sturmhauke

You guys are already on Duna, and I'm still here faffing about with my mod selection.

Right, sorry. Got a little carried away. Not yet, no.

One time I sent Jeb to Gilly on a superlight ion craft, with a command seat instead of a capsule. It had a nosecone and airbrakes protecting the seat for reentry to Kerbin, but they were barely enough. Most of the time Jeb caught too much heat and went poof. I finally managed to land after a bunch of reloads and way too many aerobraking passes. Another incident was also heat related. I was midway through a career game, and had just gotten an SSTO into orbit. I sent Bob out to collect some science... but the hull was still hot from the ascent and poor Bob fried when he left the airlock.

For my sample review, I found an old entry from the original thread and decided to give it a try. Original review here. Test Pilot Review: @qzgy's Kramer 150-100 Baltimore Figures as Tested: Price: $116,015,000 Passengers: 96 Parts: 53 Mass: 51 t Fuel: 3120 kallons Takeoff speed: 55 m/s on land, 84 m/s on water Landing speed: 60 m/s on land and water Cruising speed: 262 m/s Cruising altitude: 3030 m Fuel burn rate: 0.31 kal/s Range: 2637 km KPPM: 0.020 Review Notes: In light of recent changes in the game engine and mods manufacturing and maintenance procedures, Kerbal Express has decided to review an older aircraft in the medium regional category, the Kramer 150-100 Baltimore. Unfortunately, while it has some nice features, it is also expensive, overpowered, inefficient, and very unsafe to land - except, oddly, on water. The Baltimore had to be tweaked a bit before its test flight. Perhaps the maintenance crew was sloppy when they put it in storage. In any case, there was some monoprop in the tanks, and the two-slot flaps were not programmed to extend fully. After correcting those issues, Jeb took it out for a spin. The four turboprops are certainly loud, as noted in the previous review. And with four of them, it makes for an unpleasant ride, especially for the wing seats. However, they are powerful enough to let the Baltimore take off at only 55 m/s with the first flap setting. They can even do a vertical climb! The plane is also capable of some impressive maneuvers. We found that its cruising altitude was a bit lower than advertised (mostly due to trouble maintaining level flight at higher altitudes), while its speed was a bit higher. This is all very surprising, as the sales brochure described it as "big and slow." Maybe a bored mechanic was doing some unsanctioned upgrades on a mothballed aircraft, who knows. Honestly though, this kind of performance is overkill for a civilian airliner. It would be more appropriate for military use, or perhaps skydiving. Landing is unacceptably dangerous. While it is possible to land at 60 m/s with full flaps, this is close to the Baltimore's stall speed, making it difficult to control. And if the approach is not absolutely flat and level, the plane has a bad habit of exploding. Our engineers think that the landing gear it ships with are just not sturdy enough. Strangely, the plane can handle much rougher landings on water. It was tested at speeds of up to 75 m/s with no ill effects, other than yawing sharply and making Jeb a bit sick. The turboprop blades seem to be converted from ship propellers, since they apparently worked just as well in the water as in air. Despite not being advertised as a seaplane, or built like one, the Baltimore was even able to take off again at 84 m/s, although with some difficulty. Finally, the price tag is substantially higher than other offerings in the medium regional category, while the fuel efficiency, range, and maintenance costs are lower than average. The Baltimore does meet some criteria of some other categories, but it's just not a focused design. The Verdict: The Baltimore isn't good at the things it was designed for, and excels at a few things it wasn't designed for. It also seems to have wheels made of explodium. We will not be purchasing any for our fleet. However, with a few modifications, the Baltimore may find a home with the Kerbal Air Force or extreme sports enthusiasts.

Henry the Black was a translator and a slave. It's possible he was the first person to do it, but if so it was only by accident and because he was bought and dragged around the world on Magellan's expedition. Elcano was the navigator, and ended up taking over after my ancestors killed Magellan in battle.

I might be late to the party on this, lol. Last night I was taking out the garbage and happened to see it. I thought it might be Mars, which is when I looked it up and then posted this.

That leaves you with no propellants at all, only kraken drives. You might want to rethink this one.

Fair enough.

If anyone else is awake right now and in a good viewing location, go outside and look south. See that bright red dot? That's Mars. If I had a good enough camera I'd take a picture, but alas I'm stuck with the old Mk1 Eyeball. more planet watching info here

So I went and looked up aircraft fuel efficiency and found this Wikipedia article. It uses a few different units, but I think the relevant one here is passenger-kilometers per liter, or pax-km/L. I also saw another site that mentioned the equivalent "seat miles per gallon". Both are essentially the reciprocal of our KPPM unit, and I think a bit easier to grasp at a glance. We could call our version PK/K (or PKK? PKPK? Pika-pika? I dunno.), because who wants to type out pax-km/kal all the time? It's calculated as passengers * range (km) / kallons. Or, since range is already a derived stat, it can also be calculated directly as passengers * cruising speed / kallons per second / 1000.

Wait, are you reviewing your own planes?

I'm modded up and have flown a couple of earlier planes. Before I start doing a test review, I had a couple questions about the Kallons Per Passenger Mile stat I've seen in a few places: 1 kallon = 1 unit of jet fuel, right? Why is it miles instead of kilometers? The game is built around metric after all. Are we still doing that anyway? What is the airspeed velocity of an unexploded kerbal?

I've read a few reviews already just to prepare for making my first submission. I'll download some planes this week and try them out.

Sure, sign me up! Wait, what am I getting into?

Wow, that's a lot. Well I might be a n00b around here, but I've been active over on r/KerbalSpaceProgram for a while. I have a background in game QA, and you can see my writing style on some of my Imgur KSP albums: Flying dodecahedron, anyone? The Katar and the Kraken Twin-Boar Efficiency challenge Merry Kerbmas!

Sounds good to me.

I was working on a luxury super jumbo with full Mk3 cabins, but I had to scrap it. I managed to get it in the air and do some turns without ripping the wings off, but it was about as fast as a glacier. On landing I destroyed about half the runway. Plus it would have cost 1.8 billion dollars.

My first station in career mode, Kerbal Research Station 1. This one is more recent, made in sandbox. I call it the Archimedes Space Hotel.

I'm a professional web developer. While you can slap a basic site together with services like Wix, it takes someone like me to build anything complex that actually works well. Perhaps OP is thinking of something like Bioware's old Neverwinter Nights game, which shipped with a full-featured campaign editor. Thing is though, that wasn't an add-on. It was an integral part of the game software, and took as much or more development time as the main story campaign.

I think I'm gonna mod it up for this challenge. Currently I've only used utility stuff, but all my designs to date are stock. And yeah, spaceplanes might be more limiting and all, but I like them.

Anyone doing a spaceplane SLV? I have a cargo SSTO plane I was already working on before this, but with a Mk3 cargo bay the payload width is limited.

Bombing the KSC full album

Those are cool. I haven't messed with any parts or gameplay mods yet, just utility stuff like KER. I really need to fix my gaming rig; I've been playing on my laptop, which is kind of an old potato now.

Lol I know what you mean about the spare time. I'm juggling a job, a long commute, family, and KSP, with the occasional round of Factorio. Who needs sleep anyway? I haven't started planning my Duna mission yet. I'm currently working on a ridiculous super jumbo jet for that airliner challenge. I might try to do an electric prop plane for Duna, if I can figure out how to stow and unpack it.

Woo, thanks! The UFO is capable of a rolling STOL takeoff too, but I understand if it doesn't qualify as-is.