Box of Stardust

So basically a good rule of thumb to stay within the spirit of the challenge is to not resize (downsize only?) parts if there is already an existing equivalent part of that size.

TWIN CROWN AEROSPACE presents its contract bids for Kerbal Express Airlines, with a prominent theme of: conventional, unassuming, effective, and flyable just adjusting trim settings. Also excellent ground performance, with all aircraft able to get wheels up by 60m/s and fairly short landing distances. Control notes (generally; special cases exist): AG 1 toggles engines. AG4 toggles engine mode (thrust reverser in most cases). AG2 and 3 are usually flaps. A-104 Aspen: A Turboprop Scrapped Together By Engineers From The Wrong Department With The Wrong Engines (Superseded by A-104 Block 3. But we've got a few Block 1 and 2s already manufactured, so maybe you'll want to take a look anyways?) 1A: 21,261,000 ; 24 passengers ; 225m/s @ 3100m = 2000km 1B: 22,131,000 ; 32 passengers ; 225m/s @ 3100m = 2000km 2A: 20,301,000 ; 24 passengers ; 160m/s @ 2800m = 2400km ; 165m/s @ 2500m = 2500km 2B: 21,171,000 ; 32 passengers ; 165m/s @ 1500m = 2300km Okay, a bit of a lie about that pitch. The KEA contract bid announcement was apparently accidentally sent to Twin Crown Aerospace’s Military Applications Division (TCA-MAD), whose engineers saw the top of the list of requirements and quickly decided to hack something together. Because profits. Mainly profits for extra pocket change to continue the drone program. The MAD engineers took a few surplus PEGASys-D3s from the production line and pulled them apart for parts, creating the A-104, which they creatively named the Aspen. After the drone platform they pulled parts from. And the tree. Because the tree is pretty cool. A-104 Block 1 is therefore powered by 4 Tiger engines, which makes it pretty fast for something in the turboprop class. In fact, one more cabin, and it would qualify as a small regional airliner. A-104 Block 2 was produced after MAD engineers read the contract titles more clearly, and decided that using a turboprop for the turboprop class was probably a good idea. Efficiency, not speed! Buy 3 A-104s and get a voucher for a free ASPEN-PEGASys drone! Warranty void if used for anything else other than spare parts. A-202 Safari: Ridiculously Engineered Amphib By the Previous Guys 2A: 31,459,000 ; 32 passengers ; 200m/s @ 1500m = 1300km (as fueled) The A-202 Safari is one more design from TCA-MAD. After quickly skimming through the mail, the MAD engineers realized they skipped past the contract for a seaplane. So, in the interest of efficiency, they took some ASPEN drones from the production line and dismantled them for parts. Hence why there's an ASPEN drone body on top of this plane. Also, they took the Tiger engines. This aircraft can takeoff from water using its afterburners (Action Group 4). Takeoff from water is achieved at 50m/s. It's called the Safari because adventure! And Tiger engines. It can fly really fast. And far. Especially if the wings are fueled up. (Has not been tested with full fuel load, fuel at own risk.) When told that this was probably not what the contract was asking for, MAD engineers just scoffed and said that there's probably a market for these anyways, and they wouldn't have built them if they weren't sure of it. A-401: Small and Well-Rounded 1A: 24,341,000 ; up to 56 passengers ; 220m/s @ 6300m = 3000km 1B: 24,141,000 ; up to 64 passengers ; 220m/s @ 6300m = 3000km ; 225m/s @ 5300m = 3150km (wait why is a door more expensive than a cabin) A small regional jet design thrown together after failed attempts to downsize the A-501 economically. It turns out standard cabins are far cheaper than luxury cabins! Who would’a thunk it. And for a ‘thrown together’ design, it’s possibly TCA’s best-flying airliner. Stable and safe. 56 passengers in the 1A with a ramp entry for remote airfields, and 64 passengers in the 1B for standard airports. The Lotus engines are both a blessing and a curse. Their high altitude and speed performance is poor, giving the A-401 a top speed of only 220m/s, but are efficient enough to cruise at 6300m for a range of over 3000km. Also, as payback to the Military Application Division guys for taking a swing at the first contracts, the designers of the A-401 stole the parts meant for ASPEN-platform combat drones and used them in their intended purpose as actual wing strakes. A-501: Middling In All Aspects 2A: 62,676,000 ; up to 104 passengers ; 265m @ 6000m = 2300km A medium regional jet design used as TCA’s starting point for jet liner ventures. Features seating for up to 104 passengers. The wide main body allows for luxurious cabin configurations if so inclined. The A-501 is powered by three Wheesleys, a fact that endlessly irritates TCA engineers, who much prefer the newer Lotus engine. However, to meet class requirements, namely speed, the Lotus could not be used due to its 220m/s cruising speed limitation. As such, the A-501 is among the shortest-legged of TCA’s offerings, with ‘only’ 2300km range. A-701 StratoLiner: A Supersonic Cruiser 1A: 79,909,000 ; about 100 passengers ; 1000m/s @ 20000m = 2700km A supersonic transport that takes design cues from the Aerospace Division’s AS-3 project. Seats up to about 100 passengers, but the ‘hump’ is a reconfigurable place for classy business meetings or luxury dining or sleeping quarters with a spectacular view of space. Range is a decent 2700km. A-606: Minor Fun With TweakScale! 4A: 120,855,000 ; up to 192 passengers ; 220m/s @ 6000m = 5000km 4A-ER: 110,855,000 ; up to 168 passengers ; 215m/s @ 6000m = 7700km The embodiment of ‘boring, conventional, functional’. The A606-4A is an upgrade to an old airframe, switching out the original powerful but inefficient six Wheesleys with four Lotuses. The result is a 192 passenger aircraft with 5000km range, or a 168 extended range variant with 7700km range. It turns out, a good way to build effective airliners is… to build how airliners are. Also, I’ve learned far more about the interaction of CoM, CoL, and most significantly, CoT in this challenge than I have in my past 1000+ hours of KSP. I mean, it should be pretty simple to understand the Co(x) vectors, but I’ve never messed with them in the configurations as these planes, and to make them fly very stable. Lastly, I learned that, like real airliners, giant wings should be allowed to flex, so don’t turn on rigid attach or struts. Or else it may act like it got hit by an invisible SAM past some altitude or speed.

I may have messed something up when I switched FAR back and forth into my install. I noticed that all of my craft were missing their control surface limit values and the actuation toggles in the editor. However, I looked into the craft files and those values are all still saved properly. So for some strange reason, the editor isn't reading the craft file correctly. However, saving a craft will lock the 'defaulted' 100% + all actuate values that are currently in the editor. Not really sure what else I can say. I have other mods installed, will list if needed. EDIT I found the offending mod. Atmosphere Autopilot for some reason causes this.

I only went up to 6-8 airliner wings under the assumption that any more would just be too much drag. Guess I was wrong.

If there's a way to get over 30t to the island, I haven't found it. I've experimented with various combinations of values between dead weight and wing mass. Too much wing causes too much drag, too much weight with not enough wing means not enough lift. Seems to me that with a +30t aircraft, 50m/s is the minimum speed needed to remain airborne, but the Juno doesn't have enough thrust to overcome the drag, nor does it have the accleration to put wings in fast enough airflow to create significant lift. And I understand KSP's funky stock drag model fairly well. No other radially attached parts other than wings and landing gear, streamlined main fuselage. Maybe in FAR though. Whenever drag becomes a problem, FAR is usually the answer! The last potential solution I could think of for stock KSP though is having jettisonable landing gear, but that 1. wouldn't bode well for landing on the island, and 2. probably doesn't have that much of an overall effect anyways. But when you're chasing every single reduction in drag, maybe it does count.

What's the definition of 'ruining the challenge with TweakScale'? I just want to enlarge control surfaces and the airliner wing to (scale-correct) sizes.

I put your Tiger engines to good use. And the landing gear. Tiger craft Respectfully request we get 1-seat versions of both Mk1 Non-Commercials eventually? Also maybe make the cockpit glass work with WindowShine down the line?

To be honest, these kinds of things should be in the install instructions. Given this new knowledge, maybe new Vulcans work fine with hitpoints, I don't know.

Bit of random here: It turns out FAR solves the slow problem. Man, sometimes stock KSP's drag model is really annoying.

What has two 20mm cannons, two jet engines, and six hardpoints? "Which plane am I going up in, Captain?" The literal purpose of those engines. Oh, and you'd better believe it's slow as a slug, despite weighing no heavier than the actual aircraft and having as much thrust as the actual aircraft. Probably has something to do with drag, idk. Will have to change to an F-20 Tigershark using a Panther engine to make this thing actually move. 1 Panther is equivalent to about 4 Tiger engines, so that would definitely help in the thrust department. But (un)surprisingly, build an aircraft to a real design, and it turns out the CoM and CoL fall right where they need to be! I haven't put an AI on this yet, so no tuning yet. Also, it can't win in a KSP BDA competition lol. But it looks nice! ACE COMBAT 5 INTENSIFIES

Yeah, but OP wants B-2/high-altitude recon UAV-style flying wings. Anyways, I'm pretty sure this is what @Phreakish did, and I can't believe I forgot about the weirdest flight control in the game that does allow the SAS to properly correct for yaw (unlike the other conventional control surfaces that have to be oriented in an angle where the control input will actually have effect for them to actuate), as well as turn in a stable manner by manually doing a realistic coordinated turn with yaw and pitch controls. Craft link included for interested. https://kerbalx.com/Box_of_Stardust/MANTA

Or to go with the theme, the F-86 Sabre had 6x .50 cals. I think that's what we're wondering. Also is the thrust limit with afterburners or no...

The engine number limitation for aircraft mass makes Tiger engines impractical. Especially nutty is the fact that the real F-5 Tiger wouldn't be valid in this competition under that rule, due to only being ~7t loaded. Perhaps set an engine number limitation per specific engine?

Well... ok. Fair reasoning, I guess.

Good to know. But considering how hitpoints are integral to BDAc 1.1, shouldn't the armor editor be included with BDA instead?

There's the HP editor of course, for other normal competitions. Also, the high HP is sometimes good, but depending on aircraft design, can be unintentionally too tanky (see: VG-D3.4-PG). Even the 'normal' planes can require a somewhat excessive time under guns. I've taken the best-tuned, stable planes from this competition, and they all either run out of ammo or fuel. (They may or may not have done something with the AI too that changed how they behave in combat.) They just can't keep their guns on target long enough on targets small and fast as the drones we have. (Maybe larger aircraft would solve this though?) For what should be 20mm cannon shells, it sure feels like .30cal machine gun bullets. Needs testing to determine the exact parameters for aircraft construction for such a competition. Might even reasonable to include weapons excluded in this competition (like the turrets).

It was weighed without drop tanks for dry weight and with them for combat load. If you'll note from the pictures, there's a funky little thing in the background that I've been testing against this drone board for fun, and I'm getting interesting results.

? You can build as light as you want. To be honest, I made up the 0.9t rule for Vulcans before weighing your P-5. All I knew was that I wanted a maximum of 4 Vulcans to restrict gun spam (and the 0.9t rule would extend fairly neatly here too), but also make mounting 4 Vulcans achievable within the 4.0t empty mass limit. I figured that the minimum viable craft weight couldn't be lighter than 0.9t anyways. The P-5 actually came in at 897kg empty, but, you know, rounding.

For Light Drones, you're over the Vulcan limitation by 1. Removing that will solve the loaded weight (unless you decide you want more fuel or chaff/flare or something, then remove an ECM).

By 'submit reply', there's 'insert other media' and in it 'insert image from URL'. Have you tried that?

Hey guys, Another comparison up to fill the time. As I may have mentioned, I'll be posting up a Light Drones competition offshoot on release of BDA 1.1 for 1.4.1, and I'll be taking entries here that will fit the parameters (they're not that strict really). The primary Light Drone craft parameters are: 4.0t maximum dry mass (empty of all fuel, missiles and pre-routing devices (e.g., MLRS), gun ammo, and chaff+flares), 5.5t combat weight (as loaded on the runway), and 1 Vulcan per 0.9t of empty aircraft weight (inclusive). Here are there contenders, and as per usual, some currently unlisted projects of mine: And because I was really scratching that air superiority itch, here are the stats, mass (empty, as-loaded) rounded to nearest hundredth of a ton: @dundun93 A26 3.00t 5.58t CShRAID Type 2b 3.49t 5.19t @dundun92Du-8C 2.15t 2.95t @Wolf5698 Lynx 2.40t 5.19t @53miner53 P-5 Flash 0.90t 2.85t @goduranus Vampire Squirrel (B) 3.27t 5.73t @ZLM-Master X-Fighter 2 EX 2.47t 4.48t PEGASys-E4 3.60t 5.50t CShRAID Type 3c 3.00t 4.60t All aircraft on the list meet all the requirements, including Vulcan amount limitation (well, actually the A26 doesn't; it's 1 Vulcan over). The two that exceed the 5.5t limit require minimal modification (remove 1 ECM from the MLRS).

lol Well, it's your challenge. Not like I managed it either.

It's a pretty good demonstrator of why true flying wing designs are computer stabilized. Piloting my design is near impossible to put into a turn, just because controls in KSP can't be told to actuate control surfaces in a specific manner. Controlling split ailerons as aibrakes for yaw control through action groups isn't precise or fast enough, nor can they be dynamically actuated when mixing inputs (though for my design that can be solved to an extent by just not using them for roll control). Anyways, this is my entry, going for the closest as possible to the spirit of the challenge (no thrust vectoring, since that's the obvious 'easy' solution), while at the same time also maybe kind of cheating. But I'll leave others to determine exactly what might be and why. Anyways, the outboard controls are the split elevons. Originally, they were the inboard controls on the large wing, but putting them further back and outwards would provide better yaw control when deployed. The downside is that they're also the ailerons, so control input mixing isn't really feasible in stock KSP. (The version with the split elevons inboard could reasonably turn though, if incredibly difficult.) Does it make it to 10km? Well, yeah, in a straight line. Straight line flight is somewhat doable with the action group mess of yaw control. And a bit of debatably-challenge-legal engineering. There's no control surfaces hidden/clipped inside though; what's seen here is what's there.

This challenge is flawed in spirit, as it doesn't require any turning of sorts. The difficulty in a flying wing design is controlling lateral stability, but if all you're requiring is to reach 10000m, all anyone has to do is fly straight forward up to 10000m. A well-designed flying wing will be able to turn and all that in flight, so at the minimum, landing back at KSC should be a requisite.

So it turns out my ascent profile on my AS-3A Skystreak was just junk and overly complicated. With a much more straightforward, flat ascent, building up speed through the atmo instead of climbing high to do it, 3A Skystreak can achieve around 300m/s combined dV in orbit, which is plenty enough to do some rendezvous and stuff. I have a 3B version which uses High Altitude Flight research node parts and LV-T45s which can achieve at least 500m/s combined dV in orbit, or potentially carry a light payload. Not bad for a Tier 2 R&D SSTO.