♪ Nothing Can Keep Us Apart ♫ Extreme rendezvous

[joshudson]

In honor of love lost

 

Place (or have) a space station in orbit of Kerbin in range of 100x100 to 120x130 with at least two docking ports

Place a female kerbal in the space station. The method of doing so is expected to use up one of the docking ports.

Send as a male kerbal to to the space station at high speed. In particular:

* Have a TWR of at least 2.5 on the pad.

* Get shock heating during ascent

* Get a space station intercept within 2.5km while still suborbital (PE below 70km); use the velocity matching burn also as your orbital insertion burn

* Dock with the space station within one orbit after launch.

Hard mode:

* Intercept space station with PE still below the ground

* Exceed 5 TWR at some point during flight.

* Dock within half an orbit

* Do not rotate the space station

Insane mode: Do it in RSS (adjust space station height to something reasonable)

 

I have done easy mode entirely by accident in my career save, and hard mode on purpose. My entry (hard mode): http://imgur.com/a/nLjVU I got to intercept and matching velocities within 6 minute of launch. I managed to fail to record the time to dock, but from this point it was without time acceleration and couldn't have been more than 5 more minutes.

Balanced mods welcome.

If you really want to keep score, probably the best way in keeping with the spirit of the challenge is minimum time to dock. Yeah that leads to radical risky docking maneuvers but that's the Kerbal Way.

Edited February 16, 2017 by joshudson
I messed up my screenshots

[CosmoCat]

Oooh, this sounds like a challenge. I think I might do this when I get some spare time; is it okay if I do it in a 6.4x scaled solar system? That's my main install.  Somewhere between easy and hard/insane modes.

[joshudson]

Go for it. You'll probably have to change orbit height to I don't know what.

[CosmoCat]

140KM is my atmosphere's upper edge; 160km ok?

[CosmoCat]

  Oh, by the way: Do you think there's any chance we'll get to see your entry? I'm fairly certain that- as per the challenge posting rules- your s'posed to have one, but the mods haven't popped in yet so you may be fine... Just in case, though?

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/22919-challenge-submission-guide/

[Speeding Mullet]

3 minutes ago, TeiTimidea said:

I'm fairly certain that- as per the challenge posting rules- your s'posed to have one

Not absolutely required to have one, but it's good practice and definitely highly encouraged.  It's really aimed at challenges which might on the face of it look nearly or totally impossible.

OP - I reckon you could add a scoring/weighting system to this challenge to help rank the entries.  Perhaps quickest to dock, highest launch TWR and some other bits would be good to see!

EDIT - You could even add categories for other bodies.  Nothing can keep us apart, Tylo for example would be interesting, although it might require changing some of the rules above.

SM

Edited February 15, 2017 by Speeding Mullet

[joshudson]

21 hours ago, Speeding Mullet said:

 Nothing can keep us apart, Tylo for example would be interesting, although it might require changing some of the rules above.

Quick-docking a ship capable of landing on Tylo again would be a marvel to behold.