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Stock Kerbin Escape speed record!


DMSP

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This challenge is simple, build the fastest rocket to send on Kerbin escape trajectory!

How to enter: Find the fastest speed you had IN KERBINS SOI. Find the mass of your craft AT THAT MOMENT!

Rules:

Must be stock.

No Part Clipping.

No cheaty things like Infini-Glide, hack gravity and such.

No Hyper-edit, build a lifter.

Photos, or it never happened.

Your score is Speed*Mass

So, good luck, and Get some Speed!

Your final score is the fastest speed you had in Kerbin's SOI x The mass of your craft at that moment.

Leader Board:

1-

2-

3-

4-

5-

Edited by DMSP
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This challenge is simple, build the fastest rocket to send on Kerbin escape trajectory!

Rules:

Must be stock.

No Part Clipping.

No cheaty things like Infini-Glide, hack gravity and such.

No Hyper-edit, build a lifter.

Photos, or it never happened.

There is no points, just how many Mps!

So, good luck, and Get some Speed!

Your final speed/score is the moment before you leave Kerbin's SOI, so take a photo of it before it leaves Kerbin's SOI!

Leader Board:

1- DMSP- 15141 Meters Per Second

2-

3-

4-

5-

This is simply fastest escape speed not fastest time from launch to escape?

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I tried this with my Eve Rocks challenge all-in-one launch vehicle and managed to get a 6.2t payload (hitchiker can and other basic lander parts) up to 14216 m/s. I could have had this about 2km/s better if I was willing to use the transfers stage, but I was impatient and just staged the whole thing to save time (it would have burned for 17 minutes multiplied by about 7x due to lag). I only made a couple changes to the vessel to try this, mainly getting rid of my parachute + landing gear apparatus, but if I put more effort into it, trimming off parts from the Eve mission that are not needed as well as reducing the payload mass, I would probably do a lot better.

So if you can build an all-in-one launcher for an Eve mission, then this should end up being similar.

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This is simply fastest escape speed not fastest time from launch to escape?

Yes.

I think I want to add a new rule...

- - - Updated - - -

I edited the OP and put a new rule in.

- - - Updated - - -

No entries count. Before I changed the rule.

Edited by DMSP
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How can you get over 8.5 km/s from last stage? If I put together Okto2 (lightest probe core), FL-T 800 and MechJeb's massless control unit it gives only 6987 m/s.

I tried but did not take into account that time is limited and I need much TWR. I had about 10 km/s velocity and 15 km/s dv left at SOI change.

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Some ridiculous amount. I think it's only about 4 m/s less because the altimeter got super confused.

900.18 tons or something silly like that.

Actually, Could I have the craft file?

I just pulled a similar maneuver as you, going to just 5000 m of the Munar surface at 8kmps, and my total was still 1/4 of yours. My lifter could also get 300 tons into LKO...

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Actually, Could I have the craft file?

I just pulled a similar maneuver as you, going to just 5000 m of the Munar surface at 8kmps, and my total was still 1/4 of yours. My lifter could also get 300 tons into LKO...

I would give you the craft file, but there are some things inside it I've modified slightly (not gamebreaking or anything) because it originally didn't work, so it wouldn't be compatible with a game that didn't have exactly the right parameters. IF there's still a problem, I could in theory give you a video.

- - - Updated - - -

No not on launch. Nice entrée, but I must know the weight!

Like... dry mass, full mass, Ln(M1/M0), mass of the spacecraft to the left? Or mass of the final spacecraft?

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Just made 24km/s at 26 tons and was proud for perhaps 20 seconds. Then I noticed that any large Jool-5 mission would beat this; 1200m/s at 800 tons isn't especially remarkable.

So I guess the way to "win" this challenge is to build a huge vessel and bring it to decent speed. For nukes, it seems that expelling more than 50% of your starting mass will *decrease* your score (one could calculate this, it's directly related to ISP, but I don't know how and am not curious enough to find out). The fun part is that you don't need to stage for this challenge: as the score is a product of speed and mass, discarding the empty tanks after the burn will do you no good.

The way to win this is ISP (read: Ions) and sheer scale. You can always double your score if you send twice the mass and twice the engines.

If the score was normalized to scale in some way, this could be a lot more interesting. However, if you take the weight on the launchpad as baseline, the initial lifter will overshadow everything else. If you take weight in LKO, designs will quickly converge on a heavy ion probe.

Edit: I was curios enough, after all. Regardless of ISP, expelling about 37% of your mass for thrust will give you the highest product of (speed achieved * mass left). Someone who really understands logarithms could probably explain why. A better ISP means that you'll go faster in the end. Under current rules, the best theoretical best vessel will have about 4.5 large xenon tanks and 4 small panels per engine, dV= 18.8km/s. Clone as often as desired.

However, nukes offer a much better score per part simply because of their weight. Even if you assume that a nuclear vessel will have lots and lots of struts, 1000 parts of nuclear vessel will score similar to 6000 parts under ion propulsion.

Edited by Laie
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Here is my screenshots:

http://imgur.com/a/HllCN#0

I tried to maximize just velocity, not impulse. There would be much easy optimizations, asparagus staging etc. 3400 t launcher was also very flawless, probably I could have added more stages easily.

I broke rules and used MechJeb. It does not effect to performance. Planning this kind of vessel without it would be pain in the ass.

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Here is my screenshots:

http://imgur.com/a/HllCN#0

I tried to maximize just velocity, not impulse. There would be much easy optimizations, asparagus staging etc. 3400 t launcher was also very flawless, probably I could have added more stages easily.

I broke rules and used MechJeb. It does not effect to performance. Planning this kind of vessel without it would be pain in the ass.

Sorry, nice try thought, but it must be stock...

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OK. Do you accept if I plan a rocket by using MJ's dv calculator but leave the control unit out before launch? Then I do not have any of MJ's functions or information windows during flight. Actually anybody can do it and it would be impossible to detect, but I want to respect the spirit of challenge.

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