Box of Stardust

Next battle. After Action Report:

@bayesian_acolyte I'm not at my computer right now; what's the Saturn engine? Not coming to my mind. We use the Tiger engines for form factor, high TWR, and low heat, then just clip tons of them into each other. Drag to thrust is simply overcome through sheer numbers (though smart designing can help lower this slightly, but most of that does not lie in the engine placements). Sheer numbers also cheats the damage mitigation some. Heat in BDA is simply based on amount of thrust produced by a single engine. Fuel efficiency is generally not something we concern ourselves with. I will mention that it was somewhat of a concern in ASC-1.4, but BDA has gotten improvements such that fights do not drag out very long anymore, or at least, less fuel is consumed. This may change based on the meta and aircraft capabilities though. For now, I just use a KER readout to determine a good flight time, which I've rated at 20+ minutes of dry thrust. @panzerknoef While the GAU-8 is a more potent weapon now, I think it still sacrifices too much to be a replacement for Vulcans. Maybe. Might have to experiment with gun spam again. The Kabuto, might be able to enhance its damage mitigation. I forget its part count, but I don't know if it has additional space for additional wing surface armor plating. It still need more engines though. PEGASys, by comparison, is built on a design that has natural damage mitigation, through tons of clipping and parts stacking. There's a little more to it than that though; you'll see it in the Zircon footage better. Also, some extra things about when recording battles. I've noticed that you also use KER in your install, so I'll mention some other finer details in how I run battles. There's certain stats that I actually find helpful to display. The first is part count. It's an interesting insight into exactly how much damage an aircraft has taken when it gets hit, though do note missiles are also part of the part count. I also display the stage dV, which has a timer for fuel time. Lastly, I also show the velocity readouts, because BDA competition runners usually close out the navball for less view obstructions (although others just opt to move it to the side). I also try not to obscure the input indicators under the stage stack, as it helps show how the Pilot AI is working and reacting.

Next battle. After Action Report: Sounds really interesting. Do you want to share it to see if we have any tips we could give?

Given that I no longer have to bash my head against the table due to BDA missiles wonking out, I ran the next battle. Battle: After Action Report:

I actually rated your Du-11B-10 on the previous record sheet; it got 10 for Damage Mitigation, just like my drones. PEGASys-D still zombies through proximity missile detonations and the occasional direct missile hit, despite the weapons buff.

Well, it would also help to not have your engines on afterburner, but that was already a given. Also, the structural construction is a downgrade compared to the B-10. I actually rated your Du-11B-10 on the previous record sheet; it got 10 for Damage Mitigation. Forgot what it was like to fight against a plane that straight up tanks direct missile hits and keeps flying?

More engines don't actually increase IR signature, at least, last I knew of. Unless they've changed the system, BDA only cares about the hottest part on a craft. With the amount of weapons you're packing though, I might just consider skipping entering the Basilisk-C and skipping straight to the Super Basilisk-E. Also, go change the launch settings on the Sidewinders, just in case the missiles do weird things that cause them to detonate right after launch. Forward launch, max eject velocity, 0 drop time.

@dundun92 What's changed from the Du-11B-10?

@panzerknoef Okay, so what I was going to say earlier was that I actually had a last-minute update to the PEGASys, so if you want to grab that before you get further, that'd be cool. Also, it does have a weakness... a few odd ones. One being that it's so aggressive, it actually has a tendency to friendly fire missiles in the middle of dogfights. Not much I can do about that... The next one being that it runs out of gun ammo pretty quickly. While I could just add more ammo bins... well, maybe I will, maybe not. The plane comes from the BDA 1.0 era where guns were practically insta-kill, and I've just never felt the need to update the ammo capacity. Also keeps the weight down. So it doesn't do well in extended fights where it hasn't won quickly, or if enemy planes are damaged, but don't go down, despite being otherwise disabled. BD AI is annoying like that. Also, it's just an 'okay' gunfighter, in my opinion. I have another aircraft for guns, but that one's far more finnicky to tune the AI for. Neither aircraft are very stable when trying to get guns on target, but I haven't figured out how to get the AI to be both highly maneuverable and be super stable when trying to use guns. Potentially also part of the aircraft's physical design. Anyways, I'm not sure when that supposed howitzer hit was, but the start of the second match did have a friendly fire. That can sort of be mitigated by spacing out the aircraft at the start so they don't end up directly behind a plane at the turn-in, plus placing them close enough together (such that there is no distance marker between them) generally means they're close enough for missiles to not hit a plane somewhat in front of them. Nonetheless, you'll see what "Damage Mitigation: 10" means eventually. And, because I've just been doing my own tests against the board, if you fix up the SK-22's missiles, I think you'll find it to be a fairly credible threat.

@panzerknoef I was reading through the thread and came across @hoioh's SK-22 missile problems. I don't think I mentioned this when going over how I ran the competitions, but while the rule says 'judges will not make changes to aircraft', I did make an exception for missiles exploding on the launching aircraft. This can typically be fixed by fiddling around with the launch settings, which in the SK-22's case, needs its drop timer down to zero (which is typically the best setting for Sidewinders in any case), max ejection speed, and firing forward seems to resolve the issues. Which is great, because when I was running the KSP 1.4 version, they had not yet implemented Sidewinder fixes, and even these fixes wouldn't help much. Just in case you run into 'planes killing themselves' issues again.

I've discovered that BDA is actually quite cooperative in taking craft from old versions and just plugging them directly into the current version. You could take a look through the list of aircraft in the previous ASC-Unlimited for some tips on AI settings, since they'll probably work just fine in 1.6, actually. If I'm to be honest, the PEGASys-D7 was actually designed about 8 months ago, and all I've done was swap out the Pilot AI and Weapon Manager for new ones in 1.6, just in case something weird might happen. Aircraft I recommend taking a look at from the last ASC's queue are the HSC and Basilisk-C4.

Man, you guys have been busy. Cool. Fun to see things starting from zero this is what V2 was for, with a lot of the previous ASC's veterans not present. But I think trying to rediscover known lessons is a bit of a waste of time. So let's just continue this class in air combat from where ASC left off and... Remember- ASC is as much about dissecting the competition's aircraft and learning from it, as it is building your own. @panzerknoef

Okay, so, I've begun looking into finishing the current queue. Only thing is, BDA 1.2 for KSP 1.4.5 does not have the fixes that were implemented that seem to resolve the major issues we were having. So that means I'll probably update to the latest version of KSP (I haven't touched the game for almost half a year), which means newest version of BDA, which means things may potentially go wrong when using the older craft. But at least (maybe) missiles will stop killing the craft they are launching from and AP+ parts will have proper hitpoints.

Well, it seems that the idea of BDA dogfights just won't die, and this thread is the most recent iteration of a nearly-no-holds-barred-go-nuts competition, so... that's why this is around. It's been in hibernation for a few months though. But at least there's easy access to the competition leaderboard and queue? I mean, we've always discussed the R&D. At least when we get to a point where it seems like we've reached the current meta's limits, and it's time to innovate again. There was also the suggestion to use this as a BDA beta testing thread, which is a perfectly fine idea, given the nature of what we do in this thread anyways, pushing BDA to its limit. Aaaaanyyways, since it looks like my schedule is generally clear for the next month, expect the 'official' competition to start moving again some time soon.

I've been away due to classes and being busy and all that general stuff. Someone answer me this: has the problems with Sidewinders been fixed? Because if it has, then I'll see to getting back to this maybe within a month or so.

Battles: After Action Report: Next battle: After Action Report: Next battle: After Action Report: Next battle: After Action Report: Next battle: After Action Report: So. I will actually be holding off on running further battles because BDA is being very weird right now. Missiles are exploding on launch a lot, at least on the D-1. It also explodes on other craft occasionally. That's problematic. Even on other craft I'm making... missiles are exploding on the launch craft with frequency, despite following the new 'missile mounting rules'. A bigger problem is that some parts (I think mostly AP+ parts; the Tiger, mostly) just don't have consistent hitpoints. I can spawn in one team and the Tiger engines will have 26000 hitpoints, while the other team only has 2500 hitpoints on the Tiger engines... or even 1000. So... yeah. Problems. I haven't fully figured it out yet, if there's anything I can do on my end about it, but I also have to check in with the BDA dev team about it.

Have an example craft?

If it's guns-only, might as well allow Aviator Arsenal as well.

We've been told by the BDA devs that under full AI controls, aircraft do not reload missiles. Now if you mean that with action groups, while under full AI control, the AI will be able to reload missiles, then we'll look into it.

Stats sheet has been updated by dividing drones into weight classes, by the way.

Well the other 6 are on the PRD, so they get detached.

I was complaining a bit about the 12 flare pods on the Du-11B, which is kind of excessive, but only 6 flares stay on the craft, which I guess is okay. It just matters because too many flares has a heavy performance hit. I'm going to declare a six ( 6 ) flare pod maximum on crafts, because, well, laggy performance sucks. Download this craft: https://kerbalx.com/Box_of_Stardust/Lynx-IIC It has drop tanks. However, the fuel tank will always be locked if you reload a quicksave, due to how the Modular Missile Manager works. So you have to unlock every fuel tank in a drop tank every time you load a save. It works under the same principle as the routing devices we use. It's a GPS-based launch, and the AI will fire GPS-based weapons always at the set max range. Though, it helps if you don't have other weapons overlapping that range.

-- time out let me think --

We're in a weird spot like in ASC-BDA 1.0. The TFD wasn't really a particularly hard plane to beat if you built against it... but your plane also had to get past the Squirrel. The HSC might be able to beat the PEGASys, but the X-Fighter couldn't- twice, and even in a 5v5... but the HSC can't get past the X-Fighter. I mean, you guys could just check the queue if you want to know if things have happened. But no, Du-11 is a little bit more down in the queue, plus I gotta do some Tier 2 matches.

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