Maximum impact velocity

[MarvinKitFox]

There was nothing wrong with your submission, I just couldn't verify the altitude. It's probably pretty normal when you go at those speeds. I don't see why you feel dirty about it.

So you accept a screenshot from after the impact, but not a ....ING VIDEO that contains that same screenshot?????????

now please remove me from your cheating leaderboard as I have repeatedly requested that you do!

[Laie]

Now let's do that for real, shall we?

Important lessons:

a) the cockpit will survive a splashdown at any speed. On my first run, I came down really fast, and then... nothing happened. Everything was black, altitude read as 300m, and I was moving at ~12m/s. WHAT THE EFF? Tried it again, tried once more. Always the same. Stood up and got me a coffee. When I came back, the pod had risen to the surface of the ocean. Extra points for surviving the impact would have been nice, but at over 1000m/s it's difficult to take the screenshot at just the right moment. Eventually I brought Mechjeb to give me an idea of where the landing site would be, at a time when I could still do something about it; dry land below 500m is surprisingly sparse.

you need to start your burn early. On my last run (pictured above), I had ~2 minutes of fuel and started the engines at 5 Minutes before impact. Orbital velocity is *nothing* compared to what you add to it. I'm glad I didn't bring Nervas, timing would have been impossible (or tedious at the very least).

c) the low drag really shows. When I entered the atmosphere, I detached the pod and started to fall faster than the booster could push me down. Eerie.

I went to the edge of Kerbin SOI, de-circularized so I'd fall straight down (~27m/s), then waited until the very last moment before I started the engines. Basically, this is a glitch exploit: The game only runs about ten to twenty physics calculations per second. If you came in at 200km/second, you could theoretically fall all the way to 50km before experiencing the first drag; and then another 10km (at the drag from higher up) until the next tick of the physics clock, and so on. Drag is fiendish, you'll still slow down rapidly... but not as fast as you ought to.

It shouldn't be too difficult to improve on this, doing more of the same. I reserve bragging rights for being the first to use this method. Now please don't tell me that Mechjeb invalidates this entry.

Edited August 15, 2014 by Laie

[thereaverofdarkness]

So you accept a screenshot from after the impact, but not a ....ING VIDEO that contains that same screenshot?????????

now please remove me from your cheating leaderboard as I have repeatedly requested that you do!

Alright I deleted it. I feel like it was a pretty valuable entry though. I didn't see any video you linked but the final impact screenshot listed a pretty high altitude (unbelievably high actually, probably came in too fast for it to update), but the location looked to be a little ways out of the valley and into the hills. I could have gone and checked the altitude for you if you wanted, I still can in fact. I'm sorry if the way I listed your entry was hurtful to you, and I want to make it up to you.

But I feel like your entry deserves a spot on here. Feel free to re-submit it any time you want.

It shouldn't be too difficult to improve on this, doing more of the same. I reserve bragging rights for being the first to use this method. Now please don't tell me that Mechjeb invalidates this entry.

I won't even discern categories for MechJeb. I don't think it gives any advantage other than making sure you pick a valid landing spot, and I would encourage further entries landing on Duna to use MechJeb because of the high velocity which makes altitude verification difficult. Edited August 15, 2014 by thereaverofdarkness

[Ziv]

Why did you disqualify MarvinKitFox? Because he maybe crashed over 1000m of sea level, or because the last moment of the speed is hard to decide?

Anyway, he impacted at about 44000 m/s right? At Duna the atmosphere is about 42 km high, so he got through the atmosphere in one second. But the scale height of the atmosphere is 3000m, with 0.2 atm at sea level, so much less dense than on Kerbin. He have passed through that last 3000 meter which really matters in 0.06 seconds, so I'm sure it didn't really count in the speed! Whatever it was at sea level or at 5000m...

Also, what do you accept as impact speed proof? video and you try to pause at the last moment, or the last screenshots? Or the screenshot after the impact?

[TheReaper]

a long time ago i built a very big rocket (entire game only stock), went to mun, used both oobarth effect and gravity slingshot boost entered atmosphere with approximently 10km/s ...at impact game crashed.

[Laie]

Also, what do you accept as impact speed proof?

The navball keeps showing your last airspeed after the vessel is destroyed; so a screenshot after the action is easy to do. Except that sometimes it doesn't work, I don't know why.

At "my" speeds, it still makes quite some difference wether you hit the ground at 50m or 400m; maybe "deepest impact into the ocean" would be a better benchmark. But unfortunately, the altimeter only ever displays positive values, and I don't know if they're indicative of anything or pure baloney. Any strapped-on devices like kOS core or MechJeb will be destroyed.

[jackkymoon]

Why did you disqualify MarvinKitFox? Because he maybe crashed over 1000m of sea level, or because the last moment of the speed is hard to decide?

Anyway, he impacted at about 44000 m/s right? At Duna the atmosphere is about 42 km high, so he got through the atmosphere in one second. But the scale height of the atmosphere is 3000m, with 0.2 atm at sea level, so much less dense than on Kerbin. He have passed through that last 3000 meter which really matters in 0.06 seconds, so I'm sure it didn't really count in the speed! Whatever it was at sea level or at 5000m...

Also, what do you accept as impact speed proof? video and you try to pause at the last moment, or the last screenshots? Or the screenshot after the impact?

I was coming in at Duna at almost 50,000 m/s and the lower atmosphere of Duna slowed me down to 33000 m/s. Duna's atmosphere isn't much but it definitely slows you down significantly.

[thereaverofdarkness]

Why did you disqualify MarvinKitFox? Because he maybe crashed over 1000m of sea level, or because the last moment of the speed is hard to decide?

Also, what do you accept as impact speed proof? video and you try to pause at the last moment, or the last screenshots? Or the screenshot after the impact?

I didn't disqualify him. It was difficult to verify his stats so I put jackkymoon higher even though jackky had a bit lower impact velocity, because the verification was much clearer and the altitude appeared to be lower.

Usually taking a screenshot after impact is really easy because it shows both your altitude and velocity, but for some reason it didn't work for MarvinKitFox, and it might have something to do with the rapid entry. For whatever reason it worked better for jackkymoon, and I want to make it clear to MarvinKitFox that I don't blame him at all for what the screenshots didn't show. The main issue I had was that visually it appeared he came down on a hillside. I didn't check the altitude of that location but it looked like it was probably well over 1000m.

Duna is kind of a mess for scoring with this challenge, so please bear with me here. Just because someone scores higher than you doesn't mean your entry wasn't as good. I'm just trying to place them the best I can with limited data.

[Laie]

This takes up my interest much more than it has any right to. Once more, this time by way of going on a four year Solar orbit and turning around at apoapsis, so I'd meet Kerbin head-on:

Hitting F1 in short intervals, trying in vain to capture a good moment.

I suspect this actually is BELOW ground.

Standard picture for scoring.

(Boy, how I hate people spamming pictures and now I do it myself)

I brought along a kOS core to act as a flight data recorder. I tried to keep it as simple as possible, so I ought to have one data point from every physics tick (if that's right, I'm having around 16 ticks/second). I don't know about Duna's atmosphere off the top of my head, but it should be possible to make an educated guess about aerobraking there.

Surface speed (y-axis) vs altitude (x-axis).

[Imaginer1]

Man, I was all excited to be in first, then I got blown out of the water.

Now I'll have to try this long-orbit technique everyone is using.

But, Laie... Gotta admit, doing a four-year orbit around the Sun and coming back perfectly to hit the Space Center? Impressive. Perhaps...... too impressive.

[thereaverofdarkness]

if you check the delta-V stats, you'll find I still had a lot of burning to do, and with a TWR of nearly 20 the thing wasn't about to slow down short a lithobraking event.

Sorry for the late reply. Mine had a TWR above 20 and at a lower velocity was slowing rapidly while the engines were running. I'll happily add you if you can try it again and capture a screenshot that shows altitude and velocity. Just focus the vehicle instead of your watch tower. It doesn't look as pretty, but it preserves your speed and altitude for screenshotting.

[Laie]

Man, I was all excited to be in first, then I got blown out of the water.

Now I'll have to try this long-orbit technique everyone is using.

But, Laie... Gotta admit, doing a four-year orbit around the Sun and coming back perfectly to hit the Space Center? Impressive. Perhaps...... too impressive.

First, not everyone is using this technique. Until now it's only me. And I don't think that many more will follow... that long orbit thing isn't challenging or entertaining (But then again, I absolutely had to do it. Silly boy.)

As to hitting KSC, that's actually quite simple if you have Mechjeb. You can't really change what direction you're coming from, not by much, but encountering Kerbin a few hours sooner or later changes which side you will hit; the planet is turning, after all. Mechjeb shows you a "landing prediction" on the planet; you still have to make a few correction burns as you get closer, but the principle is the same as with any other encounter.

[Pds314]

Used a 2-stage ICBM with FAR and Aero-failures disabled (because I figure that having 40 ATM of dynamic pressure would probably kill it otherwise): 2504.6 m/s at impact.

[Pds314]

Made another attempt of a slightly different sort. I hit Jool and phased past the atmosphere thanks to how fast I was moving (~0.14*C) and embedded myself 560 kilometers inside.

FAR's Dynamic pressure reading is an appropriately insane 2.26 Terapascals.

On another note, my O-10-abusing infinite-fuel craft got there in just under an hour, or barely over 15 minutes of time in flight.

Note the time difference in the images is but 12 seconds.

EDIT: Reloaded from quicksave and just scratched the atmosphere (the thing can turn surprisingly well in the last 20 seconds before impact) and it bounced off at 1600000 times the speed of light. (Yes, one point six million. It now moves as far in one second as light moves in 2.5 weeks.)

EDIT 2: 1.25 Exameters from Kerbol. That number looks like this: 1250000000000000000 meters.

EDIT 666: Got to somewhat over 4300 Exameters (~450000 LY) from Kerbol after finally arresting my rotation and being able to timewarp. Pulled out of timewarp and velocity went to zero. Went back into timewarp and velocity became NAN. Tried to get back out of timewarp and screen went black and most of the UI went away. Damn. Kraken does not like this apparently. Maybe this is a variant of the Hell Kraken? I went back to space center and the screen stayed mostly solid black.

Edited August 16, 2014 by Pds314

[Ziv]

Laie: can you show us pictures about your launch vehicle and your trajectory in the system? I'm interested in how you did this, and also, where is your engine from your sole cockpit?

Important question for the OP: do you need a proper mission with proof (pictures/video) of the launch, the given amount of fuel (so no infinifuel), the trajectory and impact or is it allowed to hyperedit the ship into space and use infinite fuel?

[Laie]

Laie: can you show us pictures about your launch vehicle and your trajectory in the system? I'm interested in how you did this, and also, where is your engine from your sole cockpit?

The cockpit was detached before re-entry. It has much lower drag than anything else, and the effect is enormous.

I probably won't get to upload pictures until monday due to my low-bandwidth connection at home. However as to how to do it:

1. launch a craft with enough delta-V (~15km/s in my case)
   
2. Just keep going and going and going until solar apoapsis is high enough.(1)(2)
   
3. at apoapsis, turn around and go back the way you came(3)
   
4. spend any remaining Delta-V as close to Kerbin as possible(4)
   

(1) at maximum time warp, a year lasts like five minutes or something. Initially I aimed for a 40-year orbit, then found out that I'm not that patient.

(2) if you want to meet Kerbin near your periapsis, your outgoing solar orbit should last exactly n years; at least in theory. But I suggest to set up maneuver nodes and tweak the orbit right after leaving Kerbin SOI, that's better than any calculation.

(3) mechjeb will hickup when your orbital velocity reaches near-zero during that burn. You'll have to do it yourself.

(4) this will change the point of impact, by quite a bit. Set up maneuvers while still far out, then change your orbit to account for the last burn.

You definitely want a maneuver node editor when you do this. When coming back at high speed, I had difficulties finding any spot where I could place a node, and sliding it around didn't quite work. It's not merely a case of higher precision: without a node editor I could not have placed the nodes at all.

Also, I recommend to not use nuclear engines, at least not during the final run-up. Whatever they saved me through ISP was wasted because I had to compensate for long burns. See (4) above.

[totalitor]

I did the same that Laie. Spend eight years travelling in deep space and then hit the same spot that I left (not so hard to do). I just forgot that I should have powerful rockets in the end. I didn't have...so I hit only 200 m/s. Terrible!

I got better result about 600 m/s just sending rocket 12 km up and then down. Pictures later.

[thereaverofdarkness]

Important question for the OP: do you need a proper mission with proof (pictures/video) of the launch, the given amount of fuel (so no infinifuel), the trajectory and impact or is it allowed to hyperedit the ship into space and use infinite fuel?

You can use any methods you want, but some of them have to be shown. I need to know if you are using infinite fuel, aerodynamic mods, non-stock engines/lift surfaces. If you go fast enough to skip the atmosphere and thereby achieve higher results than could be obtained without exploiting that bug, I'll mark your entry as such. I don't need to know how you got your ship into your starting spot, so hyperedit all you want and don't bother mentioning it. You can hyperedit it into a location and still have it count as stock as long as any excessive (hyper-orbital) velocity was obtained through engine-burning. The one thing I won't allow with hyper-edit is setting your velocity up high, because it defeats the purpose of the challenge.

Actually, I should limit stock to hyperediting your craft inside the Kerbin SOI. You can bypass getting to orbit but if you hyperedit for extreme slingshots, I'll have to categorize you separately.

There may be more that I need for verification depending on what your entry consists of. Submit all you want to as extra alibi if you aren't sure. There have been a couple entries that I had some verification issues with, and sadly they aren't on the leaderboard due to such issues.

Edited August 16, 2014 by thereaverofdarkness

[Laie]

I did the same that Laie. Spend eight years travelling in deep space and then hit the same spot that I left (not so hard to do). I just forgot that I should have powerful rockets in the end. I didn't have...so I hit only 200 m/s. Terrible!

If you also did the turn-around at solar apoapsis, you should've been incoming at something like 20-25km/s even without further rocket assistance. Getting that reduced to 200m/s is incredible. What's your re-entry vehicle? (The MkII Cockpit is without equal).

I got better result about 600 m/s just sending rocket 12 km up and then down. Pictures later.

600m/s without ever leaving the lower atmosphere? Now that's impressive.

[CavemanNinja]

I'm not going to enter it in the contest, but my attempt which took about 15 minutes, infinite fuel, and and the new engines allowed me to hit 79m below the surface of kerbin at ~12% light speed.

If any of us really tried, we could make light speed look sane.

just sayin'

[Jett_Quasar]

I tried going into deep space and impacting at high velocity - it didn't work for me even when I fired rockets straight into the ground, so I decided to try accelerating as quickly as I could. Since sepratrons have the highest thrust to weight ratio, so I built a rig that would fire a cockpit straight into the ground - It works pretty good. Like all my designs this is fully stock - no mods or cheats.

Here's the rig and how it works - this only takes less than a minute, so no waiting 8 years for the EXPLOSION!!! The launch boosters will take the test rig to a height of about 2400 meters. Eject the spent boosters and get set for firing off the sepratrons. The optimal height to fire the last impactor stage is about 1500 meters. If you time it right, you hit the ground right at max velocity - in this case I hit it pretty much spot on at 737.4 m/s - good enough to get on the leader board.

One downside is that I still haven't had any Kerbals survive the test...

JR

Edited August 15, 2015 by Jolly_Roger

[Pds314]

I just thought of something... What if I can bounce off of Laythe's atmosphere and use the speedboost to slam into Jool at some obscene multiple of the speed of light?

Either that, or get bounced off of Jool's atmosphere at an obscene multiple of that obscene multiple of the speed of light.

[CavemanNinja]

By kod, you'd be inviting the kraken in for tea!

[chengong]

The challenge is simple: crash your rocket into the ground at as high a speed as you possibly can. You may use stock aerodynamic physics or FAR, but you must state which. You may try this challenge on Kerbin, Eve, or Duna, separate leaderboards for each variation of physics and planet. You may use any sort of stock engines and parts you want, but no mod engines, and no mod parts that assist your design in any way beyond being a structural element. You must crash your craft on surface within 500m of sea level (or under 1000 meters on Duna) to rate properly on the standard leaderboards. Really any entry is valid as long as you give the details of what you did and what you used, and a screenshot of the crash. I'll use the info to figure out what category to put your entry in.

For easiest entries, take a screenshot right after you hit. The final speed shows on the navball.

Bonus points for surviving craft parts, huge bonus if the majority of it survives intact or a Kerbal within the craft remains alive!

LEADERBOARD

Kerbin - Stock

1.) Laie - 4066 m/s - hit KSC outlying area after 8 year mission above sun

1.) Laie - 1514 m/s - used cockpit to reduce drag and discovered how to spare cockpit during impact

2.) Jolly Roger - 737 m/s

3.) Imaginer1 - 382 m/s

4.) thereaverofdarkness - 368 m/s

5.) UpsilonAerospace - 346 m/s

Kerbin - FAR/stock parts

1.) Pds314 - 2505 m/s

Duna - Stock

1.) jackkymoon - 33,876 m/s (1245m impact) - skipped atmosphere

Jool - FAR/stock parts

1.) Pds314 - 41,649,103 m/s - skipped atmosphere

--------------------------------------------

skipped atmosphere means the craft reached such excessive speeds in vacuum that it was able to travel through the atmosphere with significantly lower drag than it is supposed to endure, due to the way drag calculation works.

That is not at all how skipping works. You can skip the atmosphere or even the entire planet by either going fast or time warp your way through it. It happens because physics in computers happen in steps and not continuous, at least not as fine as the plank scale. So anything that is supposed to happen in between two time steps do not actually happen in simulations. In which time you can go through dense atmosphere or solid planet core, it doesn't matter.

[thereaverofdarkness]

That is not at all how skipping works. You can skip the atmosphere or even the entire planet by either going fast or time warp your way through it. It happens because physics in computers happen in steps and not continuous, at least not as fine as the plank scale. So anything that is supposed to happen in between two time steps do not actually happen in simulations. In which time you can go through dense atmosphere or solid planet core, it doesn't matter.

I never explained how it works, I just said the excessive speed causes it.