Van Disaster
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Posts posted by Van Disaster
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2 hours ago, DoctorDavinci said:
@keptin's Rolf-75 Spicypepper vs @Van Disaster's D.A.C Deimos Mk X
That was a little more decisive than I expected
I'll release the Deimos later when it's not a spoiler. BTW, can you guys give some music credits?
1 hour ago, SuicidalInsanity said:Some of you were wondering earlier how the Wasp Mk3.3 would do against the BT-211 SkyRebel and the Tytonid XVI, so here's a bonus battle of champions video.
One thing to keep in mind is under BAD-T III rules, the SkyRebel and Tytonid are not tournament legal - they're direct ports from BAD-T 2, using the BAD-T2 (1.3ton, 38.5Kn) version of the Foxhound engine. So, do these previous champions have what it takes to beat the Wasp?Those on the other hand went about as I expected. I think the old pair could probably do with some AI tweaks given that's changed too ( SkyRebal definitely needs min alt set! ) otherwise yeah, results as I thought.
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Only consideration for vertical tail is "does it control yaw even at high AoA" - especially if it's a spaceplane. For horizontal control surfaces for spaceplanes I'll always recommend canards - pitching up results in positive lift across all horizontal surfaces. This would be a typical design of mine. Forward sweep means there's a natural tendancy to roll into yaw, the engine-mounted winglets deal with that completely.
Demo ascent ( empty, but you can see it has masses of spare power ): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RYGEBkrGBU
Drag-wise, a spaceplane is only hitting mach 4+ in very thin air so I've found it's actually not a big deal to have engines on the wingtips, never mind about shock cones. If you're building for RO earth and Mach 25 then I'm not sure why you're building a spaceplane, let alone a SSTO spaceplane.
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13 hours ago, MightyDarkStar said:
@Van Disaster Until recently I didn't quite have the whole "weight shedding" thing down yet
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If you'd like the craft file to try out I could upload it to KerbalX, but bear in mind it uses Infernal Robotics, some other cosmetic mods, AJE and an older (but fully working) addon to AJE called Real Airplanes.
Heh, well, removing mass benefits almost everything! it's like getting free wing, free engine, free control authority and if you don't overdo it, free structural integrity through lower stresses ( eventually you'll overdo it of course, like Keptin's craft in the primaries showed ). You won't accelerate in a dive so fast, is all.
I'll get back to you if I ever do a bigger 1.3 install, currently only have 1.3 mods for BAD-T in the build ( the only reason I installed 1.3 in the first place, tbh ).
Good fight: final is looking interesting, my own testing showed they're pretty even with end results, a lot of it is down to luck.
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2 hours ago, MightyDarkStar said:
That match was bloody tense. I think I've learned my lesson though - heavy twins aren't suited to this kind of thing. I've been learning how to build lightweight planes with B9 PWings instead and the results have been far better. I hope to submit one next time!
Also, @Van Disaster, I love how you build planes, if you ever want to have a chat about it and exchange ideas I'm always open for a DM.
Unless you're the guy who wrote the autopilot ( and the aero physics ) then no, it seems not
Your craft ( like the P-92 ) could have gone on a bit of a diet though, for one thing you had full fuel tanks! and your wings didn't need to be that strong either. I did some basic tweaking & got the Kestrel down to 5.9t with consumables on board ( I suspect that's quite near 5.5t empty, I don't know ). I did build a more conventional twin ( basically by taking my single-engined plane, sticking a nosecone on, sticking another panel in the wing & gluing the engines there, and then making it a bit longer... ) but although it is actually quite nice performance, it's also not good enough. Probably would be much better if I knew what I was doing with the AI.
https://kerbalx.com/VanDisaster/DAC-Huginn-Mk-I
I don't know how many planes I've built over the years, but it feels a lot - haven't been actually doing much for a year or so though. Have a browse of my screenshot dump if you want.
1 hour ago, tetryds said:@Van Disaster you don't need to worry about how to solve these kind of problems, most of the solutions are not obvious anyway. For instance you don't need to force a hard limit on wing weight, you can surely go faster, but the engine may not be up to the task of maneuvering with a heavy plane. The lower mass limit the more you have to be careful about what you design for because every kilogram counts.
What is the most important is addressing possible issues I may not have thought of, that would help a lot.
It is an inherent game balance issue if you like rather than a tournament rules issue, my thought tree went:
* There's not enough drag for the type of craft.. What does this mean?
- Craft dive too fast, out of proportion with other maneuvering speeds
** can cause aero failues as it's an unusually stressful event compared with everything else and the AP doesn't manage well enough <-- this is the thing; we're not just building fancy planes, we have to deal with the AP and physics quirks. Mostly the AP.
** Looks daft
- Craft straightline speed is rather high
** Looks daft. Well, this one doesn't matter so much if everything is equally overspeeding because you won't really notice it. However it'd be good to be visually different from other types of planes.* Is it a problem?
- Well, the diving thing might be.* What can we do about it then?
- Add drag somewhere. Drag scales with speed, so it can be made not to affect "normal" flight for these craft in a meaningful way.
* Where though? you want people to use any parts from the mod lists without messing around altering other people's parts.
- If we're providing the engines, add more high-speed drag to the engines. That puts a lot of drag on the nose, but these are not fast craft in absolute terms so maybe that will be ok. Test!The tournament balance issue for low drag - note my thoughts didn't even go near any idea of perfomance equalisation - might be "planes don't burn off sufficient energy so there is not enough penalty for having acres of wing" - which I'm *not* talking about, that would be your job. I was just addressing what would be a wierd kink in the flight envelope caused by the parts we're working with. I mean, it's obviously not the only solution; the AP will bust it's own G limits quite happily though so that is not a thing to rely on either.
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1 minute ago, tetryds said:
Or bug @ferram4 enough until he implements a new wing profile for us.
About the airplanes, if they are light enough they can fly at low speeds, but aerobatics require much more careful piloting, which is the reason why the AI is not totally ready for it.
I'm fine with fast/high torque @ low speeds biplanes though.
Yeah, I'm fine with more power ( the reason I argued against it for jets was because they had enough power already, the tourney style just wouldn't let them use it ). Would be nice to limit speeds by engineering limits ( ie, don't pull your wings off! ) but I suspect we don't have anything sensitive enough to manage that - especially if you use struts for rigging - making the engine drag ramp up steeply would let you build planes out of whatever parts you like which can hang off the prop still so the AI is happy, but aren't tearing around at 400mph.
Hm, maybe setting FAR's aero structural failure limit down might also work. Only fear then is people won't pay attention & half the submissions will disintegrate at the first turn...
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3 minutes ago, tetryds said:
Yes there is.
There is even a fully functional rotary engine on airplane-plus.
About biplanes and monoplanes, just like with current fighters and heavy fighters, there could be a biplane and monoplane class.
Still thinking about it though, and it requires testing.
Another deal is that FAR wings don't have a suitable profile for super low speed flight, everything ends up somewhat faster and requires more speed to fly.
But that doesn't seem like a problem to me.
Bit more angle of incidence & low wing loading sorts slow speed out - I've built FAR stuff that'll fly at 25m/s ( albeit I didn't try aerobatics with it ), so it is doable. Not enough drag ( rigging, wing profile ) is the only thing; there is a bonus to higher drag in that you can dive & not reach crazy speeds which will pull your wings off. Maybe just have high-drag engines.
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Yeah, even with the power-management added since then I think you need a bit more thrust than you'd likely have for pure realism. The biplane I posted recently is about as fast as the fastest biplane ever, and that was maybe 15% higher than a comfortable minimum thrust I think ( although I've had it fighting stuff built to tournament rules, so it needed the extra oomph ). Actual WW1 planes you're looking at 120mph top, which is below what half these ones take off at... 1930 I thought a reasonable point of suggestoin with a mix of more powerful old-tech biplanes and experimental wierd monoplanes. Everyone was still using small machineguns still, I think that is probably one of the most important things.
Wonder if there's a model of a single-row radial engine around, that was really common for years.
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AI derp levels high in that one again. Tension right down to the wire though, a near-loss to friendly fire of all things too
that poor pilot at the end was in a bad place...
The sequence starting at 7:35, I just love that, the inverted Kestrel & the Deimos just rising up.
( btw dots n the D.A.C - the game doesn't like saving them as dots for no good reason, they're perfectly acceptable filename characters... )
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From previous experience in dogfight contests - AMRAAMs aren't worth the weight, sidewinders are mostly useful for causing a break-off on the initial suicide pass but you'll get a very occasional kill with them, however you can build a perfectly viable plane that'll just out-maneuver them and that's the stock modern ones rather than the limited '60s versions I'm not sure we have anywhere. Other than having rotary guns so even more burst damage there would probably be little difference to our WW2 props, because the pilot is exactly the same. Jets do have the capability to extend easier if you can persuade the AP it really wants to extend, there is that.
BAD-T 1930 might be lots of fun; low power biplanes & monoplanes, no cannon, severe structural limits.
@Alioth81Welcome! as was said, try looking for BAD-T props or Aviator Arsenal on KerbalX, and you might want to filter results for Ferram Aerospace also. If you've got a 30kN prop engine then I think you have an old version of BAD-T props, the "Griffon" equivalent ( I can't remember the name, it's the biggest one ) is now 20kN. There was some discussion abouit the jet, it's actually not bad especially for twins, but it needs separation at the start of a fight to let it build speed, it's advantage is that it *stops* accelerating at a much higher speed. It works better with the current dev version with the fixed climb throttle behaviour. The jet is pretty hopeless if the fight starts off the deck though ( as were actual WW2 jets ). I would suggest if youi need flaps to take off your craft is not going to work well in a BDA dogfight, unfortunately.
I'm posting this because it's the one I can remember without searching, but if you want some idea of jet dogfights this is all the video from a 1.0.4 (1v1) contest. The problem with 3v3 is you start getting quite bad performance issues, especially if you're trying to cap video at the same time.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMOfiFa_ZSfdns5-FZ8_3vqoeeat0JH8B
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2 hours ago, Joseph Kerman said:
May I host a BAD-T Vietnam?
Also, one problem with the BDAI: they won't trun on Panthers and RAPIER's.
Should use bi-mode afterburning engines just fine. If it isn't now ( because it was in KSP 1.0.5 when the Panther appeared ) then that's a recent issue.
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Good old Holst... you know, I wonder if someone's run a tournament on Duna. You can technically run IC engines in any atmosphere if you premix oxygen ( it was tried in subs recycling the exhaust ), you'd need a really huge prop for Duna though....
Congrats to winner! still a few to go in the other tier.
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I liked it, took a little while to redevelop my plane to a point it could reliably beat it ( my entry was actually meant to be for the *last* BAD-T & was shall we say, a little unsettled by current KSP ), so I just fiddled with the P-92 a bit too
. I do that a lot.
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That was quite brilliant. Mine has inboard ailerons to help it if the outer panel gets shot off ( you can see one flying around for quite a while in the fight with SI's plane ) but it's not *that* good.
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It does switch to "avoiding collision" sometimes when I think it's looking at terrain, I haven't really dug through that properly yet - even then just adjusting the current flight target a little rather than switching behaviour should be ok. You don't ideally want branching behaviour, you want to combine multiple behaviours.
One other thing I don't believe hasn't been suggested already, how about turning on interior overlay of closed cockpits for videoing fights? I wonder if there's some flight suit textures around.
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20 hours ago, tetryds said:
I would personally rather if the battle was the top priority, instead of obeying desired altitude parameters.
I have an idea for that - throwing out the "below min alt" behaviour & just shifting the current flight target waypoint altitiude upwards instead might do it ( the same for avoiding collision with ground ). Might also increase CFIT because the recovery will often be without the craft being wings-level, but you can just increase min alt at that point because it's not going to be so disruptive. Should be reasonably easy to test, anyway.
DrD your music choices are wonderfully appropriate
The P-92 is a pretty solid plane that could just have used a few tweaks, like a lot of entries - the wings are a bit stronger than they need to be ( and so heavier ), and you can put the ammo inside the fuselage where it won't cause drag - the rule was no clipping resource containers into other resource containers, not no clipping of anything. There's other little touches like making sure the tailwheel is inside the fuselage when it's retracted which only make minor differences but are worth doing.
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There's a plane that can shoot straight!
As I thought, I reset the guns on my craft & forgot to retune them...
SpoilerAnd, wierd how it goes - in testing my craft beats the Falcon a great deal of the time, but it lost to the Stribog & that last fight wasn't a particularily close. I wonder if there's some environmental quirkiness.
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19 hours ago, tetryds said:
Yeah, I knew it would underperform a lot, I lose about 40% of lift when turning just because they bend so much, but it didn't matter.
It also has a terrible time trying to aim, for some reason it's simply too bad at aiming
Ouch, that's a bit of a hit. My plane can't aim either, and you can see how twitchy & quick to change nose angle it can be.
As for realism/replicas, while they're intersecting sets they're not the same - I see a discussion about two particular BDA & general structural game mechanics vs real life, which is the same for *any* BDA contest. Replicas don't have to be realistic, just look right ( or you'd never have half size replicas, or VW-powered kit cars, etc etc ). My plane isn't a replica, it's a teardrop fuselage with an elliptical wing and a deliberately small tail, shapes that were arrived at by thinking about function. That it very vaguely looks like a Spitfire if it was built by Hawkers is mostly because they were the only people of the era to really use elliptical wings & that's how that engine & cockpit combo work together in that paint. The only attempts at replicas I've built are the jets, and that was just to try and limit myself to shapes that didn't have any idea about everything we learned since then or they'd look like something out of the 60s. I probably wouldn't enter a replica contest because I'm terrible at replica props. I *did* pay attention to the way the plane looks so it did look like something which might have flown IRL, so if you want to call that a replica then fine - but it really it isn't, it's just a little aesthetic consideration.
On the other hand having to really think hard about how much wing to put on sounds an interesting engineering challenge. Having to get in much closer for gun kills would be nice for running your own fights, but the poor people videoing would have a hell of a workload increase...
I have doubts the SkyRebal would win that one - Tytonid, I don't know.
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I do so love those flappy wings
the Elkow looks like a 30s air-racer, great stuff. Where did you hire those suicidal pilots, Dr D??
The end of the first fight was a great piece of ( perhaps fortunate ) camera work.
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1 hour ago, dundun92 said:
How did you get the green lines in the SPH?
Push F2.
@Eidahlilyou have a point about the guns - my plane was generally flying nose-down for a while as I tried out various amounts of incidence - I think I reset the guns after & forgot to redo them...
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It's not just about wing loading, it's about structural integrity - at the G that craft pulls in turns you'd fold the wings into U shapes ( nearly half the craft mass is in the engine in the centre of the wings let's not forget ) if that was a real wing, and that's not bringing up stresses from speed, or flutter, or a myriad of stresses from rotations. The same reasons let us build crazy spaceplanes, so it's not a terrible thing. There was a fully aerobatic WW2 bomber called the Shorts Stirling ( so much so that it could out-turn fighters ) - just have a look at how monstrous it's wing was to deal with the stresses on that large wing & how terrible the rest of it's performance was thanks to that wing.
Guns-wise, cannon had rather lower muzzle velocity - but most of it would be the pilot trying to even see a plane over a km away through a basic gunsight, when they're trying to deal with combat maneuvers & air turbulence & looking round trying not to get bounced. Successful pilots got kills at 100m, not 1000m...
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Hispanos care not for armour - when I've run tests armoured craft have just lost like they didn't have any. The Wasp takes full advantage of "it's a game" - no pilot ever is going to hit other planes at over 1km with WW2 cannon & those big wings ain't happening IRL either at that weight. If you could get a plane to sit up high & drop down on it occasionally you'd make it stall out a lot & it'd be a sitting duck given how big it is, but I've yet to reliably manage that with the autopilot. It's roll rate isn't great either but with that turn rate it doesn't need to be.
I remember reading about the RAF trying to work out tactics in the 60s of how to fight WW2 prop fighters with Lightnings, because the Indonesians had some P-51s & the Borneo conflict was going on ( I think I would rather have been in a Hunter for that fight... ). They decided in the end that dropping down behind & underneath was the best way ( which is usually not a good idea ), which is just modified B&Z really - unfortunately we can't tell our pilots to do that when they're up against slow turnfighters
I suppose you could have just dropped on top of it & given it a cockpit full of twin afterburners
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I just start a new game every new version-that-breaks-things. Usually use a different set of mods anyway. However I still have every install playable all the way back to 0.18, so technically nothing has ended yet. No idea what the longest in-game is, probably some mad attempt at landing on all the outer planets at the same time.
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14 hours ago, aleksey444 said:
Looks like Slap Chops have a metric excrements-ton of armor. Rolfs seem more maneuverable, but more fragile, too.
What happened to the 2nd Rolf in the last fight? Was he shot, or did the wings fail due to too much speed and stress?
That's exactly why my craft is a bit heavier ( well that and using proc structural parts & a lot of ammo ) - I'd rather lose by being shot than lose by falling apart. Having lost the first fight to SI's plane because it's got disposable fuselage parts, I think I'll be using wings for fuselage in future
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All I can say about that fight is "oops"...
I'll release the Deimos later when it's not a spoiler. BTW, can you guys give some music credits?
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. I do that a lot.
WW2 BAD-T III - BDAc AI Dogfight Tournament
in KSP1 Challenges & Mission ideas
Posted · Edited by Van Disaster
Why can't you insert quotes into posts when you're editing.. apologies for double post then.
* First pass shootdowns, not much you can do about that. One reason a lot of us set huge ranges on the guns is to try and make the other guy break off at this point, if it wasn't for that I wouldn't be shooting more than 700m probably.
* Gun balance - tetrydis put hours into those, they're all meant to have their strengths and also approximate real performance as much as BDA can anyway. If one didn't perform as well as another, then it just isn't as good as another. The 30mm 108 can one-shot kill a plane - the shells were enormous, of course it's ballistics and ROF are worse than the 20mms. There is some balance in the ammo mass.
* I limit distance to about 1500m to try not to waste too much ammo, but the reasons for firing at extreme range you got and I mentioned already.
* There's a G-limiter, it just doesn't seem to work too well. If the plane can pull a human into unconciousness ( these are piloted by Kerbals, mind ) then it might be too heavily constructed to be ideal.
That craft would have done pretty well in the tournament ( judged from a couple of test fights ), well done! you missed disabling the reaction wheels, btw, otherwise ( other than armour which I don't know how to judge ) it appears legal.