The CRG-04 Mission Challenge (2 challenges in one)

[dnbattley]

New budget constraints have forced the administration to outsource all flights to 3rd parties in a unique public-private space partnership. In securing the lowest bid, the administration have agreed with the private providers that all payloads must be constrained to no greater size than a CRG-04 (the small Mk2 cargo bay), though multiple, separate, CRG-04 payloads may be launched in pursuit of a mission.

 

Challenge #1 Launcher Bid

You are the bidder, and your mission is to meet the particulars of the bid by designing and building a CRG-04 payload capable craft for the lowest ongoing cost. You must be able to take one or more target payloads from the KSC to an 80 x 80 orbit to deploy. Your mission cost will include recovery costs, so it is likely that SSTO designs will be efficient, but you should also confirm the largest dummy payload that you can carry, and which must be at least 2.5T (though payloads higher than 3.5T will net the executives a performance bonus, so they are applying some hints that you should do that if you can). While the bidding process calls for cheap payload-to-orbit submissions, Jeb is on the committee and doesn't want to be seen flying anything "uncool" (his words, not mine), so see what you can do.

 

Challenge #2 Payload Bid

You are the KSC, and are trying to persuade the administration to sign off your mission. Therefore, your goal is to put together a "simulated mission" (i.e. to fly it) for a design of your proposal, as constrained by the CRG-04 volume limitation. You may take any number of CRG-04 payloads (each of which must be assembled in orbit), and weight is not explicitly limited, but part offset is, as follows: you can offset but must not overlap any parts of significance (as defined by their mission-critical resource/functional usage - purely decorative parts may be offset freely) to any obvious degree (e.g. you could move a docking port *slightly" into its connecting part, but not so much that the visible section of the port itself became obscured). Being publicly funded cost is no object (!), and proposed missions will be presented by location, with the most prestigious (and/or inventive) mission plans rising to the top of the list.

 

Full bids, combining challenge 1 and 2 are encouraged, but not required. Challenge 1 only participants may use ore canisters or other weight proxies and Challenge 2 only participants can, if they really wish, simply cheat their individual parts (in CRG-04 farings) into orbit, and assemble from there.

 

Otherwise, normal rules apply; No cheating (beyond that specified above); Scouts honour; DLCs permitted but not required.