Shoot for the sun!

[DeltaBravo]

Lies, that\'s impossible. You can\'t get energy from nothing, you must have used thrust.

Kearth, Kerbal, Kerbin, blah. All the same really

Second go around, successfully made it back, but the RCS tank led to everyone dying when it touched down.

[CarolRawley]

Kearth, Kerbal, Kerbin, blah. All the same really

Second go around, successfully made it back, but the RCS tank led to everyone dying when it touched down.

What he meant was, gravity slingshots without energy are impossible

Usir, are a fraud

[One Winged Angel]

What he meant was, gravity slingshots without energy are impossible

Usir, are a fraud

I had a similar thing happen the second time I tried this; I wasn\'t paying attention to my heading and cut around the Kerth. Since I was falling mostly parallel to the gravity well (I was only a few degrees off) Kerth\'s gravity accelerated me (I traded gravitational potential energy for kinetic energy). As I was going around the planet, I had eventually traded enough GPE for KE, and my velocity was greater than the escape velocity. I was cruising at 2800m/s to get back from the sun and ended up with a max of ~3500m/s and finally stabilized at ~900m/s. Bill, Bob and Jeb, were never heard from again. Basically my trajectory made a giant, wide < shape.

[boolybooly]

Unsympathetic pedants!

I know what you meant Deltabravo, it makes that wooshy shape when you zoom past Kerbin and swoosh on out into deep space and it looks kinda boomerangy and you might think it was slingshotty but if I understand correctly, technically you are not increasing velocity by using Kerbin\'s movement because it hasn\'t got any, so its not a 'slingshot' proper, it just looks kinda slinghot shaped.

I recorded your mission as lost in space, but that can change.

Props for trying One Winged Angel, ditto.

[nivvydaskrl]

Indeed. The technically correct definition of what happened was that 'I was going too fast to be caught in Kerbin\'s gravity well.'

If we really want to be pedantic, 'slingshot' is a meaningless phrase. Technically it\'s a 'gravity assist,' unless we\'ve hauled out the really big rubber bands to boost our rockets.

[Shedao]

After finally my Munrocket was again ready for flight (the first was stable in 0.10, but selfdestroyed in 0.11) I decided to change the upper stage and go out for the sun.

Mmh plenty of fuel left and Bob told his mum that he would be home for dinner.

The days passed and the crew had to realize that they would not make it home because Jebs aiming ('Somewhere over there.') was not the best work. :

Finally Kerbin was in sight and Jeb screamed 'Yeah we made it!' while Bill and Bob started to open the airlock because all hope was gone.

PS: We will never know who forgot the parachute ;P

[Mookzen]

Fun times.

[One Winged Angel]

So, tries 3 and 4 are in the record books. Mk. 1 was a kersplosion right before the SRB\'s burned out, Mk. 2 was the slingshot, Mk. 3 became a stable orbit (I missed Kerth on the way back and had to burn a shitton of fuel to turn myself around again and ran out of fuel before I could slow myself below orbital velocity), and Mk. 4 was a success. I attempted a powered landing (which didn\'t fare so well) but it was a success, and I landed (okay, exploded) within a few hundred meters of the KSP. Try 5 will land on the pad, I guarantee it.

This is the ship I\'m using. I\'ve downloaded C7 and Sunday Punch\'s packs, can\'t remember which parts I used in all though. The SRB\'s + 7x main engines take me to ~15k and 700m/s before the SRB\'s burn out. There\'s a moment where thrust to weight is <1, but it\'s only a few seconds. The rest of the fuel takes me to 1200m/s, then the second stage takes me to escape velocity with about half a tank left. I use that and the third stage (nuclear engine with 4x C7 tanks) to get me home. If I do it right, I have about 2 and a half tanks worth of gas to do orbital crap and powered decel.

EDIT: Oh, I used the Saturn V pack too (the first stage F1 engines are my second stage, 5x stock LFE\'s would blow up; same thrust and burn rate overall though)

EDIT2: So, I flew to the sun and back. Only to find out that I could really use a pair of wings and a parachute. Anyways:

Here\'s the sun:

On the way back now when suddenly:

A pale blue dot appears!

One Winged Angel uses Boost!

It\'s Super Effective!

[Thirster]

Le sigh, another crash this time after I readjusted my trajectory on the return voyage at about 6M km, I think it has something to do with the high eccentricity of the orbit. Anyway, Ill post a couple of shots below for anyone interested. This one didn\'t go quite so well as I didn\'t have as much fuel left (wasn\'t sure if I was going to be able to make the atmo to bleed off my speed.

Will start another attempt once I get back from work.

[Ronox]

Using ksp siliskos edition, round trip took 234 days, hit atmosphere with half a tank of fuel left 8) These boys are heroes!

[boolybooly]

Nice going Ronox, thanks for the screenies, you are indubitably a space pilot dude! (Duely accredited.) Though in case you didnt know the sun is at 13559M altitude, close enough!

I like the look of your design, landing struts(?) etc looks like it gives you the potential to get on the launch pad with a little refinement. Though it puts me in a dilemma as its pretty hard to decide who had the smaller non stock craft between you and thorfinn. thorfinn used 3x4LFT plus 6x1 S+L boosters and you used 4x3 L boosters and a huge central tank & you both start out with 9 engines. Its a bit apples and oranges and I dont have experience with the mods, but I think on the whole his looks smaller though not necessarily simpler. So unless you have something to add to the decision I would guess his Ghibli 346LP craft is still the smallest non stock craft to complete the mission.

Thirster, bad luck, when you say crash... do you mean kerboom! or computer crash? If the latter I feel your pain, did two shots on Saturday both ended in software crashes after many mins of flight time... my own fault for messing about with other apps at the same time, at least it generated some bug reports. GL with next.

[Thirster]

game program crash, thankfully no bsods or the like

[frogger]

i have found that my game will always crash if i have my flight plan as a orbit around the sun... This attempt ( currently running has a flight plan of...' find correct speed for an orbit around the sun....then added around 300-400m/s more so its an escape route' . game hasn\'t crashed yet.. only about half way there yet. and going around 670m/s .. with 1 LFT + 1 RCS fuel tank left for the return burn. t+139 hrs

Edit: i also forgot to mention that the sun has 'vanished' ..around the same time that Kerbin was out of draw distance....im not sure if the sun is hiding at an angle i cant see or.. if its going to come back when im closer.....or if im heading in the wrong direction...but i guess ill get those answers later on.

Edit 2: And BAM! 11000M ( t+192 hrs) and the Appears from thin air....Jeb has taken his Jacket off.

[boolybooly]

I expect it was a space dragon frogger, trying to eat the sun.

Like the one which nudged me off course just now ^.^

I just missed the KSC terrain with my last shot but on the up side I am claiming the smallest stock parts ship prize (which is an I.O.U. for one packet of peanuts from Mary-Lou Kerman, barmaid at The Dog and Booster).

ship going up

proof positive

looks like the boys will have to walk round

PS I had another go and surprised myself with a larger stock parts ship.

craft Capcom 1

bullseye!

flight summary

[nivvydaskrl]

I just missed the KSC terrain with my last shot but on the up side I am claiming the smallest stock parts ship prize (which is an I.O.U. for one packet of peanuts from Mary-Lou Kerman, barmaid at The Dog and Booster)

That\'s very impressive!

I went with the higher-octane design since I needed a stock heavy lifter anyway.

[boolybooly]

Thanks nivvydaskrl.

I did a kind of bunny hop over the landing pad, powering down and separating above the pad and deploying the chute when I felt lucky!

These sun shots take well over an hour each.

Personally I am looking forward to v12 and the Mune. Should give us something a bit closer to shoot for.

[Cannon_Fodder]

Are you guys doing a direct burn out or trying to sling shot around Kerbin first? I have duplicated some of the rockets and am not getting nearly the same results.

[boolybooly]

Direct burn Cannon. In all my experiments using the same rocket for both methods I always did better with a direct burn plus about 50m/s additional to the speed where the apoapsis breaks and the green line appears then disappears when you make escape velocity. You don\'t need much more than that as that will give you over 1000m/s at 1000M distance. Less for the smaller rockets so you don\'t have to decelerate as much.

IMHO The faster you move away from the gravity well the more of your velocity you keep so in the end it works out more effective to just go for it, using Kerbal physics anyway.

It is as well to add a small burn towards the sun on the 270° bearing just to take you off the vertical once you are on your way because there seems to be a bug where your velocity changes axis when you drop out of warp if you go vertical all the way out to the same altitude as the sun with ASAS.

[nivvydaskrl]

Are you guys doing a direct burn out or trying to sling shot around Kerbin first? I have duplicated some of the rockets and am not getting nearly the same results.

Direct burn Cannon. In all my experiments using the same rocket for both methods I always did better with a direct burn plus about 50m/s additional to the speed where the apoapsis breaks and the green line appears then disappears when you make escape velocity. You don\'t need much more than that as that will give you over 1000m/s at 1000M distance. Less for the smaller rockets so you don\'t have to decelerate as much.

IMHO The faster you move away from the gravity well the more of your velocity you keep so in the end it works out more effective to just go for it, using Kerbal physics anyway.

It is as well to add a small burn towards the sun on the 270° bearing just to take you off the vertical once you are on your way because there seems to be a bug where your velocity changes axis when you drop out of warp if you go vertical all the way out to the same altitude as the sun with ASAS.

I did it exactly the other way. I established a circular orbit, then did several boosts when roughly at the opposite side of Kerbin from Kerbol, until I reached escape velocity and roughly had the outgoing vector line lined up with Kerbol.

After getting away from the worst of Kerbin\'s gravity well (to avoid goofing up my outbound vector), I then resumed thrust until I was feeling uneasy about return fuel.

[brody]

my spaceplane can probly make this adventure!

[Ronox]

Just wanted to note, i think i uploaded the wrong screenshot depicting the ship i used, the one i ended up taking for the sun mission was reconfigured without landing struts and a little more fuel on the second to last stage, but is otherwise the same. Your comment about the struts got me to wondering why i put them on that rocket, haha ;P

[Zeroignite]

I just completed this using KSP Silisko Edition!

My ship 'Gauss' was nothing novel in terms of design. Lots of hybrid staging: radial and central engines activating at once, then the radials dropping away as they burn out faster. KSP-Silisko seems to love hybrid staging. Anyway, I had a final velocity of ~3.65km/s, letting me reach the sun in about 45 mission days.

I\'ll spare the screenshot of the lens flare filling up the entire screen, this thread has those already. However, I did keep cruising after I passed the sun, until I hit a distance of 50Gm from Kerbin (and ~160 mission days elapsed. The sun looks so tiny from here!

[boolybooly]

That has to be the highest altitude I have seen Zeroiginite. It seems that HarvesteR has tweaked the max altitude, I wonder how far you can go before the game crashes? I will add a prize for furthest round trip when/if you get back!

Just wanted to note, i think i uploaded the wrong screenshot depicting the ship i used, the one i ended up taking for the sun mission was reconfigured without landing struts and a little more fuel on the second to last stage, but is otherwise the same. Your comment about the struts got me to wondering why i put them on that rocket, haha ;P

I wondered where they went! Incidentally I am adding a prize for fastest round trip and your 234 days is currently the title holder. The trophy is the hubcap of Bob Kermans Korris Kinor, engraved. You will get it when he is done with it, he is still using it to hold the bolts left over from when he cleaned the engine.

my spaceplane can probly make this adventure!

Go for it brody, show us the screenies, if you can make it there and back and land on the runway with ship intact and crew alive you would definitely be one wiley star spud.

[thorfinn]

Just came back after 217 days

I wasn\'t trying to make records, but since I saw that booly likes keeping scores, I thought he\'d like to know

This required the biggest in my LV 'family', the Ghibli 444L:

If anyone is wondering where the names come from, think about the variants of the Ariane 4...

It\'s even overpowered for Moon missions: the lower stages have 1600 m/s C3 performance, the upper stage has about 3000 m/s delta vee; so I could fly out and fly back at more or less the same speed. Unless the special legs that jgiscool said would make for it weigh a ton, landing on the Moon and launching back will probably take no more than half the fuel, if I can pilot well.

I will probably try to land the 2nd stage intact on Kerbin

After the get-home burn, I tried to select an orbital plane that would take me over KSC with the RCS, because I\'m against cannonball landings... not in the sense 'they are bad and you shouldn\'t do them', obviously, it\'s just that I don\'t want to get accustomed to those and then regret it when realistic reentry heat will make them impossible.

Anyway, I managed to screw the trajectory up while doing aerobraking somehow... or maybe the plane was never really what I wanted and the map view fooled me. Nevertheless, after about three high orbits, I saw that I wasn\'t going to make it to KSC without wings, so I said 'sod it' and headed for Kanada.

[boolybooly]

Perty piccys.

You made good time, the hubcap is yours, when Bob\'s done with it. Sorry Ronox, maybe you can win it back ?

PS Ghibli makes me think of Spirited Away & Princess Mononoke.