffed. So here are the screens and the noble craft Algernon 02. Anyone who can spot the reference gets a cyber cookie.

Oh great a status contest between Mun landings and Kerbin landings, that makes so much sense. I am currently experimenting with the smallest 2 launch Kerbin vehicle I can make and I am trying to save fuel by using chutes to control the landing but it is a nightmare because the chutes interact with the thrust system and the ASAS to cause horrendous oscillations.

Experimenting, I reckon the smallest final orbiter is a three tank with no frills so you have to crash land that one. I built a smaller double take off craft 52 tanks and 14 engines with 13 firing on first take off and then a decoupler inside to release the three tank ship once landed, I have successfully used this though I fluffed the landing it was doable if I had not tried to burn for KSC terrain! See craft file 'Triple 03'. I built a ship which could lift and land that ship, with total of 238 tanks and 49+1 engines, but the game engine on my PC * goes nuts and the altitude blanks out and the landing is nearly impossible due to heavy lag so you can be doing 100 m/s either way from your readout and that is enough to kill the ship. So I am going to retire on this one until the engine is better able to handle the ship needed or the stock parts provide more viable solutions. *(Yorkfield quad with 8Gb RAM in Win7 x64 with a HD5870)

Well I did this already scoring 2 with stock and made a post with screenies in the challenge to reach the other hemisphere. So here is the link to that post. I managed to orbit, land on Kerbal, relaunch, orbit and land again on KSC terrain. But if location was not an issue it would be easier and three might just be doable... but tricky and I can\'t see how to do four just yet. I will give it a go this afternoon.