Wanderfound

TAC-FB or Goodspeed can save you a lot of pain. Otherwise, you just need to be careful with your fuel hose routing and possibly lock off some tanks to start with. The tank-in bay trick gets you extra fuel, but at a substantial weight penalty. You're usually better off just sticking the tanks on the sides of the fuselage; put 'em behind intakes and the drag isn't too bad.

Making the opening runway a bit bumpy was a good idea. Making the runway more bumpy than the paddock surrounding it, not such a good idea. Making the runway bumpy enough to be lethal to all but the best pilots, very much not a good idea. The paddock around KSC should be about as bumpy as the current level 1 runway. The level 1 runway should be about as bumpy as the current level 2 runway.

The leaderboard is starting to look like an Asterix comic; Volcanix, Merandix. Now all we need is Cacaphonix, Dogmatix and Unhygeinix...

To stop this turning into a contest of "who can build the heaviest plane?", perhaps some sort of control test vehicle might be in order? Make a basic, uncomplicated small plane and post the design; see who can land that plane in the highest wind.

BTW: are you using a PID tuner? If not, highly recommended; there's one included in the Kerbal Pilot Assistant mod. Takes all of the wobble out of SAS.

FAR vs Stock, different physics; times aren't comparable. I'm spending 90% of the run at over 600m/s. For all we know, 7:20 is going to be the winning stock time...

As few VTOL engines as necessary to lift it, enough turbojet/RAPIER thrust to get up to Mach 4 without dying of boredom, enough rockets to get to orbit without losing too much to upper-atmosphere drag. That's as close as I get to a formula. For VTOL design, have a look at the Dropbear, Locust, Grasshopper, Cacafeugo, Dragonfly X and Kosciuszko VTOL. Basically, it's just take a normal spaceplane, stash a few basic jets mounted on cubic octagonals into bomb bays and scatter some Vernors around the edges for stability. The trickiest bit is getting the basic jet and fuel placement right; just a little bit of an imbalance is enough to mess up the VTOL, so you need to keep your fuel and cargo weight balanced. RCS Build Aid in Engine mode helps, but sometimes seems to give misleading figures; trial and error trumps all. Test, revert to SPH, wiggle an engine a bit, test again, etc. Because they can rely on VTOL for lift if they want to fly slowly (or take off...), they don't need big wings. That saves you a fair bit of mass and drag, which can partially compensate for the penalty of the surplus engines.

Verdict on flying the stock track in FAR: definitely possible, but very much not novice-friendly unless taken at a very conservative speed. See http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Challenges/Kerbodyne%20Air%20Race/Track%202%20hard/story for a 5 minute 41 second demonstration. No video, because it did take a few quicksave/quickload cycles to get it right....

Looks good. It might be challenging from an aerodynamic failures POV for FAR; 15+ G's sustained for too long and you start ripping wings off. I'll give it a try later on and see how it goes. But for now, your version is the "official" stock aero track; start posting times.

Another one, just messing about: Lesson for the day: legible altimeters and airspeed gauges are valuable things.

I think do it like in the Loop & Land Challenge: out past the "shores" biome, take a crew report over the "water" biome (set an action group to do it), then turn around (an Immelmann is usually quickest) and land. It's a good idea to take a scouting flight over the mountains before your first real run, but it's not too hard to find your way once you're there. Through the big gap hugging the left-hand side, pull up and hard left as soon as you're through, look for the highest peak at the top. Once you find the highest peak (skinny pointy thing), you'll see two narrow gaps to the right of it. Go through the right-hand one of those gaps, then hard left back to KSC. So, the full race is: 1) Take off heading east. 2) Turn around, fly west to the mountains. 3) Go over the big pass, then come back through the skinny pass. 4) Bump & go at KSC. 5) Crew report over the "water" biome. 6) Turn around, land.

Dangit, I fixed that and then Youtube changed it back. Should be right now. - - - Updated - - - The thought behind it was that the KSC strip is open enough that a touch & go there would have to be super-fast to be interesting. To go super fast, you need a runup; out to the mountains and back seemed like a good way to do the runup (ducking through a narrow pass is always fun). It's the nearest landmark apart from the island. So how about mountains and back (through the passes shown in the video), with a touch & go at extreme speed on the KSC strip before turning around over the water and coming back to land? That should be doable in under six minutes, it's got plenty of maneuvering in it, nice scenery and it's different enough from the first not to be repetitive. Then we could do a slower, tighter track (e.g. take off, tap the helipad, land back on the runway) as a contrast for the third one.

A little video wot I made... Just up to mountains and back, nothing too fancy.

Here we go: track 2 demonstration, 16 min long 'cos the videocap slows my computer down a fair bit. The key bit is the bit between five and nine minutes. I'm still thinking that would work nicely as the first leg of something with a touch & go at KSC though.

I'm about to post a video demonstrating the next course. So far, it's "take off, turn around, through the big pass in the mountains then turn around sharply and come back through a narrow cleft". It's fun, but what it doesn't have is a touch & go... How committed are we to the name of the series? Watch the video before making up your minds, but we could easily add a bit at the end where you have to do a touch & go on the KSC strip, then fly out past the beach before turning around to land from the water side. Or even make it so that you have to go do a race 1 style touch & go at the Island strip before coming back to KSC, maybe with a bump at KSC on the way. But that would add more time to a race that took me 4:48 to do, and I want to keep these short enough that it isn't super-frustrating if you stuff up right at the end. So, I dunno: keep it to a five minute race, or add a little flourish on the end? If we want the bump and go, should it be KSC, Island, or KSC and Island?

Incidentally, the other reasons for the relative speed of the F1 plane: * There'll be other races; the F1 needs to be a generalist, not built for one course. * I wanted to make it a relatively novice-friendly ship, so anyone can have a go. * The stock one is just a modified version of the FAR original. The FAR version is actually rather impressively quick. A three-engined version was substantially slower thanks to increased mass and drag. So far, we're one each way on the fuel level thing, with me leaning towards allowing it. After all, race drivers do it all the time, even in tightly-controlled series like F1. Anyone care to chip in with some tiebreaker votes?

Personally, I gave 6.4X/FAR a shot, but went back to stock scale FAR. Not because it was harder, but because it was slower; it takes forever to fly to orbit on realistic scales. More ÃŽâ€V isn't difficult; just add more boosters. But longer time flying to orbit = less time to do more interesting stuff.

A chute-free FAR Open Class run: 4 minutes, 19 seconds. Airbrakes work better than I expected. Full flight at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Challenges/Kerbodyne%20Air%20Race/Open%20nochute%201/story -- Also: new arbitrary ruling, you are now allowed to alter the fuel levels on the F1 plane. As usual, mass protest will reverse the ruling if necessary. I'm about to set up the second course; you can keep going on the first as well, but this should give a new challenge for those who've already had a bunch of attempts at the original.

Airbrakes are good for adding a little gentle deceleration over a long glide, but they ain't gonna cut it at race pace. If you aren't going with chutes, then it's going to take some aerobatics: S-turns, loops, climb/stall/dive cycles, etc.

Okay: due to the hint of public support, I am now making an autocratic ruling (which will be immediately reversed if it's greeted with an overwhelming storm of protest ) that we'll separate each division into chute-assisted and no-chute categories. Just think of it as now having twice the chance to win a division. Am I right in thinking that the only chute-aided entries so far are mine and hoioh's? - - - Updated - - - The point of the F1 plane was to get a level playing field, rather than the fastest possible plane. Plus I'm planning to make this a race series​ if folks stay interested, and some of the future ones might be a bit longer-distance. - - - Updated - - - Yup, it does. The main immediate effect of crossing the sound barrier is a slight decrease in drag and an increase in stability (CoL shifts rearwards at supersonic speeds). It's a bit bumpy as you cross it, though. - - - Updated - - - General vote: should we allow preflight alteration of fuel levels for the Formula One plane or not? It's bothered some people, and I don't mind either way.

My laptop now runs well enough to stream KSP via Open Broadcaster Software; however, the mike on the laptop is so inadequate as to be useless. I could go and buy a decent mike to plug into the laptop, but it occurs to me that I've already got a perfectly good mike and voice recorder in my iPhone (which is what I used for my Kerbal Podcast stuff). Anyone know of an easy/simple/straightforward/free way of adding a voice recording from my iPhone to the recording of game audio and video produced by the Open Broadcaster Software?

Had a serious attempt at the FAR Open Class: 4 minutes, 7 seconds. Full flight at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Challenges/Kerbodyne%20Air%20Race/Open%20run%201/story

I wonder if it's possible to turn the MP function into a built-in streaming package as well? It'd be nice not to have to mess with third-party videocap software and Twitch etc.

Well, this one certainly got popular overnight. Some rule clarifications for Formula One: as was correctly assumed (kinda) by the competitors, tweaking the fuel load is against the rules. I'm fine with people tuning control surface settings, though; in FAR, that could extend as far as trying to use control surfaces as spoilers/airbrakes. No other mods to the plane, though; no adding/deleting/relocating any parts, no messing with the FAR mass tweakables. In the Open classes, the use of drag chutes is obviously hugely beneficial. Should we run a separate leaderboard for non-chute planes? There's more piloting skill involved in slowing down aerobatically. Y'all are welcome to have a go at the aerobatic contest as well (see link in .sig), or the Loop & Land Sprint (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/107547-The-Kerbodyne-Loop-Land-Sprint). The craft for that is the same as the Formula One plane here. Looking forwards to some FAR entries. I'd recommend trying the touch & go a bit slower than I used in the demonstration run for the first few runs. The screenshots don't fully catch it (I was too busy for F1), but shortly after hitting the island runway I was flying backwards towards the hillside about 20m off the ground...

Hey, you're coming first in two divisions, at least for now... I just spent an hour building and tweaking a much faster ship (blew up several of them while test flying through dynamic pressure alone; 110kPa is not a friendly environment), and just now got it through a full run...for 5 minutes 37 seconds. I spent so much time doing S-turns to wash off speed before landing that I burnt through all of the advantage I'd gotten from the faster flight. Bah. It's a lower drag (and therefore faster) design than the Formula One plane, but that also means that it has a harder time slowing down quickly. There's just less wing to drag through the air. I might be able to make it work with a really extreme zoomclimb/stall/plummet thingie, though.