The Hands-Free Mission Challenge

[Yakky]

And I struggle to build decent spaceplanes, you build one that can be flown with a spacebar. lol

That makes it a space-bar-plane.

[Sirine]

3. If you achieve orbit (periapsis above 70 km), you are allowed one press of the spacebar to re-enter the atmosphere and land.

ok. I got it.

Yeah, did press a button after launch. The time accelerate button. [>] or maybe twice [<].

Edited September 24, 2014 by Sirine

[Wanderfound]

A not-quite-there attempt.

One Kerbodyne Evangelist II RP, fresh from the showroom floor. Didn't even adjust the control surfaces from my normal settings. All stock.

No controls touched after this shot.

Away.

And up. I love self-launching planes.

Cruising. Wish I could pull the landing gear up.

Nice view.

Cranking speed, slowly climbing.

Toasty time.

RAPIER auto-flicked over to oxidising mode.

Still haven't quite got the Periapsis above sea level.

But I don't think it really matters.

So that'd be 7,819,015,658 if this counted, but it doesn't so it isn't. Maybe if I strap a brick to the nose...

[Himynameisjake]

Here's what I have so far, but I'm tired and need sleep, will continue the burn tomorrow (can't physics warp above 2x or it goes haywire. Will eventually circularize somewhere low of Mun, but it will be close.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[Yakky]

ok. I got it.

Yeah, did press a button after launch. The time accelerate button. [>] or maybe twice [<].

http://i.imgur.com/3xS5EMr.png

Looks like a very nice attempt. What was your periapsis?

[Yakky]

Here's what I have so far, but I'm tired and need sleep, will continue the burn tomorrow (can't physics warp above 2x or it goes haywire. Will eventually circularize somewhere low of Mun, but it will be close.

http://imgur.com/a/bhrCx

I suspect your general approach may be the optimal strategy for this challenge. But I notice you won't reach apoapsis for more than a day while your horizontal burn will be over in about an hour. Ideally you'd like more of the horizontal burn to happen later, when you're near the apex of your climb. Did you consider using an even weaker horizontal engine? It would be interesting to see what could happen if you boost all the way up to the altitude of Minmus and then do a very slow horizontal burn with an ant engine or ion drive. (Although your sanity might suffer from having to wait around for it to finish.)

Edited September 24, 2014 by Yakky

[Himynameisjake]

I suspect your general approach may be the optimal strategy for this challenge. But I notice you won't reach apoapsis for more than a day while your horizontal burn will be over in about an hour. Ideally you'd like more of the horizontal burn to happen later, when you're near the apex of your climb. Did you consider using an even weaker horizontal engine? It would be interesting to see what could happen if you boost all the way up to the altitude of Minmus and then do a very slow horizontal burn with an ant engine or ion drive. (Although your sanity might suffer from having to wait around for it to finish.)

Yeah, I have to drop the power of the nuke, first attempt the nuke actually put me into escape velocity ha! But it's already so slow and even with the balancing I tried to do, it's still not able to do more than like 2x physics warp without spinning out.

[goduranus]

Here's an entry with with MisterInSayne's fuel asymmetry craft, score not as impressive as moon slingshot ships, but accomplishes the task nonetheless.

Periapsis:149km

http://kerbal.curseforge.com/shareables/224244-automated-orbiter

All credits go to MisterInSayne

Note that it has provisions for a one button kerbin return if its parachutes and retro engines are merged into the second stage.

Edited September 24, 2014 by goduranus

[Norcalplanner]

Was able to get over 300 km periapsis, this time with a rocket. It used a refined version of the principle on the spaceplane, only with multiple thrusters at different angles. Fuel line routing makes the thrusters cut out one at a time, thereby changing the net side thrust angle.

Bob was recovered this time, so I think my score is 450,000 or thereabouts. As before, MechJeb is present only for informational purposes.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Edited September 24, 2014 by Norcalplanner

[Yakky]

Was able to get over 300 km periapsis, this time with a rocket. It used a refined version of the principle on the spaceplane, only with multiple thrusters at different angles. Fuel line routing makes the thrusters cut out one at a time, thereby changing the net side thrust angle.

Bob was recovered this time, so I think my score is 450,000 or thereabouts. As before, MechJeb is present only for informational purposes.

http://imgur.com/a/7ibYe

Well done! I've added you to the leader board in 2nd place. BTW what's with all the unused engines in the top stage? Just leftovers from an earlier design?

Edited September 25, 2014 by Yakky

[Norcalplanner]

BTW what's with all the unused engines in the top stage? Just leftovers from an earlier design?

They're ballast. To keep the CoM in the dead center of the tank, it was necessary to put engines on both ends of the angled side tanks. The six engines on the right hand side are all turned off. I moved them up to the top stage to keep them out of the way and prevent them from accidentally getting turned on.

[Himynameisjake]

I suspect your general approach may be the optimal strategy for this challenge. But I notice you won't reach apoapsis for more than a day while your horizontal burn will be over in about an hour. Ideally you'd like more of the horizontal burn to happen later, when you're near the apex of your climb. Did you consider using an even weaker horizontal engine? It would be interesting to see what could happen if you boost all the way up to the altitude of Minmus and then do a very slow horizontal burn with an ant engine or ion drive. (Although your sanity might suffer from having to wait around for it to finish.)

I'm over 5m for my periapis now, still burning away.

[Himynameisjake]

I think this one's in the books, some minor aesthetic issues with the post (two launches pasted together because I forgot to shoot the good launch take off, and righted the lander because it was annoying to come in sideways), but I think it's clear lateral thrust is the winner.

68,749,321.5 points.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Edited September 26, 2014 by Himynameisjake

[Norcalplanner]

Very impressive entry. I don't think I'd have the patience to let it run that long.

[Himynameisjake]

Very impressive entry. I don't think I'd have the patience to let it run that long.

did it over a couple days, thank goodness for quicksave with engines running lol

[Yakky]

I think this one's in the books, some minor aesthetic issues with the post (two launches pasted together because I forgot to shoot the good launch take off, and righted the lander because it was annoying to come in sideways), but I think it's clear lateral thrust is the winner.

68,749,321.5 points.

http://imgur.com/a/bhrCx

A fantastic effort! Glad it worked out so well... I'll even round you up to 68,749,322. BTW how many hours IRL did this take you?

Edited September 26, 2014 by Yakky

[Himynameisjake]

A fantastic effort! Glad it worked out so well... I'll even round you up to 68,749,322. BTW how many hours IRL did this take you?

A little over 24 hrs of game time, just left it running in the background

[alpinematt]

Could you not use trim to achieve a gravity turn?

[Monthar]

I've managed to get into a solar orbit with a sun periapsis over 11,000Mm. However, I only had 2 stages on the ship, the 2nd for the deorbit burn, so even with over 67 years in space I couldn't get back into Kerbin SOI unless I used that 2nd stage and ended up stuck in orbit or worse, getting flung out of the solar system. So I think I'm going to add another stage to that ship for getting back into Kerbin's SOI. Then I'll see if I can get the Kerbin periapsis as close to the edge of the SOI as possible.

[metaphor]

Since it's allowed to use one space bar to land on the Mun, is that the case with landing on other planets as well?

[Yakky]

Since it's allowed to use one space bar to land on the Mun, is that the case with landing on other planets as well?

Yes. Any celestial body(ies) you like. After launch, you can have one press of the spacebar to achieve landing on a celestial body, then after landing, one more press to take off again, then a third press to re-enter/land back at Kerbin.

To formalize this rule, you get one spacebar press during each flight segment (to land), and one spacebar press on each ground segment (to take off again). So if you wanted to do the Jool-5 grand tour (wouldn't that be impressive?), you would get a fresh spacebar press before each landing and a separate one to achieve each takeoff, plus a final one to land back at Kerbin at the end of the mission. In that case it would be a total of 11 spacebar presses during the mission.

But to be clear, you are not allowed to use your landing spacebar press for anything except re-entry/landing, i.e. you can't use it to boost your orbit higher than it was before, and then say "oh too bad, I didn't land." In particular, your periapsis height is always measured before you hit the spacebar to land. If you press the spacebar and then don't land, nothing that happened after you pressed the spacebar counts toward your score.

Lastly, if you prefer to map your staging event to a (single) action group keypress instead of the spacebar, I'm OK with that as well. The idea is that you only get to hit one button.

Edited September 27, 2014 by Yakky

[Yakky]

I've managed to get into a solar orbit with a sun periapsis over 11,000Mm. However, I only had 2 stages on the ship, the 2nd for the deorbit burn, so even with over 67 years in space I couldn't get back into Kerbin SOI unless I used that 2nd stage and ended up stuck in orbit or worse, getting flung out of the solar system. So I think I'm going to add another stage to that ship for getting back into Kerbin's SOI. Then I'll see if I can get the Kerbin periapsis as close to the edge of the SOI as possible.

Kudos on a very high flight, but the issue there is it's actually quite easy to get into a solar orbit by just blasting off in a straight line from Kerbin's surface. I realize that may not have been the way you did it (or attempted/intended to do it), but that's why I disqualified entries that leave Kerbin's SOI unless they land on another planet.

[metaphor]

Here's an Eve landing. I made different action groups for different sets of engines and only used one of them to get the right trajectory correction.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[Himynameisjake]

To formalize this rule, you get one spacebar press during each flight segment (to land), and one spacebar press on each ground segment (to take off again). So if you wanted to do the Jool-5 grand tour (wouldn't that be impressive?), you would get a fresh spacebar press before each landing and a separate one to achieve each takeoff, plus a final one to land back at Kerbin at the end of the mission. In that case it would be a total of 11 spacebar presses during the mission.

Slowly doing the math, but I'm almost positive this is mathematically impossible, not even mentioning the complexity of the mission in it's own right (hitting bop and pol would be nigh impossible from a landing on anything but a perfectly flat surface).

I'm not going to bother dissecting the flight path of Tylo to Bop to Pol to Vall to Kerbin, we're going to assume it's possible, landing at perfect places at perfect times and allowing a couple extra keystrokes for transfer and landing (to close solar panels to stop overshoot and to land, because you've got to start and stop the ion engine).

So, we start with a probe core chair with 7 xenon tanks (6 of which can be ejected), with strut legs, and a parachute (poor Jeb is going to land on his head). Add some struts to give the decouplers something to bind to) and before you know it, we're at 1.6T that we have to get from Tylo to an intercept with Pol (remember, we're going to have to overshoot by a wide margin because it's going to take a long time to slow down to hit these moons with low enough speed to be considered a soft landing). To get that overshoot, we're going to need somewhere around 5000 total dV aimed precisely. Your launch vehicle weighs 18.25T once you ditch the landing gear and SAS you needed to control and absorb the landing.

Now to land that you need a 110T lander. You can't get this off of Laythe.

I've yet to figure out a way to do this, even with the added keystrokes.

Edited September 29, 2014 by Himynameisjake

[Yakky]

Here's an Eve landing. I made different action groups for different sets of engines and only used one of them to get the right trajectory correction.

http://imgur.com/a/ismBW

So... let me get this straight... Inferring from the pictures, you had various action groups pre-configured with rockets that could fire in different directions depending on which way you needed to go to land, then you selected the one you actually needed? That's a tough call for our judging panel. Clearly a valiant effort. Hmmm.... on the one hand, it involved only one key press. On the other hand, it would have required an active navigation decision about which button to press, which goes beyond the scope of what's allowed.

On the third hand, it appears it would be possible to re-fly the same mission with all the separatrons deactivated except for the necessary ones in question, which could be then just be activated by spacebar. But that would be pointless and tedious, since you have already proven it could be done. On that basis, we will allow this entry!

Now to the question of points. (Hah, I never thought I would have to actually come up with how to score interplanetary landings!) But, after thinking about it for awhile, I am proud to present the point-scoring system for interplanetary landings:

Scoring Rationale: Interplanetary landing scores will be based on minimum separation distance from Kerbin, divided by the relative size of the target planet's SOI compared to Kerbin's (since larger SOIs are easier to hit). Bodies having an atmosphere will be further divided by 10 since they are far easier to land on than bodies lacking an atmosphere.

On that basis, here's the score for Eve:

Minimum separation from Kerbin: 3.8 billion meters

Relative size of Eve's SOI compared to Kerbin's: 1.01

Atmosphere: Yes

Score = 3.8 billion / (10* 1.01) = 376 million

Well done!