Jarnis

I wished to keep the how-to simple - the point being that it doesn\'t matter what altitude you do this at. It is true that it eats less fuel at a higher altitude.

No, it really takes a lot of delta-v. That\'s why in the real world, it is equally hard to send probes to Mercury as it is to outer solar system and most probes use multiple flybys of Earth for gravity assist to get there. Of course since Kerbal doesn\'t orbit the sun, you can\'t do that in KSP. Yet. Once it does, you will need to kill a lot of delta-v, but you can also 'cheat' with gravity assists (assuming the simulation supports them). Expect Jeb to get bored tho, as such a trajectory would take many orbits around the sun - months, perhaps even years.

So, you may have noticed that no matter which way you head when going for orbit, the orbit always goes over KSC. This is because Kerbin doesn\'t rotate and, assuming you do not change your orbital plane, your orbit will always intersect your liftoff point. But... it is possible to change your orbital plane! This is definitely more of an advanced maneuver and was very hard to do before the orbital map view was added. The trick is to do a burn 'sideways', at a specific point during your orbit. You always aim towards the horizon and towards the middle point between the two yellow markers, pointing to the direction you want to rotate the orbit around the planet. Think it like this; You are flying on orbit towards east and you burn towards north - inevitably your path will curve towards north from the point where you did a burn and... the orbital plane shifts. As you have to do the burns pretty exactly at the spot where you cross your initial orbit and the new target orbit and, after 2-3 orbits, two burns per orbit, you\'ll get where you want. For this demonstration, I\'ve started with the easy-to-explain base case where you lift off and park on orbit around the equator or Kerbin. You pass between light and dark side of the planet every orbit and pass over KSC every time. But what if... we could orbit over the poles following the terminator between dark and light sides? Such an orbit would never pass over KSC. All you need is some knowledge and fuel. LOTS of fuel. Changing inclination by 90 degrees takes a lot of deltaV. I used my basic Mun Rocket design (stock parts) but for this purpose I merged the two upper stages into one three-tank+2 RCS tank upper stage. This design gets into 100km+ circular orbit with about one third of the middle stage left and transitioning to polar orbit over the terminator took the remainder of stage 2 and over 2 tanks out of stage 3. That is a LOT of fuel. The key is to burn when you are crossing your new orbital plane - in this case, the terminator between dark and light. Initial burn pointed straight north and during the first pass over the correct spot in the orbit I got about 25% of the needed change. I was still burning with the middle stage so the rocket was heavier. Important bit is to stop the burn soon after you pass the intended spot and then wait half an orbit. After first burn the middle stage was spent so half an orbit later another burn - pointing south and bit towards the dark side (90 degrees from the new orbit) got us to 45 degree inclination. Half way there. Another half an orbit and pushing the last bits and... success. Orbital plane changed from equatorial to one that goes over the poles following the line between dark and light side. All that was left was to circularize it. Easy!

Tsk, tsk... 'pics or didn\'t happen'

I call EXPLOIT! and suggest you should beg for forgiveness...

The green re-paint of the seats = your kerbonauts. I don\'t think they survived that acceleration...

Hmm.... *ponders if that would be enough for an orbit...* To the VAB! Edit: Ah, never mind. Can\'t be enough, due to the decoupler weight. If I could dump that, it would be possible to reach muuuuch further away.

The G-meter on the UI is fairly insensitive and inaccurate.

Impressive. Most impressive. But you know what this means, right? To the VAB! More Boosters!

I omitted the launchpad shot on purpose to keep this interesting - but as a starting point... it fires 11 LFEs and 8 solid boosters on liftoff and just barely gets off the ground at full thrust... no need to manage throttle to avoid aerodynamic drag, it won\'t go that fast until it is out of the lower atmosphere 8) (And I can guarantee it is 100% stock parts and I have a pic on file...)

Rocket design perfected to a new level (100% stock parts). Bigger rocket! More boosters! Excess weight stripped (Less SAS!) Re-entry speed bumped up to Jeb-scaring 7800m/s and the results are in... Kerbonauts got squeezed to a pulp with Most Gee Force Endured: 234.4G Not a crash, not a jolt from parachute getting ripped off. Just pure speed on re-entry. I await your feeble attempts at beating this! 8)

Re-entry heat... mmm... crispy Kerbonauts... If it is in any way realistic, re-entries from trajectories outside of simple circular orbits may get interesting... as in have to re-enter at this specific angle - too shallow and you\'ll just skim through the upper atmosphere, too steep and crew can gets all crispy (and flat). Should make initial Mun missions... *Fun *Fun is trademarked by Dwarf Fortress

Do not worry. Kerbonauts are mighty tough. In our detailed experiments they have routinely survived 'straight down' re-entries at nearly 7000m/s, resulting in peak G loads of over 170G. Highest recorded spike is about 215G (suspected to be due to a parachute deployment too early ) and highest that resulted in soft landing about 190G. Jeb even smiled all the way down! (That, or the game is missing a feature that turns the contents of the crew can cabin into a suitably green paste and distributes it all over the wall facing the blunt end if G loads get too high... not sure...) 8)

I hereby surrender on this challenge unless we get a more accurate G-metering (both on the instrumentation and at the end-of-flight screen) Still, glad you liked my design

I hereby submit that the G-meter is imprecise. Here is the best I can do with the meter never visibly moving from 1G for more than 2 pixels. SSTO to stable 100km+ orbit, all stock parts, with Most Gee Force Endured: 1.7G 8) Overshot the 100km circular a bit, but it would be trivial to readjust it there with the fuel remaining.

Ditched decouplers, first try without: 1.9G SSTO rocket (dubbed 'Smooth Criminal') to a 100km circular orbit with 75% of the last trio of tanks left for orbital operations. Even has a parachute, tho I think it would\'ve snapped under the weight of the empty rocket if I tried to land... I\'m fairly sure I can beat this with further tries, but since it is officially a new record for this challenge, here it is.

I did 175G on my first try with fully stock rocket, gonna try another tomorrow... the turnaround time on this challenge is kinda looooong... >

Nice try, but not nice enough. Through careful throttle control, the new record stands at... 95 011m You may now continue your throttle optimization training, cadet. 8)

True, I could see the parachute popping open during the heaviest deceleration spiking the G load even more for a moment until the parachute rips away. :\'( But anyway, all that is needed for more is higher velocity on re-entry, which requires more available fuel for use after the flip (and possibly the flip happening slightly further away). We need a bigger rocket! More boosters!

This is easy and actually demonstrates how trivial it is to reach a stable orbit 'taking it easy'. However, I think there is a problem - I got the exact same 2.2G while absolutely certain that I never went past 1.5G on the meter. I\'m fairly certain that the 2.2G comes as a spike from the decoupler when I stage. Off to tinker the design to be SSTO...

Sub-2G should be easy. To the VAB...!

Poorly. Below 20k the atmosphere is a wall. I re-entered at 6.6km/s at 40km and by 10km it was below 1km/s.

Well, if you think that the collision spiked that, you can scratch the previous two. This one is only 6.6km/s so I\'m fairly sure that the above 215G one is not influenced by the splat, but this one definitely was not. Most Gee Force Endured: 170G 8) A couple of shots along the way included. Oh, and the Kerbonauts are protesting that this is uncomfortable...

I\'m quite sure it is atmospheric. The final collision at 120m/s produces nowhere near this kind of figures. My 2nd try finally completed... here is my little re-entry at 6.8km/s... Most Gee Force Endured: 215.5G Jeb pulled the chute too early - the ground was coming up at a very very very scary speed, so he paniced. Chute went one way and the capsule other way... still, even without it, the capsule went from 6.8km/s to sub-200m/s in under 15km of altitude, so... Edit: But if you insist... third rocket going up. Maybe this time Jeb won\'t panic and it will be a soft landing. Will take shots pre-landing and after it.

Bah, amateurs. First try, by no means 'maxed out', had to dump the last stage unused as the ground was coming up really, really fast... - five kilometers a second is quite a lot of velocity when you are less than 30 kilometers from the ground... ??? Most Gee Force Endured: 103G 8) All _used_ parts were stock parts (my Mun rocket design) but the uppermost stage ('lander', minus ascent stage, ascent engine and the legs) used the Mun lander pack fuel tank + engine - but those never fired. Landing... uuh... Jeb forgot to press the 'open parachutes' button. Yeah... Unfortunate accident. Well, that or the Kerbonauts were somewhat liquefied due to the G-loads... And no, this is by no means the maximum this rocket could do... 150G is my next goal... Edit: 2nd try in progress. 800km and still climbing 1km/s, with plenty of juice in the tank for some slight boosting on the way down...