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

[Ekku Zakku]

You would probably have to chain a ridiculous amount of gravity assists. If you can luck out and get a Tylo AND a Laythe encounter to escape, this might give enough of a boost to get mostly back to Kerbin

I did it with just a Tylo encounter, and it was a relatively high periapsis as well; I was just already in a highly elliptical orbit so it didn't take much to fling me back down to a Kerbin intercept.

If you could at all EVA down to Bop and back to orbit, you would of course have massive delta-v savings.

Exactly what I did, and while it isn't much dV, every little bit counts. I wouldn't have been able to get my science from the Mun without it.

Also, you would probably start from Pol orbit. Doing an EVA landing on Pol probably saves enough delta-v to skip the surface crew report.

exactly!

Anywho, I'm gonna see if I can jump in KSP real quick and show exactly what I did to get from Bop to Kerbin (might as well skip Pol to Bop, that's trivial) Pol to Kerbin. Just realized that I didn't have a quicksave in Bop orbit for some reason =P

EDIT: video is here: http://youtu.be/Vf2mHVKX7KE

Total dV for me getting from Pol to Bop to Tylo gravity assist to Kerbin was 1413 dV according to my calculations, out of 4660 dV from a full ship. It is a lot, but it wasn't that much compared to a direct burn from low Jool orbit to Kerbin (I estimate that's roughly 2000 dV maybe?).

Edited October 30, 2013 by Ekku Zakku

[allmhuran]

I did it with just a Tylo encounter

If you are landed or in orbit at Pol or Bop and then take off and escape from there you will not have a Tylo encounter because your Ap and Pe are going to be at almost the same altitude above Jool as the body from which you escaped, unless your escape burn is much bigger than it needs to be to change that.

In other words, you can't take off from Pol/Bop and then use Tylo to get your Jool periapsis down to the level of Tylo. You have to burn your way down.

Edited October 30, 2013 by allmhuran

[Ekku Zakku]

If you are landed or in orbit at Pol or Bop and then take off and escape from there you will not have a Tylo encounter because your Ap and Pe are going to be at almost the same altitude above Jool as the body from which you escaped, unless your escape burn is much bigger than it needs to be to change that.

In other words, you can't take off from Pol/Bop and then use Tylo to get your Jool periapsis down to the level of Tylo. You have to burn your way down.

I just meant that I didn't get a gravity assist (to escape Jool) from any moon other than Tylo. SunJumper was mentioning chained gravity assists, and I was stating that I didn't do that and still escaped Jool, at the cost of a bit more fuel. Obviously I had to burn down to get a Tylo intercept, and it's explained how I did so in the video I made for you. I recommend you give it a watch =3

Edited October 30, 2013 by Ekku Zakku

[numerobis]

I didn't get any coverage of Mun biomes or Kerbin biomes except for one.

On return, you should be able to aerobrake into a polar orbit with periapsis at 50km or so and overfly a whole bunch of Kerbin biomes at various altitudes. At 50km, Jeb can hold on just fine. With luck/skill/patience, you can have your orbit reach out to 11.4Mm and get a polar fly-by of Mun.

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

From Kerbin, for 900m/s more than a flight out to Jool -- or, even better, fly by Jool and get a boost up to near Kerbol escape velocity -- you can fly out as high as you want. Up there you will be basically still, so you can burn a tiny amount to fly by anywhere in the solar system, so you could knock the planets off one by one. It would require insane patience.

[allmhuran]

I just meant that I didn't get a gravity assist (to escape Jool) from any moon other than Tylo. SunJumper was mentioning chained gravity assists, and I was stating that I didn't do that and still escaped Jool, at the cost of a bit more fuel. Obviously I had to burn down to get a Tylo intercept, and it's explained how I did so in the video I made for you. I recommend you give it a watch =3

Sure, escaping Jool using Tylo alone is pretty standard. But the conversation SunJumper is responding to is the one I started with the question of how to inexpensively get from Bop or Pol down to Tylo in order to get that assist back to Kerbin.

My contention is that landing on Bop and Pol and then using a Tylo slingshot to get back to Kerbin costs a hell of a lot of dV, because

1) Bop and Pol are highly inclined relative to each other, so your closing speed when transferring from one to the other will be very high. IE, you need to slow down a lot to land safely.

2) Once you are landed or in orbit at Bop or Pol there is nothing you can use to assist you back down to Tylo's orbit other than the engine. This burn, even without any inclination correction, costs several hundred m/s. More if you fix your inclination to get a better slingshot.

Edited October 31, 2013 by allmhuran

[Ekku Zakku]

Sure, escaping Jool using Tylo alone is pretty standard. But the conversation SunJumper is responding to is the one I started with the question of how to inexpensively get from Bop or Pol down to Tylo in order to get that assist back to Kerbin.

My contention is that landing on Bop and Pol and then using a Tylo slingshot to get back to Kerbin costs a hell of a lot of dV, because

1) Bop and Pol are highly inclined relative to each other, so your closing speed when transferring from one to the other will be very high. IE, you need to slow down a lot to land safely.

2) Once you are landed or in orbit at Bop or Pol there is nothing you can use to assist you back down to Tylo's orbit other than the engine. This burn, even without any inclination correction, costs several hundred m/s. More if you fix your inclination to get a better slingshot.

Ha, I hadn't made the connection from his post to yours, I had just woken up and essentially glanced over those posts when I replied to them, my bad XD it undoubtedly costs quite a bit of dV, but I still think that ~1400 m/s dV is a pretty good attempt, certainly less than a direct dive down to Jool and then back to Kerbin. There's a lot more that Tylo has to offer in a gravity assist than I made use of, so I'd certainly like to see it done better, and I just might have a go at it myself later. It's definitely going to be made more difficult by Bop's crazy inclined orbit though.

[allmhuran]

In terms of the overall transfer from Kerbin to Jool and back, the most efficient way I know if is:

Burn at Kerbin for Eve: ~1100m/s

Eve slingshot to Jool: 0 - 100 m/s (Oberth burn at Eve periapsis if you didn't get enough of a kick, inclination change if desired)

Do your usual Jool stuff. It's almost impossible *not* to get flung from moon to moon within the Jool system.

When you're ready to come home, slingshot off Tylo. This can get you to Kerbin for free, but if you're willing to spend 100m/s or so you don't have to wait for a "perfect" slingshot.

Total dV for the Kerbin > Eve > Jool > Tylo > Kerbin round trip is 1100 - 1500 m/s depending on your patience.

Edit: This, by the way, goes to show just how expensive it is to land on Pol and Bop. In order to make both landings (or orbits, doesn't matter which) takes, I would say, a minimum of 400 m/s mostly due to the inclination difference. Then getting back down to Tylo will take another 300 - 400 m/s. So you're looking at about 800 m/s just to land on those two little moons, compared to 1100 m/s to do the entire Kerbin > Eve > Jool > Kerbin trip.

Edited October 31, 2013 by allmhuran

[SunJumper]

Sure, escaping Jool using Tylo alone is pretty standard. But the conversation SunJumper is responding to is the one I started with the question of how to inexpensively get from Bop or Pol down to Tylo in order to get that assist back to Kerbin.

My contention is that landing on Bop and Pol and then using a Tylo slingshot to get back to Kerbin costs a hell of a lot of dV, because

1) Bop and Pol are highly inclined relative to each other, so your closing speed when transferring from one to the other will be very high. IE, you need to slow down a lot to land safely.

2) Once you are landed or in orbit at Bop or Pol there is nothing you can use to assist you back down to Tylo's orbit other than the engine. This burn, even without any inclination correction, costs several hundred m/s. More if you fix your inclination to get a better slingshot.

Nothing you can use? If possible, you could use repeated slingshots off Pol to get to Tylo. It would take a long time, sure. It might be impossible, sure. But I have noticed that when traveling to Pol, the slingshot that would occur were I to not burn was not negligible. Also note that you can get as close as 6km without hitting mountains.

The thing I want to try with the career mode challenge, is to see how small a craft I can get that maxes out the tech tree after a 3676 science mission. To do that, I'll probably have to hack a save file to give 3676 science and strategically unlock nodes from there. The parts that I will need to unlock will be the grav sensor, ion engines, small rotating solar panels (it is less mass to have an array of the small panels than to have two large panels)), the 48-7S, fuel lines, small probe core etc. I'll edit the materials bay and the goo canister for aesthetics to be smaller, without changing mass/drag.

I'll probably start by pinging around the Jool system to see how much science can be "mined" from all the moons. If that is insufficient, I'll probably go for an additional Gilly landing. Science will be collected by:

The materials bay

The goo canister

The grav sensor

The thermometer

The barometer (I intend to impact Jool at the end)

The accelerometer (only if I do a Gilly landing)

The atmo sensor won't be used as it is too heavy for the science it gets.

In terms of the overall transfer from Kerbin to Jool and back, the most efficient way I know if is:

Burn at Kerbin for Eve: ~1100m/s

Eve slingshot to Jool: 0 - 100 m/s (Oberth burn at Eve periapsis if you didn't get enough of a kick, inclination change if desired)

Do your usual Jool stuff. It's almost impossible *not* to get flung from moon to moon within the Jool system.

When you're ready to come home, slingshot off Tylo. This can get you to Kerbin for free, but if you're willing to spend 100m/s or so you don't have to wait for a "perfect" slingshot.

Total dV for the Kerbin > Eve > Jool > Tylo > Kerbin round trip is 1100 - 1500 m/s depending on your patience.

Edit: This, by the way, goes to show just how expensive it is to land on Pol and Bop. In order to make both landings (or orbits, doesn't matter which) takes, I would say, a minimum of 400 m/s mostly due to the inclination difference. Then getting back down to Tylo will take another 300 - 400 m/s. So you're looking at about 800 m/s just to land on those two little moons, compared to 1100 m/s to do the entire Kerbin > Eve > Jool > Kerbin trip.

Do you have an image of an unpowered grav assist from Eve reaching Jool? Best Eve assist I've heard of got part-way to Duna...

Edited October 31, 2013 by SunJumper

[allmhuran]

Nothing you can use? If possible, you could use repeated slingshots off Pol to get to Tylo.

Whether or not it's theoretically possible to do that, I don't know. I suppose if you burned away from Pol in the first place to give yourself a very aggressive intercept then you could theoretically make use of Pol on another pass. But

1) This means you spent more fuel to make the Pol intercepts useful (by having an aggressive interception angle)

2) Pol is tiny, you'd have to do hundreds of assists to get anywhere. I feel confident that nobody would ever actually do this, it would take weeks of real world time.

[allmhuran]

Do you have an image of an unpowered grav assist from Eve reaching Jool? Best Eve assist I've heard of got part-way to Duna...

Nope, I've always done an Oberth boosted engine burn at Eve. But it is, apparently, possible with a perfect intercept angle.

[Vector]

I believe from Bop to Tylo will cost roughly 260 m/s delta-V, and from Tylo intercept you can use gravity assist to correct inclination and go just about anywhere you want. I don't think there is anything to be gained by trying to gravity-assist off of Pol. You don't need to bother correcting inclination prior to the Tylo intercept, because you can intercept "above" or "below" Tylo and fix your inclination basically for free.

Likewise from Pol to Bop is pretty much going to be just engine and not much else you can do in terms of gravity-assist to make the trip from Pol to Bop any cheaper. And unlike Tylo, you can't use gravity assist off Pol or Bop to fix inclination difference (theoretically you could, but it would take an insane number of repeated Bop encounters).

If you only need a fly-by and don't care to stop at Bop (or Pol for that matter) then it's not hard to get a cheap intercept without insertion. But orbit or landing is indeed very costly.

I included some additional screen shots from my visit below. I don't have delta-V measurements but I have fuel at each point.

Before leaving Pol for Bop, I had 730 fuel.

Getting an intercept at Bop, I had 691 remaining.

After killing relative velocity in preparation for landing, I had 569.

After landing, 499

After taking off and getting Tylo intercept, 395.

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Edit: on second thought, regarding Pol-to-Bop transfer, it would be theoretically possible to go Pol-Tylo-Bop and it's conceivable the savings in using Tylo for inclination change might more than offset the extra fuel to reach Tylo. I'm not sure how the numbers would work out -- it might still be impossible to do any better than direct burn from Pol to Bop.

Edited October 31, 2013 by Vector

[SkyRender]

Looks like everyone had best finish up their tech tree maxing soon, if the latest from Kerbal Daily is any indicator. Science is going to get more complicated for the next revision, and a fair few of our tricks will likely not work any longer as a result.

[SunJumper]

I have a craft that may be able to finish Allmhuran's Tech Tree, and it masses less than 20 tons...

I mainly researched the small probe core, Ion engines, the Grav sensor, and the "massless" trusses. Also, the 48-7S, being the engine of the first three stages.

Maybe if I do this under ant power I can massively shrink power (and thus mass) requirements. My aim is to bring at least 900m/s of chemical delta-v into LKO, then send the 9.8km/s delta-v ion probe to Jool (and maybe Eeloo). I think about 1000 Science may be milkable from each moon, so estimates are at the moment, nearly 7k Science.

It may be possible to get a second-mission mass of less than 10t, we'll see how this goes. For chemical engines to be more practical, I think this would require the upper stage (excluding booster) to be less than 1.5t, considering I probably put too much xenon on this thing (the fact that I may have to run the ions at 66% to 33% complicates things further)

The main benefit of a liquid powered payload is that I can soft-land on small bodies, and maybe hover in Jool to get data.

[Nome]

I'm attempting this challenge and I thought I'd share my first mission (of what I hoped would be 2, but will more likely be 3 or more). Using tier 0 parts, I managed to get a rocket to the Mun, the surface of Minmus, and back again. Jeb collected EVA reports above all of the Mun's biomes and some of kerbin's. EVA reports were collected from close orbit and high orbit around the three bodies as well, plus a report and sample from the Minmus surface, of course. 746.5 science in total, which is less than I was hoping for, but it's a start!

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More to come!

[SunJumper]

Okay, flight test pics inbound:

First half of the tree

Second Half

Payload

Orbital Insertion Stage

Lifter Stage

Twelve engines firing simultaneously

Nearly in orbit!

In orbit, enough dv in the booster stage to escape Kerbin in one go, no perikee kicks!

[SkyRender]

I hate to tell you this, but that's not an acceptable entry, SunJumper. MechJeb is pretty much the opposite of an "invisible" mod, and is most definitely not an exception to the "stock-only" rule. I'm sure you realized that and were just testing, but even so, be sure that sucker's off for the real deal.

[SunJumper]

I hate to tell you this, but that's not an acceptable entry, SunJumper. MechJeb is pretty much the opposite of an "invisible" mod, and is most definitely not an exception to the "stock-only" rule. I'm sure you realized that and were just testing, but even so, be sure that sucker's off for the real deal.

My post is not about getting on the leaderboard, its merely to serve as a demonstration of how small a craft can achieve the second mission. If you didn't notice, the first mission is Allmhuran's, so it would not be a valid entry even without MJ.

Weird bug: After reloading the flight in an eccentric Vall orbit, the Kraken broke the craft. However, I was able to get about 3000 science from:

High sun

High Jool

High Kerbin

High Laythe

High Vall

Low Vall

Low Kerbin

Kerbin Upper Atmosphere

Launchpad

It seems 7000 science may indeed be possible just by pinging around the Jool System, about 7800 is possible without landings.

Edited November 2, 2013 by SunJumper

[Vector]

Two launch unlock complete!

Initially I was just going to launch a carrier that separated into a whole bunch of probes that would send science back by radio. But I thought this would be rather anti-climactic since the science just shows up as science points without a detailed accounting. So I decided instead to try to physically return enough science to Kerbin to unlock the rest of the tech tree. This is a bigger challenge, and more interesting.

First, as others had pointed out, I could get more science at the tail end of my first mission by aerobraking into a polar orbit and getting EVAs over all the Kerbin biomes. I went ahead and loaded an intermediate save and did this, which got me up to a total of 3698 points for mission 1. This turned out to be unnecessary but at the time I thought I would need every last bit.

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With this science, I unlocked all the techs shown here, with 50 science points left over:

Then for the second mission, I made a small tug/ferry with a large fuel tank mother ship, and attached 12 science assemblies, each of which has one materials science bay, two goo, two gravioli (one for surface and one for near space), one seismic, and one thermometer. Then one by one, I docked with a science assembly, carried it down to the surface of the Mun, did the science, carried it back up to the mother ship, and then picked another one, carried it down to a different biome, and back up, untill all 12 were exposed to different biomes. Unfortunately Jeb is not very good at counting, and there are 15 biomes, not 12. But 12 turned out to be sufficient.

In addition, I put a bunch of gravioli sensors on the mother ship, with the idea that I could get high altitude gravioli measurements on all the Mun biomes too. There are 24 gravioli sensors on the mother ship, with the intent of getting some of Kerbin's biomes too. Here's a close up showing science pods and the ferry:

Then it's just a matter of dock, land, science, rendezvous, dock, undock times twelve! This is a laborious process but eventually I got it done, then went to higher Mun orbit (60+km) and got high altitude gravioli measurements. And on returning to Kerbin, I flew over enough biomes to use up the rest of the gravioli sensors.

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It would have been more graceful to splash down in water, but the crash landing didn't appear to have destroyed any science, so I didn't bother trying again for a better landing.

Grand total for second mission: 7984 science! Plus the 50 I had left over from the first mission gave me a total of 8034 to spend on science. This was plenty to finish out the tech tree, with 944 points left over.

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[SkyRender]

Nicely done! I like that solution for getting data back from the surface; it's likely a more sustainable strategy than mine given the changes that science is undergoing for the next version.

[allmhuran]

Video for mission 1 finally up.

[Cakeofruit]

Allmhuran how Many science did u get for this mission ?? Very nice video it looks like a loooong mission !

[Vector]

Nicely done. I can see it definitely pays to have two command pods. I can also see now how much I missed out on crew reports. I had not managed my transmissions -- I just hit the transmit button and assumed they would go out eventually, which was both incorrect and also a bad strategy because I had to suffer with minimal power the whole time, which is especially a problem when trying to land. Your approach worked much better.

[Lions]

This Dude Wins hands down BTW!!!

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/53998-Tier-0-new-save-first-launch-1472-science-(Kerbin-Duna-Ike-Minmus-Mun-Kerbin)

wow

[ThreeMartiniLaunch]

Mission III complete for 8305 !SCIENCE!

Three missions to max the tech tree with 5553 !SCIENCE! remaining.

TML

[SkyRender]

Good grief that is one loaded rocket. Good show, though!