Piloter

OH MY KRAKEN they're making boats easier?! What about all the arcane tricks for high-speed water bugs that aren't just 'spam intakes'? ...Of course, per Nathan and his badS drag cubes, this will only result in making them /faster/. Mach 1 in water here I come. Forget the hype train, it's time to fire up the hype-drofoils!

I had an all-terrain flying, foiling Kerbal rescue craft once, way back in .23. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/30411-Boat-Thread?p=536407&viewfull=1#post536407 . I LOVED that thing but subsequent updates broke it thoroughly as well as its total dependence on mods. I didn't get much further with the basic design in subsquent revisions but I finally decided to take another serious stab at it but with a twist. This time, add space! Functionality/parts mods used: Mechjeb FAR Ven's Stock Revamp (Some visual / effects mods...CollisionFX, Astronomers, EVE, etc.) The "Barf Bag" will launch into orbit (100km tested), circularize with fuel left over, deorbit itself, eject the deorbiters, glide down through the atmosphere with nothing more than airbrakes--no radiators, no heat shields, no nothing (thanks to the awesome conduction properties of girders), go into flight mode to find a suitable body of water--controllable at at least Mach 2--and then slow down just above it, parachute down, pop off the parachute symmetrical foils, and go hydrofoiling. A spinal SpeedPak provides additional range for flight mode or foil mode and doesn't impact speed in either. On the water, it'll hit 140 mph (~62mps) stable for ~5 minutes or a conservative 60 mph for somewhat longer. When done or when it's time to picnic it'll roll up out of the water and cruise on gear. If you find a decent upslope after that it'll also take off again and fly controllably! Yes, you read that right, the flying hydrofoil gets punted to and dropped out of orbit. It doesn't get much more multi-mode. This was built from the start to be able to carry a passenger and a pilot. I tried rebuilding it in single-seat mode with lighter components but it doesn't work nearly as well. Replacing the turbojets with regular jets also did great things for the range but reduced the top speed to a mere 60mph. So to heck with that.

Added 213, 212, 349, and craft files. Whew!

Added 1078, 1077, 283 and Super Lorin. Still to come, BV213, BV 212, BA349, craft files.

Added Ente, 328, 162E. Still to come, HE 1078B--the dual-nose beast, HE P1077--jettisonable landing gear and rocket boosters to get to speed, a little toy of a plane, FW 283 and Super Lorin--both flying and totally awesome, BV 213--high wing low engine, BV 212.3, all sweep and no tail, and the infamous BA349 "Natter" nutter, vertically-launched to great fanfare. All done and waiting to screenshot and post.

Combine appreciation of small fighter planes / parasite craft, wacky late-WW2 German technology, late nights, hotel rooms, and life on the road with the work laptop, and... Drawing from the Emergency Fighter Program (Jägernotprogramm) on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Fighter_Program), basically the Luftwaffe was getting its country handed to it by Allied bombing raids and was running out of supplies and time. So they tried to get some cheap, experimental, did I mention cheap ideas in the air in a hurry. Since we just passed the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain I thought I'd take a crack at some of these wild and crazy designs and folks with torque-wheel-powered Spitfires can shoot them down. So far I have 11 of them that I will post sequentially here. ONCE ALL OF THEM ARE POSTED I will put up the craft files. Parts-affecting mods used: Mechjeb & FAR modules Ven's Stock Revamp FAR Rules: No more than an hour or so spent per design, and most of that swearing at KSP for no good sweep wings, stock, with the CoL at the correct point. No endless tweaking and optimizing, reflecting a real-world lengthy dev time. Nope, they have to be in the air and working properly within a couple of launches. Part clipping is sloppy and quick, I'm aiming for realistic design goals (climb time, endurance, speed, takeoff options) and manageable handling in the air (basic T&B and B&Z styles) at altitude and sea level, at a realistic range of speeds. SAS added to simulate a trained test pilot and not a huge time spent optimizing control surface responses etc. Craft 1: Skoda-Kauba SK P.14, a ramjet monstrosity that required a rocket undercarriage to get up to speed. http://www.luft46.com/misc/skp14.html This flies surprisingly well if it survives the launch--turn on SAS, pitch down and hold until ~60m/sec, let off and let it rotate at ~80, pop the gear off and let them explode then fly as normal. I needed the airbrakes to get the CoL/CoM in the right places for some unfathomable reason. Thrust limiter at 50 gives it realistic endurance and climb rates. Craft 2: Messerschmidt P.1110 Ente The P.1110 was a normal-enough looking craft, with an annular intake behind the cockpit for the turbojet. This was boring. The Ente was a special bird. By which I mean a special duck. http://www.luft46.com/mess/meente.html It had canards, hence duck, and looks like what a lot of folks make as a standard high-altitude interceptor / SSTO. This went together fast and I didn't put a limiter on it because there's a real shortage of data beyond a projected top speed of 1,000m/sec. Without thrust limiters I've gotten it up to 2,800 so yeah, maybe a little OP. Service ceiling around 23.5km, VNE is somewhere around Mach 3.7 (has a bad habit of coming apart explosively) and maneuverability is much better suited to boom and zoom passes as you'd expect. Flies pretty much without drama and honestly wasn't as much fun as I was hoping. The normal ones tend not to be. Don't worry, they get stranger from here. Craft 3: Junkers JU328 The Volksjaeger was going to be replaced, which makes sense if you LOOK AT IT WITH YOUR BRAIN. This was actually the winning design of the whole EFP, was going to be made into a stretched night fighter as well but never made it into production. http://www.luft46.com/junkers/juef128.html This one was a little frustrating. The swept wings part, again, would have looked great but due to them being an ancient part the CoL is at the forward wing attachment point instead of in the middle--therefore unusable. The wings on this look proportionally too short the way they're built. It glides very well. A little TOO well which is why I had to configure control surfaces as airbrakes. There's no real yaw control during landings so last minute sideslip is not recommended. Limiter set to 50-60 produces semi-realistic performance (13km service ceiling but the rate of climb is a HELL of a lot more than 22m/sec) but 100 makes it frankly a really fun plane. Turn and burn works better than expected with the wide swept area and it's agile enough--especially for an early jet fighter--to pull off some impressive direction changes in not a lot of space. Energy conservation is always a factor with the lower thrust but not as much as I was expecting. I can see why this design won the competition based on wind tunnel results. Rotation happens...eventually. At 50% thrust, there's not a lot of runway left. Craft 4: Heinkel HE 162E "Volksjaeger" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_He_162 http://1000aircraftphotos.com/Contributions/Visschedijk/Additions/Heinkel_He_162_A-2_3-view.htm When you've a surplus of engines and a shortage of airframes, you get Kerbal-creative. This was designed to be a throwaway fighter and trials had severe glue problems as well as endurance problems--30 minutes. They were still fast (~550 mph at sea level) and with better range than the ME-163 rocket fighter. Notably the B variant was the actual inspiration for the minature fighter program...but it lost the cool wingtip dihedrals. The E variant, never built, integrated a mixed power plant, a BMW turbojet with a BMW liquid-fuel rocket mounted just behind the exhaust for 'boost power'. I built this as a RAPIER engine with a very limited oxidizer reserve. The 162 was what got me started on this mad project. I built a normal one, read about the E, and made that my first EFP plane. You can tell because I bothered to put something in that looked vaguely cannon-like. Rotation happens around 60-70 m/s, where the ramjet should be building useful thrust (historically), then 1 activates the rocket mode to zoom-climb to operational height in no time flat. Or, if you've got the time, saved for later use. It maneuvers disgustingly well. In all respects this is a GOOD plane and has decent endurance at cruise. It's Wile E Coyote at its best but all the zany dihedrals actually bloody work...I have so much more respect for German engineering in general after being able to recreate things like this without massaging excessively. If I work on it further I'll probably smooth the gear in a little, but quick design time limits and all. Craft 5: Heinkel HE P.1078B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_P.1078 http://www.luft46.com/heinkel/hep1078b.html Tailless, twin-gondola, flying wing, what's not to like? This was hell trying to get together, finding a way that would blend fuselage and cockpit and intake without getting way too wide with the couplers and etc. I tossed a bunch of five-minute designs before coming up with this. Turns out that a fuselage with about 150 units of fuel weighs the same as a cockpit and nosecone. With the thrust limiter at something reasonable (~50-60) this flies surprisingly well, great lower-speed handling. With the thrust limiter at 100% it'll pull mad Gs, yo, without disintegrating. Heinkel was onto something here. Also possibly on something. I'm not terribly happy with the proportions but--see Emergency Fighter Program. A little fiddly with yaw but these things tend to be. Rotates north of 100m/sec, jettison trolley at ~1km. Craft 6: Heinkel HE.P1077 Another last-ditch effort. Prone pilot, four RATO boosters for takeoff and a jettisonable wheel dolly. Small, cruciform tail, near-vertical climb to combat height, all of 5 minutes of endurance. Very Kerbal. This one will boom and zoom to 12km (operational altitude) in about a minute after rotation, following which the fuel will last for about five minutes. It handles pretty respectably all things considered. Craft 7: Focke-Wulf FW 283 http://www.luft46.com/fw/fwta283.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focke-Wulf_Ta_283 A low-wing interceptor with turboramjets on the tailplanes and a rocket engine for takeoff. I couldn't find a fast and decent way of replicating the sheer badassery of this (c'mon, it looks like something out of Crimson Skies) with the Mk 1 parts so I wound up using a Mk 2 setup. This resulted in a craft that is, yes, considerably bigger than the original, but looks oh-so-good. Given the whole limited supplies I think that a recovery mechanism for the rocket engine isn't entirely insane. This flies VERY well. It's fast. Good god is it fast, even with 50% limiters. Generally you're rotating at ~120m/s, climbing out at 45-60 degrees when popping the engine at 1km and already nearly exceeding Mach 1! The residual momentum alone that imparts to the engine and chute means you can loop around and fly underneath it a couple times before it splashes down. I nearly cheated on this by spending more time getting it better after the first few launches. Hidden (sort of) struts and hidden (sort of) fuel lines, and control surfaces to mask ugly rear edges. There's a lot of turn-and-burn baked into this but without a good G-suit (vintage 1946) I wouldn't want to try it in combat. Honestly this is just FUN no matter what you're doing with it. As a side bonus (pictured) if you try to rotate too soon and tail-strike the engines off, the rest of the craft survives much better than most airplanes tend to. Craft 8: Focke-Wulf Super Lorin http://www.luft46.com/fw/fwsuplor.html This was a development of the FW-183 Huckabein, radically so, with ramjets on tailplanes and built small. I'm not a fan of the Huckabein or the high-tail Volksjaeger (not the one above!) just because they're basically the same design and they look weird and not aesthetically pleasing to me. This variant caught my eye and almost ran me over the time limit. Problem is, turbojets in KSP with Ven's weigh ~1.8 tons and that is a HELL of a lot of mass to put behind a physical airframe center on a short plane! I had to clip many, many, many tanks together to try and compensate (check out those bands). Once done it flew better than I had ever expected for something I figured was going to stay a display model. This gets a little bendy during manuevers but holds together better than expected. Struts on the tailplanes and boom to fuselage would probably help. Craft 9: Blohm & Voss P.213 http://www.luft46.com/bv/bvp213.html Tiny, tiny, tiny. Part of the Minaturjaeger program and projected to use the pulsejet from the V-1 as a cheap source of motive power. (This joined the pulsejet HE162 and EF126 as contenders.) Wooden wing, two-part preformed steel fuselage, to embody the design philosophy that 'quantity has a quality all its own'. As a KSP quickie recreation, there's no SPACE to put anything. Tweakscale would have really helped here. There is heinous sideslip--exactly as you'd imagine--but otherwise pitch and roll authority are pretty good. The typical drunken weave involved with trying to keep one of these in a more or less straight line to intercept probably would've helped to avoid fire. With boosters and pulsejet on at once rotation is a little north of 80m/s. For some reason KSP won't let me equalize out the fuel in the boosters--I keep setting the one at 16.8 to 18.2 and it reverts every time afterward so the last couple ms of thrust may act to unbalance the craft a little. Has a realistic cruise endurance. Screenshots were hard to get, every time I'd let go of flight controls and swing the camera it'd try to plow into the ground. Not a terribly capable airframe and I understand why it was ditched in favor of the EF126. Craft 10: Blohm & Voss P.212.3 http://www.luft46.com/bv/bvp212.html Swept-wing, tailless, external drop tanks, with an ideal range of ~4 hours on internal fuel. This integrated the intake duct with the fuselage structure in a very odd way. Looking at all the variants, this was the one actually presented and the one that seemed most 'cool' to replicate for funky dihedrals and so forth. Apart from a degree or so of sideslip wibbling this can do a very credible turn-and-burn approach, like everything with a wide wing sweep and comparatively thin chord. I may have gone slightly overboard with fueling, cruising at 6K or so takes a couple notches of power and gives the proper 4 hours of range. Down at sea level that increases to ~8 hours as measured by FAR's data calculations. With external tanks that number goes way, way, way up. I might see if this can be a circumnavigator someday. Service ceiling is a semi-realistic 12km, things get a little coffin-corner-y up there. Suggested Vmax is around 280m/sec although there's no compressibility problems approaching Mach. Rotates between 80-90 mps. Craft 11: Bachem 349 Natter http://falkeeins.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/adder-affair-bachem-natter-feature-from.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachem_Ba_349 Oh boy, where to start. A point defense, vertical-launch, rocket interceptor, basically consisting of a rocket engine section which the Luftwaffe wanted back, a pilot that they could take or leave, and a nose full of HE (or rockets) to give to the Allied bomber formations. 60 seconds to operational altitude with quad additional boosters to be discarded at ~1km, and a theoretical ability to glide back down. This will hit altitude in the alloted time, and how, pitches down a LOT easier than up, and glides in a reputable fashion. I hated to use a part that wasn't stock, but the ablating engine from Ven's Stock Revamp proved perfect for this where the aerospike and T30 were both wrong. 1 engages and disengages the engines...after climbing to altitude and diving down on imaginary bombers, there is a little bit of fuel left to do whatever one wants with. For what it's worth this does well as a glider, as the real one did, and landings may be just as big a problem. I had to clip things all over to make this work and there's a real shortage of small surfaces so the tail was more work than it needed to be. As far as overall layout of boosters and control surfaces this is a little closer to the B variant for the 0.5 of you who care. Fun fact, if you don't cut off the engines for an apogee of 12km it'll hit 40. Landing is via parachutes...two for the engine, one for the pilot. Don't touch the stick during ascent, just turn on SAS and pitch to taste. Not responsible for dead zones causing hilarious chaos, especially in the yaw axis! Craft download: https://infotomb.com/noq6a This was a hell of a lot of fun. Next time I'm on the road I may make a couple more 'bonus' wunderwaffe in this vein and post them accordingly. Give these a fly and let me know what you think! If you tweak them into production-ready variants, post 'em back up. If you stage elaborate KMP battles with these as the expendable mooks, post up photos.

Thought I fixed that this time.

Quick, somebody replicate the old Bean-With-Bacon Megarocket, as flown by Commander Billy "Keen" Kerman...this is entirely fantastic, from the idea to the promotional shots and trailer (which had both me and the CoPiloter laughing our collective assets off). This should BE the starting equipment on the tech tree!

If you end up with "Part model requires an entry purchase in R&D.", go back to the R&D building, click on the tab, click on the AR202 part, and "research" it. That should make it available.

So will it let you semi-break the tree structure (one-to-three adapter, three fuel tanks or whatnot, then a three-to-one adapter that will have ALL the tanks connect)?

Which means it actually fits better into the game as I see it. A mechanical version of Jeb is just as capable of thoroughly screwing up an ascent, lithobraking a landing, or oscillating a hypersonic fighter into a million pieces as the best Kerbal-controlling human can. One thing that suggests itself is the idea for incremental improvements to MJ with the tech tree in career mode; starting off with controls to hold angles and a pre-programmed time for retrorockets to fire, like the first few flights of the Mercury project...up to and including taking the RCS controls away from Scott Karpenter...and progressively unlocking things like docking module, orbital information, burn scheduling etc. A properly evolving flight computer, so players who want to automate can focus on that development but everybody starts with learning the same basics.

Count me in, please, that's a great Space Age / tinker gnome style, perfect for the world we play in.

Presenting: The Mosquito. This started as an exercise in Manley Minimalism--following his VTOL 7-part jet--but it didn't work right with FAR. So it grew and then I ran across the Convair XFY Pogo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_XFY_Pogo) and thought 'That looks like a good idea!', then I started playing around with SM's PDE engines and, well, it got a little out of control from there. Mods used: B9 Aerospace FAR SM's Pulse Detonation Engine @ http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/29827-Pulse-Detonation-Engine ACTIVATE THE COMPRESSOR AT THE REAR BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE otherwise you have ~45 seconds of full power. Takeoff at ~5 notches of power, rotate at ~120m/sec, lands at ~90 m/sec but has all the aerodynamics of a brick once you cut the engine. This is a convenient coincidence. Won't go transonic until 2500+m and lacks some yaw authority, but it'll acrobatic as much as you like. 1 toggles airbrakes (useful in dives), 2 toggles main landing gear, and the party piece is X to cut throttle and 3 to drop the rear legs. Stage to pop the 'chute, it'll stabilize the airframe as a drogue until full deployment will bring it down to land on the rear legs. A kerbal on EVA can repack the parachute without climbing down and not only can you take off vertically (full power helps) but you can land it on the main gear. The version shown in the bay is the not-for-export version featuring Bill 9000 and a custom-made tank of compressed air for zooms above intake effective altitude. A skilled pilot may be able to get this thing into orbit without it. If you add jet fuel drop tanks to increase range, keep them inboard or roll authority suffers. Craft file here: http://www.filesend.net/download.php?f=55bb5e54b108ace002ffd3916b022006 Fly and enjoy!

Thanks, SM, your mod is fantastic! I've created a couple 1950s-pulp-movie-styled ships with them, made a 7Gs-in-a-straight-line acrobatic drone and accidentally punted it into orbit, built my first successful SSTO, launched a tiny rocket into orbit (8 parts, canards as tall as the rest of it), and even adventured into part modding to make a CompressedAir droptank! When I get my hydrofoil working again--it hit ~300 mph with the F117 engines--it'll be getting PDEs. There is NOTHING like rocketing Jeb into LKO on ~13 units of jet fuel and being able to aerobrake to recompress air when it's running low.

I'm still having the same issue that I was having with Damned Robotics--moveable surfaces attached to anything that moves, don't themselves move. (YES, I'm still trying to refine my flying, driving, floating hydrofoil.) Easy example: Stick a winglet on the end of a piston or on a power hinge. Controls say they're moving, but the surface itself won't and it kind of screws up anything with gimballed thrust as well, such as the B9 F117 engines. This seems independent of version of mod (happened with DR and the modded DLLs for .20/.21 as well) or whether or not FAR is installed. Am I missing something obvious?