MarvinKitFox

Yep. Your asparagus efficiency is still suffering due to a bit low TWR in the early ascent stage, and the inherent increased drag from all that plumbing exposed to frontal drag, but at least it is looking a bit more like it should. The more normal asparagus strategy requires the core and side boosters to be closer in performance. (Actually your initial design, but with 3 sets of boosters asparagus instead of the one pair you have, makes for a really solid heavy lifter)

Apoapsis. The challenge is to build something that has both the delta-v to get a circular orbit around the sun, AND the thermal ability to survive it. Of the two problems, the temperature is the more difficult one! It is easy* to build a light probe with 30000 delta-v. Making it capable of surviving the sun.. not so easy. * The word "easy" is used in this context to mean "quite hard, but doable"

For rockets, Coga speaks Great Truth. For me the sweet spot is 35 seconds. For spaceplanes, I know less, but I think Cybersol's comments are spot-on.

Interesting case, had to actually test fly it several times before it finally made sense. Your problem are those ridiculous reinforcing scaffoldings you use to mount the struts. No, seriously! They add a LOT of drag(almost doubling the rockets drag, based on the aero drag display). Your 2-booster design can handle that, because it retains all its motors and thus has enough brute force to overcome the drag between 3000m-11000m, when it is at its worst. Just when you stage off your boosters, you will have exited the high drag zone, so you can afford the reduced thrust. On the other hand, your Asparagus design loses engines, and thus thrust very early on. By the time drag on that scaffolding is max, you are down to 4 of the 8 starting booster engines. Your ship thus loafs around at low speed at low altitude, taking almost 35 seconds longer to get to 20km. That is both 35 seconds more gravity loss (an even 350m/s loss) PLUS reduced efficiency due to airpressure-reduced ISP. To fix it, you need to either retain your booster engines longer (bigger booster tanks,smaller core), or . . . LOSE THE SCAFFOLDING! . I redesigned your asparagus with just 2 changes. 1) lose the steering fins, they are not needed, you have ample steering authority on the core engine 2) replace your scaffolding with a cubic octagonal mini-scaffold. (or that miniature tiny fixed wing you get a tech 0, its just as good) So just how much difference does this make? On a pure vertical flight, your Apogee when dropping the mainsail is 27 km higher!

Considering the first thing i do is whack F10 to manually kill then, this is good. Hmm, might want to go hunt that up myself.

Its party time. Its Limbo time! Simple challenge: Using stock parts and physics, what is the lowest Kerbol(sun) orbit you can achieve? Rules: *Pick any orbit you want, the winner is the one with the lowest Apogee. *ship must contain a thermometer, and antenna. We want to know how hot it gets! *no cheats. Debug menu -> physics -> Thermal -> display thermal is allowed, indeed encouraged. Feel free to use any visual or piloting mods, but nothing that adds parts, changes parts or changes thermal physics. Best so far: 1: LordCorwin 589,874km. 2: BurningLegion 755,010Km 3: Foxster 812,507km 4: Squiggsy 878,720km . . . 17: MarvinKitFox 2636.1Mm Sorry for the long absence, I could not access this post in edit mode. As the challenge was posted under previous version of KSP, it will not be maintained any further. But please do feel free to comment, post or interact as you wish. Have fun!

Yep. You can fly faster in a plane at night, and over the arctic regions. (just a bit, but it is different)

I still have this outstanding goal: rescue Bill from Eve. Bill Kerman is on EVE since 0.18 (i think... 1.5 years ago) He is sitting on a raft consisting of one empty fuel tank and a spent goo cannister. He is 120Km from the nearest land. I keep that old savegame around, and try to rescue him every now and then, but ..... Eve is a beatch.

Catchers mitt. A scaffolding of structural members, to grip it with. Maybe landing legs as deployable fingers/grippers. just....whatever you do, do NOT timewarp once engaged.

Adding those nosecones will reduce your drag on those big tanks, by something like 15% Not really worth it, but it helps a bit. The nosecones on the SRB are very functional, but are you really going to fly so far, so fast with them that it is worth it? and, way above it all.... That monstrosity of structural girders and wheels in the airstream has 8-10 times more drag than the rest of the ship, combined! It is possible to fly a thing like that, here is a link to my own even bigger but very similar monstrosity.http://i.imgur.com/D0qOn8h.png The trick is to not worry about drag. Stay *below* 300m/s until you get so high that air does not matter. Yes, this will cost you a lot of fuel in gravity loss, but that is actually less than the drag loss from supersonic scaffolding. Plus, stability becomes a non-issue.

Ok, took a look at your file. Here it is back, with the bare minimum changes. This is now solid as a rock! https://www.dropbox.com/s/pe5mh5fbo6yl6lw/Galileo%20Station%20v8.craft?dl=0 Never mind the CoM vs Drag issues. Never mind the excessive TWR Never mind the cute but ridiculous reversed-nosecones on your drop tanks. The only insoluble problem with this ship is that you are a poor seamstress. Meaning, you do not use struts correctly. changes: I removed your monkey-cage struts from around your hourglass, and replaced it with cross-strutting. I added 1 strut from each outboard tank to the core I added 3 struts to the top probe, it was bobbling. Total addition:9 struts. I have also moved your launch clamps to first stage, this is a stylistic preference of mine. move em back if you wish. Try it please.

Jeb is made out of ChuckNorrisite, the strongest, meanest material in the known universe. on the other hand, Tourists are made out of Flan.

Which mods are you running. and Post images of your craft. a *.craft file might be handy too

Disclaimer. Contrary to the rulez, i did make liberal use of F5 and F9 I don't think this violates the spirit of the challenge at all, does it?

Use only my mouse? Where's the challenge in that?

You should not read so fast, i fixed it within 20 seconds.. hasty people, you will be the death of me.

Ok class, now chant the magic spell with me. Be very careful to get the incantation right. Be extra sure you are not using the ALT-key when chanting. All together now, say "><" (those of you of unshifted bloodlines may want to use the variant ".," ) And see the wonders of Magic. By a single short enchantment, you have frozen all rotation in the universe!

WOW. What an honor to meet the person who wrote the text for KSP contracts!

The ship itself cannot contain any part loops. Use a pair of docking ports to make that last connection. Docking ports should (well, can) bypass this limitation. A nice pile of struts can also make your problem disappear, not by actually solving it but by making the loose parts too scared to move visibly.

I have encountered only two games that were good value for money. Fallout 3: $20, for only 1200 hours and KSP: $26, for less than 4000 hours.(so far) That is sheer daylight robbery, Squad is charging me the ludicrous rate of 0.65c per hour to play their game! That is more than a dollar per week!

That's an easy one. I had a contract for a Base. On Gilly With a power, antenna, docking port. With a LAB And space for 11 kerbals And must contain 5000 units of ORE . AND must be on wheels. . . Interesting factoid. Wheels don't work well on Gilly. They slip n slide, and tend to leave you "in space" when you and a whole jury could swear it is sitting on the ground at 0.0m/s But only if all 4 wheels are touching ground. so..... I spent a year and a half like this, so that I could be in "landed" state and still have my drill reach the ground

For now, just do a search of c: for "*.sfs" This will show you where your savefile actually ended up. To prevent this, put your KSP folder somewhere outside of "Program Files"(x86)", or edit the folder to give your current user unrestricted rights in the KSP and all subfolders. (this may or may not *fix* your problem, likely KSP now remembers this new location and will save there regardless) What happened is that KSP tried to save, was denied permission, and found some other place where it was allowed to create the savefiles.

AMEN! Squad, read this. it is a very needed feature!

2.4 million KM Kerbol orbit? Yes, from 1000 km Kerbin orbit, you need 3018m/s to get there. But that is the least of your worries. Matching orbits, so you pick up a Kerbalnaut, not a bugsplat on your windshield: 6160.9m/s Getting back out to Kerbin: another 6160.9m/s. Total from 1000km orbit start: 15400m/s This assumes zero losses to plane changes, bad navigation, and instantaneous burns. Also assumes you have a ship that can withstand a 6.5km/s re-entry brake in Kerbin atmosphere. Otherwise add that, too.

Easy 3 tons asymmetric payload to Duna, check. Easy enough Ok, it must be a spaceplane. No problem. Make that a true SSTO and landign and SSTO and back spaceplane. Difficulty * 12 WHAT!!??? ok, that ups the difficulty by a factor of 65 Duna does not come with runways, and someone also short-changed it on air to fly with. Horizontal takeoff on duna needs monster wings, or monster speeds. Ah sorry, my mistake. that 65 in the line above should read 1297 difficulty factor - - - Updated - - - for me, a BIG part of the problem is his spec that it must be a "no vertical launch (from Kerbal and Duna)" So no vtol. He needs to *fly* off Duna - - - Updated - - - Ah, your original post neglected to mention that this design is allowed to run on black magic. May I suggest you save yourself the effort, and use the HyperEdit mod instead?