Maximum Delta-V rocket

[Xaiier]

57,303 m/s

Happy? Have I successfully showed you the maximum delta-v?

Now let's come back to reality, and realize that DV is UTTERLY DOWNRIGHT USELESS without an equivalent TWR stat. The two are entirely interchangeable, so giving one without the other is pointless! This craft I've made, while having a downright monstrous DV, has a TWR so useless that it could never ever be flown to anywhere. (and the sad part is, I've seen ships posted on these forums that have a TWR like this!)

If we are going to talk about the maximum DV, we need to include TWR into our discussion, because otherwise delta-v means nothing.

[Bobnova]

Make a lifter that'll put it in orbit and you're set.

[TheDarkStar]

Make a lifter that'll put it in orbit and you're set.

I kind of want to see a lifter that can get 1200 tons to orbit now.

[Xaiier]

There would be no problem building such a craft in pieces, in fact its design is so simple it wouldn't be hard at all to slice it up to send it to orbit.

Alternatively call whackjob.

[cantab]

Once you're in orbit low TWR has two drawbacks, but neither are dealbreakers. One is that your burns take longer and thus you need more delta-v for the manouver. How much more depends on the transfer. For an idealised low thrust transfer, where you're burning slowly all the way, the delta-v requirement is simply the difference in starting and ending velocities. The other is that your burns take, well, longer so get an autopilot.

[Pixel of Life]

Infinite dV, thanks to KSPI's antimatter reactors and plasma thrusters. The craft was able to tour the whole solar system multiple times before it had to be refueled. Then I just took it to Jool and let it orbit it a couple minutes at max warp and the antimatter tanks were full again.

[sjwt]

Biggest I've done so far is something that would put 30Tonnes of payload in orbit around the mun, not sure what the DV their was, as most of that 30 tonnes was fuel, so lots of leftover DV

[quantumpion]

Largest launcher I've ever made was 2500 tons on the pad for 300 tons into orbit. The vessel had about 10k dV with a 50 ton payload.

[Whackjob]

Somebody page me?

[ComradeGoat]

Not up there with some of the other creations in this thread, but this is my Endurance Explorer. I built it for direct ascent missions to Moho. It has 17km/s dV on the pad. With some care, the last booster stage can be retained to orbit and refuelled there to propel it beyond escape velocity at >1g acceleration.

[Redshift OTF]

It depends on how you want to do it. With the tweakables you can launch 100 empty orange fuel tanks in asparagus staging with 1 LV-N attached, fill them up in low Kerbal orbit and you could have a ship with over 50K delta V. As others have said though it isn't very practical as the TWR of the ship would be so low it would take you forever to do the node burns.

[Redshift OTF]

111 orange fuel tanks in an asparagus staging setup and 1 LV-N gives almost 40K Delta V. No Ion engines used. If you emptied the fuel tanks the whole thing is about 450 tons which could be lifted into orbit intact by a heavy lifter. You could then fill all the tanks in orbit and you would have a 40K Delta V craft, although it would take you forever to get any where especially considering the physics slow down would double or triple the journey in real time.

[metaphor]

This ship has the TWR to go down into Jool's depths below the 0m marker and come back out into orbit, 22 km/s of delta-v.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

This one that I used to get into low Sun orbit had about 43 km/s of delta-v.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[John FX]

I`m loving some of the extreme ships although if you have any sort of minimum desired TWR it seems about 20kDv is tops.

I just had an odd thought.

Can you `aerobrake` using the Sun like you can with Jool?

I`m guessing not.

[Hans Dorn]

Nope.

Curiously, the sun is lacking an atmosphere.

Cheers

Hans

[John FX]

Nope.

Curiously, the sun is lacking an atmosphere.

Cheers

Hans

Sort of makes sense in a game dynamics way. I can imagine people doing silly burns from Eeloo to Moho using the Sun to aerobrake completely in defiance of the fact that whatever they built their ship from it would just melt.

[magnemoe]

Sort of makes sense in a game dynamics way. I can imagine people doing silly burns from Eeloo to Moho using the Sun to aerobrake completely in defiance of the fact that whatever they built their ship from it would just melt.

In one of the Man-Kziin books they used the a sun to aerobreake.

yes they cheated using an shielding device who stopped time in the ship making it practically invulnerable at least for the short time the braking took.

To make things more fun they was braking from 0.7c or something, assault ship was dropped from a buzzard ramjet.

[magnemoe]

This ship has the TWR to go down into Jool's depths below the 0m marker and come back out into orbit, 22 km/s of delta-v.

http://imgur.com/a/DrPqp

This one that I used to get into low Sun orbit had about 43 km/s of delta-v.

http://imgur.com/a/XNMTn

Fun I have done the same two missions myself. Low orbit around the sun was boring but required less dv than expected, its also the best way to get maximum dV, nuclear asparagus with ion upper stage.

[NecroBones]

When building my ships, I don't usually look at the dV numbers for the lower stages. There, I care more about TWR, and whether I can get the orbital stages into actual orbit. dV only matters to me from the point after getting into orbit. Once there, if you still have 8 km/s or so left, you can go just about anywhere.

[guveqnuv]

I think I beat every single one of you. I have a ship with 40.007 km/s that weights 879.215 tons.

Edited July 28, 2014 by guveqnuv

[CanOmer]

This is my highest Delta-V rocket yet. I designed it for multiple temperature and pressure scans around Mun.

[Dr.K Kerbal]

I dont know how to inert pictures but 18k is my best.

[numerobis]

In 0.23 or so there was a contest by zarakon which was about getting as far as possible in 10 minutes under a resource limit. I built some crazy asparagus forests that produced around 15 km/s, which would have my spacecraft going around 11-12 km/s at the peak, then coasting for five minutes. The nuke was not the right engine for that: high-TWR was the name of that game.

A related challenge: get to the Mun SOI as fast as possible. About 15-20 minutes with similar designs.

Might be fun to update that for 1.0.5 which puts different constraints on the flight path. In 0.23 you were limited by drag through the atmosphere, which cost you a couple minutes. In 1.0.5 I bet you'd be limited by heat.

Edited January 23, 2016 by numerobis

[Norcalplanner]

There was also a challenge for how fast you could go before leaving Kerbin's SOI. Here's my entry for that, at over 31 km/s - http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/102973-stock-kerbin-space-speed-record/&do=findComment&comment=1835484

[Tatonf]

So much empiric tests while the maths are quite simple. Just take the rocket equation :

Delta V = v_e * ln (M_initial / M_final )

If you were adding an infinit amount of fuel tank, that would push M_initial to infinity. If you were to calculate the limit of this equation with M_initial --> +oo ; knowing that M_final and v_e  are positive finite numbers, then you would get an infinit delta V.