BagelRabbit

I was waiting for someone to bring this up. In all of my other challenges (except for one), I've made the explicit statement "The rocket/plane should leave the pad," and for every one of these challenges, someone doesn't read all of the rules, because there are too many. Then, they are in for a big surprise when their design isn't legal. (My very first challenge was one where a plane had to drop off as many Kerbals as possible somewhere in the world, and the third rule down was "Don't use external command seats." Apparently, four separate people missed that one, and I had to disqualify their entries. Trust me, I do not want that to happen again.) I'll add this to the rules (grumble grumble...)

I don't want to irritate you, but this wasn't the best choice for Thread of the Month. The challenge has already been won, three days into the month, and it's just going to ferment here for the remainder of the time. I would advocate choosing a new challenge now, but there's an unspoken rule against that. (sigh)

It is very possible to push against a magnetic field in this way and stably maintain an orbit. However, an electromagnet with a large enough charge to do so would require a rather large amount of power. If you're using that amount of power, it is far easier to just use it on powering an ion engine. Ion engines are very reliable, efficient enough to almost certainly outlive the satellite's electronics, and produce more force per unit of electricity than pushing against the Earth's magnetic field. That being said, it's still a viable concept. I believe that it's been done before, at least in a laboratory, though I'm not sure.

I do recommend turning the sound down or taking off your headphones for this challenge. The noise is not very pleasant, but I don’t see this as a problem with the challenge so much as it is a problem with the rocket engine noises. Congrants. While your craft does have RCS, it seems to have been able to make orbit quite easily without any monoprop, so this entry won’t be disqualified. I’ll put you down for Kerb Kan, Fustercluck and Orbug. I’m sorry, I won’t give you ‘Veggies are for Wimps,’ but I will give you the ‘Back before Dinner’ distinction if you can give proof that your craft returned to Kerbin. You can make as many entries as you want, but your name will only appear once on the scoreboard, for your best attempt made. In real life, small engines have been proven to be more easily testable and more reliable than their larger counterparts. In addition, beyond a certain point, you can control your spacecraft by running some engines at a slightly higher throttle than others, resulting in a nice turn in the direction you want to go. Finally, if one clustered engine fails in real life, another engine on the other side of the rocket can simply shut off and the rest of the engines can be throttled up to compensate. In KSP, clustering small engines is generally used to exploit engines with a good TWR and efficiency. For example, a small cluster of Rockomax 48-7s is far more efficient than an LV-909 or even a Poodle, in terms of their efficiency, high thrust and low weight.

No, that's fine! I would love to see your drawings of debris. I can't claim to "own" the concept of debris drawing, because it's such a broad one. Even if I did, somehow, "own" the concept of drawing debris in pen or pencil, I still wouldn't have any objections to anyone else using the style. You can say "Inspired by UpsilonAerospace's Debris Series" if it helps your moral conscience, but even that's not really needed. That's funny that you bring this up. I actually draw most of my scenes from memory, especially the ones from before 0.23.5. This leads to some slightly-embarrassing results, sometimes. The last drawing on the first page, I realized, has an antenna configuration that doesn't exist in KSP. *sigh* New drawing coming tomorrow, hopefully.

In a word, yes. Some of them aren't stackable (the Piece-Keeper and the Orbug distinction, namely) but the rest are. I suppose that I should make that a little clearer.

The Kerbal Space Center has been a place of many pioneering minds convening to explore the cosmos. Unfortunately, it has also been a legendary place for partying. Over the course of the last KSC party, several SRBs and liquid fuel rockets were launched as “fireworks,†which terrified the Kerbal Air Administration. After all of the dust (and hydrazine vapor) had settled, the Administration banned KSC from using engines with over four kilonewtons of thrust. But, of course, Kerbal scientists still strived to send ever-more-advanced craft into the cosmos. So! Your mission is to explore as much of the Kerbal solar system as possible, using only LV-1 and LV-1R engines. Rules (I’ll try to keep this short): 1) Please keep this all stock. (Aesthetics-changing mods, however, are okay.) Also, no using the Alt-F12 Debug menu to change gravity or provide infinite fuel. (Part-clipping is okay, but see Rule 3.) 2) Only LV-1 and LV-1R engines may be used for propulsion. No ion engines, RCS thrusters, infinigliders, decoupler-spam-powered rockets, etc. allowed. 3) Keep your craft under 300 parts. (Just because tiny engines are all but massless, and I don’t want this challenge to devolve into who can get the highest-part-count ship at the expense of others.) 4) Please post, at minimum, a photo at launch and a photo once arrived at your destination. (More photos or a video would be great, too.) 5) Your rocket must be capable of leaving the pad to qualify. (Added for the sake of MarvinKitFox.) That should have been short enough. Did I miss anything? Distinctions! Kerb Kan: Launch a Kerbal Light Lifter: Have a <50 part spacecraft Big Bug: Have a >200 part spacecraft (hooray, alliteration!) Veggies are for Wimps: Build a craft without ‘Asparagus’ (or any other) parallel staging Fustercluck: Have one stage of your craft use more than 50 engines at one time. Dragonfly: Return every stage of the craft back to Kerbin without any damage. Piece-keeper: Have a single-stage design that launches, flies and lands without losing any parts (if you get this, you won’t get the Dragonfly award too. Sorry.) Escaping the Madness: Leave Kerbin's Sphere of Influence. Orbug, Munbug, Minmug, Ikebug, Dunbug, etc.: reach Kerbin orbit, land on Mun, land on Minmus, land on Ike, land on Duna, etc., etc., etc. (These are stackable except for the Orbug one.) Back Before Dinner: Safely return to Kerbin after flight. It is possible to gain many distinctions during a single launch, depending on the quality and Delta-V of your craft. Scoreboard (arranged by number of distinctions earned, though no ranking system is in place): Jouni: Kerb Kan, Big Bug, Veggies are for Wimps, Fustercluck, Minbug, Back Before Dinner MockKnizzle: Kerb Kan, Big Bug, Veggies are for Wimps, Fustercluck, Munbug, Back Before Dinner (Many kudos on Apollo-style mission.) Koolkei: Kerb Kan, Big Bug, Fustercluck, Minbug, Back Before Dinner UpsilonAerospace: Fustercluck, Veggies are for Wimps, Munbug, Back Before Dinner [Your Name Here]

It'll be two years old the day after tomorrow. Happy Birthday, Thread! ... It might be best for the moderators to close this.

That may be true, but electronics are much more pressure- and temperature-resistant than humans. EVAs would be almost out of the question, unless humanity figures out a cooling system far more powerful than the ones we know today. (And cooling a block of some strange material below absolute zero would take an obscene amount of energy, by the way.) Keep in mind, gravity on Venus is about the same as gravity on Earth, and even the Apollo moon suits would be very taxing to wear on Earth. With the additions suggested, suits on Venus may weigh over 200 pounds. That's being optimistic. Also, you would get blown down by even the slowest of Venusian winds, and moving through the atmosphere would be like moving through half-melted chocolate. Returning to Earth would be viewed as a must, and returning from Venus would take an absolutely huge amount of energy, enough that the mission would, again, likely not be possible with today's technology. That being said, a manned flyby of Venus would be very easy to accomplish, more so than a manned flyby of Mars. So why don't we start there and work our way up?

Assuming that you took the lens cap and the eyepiece cap off (hey, just making sure): First of all, take a look inside the telescope. See the mirror. Geek out, just a little bit: Telescopes are pretty sweet, right? Proceed to look through the eyepiece at something sufficiently far away during the daytime (like a telephone pole or a distant tree). If your eyepiece is bright but shows no detail, try to focus it using that little focus knob. If your image is still dark, you may want to call iProton. Bad focus can really knock a telescope out of whack. With poor enough focus, not only are faint stars rendered invisible, but even brighter stars are much more difficult to see. I would recommend pointing the telescope at the moon manually (it's not too difficult to find) using your lowest-magnification eyepiece. If you see a bright blob or a bright circle, focus until you can see the craters very crisply. Now, go and look at other things out there! Again, because your telescope's GoTo function is not absolutely perfect, try first viewing from your lowest magnification eyepiece (which is, perhaps paradoxically, the K25), and finding whatever you want to find in your eyepiece, manually adjust until it's at the center of the eyepiece. For more detail, you can use the K10. Just switch back to the K25 before moving on to your next target. Open the smallest lens covering if you want to get less light into your telescope. (This often helps when viewing the Moon or some of the brighter planets.) You can also fit a smaller (and cheaper) solar filter onto the smaller lens covering, with no loss of detail. Just don't use eyepiece solar filters. They will make you blind, it's a question of when not if.

Yes, but having thin heat shield material all around wouldn't be all that you think it is. A properly made hyperbolic heat shield is more effective than any spherical heat shield. Think about it: during reentry, a tumbling spherical heat shield will almost certainly leave sections of the heat shield undamaged (and therefore just about useless). A hyperbolic heat shield will be more evenly, and thoroughly, ablated. Besides, if there is an uneven mass distribution in a spherical capsule, the area with more mass will come to face downwards, just like a hyperbolic heat shield. Compensating for this means that the heat shield mass is higher than it could otherwise be. There are a very few ways that spherical heat shields are better. For example, they don't experience the sorts of oscillations that can develop with hyperbolic heat shields: In the early days of spaceflight, some astronauts reported extreme oscillations as their craft fell through the lower atmosphere. Regardless, this problem was not a difficult one to fix. I suppose that the biggest advantage of spherical heat shields in the early days of rocketry were that they were more predictable. But now, with our new-fangled computers and such, we can predict what capsule shapes will be stable with a high degree of accuracy. There really isn't any need for spherical heat-shields anymore.

Here, have a dragon. ... ohhhhhhh, you mean That Dragon. Like, the spacecraft. Sorry. Seriously, there are a great many people on the Spacecraft exchange that have really good Dragon replicas. You may want to PM some of them and ask whether they would be willing to partake in this. Me, building a Dragon spacecraft is beyond my technical expertise. I made a MAVEN spacecraft once that really, really sucked. I'm not gonna try that anymore.

I take the weapon. I hold the weapon for a long time. It's pretty clear that you haven't armed it, and that it won't detonate. I take the weapon home. You follow me, because you're watching the weapon in my hand and wondering why it isn't detonating. Then I call 911 and report a robbery, saying that the robber is still inside of my house. The cops come in with their guns drawn, remove the suspicious weapon and throw you into jail, where you remain until your next KSP forum post. The bomb is taken and remotely detonated, but unfortunately the next person is still right next to the bomb when it prematurely explodes.

Ouch. Why? The user below me thinks that the dancing Mudkips above are bizarre but oddly appealing in some way or another.

Granted. You turn Polandball to get a better look at it, causing the entire country of Poland to shift and destroying much of Europe. No one is pleased. Or something like that. I wish that I could build better rockets in KSP.

Here is why I adore 2001. In my opinion, it is The Most Technically Accurate Science-Fiction Film Ever Made, Given the Time that It Was Made In. It forecasted all sorts of wild technological innovations, from TV screens in the seatbacks of airplanes... to the iPad. I'm serious. Look it up. The actual spacecraft have an amazing amount of technological sophistication and would likely actually work in real life (with a few changes), as opposed to every single other science-fiction movie ever made. I won't even go into the poor designs and lack of foresight in 2010, but they serve as a view of what conventional science fiction was at the time. For someone who knows anything about space, 2010 is difficult to believe and unpleasant to watch. 2001's plot is slow but very present. Instead of Kubric forcing the plot down your throat, you have to discover (HA) what's happening yourself. This may take a while and a couple of watchings, but there is a heck of a lot going on behind the scenes, enough to write a book about (and there actually have been books written about it). Pretty much every bit of 2001 is now cliché. The music is cliché, the monoliths are cliché, HAL is cliché, and the warp through space is cliché. But this is because the movie is so good! If the movie was really as poor as you're making it, it would have very quickly faded out of view. Ironically, today we see the film as a string of clichés precisely because Kubric was so avant-garde during his day that people remembered what he made. So you absolutely can't blame him for that. I won't say that 2001 is my favorite film of all time but it's certainly way up there. I won't criticize you for disliking it; different strokes for different folks, after all. But I really admire the movie and urge people to watch it if they haven't already. Don't let this thread keep you from watching 2001.

Most of my spacecraft launches are Low- Orbit Launches.

So, a couple of notes on this challenge: If you keep adding bridges, this challenge will eventually become a whole lot like the Three Bridges Cup, which can be found in my signature. (It's a shame that only two entries have been posted so far, would anyone mind trying it out? ) Also, Mareczex333 seems to be in last place... until you consider the fact that... I think that this run, under your guidelines, gets over 200 points. (I'm not sure.) The only problem, of course, is that that this video was originally made for - you guessed it - The Three Bridges Cup. I'll try to use one of my mini-planes for completing this challenge, a little later. [EDIT: Nuts! It appears that VTOLS aren't allowed, and thus, this entry is invalid. Regardless, I think that it's still pretty cool.]

.craft file is here! https://www.dropbox.com/s/r3re345mvwbpg7r/Dragon.craft Be sure to read the instructions before flying, as the craft is really very finicky. But it's a dragon. If you don't want to read the instructions or if you want to view the Dragon in flight before you fly it yourself, here's a Promotional Video! Let me know if anything is broken or weird, and I'll try to fix it right away. Enjoy!

Indeed. You can right-click on lights and change their colors now. The trouble is mounting them in the right places. .Craft file first thing tomorrow.

Wow. This design seems to be rather popular. I’ll release the design either later today or tomorrow, depending on how easily construction continues. It’s already at <250 parts, so that’s mildly worrisome. Regardless, I’ve tweaked a few little things that seem to make it work much better. This is possibly the best quote I’ve seen on the KSP forums. I may just use it in my signature. That seems to be a common sentiment, as seen below. I’ve changed the title to make it a little more clear. I’m trying to get this thing to VTOL on rockets. It certainly does breathe “fire†(Its nostrils in that last picture are LV-1R engines) but I don’t think that I can get it to glide on ion engines. I’m just using normal rockets for that function at the current time. The title has been changed, so hopefully no more confusion. I wasn’t even thinking about the Dragon spacecraft when I made this, so sorry for that. Interestingly, due to aesthetic battery placement, this craft has over 15,000 units of ElectricCharge. Also, the large wing area and several control surfaces cause the wings to “flap,†or at least oscillate, above 120 m/s. I’m wondering whether I should attempt to curb this motion, or whether I should keep it for maximum “accuracy.†Thanks for your comments, and I'll leave you with this image of a nighttime test of the light system!

Here's The Smallest Rover that I Have Made in KSP: The Picorove B. .28 tons, and has eighteen parts (most of which are massless). I could decrease the part count to nine parts (eliminating science equipment and the like) but I really don't feel like I have to.

The title of this thread made me think of making a "real" dragon in KSP. The dragon that I eventually made is on this thread: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/81413-Here-s-a-stock-dragon-in-KSP ...and it's pretty sweet.

I've been working on this for a couple of days now... it's pretty sweet and actually surprisingly stable. The Dragon is meant to terrorize the poor, simple villagers around the KSC. Kerbals are thus provided as sacrifices to prevent the mighty dragon from attacking. These "sacrifices" are then trained to be astronauts, and launched into space. While frowned upon by Kerbal rights activists, this process has been proven to be very reliable and is now frequently used by KSP staff. [EDIT: Here's some images of the completed Dragon!] ...as compared to the WIP Dragon... ... and here's the Dropbox File! https://www.dropbox.com/s/r3re345mvwbpg7r/Dragon.craft

I want to improve this model a bit before I'm ready for submitting it for the competition, but here's the basic premise. It's deployed off a raised Launch Stability Enhancer, because landing gear is overrated. It has exactly one of those inline xenon tanks, giving it 700 monopropellant, and a single ion engine. It's got over 400 battery power, but I didn't tap into the batteries during the ascent, so they're really not needed. I should probably take them off. Just looking through these designs, this one is certainly one of the simplest that's been presented so far. The Ioner 705.9 m/s surface velocity (I think it passed 706 m/s when the engine was still firing but oh well) at 27,722m.