Unpowered Landing challenge

[DualDesertEagle]

The goal: Go to any body with an atmosphere u like (they'll be sorted in categories, Jool and the sun excluded) and de-orbit ur challenge craft for a completely unpowered landing on parachutes at best.

 

The rules:

- Bone-Stock only except mods that provide pure read-outs, that means no additional parts, no altered physics and no additional bodies are allowed

- Any and all engines and RCS HAVE to be ditched before the final entry of the atmosphere (which means aerobraking to establish orbit on arrival is excluded from this rule)

- Parachutes are allowed but take a certain bite out of ur score (which is calculated by using the formula in the final rule), creative methods of increasing aerodynamic drag are penalty-free

- Kerbals CAN, but don't HAVE to be aboard the craft, yet have to stay in their pods, command seats or other kinds of crew containers from the first moment of re-entry

- Any use of glitches or bugs, no matter who it is identified by, results in disqualification

- Fuel may be used to increase the craft's mass but may NOT be spent in ANY possible way during the final entry (C'mon, do u really need any fuel cells to generate power? I don't think so!)

- U have to provide a screenshot of the velocity during the last 100 meters of decent, one of the craft's mass after touchdown and one in which the number of parachutes (if any) can be read from the staging column

- Every contestant can submit one entry per body, new entries by the same person invalidate their old ones

- Make sure the craft stays intact, damaged crafts get a 50% penalty! Thanks to @ sevenperforce for pointing me at that issue

- The score is calculated like this: Mass in kg / (1 + number of parachutes) / velocity in m/s on the last 100 meters, highest score wins Adding 1 to the number of parachutes is necessary so that even a single parachute generates a penalty!

TO FINALLY CLEAR THIS UP ONCE AND FOR ALL: IT'S THE LOWEST SPEED ON TOUCHDOWN THAT WINS HERE, NOT THE HIGHEST! The "/" in the calculation stand for DIVISION, not multiplication!

Kerbin Leaderboard:

1.

2.

3.

 

Eve Leaderboard:

1.

2.

3.

 

Duna Leaderboard:

1.

2.

3.

 

Laythe Leaderboard:

1.

2.

3.

Edited July 28, 2017 by DualDesertEagle

[sevenperforce]

So....the score is based on landed mass?

A really big Space Shuttle would win this easily.

[DualDesertEagle]

12 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

So....the score is based on landed mass?

A really big Space Shuttle would win this easily.

Don't forget that the touchdown velocity also counts and that should be as low as possible.

And here comes an example of what a submission could look like:

A 2.5m command module with a single nose parachute, just 2 parts to keep it simple for now, decending at 8.4 m/s

 

And this pic shows the total mass:

 

 

So we've got a mass of 4 420 kg, divided by 1+1 = 2 for a single parachute, the whole thing divided by 8.4 m/s = a score of 263.09 (rounded down)

Score updated after changing the score formula!

This should be easy as hell to beat and I'll do my best to submit a better entry later on.

Edited July 21, 2017 by DualDesertEagle

[tseitsei89]

9 minutes ago, DualDesertEagle said:

Don't forget that the touchdown velocity also counts and that should be as low as possible.

Yeah so a plane is even more OP since you can easily land at 150+m/s. Remember that you didn't specify VERTICAL velocity. So horizontal speed of the plane also counts.

[sevenperforce]

2 minutes ago, tseitsei89 said:

Yeah so a plane is even more OP since you can easily land at 150+m/s. Remember that you didn't specify VERTICAL velocity. So horizontal speed of the plane also counts.

Well, you are apparently supposed to divide by speed, so higher speed hurts you.

But to the OP -- it's not clear whether all of the vehicle needs to survive.

[DualDesertEagle]

Thanks, I'm gonna add that right away.

Edited July 20, 2017 by DualDesertEagle

[tseitsei89]

Just now, sevenperforce said:

Well, you are apparently supposed to divide by speed, so higher speed hurts you.

But to the OP -- it's not clear whether all of the vehicle needs to survive.

Ahh true. Sorry my bad. But you can also land quite slowly with a plane if you just add enough wings. So I still say that planes are probably best in this

[sevenperforce]

Just now, tseitsei89 said:

Ahh true. Sorry my bad. But you can also land quite slowly with a plane if you just add enough wings. So I still say that planes are probably best in this

And you can simply nose-up right at the end and drop tail-first onto sacrificial parts.

[tseitsei89]

Just now, sevenperforce said:

And you can simply nose-up right at the end and drop tail-first onto sacrificial parts.

Yep. Big wings and stall at the end was what I was thinking.

[DualDesertEagle]

 

16 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

But to the OP -- it's not clear whether all of the vehicle needs to survive.

Fixed

12 minutes ago, tseitsei89 said:

Yep. Big wings and stall at the end was what I was thinking.

Not anymore, any damage to the craft adds a 50% penalty now.

Edited July 20, 2017 by DualDesertEagle

[tseitsei89]

http://imgur.com/aIJkkTv

 

Quick and dirty plane just to show that you can land planes quite slowly without damage. Obviously using ore tanks is not good because they have very high density but this was just a test and it can be easily scaled up.

This is nice concept since you can always quite easily add mass to the plane and then just smack in more and more wings until it has enough lift to fly VERY VERY slowly

Of course at some point it becomes so big that it becomes fragile but that is the problem with all crafts if you try to scale up

Edited July 20, 2017 by tseitsei89

[herbal space program]

Can we keep our engines/RCS attached if we can show using the resource tab that we didn't use them at all? Jettisoning all the engines from a plane generally makes it unflyable because of how it affects the center of mass.

[sevenperforce]

30 minutes ago, herbal space program said:

Can we keep our engines/RCS attached if we can show using the resource tab that we didn't use them at all? Jettisoning all the engines from a plane generally makes it unflyable because of how it affects the center of mass.

You can always put twin engines on the wingtips at the COM.

[herbal space program]

Just now, sevenperforce said:

You can always put twin engines on the wingtips at the COM.

I'll take that as a no, in which case nevermind. Deadstick landings in planes are easy, but building a whole new plane just to show you that is boring.

[sevenperforce]

5 minutes ago, herbal space program said:

I'll take that as a no, in which case nevermind. Deadstick landings in planes are easy, but building a whole new plane just to show you that is boring.

I'm not the challengemaker, haha! I was just saying how I'd do it. If I was going to. 

[herbal space program]

2 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

I'm not the challengemaker, haha! I was just saying how I'd do it. If I was going to. 

Oops! Sorry. I was in a rush, looking at this forum when I should have been working.  Anyway, the way @DesertEaglehas written the rules, any glider that can land from orbit in one piece will get an infinite score, regardless of mass or velocity. I guess the way to fix this and convey the OP's actual intent would be to make the parachute denominator term 1+ the number of chutes instead of 1.5X the number, so we can't trivialize the challenge using division by zero. In any case, assuming that correction is made, I'd say that the ultimate winner of this challenge will be a copter of some kind. You could drop it from some powered ship with a big fat heat shield underneath it, then spin it up as you near the ground. Based on my prior experience with copters, it would be easy to get a screenshot just before touchdown with a velocity readout of <1m/s. Slapping something like that together would be a lot simpler than building a special space plane, so I may just give that approach a whirl, so to speak....

Edited July 21, 2017 by herbal space program

[SpacePilotMax]

Am I allowed to hyperedit the craft into orbit?

[Aetharan]

Although the equation, as written, would indeed present a divide-by-zero answer without chutes (which may or may not be both positive and negative infinity simultaneously depending on who you ask), the intent is pretty clearly an implied if-then-else.  A reasonable interpretation would be S=M/V/if(P>0;1.5*P;1) where S is your score, M is vessel mass in kg, V is velocity in m/s at some point in the last 100m of the descent, and P is the number of parachutes present.

Edited July 21, 2017 by Aetharan
Removed unnecessary parentheses.

[tseitsei89]

2 hours ago, herbal space program said:

I'd say that the ultimate winner of this challenge will be a copter of some kind. 

You might be right here. I didnt even think about copters since I have not built those ever...

[herbal space program]

8 minutes ago, tseitsei89 said:

You might be right here. I didnt even think about copters since I have not built those ever...

I'm fairly close to having it working already. Not quite there yet, but I'm pretty confident....

[DualDesertEagle]

Ok, quite a bunch to catch up on here...

11 hours ago, tseitsei89 said:

http://imgur.com/aIJkkTv

 

Quick and dirty plane just to show that you can land planes quite slowly without damage. Obviously using ore tanks is not good because they have very high density but this was just a test and it can be easily scaled up.

This is nice concept since you can always quite easily add mass to the plane and then just smack in more and more wings until it has enough lift to fly VERY VERY slowly

Of course at some point it becomes so big that it becomes fragile but that is the problem with all crafts if you try to scale up

Ok, that means 12 428 kg / 1 / 28.3m/s = 439.15 (rounded down to 2 numbers after comma). Having built a plane that took off at 5.6 m/s
I could probably beat that quite easily.

10 hours ago, herbal space program said:

Can we keep our engines/RCS attached if we can show using the resource tab that we didn't use them at all? Jettisoning all the engines from a plane generally makes it unflyable because of how it affects the center of mass.

Since u have to drop ur craft from outside the amosphere u can set the CoM without any engines attached, built an ascent stage around it, get it up there and then drop everything before entering the atmosphere, leaving u with a perfectly balanced glider.

7 hours ago, herbal space program said:

Oops! Sorry. I was in a rush, looking at this forum when I should have been working.  Anyway, the way @DesertEaglehas written the rules, any glider that can land from orbit in one piece will get an infinite score, regardless of mass or velocity. I guess the way to fix this and convey the OP's actual intent would be to make the parachute denominator term 1+ the number of chutes instead of 1.5X the number, so we can't trivialize the challenge using division by zero. In any case, assuming that correction is made, I'd say that the ultimate winner of this challenge will be a copter of some kind. You could drop it from some powered ship with a big fat heat shield underneath it, then spin it up as you near the ground. Based on my prior experience with copters, it would be easy to get a screenshot just before touchdown with a velocity readout of <1m/s. Slapping something like that together would be a lot simpler than building a special space plane, so I may just give that approach a whirl, so to speak....

The 1.5 is of course only used if parachutes are used, if u don't have any parachutes onboard then u just divide the mass by the pre-touchdown speed. So there is no such thing as infinite score here. But I still changed it.

6 hours ago, SpacePilotMax said:

Am I allowed to hyperedit the craft into orbit?

Since the challenge basically starts with entering the orbit, yes.

4 hours ago, Aetharan said:

Although the equation, as written, would indeed present a divide-by-zero answer without chutes (which may or may not be both positive and negative infinity simultaneously depending on who you ask), the intent is pretty clearly an implied if-then-else.  A reasonable interpretation would be S=M/V/if(P>0;1.5*P;1) where S is your score, M is vessel mass in kg, V is velocity in m/s at some point in the last 100m of the descent, and P is the number of parachutes present.

The 1.5*number of parachutes isn't even used if no parachutes are used so there is no division by 0, if u don't have any parachutes u just divide the mass by the pre-touchdown speed. But I changed it anyway.

 

 

OP updated!!!

Edited July 21, 2017 by DualDesertEagle

[tseitsei89]

2 hours ago, DualDesertEagle said:

 

Ok, that means 12 428 kg / 1 / 28.3m/s = 439.15 (rounded down to 2 numbers after comma). Having built a plane that took off at 5.6 m/s
I could probably beat that quite easily.

I don't doubt that even in the slightest. That was just a proof of concept. To get a good score I would have to build a much much larger plane obviously. It was just to show that landing speeds of ~20m/s (and probably even less) are very easily achievable.

But as @herbal space program pointed out a copter is probably way better at this. Since you can effectively get "propulsion" from KSP style reaction wheels if that is still considered an "unpowered landing" in your books. It kind of is unpowered but it also kind of is equivalent to using an electric motor in real life so not really unpowered in that sense Don't really know what to think about those but that is your decision to make anyway.

[DualDesertEagle]

33 minutes ago, tseitsei89 said:

I don't doubt that even in the slightest. That was just a proof of concept. To get a good score I would have to build a much much larger plane obviously. It was just to show that landing speeds of ~20m/s (and probably even less) are very easily achievable.

But as @herbal space program pointed out a copter is probably way better at this. Since you can effectively get "propulsion" from KSP style reaction wheels if that is still considered an "unpowered landing" in your books. It kind of is unpowered but it also kind of is equivalent to using an electric motor in real life so not really unpowered in that sense Don't really know what to think about those but that is your decision to make anyway.

To be honest I've tried such a thing myself, tho I made the whole craft roll  (while nose straight up of course) to keep the size and weight low. Even then it didn't work for me. Also, it would probably be beyond all reasoning to build something with 2 counter rotating rotors which would in turn be necessary to keep the craft pointed in the same direction as nothing is allowed that produces thrust by burning fuel. I think it's not gonna be much of an issue and whoever can pull it off has proven to have the creativity for alternate ways of producing aerodynamic "drag"

[herbal space program]

5 hours ago, DualDesertEagle said:

To be honest I've tried such a thing myself, tho I made the whole craft roll  (while nose straight up of course) to keep the size and weight low. Even then it didn't work for me. Also, it would probably be beyond all reasoning to build something with 2 counter rotating rotors which would in turn be necessary to keep the craft pointed in the same direction as nothing is allowed that produces thrust by burning fuel. I think it's not gonna be much of an issue and whoever can pull it off has proven to have the creativity for alternate ways of producing aerodynamic "drag"

I actually already did it! 

Album a/LGBN5 will appear when post is submitted

I don't have time to fully annotate it now, but my ship weighs around 9000kg on touchdown, and I have a screenshot showing a velocity of 0.4m/s just above the ground. I'm pretty sure that set-up will work on Duna and Laythe as well, Eve not so much. Anyway, I'll add captions and more commentary this evening......

Edited July 21, 2017 by herbal space program

[DualDesertEagle]

34 minutes ago, herbal space program said:

I actually already did it! 

Album a/LGBN5 will appear when post is submitted

I don't have time to fully annotate it now, but my ship weighs around 9000kg on touchdown, and I have a screenshot showing a velocity of 0.4m/s just above the ground. I'm pretty sure that set-up will work on Duna and Laythe as well, Eve not so much. Anyway, I'll add captions and more commentary this evening......

Doesn't the big heat shield also add a whole lot of drag and reduce the falling speed alot? Just curious, coz if it does and u STILL need so many "rotor blades" to slow down to a reasonable touchdown speed then it becomes clear that this thing is HEAVY

 

Let's see, 9 074kg / 1 / 0.4m/s = 22 685 points