OJT

Yeah, I know about Magic Wings. But most Magic Wings from my knowledge are more applicable to supersonic and SSTO purposes, something that is outside of the scope of our challenge I think. And I play on version 1.12 personally, so flags are out of the question for me. Speaking of wings: from I gather, Magic Wings are mostly advantageous to get excellent Lift to Drag ratios for more efficient climbs. However, here we need to maintain lower altitudes to get better prop performance AND we need to maintain it stably so the plane doesn't do any corrections. For that no AoA seemed to be optimal setting for the wings. I did experiment with wing AoA and from the information I've found on the internet (KSP forum, reddit and Lt. Duckweed's wing video), 2° of AoA is the most optimal for low subsonic speeds, but the plane with 2° AoA not only flew slower, it also struggled more with take off.

That's what I was thinking about too Without touching prop blades, the maximum distance you can go is roughly in 2000-2200 km range (and I did lots of testing to verify these numbers). Moving prop blades however creates these effects that both you and @camacju have described. Move them in far enough and they don't even need any electricity to spin by themselves, basically granting you infinite flight. But, does it make it viable to move the props in "just enough" that they still use charge? Like, camacju is getting theoretical ranges of 33 thousand kilometers for crying out loud At this point, what constitutes a "legal" and "illegal" exploit? This whole challenge was pretty much dominated by aerodynamic exploits (with closing nodes and offsetting everything into the fairing and whatnot). And now we are at the point that the exploit is so strong that, if we use it too much, it goes into cheat reality, because you won't need any more charge to fly at all. So you're forced to scale it back intentionally so the engine still uses electricity. But how do you even optimize at that point? Even in-game telemetry gets confused and difference between 0.01 charge per 1 minute or 2 minutes can be in order of tens of thousands of km of range and how many more microns you move the prop inward P.S. By the way, your wing structure is actually genius. How did I not think of that?

I tested this directly after my 2000+km entry The very same plane, only thing done is fan blade offsetting. 1.99 microunits per second max usage (compared to 3.48 microunits) and cruise speed of 92-98 m/s (compared to 69-75 m/s). Not taking into account the 2 EC used to get up to speed and taking the average speed as estimate, (98EC/0.00199units)*95m/s = 4678km of range However, at this point the flight will take over 13 hours, and I already didn't feel comfortable leaving the game on for 8 hours in previous entry, so this is basically left as a thought experiment of sorts. But YES, you can circumnavigate on 100 EC

Both 1000 and 2000km entries used 20% sized small motor. Reducing the motor size to 1% saves me 7 kilos, which doesn't really make much impact However, I noticed what DOES make a huge impact: fan blade offsetting. Offsetting them inwards, so they make a smaller circle, noticeably increases thrust while consuming less charge. My calculated theoretical ranges exceed 4500 kilometers by now, which is more than enough to make a circumnavigation From what I read, @camacju also did prop offsetting in his latest screens. It seems, after all, you can make a circumnavigator with 100 EC charge

All of my planes had 8 small fan blades per engine. And during the testing for the latest entry I tried various combinations of fans, from 2 biggest ones to 16 smallest ones. At the end I determined during testing that 8 fan blades gives the best results: other fan blade configurations either didn't give any speed improvements or slowed down the plane altogether As for the controls, I personally felt that it would be easier to control all elements through RCS controls, because this way you have one hand on directional (WASD) controls and the other hand on the RCS. Of course, in this challenge the Autopilot handled the flying, so I had both hands on the RCS. I also engaged Caps Lock for fine adjustments and after that I basically tried to tap the buttons as lightly as I could to get the fan blade angle for example: getting the 19.19 degrees was crucial to get the best combination of speed and average EC consumption. The RPM and Torque settings were adjusted by hand at first parts of the flight, but then I just typed in the necessary values once I was going at final cruise speed I mean, the record flight alone took me over 8 hours, not even counting in all of the testing which in total probably took me longer than the flight itself. I have about 7 pages on my iPad filled with lots of data: plane configurations, RPM/Power/Prop angle settings, EC consumption, average speed, theoretical range from 95 EC charge (the 5 EC is basically as a safety margin for the takeoff, climb and acceleration) and so on. I don't think I did as much research for any other KSP mission lol

Well, I promised you all a huge breakthrough. Here it is. As usual, the name doesn't actually represent the version number: I've had maybe 8 different variations of this craft before I went ahead with this one First new thing is the fuselage: it has been carefully optimized and improved upon the previous plane by offset/rotate manipulations. Also, 100 EC battery has been swapped with 1k round battery for drag optimization reasons. In the end not only have I got a less draggier fuselage, I also managed to reduce the dry weight of the fuselage a little bit. Although the weight reduction doesn't really make much of a difference and it was not the main reason for new fuselage anyway, but still, a nice bonus. Engine and prop setup is the same as in previous entry Wings are also new, with a bit of extra wing area for gliding. This made the plane a bit heavier than my previous entry, after jettisoning the landing gear the plane weighs cool round 1000 kilograms (with both Kerbals without jetpacks and parachutes). Speaking of kerbals, they will again be females Proof of EC charge. As this is a much bigger battery, I reduced its charge to 100 in SPH At this point you might be wondering: the plane doesn't look that much different from the previous entry, so what's the breakthrough? The breakthrough is flight profile. Carefully adjusting RPM, engine power and prop angle throughout the entire flight delivers fantastic results. So to do this, I assigned the RCS controls to prop angles, engine RPM and Torque limit I start at 150 RPM and 7% power and hold these for the takeoff phase. The main adjustments are with prop angle at first: right at the start I set the angle at 85 degrees and then gradually lower it to around 50ish degrees as I accelerate on the runway. I look at the Forward Lift produced by the props and on the runway I keep it in 0.2-0.3 kN range through beforementioned prop adjustments. With this a takeoff speed of about 56 m/s is achieved. Just as the plane goes off the runway, I discard the landing gear and engage the Autopilot. I set the vertical speed of 3 m/s to slowly climb to 700 meters as I continue to accelerate through prop adjustment: at this point I don't look at forward lift generated anymore, I simply monitor the velocity As I reach 700 meters, I tell the Autopilot to hold the altitude and from then it's all adjustments: I carefully lower the prop angle, reduce the RPM limit and raise the Torque limit until I end up at the following settings: 19.19 degrees of prop angle, 50 engine RPM limit and 10 engine Torque limit. This achieves maximum EC usage of 3.48 microunits per second and cruise speed of 69-75 m/s depending on the air temperature. These settings will be kept for pretty much entire flight Flight path will be the same as in previous entry: fly eastward towards peninsula and then roughly following the geodesic line. Passing over the peninsula now: I've setup a series of "checkpoint" flags before the mission for ease of navigation. Some of those checkpoints I followed to the T, for the others I simply used them to assess the direction I was going in Sunset and moon crescent Passing by the islands where my previous entry splashed down: we're still going strong Reaching the isthmus at the far north of the map. This is where things got a bit scary: as I was approaching the land I wasn't sure whether my plane would clear the hills, so I tried to climb to 800 meters. By doing so however my engine slowed down, props didn't generate much thrust and I stalled the plane. Thankfully, by quickly readjusting all settings and recovering the plane I saved the mission, but I gotta tell you, I was shook 800 meters proved to be enough with a safe margin, so I continued forward. I even did some planet spotting as it got darker lol Crossed the isthmus. From then on it was all water and no more dangerous landmasses, so I descended back to 700 meters Slowly running out of charge. Preparing the plane for landing Out of charge. Retracting the fan blades and slowly gliding towards the water Splashdown! Coordinates of the splashdown Now is the time to calculate just how far I managed to go. Again I will be using the website that I used in previous entry. These are the coordinates I used for calculation Starting Flag near the Runway (-0.2, -74.43) Checkpoint 1 Flag, on the Peninsula (-2.1, -39.22) Water passage between Two Islands, near Checkpoint 2 (27.94, 16.259) Checkpoint 3 Flag, on the western side of the Isthmus (45, 55.37) Checkpoint 4 Flag, in the middle of the Isthmus (47.35, 69.17) Checkpoint 6 Flag, on the eastern side of the Isthmus (47.30, 89.53) Splashdown Site (20.43, 132.22) Photo of the checkpoint flags below All of this ends up in the final distance of...... 2082.916 kilometers This is an extraordinarily good result, but there is a downside to it: this is basically the limit of the current concept of the aircraft I've flown. Different RPM/Torque/Prop angle settings bring in diminishing results, different wing configurations didn't bring much either and the fuselage is already as streamlined and light as it could be. Not even adding or reducing amount of fan blades bring any improvements, only worsened the theoretical range. So, unfortunately, my dream of circumnavigating Kerbin with 100 EC are not gonna come to fruition, at the very least with the current aircraft design The only thing I didn't touch in any of my entries (including this one) is the fan blade positioning: perhaps you can get more range if you carefully offset/rotate the blades so they spin themselves up, but at this point if your fan blades spin themselves up without any EC usage, then what's the point of the challenge anyway? But hey, that's just my opinion @18Watt As for now, I've basically shut down the whole challenge lmao

@Artienia Hey man, are you still away? I've taken a little break from Shuttle building to do other challenges, but there's still some progress I've made: everything for Minmus Mission is ready to go and I've also completed the Asteroid Recovery mission. You can find it in my STS thread, along with Jool STS-1 and Eve STS-1 submissions. Hope it's not too overwhelming to review 3 submissions in a row

Well, I nodded off and the plane crashed... will be restarting later in the day, results might take a bit longer than I initially planned

So, I was playing around with the craft design and managed to make a huge breakthrough. The new plane is currently flying and, if everything goes smoothly, I will be posting results later in the day

Yeah, I realized that I done goofed up after posting the message. Gotta firm the L

Let's assume one would build a plane that could circumnavigate Kerbin and that would fly in a similar way to my record setter (as in, low to water and in straight lines). Quick glance tells that it would require at the very least 5 major corrections, therefore 5 points: one at the edge of peninsula east of KSC and then roughly following the Elcano marine circumnavigation trajectory, making a full circle at the peninsula edge. Photo of that below. My attempt finished halfway between 1st and 2nd point, near two small islands. In addition, the website I linked has a limit of 20 waypoints, so I think, incase someone actually manages to build a 100 EC circumnavigator, 20 points should be more than sufficient if one would like to make the corrections smoother instead of sharp turns because that can save a lot of kilometers Now will such plane even be built? 2 days ago I would say that a man must be tripping to even consider that, but seeing how stupidly far we managed to travel I can't entirely dismiss such possibility

Oh boy, was I wrong with my estimates. But let's not get ahead of ourselves Remember I talked about a mission that I was flying and asking if it would be an eligible entry to this challenge? Well, I forgot to adjust one time and the plane crashed into the island, the very same one that me and camacju finished our best entries so far. To say I was annoyed would be an understatement, however I decided to use this opportunity to optimize the design and see just how much I can squeeze out of 100 EC units I did a LOT of test flights, tested lots of part combinations and different settings on engines and props and in the end, I ended up with this. Behold! And ignore the name, this was far from 6th iteration but I couldn't be bothered to make lots of craft saves for every single minor adjustment Firstly, I reduced the weight. From my tests the weight didn't influence the battery consumption much and it more came down to drag, but more on that later. However, tests showed that lower takeoff weight allows for easier acceleration on the runway which can preserve every tiny bit of battery charge. I replaced or removed some parts, most notably I swapped 4 hardpoints for two decouplers. Google search showed that even though jettisoned decouplers leave small mount points on the part it detaches from, these points have zero drag and zero mass, so the functional shape wouldn't be influenced. I also went for deltawing configuration similar to camacju's designs to get rid of rear winglets which also saved a bit of mass Most important adjustments came from aerodynamic optimizations. I played around with fairing design to get the most optimal shape I could manage (both in terms of streamlining and weight). Size of control surfaces has been reduced and positions of said surfaces has been carefully adjusted to make the plane cruise as stably as possible. Reason being I wanted to eradicate any unnecessary corrections that Autopilot might do to hold its course, which is why, for example, I am still utilizing two small control surfaces as yaw stabilizers: single Basic Fin made the flight a bit twitchy and Autopilot used a lot of adjustments to hold course, reducing prograde velocity. Two small control surfaces might be heavier, but they make the plane much more stable. Every minuscule detail that I could consider I did. I even swapped out one pilot for this mission Both pilots for this mission will be females. Why? Because during tests I actually noticed, to my own surprise, that even though all kerbals weigh the same, female kerbals are actually a bit shorter than male kerbals. This allowed me to make the fairing a bit smaller than I otherwise would have to. Picture of kerbals below for demonstration. Unfortunately, it does mean that Jebediah has been sidelined and has been replaced by an equally capable female pilot. Valentina still stays, repping The Original Quartet in this mission We know the craft, we know the pilots. Let's proceed with the mission! Proof of battery charge Because the plane was extremely optimized for level flight, takeoff proved to be very difficult. I utilized the entire length of the runway to accelerate, then as I left ground I dropped the gear and quickly pitched up before hitting the ground and then I engaged the autopilot to maintain the level flight. Takeoff was quite extreme for the relatively low speeds that we are dealing here, I almost crashed the plane right as I left the runway, which is why I didn't take any screenshots of the takeoff After the plane stabilized it slowly started to pick up speed until it reached the cruise velocity. I used 150 RPM limit and 7% throttle at first with prop angle of 50 degrees Then a bit later, after playing a bit with the settings I stopped at 140 RPM limit and 49 degrees prop angle (it says 48.5ish but the value I inputted was 49). I maintained roughly the same speed, but EC usage reduced by 0.5 microunits per second, therefore making the flight more efficient I also noticed that the plane was veeeery slowly climbing by itself, so I set the Autopilot to maintain the altitude at 114 meters. No particular reason, it was just the height the plane was flying at when I engaged the altitude hold. As you can see, I fly very low which is why it was important to maintain flight above water. First I've reached the island that my Personal Best attempt finished at After that, I simply roughly followed the geodesic line that is used for Kerbin Marine circumnavigations. This ensured that I was flying above water and perfectly straight, reducing the unnecessary corrections Sun was slowly going down, and with it my cruise velocity. KSP simulates temperature changes depending on time of day (and latitude if I remember it correctly), and temperature is an important factor in aerodynamic equations. At least this is my assumption on why the plane slowed down a bit. It still maintained the level flight however and my EC charge actually reduced a bit aswell due to reduction of engine's RPMs, so I didn't lose out on theoretical range (from my calculations at least) Sun comes up, I reached another set of islands and I was almost running out of charge Out of charge, finally. Before the charge depleted I prepared my autopilot to maintain slow descent rate to get those extra meters through gliding. As the charge went out, I engaged the descent rate hold and retracted the props Splashdown! And final location But what is the final travel distance? As you can see I travelled quite far north which makes the distance calculation purely through longitude change senseless. So, after a bit of quick googling, I found this website. It can calculate the distances between multiple waypoints based on coordinates, which makes it very useful for this challenge http://kerbalspace.agency/Tracker/distance.htm I used three waypoints for calculations in total Position of the flag at the runway (-0.23 lat, -74.43 long) Position of the shore near the island that I flew past roughly halfway into the journey (-4.26, -40.47) Position of the splashdown (27.45, 19.43) This gives me the travelled distance of... 1047.055 kilometers. Yes, I cracked the thousand. And even though the real distance from the flag will probably be a bit lower than that, the fact that I've built a plane that can fly over 1000 km with just 100 EC units is pretty damn good Now that I see camacju's offset prop experiments, I wonder if I can push it even further

Ahhh, about that... I've been conducting lots of experiments today with various plane designs and various flight profiles and this is what I found out: 1) Fan shrouds actually do have a purpose: they have very low skin drag. Hell, the aero debug menu shows 0 OccA and 0 WDrg in both Y directions if both nodes are occluded. Putting the engine inside the shroud makes the whole plane more aerodynamic 2) And continuing to that: props in fan shrouds work even if the fan shroud is completely covered! So, for example if you attach the fan shroud to the end of a plane, put engine in it and then place, say, a nose cone on the rear node, the props will still generate thrust. This gives extra opportunities for drag optimizations The most important discovery however doesn't have to do anything with plane design. It is the flight plan: I've completely revised it All of my (and seemingly camacju's aswell) attempts followed this profile: slowly get to high altitude, play around with variables (engine power, prop angle etc.) during ascent, try to spend as much time high up as possible while maintaining speed, slowly glide down when power runs out. I've figured out completely different approach: pick the engine RPM, Torque and prop angle very carefully, take off and then fly very low and very slow, like about 50-70 m/s. If you pick your variables very carefully and maintain perfectly level flight, the electricity usage will be extraordinarily low and even despite the low speed, you can reach flight distances of over 800 km! Yes, you've read that correctly This bring along good news and bad news. Bad news is, the stuff named above assume a single-rotor plane, which makes the "maintain perfectly level flight" part of the equation pretty much impossible in stock KSP because you will need to constantly correct the heading with trims and whatnot. And considering the estimate distances and velocities, this flight can take up almost 4 hours. And I don't think there are people crazy enough to attempt to fly this with the limitations that I've mentioned What's the good news? I've actually found an autopilot mod that can do exactly what we need! It is called AtmosphereAutopilot (I think there's actually a forum topic in the Mod Showcase section, I found it on SpaceDock) and it has very sophisticated cruise flight options. In fact, I am flying my mission at this very moment that I am writing this. Unfortunately, phys time warp is screwing up the said Autopilot, so I have to fly it in real time, but at least I don't need to actively participate in the flying: I just need to occasionally check the progress, maybe correct the heading from time to time to avoid islands and whatnot, but other than that it is entirely self sustained. I just need to hope that the game doesn't crash midflight This brings in different problem though. You didn't seem to discourage any so to speak "flight assistance" mods in the OP, but this Autopilot mod is so overpowered that it makes the challenge absurdly trivial, because before we needed to build AND fly our creations, but now we basically just need to build and let the Autopilot fly it for couple of hours and claim the leaderboard spot, and when it comes to building you eventually reach a certain point where no more optimizations can be applied (which I feel like I've reached now with my concepts) What do you think about all this? Will you allow my "Autopilot" submission (that is flying at the moment) if I post it? Or will it not be in the spirit of this challenge? Let me know what you think @18Watt

UPD: I did calculations myself and my traveled distance comes out as 370.2 km. Claiming top of the leaderboard again, but gotta say that's hell of a competition. Fair play @camacju From what I see, I use fan blades instead of props. They are more compact than props but from my experience building prop planes I've actually found them much more effective: they generate more thrust. But also, I use fan shroud and put the engine into it. From my searches and experiments, I couldn't determine whether fan shroud is a cosmetic part or it actually is beneficial for fan blades. I suggest you experiment with fan blades instead of props But I gotta say, I find it amusing that we both are getting quite similar results while using two vastly different looking concepts No. I use Caps Lock to fine tune trim adjustments. Not saying it's "be all end all" solution to the problem, as I still need to correct the flight path regularly, but alas there's no way around it in stock game Got pretty similar numbers, 370.2 km And how is it bad news? I did beat camacju's result no? EDIT: Okay, seems like camacju is downplaying his range for some reason. From my calculations he got 372 km. I guess I gotta try crack 400 km next time

Pretty much at the same time as camacju: I was uploading the screenshots just as he posted his latest submission. My third attempt (and last one for today, it's getting quite late here) Pretty much same concept as my second plane, just with weight optimizations Proof of battery charge I reached 13.9 km altitude. By the time I've beaten my 2nd submission of 231.4 km I was still flying under engine power. In fact, drag that high is so low that at one point I was actually flying with just 14% of throttle (on already 12% sized engine). Plane was using only 0.03 EC per second, honestly mindblowing Running out of charge. I noticed on previous attempts that the engine automatically locks up when out of charge. In this one I turned off automatic lock after battery depletion and let the engine spin for a bit before retracting the props. I dunno if it gave me any extra kick, but at least it didn't make things worse (visibly at least) I was planning my landing when I saw... land. I actually made it to the land Passing 350 km. I was expecting to land in the water near the furthest shore... Unfortunately (or fortunately) I glided for a bit after that and had a hard landing. Plane was wrecked, but Kerbals thankfully survived. I waited for the morning to have more light in my screenshots Chairs also survived the crash landing, so I sat in one of those to get KER distance readings. 364.8 km And here are the coordinates if you wanna calculate these

Trying to optimize my design (and failing), I decided to give the plane from second submission another try. I reckoned that by optimizing the flight profile and carefully adjusting the throttle I could squeeze extra mileage From test flights of my failed optimization attempts I concluded that the optimal strategy would be: carry as much speed as possible, reach 10 km altitude as soon as possible and carefully adjusting the throttle throughout the whole powered flight. I applied this flight plan to my Second Submission plane and saw noticeable improvements: I passed 160 km distance before running out of juice and then I carefully glided using only trim for control, no SAS. This allowed me to reach 260.4 km at splashdown, beating the current record Now, I am not trying to diminish @camacju 's submission. But KER also gives latitude/longitude readouts, and my final longitude was 49 degrees 39 minutes. Seeing as our results are very close, you sure you got your distance calculations right?

Second entry What's changed compared to other entries? One motor instead of two, motor itself is now placed at the back, smaller wings all around. Then it suddenly hit me that rules do not require for the plane to be landable on solid ground, so I made the landing gear detachable with small hardpoints. All of this brought the total mass of the aircraft to 1631 kg with landing gear and 1343 kg without it, saving up over 600kg from my first submission Unfortunately, I didn't plant the flag far enough from the runway on first attempt, so I had to replant it Proof of battery charge As I leave the runway, I drop the landing gear Since I am flying with only one engine, I had to trim my ailerons from time to time to keep the plane flying level. But it is worth it since I am saving up a lot of charge now. First airplane consumed around 0.24 EC units per second to maintain speed. This one uses up around 0.12 EC units per second. Combine it with lower weight and it makes the plane much more efficient I wasn't sure how high kerbals could fly without helmets. Since I was reaching higher altitudes than on my first attempt I put the helmets back on. They did stick out a bit, but it didn't seem to generate any extra drag Beating my first attempt. And I am still flying under engine power! Infact, I actually reduced the throttle a bit without losing speed, so I was saving up even more charge. And also, I passed the 10 km altitude 125 km distance, still flying. Although I was getting very close to running out of charge Finally running out of charge. Instantly retracting the props and correcting the trim. I tried to glide with SAS at first, but it seemed that it glided better with occasional trim, so I turned it off 150 km distance, still gliding Passing 175 km Passing 200 km. At this point I actually couldn't believe my own eyes Passing 225 km. What will be the final distance? Aaaaand splashdown! 231.4 km, more than double the distance compared to my first attempt From personal observations, if I glided without SAS from the start and played a bit with throttle settings higher in atmosphere I could've potentially squeeze a couple of more km out of this, but this design's limit will be around 250 km Fun fact: both this mission and my 100 EC rover mission took around 50 minutes to complete and the plane travelled over 23 times further. Just shows how wack rovers are in this otherwise great game. I hope for major improvements in KSP 2

First entry. I think this endeavor went much better than my rover I closed up all nodes I could find (I forgot about motor front nodes tho) and utilized the fairing trick to get rid of as much drag as possible. Both external seats are placed on the offset grip pads inside the service bay. 4 wheeled landing gear setup for stability on the runway. Very downsized small motors with 8 smallest fan blades each. 1787 kg dry, 1975 kg with 2 kerbals. I also took off the parachutes and jetpacks that they had in inventory to save up weight I didn't go to great lengths with optimizations. I simply made a reliable small plane first just as a benchmark. Like, add a solar panel or an RTG and you can easily fly this plane all around Kerbin if you wanted to Planting the flag. I put it on the side of the runway so I can spawn new planes on the runway without the flag disrupting it Proof of battery charge Taking off and flying eastward My plan was to slowly gain altitude and then, when the charge runs out, gently glide the airplane to the halt. Around half throttle seemed to be sufficient to maintain the velocity and climb rate without consuming too much charge Running out of charge at above 6km altitude. As soon as that happens I retract the fan blades (with a custom action button) so their edges face prograde and don't generate drag Speed drops off rapidly as the engines run out of charge, but wings provide enough lift to glide with descent rate of about 5m/s. At this point I thought that I would be able to phys time warp, but phys time warp seemed to pitch down the plane every time I tried to engage it. Maintaining stable descent rate was crucial for me, so I decided to glide without phys time warp A bit of eye candy I actually managed to pass 100 km mark on my first attempt! Problem is, target blip of the flag disappeared at 100 km. Thankfully, KER provides distance readouts for targets: you can see it on the left in Rendezvous window And final splashdown happened at 109.9 km. I honestly did much better than I expected. And thanks to low splashdown speed, the plane is fully intact, as are both kerbals Imma see if I can improve on this

Now that's more my type of challenge! Although rotors are also not very kind to physical time warps, but at least I can move faster Will try to scramble something up for this

My attempt was almost 50 minutes lmao

I hate building rovers in KSP. They're too slow, handling model is way too simplistic and lacks basic stuff that even arcade racers have, let alone racing sims (and I know what I am talking about). And the fact that they can't reliably drive even on x2 physical timewarp makes the whole experience truly dreadful. I genuinely don't understand how some people have the patience to complete Elcano challenges This right here seemed interesting though. Relatively short (compared to Elcano) distances, room for optimizing and creativity... So I decided to give it a quick crack I basically picked up the lightest parts that I could gather up and stitched them up together. Tricycle configuration, with powered Rover wheel at the back and offset to center. I initially wanted to do this with only octogonal strut piece, but the rover was too susceptible to rollovers due to narrow wheelbase, so I added two small cubic strut pieces at the front to make the front track wider. 188kg dry, 376kg with 2 kerbals Planting the flag and showing that rover is fully charged and has 100 charge units I decided to also go south like you to utilize the flats around KSC. After that I proceeded along the shore. I also took off the helmets on both kerbals: we are driving on Kerbin after all, might aswell enjoy the fresh air Breaking your record, and I still have charge to spare And soon after that. what I feared most happened: the rover flipped You clearly stated in the rules that I am not allowed to push the rover as a kerbal. However, I wasn't sure if it was forbidden to push the rover at all or if I was allowed to get out and try to flip it back on its wheels to continue further: I did have more than half of battery charge left. I didn't make any saves, so I decided to take the liberty and flip the rover with Jebediah Back on track! I continued and passed the 9km mark. 10km was so close... And then the damn rover flipped again I tried to fix the situation again like the first time, but Kraken decided to finess me and started to spin the rover by itself violently. Valentina was knocked off her seat in the process. The rover could not be saved And to put salt on the wounds, I flipped the rover at 9.9km... But eh, what can I do. There still is a realistic chance that this milestone will be annulled anyway So here it is: 7.7 km without any pushes, 9.9 km with a push to flip the rover back onto its wheels. I will leave it up to you to decide which milestone to take

Hello everyone Seeing as I almost finished all Main Series missions (except for Minmus, but that will come very soon), I figured I could aswell try to do the other missions. I had a quick look on the requirements of Bonus and Test Pilot missions and I think I can complete them using Mk.2 parts for the Orbiters. Starting with... Kerbin Bonus Series: STS-9 In this mission, we simply need to recover an asteroid and bring it back to Kerbin. I also need to land on runway to get Commander rank List of requirements is small, but that doesn't make the mission less challenging than the others. Making an Orbiter that can recover asteroids and still reenter and fly stable is no easy task and it also needs to pack more fuel than it would otherwise need to compensate for increased weight after hooking up to asteroid. This is the Orbiter I designed for the task ahead Large landing gear, huge wings, grabbing unit directly above the CoM and nuclear engine with tons of dV (it is not fully fueled on the screenshot). It also has solar panels for electricity generation, Mk.2 probe core acts as an extra battery storage and there's also RCS thrusters, although they are not aligned in all 6 directions, but it should be sufficient Here's the rocket that will launch it: somewhat short, one stage and very "orby" fairing First we need to wait until next morning for suitable launch window: asteroid's trajectory seemed to be highly inclined relative to Kerbin. After that, the rocket ascends towards northeast I had way more deltaV that I would need, so instead of waiting for asteroid to get into Kerbin SOI, I decided to escape Kerbin and encounter the asteroid in interplanetary space. So that's what I did With a bit of small adjustments we encounter the asteroid and hatch up to it. I also picked a class A asteroid so it won't be too big and heavy Asteroid was on an impact trajectory, so not only am I completing the mission, I am also saving the Kerbalkind. I did small adjustment to raise Kerbin periapsis and enter its atmosphere to aerobrake. First reentry was rather toasty, so for subsequent aerobrakes I raised the periapsis a bit more and while at it also adjusted the inclination so it would match the equator After parking in low orbit and waiting for suitable descent window, I did a retroburn and entered the atmosphere for the final time. During my aerobrakes I noticed that plane was somewhat unstable at higher angles of attack, so I had to do final aerobrake facing directly prograde. It got extremely hot, nose cone reached 98% heating, but we survived. Although at the end of reentry phase I still spun out of control, but this actually allowed me to shed off the velocity much more rapidly. I would've otherwise overshot the KSC but because of that I actually lost all of my speed pretty much directly above it. I also managed to recover from the stall, although I had to fire up the engine briefly to recharge the batteries I did a small circle to align the Orbiter with the runway Nice controlled landing One Space Potato Walnut delivered to KSC for studies

In addition to what @cantab and @swjr-swis have said, I have couple of more suggestions on the metrics that can be used to judge the submissions Yes, passenger capacity is certainly important for a commercial airplane, but we should not forget about cargo: airline passengers rarely travel without any luggage. EVA Experiment Kit and EVA Repair Kit weigh 20 and 10 kg respectively, so you could use the Experiment Kit as a baggage and Repair Kit as hand luggage. You could use the inventory slots of Crew Cabins as baggage space or add additional space via Cargo Storage Units It is important to set certain limits on sizes and weights of the submitted aircrafts: you could build an equivalent of say an Airbus A380 which can haul lots of passengers and cargo in one go, but what use is such a big plane if it is too big and/or heavy for the destination runway? Of course you don't have such constraints in KSP, but for the purpose of the challenge I think it would be good to set limits on weight and size of the aircraft (length, wingspan etc.) or outright classify the entries depending on these factors As for the Maintenance, I think I might have a good way of rating it: Say, after certain amount of flights we need to do engine servicing. From quick Google search, price of the Boeing 747 jet engine ranges between 12 and 21 million dollars. According to Wikipedia, an engine overhaul for jet engines in general takes up about10-20% of the price of a new engine (in B747 case it is 4 million dollars). So, what we could do is take the engine that the plane uses, divide its price by some number, multiply it with the amount of the engines the plane has and you can get the Maintenance price. This way is simple to understand, easy to rank and it also will influence the coming entries, since the challenge contenders will need to pick their engines more carefully if they aim to make the plane as low-cost as possible

Take your time, I am not in a hurry There is also the Minmus mission left to do, but yes, Test Pilot Series and Asteroid recovery

Huh, I assumed that there was a certain weight limit that one must go under to get the Minimalist rank. From what I understood, it is an "absolute" rank (meaning if you want to get it, you need to break the record) Still, at least I got my fourth Advanced Pilot Precision award