The KSP StarRally 2012 - The Great Orbital Rendezvous Race!

[sal_vager]

[move]mager42 sets incredible Mod time of 10:05:06! : Kerbal Herald exclusive, Kosmo-not 'Top spot is mine!' : Cykyrios knocked from 1st place! : Competition is intense : Best stock time to date 11:18:33 : Contestants warming up engines in skies above KSC : \'Back up your save\' man gives interview : Cleanup crews running out of white paint : Parked rockets draw large crowds : Rocket Hotdogs E-coli scare : 'PakledHostage thrills the crowd' headline of The Kerbal Herald : Jebediah, Bill and Bob seen near launchpad : Fans enjoy party atmosphere : Orbital cameras clogging space lanes : Trees liquefied to provide extra fuel : The Kerbol 'Check out our page 3 Booster Babes' : KSC predicts burnt fuel smog over cities : Camera drones gang up on Kraken : Lost contact with Mun camera crews : Ticker operator playing Minecraft[/move]

Ladies and gentlemen!

Welcome to the first annual KSP StarRally, the ultimate test of your piloting and ship construction skills!

The Course.

The standard course is made of 3 checkpoint rings and a finish line ring, the 3 checkpoints must be flown in order and the finish line must be last.

Checkpoint 1: Situated in high Kerbin orbit, racers will have to intercept this first ring early if they want to stand a chance later on.

Checkpoint 2: In a stationary orbit visible from the KSC, you can be sure thousands of fans will have their telescopes ready to catch the action.

Checkpoint 3: Orbiting the Mun at 75k, this checkpoint offers excellent vistas of our nearest neighbor, but try not to get distracted.

The Finish Line: It'll be a mad dash back to low Kerbin orbit for a retrograde intercept, possibly the hardest section of the standard course!

The extended course consists of 3 bonus rings, these rings are optional but if flown, must be flown in order between checkpoint 3 and the finish line, you don't have to fly all 3 bonus rings.

Bonus 1: Part of the extended course for those foolhardy enough to scoff at the regular checkpoints, Bonus 1 sits at the very edge of Kerbins gravitational hold, where strange forces can interfere with your vessel.

Bonus 2: As if the other rings were not hard enough, are you ready for a precision Munar landing? Only rockets inside the ring will count.

Bonus 3: You\'ll be on edge with Bonus 3, this checkpoints orbit is tilted at a crazy 45 degrees, and you'll still have to get back to the finish line!

How To Play.

1. Make sure you are using 0.14.2 or above, as the older versions are not compatible.
   
2. Backup your existing persistence file! It's in the KSP/saves/default folder.
   
3. Download the StarRally.zip and copy the contained persistence.sfs to your default folder.
   
4. Build a ship that can intercept at least 4 orbital targets.
   
5. Fly the course, take a screenshot when you pass through each ring (or alongside the Lite rockets) with the F1 key)
   
6. Make sure the mission clock and altimeter are readable, these will be needed to verify your times.
   
7. Final score is your time at the finish line, faster is better.
   
8. If you restart your flight, restore the persistence file from the zip so everyone starts the same.
   
9. Submit your results including pics in this thread.
   
10. Don't forget your ships name and link to the mods you used (if any)
    
11. Teams can share their persistence file and take turns flying, remember to credit everyone.
    
12. PM me with a link to your entry, so I can keep track of them.
    
13. You can design and fly your ships however you want, the only real rule is that config edits are not allowed, it must be possible to build your ship without having to edit any files.
    

Competitors Kosmo-not and Cykyrios have made spreadsheets to help with orbital rendezvous, you can find Kosmo-nots on his page, and Cykyrios's can be found here.

The Stock Leaderboard.

[*=center]Kosmo-not, catapulting into first place at the helm of the katapultieren, with a record time of 11:18:33!
[*=center]Cykyrios, in the cockpit of the Zensoku, is the first to break the 24 hour barrier with 22:15:42
[*=center]sal_vager flying the RayChaser, total time 1:00:35:49
[*=center]PakledHostage piloting the Ker-Blue I, with a final time of 1:02:14:53

Stock Bonus 1

Stock Bonus 1 and 2

Stock Bonus 1, 2 and 3

The Mod Leaderboard.

mager42, pilot of the Skylon 2M, setting what must be an unbeatable time of 10:05:06!

Mod Bonus 1

Mod Bonus 1 and 2

Mod Bonus 1, 2 and 3

Please note, due to a bug with fuel usage in 0.16, it is recommended you use the Fuel Consumption Bug Fix.

Good luck and have fun

Sponsored by Ker-Flow-Full Sewerage and Pipeworks.

Edited August 16, 2012 by sal_vager
Updating

[Feragorn]

0_0

whoa...

[Emilio]

X_X

What a challenge !

How did you make the image ? I suppose it\'s a render since you cannot switch ship when one is accelerating..;

[Kosmo-not]

X_X

What a challenge !

How did you make the image ? I suppose it\'s a render since you cannot switch ship when one is accelerating..;

Photoshop or something similar.

Oh, I wish I wasn\'t going to be out of town this weekend!

[sal_vager]

X_X

What a challenge !

How did you make the image ? I suppose it\'s a render since you cannot switch ship when one is accelerating..;

I used Gimp, my gimp and photoshop skills are lacking, it took ages to find a filter for the engine glow

[Acurus]

That is one hard challenge! I\'d consider it a victory if I can complete it

[togfox]

Novel idea. Hats off to you.

[Kosmo-not]

Okay, somebody\'s gotta start us out.

On my next attempt, I\'ll use 0.14.2. The bugs I was encountering were frustrating me. I thought I was going to have a fuel crisis towards the end because the staging got stuck (a bug I have never encountered before). I almost went for bonus 3 by accident.

Total time: 1:23:08:35

Checkpoint 1

Checkpoint 2

Checkpoint 3

The sun rose just after I took that last screenshot.

Finish Line!

[sal_vager]

Absolutely fantastic Kosmo-not, I ran out of fuel on both my attempts so far, mainly due to my preference for smaller ships.

I have updated the instructions to let everyone know to use 0.14.2 and above, as there were some changes to the persistence files, the landed ring might have exploded had you tried to land in it.

I\'m looking forwards to seeing who competes next

[Nooblet68]

Looks too hard for me... I\'ll enjoy watching everyone else though.

Good luck!

[Causeless]

On my next attempt, I\'ll use 0.14.2. The bugs I was encountering were frustrating me. I thought I was going to have a fuel crisis towards the end because the staging got stuck (a bug I have never encountered before). I almost went for bonus 3 by accident.

Make sure the mouse wasn\'t over the staging menu, or you didn\'t press Alt + L. That locks the staging.

[Kosmo-not]

Make sure the mouse wasn\'t over the staging menu, or you didn\'t press Alt + L. That locks the staging.

I\'ll try the alt-L thing next time.

[sal_vager]

I have finally managed to complete the course, my previous rockets ran out of fuel part way round, and I have managed to set a new time to beat on the stock leaderboard

Time at the finish line: 1:00:35:49

The RayChaser on the pad

Rendezvous with Checkpoint 1

On approach to Checkpoint 2

Passing through Checkpoint 2

Shortcut in high Kerbin orbit

Nearing Checkpoint 3

Passing through the Munar Checkpoint

Too far ahead of the Finish line

Closing the distance

The end is in sight

Crossing the line!

[Kosmo-not]

Great work there, sal_vager!

A question:

Do we need to lift off right away, or can we get the timer started and delay the real launch?

[sal_vager]

Someone asked this on reddit as well, you are free to wait till you\'re ready to launch, i think the timer won\'t start till you launch either.

It\'s all part of figuring out how to fly and dock quickly

[MartiUK]

Hi, just tried downloading the save, but I\'m getting an error when trying to extract it. Is there a mirrored copy?

[sal_vager]

It must be because the servers are being migrated, I put it on filedropper for reddit, I\'ll grab the link and update the original post, thanks for letting me know.

[togfox]

I\'m late to the party but ready to try this now. Fingers crossed!!

[sal_vager]

Cool I\'m looking forwards to seeing your time togfox.

The most important thing is to have fun doing it though

[PakledHostage]

Cool I\'m looking forwards to seeing your time togfox.

The most important thing is to have fun doing it though

I was initially excited about this challenge, but I couldn’t get through it without lagging out my system.

I tried it a couple of weeks ago and managed to get as far as the geosynchronous waypoint, but my little netbook doesn\'t have the horsepower for this challenge. My frame rate drops to ~0.5 Hz when I get close to the waypoints...

Any chance of creating a variation of your challenge for those of us running slower PCs? Or am I just an anomaly?

[sal_vager]

I tried to keep the rings as basic as possible, they should have been fine and it should only be your ship and one ring in the same spot at the same time.

I do get a lag spike at 200 meters when the physics loads but that passes.

Do you have a nvidia optimus laptop? you can get those to share the load between the nvidia card and the built in intel card.

I\'ll see about remaking it with just a basic ship at each spot, you\'ll have to get a screenshot of yourself next to it.

Edit: I have replaced the rings with much more cpu friendly light rockets, each is marked in some way but it\'s easy to see which one you\'re at from your altitude.

Try to get a screenshot as close to the target craft as possible, you already saw how close you were to the first checkpoint ring

The new zip is here and in the OP.

[Cykyrios]

So, I tried this thing to test my rendezvous skills, and here\'s the result: I\'m not quite as good as Kosmo-not and sal_vager yet. Btw, that\'s a very nice (and difficult) challenge!

Anyway, here are some facts:

- I had tried KSO rendezvous only once, and that was before my first successful rendezvous

- I had never tried anything around the Mun except landing on it

Flight events:

After a missed launch window, I took 4 hours to pass checkpoint 1:

Then I was en route to KSO, with a not so bad transfer (made by eye):

Poor maneuvers start, and checkpoint 2 is reached after 2 days:

My Mun orbit maneuvers were quite poor as well, and I needed 5 orbits or so to get to that third ring (RCS ran out of fuel, which didn\'t help):

After 4 days racing around, our 3 kerbals made it back to Kerbin, where that finish line trolled them for a bit:

So close, yet so far away! This one is by far the most difficult, as you have to get as low as 60 km if you\'re just slightly behind the finish line.

And in the end, I ran out of fuel less than 20km away from the finish line...

Anyway, I\'m quite happy with it as it was my first try, and I\'m pretty sure I can make it the next time (that would be tomorrow, around the same time, if all goes well).

EDIT: Please note how Jebediah looks very happy during the whole race

[sal_vager]

Well done Cykyrios, I\'m looking forwards to seeing your next go, I hope you had fun, nerve wracking edge of your seat panicky fun

[Cykyrios]

Well, my 2nd attempt failed pretty much the same way, except the timings at checkpoints were a bit different...

I WANT to finish this so bad, but I\'ll have to wait until tomorrow before trying again.

[sal_vager]

It\'s easy to over do it with the RCS, I tried to conserve it by using my main engine on minimum throttle while still several kilometers away and saved the RCS until I was closer and needed the finer control, just don\'t rush though as it\'s better to take your time at the actual rendezvous.

I actually had RCS to spare and was getting low on regular fuel by the time I reached the last ring, also try to get in front of it, even if you are over 100km in front it\'s still easier to go to a higher orbit to slow down than it is to risk dipping into the atmosphere, that\'s were you\'ll really lose all your fuel.

Kosmo-not made a table of when to burn for orbital intercepts that might help you, check it out here : http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=9726.0

Good luck.