Prospecting Expedition to the Mohole

[Pds314]

Mission Briefing:

Moho's South and North poles have enormous holes which have been speculated to be of importance in figuring out how the Kerbol system was formed. That being said, without a sample of their exact composition, here on Kerbin, this speculation will remain just that.

That's where you come in.

Launch a mission to collect an ore sample from near the bottom of the Mohole. Ideally we would like this sample sooner rather than later, so please do so by the earliest possible date (NOT MISSION TIME! THIS MEANS YOU SHOULD PROBABLY START A NEW SAVE!).

That being said, we don't want costs getting out of control here either, but we do think we could do more useful work with a few tonnes of ore samples than, say, a few grams.

 

Scoring Formula:

Score = 1000000* Ore retrieved^0.75 / date - cost

So for example if you obtain 150 ore with a 100,000 cost mission by day 300 that is a score of 42872.

 

Rules:

0. No glitch drives, modded parts, or debug menu cheat.

1. No launching with ore from the VAB/SPH and no mining on Kerbin.

2. Cost is total minus recovered. Assume 100% recovery value for anything that lands on Kerbin's surface intact.

3. Date is measured in Kerbal days. Use the UT date, not the mission time.

4. Ore retrieved is the units of ore you mined from deep inside the Mohole and retrieved. While you may use ISRU as much as you want, only the ore you retrieved from the Mohole counts toward your final score.

[FleshJeb]

The ore concentration is dependent on the save seed. This challenge as-written will have highly varying difficulty (or be impossible) for each contestant. You might want to specify a seed that works, and have contestants edit their persistent file to use that one.

[Pds314]

On 3/16/2021 at 4:21 PM, FleshJeb said:

The ore concentration is dependent on the save seed. This challenge as-written will have highly varying difficulty (or be impossible) for each contestant. You might want to specify a seed that works, and have contestants edit their persistent file to use that one.

oof really? I didn't realize that.