Wanderfound

HOTOL is "horizontal takeoff and landing", BTW. As in, launches and lands as a conventional winged and wheeled aircraft; it's just shorthand for "this competition is intended for planes" without getting into a philosophical discussion about how to exactly define a plane. Similar etymology to VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing), VSTOL (very short takeoff and landing), etc etc.

There seems to be enough weirdness with the CoL marker (which, as mentioned upthread, is not actually representing CoL now) that I'm pretty much ignoring it. So long as your stability numbers are green and your yellow lines are sloping down in the AoA sweep, you're all good.

Would you prefer to have another go with a Kerbal onboard (an occupied command chair would do), or should I do a separate leaderboard for unKerballed drones? Either is fine by me.

Good point: * Keep all heat/drag/aero/etc settings at default levels. This applies to stock as well as FAR.

Is there a pilot stashed in there somewhere ("Kerballed HOTOL aircraft")?

Tetryds understands this much better than I do, Tetryds is wise. Listen to Tetryds. In particular: as Tetryds says, have a fiddle and see what happens. Open up the graphs, move some bits about with the translation tools, and try to figure out how to minimise your wave-drag number. It's not that hard; the one of mine pictured above was my first attempt at it, and that ship roars up to Mach 5 on jets with no trouble at all.

Nope. If you want to melt your cockpit with hypersonic low-altitude nuttery, you are now free to do so.

See http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/111541-Thinking-about-making-the-switch-to-FAR?p=1927228&viewfull=1#post1927228 and the two posts after that. This post might also be helpful: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/20451-1-0-2-Ferram-Aerospace-Research-v0-15-1-Fanno-5-10-15?p=1907618&viewfull=1#post1907618 Basically, they're a means of visualising your supersonic drag for area-ruling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_rule) purposes. The green line shows the cross sectional area of the craft as you move from nose to tail; the yellow line is a measure of how smooth the curvature of the green line is. You want the yellow one to be as close to a straight line as you can possibly make it, which will in turn reduce your supersonic wave-drag area (which you can find in the transsonic tab of the FAR analysis tools). The lower the wave-drag, the less thrust required to get up to speed. Your ship is actually pretty good already from an area rule POV (guess those Skylon guys know what they're doing after all...), but you've got some fairly extreme wing loading to deal with (hence the unplanned disassembly...). You could improve the area-rule stuff further by adding a bulge or two to the fuselage just in front of the point where the green line inflects sharply upwards and shifting the rear engines forwards a smidge; turn the green line into a smooth curve and the yellow line will flatten out.

It's not "make sure area doesn't change", it's "make sure that any changes in area happen smoothly". One way to do this is to have a featureless tube, sure, but it's not the only way. And the key point of area rule is that the distribution of area within a given bit of cross section doesn't matter; you can get away with big wings so long as the fuselage narrows a touch at that point. You can massively reduce or increase supersonic drag just by tiny adjustments to the position of parts; there's scope for endless fiddling. Fun for those who like tweaking their designs, huge PITA for those who don't enjoy such things. See here for example: The thing that you're actually targeting is the Mach 1 Wave-Drag area; you want it as low as possible. The green and yellow lines give you clues as to where to concentrate your efforts. This one is fairly good already (although the yellow line is wiggly, the amplitude of the wiggles is low), but you could smooth it a bit further by adding a bit of bulge to the fuselage between the canards and wings (for example). I expect that tricks like "stack of empty Oscar-B's with a mini nosecone on the front, partially sunk into the fuselage" are going to see a lot of use. Area ruling is part of why fighter jet fuselages tend to flatten at the rear of the aircraft; they're thinning the fuselage to compensate for the cross-sectional area of the wings. See how the cockpit canopy gives way to the intakes, then the fuselage flattens at the wings? And how the vertical stabilisers kind of fill the gap between the wings and the stabilators? Even though the distribution of area changes sharply, the change in total area flows smoothly.

To add a bit more piloting challenge, last time we added a touch & go on the island runway; takes a bit of finesse to survive tapping the ground while supersonic. Might do that again for round two.

Under NuFAR, I'm finding it easy to extract extreme speed from sleek, single fuselage ships, but very very difficult (good!) to get anything multi-fuselage (AKA "hot dog") up to speed. I'd be interested in seeing if anyone's managed to get a larger ship working yet.

Outdated now, but: Kerbodyne Sabotage. Test flight at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Sabotage/story Alternate format at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/slideshow/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Sabotage Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/4r9gc6zi5p57lrp/Kerbodyne%20Sabotage.craft?dl=0

You do need to balance the heat; steep climb to start, level off such that you get flattish before the RAPIERs flick over. The low drag design helps, too; friction means heat. I'll have a bash at a turbo/nuke pure LF design next; I think it should work well so long as you can keep the wave drag down. What sort of drag areas are you getting? Queequeg is at 0.8m² wave drag from 5m² cross section.

First up for the nuFAR range: Kerbodyne Queequeg. Chase your space whale. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/r2e9iw79kwnaamk/Kerbodyne%20Queequeg.craft?dl=0

You can, but you shouldn't; it's much more fuel efficient to use a flatter approach. If you keep the Queequeg in a vertical climb, it'll boost the Ap to 80km or so on pure jet, but you'll empty the oxidiser tanks trying to circularise it. OTOH, a pure turbojet suborbital tourist ship is now feasible.

It really isn't. ...and that's without even using any S-turns or other such trickery; just throttled-off drag. Sure, it'll take longer to slow if you're flying some 100 ton behemoth, but in that case you should be using a 747-style glideslope, not trying for a dive and flare landing.

Okay, an official entry to get the FAR board started: 4 minutes, 23 seconds.

You can make 'em shorter, but only if you add some lateral tanks; the long fuselage on the Queequeg was for fuel storage rather than aerodynamic reasons. But as soon as you go beyond single-fuselage, you've got a lot more drag to worry about...

Dangit; just had another hard computer crash following an aero failure.

Thanks for the entry. Is the course layout okay (i.e. not too hard, not too easy) for stock flyers?

First up for the nuFAR range: Kerbodyne Queequeg. Chase your space whale. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/r2e9iw79kwnaamk/Kerbodyne%20Queequeg.craft?dl=0

Time for a race: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/120751-Kerbodyne-Race-Series-Redux-Race-1

Okay, now that both nuStock Aero and nuFAR are up and running, it's time to see how far we can stretch the performance envelope. So, time to revive the air races. Rules: * Separate leaderboards for stock vs FAR. * Stock parts only. * Kerballed HOTOL aircraft, jet engines only. No rockets (RAPIERs okay; even in oxidising mode, they won't outrace a low-altitude jet). * Usual spaceplaner mods are fine (Kerbal Flight Data, Kerbal Pilot Assistant, Kerbal Flight Indicators, Dynamic Deflection, etc), but no obvious hacks or cheats. If in doubt, ask; obey Wheaton's Law at all times. * Aircraft must begin stationary on the runway, facing east as per usual. * Don't use the "spool up engines with intakes closed, open intakes for instant 100% power" exploit. Spooling up the jets while the wheel brakes are on is fine, but once the jet overpowers the brakes it's time to start flying. * Post screenshots or video documenting the key parts of your run (before takeoff, making the turn through the mountain passes, landing and stopping). * Your time is your elapsed mission time after your plane is once again completely stationary on the runway. Make sure that this time is visible in your final screenshot. * Keep it below 5,000m for the entire flight; the idea is to go through the mountain passes, not over them. * No parachutes. * Keep all heat/drag/aero/etc settings at default levels. This applies to stock as well as FAR. The first course is as shown below; Take off, turn around, head to the mountains. As you get close, an extra-pointy peak will appear from nowhere. Fly through the V-shaped pass to the right of that, then pull hard left to come around the peak (below its summit, hence the 5,000m altitude cap). Then, back to KSC and land. Leaderboards Stock FlipNascar, 3:23 Juzeris, 2:37 (off-course) FAR Phearlock, 2:57 Wanderfound, 4:23

Good news! Aero failures are confirmed as no longer causing my laptop to crash: Not such good news for Loberry, though...

New nuFAR released today; fixes most of the initial bugs. The squiggly lines are about supersonic drag and area ruling. Green line shows how the cross-section area of the craft changes as you go from front to back, yellow line is the second derivative of that, showing how smoothly the first curve changes. Basically, if you're planning on going supersonic, you want the green one to be as close as possible to a straight line (inclination not that important) and the yellow one as close as possible to a zero-inclination straight line. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_rule for why.