Reach for orbit with an ion glider!

[zarakon]

Is thermoelektronik generator allowed? How about batteries?

RTG is allowed. It weighs too much to actually fly, since you need a bunch of them to fully power just one engine, but I suppose it could be useful for getting a tiny bit of thrust on the dark side of the planet

Batteries are ok, just don't abuse/spam the massless ones

Leaderboard updated! Let me know if I missed anything. I also added post links for each entry

Edited April 24, 2014 by zarakon

[Nedal]

Very nice zarakon, now I'll have to tweak to see if I can improve. I think with everything we've learned and between all of us. Once everything is said and done we'll have one badass little cruiser.

Been having a lot of fun with the new ion drives. Made a pretty sweet fully equipped science vessel capable of munar landing and return yesterday hehe. Only thing that kinda sucks is the part counts can get high quickly with all the panels cubes and batteries.

[FREEFALL1984]

I attempted a big light craft last night, using a rockomax adapter at 0.08t and piling dozens of solar panels on it, I then had 7 ion engines clipped into each other thanks to laterally placed girders and 8 sets of winglets for lift, I made it up to 30km and reached 900m/s, but I think I cheated because I had a landing gear attached using radial decouplers which gave me a bit of an illegitimate boost when I decoupled. Heres a question,

during the early morning I was loosing power, would it be better for me to just max throttle and deal with it or drop my throttle, allow my batteries (none spammed) to fully charge then get a brief full throttle boost before dropping back to an underpowered state again

[Ziv]

Alright, I finally managed to reach orbit myself!

Congratulation, very nice, clean and effective design!

[Nuke]

i didnt really intend to enter the challenge, but i saw the thread title and it inspired me to play around with the concept. i didnt actually follow the rules as im using some firespitter and some as of yet unreleased parts from my own mod, so dont consider this an entry. the only reason im posting is because impressive design:

18 stock ion engines, a lot of solar panels, 6 drop tanks, and a lot of wing area, and launch mass was a little under 14 metric tonnes. this thing lifted off at 15 m/s.

i didnt actually succeed either because i ran out of fuel, (and i am a rebel and dont follow rules too well). but this plane looks kinda cool. flying wins are notoriously unstable. mechjeb flew it for a few hours while it gained altitude and speed. it got squirrely at above 17000m and 300m/s. i tweaked the pid controller and it stabilized untill around 20000m and 500m/s, after that i had to fly it manually. ran out of gas at 21771m and 633.2m/s. after that the plan was gliding for a little bit, then it entered a flat spin which evolved into an endo spin as it got close to the ground. i managed to regain control in the last 100m, but i was having trouble keeping the nose down and managed to roll into the aoa icon, this resulted into a wingtip first dive into the ocean, everything blew up except the cockpit.

Edited April 26, 2014 by Nuke

[totalitor]

"...flying an optimal ascend is second nature to me..."

Not to me. Ascending to orbit is so difficult that I quit. Congratulations for those who succeeded.

[ttnarg]

We need a Manned leader boards. One for just a seat and one for a command pod.

[zarakon]

I don't generally consider something with a command seat as "manned" since it weighs almost nothing. If you use an actual manned capsule, I'll add a note for that. If enough people do it, maybe I'll add another section

[donfede]

I don't generally consider something with a command seat as "manned" since it weighs almost nothing. If you use an actual manned capsule, I'll add a note for that. If enough people do it, maybe I'll add another section

Don't underestimate the difficulties of pushing a kerbal into orbit with ions. While their mass is not typically accounted for, it IS counted (0.09t) when using EAS Command Seats, and we're clearly seeing the value of a small payload/craft for this mission.

I've been attempting (unsuccessfully so far) to design a craft around the less efficient Swept Wings (as Small Control Surfaces and Delta Deluxe Winglets have been done already). Below is my latest attempt, from this past weekend. I've paused (after spamming Small Control surfaces and adding MOAR ions), trying to figure out the best flight plan and AoA. Running Nedal's craft (thank you for sharing!), I see the value of the minimax-ing this mission. His 0.7t craft could achieve twice the velocity my 2.3t craft could, and still create less "Force drag" (as KSP associates that with mass). If Force lift matches Chevron Tango's post, i don't have good feelings about the potential to leverage lift over thrust (seeing v is squared for drag equations, and not for lift). O-doc's call for a TWR > ~0.35 for this mission, looks to be pretty accurate (Nedal's craft had 0.33 at takeoff, and 0.54 by orbit).

That velocity is instrumental to getting up to 33km quickly, which is necessary to reach orbit velocity of 2300m/s before the sun sets (~60minutes from launch at sunrise). The alternative is to fly in a circle, but that requires even more fuel/mass and likely staging (kudos to Ziv for his success and detailed flight plan).

As mass is key in this challenge, so are the mass-less parts, so I'll mention the new wiki page on mass-less parts.

Looking closer at the thread, I see Redshift has also gotten a kerbal up using an ion flyer.

Mission (kowigC09) pics, flown by Bob (while Jeb is away at Moho):

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Mods used: TriggerTech's Kerbal Alarm Clock

Stock craft; designed and mission on v0.23.5

kif07-KMk6 craft (all control surfaces fixed)

kdonfede

--

"Adding K to every word..."

[quasarrgames]

Single stage to (almost) orbit!

66,000m/20=3300

3300+2015m/s=5315-final score

Obligatory album of pictures:

<iframe class="imgur-album" width="100%" height="550" frameborder="0" src="http://imgur.com/a/

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/embed"></iframe>

Next time i'll fly west. Might get to orbit that way!

Edited May 3, 2014 by quasarrgames

[zarakon]

Take the "FyCvk" from the album URL and put it in [imgur] tags

I think you can also just put the whole URL in tags and it might do the same thing

[quietsamurai98]

RTG is allowed. It weighs too much to actually fly, since you need a bunch of them to fully power just one engine, but I suppose it could be useful for getting a tiny bit of thrust on the dark side of the planet

Challenge accepted!

It takes 12 RTGs to power 1 Ion continuously, which weighs a bit less than 1t.

The Nighthawk is now in development.

UPDATE: Flight 01

The Nighthawk is now on its maiden flight!

It has 1 Ion Thruster, 530kg (5300 units) of Xenon Gas, 12 RTGs, 2 Delta Wings, 2 Standard Control Surfaces, 2 Small Control Surfaces, and an OKTO2 probe.

It uses Mechjeb to maintain a 90° heading and 16° pitch after taking off, and after 15 minutes and 19000 meters of surface travel, it has yet to crash.

Debrief: After reaching an orbital velocity of 207 m/s, an altitude of 2700m, and flying over 61km across the surface, the flight was ended due to the fact that it took 40 minutes to reach this point.

Edited May 5, 2014 by quietsamurai98

[donfede]

Challenge accepted!

It takes 12 RTGs to power 1 Ion continuously, which weighs a bit less than 1t.

The Nighthawk is now in development.

UPDATE: Flight 01

The Nighthawk is now on its maiden flight!

It has 1 Ion Thruster, 530kg (5300 units) of Xenon Gas, 12 RTGs, 2 Delta Wings, 2 Standard Control Surfaces, 2 Small Control Surfaces, and an OKTO2 probe.

It uses Mechjeb to maintain a 90° heading and 16° pitch after taking off, and after 15 minutes and 19000 meters of surface travel, it has yet to crash.

http://i.imgur.com/pT4ZbWT.png?2

Debrief: After reaching an orbital velocity of 207 m/s, an altitude of 2700m, and flying over 61km across the surface, the flight was ended due to the fact that it took 40 minutes to reach this point.

Nice show samurai98

Can you share the craft file? Monty Droppings had been working on a similar "dark ion" craft, but I'm not sure if he concluded that project. Good to see that research being pushed ahead.

[gchristopher]

Doesn't break any ground that anyone else hasn't covered, and a KAS winch is actually a worse deal than an external seat (both mass and drag), but Jeb insisted...

12 RTGs, 2 swept wings, 2 small control surfaces. A bunch of fuel on drop tanks. 2 Delta wings on the outermost fuel stage.

It has problems with tracking due to no vertical stabilizer. Trying again with one more small control surface so it keeps a heading better.

Edited May 7, 2014 by gchristopher

[gamerpuppy]

I landed on minmus. I have 4,300 dv left where do i go now?

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I'm sure there is a more efficient ascent profile than what i did https://www.dropbox.com/s/xh0r1l5t2x62shx/better%20ion.craft

Edited May 8, 2014 by gamerpuppy

[zarakon]

Well, I certainly didn't expect to see anyone do THAT!

4300 remaining? Land it on Gilly too then land back at KSC? I think you've got enough for that

[Aghanim]

Here is my FAR entry:

And that is as high as I could go. The problem is transonic drag, when speed approach Mach 1, the amount of drag increases until the plane is fully supersonic. Any control input is unstable at that point

Edited May 9, 2014 by Aghanim
small battery pack is massless

[Fengist]

Ok, this has to have been the most AGGRAVATING challenge yet. Everything conspired against me completing it, including a solar eclipse. Grrrrr.

But, here's the result of my frustration:

5 Ion engines.

6 PBX-150 fuel tanks.

God, don't ask me how many panels. I changed it soooo many timesssss.

All of the control surfaces were locked except for two.

I wasn't intending this to look like everyone elses but someone in this thread got it right when they said there's only so many configurations that can possibly do this. Originally I had 8 of the PBX's. Just removing 2 of them was the difference between my first stage reaching 22km instead of 10km.

Not sure of my total time but I from the screenshot I it looks like circularized at 110km at 51:28. If that works for you.

Oh, and the Mun landing, I have a Kethane miner there that can refuel it.

Edited May 9, 2014 by Fengist

[gamerpuppy]

So i made a new design. It gets a full single glider to orbit. 6950dv in a 80x70km orbit.

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Edited May 10, 2014 by gamerpuppy

[Speeding Mullet]

I spent the whole day trying to get a Mk1 Cockpit complete with Bill as high as possible. I'm still thinking it's possible to get this much higher, but this was my best effort today.

SSTNowhere

4 ion engines

2 control surfaces

4 PB-X150

2 PB-X50R

45 OXSTAT

Orbit: 384.6 m/s

Altitude: 13,972m

Images taken from separate flights, but just wanted to show front and back.

[Blue]

New record for me, with the Marigold 4, which was changed heavily to something similar to Ziv's design.

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(27530 / 20) + 898 = 2274.5 final score. It doesn't improve my place on the standings, but at least I tried... for now...

[Nedal]

Wow lots of cool stuff. Haha I remember thinking of making copies of the ship that would feed fuel and break away like gamerpuppy has been doing.

Haven't been working on this after I installed FAR and failed to reach orbit with ions. Then got addicted to mods and started a whole new interstellar career. I could make a plasma ssto

In fact the ship I'm working on now is planned to be a single stage to eve surface and back. But unsure if microwave power attenuation over that distance and atmosphere will screw it up! I used to be against mods.. but I'm really surprised at how balanced they are. Using the Scott manley interstellar quest set of mods. Adds so much.

[fireblade42]

Been trying an RTG powered one for a while now. This is the best I've done. Only the back four wings have their control surfaces active. I think making it with 2 IONs per stage might work out better.

Score = 1299.6

[BagelRabbit]

I want to improve this model a bit before I'm ready for submitting it for the competition, but here's the basic premise.

It's deployed off a raised Launch Stability Enhancer, because landing gear is overrated. It has exactly one of those inline xenon tanks, giving it 700 monopropellant, and a single ion engine. It's got over 400 battery power, but I didn't tap into the batteries during the ascent, so they're really not needed. I should probably take them off.

Just looking through these designs, this one is certainly one of the simplest that's been presented so far.

The Ioner

705.9 m/s surface velocity (I think it passed 706 m/s when the engine was still firing but oh well) at 27,722m.

Edited May 27, 2014 by UpsilonAerospace

[Zamaszysty]

Now this looks like a fun challenge to try out !

I have an idea that was not shown by anybody anywhere here so far, so keep Your fingers crossed that my idea is not just a mad mans lucid dream, as I have a suspicion I might be extremely wrong about everything