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life_on_venus

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    Makes aircraft mostly

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  1. Fleetwings presents: Fleetwings SFB "Mercury" Privet Comrade! We would like to present to you our small flying boat of 24 passengers. By combining canard design and sleek airframe in no way derived from secret jet bomber, we create aircraft with exceptional performance. Canard mean is capable of takeoff 70m/s on land or 60m/s on water. Landing is just glide with no engine until aircraft reaches water, be gentle. Lack of horizontal stabiliser mean pitch instability is not so good if you are manhandling of the controls, but for competent russki pilot is no trouble. Range is approximately 400/0.06*100/1000 = 666.6km, purely coincidence and in no way reflecting of pitch characteristics. Test conducted at 7000m altitude, where engine begins to lose power. Price is approximately 20,186,000 per aircraft. If you are interested for purchase please contact foreign trade minister below: https://kerbalx.com/life_on_venus/Fleetwings-SFB-Mercury
  2. By the way, has anyone seen HarvestR's new game, balsa? It's an aircraft design game similar to KSP. The challenge could work there too
  3. If I remember correctly, FAR could produce graphs of drag at various cruising speeds and altitude, without leaving the hangar. If we could make something similar for KSP's stock aerodynamics, we could calculate the thrust needed to maintain that speed and therefore fuel burn. Combining this with the fuel onboard gives you the range, crusing speed, and altitude. In fact, it might be easier to generate these graphs inside of KSP with a small mod or plugin, then export all the data to a spreadsheet that will automatically identify the optimal cruising speed and altitude.
  4. That isn't quite what I meant The design was a good one, but it wasn't the best solution to what the airline wanted at that particular time, with compromises where necessary. It was the best because it used like 5 parts in a really unrealistic manner, because KSP currently has limited aircraft parts
  5. Yeah, those categories sound good. Maybe we should go old-school KSP and create a set of .cfg edited parts all entrants must use. I'm thinking various generations of jet engines with slightly better power/efficiency, and so on. I don't think KSP has the variety of parts to make so many competitive designs. We saw this with the previous challenge - there was 1 design for small jet that was simply the best, and couldn't be improved upon
  6. Yes, that sounds really good actually. What are your thoughts regarding the categories in the current challenge? I know in the reboot they added 3 categories (S/M/L hopper), but I'm wondering if some categories should be added or removed for the reboot. Large hopper, for example, doesn't make much sense because in real life these small city airports only operate smaller planes. Equally, I think turboprop and seaplane could be turned into S/M regional prop, with extra points for operating on water, snow, gravel, etc. Finally, we've seen most passenger 747s retire and A380s are going the same way. Since jumbo jets are becoming obsolete, what about replacing it with an Ultra Long Haul category, where you can enter either a traditional jumbo or newer widebody aircraft and compete over cost per passenger mile (with hard minimums for range and speed)? Edit: To clarify, a system of: S Helicopters S/M regional prop S/M hopper S/M/L regional jet M/L Ultra Long Haul
  7. What about a tiered system? A design company starts at tier 1, where they can submit 1 plane at a time. As more of their planes sell they get the ability to submit more designs, and larger ones such as jumbo jets
  8. Personally I'm not keen on the idea of a full business simulation, it requires a huge amount of commitment and takes the focus away from design. That said, there should definitely be points scored for reusing subassemblies, developing variants of the same aircraft, and specialising in a particular segment. I just can't imagine most people putting the time in to run a company
  9. Hey Pds314, Sorry I don't see any entries to this challenge yet. If it's not necroposting, I have one for you: https://imgur.com/a/Vr0ldpD Granted, 7.1 m/s isn't what you'd call a blistering pace, but I thought this was a decent first attempt. Powerplant is two medium motors at 100% torque, although you quickly run out of battery running them. The speed was quite unstable, even when the batteries were charged the craft was hovering around 6.5 m/s
  10. I'd be cool with discarding the backlog. Besides, with the changes coming in KSP2, those airplanes might become completely irrelevant
  11. I definitely think there should be a cost relief for designs that share the same layout. Otherwise, people will just build all-new, purpose built aircraft for each challenge. With this restriction they would have to build up a fleet of broadly similar, realistic aircraft. Obviously this restriction wouldn't apply for seaplane, supersonic, jumbo jet as these are very specialised aircraft
  12. I'm not sure how well that would work, but a system that lets entrants score themselves would be useful, e.g: Jumbo Jet 4000km range requirement, -1 point for each 10km below, minimum 3800km Medium Jet 120 pax requirement, -1 point for each 10 pax below, minimum 100 pax Turboprop £5,000,000 max, +1 point for each £100,000 below, maximum +5 points Small Jet +1 point if complete wing shared with medium & large jets etc. ### Perhaps a perfect design gets a score of 100, anything below 60 would be a "bad" design. This would allow entrants to rate their prototypes and improve them until they have a production-ready version. Maybe prohibit submissons with a score less than 70 to cut down on the number of submissions?
  13. It looks like there's a decent chance of that happening. Also, I believe the KSP2 devs mentioned something about improved aerodynamics, which may mean a wider variety of viable aircraft, and more realistic ones too!
  14. I'm curious how everyone found the Jumbo Jet challenge, I struggled to achieve the 4000 km range required. Any tips for that?
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