BlueCanary

I had something similar running the version-before-the-latest-one TCA release, but now its working fine for me. If its possible you're not on the most up to date version that could be the issue and updating seems to have fixed it for me, but now I'm having TCA struggle to hold my crafts steady and it quickly causes KSP to run extremely slow and crash on 1.4.2 (I'm aware the release is for 1.4.1) so if you're in a similar position you might still have issues.

https://kerbalx.com/BlueCanary/F-20-Pirate Don’t have access to KSP rn but I wanted to get something in the contest quickly so here’s a plane I made that was tweaked for another challenge, if I remember right it should meet the rules but it might have some AIM-120s attached, if so would you mind removing them for me because there’s no way I can do it myself right now? Thank you for making this challenge, I’ve been looking for a manned BDArmory contest for a while now. EDIT: also miiight be a little short on mass for the heavy fighter challenge and a little too much thrust for the light fighter challenge. Hmmm.

Yep, I think I've managed to tune it to be somewhat decent but it's still not perfect. My hope is the low wing loading will help it maintain energy and iron out some of the iffy bits of the AI setup. Looks like I forgot to publish! How's this link? https://kerbalx.com/BlueCanary/F-20-Pirate

My first attempt for this competition, the F-20 Pirate: https://kerbalx.com/crafts/41353/undefined 2 engines, 11.6 tonnes starting weight in this variant, 42 parts, carries 4 sidewinder, 2 AIM-120, and a Vulcan. Flies great manually but I'm not convinced it's gonna be friends with the BDArmory autopilot.

I want to get back into KSP (current PC can't handle it anymore, gave up fighting through the crashes) and I need a laptop for college. Being able to run KSP with a few mods (say, KIS+KAS, mechjeb and BDArmory) is my only requirement beyond basic generic essay writing and whatever, but I don't really want to spend a huuuuge amount of money, say £450 if that's possible. Any suggestions?

Awesome, that's cheap enough that I could justify adding an SSD and nicer graphics card etc. No idea why every build I tried came out so much more expensive. EDIT: Wait, I see why this looks so cheap, the cost of the motherboard and graphics card didn't register for some reason. Still better than what I was looking at though.

My budget is hard to say since it all depends on how long I take to learn to drive, how much I have to spend on insurance and how quickly I can get a job when I do (since where I live it's not really practical to get a job before I can drive myself to it). But it's a lot higher for a laptop than a desktop since I pretty much have to get a laptop some time in the next year or two for university, so if I get a desktop I would have to buy a laptop in the near-ish future anyway. Also if I got a desktop I ought to get a new monitor too, eating into the budget even more. I'd say 40+ fps on mid-high graphics settings with a few small mods would be the goal. If it could be done on, say, £450 for a desktop and £600 for a laptop (including OS), give or take £100 or so, that'd be good, but my actual budget might turn out to be higher or (more likely) lower than that.

What's the least I could spend on a computer to be able to play lightly modded KSP stably with a decent framerate? Also, is it possible to play KSP without frequent crashes or terrible FPS on a laptop? I haven't been able to play KSP recently because my 8 year old PC is finally starting to die, and it just can't handle more than half a flight per crash anymore. So since the computer is getting to the point where having three tabs open on firefox is dicing with death freezing up and probably crashing it, I pretty much need to get a new one, but I don't have a huge amount of money at the moment and don't play games enough to justify the fancy gaming PC I want, so I'm looking to spend as little as I can while still getting to play KSP. Also, since I'm probably going to go to university in a year or two and will need a good laptop for that, plus since I accidentally through a dog toy through my good computer monitor and am currently using a relatively crappy one, I was wondering if it might be a better choice to go for a reasonably high-end laptop to kill two birds with one stone. Is that a viable choice or would KSP just be too much to ask from a laptop?

Awesome, I think I'm going to go full 1950s-60s and get a black and white CRT then. Will I need to get one with a composite video input or is there a way around that, since most of the ones I've looked at on ebay don't seem to have one?

Thanks for the advice, sounds like the Raspberry Pi is the nearest thing to what I want to do, so I guess I finally have an excuse to buy one now. Just out of interest, which of these do you think would look best for the monitor (bearing in mind the rest of the stuff I'm planning is mainly analogue gauges, a physical version of the KSP altimeter (maybe based on an odometer or something), kind of 1950s/60s/Vanilla KSP style): Normal LCD display - probably the easiest to do I guess, or a colour CRT, or a black and white one? I'm thinking a really old, flickery, black and white CRT could look really cool, but also might not have as many options for how to use it as a colour display. Also apparently CRTs are really dangerous when you remove them from their housings? I'd be wanting to put it in a nicely painted case with a bunch of toggle switches and things and apparently that's a great way to blow fingers off.

So I've had an idea, and if it is possible I'd imagine it'd be quite easy to do, but it might not be possible at all, I'm not sure. The idea is to get a small (6-7 inch) portable CRT TV, possibly put it in a new housing (just for aesthetics), connect it to my computer, and (this is the bit I'm not sure about) use it to display the Navball/Docking Camera/Pretty much anything that a Raster Prop Monitor display would show I guess. The problem is I have little experience with this kind of thing and I don't even know where to start with the last part, although the rest sounds relatively simple. Any ideas?

List of people who urgently need to make a new plane: - me. Are you planning on running another one of these tournaments? Because if you do, I'd love to compete, this time with an entry I've actually tested, the weight and cost limits make it a lot of fun.

The central section of the wings, at most a quarter of the total wing area, is clipped, not for any tactical advantage (the plane was made way before I even knew about this challenge) but because it is the only way the design worked - otherwise the proportions were all messed up. Also the strakes are slid back into those wings a bit, again just for practical reasons and not in a way that gives any significant combat advantage. If the plane is completely unclipped (which has the side effect of making it look like seriously messed up and be completely unflyable) it's really not that much bigger than it is now, and the total area of parts concealed is really not that big. IMO it's nowhere near to becoming an unfair advantage, especially since it's still quite a big plane compared to much of the submissions. It doesn't seem by any means hard to hit when an enemy gets a good angle on it, and is usually destroyed in the process - any unfair advantage it may have is more than made up for by the disadvantage it has in being a very low part plane where any hit is usually a vital part destroyed, unlike in a high part count plane like the Anduril that can lose parts with little ill effect. If you're still sure it's an unfair design, I've been working on some replacements, without much success so far: Re-engined light attack plane (the delta winged single engined one), decent all-round but just a bit behind the Anduril and El Quicko (my current main benchmark planes for testing) in terms of maneuverability and acceleration, although benefitting from a significantly smaller planform than both, which didn't actually seem to help it a huge amount - if a plane could get behind it, it could kill it. Modified HNC (reverse sweep and vertical engines)- again, the Anduril and El Quicko had the edge in maneuverability and acceleration and managed to completely outclass it. F-8 Red Kite (big reverse swept wing one)- very maneuverable but had wing strength issues and lacked the TWR to keep up, was quite easily taken down.

That's fine, I'll probably make a new plane since I can't really do much to that one without completely changing the aeasthetics and performance - there isn't actually anywhere to offset those wings or strakes. Are you sure about the wings though, because they're slightly angled to stop Z-fighting there's actually only about half a metre of each embedded in each other, not much more than with Zahida's CF-59 Naga. Similarly with the strakes, probably only a third of them is hidden.