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.

@CreativeCombat how's this on your wing clipping rules? There's quite a bit of clipping but it doesn't really give any advantage other than making the design possible, nothing is armoured and it's not getting silly in terms of fuel volume, EDIT: Also, are you sure 5 fights is enough? With very closely matched planes like the Anduril and El Quicko, I've had one be winning after five fights but by seven the other has overtaken and by nine be the decisive winner, and with very maneuverable fighters like those two you can expect at least two mid-air collisions, further messing up the result.

I notice you're using rapiers, is there a reason for that? Surely the Panthers have just as much thrust, weigh a lot less, are more efficient, and have all that lovely gimbally goodness?

Ok, does anyone know a setting that stops the AI flying in a perfectly straight line not even trying to avoid fire until it either gains speed and breaks hard, losing all that speed, or gets completely annihalated by guns? I'm fine tuning the El Quicko for the all guns tournament, and against the Anduril 90% of the times it gets shot down it's because it just suddenly disengages from the fight and starts flying in a straight line, putting the Anduril right on it's tail. Maybe turning maximumspeed down will help? At the moment, despite being totally capable of fighting the Anduril on at least equal terms usually, it just keeps commiting plane suicide, which it never seemed to do before.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mdq08iud6grf3nl/El%20Quicko%20X-A3.craft?dl=0 Try this one, hasn't had any tweaking done for this challenge or anything but is doing pretty well in gunfights in the Top Gun AI challenge. 2 vulcans, has flares and chaff installed but not used. Shouldn't be too hard on your PC, stock version is 25 parts, not much more for this BDArmory version.

I know, I was just saying the reason my plane in particular gets shredded by guns is because when I built it the plan was minimum parts - which turns out to also mean maximum ceasing-to-exist ..

Yup, that's the disadvantage of building for minumum part count, nothing can break off without losing a significant chunk . It can fight quite well with only one engine though, and can lose a canard or an elevator too and still remain thoroughly in the fight.

@Redshift OTF The Anduril Mk2's damage resistance is insane. El Quicko shoots off two engines and half of each wing, it's still fighting, and then it lands a GAU-8 burst that just vaporises the El Quicko. And then the twenty screenshots I took failed to save. These were the best I got:

This is against the Anduril Mk2, wings not angled. I don't know why it's got better at missile dodging, but the main changes I've made since it got comprehensively slaughtered in the tournament have been simply reducing the fuel load and removing the sidewinders (which seem to have made the AI delay missile avoidance whilst trying to get a sidewinder lock and caused it to try and fight at long range where it's more vulnerable to missiles). Seeing as at the moment it only comes to 28 points though, I'm thinking of adding tonnes of countermeasures to further boost it's missile avoidance capabilities. So the fighters look to be overall pretty much equal, with the Anduril having a clear advantage in terms of missile kills but the El Quicko winning every single tight maneuvering gun fight. If the El Quicko could dodge missiles better, or the Anduril could somehow keep it far enough away to avoid entering a maneuvering gunfight, this could change, however.

Sorry, I forgot to remove the sidewinders. It actually fights much better with just the two AIM-120s. So far, after 9 fights: 3 Wins for the Anduril, all with AIM-120s. 3 Wins for the El Quicko, all with guns. 3 Mid-air collisions.

I really couldn't tell which is best in a gunfight. Mainly because the most common result is a mid-air collision. Time to try the latest El Quicko against the latest Anduril, it's pistols-at-dawn time https://www.dropbox.com/s/z5qwyqlzl0wok0g/El%20Quicko%20%28-X%20Variant%29%20Missiles.craft?dl=0 <-- latest El Quicko with dual Vulcans, dual AIM-120s, and a reduced fuel load.