The Docking Challenge (0.23)

[leafty]

The goal of this challenge is to dock two ships together as fast as you can.

Rules:

1) The two ships must be either airborne or in space from launch to the moment they dock together. (Docking two rovers is not really a challenge.)

2) The docking ports cannot be aligned at launch. (This is about piloting skills, so you are required to pilot the ships.)

3) Both craft are to be manned. This is KSP, you dock or die.

4) No obviously overpowered parts (from mods).

5) No auto-pilot or piloting help mod allowed. You are the pilot, it's not the computer's job to do it. (SAS is fine.)

.

Scoring:

You score is the time it takes in KSP time from the launch of the first ship to completion of the docking maneuver. Please be careful here, as MET time and flight logs will most certainly not display it. As a proof, I encourage you to record a video or to use a mod like TAC Atomic Clock to provide something reliable.

Notes:

1) You can launch both ships simultaneously or sequentially, just keep in mind that the timer starts when the first ship is launched.

2) Recording time seems to be a bit problematic with this challenge, please be honest and don't cheat.

My own submission: 4:35 (being generous here)

Leader board:

1) 00:07 Kasuha

2) 04:16 Dave Kerbin

3) 04:35 leafty

Edited January 16, 2014 by leafty

[Kasuha]

I don't see how this is a pilot skill challenge. The fastest entries are clearly going to be ships which will align and dock automatically in a few seconds after launch.

If you want piloting skills to be involved, provide a quicksave.sfs with ships already designed and positioned for a challenge.

[Dave Kerbin]

So it's really one ship that immediately seperates into 2 ships, then comes back together?

When the no RCS docking challenge was up on Reddit I did a fast docking to compete with another entry (with no RCS obviously). Only I used seperate ships so it's the same craft file, but the first one is driven off the launchpad and over to the grass to make room for the second one.

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MET is 4 minutes 16 seconds. Seperate ships, no RCS, and they where placed into a stable orbit (no falling back down as soon as they're docked).

Doing it with one ship that just seperates and doesn't need to make it into orbit makes it viable to dock in under 2 minutes (atmospheric dock), especially now that .23 has tweakables.

[leafty]

Yeah, I think we can do it in less than a couple of minutes, but I didn't want to have a difficult entry barrier. Nice job Dave, doing it without RCS.

[theend3r]

I guess this would be considered as cheating but I'll post it here nonetheless just for fun

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[leafty]

You're not really maintaining the bottom part yourself . So maybe I should amend rule 1 to say you can't touch the ground directly or indirectly by touching an object on ground. Funny idea, still.

[Kasuha]

1) Both ships are airborne

2) Docking ports are not initially aligned

3) Both crafts are manned

4) Stock only

5) No autopiloting except SAS

6) No ground contact, direct or indirect

0:07

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[SirJodelstein]

Experimenting with in-air-docking short after launch. Not successful so far, but got some close misses and high-velocity dockings (i.e crashes). Would something like this be acceptable for a valid entry at all (if done with manned vessels)? Anyway, having a lot of fun trying to make this work. The "Ports may not be aligned" rule makes this a lot harder.

Video: http://videobam.com/cmxAY

@Kasuha: genius!

Edited January 15, 2014 by SirJodelstein

[leafty]

I didn't think you could bypass the rules with something so simple yet so crazy, Kasuha. Very nice job. With something like that, we can even try to go below 0:05.

The fact is that I still think that making a challenge out of trying to dock mid-air can be quite fun, but I still need to figure out how it should be implemented. If I provide a save file with the target already mid-air, I fear it will not maintain its altitude and crash before we can dock with it. Feel free to give out any suggestion at making this challenge better.

[Kasuha]

I think just putting two ships in orbit and the task being to dock as soon as possible could make the challenge you intended.

If you want to give it some drama element, you can leave one of ships with no fuel and no chutes (but with torque and electricity) on suborbital trajectory and the other ship (on similar trajectory, but with chutes and/or wings and in certain distnce) having the task to dock to it (points for time) and land safely (bonus). You can make the quicksave right above the atmosphere.

Just a little while ago I was going to Minmus with my rover and shortly before landing I realized I have the rover attached upside down. So I redocked the rover while on suborbital trajectory with about minute to crash. These were nice adrenaline moments...

[Javster]

Maybe add a rule where you must launch the two ships several hours apart?