Cygnus

You might want to consider making teams of 2 or 3 if there are enough people. The purpose is to spread the veteran players with the newer ones to make the competition more fair and so that the experienced players can help guide their teammates. You may introduce diminishing scoring returns for repeat accomplishments within a team, such as the first teammate to arrive at minmus will get full points and a second teammate will only get half points for the team. This way the score wont entirely consist of all three members going to one place and reusing the same exact design and mission profile, and it will force people to plan diverse missions to maximize points. It will also give experienced players incentive to leave the easier tasks to their newer teammates (such as a mission to the Mun) so that they can focus on high risk missions to jool or wherever. I wish there was a KSP competition at my university...

Thanks! I hope there are more contenders to compete with! For visuals, I used the Better Atmospheres mod but for the sun I think you can change that by itself using the SUNFLARE.DDS file in the better atmospheres mod and using these instructions.

Hi there, I only recently found this challenge and I hope I am not too late. Here is my entry: Perseus MK-1 It is part of my Skylon inspired all stock unmanned SSTO's built for FAR. The original model named Zeus was designed to mimic the Skylon design and lift 10 Tons to orbit in a cheap reusable unmanned SSTO. The model I am entering, Perseus, was designed to push the concept to the limit and lift 20 tons to orbit. Specs: Cost: 46,567 Funds Wet weight: 28.9 Tons Dry weight: 13.951 Tons Power plant: 1x PB-NUK RTG Engines: 3x RAPIERs Intakes: 1x shock cone intake per engine Rated to lift 20 Tons to an 80 km circular orbit. Here is the link to the album detailing the 2 flight requirements for the challenge: Perseus Flights Both flights carried a 20.2 Ton probe into >80 km orbit. Flight 1: Recovered funds: 45,183 Funds used: 1,384 Funds per Ton: 68.515 Score: 20,200 / 68.515 = 294.8 Flight 2: Recovered funds: 45,217 Funds used: 1,350 Funds per Ton: 66.832 Score: 20,200 / 66.832 = 302.3 Average: (294.8 + 302.3) / 2 = 298.6 Total Points: 298.6 I hope more people post their designs and good luck!

It seems that the forums ate my last post by logging me out and then bugging out during the relogin and I forgot to copy it, so I will be brief: I bought this game a month ago and I have hit a wall with overly complicated ships. I looked on the forums and learned about the Max Physics Delta Time. Some of the descriptions of it were confusing, in game and on the forums and since then I have come up with my own understanding of it: 1. This setting controls the maximum physics time step that the game is allowed to use. 2. The minimum physics time step is probably 0.01 seconds, so it effectively tries to do 100 physics steps per in game second. I came up with this number because it is the lowest setting possible in the .cfg file. 3. The game dynamically increased the physics time step from 0.01 to your maximum physics delta time setting in order to maintain realtime gameplay. 4. The game will not use time steps above your setting so it will instead slow down game time to allow the cpu to catch up. My observations of the effects of this setting: 1. Higher settings result in inaccurate physics and make the game unplayable due to absurd physics. 2. The physics calculations seem to be more complicated the higher the time step is, in other words, it takes longer to calculate a time step of 0.03 than a time step of 0.01. If the calculations took exactly the same amount of time, then at maximum time step, the game should run 3 times slower at 0.01 than at 0.03, but I found that this is not the case. In my experience, I have seen that time slow down only 1. times more. Why or how this is happening is unknown to me and I need to run more tests. 3. The game drops frames. Why and when it decides to do this is also unknown to me. I have found that under a high part count ship (660 parts), my frame rate is only 24 per in game second for 0.03, and 50 for 0.01 (8 FPS and 12 FPS respectively). My suggestions: 1. The max physics delta time slider should be adjusted to bet between 0.1 and 0.01. This because the physics are far too inaccurate above 0.1 and I doubt anyone on here uses a setting above 0.1. How low you will go depends on how much in game time dilation you are willing to accept for higher frame rates and better physics. 2. Physics time warp probably functions by increasing the time step to a set amount. Perhaps this should be set so that it increases the time step to no more than 4 times of what your max physics delta time is. Currently, this setting upsets the physics too much so that larger ships tear themselves apart way to easily, and even small ships act oddly. If it can increase the time step from my 0.01 setting to 0.04 or even to 0.1, then the physics should still be okay as long as the forces applied are not too extreme. I still need to do more testing, and all this is based on conjecture so please take it with a grain of salt. I will appreciate any comments and I am sorry for rambling so much without presenting any graphs!

As I said, the equation goes on infinitely, so the only real speed limit is c, the speed of light. And just for fun, I calculated the number of tanks that are need to reach 1% the speed of light. I couldn't use the website that I linked because it's servers couldn't handle sums above 1E7 but I was able to extrapolate the number to 1E186 orange fuel tanks. That would mean the starting mass is at 3.6E190 kg, which is more than the mass of the universe... And I worry that I made a mistake somewhere so feel free to correct me.

There is a feasibility limit to this as well, and you can figure out the maximum possible dV with regards to the number of drop tanks you have, by using a summation equation for orange tanks plus 1 LV-N engine: 9.81*800*sum{ln[(36x+2.25)/(36x-29.75)]} With x=1 to 10 the dV is 29538 with x=1 to 100 the dV is 45527 The dV didn't even double from increasing the number of fuel tanks by 10 times. going on to 1000 orange tanks only gets you to 61582 dV, so while it can go on to infinity, you will need ridiculous amounts of fuel tanks to get you a higher dV. Yuo can do this yourself at http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sums and input the equation as ln((36x+2.25)/(36x-29.75))*800*9.81 and start at 1 and end at whatever number of drop tanks you want.