Around the World Bossfight

[QF9E]

It should just about be possible on Kerbin:

The studio version of the song is 7:09 long (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwDns8x3Jb4). Taking x4 time acceleration into account gives an allowable mission time of 28:36. I launched my craft in the retrograde direction from the KSC, and it is comfortably past the KSC after its first orbit, at 28:42 mission time.

I used KAL hacking to get infinite fuel: the craft has 2 Vector engines, one pointing forwards and one backwards, with the forward facing one at -100% thrust. It appears that you can no longer set out-of-bound values for the KAL inside the game, so I modified the craft file in a code editor, and that still works fine. The engines are inside a fairing, which is fully occluded front and back so as to give almost zero drag.

I noticed that despite fairing occlusion the craft still had a bit of drag (probably because it does not have an exactly 0 degrees AoA in the lower atmosphere) so I had to fly at higher altitude than I would have liked. It might be possible to do this at a lower altitude, which will give you a lower time. The Vector thrust could also be set above 100% so as to accelerate faster at launch, that could shave off some precious seconds as well.

Edited February 3 by QF9E

[QF9E]

 

[Watermel00n]

On 2/3/2024 at 5:36 PM, QF9E said:

I used KAL hacking to get infinite fuel

Is it possible without KALs though? Congrats on completing my challenge! You get:nothing!

[QF9E]

11 hours ago, Watermel00n said:

Is it possible without KALs though? Congrats on completing my challenge! You get:nothing!

Yes it is. I've since completed the challenge with a similar craft as the one in the video, with a single Vector and some fuel tanks clipped inside a fairing.

I don't think it is possible without abusing fairing occlusion as the aero drag would slow the craft down too much.

[QF9E]

I was too pessimistic in my previous comment: it turns out to be possible to complete the challenge without using any exploits whatsoever. No KAL hacking, no clipping, no fairing shenanigans or other dubious aero constructs. Because the craft has real drag now, I had to run the engine a couple of times to keep the orbit high enough in the atmosphere to prevent the craft from getting too low and burning up. And since the apoapsis of my orbit was substantially lower than the previous run, this run is faster as well.

 

[Alex Verb]

On 2/11/2024 at 12:38 AM, QF9E said:

I was too pessimistic in my previous comment: it turns out to be possible to complete the challenge without using any exploits whatsoever. No KAL hacking, no clipping, no fairing shenanigans or other dubious aero constructs. Because the craft has real drag now, I had to run the engine a couple of times to keep the orbit high enough in the atmosphere to prevent the craft from getting too low and burning up. And since the apoapsis of my orbit was substantially lower than the previous run, this run is faster as well.

 

Wow! Amazing! Masterpiece! Thank you for proving I'm right!