BlueCanary

So if someone manages a crankshaft, Kerbal Absolutely-enormous-8-billion-part-internal-combustion-engine Program?

So awesome, how much thrust does it put out?

Now it just needs an Arnold Schwarzenegger replica to drive it

Great choices this week That jet engine is incredible, like KSP squared.

So, has it been decided who is doing this week then?

If only I knew the answer to this, I might have got a better grade in English. The number of times I got told "it's good, but why is there a cat eating mcdonalds?..." EDIT: Oh wow, just realised how far off topic I just off-topiced this, all by accident. EDIT 2: Attempt to re-on-topic, the main reason I see threads go off topic is people arguing whether the thread is a good idea/question/etc. or not.

yay, semi-relevancy: spent so long looking for a front bottoms song even vaguely KSP-y

There's some formula somewhere that works out how much rep a person gives each time they rep you, you get 1-5 points depending on how long they've been on the forum, post count and a bunch of other stuff I think. Also, I'm 19 points from a bar.

Thanks for the advice, I'll try this next chance I get - - - Updated - - - Also, would be another 0.3 tonnes weight saved. Good idea.

More work on my fuel efficient business jet, now has more fuel, more control and can carry 4 passengers and 2 crew. I did another test flight where it hit KSC after an eastwards circumnavigation and overshot by a huge distance so I kept it at altitude and it managed to make it half the way back around Kerbin, before I realised it can't land on water. It is 38 parts and about 17 tonnes fully fuelled. Since it takes 220 units of fuel to takeoff and climb to altitude and had way more than that on passing KSC after circumnavigating that means (I think) it has enough range to go anywhere on Kerbin, land, and return, in about an hour and 5 minutes. It can do so on less than 1320 funds too (the cost of a full refuelling for it), so it could be really useful for career, especially since you could swap out the passenger module for a cargo bay full of science or a small rover (1.75 tonnes) and do survey contracts. It needs a better landing gear, the current system looks bad but I can't think of another way to do it without huge drag. Also, it is very prone to overshooting because of very low drag so airbrakes would be good, but I don't want the drag when they are closed and anyway, for maximum efficiency you would let it glide as far as it can to the target.

So if there was a bearing that didn't require craft to be seperate it'd have a lot more chance? Maybe using structural pylons, I saw something somewhere about them being used for rotation.

I assume gyroscope effects make it too hard to just brute force tilt the entire rotor disc with something? Also maybe there's a way you could just use control surfaces as rotors and somehow find a way to tilt them at the right times? Maybe KOS would have a way to do it? Or by making it a chinook style or even quadrotor system you could just adjust pitch for the whole of one rotor to get control?

Awesome, what engines does it use?

Also is the drive when in anti gravity mode directional?

Do other engines still work whilst the one with just-over-1g acceleration is active? Like, could you have a vessel with that drive for weightlessness but other engines/rcs for control? Star Wars repulsorcraft anyone?

Is there any way to make variable pitch props in stock? I made a tip-jet powered helicopter but the lag between tipjet throttling and rotor speed makes it very hard to control. I was thinking varying rotor pitch a la real life would work, but if not what about running the rotor at a speed slightly too low to support lift and using auxillary lift jets to provide control?

"I spy with my little eye something beginning with... e" "The empty void of space stretching out endlessly before us as it will continue to do so for years to come?" "yes"

With a design blatantly ripping off inspired by pandora's kitten's HX-1 Circular Wing Hypersonic Plane (although in the end it didn't really end up looking very similar at all), this was an attempt to make the most fuel efficient plane with which to travel around Kerbin. The idea was to go for absolute minimum drag, high wing area to reduce AoA and so further reduce drag, and to only use a single turbojet for minimum engine weight and drag. It actually worked really well - it has sufficient climb performance and thrust to get up to altitude without a huge amount of work, and once there (21000m or so) only burns 0.25-0.35 units of fuel a second whilst maintaining up to Mach 4. It can handle 4x timewarp too, which is nice. I would be interested to know how this compares to other peoples designs, what is the average performance of these kind of craft? I figured since this is one engine and one intake it must be pretty good, but how does it compare to other craft with more power? In testing it took off with a partial fuel load (1160 units, because filling the front tank throws off balance) and after an inefficient (much screwing up with autopilot input errors etc.) began to cruise off to the east, and managed to circumnavigate Kerbin with about 160 units of fuel left with about an hour from takeoff to landing. Things did start to heat up but stabilised very quickly, so nothing blew up. This was a eastwards circumnavigation too so less efficient than a westwards one. The problem is though, in this test flight there was no useful payload, just 2 kerbals. I'm worried that TWR might take such a hit with more kerbals/payload added that it would use a lot more fuel in the climb.

Awesome, thank you

I am also, depending on how things go irl next week (starting new school) likely to have time to do a week whenever is needed.

Time to try and keep my boat from exploding for long enough to get anywhere

FlipNascar, I heard somewhere that wing lift is applied from the root, so it might be that your first rotor disc was taking the very slow speed at the roots of those wings and applying lift based on that, whereas if you flipped them around it could be much more effective due to higher speed at the tips.

Can't wait for this

so would it have been able to do vertical takeoff if the same engines had instead been simply angled downwards?

In the imgur album for 1.1, it's all still very much subject to balancing I guess but you can see most of the stats (no isp unfortunately) in one of the screenshots.