Karmageddon!!!

[Rover 6428]

A couple of days ago, The tracking station at the Kerbal Space Center has detected an asteroid that is on a collision course with Kerbin. Although it is no bigger than a class "C", which is not an "Extinction Event Class", it is big enough to cause mass devastation in the southern regions of Kerbin, where it is headed. Unfortunately, this asteroid (informally named "Rider of the Karmageddon") was detected when it already entered the sphere of Kerbin's influence, which meant that due to the current level of technology, the U.K.R.S.A cannot intercept the asteroid. Furthermore, the current tracking technology forbids us to accurately calculate the place where the asteroid will impact, and it will take a lot of time and effort to evacuate the whole southern region. So we decided to keep this a secret until we come up with a plan to remove this threat. This is why I am writing this topic. I need your help to tackle this threat with any legal means possible. Here is all the data we know.

- The asteroid  is in a highly eccentric trajectory, which is on a collision course with Kerbin. This diagram represents the trajectory of the asteroid:

*not to scale

- The asteroid has passed its Ap

- It is headed for the southern region, coming from the down from the south pole.

- It is estimated that the steroid will hit in a matter of days.

Mission Objective: Eliminate the threat without cheats or "OP" mods like warp drives etc.

 

Here is a save file for the challenge:

 https://protect-eu.mimecast.com/s/lRzzCANODiywPktGY2IP?domain=dropbox.com

 

Edited March 6, 2019 by Rover 6428

[GRS]

Maybe...?

[Dark Lion]

I'm interested to see if it's possible.

[KingDominoIII]

I'll do it. Seems easy enough.

[sevenperforce]

Count me in!

[sevenperforce]

On 3/2/2019 at 4:00 PM, Rover 6428 said:

A couple of days ago, The tracking station at the Kerbal Space Center has detected an asteroid that is on a collision course with Kerbin. Although it is no bigger than a class "C", which is not an "Extinction Event Class", it is big enough to cause mass devastation in the southern regions of Kerbin, where it is headed. Unfortunately, this asteroid (informally named "Rider of the Karmageddon") was detected when it already entered the sphere of Kerbin's influence, which meant that due to the current level of technology, the U.K.R.S.A cannot intercept the asteroid. Furthermore, the current tracking technology forbids us to accurately calculate the place where the asteroid will impact, and it will take a lot of time and effort to evacuate the whole southern region. So we decided to keep this a secret until we come up with a plan to remove this threat. This is why I am writing this topic. I need your help to tackle this threat with any legal means possible. Here is all the data we know.

- The asteroid  is in a highly eccentric trajectory, which is on a collision course with Kerbin.

- The asteroid has passed its Ap

- It is headed for the southern region, coming from the down from the south pole.

- It is estimated that the steroid will hit in a matter of days. 

@Rover 6428, I just emailed you with a simple cheat-menu parameter set so anyone can create this mission from scratch without a save file.

[sevenperforce]

Just ran this on the reference mission I came up with. Used a nuclear core with 4 parallel staged nukes on top of a five-meter TSTO. Ended up with enough excess dV to throw the asteroid into Kerbol with 400 m/s left over.

[vyznev]

2 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

Just ran this on the reference mission I came up with. Used a nuclear core with 4 parallel staged nukes on top of a five-meter TSTO. Ended up with enough excess dV to throw the asteroid into Kerbol with 400 m/s left over.

Was that with or without ISRU? 

[sevenperforce]

25 minutes ago, vyznev said:

Was that with or without ISRU? 

No ISRU. Just a big single-stick rocket.

I didn't plan in ISRU because of time (there is a limited amount of that) and because I didn't know whether the asteroid in @Rover 6428's save file would have much ore.

Technically it is not quite single-stick -- it was eight Vectors on the lowest 5-meter stage, a single Rhino on the second stage, but inside a fairing I had a core four-engine nuclear stage with four parallel nuclear stages hanging off it. I was able to blow the fairing and begin firing the peripheral nukes while the Rhino was still burning, so I included an extra LF tank in the second-stage stack to feed the nukes while the Rhino was doing its thing. 

The OP actually has a gameplay situation in his save file that he is going to send us. But if we wanted to make this as much like Armageddon as possible, we'd do an E-class asteroid and have it lined up on a hyperbolic Kerbin impact trajectory either coplanar or nearly coplanar to the Mun, coming in from approximately Minmus, so that we could use a free-return Munar slingshot to "catch" it. We could also specify, just to make it challenging, that the vehicle needs to be manned and needs to glide to a landing at KSC.

Just occurred to me that this is yet another problem with Armageddon -- even with all the other wildly implausible nonsense in that film, even with the wild notion that exploding a thermonuclear bomb 1% under the surface of a Ceres-sized dwarf planet would cause it to "fracture along a fault line" and drift apart in two pieces with no gravity pulling them back together -- you had to get the Shuttle off the surface and onto a survivable Earth re-entry trajectory.