Box of Stardust

What's the correct specific way to export all new placed statics in the world? For easy sharing of placed KK locations and all that, and so that they'll integrate properly into other people's installs. Still in 1.3.1 by the way.

And finally, to close off this thread, what better way than to end it with a veteran that once held a place in the skies of ASC. @Earthlinger's Berzerker 2.1 takes to the skies against Viper-ASP MkIIc. Related announcement: with this non-standard location match, I've been considering a new system to make the leaderboard more dynamic and to actually give these locations a purpose other than 'visual variety'. The idea is that, after a number of victories/defending their place on the leaderboard (e.g., #5 spot defends its spot against 4 other aircraft), a competitor may challenge the next place in the leaderboard (e.g., #5 challenges #4) in special combat. The concept so far is an 8-plane reserve, with 5v5 sorties, at the location of choosing and spawn point of choosing by the challenger. What this means is that the challenger gets the advantage in choosing location, if they feel that there's a specific combat zone that complements their aircraft's abilities/reduces its weaknesses. For example, there's two locations that have mountains between the spawn points, rendering all merge scenarios nonexistent, even with pre-routing devices (e.g., Vampire Squirrel MLRS). And with that, I declare this the final battle of this thread. I'll finish the few remaining things of the setup later and the new thread should be up by tomorrow.

And one more: @prgmTrouble's X-15 Exoneratis Hirundo vs Viper-ASP MkIIc. It's like Gunbrick, but with 2 more guns. It should amount to interesting results, right?

New official match. @[INDO]dimas_1502 KF/XIF-X C-100 vs Viper-ASP MkIIc.

Hey everyone, since BDA 1.2 for KSP 1.4.2 came out, you know I had to do some tests. So here are three exhibition battles, where I've discovered new and interesting things! Also inadvertently 'declassifying' some (a lot) of my projects... These dogfights were all done with default hitpoints and 0 armor added. Oh yeah, and I left all the visual mods on, so it's running at about 75-50% real time. This battle was done real quickly and lazily when I didn't yet know what to expect. Both teams started from the runway and were launched to a 15km start. Immediately, you'll notice the flight AIs have done something very interesting and different- they don't fly towards each other right away. Instead, the teams travel indirectly towards each other until about 10km, and only then will they turn in to combat. This seems to have the effect of assisting the AIs in keeping tighter formations when entering combat. Next surviving missile hits. And survivability in general. Wew. Yeah, that's an interesting one. While the rebalancing done in 1.2 (if any) seems to have alleviated some of the 'flying tankiness' of aircraft, the guns still seem way underpowered. However, missile hits do seem to be reasonable in their effect on targets. (Also, my structural rearranging on the PEGASys pays off.) And the dogfights- they're so much more action-packed, though probably partially attributed to aircraft surviving longer and after taking hits. Also, the AI seems to have been improved in behavior. Also, from BDA 1.1, they don't seem to be as liberal with afterburner usage, which seemed to be a bug, which brings us to the next point. For being action-packed however, it costs a lot more flight time. No more emptying your tanks as much as possible guys. Quick and dirty, at least with default hitpoints, is no more. Even me, fueling up my planes pretty conservatively (15m flight time according to Kerbal Engineer), and margins were tight. This is especially an important consideration for my own series, ASC Light Drones, as both aircraft featured here are valid for that class. Also- using Big-S Wing Strakes as fuselage- you see what happens here is that if they're a major fuel tank, you lose one, and that's a fairly significant hit to fuel load... Lastly- weight of fire matters. It mattered before, but it matters even more now because of damage through hitpoints instead of thermal. In the thermal system, heat could 'bleed over' to other parts, from what I observed, and that's the cause of aircraft exploding spectacularly upon being hit with any weapons fire. However here, because parts have their own hitpoints, they rather disintegrate as parts are depleted by more-focused damage. You'll notice that the 2-gun Lynx IIC struggles to down the PEGASys, but the 4-gun PEGASys can actually get kills- and it's a difficult task. Again, hitpoints need to be rebalanced for air combat with the DCK hitpoints tool (probably to 50-30% of default hitpoints). So pretty much, excessive firepower is still probably a valid solution. Cool, so that was just the first match. Then I got curious, so I did a 'standard' match from the Island. This time, I tried seeing if competition start distance had anything to do with the 'turn-in', but apparently not. Still 10km. So anyone starting matches from the default 8km will probably not get this effect (though I have not looked into it). However, aircraft seem to be far more compliant and don't seem to experience 'first takeoff glitch' anymore, holding good formations right from takeoff, and aided in flight by this new 'delayed turn-in' feature. There is also one other new feature that I discovered, however, and it's that because of the 'delayed turn-in', aircraft continue climbing. So what that means is that, by default, the teams will begin combat at higher altitudes, instead of just above the minimum altitude setting. Again, weight of fire matters. But guns on target also matters. 6 guns should be pretty devastating, and they give enough of an edge in this fight it seems. Again, fights seem to be a lot tighter now, especially with hyper-drones that have absolutely ludicrously small turning radii. So, I decided to test the Weapon Manager's gun range setting to see if that was made more effective, and lowered gun range to 700m on all aircraft... Yeah... no. It didn't do anything at all; guns are still used at max programmed gun range on the guns themselves. Though it may be worth looking into sub-1200m gun ranges now, and loading up with more Sidewinders. But again- I've also not tried dogfights with reduced part hitpoints, which may alleviate the plane tankiness. What else is proved here though is that (with default hitpoints extending combat time), matches seem a lot less decisive between planes now. With no more one-look-insta-kills with guns, fights have a greater chance of going one way or the other. Also, plane survivability is pretty cool. And again, fuel may be a concern. Okay! So, the takeaway. Reducing craft-wide part hitpoints to 50% to 30% of default values using DCK's hitpoint tool should be looked into for aircraft. That will improve gun effectiveness; however, that may mean more immediately lethal missiles (post-battle inspection of aircraft hitpoints suggest this may not be the case though, hopefully). Something to consider. But, right now it does feel like I'm playing War Thunder Air Battles at Battle Rating 1... except that the I-153 Chaikas actually absolutely disintegrate other fighters that they can keep their guns on for even just 2 seconds. Like, seriously, these Vulcans firing 20mm High Explosive rounds are just... kinda pitiful. Speculation from that point on- potentially more of the same that we've been having in ASC, but a little more drawn out and a little more exciting. I will post up the Re-Continuation of the ASC thread for KSP 1.4.2 and BDA 1.2 tomorrow or Thursday! Despite Kerbal Konstructs not updated yet, I think these new changes to the BD AI will have enough 'fairness'-effects to satisfy my requirement for equal circumstances, and that the new battlefields I've created aren't necessary for starting the new thread (though since they're all basically done, it will be used anyways once KK is updated). As aircraft are not transferable directly from BDA 1.0 / 1.1 to BDA 1.2, designers will have to re-arm/re-equip their aircraft, replacing all BDA parts, with 1.2 versions in 1.4.2 (however, I may make an exception for the leaderboard and do it myself on them, that point is reached). As for the KSP 1.3.1 BDA 1.0 queue which will be finished, it looks like this: 1 PEGASys-D3 2 Vampire Squirrel 3 Gunbrick 4 TFD Mod A 5 Viper ASP MkIIc KSP 1.3.1 BDA 1.0 Queue: @[INDO]dimas_1502 KF-XIF-X-C-100 @prgmTrouble X-15 Exoneratis Hirundo @Earthlinger Berzerker 2.1 @ZLM-Master V-TEK @53miner53 P-5 Flash @Wolf5698 Lynx @Wolf5698 Cheetah @GillyMonster Dart II @dundun93 TFD 2.1 @Box of Stardust Basilisk -C3 @Box of Stardust CShRAID @goduranus Vampire Squirrel B @dundun92 Du-5Rs @dundun92 Du-6S "Diode" @dundun93 A26 @dundun92 Du-8C

Er, must've been flareDispenser. Haven't gotten the names straight, just quickly looked through the config files in Parts and looked for any discrepancies between the flare and chaff parts.

I found that the cmDropper config file was missing a model and texture reference. I copied the model reference from chaffDispenser, but that didn't fix it. Thanks for the hotfix.

So, I'm pretty sure I didn't do anything wrong (this was installed fresh through CKAN), but, uh... "flare dispenser"?

You should read the rules, there's some challenge-specific peculiarities concerning passenger capacity and range specifications.

I'm imagining the scene switching to the Death Star, then 'physics loads', and, after a brief moment of the camera pan skipping and lag, the Kraken just makes it explode, with a spaghetti-ing kerbal in the midst of all the debris.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Ah, I suppose that makes sense from that perspective then. If it's the airframe designers that can't run mods. Unfortunately, it then comes down to people that are willing to take designs from airframe constructors and do something with them. Not that it doesn't make it impossible, it's just that I personally don't see it being viable. The closest thing I know of happening similar to this is... me, where I toyed around with someone else's plane (twice) because it interested me to rework it a fair amount and mess around with it. That's the kind of person you'd need to sort of partner up with- people willing to toy around with other's designs and make it work, but these kinds of people I would think would be the kind to be motivated to make their own craft from scratch. But again, there will be a new thread up, which may present new opportunities and new interests, so who knows.

That's what I figure you were getting at but I'm not sure what you mean by 'can't run mods' hindering participation. Wouldn't players already be at the 'running mods' part if they're entering something in the competition? The only barrier that 'not being able to run mods' I can see is that they can't test their own aircraft, but honestly, adding weapons and working out the AI for them really isn't that hard. As well, if a player is unable to run mods effectively to test their aircraft, then they kind of lose out on arguably the hardest part of the 'adding weapons' part of the process, which is seeing what works and what doesn't in terms of weapons management and flight AI. While this part is actually difficult, again, I don't see how providing an airframe makes this any easier for new players. And lastly, our mod list, while open-ended, isn't very extensive; it's mostly just AirplanePlus and Tweakscale, and upcoming in BDA 1.1, DCK. You do know that competitors aren't obligated to run the matches, right? That's all left to those who volunteer as judges, so there's never any worry about straining machines trying to get potentially stressing 3v3 matches recorded. If you want to know my solution for your proposal, it would be to have a separate leaderboard where veterans cannot place in, to give new designers a chance to learn.

Er, well, under my authority, I guess I can work out a way for this to work, but I don't really see the point. Weapons are part of the equation, but how an aircraft flies is a big part of this competition, as well as AI tuning. With that much work already being put in by competitors here in the aircraft itself, I'm not sure anyone would really be interested in just taking an airframe and adding weapons, if they're just going to have to modify it to make it fly their way as well. Basically, I don't see the current competition environment having a place for that kind of thing to be able to exist. While there's no rule against it, there's nothing encouraging it either. However, since this thread is ending and will soon enter a re-continuation, I might be able to put in some rules in place for it to work out. Maybe.

Yeah, they're all Runway Strips. For my intents and purposes, the runways are simply tools to get aircraft to the arena, which is just some nice unique landscapes. Some more for exhibition combat, like a river ravine.

I was considering it only if I could save KK creations as 'assemblies' of multiple statics, which I haven't found a way (though admittedly I have not searched too thoroughly). It already took me a few hours to place down... 15? pairs of runways (though admittedly a lot of the difficulty was measuring stable spawn distances, which I've discovered to be correlated with altitude/LoS to each vessel; i.e., world curvature not blocking it; weird). To place down markers for each runway... no thanks. I just eyeball the spawn points now; I figure a few meters off of difference won't be significant variance that the AI pilots won't induce in the air anyways.

Haha okay that's pretty creative.

The slingshot maneuver shown in the comic is, as labeled, the Oberth Maneuver, which is a real thing, and one of the more easier things to understand in orbital mechanics; it's pretty much a gravity assist combined with burning the engines for maximum effect. As for the plane thing, the leaderboard in the first post is pretty much current in terms of the biggest entries, so that would be me.

That's pretty much what I was thinking, except that those spawn points are too close together. They'll cause the AI to do 'avoid collision' things.

I admire the consistency, but having to go back to the SPH every time is too much. I don't think I can handle spending 1-2 minutes to spawn each plane. The idea I had was to make a tool in the SPH, with I-beams, that has the right placement spots for planes on the runways. Or you could place KK markers/lights on the runways without colliders turned on, for where you put planes. Not sure if you can save structures as combined structures though.

Daily update so far: I've decided that since the KSC combat zone is arguably the most important due to ease of access from the space center screen (able to quickly access spawn beacons and recover aircraft), I re-did the spawn locations to make it an unbiased location. For some strange reason, it also only kind of occurred to me that, with the ability to place runways literally anywhere, I could even simulate in-air interceptions by placing runways in the sky. What this does it extend the altitude floor when aircraft battle. And what that means is that there's now arguably a much more equal footing between aircraft, as the minimum altitude setting comes into play less, as aircraft start at a higher altitude by default. This realization came about when I re-examined my private testing between Gunbrick and Vampire Squirrel at Eaglin Straits, realizing that the runways, while for the most part 'on the ground', start at 300m height. And note that the minimum altitude setting uses terrain height, not sea level height. So, what this means is that, when aircraft take off, first they reach their minimum altitude over their current terrain, then in-combat over Eaglin Straits, there's actually a 300m additional buffer to the usual combat altitudes from the original KSC-Island format, because water is at sea level; 0m. So instead of having only, say, 200-300m to maneuver and evade missiles, there's more like 500-600m. One of the problems with the original format was that by always launching from the ground, there was (and still kind of is) a tendency for the lower-altitude aircraft to have an advantage, simply because they'd pull the opposing team down to their altitude. This effect is quite pronounced with the KSC-Island spawns, as aircraft will turn-in towards the opposing team once they have taken off and reached minimum altitude. And when the minimum altitude is so low, the AI always has to juggle maintaining minimum altitude and evasive maneuvering, which also partially gives an advantage to the aircraft with a lower minimum altitude. Which is kind of dumb, but the planes are also risking flying into the ground/ocean, which is... kind of even dumber. This is an air superiority competition; avoiding the ground shouldn't be a concern if we only want to focus on the 'air combat' portion. Interestingly, this was less-pronounced if the starting method used is to start both teams off in a common location and make them fly away from each other to the competition start distance, then turn back, because in this method, aircraft will keep climbing until they have either reached the default altitude setting or the competition start distance is reached. So this generally meant that combat altitudes were at least around 1000m, unlike the ~500m we usually see with KSC-Island. Progress on setting up the new locations is going smoothly, and I now place runways at equal heights if it makes sense to, and in the air to add that buffer zone. There's still a few that have the combat arena close to the terrain, but now it's mostly just for 'flavor'. The KSC 'arena' after I reworked it can easily be the only location used for aircraft testing due to minimized bias and ease of operations. Its runways are placed at 750m height, which translates to, after takeoff, roughly 900-1000m altitude. That's enough of a buffer to ensure that the minimum altitude setting infrequently comes in to play. Lastly, there is, again, a new spawn arrangement. Now freed from the default spawn location of aircraft on the KSC runway, since all aircraft are now spawned with Vessel Mover, I figured we should do something that looks more like an actual aicraft formation. Lead aircraft left center line, #2 on right edge line, and #3 on left edge line. This, I think, optimally arranges aircraft so that they minimally interfere with each other in-flight to target, since there's no trailing aircraft that's going to have both aircraft in its way crossing in front of it when the BD AI does its little 'position flip' thing after takeoff. No new battles for tonight. I might re-test Gunbrick vs Vampire Squirrel once more with the finalized KSC arena, in a best-of-5 for better statistical significance.

One more battle for tonight, showcasing an 'old but new' location. We're back fighting over KSC, but this time with spawns facing directly at each other. This location was redone and kept as a combat zone because, quite frankly, sometimes it's nice to be lazy and be able to quickly recover aircraft after a quicksave load right from the space center screen, instead of having to go to the tracking station to do it. Also, I'm planning on adding an optional 'easter egg' to it later. So here we go, the original battle of debate which prompted creating easier spawn points in the first place: Gunbrick vs @goduranus's Vampire Squirrel: I decided to try something different for the third battle, under the long-ago-discussed effects of a stationary, landed observer, as opposed to following around aircraft.

Progress on combat locations continue. Got 3 locations set up today, about maybe 12 to go. Progress will go faster now that I'm getting used to the process. Not sure if there's a correlation between latitude on Kerbin with 'stable' distance. The farther away I got from the equator, the shorter 'stable' distances it felt like. I was able to get a 26km separation between spawns at a location near the equator, but couldn't get past 20km safely once I got farther from the equator. There's also now a new 'standard' spawn arrangement, placing #1 on the left center line, #2 on the right edge line, and #3 on the left edge line. Seems to work well. Anyways, here's the next battle, showcasing another one of the new locations. Something different for visual variety! It also seems like there wasn't much problem with 'first takeoff glitch' this time, with both teams settling into identically tight formation. Speed is a factor though, and formations tend to be tighter with slower aircraft. Nonetheless, this method is proving to work well to keep formation consistency. Gunbrick vs @dundun93's TFD: Yeah, results are more of the same. Not much to comment on. The next one though is Gunbrick vs Vampire Squirrel, which is where things get interesting. Honestly not sure how this one will work out, given the new 'certain, consistent' spawns.

Hm, this is probably a dumb question, but do they have to be removed when imported, or is it fine to import them in, then just remove them before launching the craft? You know, for ease of replacing components where they were exactly, as well as retaining WM and PAI settings for reference.

Out of sheer laziness, when importing craft from 1.0 to 1.1, can we leave things like missile rails on the craft? I can't see how missile rails would be broken by the update. Also ammo boxes. Do those need to be removed too?