One life - how far can you get?

[Ultimate Steve]

This is a challenge designed to test your ability to get things done on the first try - and to test your ability to design for contingency and accuracy.

The procedure for this challenge is simple - start a new stock sandbox save, build one ship, and launch it. No reverts. No quickloads. No nothing. Land on as many celestial bodies, crewed, as possible. There are specific scores for each body.

I have no way of holding you to this - but you aren't allowed to test beforehand, or use prebuilt ships, or revert or quickload. This challenge is about what you can do on the first try.

Rules:

• No part mods or mods which change physics. Informational and visual mods are allowed.
• No use of the cheat menu or savefile editing, etc.
• You must not quickload or revert at any point during the mission. If you explode, you explode. You either end your attempt there or try to keep going. Be honest about this.
• You may launch one ship and one ship only. No orbital assembly.
• No test launches.
• No using prebuilt ships.
• All landings must have a Kerbal on board in order to count.
• You may attempt the challenge multiple times but you have to rebuild your ship each time and say that you had to attempt multiple times.

Scores:

Format is Body - Points for Kerballed Orbit/Points for Kerballed landing/Points for successful Kerballed Ascent into orbit/Points for returning the landed Kerbal to Kerbin.

• Kerbol - 10/NA/NA/NA
• Moho - 50/50/50/50
• Eve - 20/20/500/200
• Gilly - 20/10/10/50
• Kerbin - 5/NA/NA/5
• Mun - 10/20/10/10
• Minmus - 10/20/10/10
• Duna - 20/30/50/50
• Dres - 30/30/30/30
• Ike - 20/20/20/20
• Jool - 50/NA/NA/NA
• Laythe - 50/50/100/50
• Vall - 30/30/20/50
• Tylo - 30/150/150/50
• Bop - 30/30/10/50
• Pol - 30/30/10/50
• Eeloo - 50/40/30/70
• NEW: Asteroids (Rendezvous/surface sample/return Kerbal to Kerbin)
• Asteroid - 30/30/30
• Dresteroid - 30/30/30

Extra multiplier 2x if no Kerbals are killed NEW: Or stranded at all.

Leaderboard:

1. @Ultimate Steve - 920 points. Large nuclear mothership with four reusable one man landers. Landed on Gilly, Mun, Minmus, Ike, Dres, Vall, Bop, and Pol as well as orbiting Eve, Duna, Jool, and rendezvousing with a Dresteroid. Attempted a landing on Duna, but failed. Also, the Vall landing blew up an engine.

2. @IncongruousGoat - 605 points. Jool 5 attempt, successfully landed and ascended from both Laythe and Tylo. However, due to CommNet issues, lack of fuel on the lander, and using only one Kerbal, he was unable to return to his space tug after ascent into low Tylo orbit. Props for nailing that Tylo landing, though. Tylo is pretty hard.

3. @Wanderfound - 480 points. One Kerbal Duna-Ike mission that went off successfully!

4. @sevenperforce - 235 points. Attempt at a grand tour, went to Minmus, then Gilly. Eve, eater of landers, did eat his Eve lander, and there was just barely not enough fuel to land on Moho successfully, about 20m/s short. This ended his very ambitious attempt.

5. @macktruck6666 - 230 points. Interestingly designed ship that visited the Mun, Minmus, Duna, and finally Ike where a landing gear glitch blew up the ship.

6. @DoctorDavinci - 210 points. Interesting Kerbin and Minmus landers involving landers that separate once in Kerbin orbit. Also got the 2x multiplier for not killing or stranding anybody! PS I'm totally "borrowing" the vernor VTOL design, I would have never thought to use them that way!

7. @sevenperforce - 120 points. A slightly less ambitious attempt than his earlier one. Built a shuttle clone (it was his first time doing this) and stuck a Minmus lander in the cargo bay. Docked with drops of fuel remaining after some clever Munar gravity assists. Managed to land successfully, though slightly far away from KSC! Also coined the term "SPH-fu."

8. @qzgy - 15 points (I think). Had a really ambitious and huge rocket but accidentally timewarped into the Mun.

9. @CrazyJebGuy - 5 points. Orbital mechanics did not work well, but Kerbin orbit was achieved.

10. @Physics Student - 0 points. Honorable mention. Rocket exploded on the launch pad due to abnormal fairing behavior. Would have attempted an Eve landing.

 

Remember, the idea behind this is that if you mess up, it is permanent. So, try your best, and good luck!

I will be making my own attempt tomorrow, and I'll probably fail. I made my attempt and did fairly well, but unfortunately I killed Ronman trying to land on Duna.

Edited January 6, 2018 by Ultimate Steve

[Piatzin]

I feel like heading to Duna is too risky lol

Might try a dual Minmus/Mun landing....

[sevenperforce]

This calls for Ridiculous Overengineering.

[SG Aero]

My specialty! I happen to be quite good at overengineerig and launching ridiculous payloads in one go! You should probably outlaw KAS/KIS as well so that they can’t build new parts onto their ships.

Edited December 28, 2017 by ShadowGoat

[CastleKSide]

1 hour ago, ShadowGoat said:

You should probably outlaw KAS/KIS

I think they would already be outlawed as they add parts? They probably count as changing physics too.

11 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

No part mods or mods which change physics.

 

[qzgy]

ooh this is gonna be fun. Seeing as I almost always forget about the quicksave option, I might do ok with this.

[Ultimate Steve]

Glad to see so many people are interested! I've just completed construction of my ship, it's a lot bigger than I thought it would be - I gave it 50/50 of reaching orbit, but hooray, it did!

I have four different landers connected to it, all identical, so I can continue the mission if something goes wrong. I've sent it to Jool first, but I will not be attempting Tylo or Laythe landings because the landers weren't designed for that. I could send one poor chap on a one way Tylo landing, but I really don't want to... Maybe I'll rescue him on a later mission...

[qzgy]

One question @Ultimate Steve - Is the points for landing kerbals cumulative? Or is the feat of landing one kerbal the same as landing 20 in terms of points?

[Ultimate Steve]

5 hours ago, qzgy said:

One question @Ultimate Steve - Is the points for landing kerbals cumulative? Or is the feat of landing one kerbal the same as landing 20 in terms of points?

One Kerbal is the same as twenty. I'm trying not to make the challenge about "how many Kerbals can you land on the Mun," it's more about "how many places can you go."

Not all of the landings have to use the same Kerbal(s), though, as long as they all launch together. If you land a Kerbal(s), you get the points. The number landed does not matter.

 

EDIT: Update on my mission. I'm having a lot more stress than I thought I would. The most stressful moments for me so far have been:

1. Loading up onto the launch pad
2. Launching
3. Booster separation
4. Fairing jettison
5. Decoupling the first lander
6. Accidentally performing a near-perfect suicide burn on Vall

EDIT2: I am updating the score chart with asteroid scores.

Edited December 29, 2017 by Ultimate Steve

[IncongruousGoat]

All right, I'll give it a shot. And, because I am a crazy person, I'm going to try and go for a Jool 5. Also, I think you underestimate how hard it is to nail Laythe on the first try-landing and return should be worth a lot more.

[Ultimate Steve]

3 minutes ago, IncongruousGoat said:

All right, I'll give it a shot. And, because I am a crazy person, I'm going to try and go for a Jool 5. Also, I think you underestimate how hard it is to nail Laythe on the first try-landing and return should be worth a lot more.

Okay, since nobody has actually made an entry yet, I'll up those points. I remember now, Laythe is pretty hard.

Update on my own attempt, I have landed on Bop, Pol, Vall, Dres, and sampled an asteroid, as well as orbited Laythe. Somehow nothing has gone wrong, yet. I'm going to Ike next, and if I'm feeling adventurous, maybe Duna. I think I have enough fuel for Gilly and the Kerbin moons, and I might even be able to sneak Eeloo in if I really try.

Edited December 29, 2017 by Ultimate Steve

[Piatzin]

6 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

Update on my own attempt, I have landed on Bop, Pol, Vall, Dres, and sampled an asteroid, as well as orbited Laythe. Somehow nothing has gone wrong, yet. I'm going to Ike next, and if I'm feeling adventurous, maybe Duna. I think I have enough fuel for Gilly and the Kerbin moons, and I might even be able to sneak Eeloo in if I really try.

That sounds like a lot of D-V lol

[sevenperforce]

So what if you build a 2 kiloton, 300-part monstrosity, and it blows up on loading?

[SG Aero]

I’m working on my entry. Also refueling is allowed, correct? You just have to be careful not to damage the lander.

[Ultimate Steve]

1 hour ago, sevenperforce said:

So what if you build a 2 kiloton, 300-part monstrosity, and it blows up on loading?

Game over, unfortunately. At least it wasn't a 5 kiloton, 500 part monstrosity... When I was working on it I stared at the screen for at least half an hour trying to think of places where I could add more struts. Thankfully it worked. Update, though, I have killed a Kerbal trying to land him on Duna. RIP Ronman Kerman.

48 minutes ago, ShadowGoat said:

I’m working on my entry. Also refueling is allowed, correct? You just have to be careful not to damage the lander.

If the refueling equipment was launched on the same launch as the rest of the entry, then yes, it is allowed (ISRU).

[sevenperforce]

2 minutes ago, Ultimate Steve said:

Game over, unfortunately. At least it wasn't a 5 kiloton, 500 part monstrosity... When I was working on it I stared at the screen for at least half an hour trying to think of places where I could add more struts. Thankfully it worked. Update, though, I have killed a Kerbal trying to land him on Duna. RIP Ronman Kerman.

If SWIM wants to start over from scratch with a new design, is that permitted?

[Ultimate Steve]

2 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

If SWIM wants to start over from scratch with a new design, is that permitted?

A tad confused what you mean here, but (Oh, googled SWIM):

If you launched and it exploded you should start over with a new design under a new entry.

If you haven't launched yet, of course you can start over.

You can enter the challenge multiple times.

[IncongruousGoat]

A couple questions, before I get any more carried away with the mission...

Is use of Ven's Stock Revamp okay as long as I stick to stock parts, and what's the policy on jetpack landings?

Also, holy crap my half-baked, definitely-wasn't-going-to-work Laythe plan actually worked. Somehow.

[Ultimate Steve]

1 minute ago, IncongruousGoat said:

A couple questions, before I get any more carried away with the mission...

Is use of Ven's Stock Revamp okay as long as I stick to stock parts, and what's the policy on jetpack landings?

Also, holy crap my half-baked, definitely-wasn't-going-to-work Laythe plan actually worked. Somehow.

Looking at VSR, I don't think it severely changes much... Go ahead. However as some stuff seems to be tweaked, I'll add a note to your score saying you used VSR. It shouldn't make a difference, though.

Jetpack landings are 100% ok.

Glad to hear Laythe worked out! I just finished my own entry and I had some terrifying moments, but I'm finally home! But Imgur isn't working right now!

[macktruck6666]

Seems like a pretty easy desighn. Single stage to kerbin orbit using KS-25, add a couple engines for low gravity bodies, add second stage for escaping eve. Leave tanker in orbit. Second refining lander to refuel tanker from low gravity bodies.

[IncongruousGoat]

Welp... so much for that. It was all going so well. And then my mistakes started showing up. I forgot to put any kind of communications gear on my ship, so the parts I had intended to control with probes had to be crewed instead. And then my Tylo lander turned out to not be as good of a design as I had thought. And then it fell over. Ah well. It was fun while it lasted.

[Ultimate Steve]

2 minutes ago, IncongruousGoat said:

Welp... so much for that. It was all going so well. And then my mistakes started showing up. I forgot to put any kind of communications gear on my ship, so the parts I had intended to control with probes had to be crewed instead. And then my Tylo lander turned out to not be as good of a design as I had thought. And then it fell over. Ah well. It was fun while it lasted.

Well, if you can post it here, I can still put you on the scoreboard! Also, Imgur finally stopped acting up, so I'll be posting my attempt in a bit!

[IncongruousGoat]

Well, here's an album of my attempt:

https://imgur.com/a/aSoCv

I wanted to go for all the moons of Jool, plus anything else I had the dV for, but my own pre-1.2 habits, a necessary lack of testing, and Tylo being Tylo caused mission failure.

Edited December 30, 2017 by IncongruousGoat

[Ultimate Steve]

My attempt:

Spoiler

The ship, for lack of a better name, has been christened OneLife. It has a return pod for four people, a nuclear stage, a huge nuclear stage, and four asparagus nuclear boosters around that. Then there is a rhino stage and 6 mammoth boosters with 2 extra vectors each for TWR purposes.

There are four pretty simple one man landers on board with about 2k delta V each. There is also an X-200 16 tank for refueling the landers. Four landers and four Kerbals, one per. Leery, pilot, Ronman, engineer, Germing, Scientist, and Corlo, commander. I chose Corlo for command because his name sounded the coolest.

You will see several nerve racking moments in bold, along with the number, how nerve wracking it was out of ten, and a description.

Nerve racking moment #1 (7/10): Loading the ship onto the pad. I was so afraid it would fall apart. Half of the parts are probably struts...

Nerve racking moment #2 (6/10): Releasing the launch clamps. And then it rose off the launch pad perfectly fine... WOOOOHOOOOO!!!!!!! Then I had to make sure it would not tip over in the atmosphere.

Nerve racking moment #3 (5/10): Releasing the boosters. This is one of the few times I actually put separation motors onto side rockets. fortunately, they came off well.

Then I went to Jool first, because it is a gold mine of points.

I used a Tylo gravity assist to enter orbit, then a Laythe assist to lower my apoapsis to Vall's altitude.

Nerve racking moment #4 (7/10): Jettisoning the fairing. The fairing holds the landers during launch, however I realized too late that if I jettisoned it, it would crash into the side boosters. I ended up pressing space and the time warp key basically at the same time to despawn the fairing pieces.

While I was flying by Laythe, I took Germing Kerman (Scientist) into her lander, Chord Story, and briefly entered Laythe orbit to get the points for that before burning right back to the mothership.

Nerve racking moment #5 (3/10): Detaching the first lander. The landers are usually stored on docking ports radially mounted around a fuel tank. However, during launch, they are stored below the fuel tank for compactness. I was worried some of the parts were clipped and might explode. Fortunately, separation went normally.

Then I did a few course corrections and went to Vall.

Booster Jettison. Each of the five nuclear cores has four Nerv engines.

Leery Kerman (pilot) was assigned to Vall. She named her lander Stinger.

Nerve racking moment #6 (8/10): Accidentally pulling off a near perfect suicide burn on Vall. The ground had gotten a bit closer than I wanted it to, but I still reached zero velocity a hundred or two meters off the surface.

Leery on Vall with Stinger. She then proceeded to ascend and dock with the mothership with 5m/s left in the tanks at the time of docking (the mothership had to help in rendezvous a little bit).

After the ascent, OneLife left for Pol.

I remembered at this point that Pol can be a bit finicky with surface colliders. I've never experienced this myself, but several other people did, especially in the olden days.

I decided to do an EVA landing on Pol because I could. I chose Ronman (engineer) to do this.

Then I went over to Bop.

For this landing I used Corlo. I didn't like the margins on the EVA landing (jetpacks have 600m/s) so I took a lander. This gave me too much margin, so I decided to go to Bop's north pole.

Corlo named his lander the Charlie.

Hey, Corlo! Did you break Jool, or something? I'm pretty sure this is not supposed to happen!

That's Bop's north pole. A bit less spectacular than some of the other ones (Moho, Duna, Eve, and Tylo all have spectacular poles).

Rendezvous was a little bit precarious, but it's Bop, so a lot less scary than it looks.

After I had redocked, I tried to go to Eeloo. I plotted a bunch of maneuver nodes to test trajectories, but unfortunately getting to Eeloo in any less than 30 years would have taken, like, 4k delta V and I decided Eeloo wasn't worth it. So, I went to *GASP* Dres.

For the Dres landing, I chose Ronman because he hadn't used his lander yet. He named it Spirit of Jebediah. Jebediah himself was sitting in a broken rocket powered VTOL on top of the astronaut complex and had been for several years by this point...

Landing on Dres, next to the biggest canyon in the solar system. People like to diss Dres, but I find it, especially the canyon, an amazing place.

Just for fun, I decided to EVA Ronman over to the bottom of the canyon. I knew this was risky, but things were going so well I'd begun to think I was invincible.

 

I've been having imgur problems all day and this set of images will not upload for some reason. I then sent Germing to a Dresteroid and Leery to Ike. Leery's engine exploded on landing so I had to EVA her back to Orbit. If anyone is questioning the validity of this, I will upload the images if asked, but Imgur does not want to work right now.

 

Then I tried to send Ronman to Duna.

The logic was that even though the lander probably didn't have enough Delta-V, his jetpack would, so I was trying to conserve as much fuel for ascent as possible, so I didn't notice how low I got and, well, Ronman died.

Then I went to Gilly.

At this point, I was on the last stage of nuclear rockets.

Corlo on Gilly with his lander.

Then I went back to Kerbin and stopped at the Mun and Minmus briefly.

Again, Imgur is having problems. I do have a picture of me on Minmus but I can't upload it now.

De-orbiting using a lander. I had plenty of oxidizer left over, actually... I just didn't want to de-orbit a nuclear device onto Kerbin.

Nerve racking moment #I forget (10/10) - the final EVA

I was at about 80km when I was about to jettison the lander. However, at the last moment I remembered the experiments were only transferrable via EVA. So I quickly EVA'd, grabbed the experiments, and went to the Mk1 command pod... which was full. I hit the atmosphere and started to panic. I jetpacked over to the other pod, but I was on the wrong side (darn oddly placed ladders) and I went over to the correct side. The atmosphere was starting to push me backwards and I just barely grabbed the ladder before I would have had too much drag to keep up with the capsule. Then the heating gauge showed up and flickered around for a few seconds before I boarded the capsule.

 

 

Yay, most of us survived!

 

 

 

 

Score:

Gilly - all 4. Total 90.

Kerbin - 10.

Mun - all 4. 50.

Minmus - all 4. 50.

I won't count Duna because I crashed and didn't land safely.

Ike - all 4. 80.

Dres - all but return, because it was Ronman who landed. 90.

Dresteroid - all 3. 90.

Jool - 50.

Laythe - orbit. 50.

Vall - all 4. 130.

Bop - all 4. 120.

Pol - all but return, because it was Ronman who landed. 70.

 

I don't get the 2x multiplier because I killed Ronman.

 

So it looks like my total is 880 if I am not mistaken. @IncongruousGoat, you have:

Kerbin - orbited. 5.

Jool - orbited. 50.

Laythe - all but return. 200.

Tylo - all but return. 350.

 

For a total of 605 points, not bad! You tried two of the three hardest bodies in the game and did everything except for return to Kerbin, so great job!

 

EDIT: I actually orbited Eve and Duna as well, so my total is now 920.

Edited December 30, 2017 by Ultimate Steve

[qzgy]

Looking at the two things currently posted, I think I'm thinking too big.... (I'm talking a craft the size of the SPH with 3 rhinos and 2 poodles.)