swjr-swis

Ok, my first entry for this challenge: the SpeedyReturn-2 - 0:22 to 1000 m/s, 0:54 to full stop on the runway: Full imgur album: https://imgur.com/a/rg3xe5w And a video: Craft file: https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/SpeedyReturn-2 (consider yerselves challenged to beat my time in this baby ) The roundtrip can be done better: the one posted could've been under 50 seconds, but I forgot to fire the retro rockets to come to a full stop quicker. My fastest run was on the very first trial (46s!), but I wasn't recording that one. For now, this one takes the top spots.

https://www.getpaint.net/ You don't really need much more.

Thank you. It's not about the place on the leaderboard - I don't want people to lose interest in participating in challenges, there's all sorts of things to learn from the entries made. I hope you will consider updating it when @sevenperforce gets the 9-terrier vertical solution working with a kerbal. Plus someone may still come up with a no-part-shedding SSTO version. There's still life in the original challenge.

Yeah, good luck with getting any entries for that. Please re-read the challenge posting rules, take a look around to how other challenges are run, and decide whether you are actually willing to do the work that is expected from a challenge poster. It's rather disrespectful of all the time and effort entrants spent to just completely ignore them and not acknowledge when they post successful entries. Now you basically invalidate ALL good entries made so far by completely changing the challenge objective, even while there are still people working on new entries. It now just looks like we've all been posting nonsense for the first two weeks of the challenge. If you're bored with your challenge and want to move on to a different one, mention that you're closing it in the OP and post a new thread. I tell you though, don't expect much interest - no one likes to waste their time when they figure out the OP is not really interested.

Don't change too much, it's already almost there. Maybe just drain some of that excess LFO from the last tank; that should be pretty close to the extra mass of command seat and kerbal.

The challenge objective is to get a Kerbal to orbit though. You still have 5 units of LFO left in orbit - that might be just enough to get the job done.

It could've been, but it ended up being a highly contested choice between "Bills" and "Coins", and they put it to a vote, splitting the KSC right through the middle on the issue: Half of them (everyone in the Administration Building, Mission Control, R&D, and the Runway personnel) felt Bills was the obvious choice - rectangular and flat, administratively neat, efficient storing. The other half (Launchpad personnel, Tracking Station, VAB, SPH and Tower) felt that it absolutely needed to be Coins - stackable, rounded, more payload, and flippable to decide who gets to test the next contraption. The vote ended in a deadlock, so to keep the peace it was decided to join the two in the name.

Maybe 'Billcoins' is appropriate, in honour of the (not-so-anonymous?) kerbal geek that redirected every spare cycle of the KSC mainframe into blockchain code to fund the space program.

Actually, it can be done in the craft file too, if you just want to make this change once for that one craft. Search for the following in the craft file: XSECTION { h = 0 r = 0.625 } XSECTION { h = 0.598072052 r = 0.625 } XSECTION { h = 1.24200153 r = 0.523973823 } The fairing part in the craft file will have an 'XSECTION' per (height) segment of the fairing. h is the start of the segment counting from the top of the fairing base, and r is the radius, both in meters. The first XSECTION is effectively where the fairing touches the base, and should always retain the standard values. Keep in mind that the fairing code will try to 'soften' abrupt changes in diameter, which may cause some of the segment edges to be wider/narrower than the exact number chosen.

Well... you have now. Full imgur album: https://imgur.com/a/OEaCRFo Craft file: https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/McTailfins

I had a nagging suspicion that it should be possible to do a very lean horizontal take-off - all I needed was to get the orbital stage of my rocket entry up to 120 m/s and 1km high, or better. So I stripped the rocket booster stage, rotated it to horizontal, and made it into a spaceplane. It ends up being a similar staging concept to that of @vyznev, except I'm a bit more ruthless in staging off stuff I no longer need. This allowed me to stick with just three Terriers, needing a lot less wing too. The end result is the Terrier2LKO-2b, a 10.1t 3-Terrier craft that starts as a spaceplane and takes off from the runway, and then sheds parts while transforming into a rocket in a gravity turn. 100+km LKO can be reached, and the orbital stage can safely bring the kerbal back to the surface again. Full imgur album: https://imgur.com/a/UfQAM3W Craft file: https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/Terrier2LKO-2b Btw @DAL59, are you going to update the leaderboard with everyone's entries?

Juno engine power curve, it's not surprising. It's worth the risk dipping as low to the surface as you can if you are just a few decimals away from reaching the next full m/s. The 5 m difference could help, but you would definitely need to switch to fine controls (why are you not using that?), and disengage SAS entirely and fly on trim (I can't tell from your screenshots if you do or not). It also helps to lower your elevator authority to 10% or less, to make your pitch control more gradual and accurate. Not that curious either: there's an equilibrium point where the aerodynamic forces, gravity, and remaining engine thrust balance out, allowing the plane to keep cruising without loss of airspeed. You can briefly dip above that, but this is basically done by exchanging airspeed for altitude, which makes airspeed and lift drop below the balance point, until you inevitably lose the gained altitude again. I think you are partly drawing the wrong conclusions. The role of gravity in maximizing your craft top speed is almost negligible compared to the aerodynamic forces (drag!). I do agree you could do with a lot less Junos though, and still get more speed out of that frame. I did a quick rebuild in 1.3.1 to test: You could do even better by entirely removing the two Mk1 LF tanks - they are just adding superfluous mass and drag to the craft, as even just the 200 LF in the intake is enough to reach any place on Kerbin within an hour. The above craft are simple WYSIWYG stock rebuilds based on your screenshots, with offset adjustments on snap to move CoM/CoL where I wanted. No real fine tuning was done, leaving potential for better numbers by either fine tuning, adding extra Junos, or replacing parts for better alternatives (pre-cooler comes to mind). Any other 'tricks' used to achieve the results (elevon deployment, flight method, etc) are visible in the screenshots. Use to your advantage. I would feel inclined to disagree.

Technically third, since @Klapaucius entered two different eligible Mk2 planes, in separate posts. That draggy open node in the back is killing all that excess thrust - it's like flying with a giant deployed airbrake. Remember my Dodo from a few pages back? It doesn't take all that many Junos to push a streamlined Mk3 craft close to Mach 2 and beyond. The added weight of the extra parts is well worth it: Mk2 planes can be quite fast with a minimum of Junos too: Make it so the fuselage angle of attack nears zero (and thus body drag), and you'll slice through the air on a minimum of thrust, even when using the notoriously draggy mk3/mk2 parts.

The text box widget seems to present text in the same way basic HTML does: it completely condenses all whitespace, which includes CRLF and empty lines. The way I have been working around this is by placing a line with just a single period by itself. The period is almost invisible, and you get nicely separated paragraphs. Cave at: the single period does have some strange interaction when directly preceding or following a bullet list: it will prevent the list from showing as bullet points, skip the paragraph (and line, sometimes) separation, or both. Extra workaround in that case: add an extra empty line between the single period line and the bullet list.

I can't load your plane in 1.3.1, and the pics you have posted don't show it well enough to rebuild, so I can offer only limited help, but I can see a number of things that would help improve that plane: You can cut a good amount of drag by minimizing the number of intakes. The single DSI I see on the tail section is plenty by itself to feed up to 25 Junos, which means you could remove the radial ones and replace (most of?) the small circular ones by small nosecones. You say wings are overrated and cut down on them, but having enough wing to keep the plane 'afloat' helps in maintaining a small angle of attack, and thus, minimizing body drag. I can't tell from the pics how many basic fins you use, but it it's just the visible ones, that is not enough for the mass of that plane. Body drag is very likely setting the speed limit of your plane at the moment. Switch the landing gear for the smallest retractable gear. Yes, they are marginally heavier, but once retracted they are a lot less draggy in flight, which quickly overrides any downside from the tiny extra mass. As an added bonus, they are much stronger for landing on.

I'm not sure why you feel we're in disagreement: your explanation rather proves my main point that stock has a restricted number of action groups to use, which makes them a precious resource that require careful weighing of what we want to use them for. Yes, there are a few more than the 10 'custom' action groups, but like your explanation shows, the functions tend to be necessary and so we often end up adding to their function, not simply using them free-form for entirely unrelated things. In the end, what the OP suggests doesn't seem to add anything to already existing stock functionality: roll/yaw/pitch are already assigned to individual keys in a slightly more functional way than they would be if the keys only worked as toggles like the action groups. This is why I ask some clarification. I fly only with keyboard and mouse too. I am a bit confused by the above explanation, especially because you use the default brake key as an example. The brake key is precisely the only 'action group' key that does not work like an action group: it is not a toggle, it only 'works' while you keep it pressed. Which is exactly how the default keys assigned to roll/yaw/pitch work already. This I would love having, although I would simply ask for a toggle button on the PAW of engines -all engines- where we could select 'Act as RCS'. If the game allowed this, we could build RCS with the power to match the size of our craft/station, or to use for VTOL like you explain. But this is an essentially different thing than what this OP is asking.

Choice is good. Don't restrict yourselves or your designs by thinking of conventional uses only, and consider also use cases in which the combination of properties of the pre-cooler makes it the best choice (or compromise). I'm not alone in responding here that I use it, so obviously people do find uses for it - open your mind to the possibilities. Besides, I find the aesthetics and (imaginary) practicality of the part appealing too. I don't know how viable such an intake could be in real life (I don't think I've ever seen one), but I have a feeling that if engineers had such an option, it would be used a lot - no open ducts/funnels to mess up aerodynamic flow or to 'design around', no need to worry about bird strikes or runway debris, etc etc.

I use the pre-cooler all the time. It's surface attachable, it's still the least draggy of the 1.25m intake+tank parts (and the -shared- lightest dry mass), and it is a bit better at pulling heat from attached parts due to its thermal properties - especially helpful with hot-running engines like the Whiplash or Nerv. Care to explain with a bit more words what you mean with useless, or what change you are looking for?

Craft with probe cores are not automatically crewed if you don't do it explicitly before launching (or save it at least once with assigned crew). Are you sure you actually launched it with a Kerbal inside? Or did the probe's core fly the plane instead?

Hey, I hear people like a bit of margin. As the name might give away, there was a 1a version before this, which had the luxury of an additional 3rd stage of 6x radial boosters (half-filled FL-T200 with Terrier on radial decoupler). They were empty and dropped at barely 10m/s and 120m up, and yet it allowed the orbital stage to reach 100km orbit with about a quarter Oscar-B tank left. The boosters were even capped and had chutes - totally useless in this scenario but it looked good. That felt positively wasteful, so I decided to make it a bit more frugal and stripped off the radial boosters... Besides, I needed to use less engines than you. You practically dared me.

Presenting the JunoSkypuncher-1: single-juno winged manned aircraft, vertical-launch. Climb numbers for fastest climb leaderboard: 100 m: 0:01 2000 m: 0:16 (+0:15) 5000 m: 0:30 (+0:29) 8000 m: 0:45 (+0:44) 10000 m: 0:55 (+0:54) 15000 m: 1:32 (+1:31) This one is purely for the fastest climb part of the challenge, although I handicapped it a bit to still maintain a minimal semblance of an aircraft. It does sustain level or climbing flight between 8-9km for about a minute, but it was too twitchy to keep within 20m for 30s as required, so I'm not entering it for sustained altitude. I'll enter a separate craft for that.

Ok, fine, I'll enter too. One traditional rocket type vehicle, two stages, 20 Terriers, launched from KSC. One kerbal to orbit... and back. The booster stage uses 19 Terriers in hexagonal arrangement (some clipping, but the nozzles are kept free, I felt was an acceptable approximation of a composite engine). It just serves to get the first 160m/s and about 2km out of the way. From there, the orbital stage -a fairing cabin with command seat pushed by a single Terrier- can carry itself to orbit via a regular gravity turn. It arrives to 80km orbit with just fumes in the tanks, but even those fumes can be used to deorbit the craft again, and with the aid of some aerobraking and the added chute, the kerbal makes it safely back to the surface. Full imgur album: https://imgur.com/a/39fzZ4n Craft file: https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/Terrier2LKO-1b

It looks like you're launching the launcher, instead of the actual game. Ignore the launcher, it hasn't worked for a long time now, I don't really know why they still keep including it.

You realize that this is just one special case of the 'weak engine to space' challenge, yes? The solutions posted here will in concept be the exact same as for that challenge, just only with the terriers. The terrier does starts awful at ASL, true, but even then it's still a 1+ TWR engine, which means it's all a question of how many engines you want to spam and how many parts your PC/patience can cope with.

First: if you were hoping for some serious feedback, I would suggest leaving the meme-talk for other places; it doesn't work in this forum. Second: it would help start the discussion if you explained what the benefits would be of your proposed suggestions. For example: I get a feeling you either didn't quite think this one through, or you are failing to explain what you mean by it. Action groups are toggles, on/off. Apart from taking up precious action group keys very rapidly (stock only has 10), there is no fine control with action groups - it would be full deployment or nothing, which is no use for roll/pitch/yaw. What would be the benefit of this, when in stock you already have a separate key or input assigned for each of those, which do allow fine control? Unless you mean something entirely different, but you'll have to explain. This part, if I understand it correctly, has been mentioned before, and I think it is on a lot of people's wishlist. Symmetry is often handy and efficient for building a craft, but just because I build with symmetry doesn't necessarily mean I want the parts to *act* symmetrically when flying it. Unfortunately right now it's both or nothing. Options are good, and this one would certainly get used if it was implemented.