KSP Caveman Challenge 1.1

[Grenartia]

On 1/1/2016 at 9:04 PM, pasukaru76 said:

I agree that one definetly wants the low and high orbit science to finish quickly in easy mode. It's a rather big amount of science points compared to what adding another Kerbin biome would yield, and a suborbital hop only takes a couple of minutes.

I've heard about the Tundra biome somewhere close to KSC, too, but like you have never bothered trying to find out where exactly that is located.

IIRC, its pretty close to where the water meets the ground. I recall there being a Scott Manley video explaining how it works. I'll link it when I find it.

[Bev7787]

@ManEatingApe Me on the other hand casually sent a mun probe to Duna

Edited January 4, 2016 by Bev7787

[ManEatingApe]

 

11 minutes ago, Bev7787 said:

@ManEatingApe Me on the other hand casually sent a mun probe to Duna

I've just watched the YouTube video of your mission 

As homework before any more missions I read all 13 pages of the original thread. It was fascinating reading, so many inventive approaches.

[Grenartia]

On second thought, I can't find it, and don't remember the name. Basically, though, he was running a rover on Duna, and almost got to the polar biome, but he stopped at the border (intentionally), because that border is the crater biome. He offhandedly mentioned that the border biome on Kerbin was Tundra.

[Moesly_Armlis]

11 hours ago, sal_vager said:

Well done @MoeslyArmlis, this is a great challenge, you're stickied for 2016!

Thanks that is so delightful.  Thanks goes to Slashy for providing the excellent foundation and getting this all started.

Made me so happy I celebrated by doing math.

 

 

 

[Bev7787]

Are you still going to Duna?

[pasukaru76]

On 3 Jan 2016 at 0:49 AM, ManEatingApe said:

I was just giving orbital docking a shot. First of all <facepalm> it turns out the the navball will show target mode once you're close enough (~10km not sure of exact upper bound)

Yay, I managed a caveman orbital docking, too! Sadly I had to burn some fuel from my payload, so only half a fuel tank was added to the main craft. I had to use a lander can on my tug just for its monopropellant. 

I ran out of monopropellant and then did most of the docking with the terrier throttled down to 10%, so maybe next time I should try this without RCS which would save some weight.

It's gonna be really annoying to do this enough times to go to Moho, though.

Edited January 5, 2016 by pasukaru76

[ManEatingApe]

1 hour ago, pasukaru76 said:

Yay, I managed a caveman orbital docking, too! Sadly I had to burn some fuel from my payload, so only half a fuel tank was added to the main craft. I had to use a lander can on my tug just for its monopropellant. 

I ran out of monopropellant and then did most of the docking with the terrier throttled down to 10%, so maybe next time I should try this without RCS which would save some weight.

Nice work! I'd definitely recommend ditching the monopropellent and RCS thrusters as the crafts are so small they don't need them. What I do instead is just switch between crafts once close enough and rotate them so that the docking ports are facing each other.

The Ant engine is handy in this situation, it's puny enough that you can't fat finger the throttle and go shooting past your target.

1 hour ago, pasukaru76 said:

It's gonna be really annoying to do this enough times to go to Moho, though.

Agreed. I just tried the normal transfer window approach where I dropped my PE to Moho's descending node but without conics I couldn't get a precise enough intercept. Looks like I'll have to try the less efficient route of matching inclinations and gradually tweaking the orbits by eye.

I'm budgeting about 7000 m/s dV (2000 over and above the optimal 5000 m/s needed). With 2.5 tonnes into LKO from each launch, I'm estimating 3 launches total for a minimal probe with Science Jr.

Edited January 5, 2016 by ManEatingApe

[Moesly_Armlis]

The Vehicle Assembly Lawn is where I have been spending a lot of time lately.  This latest design I am trying to build tools that will allow construction of a vessel above the 20 metre mark.  The plan to lift an eleven tonne payload which seems to be working out.  There have been some snags and unexpected results, however, progress is still being made.  In this design I choose to replace the MK-55 with the LV-T30.  The lifting potential has increased and will need to explored. 

A vessel could be constructed horizontally and then lifted into place.  The counter balance mass located in the "foot" of the crane is ten tonne and the mass in the "toe" is three tonne.  With the LV-T30 cable of producing 200 kN of thrust what would be the maximum payload this crane could lift? 

 

The latest issue to pop up is payload droop.

The payload is lifted into position but once the Cherry Picker Crane removes the payload from the H2V Crane there is not adequate support and the payload droops off vertical twenty degrees.  The payload, H2V Crane, Cherry Picker Crane all had to undergo many revisions.  Now I am about to repeat this assembly process. 

With all of the docking maneuvers performed I have honed my dock-jousting skills.  Starting from the side of the crawlerway I accelerate to 12m/s and then make a turn to line up the payload.  Using the brakes at the last moment and with a screech make the docking port connection.  Sometimes the payload is pushed and then the ports connect but I call foul on that maneuver, it should be a gentle connection.

 

Edited January 6, 2016 by MoeslyArmlis

[ManEatingApe]

@MoeslyArmlis That is the most ingenious contraption! 

In the meantime, I managed to make it to Moho's orbit with a minimal probe, although lining up the intercept was extremely difficult due to Moho's tiny SOI. When I was close enough that I could see Moho in normal view, I chanced an unorthodox technique. By doing my best Clint Eastwood squinty impression, then leading Moho a little, the probe was able to pull off a deflection shot and clip the SOI.

 

Album:

 

 

Unfortunately there was not enough fuel to land, so @pasukaru76 I'll have to leave that up to you

Edited January 6, 2016 by ManEatingApe

[pasukaru76]

1 hour ago, ManEatingApe said:

Unfortunately there was not enough fuel to land, so @pasukaru76 I'll have to leave that up to you

Spectacular! I need to rethink my craft design some more.

[Xavven]

Hi, everyone! Here's my entry on 100% stock, Hard. I forgot to take a screenshot of me making the career at the menu screen, but as you can see from the "Settings" menu, it's stock Hard (or else it would show as "custom":

 

 

My method was as follows:

1. Standard opening of launchpad science, runway science, and some science on Kerbin Biomes.
2. Get some crew reports and science jr. returns from orbit, low and high over Kerbin. Unlock probes.
3. Unmanned flybys of Mun and Minmus with returns of goo, science jr., temp. I did do one "orbit around Sun" science gathering mission by burning barely outside Kerbin's SOI and then turning around and burning back. With no patched conics it was tense, but I made it just fine.
4. After that, the majority of my science was from Minmus and Mun landings + transmit in different biomes. I eyeballed transfers to Minmus by trying to match my orbital plane by eye (moving the camera around a lot to check my inclination) and then burning 45 degrees ahead of Minmus. My eyeball transfers worked better than I expected. Apoapsis dwell is a wonderful thing!
5. Once I got both docking port jr. and RCS thrusters, I launched a slightly modified lander vessel (I just added a heat shield, parachute, and docking port) and rendezvoused it with a tug. The tug uses more than half of its upper stage tank just getting to orbit, but it has enough fuel remaining to push me to Minmus, which gives my return vessel enough to land and return instead of having to transmit. See my screenshots above of my setup.

Edited January 6, 2016 by Xavven

[Bev7787]

Geez you guys. and here i am finishing of the challenge to start a Laythe colony

[pasukaru76]

8 hours ago, Bev7787 said:

Geez you guys. and here i am finishing of the challenge to start a Laythe colony

Well, we have to start somewhere, it's not like the ability to start a Laythe colony comes without practice. ;-)

Edited January 7, 2016 by pasukaru76

[ManEatingApe]

9 hours ago, Bev7787 said:

Geez you guys. and here i am finishing of the challenge to start a Laythe colony

We're looking forward to seeing the first Caveman colony on Laythe!

How were you planning on capturing at Jool? Standard practise is to use a Laythe or Tylo gravity assist, but without patched conics that might be tricky. I hear interplanetary aerobraking at Jool is possible as of 1.0.5 (in 1.0.4 it meant instant fiery oblivion) though I haven't tried it yet.

[Bev7787]

I plan to dock four refuelling modules in orbit, following that an engine module comprising a refuelling module with a terrier on the end. Then I will dock a standard manned ship with a docking port before launching the whole thing to Jool. Once there I will aerobrake slowly till I have an orbit that dips just into Jool's atmosphere and just below Laythe's orbit. Then I will wait until I catch up with Laythe and I get an encounter. Then I will land, hopefully not in the water.

[Moesly_Armlis]

The Order of Troglodyte Award has twelve figurines.  The original idea was a figurine for each of the planets and some moons.  Altering the award structure will allow more opportunities.

1- A single award to cover any interplanetary exploration

5-  Awards for landing a kerbal on planets: Moho, Eve, Duna, Dres, Eeloo

2- Awards for landing a kerbal on moons Tylo, Laythe

Four OTA figures remain.

Looking for some ideas on the Order of Troglodyte Awards.

Post ideas for what the remaining OTA could be.

 

 

@Xavven

Well done.  That is impressive work.  You will be receiving your badge and topaz mineral.

 

Welcome to the clan.

 

 

On 1/6/2016 at 0:15 AM, ManEatingApe said:

By doing my best Clint Eastwood squinty impression, then leading Moho a little, the probe was able to pull off a deflection shot and clip the SOI.

 

This made me chuckle.  Very good idea though.  The altered Order of Troglodyte Award structure means this is just another notch in the interplanetary OTA for your space agency.  In order to receive a new OTA you now have to land a kerbal on Moho.  I have a vision that a caveman will visit all the planets and moons.  Your detailed logs are helping build the path.

 

21 hours ago, Bev7787 said:

I plan to dock four refuelling modules in orbit, following that an engine module comprising a refuelling module with a terrier on the end. Then I will dock a standard manned ship with a docking port before launching the whole thing to Jool. Once there I will aerobrake slowly till I have an orbit that dips just into Jool's atmosphere and just below Laythe's orbit. Then I will wait until I catch up with Laythe and I get an encounter. Then I will land, hopefully not in the water.

The plan is sound.  Your agency seems quite capable and we have confidence that you will accomplish the task.

Were you asking me if I was still planning on going to Duna?  The answer is yes. The attempt will occur during my hardS trial run and Duna is almost in position.  The Five Rocks vessel will be remade to make use of the new docking port feature and the mission report will be updated.

 

VAL Update

The lawn is sometimes were catastrophes occur.  After dealing with numerous rebuilding of the H2V Crane and the Payload, I then encounter the fuel feed bug.  Fuel was attached to the H2V Crane and only one LV-T30 had fuel flow.  After experimenting with the fuel feed issue I understand how to avoid the issue but not sure of why it was going wrong.  Now another reassembly of the Crane and Payload to remove this fuel feed issue and onto payload cherry picking.

 

The lower part of the crane or "foot" had to be altered twice to allow the Cherry Picker Crane to dock with the payload.  The payload was successfully connected with docking ports oriented in the horizontal and vertical plane. 

 

After the H2V Crane was detached the payload still was not free and was necessary to use the recovery team to remove the H2V Crane from the launchpad.

 

The payload droop was much improved.

The failure occurred when the Cherry Picker fired its reverse thruster to move west and the payload tipped eastward. 

A redesign to the Cherry Picker needs to be done and would seem struts would be the part that would offer the most advantage.

 

[ManEatingApe]

12 hours ago, MoeslyArmlis said:

The Order of Troglodyte Award has twelve figurines.  The original idea was a figurine for each of the planets and some moons.  Altering the award structure will allow more opportunities.

1- A single award to cover any interplanetary exploration

5-  Awards for landing a kerbal on planets: Moho, Eve, Duna, Dres, Eeloo

2- Awards for landing a kerbal on moons Tylo, Laythe

Four OTA figures remain.

Looking for some ideas on the Order of Troglodyte Awards.

Post ideas for what the remaining OTA could be.

I think this a good idea. Reserving the majority of awards for the hardest mission type (landing a Kerbal) makes sense. Although that Tylo figurine might remain unclaimed for a while 

For the remaining figures, some proposals:

• Splitting the award for interplanetary exploration into two - The easier planets Eve, Duna, Dres and the harder planets Moho, Jool and Eeloo. 
• Craft taller than 20m, as you'd have to construct it using Sky Cranes or your H2V method.
• Craft heavier than some threshold (say 50 tons) that reach orbit.
• Docking 2 or more vessels together

The goal would be to encourage players to stretch themselves a little when doing the challenge.

Edited January 9, 2016 by ManEatingApe

[pasukaru76]

3 hours ago, ManEatingApe said:

Splitting the award for interplanetary exploration into two - The easier planets Eve, Duna, Dres and the harder planets Moho, Jool and Eeloo

I like this splitting idea, though for me going to Jool was way easier than going to Dres. Jool has a really big SOI so eyeballing a rendezvous works nicely. Dres with its tiny SOI was very hard to hit.

I've been wondering whether it's possible to complete the entire tech tree if upgrading the R&D building would be allowed (but no other building upgrades). That gains you surface samples, but since you can't EVA outside of Kerbin without getting innovative I don't think that adds all that much science.

[Doctor Mandarb]

Here comes my entry to the cave wall. I played Moderate Career, and in total it took me about 14,5 h. All of it was livestreamed on my twitch channel. I've uploaded all 3 parts to youtube too.

Because of that, my pictures only show the beginning, almost at the end science and the unlook of all nodes, including a picture taken after all unlocking of all the buildings.

pictures on imgur

As to how I got my points: I collected all data on the KSC, took a plane, to visit allmost all biomes, including the north pole. The rest was low and high over Kerbin. Most points came from my probes that I'd sent out to the mun. A few flyby, 1 x Orbit, and 2 x landed probes got me all the science I needed. I'm glad one can go to the mun without much trouble and nodes.

Why did it take me more then 14 hours? Well, part of that was wasteing time to complete contracts I'd taken on (yes, contracts gave me a few points too) and I was messing around to long with early planes. Then again, not haveing played for more then half a year, and never gone so far into the game without upgradeing any buildings, made for slower progression too. Ah, and since I play right now without any kind of mod, it was hard to not have Kerbal Engineer installed.

It was much fun, and I'm still going after a few more community challenges before 1.1 comes out.

[pasukaru76]

9 hours ago, Doctor Mandarb said:

I've uploaded all 3 parts to youtube too.

Nice work! I've managed to find the Tundra biome on the airbase island using your video as a reference. Here's a screenshot for everyone (taken from a sandbox save):

[JAFO]

Here's my entry for the Moderate Career. I don't have an Imgur account, so here's a zip with screenshots, gamesave, and craft files as evidence. The only mod used was Sarbian's GCMonitor, as my laptop can only use 3GB, so after a crash in the early game due to lots of VAB switching, I added the mod to make sure I could save in time if memory usage got out of hand. It can be seen showing RAM usage and FPS in the upper left of the screenshots.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/k7skkqhwgc7hcvf/Caveman%20Challenge%20Entry.zip?dl=0

 

I collected very little except incidental science from the surface of Kerbin, and managed to avoid milking the KSC for science until mid-game, when I found myself in desperate need of certain parts to progress. After that, most of my science came from probes sent to flyby or orbit the Mun, after which I completed the tree by sending a pair of manned landers to Minmus, and returning them to Kerbin, using an improved version of 5thHorseman's "Kill Me Not" lander. I nicknamed it the Flying Sparkplug, for reasons which the second and third pics make obvious.

 

(Staging is not quite right in this pic. The LV-T30 Reliant should be in stage 4, along with the pair of RT-5 Fleas.)

 

 

 

All told, it was great fun, and I think my skills have improved quite a bit, as a result of this challenge.. will definitely be trying for some of the other gems in this challenge, down the track.

Edited January 26, 2016 by JAFO
corrected 5thHorseman's name

[Doctor Mandarb]

On 10.1.2016 at 1:38 AM, pasukaru76 said:

Nice work! I've managed to find the Tundra biome on the airbase island using your video as a reference.

Yeah, well it was an accident that I found it But glad somebody learned something from it

 

[Workable Goblin]

You can actually find tundra a bit more easily by going to the south of KSC proper to the area where the KSC peninsula and the inland grasslands meet. A good chunk of that transition zone is tundra biome. I ran across that by accident while hovering up near-KSC science in a recent (not-caveman due to mods) game.

[Pamynx]

Hey I manage to do it ! Farming science on Minmus. Just normal difficulty.

I managed to loose Val and Jeb while testing my tourism rocket but I dit it