Basic lunar lander at record speed.

[Joene]

Ok, here is the challenge.

Build, from stock parts only, a rocket with a basic lunar lander, throttle up, press T and let her fly straight up.

Speed that counts is the speed with the lander still fully loaded and her engine unused.

The only SAS unit on the rocket is the Advanced SAS on the lunar lander.

The lander is a basic lander:

Command pod

Parachute

Decopler

Advanced SAS module

RCS unit removed

Fuel Tank

Engine

and 3 Radials with winglets on it for landing legs.

So straight up, with a lunar lander. As fast as possible. No manual controlling except hitting the space bar.

unfortunatly im a v poorly designer and have only made it to 4100m/s with a monster of a ship. (attached)

Good luck, winner gets ultimate glory.

edit: removed RCS unit

[mindvr]

Not so interesting, but good reason for me to practice with new 0.13 parts. Since this challenge don\'t mean Mun landing I\'ve replaced 2*3 radial decouplers with an fuel tank with equal mass.

The result is 6472 m/s, here are screenshots:

[Joene]

Well, looking at your design, and with the use of many many fuel lines and an insanely 11 stages, 66 liquit fuel tanks and 12 solid boosters, expensive enough to make any country go bankrupt i managed to get her up to a speed of 7210 m/s.

The flight takes over 15 minutes.

Dropping 2 engines each time 10 fuel tanks are empty.

Altitude: 2.5 million km.

craft is attached.

[Joene]

Removed my boosters, added 3 more stages of liquid boosters.

8400m/s

17 minutes.. (getting bored now)

3.2 mil km.

She still seems to handle fine.

(attached)

<edit>

Actually all i did was use your basic design and finetune it. Sorry mindvr. Credits go to you.

<endedit>

[mindvr]

Tried that, pretty Kerbal:

[Joene]

Lol..

Make sure to eject stages when they are emty.

Each stage uses exactly 10 liquid fuel tanks.

Added a craft with some booster help.

After boosters have been ejected the second stage should be released around the 33 seconds mark.

After that, simply drop each 10 empty tanks.

She is a bit heavy.. And pretty Kerbal

[khyron42]

Was the competition lander also supposed to include RCS fuel tank? I\'m working on an attempt at this now.

[Joene]

It was.

However i never use it, so i kinda cheated and removed it.

Can`t believe i cheated my own challenge.

[khyron42]

Ok, this is a complete monster of a craft with every tank I could manage to get onto it without breaking the fuel flow paths. Total of 37 engines, based off of my 'speed challenge rocket' but with your lander (RCS thrusters but no RCS tank.) This ship, on my very high-end desktop, slows the graphics to 1 FPS and breaks the altimeter. It also just barely clears the tower.

Putting most of the per-stage speed checks behind a spoiler tag...

Stage one: The 24 outermost stacks(144 total tanks) feed all 37 engines for just short of 5 minutes, then you stage. That gets you out of the atmosphere and the 13 remaining engines start chewing through the outermost ring of 30 tanks (at the bottom of the screenshot you can just see the first stage dropping away still):

Further stage separations to show the speed and time progression:

Complete image gallery Here.

Final burnout with lander stage intact, 9684.3 m/s, about 3,884 km altitude, 16 minutes into the flight:

I can probably do better, I think I can put 2 or 3 more tanks onto that final stage and still get liftoff.

edit: oops, forgot the .craft file.

[Joene]

you sir, are mental.... (or kerbal)

I like it.

<edit>

next few days i might have a go, but i doubt i can beat this

<endedit>

[khyron42]

Your comment that it was mental/kerbal got me thinking... it\'s really a fairly solid-looking ship. It should look more cobbled-together. I\'ve seen from your designs that those fuel lines can stretch a really long way... hmmm.

So I came up with something even more Kerbal. I\'m surprised it doesn\'t blow up when it launches. I give you the newest way to hurl little green men to their dooms: the Almighty Tallest.

Somewhere mid-flight, the strain gets to be too much and one of the fuel lines seems to consistently break. First time it caught me by surprise and I lost the flight. Second time, I just staged a little early - but not before the early loss of one engine tipped me over a bit. Still, I followed the challenge rules and didn\'t use any flight controls other than spacebar!

I also had to stage a little early on that next stage since one of the tanks had drained already a bit from the broken fuel line. Final speed was only 9611, but if the fuel line problems were fixed it might match the other design!

Once again, more images Here.

[WX_Echo]

There is some epic rocket design going on in this thread. I\'ve had my head buried in the orbital analysis side of things for so long that I\'ve failed to appreciate the detail available to the user in just getting off of the ground.

I need to schedule some VAB time soon.

[Joene]

mmm... that monster makes my computer pull its hears. awsome.

I was under the impression that fuel lines had to go from bottom to top.

Will they also work from bottom to bottom?

[khyron42]

They work from bottom to bottom just fine, with one glitch (that I find useful rather than annoying.)

When the 'supply side' runs out, it switches to using the bottom tank of the destination stack for a split second, then fuel starts flowing down from the top one as usual. So, throughout your burn on the next stage, you\'ll see one whole set of tanks with just the tiniest bit used... and you can just keep an eye on that set knowing that it\'s the bottom-most in the currently burning stage, and just stage when it\'s empty.

[zarakon]

khyron42, I noticed that the top speed on your rocket is higher than Kerbin\'s orbital velocity around the sun

so I decided to use it for something slightly more.. kerbal..

I\'m sure people have already done this sort of thing, though maybe not with stock parts... It\'s all new to me though!

The sun has a radius of about 60Mm. You pass through the surface with no effect at all, and the center continues to act as a point gravity well. Once you go through the surface, the altimeter starts counting up again. It confused me because I thought I had passed perihelion, but my speed was still increasing. Looking at the map view showed that my altitude was actually becoming more negative and I still had a while to go

In the last screenshot I have before it went nuts, I reached a speed of 626,812m/s at -59311Km altitude. G Force meter is maxed out at this point - Jeb was loving it

Then my speed suddenly jumped to 54,462,509m/s, and I was shot out below the plane of the system. My ship actually slowly started to separate, split apart in the middle by the sudden acceleration I guess

As of now, my altimeter is passing 500,000Gm, speed is 54,462,117m/s. Navball is going haywire, map view goes nuts if I focus on Kerbin or Mun.

[Joene]

Finally managed to get a little more speed.

18 stages and 24 minutes of thrust.

9839 km/s with lander intact.

She is not as Kerbal as I wanted to, but does the job. (probably even a little bit to easy)

I relocated all the fuel tanks to the appropriate stages so its easy to see when a new stage should be dropped.

I think I could ad a few more stages, but the hangar obviously isnt large enough. Neither is the launchpad.

With 'only'30 engines and 181 fuel tanks this baby almost runs for free. Bob Bill and Jebediah demand larger crafts.

[Joene]

On a side note..

I think we should remove the RCS completaly.

I have never used it for a landing anyways.

I will edit the challenge.

[mindvr]

Tried to improve this design adding 2 more stages:

but

So, I decided to finish with this design ???

[OONNIILO]

Having worked on something somewhat similiar i noticed this thread and made little changes on my challenger..

About to take off..

nearly 21 minutes later broke the 10 km/s mark resulting in 10313,7 m/s..

There were some bad stagings, I guess 10500 m/s might be doable with this design. My strategy was to pass dense part of the atmosphere with max OOMPH, seemed to work out pretty well

[Joene]

Holy shit.. everytime i think people cant build sicker.. they do..

Would you mind trying her for this:

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=5099.0