Sevant

The hardest for me is tied between two missions. The first was my very first Duna landing. I didn't have any concept of calculating delta V at that point, so I just made the biggest rocket I could and went for it. After safely landing my 3 kerbals, I discovered that I didn't have enough fuel to get back into Duna orbit; though I was close. Not one to waste time designing a new rocket (after all, surely there would be enough fuel for the round-trip if my rescue craft didn't have to land on Duna), I sent a sister of the stranded ship to rescue my crew. After getting the rescue craft into Duna orbit, I used the first ship's fuel to make near orbit, and then I sent all three kerbals on EVA and switched rapidly between them to finish the orbit using their jet packs before they hit the atmosphere. After collecting my floating, fuel-starved kerbals, I headed back to Kerbin--and promptly ran out of fuel again. A third rescue ship and a deep space rendezvous later, all three kerbals landed at home no worse for the wear, though quite a lot older than when they'd left. The second hardest mission was building a rocket capable of reaching a stable kerbin orbit using only the parts you start with before doing any research in science mode in 1.1.2. No decouplers, no struts, no aerodynamics, no liquid fuel engines--only the very smallest solid fuel engine for thrust, some girders, a parachute, and a command capsule. A lot of ships (and launch pads) blew up, but good abort sequences and a few autosaves meant no kerbals were harmed in the process. Upon success, however, 1 kerbal was stranded in orbit. I'm sure he'll be fine...

I just logged on to suggest this very thing. I would love such an option, even if it was just popped up a generic list of the maneuver icons on the side of the screen so you could click and drag the icons to adjust the node that way (i.e. instead of having to adjust the node only via the neat but cluttered spherical icon madness that we currently use, add the option to adjust it by sliding a set of the icons which could be individually listed along the edge of the screen). A new icon would have to be added for moving the node itself backwards and forwards along the flight path. Innovine's idea of having a zoomed in view of the actual maneuver node could be more useful (and you wouldn't have to memorize what each symbol does), but it would require a mini-camera window which is fully rotatable, and you'd still have to deal with accidentally grabbing the wrong symbol or moving the node every time you slightly miss-click.

Lol [Ten Character Limit]

Nice job Tidus! OP: Is his run officially a new record?

Nice plane, excellent landing! I couldn't agree more about the stock gear--both for speed and wimpy brakes. I enjoyed your use of a wing to slow down on the runway. As to embedding video, there is a button labeled "insert video" in the advanced post window. It will bring up a box for you to paste the video link into. Once you have done this and clicked "ok", you should see a line similar to this in your post: [ VIDEO] To keep the above text from actually embedding a video, I put a space between the first bracket and the word "VIDEO". In normal embedding, that space is not present.

Cool looking plane Tidus! Just a few things. 1) I'm not sure about the rules on taking off from the runway by suspending the plane on a mount. OP will have to decide that one. 2) Rules say you have to stay under 1000m at all times, even for the return trip as I understand it. 3) I think you need to provide proof of landing. That means a picture of your plane landed, with a screenshot of the mission report (press F3) showing your max speed and proving that your max altitude was less than 1000 m. 4) Some of your pictures seemed to show pretty badly clipped parts. I'm pretty sure parts count as clipped whether or not you enabled the clipping cheat or not. Even without the clipping cheat, I can make the game put whole blocks of fuel-tanks + engines inside each other. (That said, the game clips some parts in minor ways no matter how carefully you try to avoid it. The key in my mind is to do what you can to avoid it, and to not intentionally gain a performance boost by clipping parts.) Keep it up, I look forward to seeing your next entry

Thanks guys!

My main computer is still down and out, and the backup that I'm using can't handle video capture (the game crashes about every other flight even with every other program shut down). As such, I just took a bunch of screenshots for this one. You'll notice that I took a tour of KSC after landing--that wasn't intentional. While braking, Bill forgot to shut down the engines. Even though they were throttled all the way down, they kept him from stopping. By the time he noticed it, he didn't have enough battery left to stop (yay for landing at sunset), so he just rolled around until the plane hit a building. That slowed him down enough to go EVA and push the plane to a full stop. Looking forward to seeing the next fastest plane Edit: Thanks to ihoit and m1sz for helping me get this slideshow posted!

Nice looking plane

I'm surprised that the takeoff speed is so high on that thing, then again, I haven't been flying planes with stock physics since I entered this challenge. As to the MD-160, that's pretty sweet! I suspect rough seas may have been something of a limitation for it though.

So I worked on a new plane today, finally got up to 1,400 m/s with a stable plane. After refining the model I hit 1,510 m/s, but I wasn't good enough to land it (theoretically possible, but not happening with me as the pilot). Thus, I spent 2 hours reworking the plane to ditch nearly all of it's dead weight after reaching speed. The result: a plane that could reach 1,495 m/s with a Kerbal at the helm and was a breeze to fly and land. Yay! Right? Not quite. I finalize the plane design, I start up my screen capturing program, and I do an official run to break the record. I make 1,495 m/s no problem, slow down no problem, ditch all my extra engines without a hitch, turn around, start flying back to land, and the Blue Screen of Death pops up. My hard drive died. That's all there is to it. I have some work to do before I know for sure if I just need a new hard drive or if my laptop has other problems too. I'll try to recreate the plane on a different computer, but all my video editing software is gone (licensed for that hard drive only) so it might be a bit before I can post anything. In the meantime, best of luck everyone!

Nice looking plane! Will it fly if you put smaller wings on it?

Try making sure that your craft is completely symmetrical top to bottom (with exception of landing gear). Small drag differences on the top or bottom of the craft will make it very difficult to fly above 1000 m/s. Also, SAS modules never hurt to keep it under control.

The fairings in my planes don't cover anything (with the exception of the center fairing occasionally covering a small probe core). I use them because they are more aerodynamic than any of the nosecones that I know of. As to covering air intakes, I don't know. There is some speculation about that on the forum, but I've never tried it myself, and it is (I think) against rules (and the laws of physics) to use it for an entry to this challenge.

Would anyone else find it useful to have a landing simulator built into the game? What I mean is this: Have an option to run a simulation where your plane starts maybe 5 km downrange of the KSP runway at perhaps 1 km in height (total guesses, maybe should be adjustable) going at whatever speed you input (maybe put a reasonable limit on this function). The benefit of this would be to test the ability of a plane to land without having to take-off, dump all pre-landing stages, and then turn around and line up with the runway, and then crash, and then do it all over again. What do others think?

Congrats!! Thanks for all the hints too. When I said that I thought I knew what your next entry would look like, that was it (with shorter fairings in my head). I even built that plane, but I kept maxing out at 12,010 m/s because I kept using the other engines. With your tips, it's back to the drawing board

Yep, I found this very disappointing too. I suspect they may fix this limitation later on, but it's just how it is for now. Kermunist is right, struts are the only real workaround.

I don't mean to discourage you, but that sounds overly ambitious for a high school project. Even if you're a brilliant coder and rocket physicist, and even if you limit the game to one rocket design, this is going to take an a lot of time to put together. You should consider if 1) you can complete the project within the appointed deadline (preferably while still having time to eat and sleep) and 2) creating such an elaborate project is worth it. Even if your goal is simply to learn as much as you can, you can learn something from a smaller project, and then continue learning by doing larger projects in your free time (ie. without having a deadline to meet). I suspect that the only way you could complete this project within a school year would be to steal a lot of the physics code from other programs.

On the subject of ripping holes in fuel tanks, it would be pretty sweet if you actually leaked fuel from a damaged tank.

What about bringing spare parts in a storage container and allowing Kerbal engineers to replace things as well as fix damaged items (ie. detach old parts and attach new ones)? I'm thinking this would be useful for situations like having something blow up on a Mun base when it lands. Instead of sending a whole new base, you could sent a repair craft to fix/replace the broken/missing pieces.

Are those small engines in a separate mod or have I just never noticed them in B9? I liked your plane, though I have a few suggestions for making it easier to land. 1) Reduce the amount of fuel you have on take-off. You should only need about 20 fuel units to fly the mission, and your craft will be easier to land when it's empty of fuel weight. 2) Try putting your rear landing gear on your wings. It will let the plane sit lower to the ground and give you a wider wheel base. (As a bonus, it will pitch the plane up on takeoff such that it will take off by itself without pitch input.) 3) Try not to touch down until you're going less than 100 m/s...might not be possible if your plane stalls above that speed. 4) Watch my videos to see how not to land, then seriously question taking any advice from me

I'm not a patent lawyer, so I'm probably mistaken, but I used a quick patent term calculator and I think that patent expires this December... That said, I did have to guess on a few of the boxes in the calculator...wishful thinking?

I don't think that's necessary for reaching mach 4.5...that said, more powerful engines or stronger joints may be necessary. That, or some uncommon genius.

I agree, but I don't just want ramjets (they stop helping at about mach 6), I want scramjets too so we can shoot for mach 24 ...of course that would mean leaving orbit in a matter of seconds once you got up to speed--or rather before you got up to speed.

An hour of tinkering and I can go 5 m/s faster...the law of diminishing returns is rearing its ugly head.