panzerknoef

The problem rn is that the mk1 crew cabin is disproportionately cheap compared to the other ones, giving it a massive advantage. At least, that is a problem to me...

Not a fan of this, once again, all work should be done to lighten to load on the judges, not increase it. If you're gonna work without classes, how are we ever gonna set up a system of range requirements etc? Though I do agree that certain kinds of classes could be a sub-class of another one, and those could then be assigned by the judges depending on the plane's ability.

Challenge is basically closed because of technical issues rn

I'm really not a fan of reorganizing the classes of planes to be honest. I wouldn't say we've ever really had issues with them or felt limited by them in any way, not were they unbalanced. Ofc some changes here and there are never a bad thing. The helicopter part though, I would leave that out entirely, these craft are too different from what the challenge started from. Cargo planes... Idk, it would probably not be too much effort to make a plane with a cargo variant. The thing I worry about most here is that we have an overly large amount of classes to choose from, this complicates judging again since there will also be less planes to compare against and more specific stats to remember. Remember, we should do absolutely anything to make judging easier, not the opposite. Judging killed this iteration of the challenge, we can't let it happen again.

Interesting, I'll surely try that out next! I haven't really carefully considered anything of this craft tbh, it's just a quickly thrown together ball of engines and power! Guess now's the time to add some subtlety

okay well, here we go again... adding a few more engines gives me the Speedster mkIII (I did promise overkill so that's exactly what you're getting) It managed a top speed of 3581.5m/s (if you're taking orbit speed that is, otherwise it's 3399m/s). and the surface speed window as well

Time for my second entry The Speedster mkII Maximum speed achieved: 2929m/s I'm pretty sure this behemoth can do better, but this is a quick first attempt.

Oh lmao, we don't even have to stay under 50km all along... That makes excrements a whole lot easier still... Time to strap some overkill together and go for another run

I've been trying around a bit myself the last few days, does indeed seem that a price increase is unnecessary. You need twice as many cabins compared to now. I dunno about the weight, but with that many cabins you'll definitely have quite a lot of drag (unless you go slinky style ofc, but let's just discard that rn). This change would drastically impact plane sizes and prices ofc, so we might need some time before we can say what prices are average again. I do hope these changes would make other cabin types more interesting, should give us more variation in aircraft design as well.

I'm just wondering, can the altitude of the plane never exceed 50km, or does the speed record have to happen below 50km, after which the plane might glide up to an apoapsis higher than that altitude. Regardless of that question though, here's my first record attempt. Presenting: the Speedster mkI Top speed of this little aircraft was 2214m/s, with an apoapsis of 48km. Pictures in the spoiler below.

I agree with pretty much everything @Box of Stardust has said here. As much as I am a fan of a pricing system that could be integrated, it does seem to me like the first plane that is posted should not adhere to any of those rules. Think of every company as one that had massive amounts of economic support from all kinds of places leading up to their first plane. As he said as well, jumbos and supersonics were by far the most submitted classes. They are however as well the most tedious classes to judge since they take a long time to review. I would rather not see people submit entire catalogues of aircraft at once though, even if they would be split up between a primary and secondary queue. My opinion is that people should still be restricted by a hard cap on the amount of planes they can have pending. So if they want to upload a catalogue, let them do it in smaller pieces and it'll be fine. I would also like to keep the categories that we started out with in the challenge, the more we add, the more tedious reviewing is going to become, and that should always be prevented. Now on the topic of cabin rebalancing. I suggest we nerf the mk1 cabin down to 4 people, which will still make it the best price/passenger cabin out there by a fair margin, but it'll at least make it a lot more difficult to spam like before, giving other cabins a chance to actually be used properly. Mk2 can actually stay at 8 people for me, giving it a use other than added luxury. For size 1.5 I would suggest something like 16, size 2 can be 24 and size 3, 32. Oh, and then there's size 3S1 which should keep the 2 passengers that it can actually carry. Perhaps we should consider modding the cost of the mk1 cabin to about 1000 to keep it somewhat in line with the other cabins. Aaand, that's all I have to say for now...

Challenge is currently closed as we are discussing how to revive it in a way that's suitable for everyone. Please hold on to be your plane until that time as it won't be reviewed right now.

Shall we bring up the topic of rebalancing crew cabins as well? Size 1 obv needs to fit fewer passengers, size 1.5 and 2 never got anything assigned iirc and now there's size 3S1 as well

We should however force people to take some margins when it comes to calculating range... I didn't like flying a plane for 20mins just to get the exact right situation in which the plane manages its described range. Perhaps something like a 10% margin that should be taken off the range as you calculate it first. Then what remains should become the advertised range.

Sounds like a pretty good idea to me. Especially since the most problematic planes are usually the jumbos, this system of yours would work pretty well at preventing people from spamming poor quality jumbos.