The Career Mode !SCIENCE! Challenge - Max that Tech Tree!

[SkyRender]

Planet-bouncing is indeed easy as long as you're very patient. You practically don't have to even think about it: as long as the inclination is correct at the ascending or descending node of your intercept, you will eventually get an encounter; trimming to get one from a close future encounter rarely takes more than a few dozen m/s dV, if that. It really eats up time on your counter, though! Hence why I decided to do a 3-launch "practical" tech tree mastery instead for my (in-progress) entry.

[Ekku Zakku]

You may or may not have, there's no way to know. The ship from my previous post has about 50% more delta V and 3 times the experimental storage. I've at least proven I can fly it into orbit. I could then sit with another craft on the pad while I went and got dinner to run up the mission timer, fly around and edit the save to keep refuelling, claim I got even more lucky gravity assists, post up a truly insane result, and have just as much evidence to show for it.

Very true, and it's good that there are some people who question a person's claims rather than (quietly or blindly) accepting everything people say, people hardly ever step up to say anything unless a person's claims are obviously bogus or their evidence is terrible XD I'm not offended that you've questioned the validity of my mission at all (even though my ego is a bit >w>).

I didn't necessarily say that I got a lot of lucky gravity assists, just the one from Tylo that happened to bring my orbit only within 200,000 km of Kerbin without even trying. Wouldn't have been difficult to change the timing of my orbit to get an encounter or even to get the Tylo gravity assist (it's quite easy to get an intercept with any of Jool's moons when you're in a highly elliptical orbit lol). Also the ones from Duna and Eve weren't perfectly timed either, I did go around Kerbol a couple of times before I got the gravity assist from Eve.

To help quell your doubts, I've decided that I will record my next mission, since that's going to be the important one anyways =3 I feel like I have something to prove lol, nobody has ever questioned my skills at KSP XD I'd easily rank myself at a higher skill level than Scott Manley, that's my honest opinion (gosh I must sound so full of myself right now lmao).

It would be really cool to see you do that trip. You've got a bunch more dV than prior spacecraft -- you should be able to cream the competition. Ekku aerobraked at Jool to get to Bop -- that's suboptimal, you could do better! And setting up gravity assists isn't exactly rocket science.

Oh wait, it is.

I didn't aerobrake to get to Bop, you're right, that would have been really suboptimal XD about 900 m/s to circularize at Bop was what my maneuver node said =P I actually aerobraked into a highly elliptical orbit and raised my periapsis up to Pol's orbit, kinda like a bi-elliptic transfer I suppose, and once I was done with Pol I did a Hohmann transfer to Bop.

Edited October 26, 2013 by Ekku Zakku

[Vector]

You put it on the pad and either salvage it or get any science at all from it that gets saved across persistence, it's a launch. If you want to run "science-free" flights for whatever reason, you certainly can and it won't count against you. It's not really going to do you many favors either, of course...

Not really a serious entry, as for me it doesn't go with the spirit of the challenge, but here is a single craft that separates before leaving the pad... just to see if I could.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[Ekku Zakku]

Haha, that's awesome XD I was thinking about something like that, but yeah, it really doesn't seem in the spirit of the challenge lol. Also it'd be pretty hard to get a full unlock even that way, I wonder if it'd even be possible without more experiments.

[SkyRender]

Yeah, that is very clever, but obviously quite a lot breaking with the spirit of the challenge.

Update on my Munar excursions, incidentally: I have sucked the poles, polar lowlands, polar crater, canyons, farside crater, and highlands of their tasty tasty !SCIENCE! and gained around 4400 so far on this launch. My plan is working better than even I predicted: I have enough fuel left for 10(!) more trips down, and that's even accounting for the need to get back home to Kerbin once I'm done. Just 8 biomes to go...

Edited October 26, 2013 by SkyRender

[allmhuran]

Just because your ships are hard to get into orbit doesn't mean they all are.

They're all basically the same ship, following my 1662 science initial design (video in sig). And all of them will behave the same way in the atmosphere. Drag is a funtion of mass in the game, and they all have a huge amount of mass at the front. This means any pitch away from vertical will introduce very strong drag acting laterally through the nose, which will tip the rocket over.

The bigger the payload, the worse it gets. The "double neck" rocket I posted above has a payload with twice as much fuel as the one you have here, twice the engines, and three times the command pods. It is an absolute terror to fly!

[ThreeMartiniLaunch]

huh....I was pretty proud of my 411 points on mission 1.

It's looking pretty pathetic now.

Experiments on mission 2 put it in the low 4000s at best.

There's no doubt I could do this in three missions but I'm wondering if I should start over and try for two.

TML

[SkyRender]

huh....I was pretty proud of my 411 points on mission 1.

It's looking pretty pathetic now.

Experiments on mission 2 put it in the low 4000s at best.

There's no doubt I could do this in three missions but I'm wondering if I should start over and try for two.

TML

You should do it however you like. If you place some sort of arbitrary goal on yourself and note it in your breakdown of the missions, I'll note it when adding you to the leaderboards. It's only fair, given the crazy-awesome methods of some of our challengers!

[allmhuran]

So this is now a thing in orbit...

[Sirine]

So this is now a thing in orbit...

That is awesome!

About that middle solid booster, normally at space, the "heat" will not raise that much, hence difficult to blowup.. I'm using the opposite direction pointing that solid booster upward to perform decoupler.

[solid booster] -->[fuel tank]<--[liquid rocket].

*--> pointing direction.

[fuel tank] this blowup to achieve decoupling.

[allmhuran]

I will be firing the SRB and the next stage engine at the same time to over heat it. This does mean wasting about 1/4 of a tank of liquid fuel, but that's less mass to drag around than a full SRB. How long does it take to overheat the fuel tank?

[allmhuran]

Hm, actually you could use that fuel in the decoupler fuel tank by disabling all fuel tanks above the engine. It will draw from a tank below the nozzle, and then will immediately stop firing when decoupling occurs because the tank it was drawing from will be gone. So your way might be better in the end.

[Sirine]

I will be firing the SRB and the next stage engine at the same time to over heat it. This does mean wasting about 1/4 of a tank of liquid fuel, but that's less mass to drag around than a full SRB. How long does it take to overheat the fuel tank?

Could you please try out? http://www./download/2k8ks83p8duu882/003.craft

I have no ideal how to describe how fast it overheat.

[allmhuran]

Yours overheats faster, but it does have to carry up the mass of the fuel tank which is blown up. It's probably slightly more efficient than my way if you do go ahead and disable flow from all of the other fuel tanks feeding the engine. It does also introduce an additional part, which might be an issue if you already have wobbliness/structural failure problems.

Btw, lol @ the ghetto landing legs.

[Sirine]

disable flow from all of the other fuel tanks feeding the engine

Nope. It just happened to draw fuel from below...I don't know why, but it just happened.

[allmhuran]

It's going to be really close, and depend somewhat on the rest of the design as to which way is better.

Your way effectively uses a whole small fuel tank to decouple (because you blow it up!). If you draw the fuel from the decoupler tank, it doesn't really matter whether it blows up in half a second, or if it takes all of the fuel in the tank... either way, you're carrying up and then losing one tank of fuel. But you aren't left with the mass of the empty tank attached to the ship (0.125 mass).

My way only wastes about 1/4 to 1/2 of a fuel tank to blow up the SRB. But this means I have less fuel for the ship. If you use this method you could carry up a whole additional tank to make up for it, but that's two empty-tank-masses worth of extra weight being carried around for the whole flight (0.25 mass).

[Vector]

They're all basically the same ship, following my 1662 science initial design (video in sig). And all of them will behave the same way in the atmosphere. Drag is a funtion of mass in the game, and they all have a huge amount of mass at the front. This means any pitch away from vertical will introduce very strong drag acting laterally through the nose, which will tip the rocket over.

The bigger the payload, the worse it gets. The "double neck" rocket I posted above has a payload with twice as much fuel as the one you have here, twice the engines, and three times the command pods. It is an absolute terror to fly!

The problem as I see it is that SRBs have a different drag coefficient. With a lot of SRBs at the back, drag tends to tip you in the direction of your velocity, like fletching on an arrow. This is only a problem if you have a long, low-TWR burn in the early phase of flight. In that case the tendency to tip in the direction of your velocity amplifies itself.

If you have higher TWR in eary flight you won't have this problem. You may have to sacrifice some dV, but dV at low TWR is mostly wasted anyway.

[Lions]

So i am trying this, but only got 119 science with my first tier 0 flight, is this good enough or am i a weak contender?

regards

[SkyRender]

So i am trying this, but only got 119 science with my first tier 0 flight, is this good enough or am i a weak contender?

Seeing as we've only had one finishing contender thus far, I don't think you should worry too much.

Also, update on my own mission: 6600ish !SCIENCE! has been sucked out of the Mun thus far, meaning I'm a little over 2/3rds done. Just the northern basin, east crater, midland craters, and highland craters to go... And possibly a few repeat visits to places I went on my first expedition, just in case I decide I want some gravity, seismic, and temperature data from them too.

[SkyRender]

It is finished.

So let's go over the mission in detail now. To start with, only the tiny science lander ever went down to the surface on this flight.

Every time it came back up from its expeditions, it refueled with the central tanker in orbit.

Repeat 11 times, once per biome, for best results. (I decided not to revisit the midlands or the southeast crater.)

And we're done! Discounting the time it took to reach the Mun and get the mostly-polar orbit, this mission took slightly over 1.5 days of game time. Real-time, it took around 8 or 9 hours. Yeah, "long haul" is the term that comes to mind.

The journey home is expensive, but look at all that fuel left! I even left the science lander fully fueled in orbit, I was that confident of my abilities.

And rightly so! Look at all that fuel left!

I was so full of fuel that I had no problem re-adjusting my course so I'd land on the grasslands instead of in the ocean.

Jeb then experienced what would later be known as the gentlest return to Kerbin ever.

And so it ended.

The actual spoils of the mission capsule were anemic, but keep in mind where my science sat BEFORE I transmitted data about 11 Munar biomes.

In fact, I pretty much overdid it on getting science, and could have returned without ever visiting the last two biomes. But I wanted to make my point: the Mun is a harsh mistress... full of !SCIENCE! And I did it all well under a game month's time. Now then, let's see someone top that with a 2-mission tech tree maxing!

[genveir]

Not entering into the challenge, but you can easily max out the tech tree on Mun science. I did a mission to "max out the Mun", and got 12721.8

[Ekku Zakku]

After seeing the Mun milked for science, now I kinda just want to put a rover on the Mun, drive to all the biomes and do all the science, and then go back to a mothership and also do my previously planned (non-landing) grand tour just to see how much science I can net from one mission XD

[SkyRender]

Hmm! I may have found a way to complete the tech tree not only in two missions, but also without ever leaving the Kerbin system. Only problem: it requires a rocket with ~3000dV from LKO, something I'm not really too terribly interested in making happen. Ah well, perhaps someone else will spot what I did and make it happen...

[Vector]

My own grand tour: 3629 from first Tech-level 0 flight.

Took FOREVER, but I managed to get a high and low flyby of all bodies except Mun and Minmus. Also landed and got samples and surface EVA from Gilly, Pol, and Bop.

The craft was not particularly spectacular, only 20 cans of fuel once in LKO.

With this start, I think two launches is very feasible.

The plan was to do Mun and Minmus last, but I barely had enough fuel to get back after all the other visits, so I went straight home.

Here's the science summary:

Javascript is disabled. View full album

I took a ton of pics, here's a sampling of screen shots from the tour:

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Sometimes to take advantage of gravity assists, I made multiple visits rather than getting high and low and all moons on every visit. Eve was first but Gilly was last. Low Duna was on a separate pass from Ike and High Duna, etc.

The sequence was:

1. Near Kerbin (Highlands)

2. High Kerbin

3. High Sun

4. High Eve

5. Near Eve

6. High Ike

7. Near Ike

8. High Duna

(was hoping to thread the needle and get high and low Ike and Duna in one pass, but I messed up)

9. High Moho

10. Near Moho

11. Near Duna

12. High Jool

13. Near Jool (aerobrake seems not to allow air sample)

14. High Pol

15. Near Pol

16. Landed on Pol (extreme EVA)

17. High Bop

18. Near Bop

19. Landed entire craft on Bop -- I think this turned out to be a mistake and wasted a bunch of fuel in the process

20. High Tylo

21. High Vall

22. Near Vall

23. High Laythe

24. Near Laythe

25. Near Tylo

26. High Dres

27. Near Dres

28. High Eeloo

29. Near Eeloo (didn't take a ton of fuel but took a very long time to go to Eeloo)

30. High Gilly

31. Near Gilly

32. Surface Gilly (extreme EVA)

I didn't get any coverage of Mun biomes or Kerbin biomes except for one. I would have liked to have gotten EVAs above all Kerbin and Mun biomes and also gotten High, Low, and samples from Minmus. I would have also liked to have gotten low sun if it were feasible, but I didn't see a good gravity-assist opportunity, and flying directly is very costly.

I also believe the transmitter didn't get all the crew reports back home, because 1) I was constantly out of electricity, and 2) the transmitter seems to flake out when starved of electricity for a long time. Saving and reloading seems to help but I didn't reload any saves just to fix the transmitter.

[SunJumper]

I think you could have got a little more science by aerobraking into a decaying low orbit to get some more biome reports, but 3629 science units is mind blowing!