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localSol

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    Sometimes Hypersonic
  1. Good to know! This article is about turbofan nozzles I think , I thought i had heard of compressed air systems too at one time, I wonder if a plane could compress air as it flew efficiently enough to refill air tanks for that purpose. Canards helping mach tuck? I will try this today too with a sort of wild x/cross wing type craft. B9's super tall landing gear are convenient. Spaceplane Plus parts look high quality, I would love an inline mk2 cockpit too, I don't know of any other available.
  2. Cool! What was the blue ring looking part on the front of the first version? Did the one with canards and vertical fins fly better?
  3. Satellite uplink audio recording..Timestamp Apr 12, 1979 : "chht!Ahh, Kerbtraut-33-1 this is foxtrot-32-1, we have the alien scout on radar, we're receiving helium sounding giggling from your communication ID, you're moving out of formation please respond, ahh, over.chht!" Thanks for another great FAR release! I remade the 'MiG-32 Foxtrot' from the game Xenonauts in KSP. It could maybe have fancier shaped control surfaces, I got impatient. It flew amazingly well on the first test takeoff, straight to supersonic after only four struts. !? Maybe too well, I wonder if anything is malfunctioning, but if not, what fun it was anyway! Proportions are a little different from the xenonauts aircraft. Engines are AJE 1.0 stock burning Realfuels 5.1 kerosene. Screenshot album : Craft file (for KSP 0.23.5) : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6231140/KSPstuff/kerbtraut-33_10.craft Mods used (probably require most of them to load it) : Hotrockets r6, AJE 1.0, FAR 0.13.1, RealFuels v5.1, B9 for ksp 0.23.5 patch (and B9), Procedural Dynamics 0.7, Deadly Reentry 4.6
  4. Nice one! I like to see what people come up with, I have never made one quite like that. There are so many possible combinations.
  5. Sometimes I was surprised at what happened. In your pictures your plane is climbing, how is it in level flight? I would think near or over 200 m/s at least. Even that is hard. I made many planes that were under 200 m/s but had other useful characteristics. What are the dark things used on the back? I was looking for an alternative to the stock bicoupler that causes lots of drag in FAR.
  6. I have doubts about it being possible to do much with FAR, but the advantage of ion engines is the high and flat isp. My plane could fly with TWR 0.21 (or maybe lower, I think VOID is not always accurate with these particular electric engines?) But I think the takeoff TWR would need to be higher. Big disadvantages from ion are low thrust and much higher energy consumption. I'll play with the kethoelectric generator and/or a nuclear generator but I doubt even that will help much. Who knows. Also not perpetual since xenon fuel is needed. The energy requirements for a ~0.114 TWR quick test I did with 13 normal ion engines are extremely high at more than 100 energy per second with a xenon-tank to ion engine ratio of 1:2. A nuclear generator from interstellar or near future might be too heavy and require even more engines but I'll give it a try today.
  7. This was hard, but I spent many hours testing a few different things to see what might work, and re-learning a bunch of ksp navigation stuff with FAR in the process. I'll post below an album of one I flew with for about 2 hours real time, making around 4 hours at 2x time compression. I had ot take breaks. No wonder airlines use two pilots! I was going to go for a high aspect ratio wing but by mostly using the FAR static analysis , it ended up becoming something like an airliner hybrid. In retrospect I'll not put wings low for long distance planes especially if they have elevators way back, it was very maneuverable but hard to trim for long distance flight with adjusted elevator travel and FAR DCA at 66. I think FAR DCA and assists were doing a great job considering that this particular design had the trillion battery banks causing a lot of flexing wobble that needed struts to compensate compared to solid fuselage. Cool idea about kethane and other sources of energy, that's probably a good practical solution for long distance flight power backup if kethane is so lightweight. I liked the idea of that generator but never actually knew what to do with it until that suggestion. But solar-only makes it a different challenge being reliant on the sunlight only. Especially like I found out flying east! I was not chasing the sun and hoped my batteries would last. They didn't, I got about 66-75% of the way until I got into daylight, and at such a slow average speed of about 148 m/s, part of the suspense was waiting and hoping the sun would rise while I seemed to float along! I thought I would look for a landmass around 15% energy to land and wait for daylight since I knew I wouldn't make it at about 1:50 in. Of course I mistook the size of the continent under me earlier and then I couldn't see land anywhere on the horizon, until I barely had 3% battery. I coasted but came up just short of the coast. Toast. Ground distance covered 2,253.979 km. Crashed at ~ 136East, 4 South. pictures : http://imgur.com/a/f3Qbx#0 Suggestions for badges/features to give myself (haha) : Brine is Fine - crash into the ocean on the way Charge it - Have more than 100k battery storage Medium mass - Plane greater than 10 tons Flying Tortoise - Average practical speed 150 m/s or less FAR student - Disable all reaction wheels during the whole flight including takeoff and landing Other possibilities : Low Mass - Plane less than 5 tons Ultrasprite - Plane less than 1.5 tons Teh Win - Circumnavigate with only solar power (complete the challenge with all the OP rules) Tiny Spinner - Use only the folding electric engines Tater Power - Use at least one firespitter yellow Lemon-potato electric engine Cool Electric - Use at least one FS1ENE Nose Mounted Electric Engine Lithobraker - Crash or lose parts by colliding with the ground during an attempt to go all the way around. Flying Research Center and Deli - Plane greater than 25 tons How did you do your flight g00bd0g? What qualifies as one night cycle for this challenge if not circumnavigation back to KSC? I guess you didn't circumnavigate on the equator if you traveled a total of 800+km? How long does a kerbin night last at KSC or the equator? And/or how much does that vary over time?
  8. I did lots of tests going between solar challenge and this. Since these electric engines start to lose power at 1000m, the amount needed to get faster than about 200 m/s becomes obsurd(ly funny). I made one that could go to about 280 m/s at 1000 meters, 'batcurve_mintoo_7' . I think the engine placement would not allow for that much power realistically because of wash/turbulence/I-don't-know-what-magical-aerodynamic-word from close other propellers. It also might just tear itself apart, but it was fun to try. I made more reasonably placed multi-engined planes too though. I made an album including nearly all the planes I tested including more practical but slower planes with some descriptions here : http://imgur.com/a/PXxpG#0 I don't expect my fastest one to be entered because it bordered too close on un-landable and unstable. Good challenge idea, I'm glad for the opportunity.
  9. You're welcome and thanks! I didn't see the battery powered challenge, I'll check it out now. I built several more planes today but they didn't work the way I expected. Fun though. I like challenges that give participants the opportunity to show what they've done in many ways instead of or in addition to a point system, since to me challenges are best with flexibility, discussion and experimentation. The badges people come up with can be pretty hilarious. I would track multiple entrants but I can see how it can be inconvenient.
  10. Thank you, yes, I didn't notice that but I get the same thing and it makes sense to me. I could improve resource and part efficiency by using less panels. More panels in more places let you maneuver better though of course a plane with no batteries is unusual to do that. At 8000m my plane's electric folding prop made 5.2kn at full throttle using 4.95 energy units per second reported by Fusebox. It uses 20.02 energy units at 1000m at full throttle. There, even at level flight it seems to reduce power over the first 5 seconds that I can maintain full throttle, from 23kn to about 21kn. I wonder what that is simulating about the engine if anything. The drag on the propeller reported by the right click menu seems much lower than my first conic part, I wonder why that is too. I don't know. The 7.5 monopropellant in the mk2 pod weighs nearly 1/10th of a ton so I got rid of it. I don't remember if that's stock or part of modular fuel tanks but the flexibility of that mod and/or real fuels is really great. Edit : Until g00bd0g comes back the unofficial unserious scoreboard of unordered maximum forum props and props : [g00bd0g came back]
  11. Nice forward swept one. Funny that, I guess a poor transonic kerbal would really be obliterated. I have DRE, I wonder if it would do that. How can you get so much power with what looks like only 15 panels? The pointing straight up must help, though I had to use 30+ for one folding electric engine. With one engine I had takeoff TWR of about 2.0(!), I wonder what 2 or 3 engines would do? I noticed some weird drag effects sometimes with procedural fairings on reentry where the drag was down to practically 0.000. Can't be right? Otherwise I used a huge one as a very good lifting body on a rocket with no unusual effects AFAIK yesterday. I'd like to get something to takeoff at 35 m/s! To the drawing board. Qualifying for land-ability : Adjusted landing gear position relative to center of mass for more neutral gear position , adjusted control surface purpose and travel, added flaps and spoiler function with FAR for better takeoff and braking while landing. On this particular attempt, I flew down too steep while landing and scraped the wing a little - it is easier to land than that usually. Tail elevators maybe could use toning down slightly. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZftZE93OTCc Craft file : https://www.dropbox.com/s/5v7ypiau7lueoey/Solarscreech5.craft
  12. I remember your amazing nuclear powered land vehicle with suspensatron suspension. Another good plane. I like the all-pwings tail. Are those panels inside a recessed fuselage? Cool. I'm glad you mentioned 5km for a good altitude, I used that to start on another plane. [720p in Kerbalvision where available] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjjemvKuXr0 I made this 'K-84 SolarScreech' based on the F-84H Thunderstreak aka Thunderscreech which was capable of 299.517 m/s, with a gas turbine propeller and "emitted ~15 sonic booms per second, even at low speed". They say it was loud(!), I've never actually heard a recording. This solarscreech is just barely fast enough to start mach effects and get the atmospheric sound mod activating, which was really fun listening to. Very twitchy plane and hard to take off especially without the command pod's standard reaction wheel enabled, and I didn't even try landing! For level flight speed I was able to maintain 250 m/s at about 5580 meters for 5 seconds and 248.7 for 10 seconds at about 6100 meters, both in video. Craft file : https://www.dropbox.com/s/adddcnjsrzp4d9r/Solarscreech4.craft
  13. I'm using it like that too. With KSP mod admin you can uncheck the kinetech animation folder when installing it to keep the plugin from being installed. I recommend the mod a lot, I hope it doesn't cause any confusion lately because I have been adjusting it as needed without remembering for the newer ksp versions. Also for smaller parts you can use StretchySRB that has 0.5 and 0.625 diameter various tanks and also diameter-stretchable (which it calls super-stretch) SRBs and more. Edit : Also the included module manager is an old version, and I removed the ballshark to save space. Also there is ballshark.dll and basicpropscript.dll which I seemed to have removed. Hope it helps.
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