Kerbol is going supernova, get 1 trillion meters away as fast as you can.

[nhnifong]

Excessive staring into the sun has revealed that it is going supernova in 1000 days. 1 Kerbal must escape at all costs. build a craft that can get him 1,000,000,000,000 meters from the sun as fast as you can!

Leaderboard:

1: mathmavin - 1Tm in 710 days

2: fong - The Interslicer - 1Tm in 1016 days

3: asaman - Special mention

Rules,

You must use traditional liquid fuel

You must use command pod mk1

Tanks must not be denser than 200 units of fuel per unit of mass

Engines must not produce more than 30 units of thrust per unit of fuel consumed. (unless it's vanilla, it's not clear how to measure those, but they are all OK)

You must avoid the fuel bug somehow (I've heard running at full throttle all the time is one solution)

Edited August 25, 2012 by nhnifong

[Suzaku]

Wow, this is going to take a long time to acomplish heh.

[Asaman]

I did manage to get this far from the Sun a while ago, but on a wrong type of ship. Time to recreate the flight.

[Suzaku]

I did manage to get this far from the Sun a while ago, but on a wrong type of ship. Time to recreate the flight.

OMG WHAT HAPPENED TO JEB'S FACE?!?!??!?!

The horrors of the warp!?!?!?

[mathmavin]

710 days.

http://imgur.com/Wf2Ew

[Asaman]

OMG WHAT HAPPENED TO JEB'S FACE?!?!??!?!

The horrors of the warp!?!?!?

Alright, so, I might have broken something.

I decided to use my Minmus land&return ship Hades I

[

...yet the bugger is still happy

Edited August 25, 2012 by Asaman

[nhnifong]

When I did it, I launched against Kerbin's rotation to achieve an elliptical orbit around the sun, burned retrograde to get my periapsis down to about 300 kilometers, and then down there near the sun, I burned the rest of my fuel prograde.

What strategy did you use?

[Asaman]

I skydived into the Sun, and then the glitch happened. Will try to redo the challenge; this time hopefully without bugs.

[thirstyemu]

I did manage to get this far from the Sun a while ago, but on a wrong type of ship. Time to recreate the flight.

That far in 14 seconds?!

[Nooblet68]

That far in 14 seconds?!

No. That's how long he'd been in EVA for.

[thirstyemu]

No. That's how long he'd been in EVA for.

ah, classic mistake :/

[mathmavin]

When I did it, I launched against Kerbin's rotation to achieve an elliptical orbit around the sun, burned retrograde to get my periapsis down to about 300 kilometers, and then down there near the sun, I burned the rest of my fuel prograde.

What strategy did you use?

I just burned in the same direction as Kerbin's orbit around the sun. I got a very high exit velocity relative to kerbin, and I got to skip out on the transit time towards and then away from Kerbol. My upper stage was a single one of the small liquid engines and 13 tanks, staged to release empties 2 at a time, so I had a very good mass fraction and the highest ISP engine, so I got a ton of delta V out of it. I had about 10 km/s relative to Kerbin when I left its sphere of influence.

I thought about doing a run like you did where I do a close pass of Kerbol, but you also lose a bunch of speed dropping your orbit, so it negates a lot of your gains there, and adds a good chunk of time.

Edit to add: also, the last stage was burning for over an hour at max thrust, so I didn't really feel like investing that much time into another run >_<

Edited August 25, 2012 by mathmavin

[Saphira]

I might give this a try, time to make a rocket worthy of a 1 trillion meter flight

[Bluejayek]

573 days, 14 hours, and 50 minutes.

I ran into a bit of a problem at about 995000Mm. I cut down out of top time warp, and it froze me in x1 time warp. If I reloaded the save there would be a sound like thunder going odd, Jeb's portrait would go black for half a second, and then all would be as normal, except I couldn't time warp. Hence, I had to do the last 5000Mm of the journey in EVA time warp. This took a couple of tries to avoid floating too far away from the capsule to get back in, as even a tiny relative velocity makes a huge difference over that kind of distance.

As per my method, I time warped on the launch pad until I was facing in the direction of kerbins rotations and then just burned. It was a constant full thrust burn with the exception of one point in my third last stage when I had to cut power to wrestle the kraken (Going about 8,000m/s in Kerbins frame at this point), and I also cut power for a few seconds once in my final stage.

Aspargusing is awesome

PS: Don't use this craft unless you are on a debrisless persistence file with a good computer. I still get 0.5FPS or lower on a clean persistence file running an i7 960 quadcore with 16GB of RAM.

PPS: I could probably have gotten there quicker with some modifications to the design. Firstly and most obvious, it clearly doesnt need the two sets of landing legs and parachute I have on here; I just used a design I had handy that was a prototype for planetary exploration. Secondly, I can almost certainly scrap the decoupler between the second last and last stages, and save weight that way, as well as having the higher efficiency engine running on all 4.5 tanks.

Edited August 25, 2012 by Bluejayek