Interplanetary No Energy Generators Challenge

[SirJodelstein]

This is a challenge to explore the hypothetical question "What if electric charge was a limited resource?" In my opinion, this would definetly have a heavy impact on gameplay, forcing the player to make some additional interesting decisions during craft building and mission execution.

Challenge Outline

Build an unmanned craft less than 10 tons (payload in LKO) and perform an interplanetary science mission. Highest science return wins. But here is the trick: The limited part list contains no energy generators. You will have to trade available dV vs battery lifetime, and balance probe lifetime with transmission costs.

Part list

- Any probe body

- tanks: FLT-100, torodial, oscar-B

- engines: Rockomax 24-77, LV-1R, Sepratron

- Any science experiment except

- Communotron 16 for transmission

- stuff: Fuel line, any chute, any landing leg, any inactive structural and aero parts (no decoupler/separator - you can however use several sepratrons to create a makeshift overheat separator)

- any battery

Additional rules:

- This is an interplanetary challenge. No science experiments at Kerbin/Mun/Minmus.

- atmospheric entries must be protected by a makeshift heatshield (plates/nosecones/adapters/etc), and be able to keep that heatshield in prograde direction during atmospheric heating phases.

- start with your craft in an 100x100km (+-5km) orbit around Kerbin. Use whatever you want to get it up there.

- required documentation: screenshot showing craft in orbit, map view showing initial mass&orbit, mission summary showing total science acquired

- try to keep a somewhat sane shape (imagine you had to build a lifter for it)

- informational mods and mechjeb are allowed for this one, as it is more of a builing/strategic challenge

How to play

get this zip, put it into your "scenarios" folder, and "unzip here". This should give you a scenario with 0 science and all nodes already unlocked (i could not create a scenario with the specific part list without modifying the part.cfg files). Go from there.

I am currently working on my submission (current plan is a 20-day sprint to Duna impact with Ike flyby), and am curious what you can come up with. Highly recommended: Launch window Planner for non-homann transfers

Edited October 25, 2013 by SirJodelstein
title typo

[numerobis]

I was going to say that this is ludicrous, but I had missed the addition of the Z-4k. Interesting...

You still need several tonnes of battery for this mission.

[fatfluffycat]

You know how many batterys that would take?

Over 9000

But really, how would you transmit data and keep the craft alive?

[numerobis]

It would take about 13 Z-4k batteries if you can do it in 20 days. Perfectly reasonable.

The 10-tonne limit is pretty constraining given the requirement of having quite so many tonnes of battery on hand. Mind if we change the resources to have flowMode=STACK_PRIORITY_SEARCH for electricity, so we can asparagus off the spend batteries?

Edited October 25, 2013 by numerobis

[SirJodelstein]

The 10-tonne limit is pretty constraining given the requirement of having quite so many tonnes of battery on hand. Mind if we change the resources to have flowMode=STACK_PRIORITY_SEARCH for electricity, so we can asparagus off the spend batteries?

As it is possible to transfer energy like fuel via Alt+RightClick, so yes, this is perfectly reasonably (but not really required).

[SirJodelstein]

Ok, here is my entry: Mission EnDuranCE (short for Experiment to navigate to Duna requiring astronomical Charges of Energy)

Ike flyby to burnup in Duna atmosphere in 35 days, with battery capacities for 38 days, and 50 dV remaining. For added fun, i used only the medium stack battery banks:

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Science bounty can be seen in the last images: Goo+Temperature from high+low Duna/Ike: 557,9 sciene!

Be aware that there seems to be a bug with the energy consumption at high warp rates: My 95k charges ran out in about 29 days where they should have lasted 38 days (only consuming element is the probe which should have used 1.6777 charges per minute, and the SAS was deactivated for the flight). I edited my quicksave afterwards to restore 21k energy i should have had just after entering Dunas SOI.

10 tons is really harsh limit, i'm going to open up a new "middleweight" category for vessels less than 12 tons which should dramatically increase the options to go with.