Pds314

The plan is simple. Get from 45 degrees South, 47-48 degrees East. To 39 degrees South. That looks like this. Rules You must use a boat, and you must not use ANY thrust engines or aerodynamic surfaces (defined as parts with lifting or control surface modules). Also please no Kraken drives. The race starts when you begin moving and ends when you are North of 39 degrees South. Scoring: There are two categories: A. Speed: get there in the shortest period of time possible. Lower is better. B. Freight economy: minimize time * vehicle cost / units of Ore carried. Do not clip the ore tanks. Lower is better.

Well yes. I said BG bearings, not necessarily motorized. As in powered by reaction wheels but using a BG motor to replace the complex, finicky, and often draggy stock bearings, be they Sputnik, Needle, or wheel-based, that have many parts.

I'll bet you could do a supersonic flying wing in FAR even with Juno engines or AJE. Actually, a supersonic flying wing with a two stage sounding rocket slung underneath sounds like a pretty good first vehicle for an RP-1 career, unless you crash it. Though obviously you've gotta be careful about overheating and balsa wood wings so high altitude (but not high enough to suffocate) or rocket-boosted is probably better than trying to go mach at sea level. (also drag rudders might cause too much drag if you just let the regular SAS fly it rather than something a little smarter).

At what point is it better to stop using turbine blades and start using wings on your BG motors? If this is a speed-limited challenge I feel like that's the bigger concern. Throwing a big pile of BG motors or SAS wheels behind a stock prop might break 350 m/s. I mean, people have gotten to like 1400 using stock bearings (twice that with magic wings) so BG bearings have to be better, right?

"Refueling in orbit isn't required but I can't see how to complete it otherwise" I'm slightly confused. Why would you need to refuel in orbit? Won't reentry slow you down? Or is the dV really that marginal that you won't be able to afford landing fuel without hurting the tourists? This challenge doesn't *seem* that bad.

WHOA! 60 DEGREES NORTH?

It probably depends a lot on launch profile. Minimizing entropy and the butterfly effect essentially.

Nothing like that. I'm actually yet to lose any metal. Just lights, wheels, Kerbals, panels and control surfaces. I have not had any confirmed collisions with trees yet. Three that were within less than 5 meters though. Are all the collisions simultaneous? Does it say you achieved some obscenely high altitude in F3? Are any of your parts durable enough to survive top apeed impacts? What happens if you drop-kick your rover off the top of the VAB? Does it jitter or explode or generate phantom forces?

Wow nice. Under 76 km is impressive.

Currently my PC is occupied by an automated rover but I am concept-designing and prototyping some autoloader cannons and possibly flat-trajectory guided smart ammo. As well as a possible lighter autoloading cannon that is based on firing tiny loose dumbfire rounds held in a magazine.

The aim of this mission is to put satellite into orbit without touching the controls once you're off the pad/runway. The scoring is fairly simple. Have the lowest possible Apoapsis with a Periapsis of at least 70,000 meters. Any orbit below that is considered disqualifying. The payload satellite should decouple from the launcher unless you're not using KAL. Don't alt-F12 cheat or use over/underclocking or mods that give an advantage.

These hills are infuriating. They have so many random little bumps that can flip or throw a vehicle that I've cut my prop angle (yes, my tank is prop driven because that's what SAS can control) down to 4 degrees. Here's what happens every 3.8 hours right now: I'm having to slow way down and even then it's no guarantee it won't crash.

If it doesn't affect the run I would say any intervention for documentation purposes is fine.

Well or player action/axis groups. Or other KALs, but there's not really sensor inputs.

This is a bit of an unusual a challenge. The basic idea is to put a prompt for a mission profile, vehicle type, and situation in KSP into an AI art generator such as Craiyon, and try to perform said mission and take a screenshot matching one of the surreal AI-generated fake KSP screenshots as well as you possibly can, especially the vehicle itself, ideally without it seeming too contrived or staged.

I genuinely wonder if there's a way to make useful sensors to control a KAL. Like, maybe using docking ports that undock periodically, and if they're undocked for some period of time, a second KAL controlling the throttle will throttle down or something? Or multiple crafts moving together with one targeting the other so that SAS manipulates a control surface in some particular way. I.E. If the vehicle is on a slope, it throws the control surface around and does something.

I created a course I thought would put the tank on relatively flat terrain to the pole, but accidentally sent the tank through some terrain more rugged than intended, resulting in it eventually failing. The tank made it 33.396092 degrees north. It is pretty badly beat up, minus two Kerbals and with the third loose in the cabin, and with a lot of part connections yielded from the tumbling, and upside down. Jumping 7 meters in the air. Tank is already missing a few things by this point, but I was AFK for that. Perfect landing. 9 meters above the ground and falling fast. Another excellent landing. It trips on something and tumbles. Loosing some parts, as well as stranding Jeb and Val, knocking Bill out of his seat, and crushing in the front right edge of the tank, including busting two wheels. That means the only thing piloting it is now the avionics nosecone and docking port. Fortunately the broken wheel yielded a little upward, which means it isn't dragging most of the time. That is some serious damage.. The wheel periodically clips and causes the tank to do donuts on the low friction wheels. Unfortunately, it flipped the tank, leaving Bill trapped in an immobile upside down busted tank quite far from the KSC. Task failed successfully! Yeah... That might be a bit far to walk back from..

KAL can indeed open and close cargo bay doors as desired. But manually opening them in response to heat definitely isn't an automated run unfortunately.

Not so much long expeditions but I've definitely bent planes and rovers before. Usually timewarp instafixes it.

IIRC there is nothing stopping a KAL from handling long intervals. And if they couldn't, you could just daisychain them off each other. I have managed to get 29.9 degrees north with the tank before chaotically blasting the wheels off in a crash. I might post that run if my current run fails. I've begun modifying the speed of the vehicle in areas that are either untested or very hilly or far into the run on because it's perfectly doable to go 40+ in some areas but in others high 20s is dangerous and I neither want to drive 25 the whole way or crash 3 hours into a run because I'm going too fast.

kOS feels a bit unfair given that it allows easy, simple closed loop control and global keolocation and thus completely eliminates the innaccuracy problem, rejecting all the butterfly effect of mid-course disruptions caused by unpredictable bouncing off the terrain and race conditions in KSP's physics that should normally be causing hundreds or even thousands of meters of midcourse inaccuracy. I feel like if I were doing a kOS rover challenge I would want to make the target location randomized by a kOS script. It would still be interesting to see how far you can make it with kOS but I think it's too big of an unfair advantage unless you can use it in a way that doesn't have access to information a KAL doesn't have access to.

Probably the exact same mountain as mine had issues with. Yeah about the only way to control wheel steering with KAL is to attach the wheel to something you can control, e.g. robotics parts, and steer it that way, or steer it indirectly using control surface collision. Though to be fair, control surface collision isn't a half bad way to do that. I might actually try that since it lets SAS manipulate the wheels, and you can do it in a way that doesn't produce problematic aero forces (or if you really way to, no aero forces at all).

Are there any limits to the propulsion of the boats or can we use anything?

Hmm... Well I just made a light tank for my other challenge (because a fast, rugged, turreted vehicle was necessary for a KAL to pilot it) Making it swim can't be THAT bad, can it?

Not an entry yet but I did think this was pretty impressive. It survived so many jumps.