goduranus

Ok no nukes and ions plz, cuz it would involves mods which not everyone is willing to download. I also fear it might turn into "who can wait through the longest ion drive burn". Though submissions with nukes and ions will still be recorded. Also, how about a max weight per launch limiy? What would be a good number here? 200tons? 1000tons? Or less?

This might be a fun challenge, see how far you can get from the Kerbin sun the end of one Kerbin year, which is a bit over 426 Kerbin days. There are varied considerations which could make this interesting, such as how you build your craft, whether you wait for an orbital refuel, whether you spend slow down to refine fuel at an asteroid, what combination of gravity assists you perform, and your final solar ejection vector. How to perform this challenge: Start a new Sandbox game on normal difficulty Build and launch whatever rockets you need, can be more than one Perform whatever maneuvers you need, including gravity assists, orbital refuel, IR scan for near Jool asteroids or asteroid refining Time accelerate while watching the "Universal Time" clock(the clock on the top left of KSC screen, or craft screen when you click on MET to switch to UT") When it says Year 1 Day 426 stop time accelerating and check the craft's altitude, record the altitude any time during Year 2 Day 1 Entry should include a description of your craft(s) construction, and what maneuvers you performed. Hard mode: Do the above in Campaign normal difficulty, and you'll have to consider how much time to spend on technologies and KSC upgrades before you launch, better tech and more upgrades = less time to actually travel the distance Additional Rules The final craft for clocking altitude needs to have a probe core [new]Weight per vehicle launch should be under 1000 tons, to make it fair for people who don't have a good computer [new]Due to concern that the optimal strategy may be a long nuke or ion engine burn, which is boring to wait through, nuke or ion drive will be disallowed, but will still receive honorable mention for people willing to wait theough the burn. No mods, only stock and whatever DLCs come pre-installed with KSP No using exploits or glitches like kraken drives or fuel transfer propulsion All crafts needs to be built or edited in VAB or SPH, no building or editing them with external programs or text editor No using the Alt-F12 menu or saved file editing Discussion, maybe ban nuclear engine and ion engine? cuz waiting for those to perform maneuvers is boring. Also maybe a launch size limit would be a good idea, cuz theorectically infinite deltaV is possible, given an infinite sized rocket then it becomes a competition of how many parts your PC can handle. Leaderboard: Sandbox Leaderboard @sevenperforce240,416,763,013m Asparagus staged single rocket. goduranus 12,408 Megameters Campaign Leaderboard You belong here! Honorable Mention: @Marschig 503,002,934075m Ion Drive @MarvinKitFox 386,628,029,271m Ion drive Kerbol Gravity Assist craft submitted before rule change. My attempt: Failed to even get into solar escape orbit, for a feeble 12408 Megameters

That would be me my Kerbalx also has a fighter with infinite fuel 10x thrust and 20x SAS torque and can fly backwards.

Wild Weasel

Do you mean what is technically possible? or what we should submit for the thread? Text editing allows you to give an engine more thrust and use no fuel, give SAS modules more torque and your batteries more electricity. So you could potentially build a craft with much higher thrust to weight ratio and faster steering. You can also edit the alignment of guns so they line up perfectly instead of being very slightly off when you attach them to curved surfaces. With BDArmory, you can influence of the autopilot logic and change various AI settings, like how much to lead missile launches and how far away to launch them from and how often to check for weapon switches.

The Juno's heat is low enough that IR missiles don't lock onto most of the time. Although, I don't think crafts with tweakable values outside normal ranges should be allowed, the Hedgedrone and Pike both have settings outside of normal ranges. Hedgedrone's AI settings, weapon swap interval, and missile offbore angle are way different than what people can set in game, giving it an advantage over players who don't know to how text edit the craft file: Here I suspect that max G force and max AoA controls when the autopilot decides to break off of its gun run, and by giving them huge values the plane will stay on target's tail when normal planes would have broken off and reset its maneuvers. Also the scan interval, normally is 3, which I think sets how often the plane can switch weapons. Low value helps it avoid cases where the plane momentarily fails to open fire because the target moved into the range of a different weapon, but the AI has yet to switch to that weapon. Also the max Missile on target usually capped at 6 but doesn't matter in this case. And missiles with offbore set to 100 where it's normally 50, allowing it to shoot at stuff at higher deflection angles

I dug at the mod files, looks like R60 is straight up better than AIM-9, having half the mass, but the same thrust and warhead power. So it has twice the acceleration, weights down the carrying craft less and has no downsides.

Rabid Squirrel has 1 mod excluding BDA.

The first two Pike videos are actually Berzerker videos?

Looks like first Berzerker died from friendly gunfire.

Nope that for when it is closing on a target.

I don't know how it exactly it works, but I suspect each craft has a thermal output, increased by devices it has running, particularly afterburners. This is matched by the sensitivity of IR missiles, which is decreased by distance. So the IR missile could get a lock even while the target is not using afterburners if it is really close.

It is a result of the missiles self detonating when it loses the lock right after launch, because the target's heat signature suddenly decreased(for instance, turned off afterburners), the only real solution is to set missile max range shorter so that the missile has IR lock even at the low end of the target's heat signature. Note that when launching at far ranges, the IR missile often locks and gets fired during a heat spike that only lasts a few moments, of it will often self detonate when the target's heat signature returns to normal.

Just had a quick look, the ECM was set to "Toggle" instead of "Enable". When BDAc takes off airplanes spawned in the Vessel Mover, it actually double taps the Gear action group, so it toggles the ECMs off again. This is because Vessel Mover initializes crafts with Gear action group turned off. Set ECM to "Enable" with Gear action group to make it work.

Looks like the Berzerker's downfall was ECM pods not being on constant active, so it was suppressed by radar missiles, allowing Squirrels to get on its tail while it was dodging.

Does AI actually fire rockets? it never did for me, so maybe swap those for bombs.

I swapped Goal Keeper with Oerlikon and had a few amazing test rounds against the intruder, so I got excited and made a post, but turned out Goalkeeper is still better. Also, did you run your Intruder tests with my MUVAs on evasive maneuvers? In my tests of 3 Goalkeeper MUVA vs 3 Intruders, the Intruders were not able to hit the moving MUVAs with missiles or bombs.

Err, I thought I came up with a better design but after some more testing it seems that its early successes were due to luck.

Did you make sure to Spacebar and throttle up the MUVAs in your test? I tried on my end, Intruder's bombs and missiles were not able to hit moving MUVAs. @AlexClark Also an update which fixed how the previous version gets spawned sideways in the Vessel Mover menu, added some ammo as well. https://kerbalx.com/goduranus/Goalkeeper-MUVA

Did it score kills with the hellfire or rockets? Hmmm...

Yup, I think it's overpowered but I think I saw another plane with Airplane Plus engines here, so I am using it.

I got an AA vehicle as well. Not fully optimized yet but is probably sufficient for defeating currently submitted airplanes. Need to set throttle to max and give it a press of a space bar to activate, else it'd be a sitting duck. https://kerbalx.com/goduranus/Goalkeeper-MUVA Note that spacebar also turn on the Guard mode, so if you don't want that, maybe manually turn guard off from the menu, or remove Guard mode from the Spacebar action group.

I am using a bundle of Tiger engines from Airplane Plus because they have better power generation, allowing constantly active ECMs without battery, and also higher static thrust to weight to accelerate out of turns.

Since alot of the good air-to-ground weapons in BDA are GPS guided, try making the SAMs mobile to let it evade most of the attacks, also add some smoke grenades cuz I think that one blocks laser guidance.

Yeah, I use the same user name on that forum.