All Purpose Reusable Astronaut Retrieval System (APRARS)

[SunJumper]

This challenge is to create a plane/rocket/car (VTOL or HTOL or any variant) that can hold four kerbals, such that it has one pilot and room for the crew of a 3 - man mission.

It must:

• Be able to circumnavigate Kerbin without re-fuelling (ie travel to KSC's antipodal point and return) - even if this occurs at 40km and 2km/s.
  
  • Alternatively, it can travel to this point via a sub-orbital hop.
    

  [*]Be able to land on land or water, without losing parts.

  [*]Be able to return to KSC, not necessarily the Runway.

  [*]Be reusable, in that no parts are destroyed or jettisoned.

  [*]have adequate infrastructure to allow astronauts to climb into the cockpits

It may:

• Land via parachutes, so long as one of the passangers can repack them.
  

Scoring:

Entries will be scored on the mass of the craft. To qualify, you need only an image of the plane at the runway, the plane at roughly KSC's antipode, showing the fuel levels to be half or less, the plane landed on the island of the second runway (not necessarily at that runway), and the plane landed on water. Due to the water requirement, your design may need to be a VTOL or VTOL capable.

Edited April 27, 2013 by SunJumper

[Read have Read]

This is a cool challenge that I'll participate in later. Just a half hour ago I had a staging failure; Now I have three a 3 man crew stuck at the north pole. Hmm, I also have a 3 man crew splashed down in the wreckage of an cargo SSTO after the payload exploded when unloading it. can kerbalnauts swim and enter vehicles from the water or will I have to have them jump down onto something? I'll be sure to document the rescue missions

[Saaur]

Why does it have to be a plane? A landable reusable rocket should work too, don't you think?

[SunJumper]

Yes, that would also work, and your design may use it. A rocket APRARS ma be heavier than a jet one, so keep that in mind.

[Istas]

I'm not really eager to try yet another challenge of yours, posted today, when you have at least three other challenge threads open where you haven't responded to an entry or question for over a day.

[squeaky024]

This is an interesting challenge but i'm not sure ranking based on the mass of each entry would be a valid method. I'm also not sure exactly what you mean by some of those photo requirements (which seems like quite a lot of requirements imo) and what if someone's plane/rocket uses less than half it's fuel to reach the other side of kerbal?

[SunJumper]

This is an interesting challenge but i'm not sure ranking based on the mass of each entry would be a valid method. I'm also not sure exactly what you mean by some of those photo requirements (which seems like quite a lot of requirements imo) and what if someone's plane/rocket uses less than half it's fuel to reach the other side of kerbal?

There's basically four photo requirements:

* On runway

* At KSC's antipode with half fuel or less. This means it counts if you've only used a millilitre of fuel.

* Landed safely at sea

* Landed safely on land, far enough from KSC, such that I can see that you would not have simply taxi-ed to your landing spot.I used the second runway island as an easy example for such an example, the intervening sea prevents taxi-ing.