chadgaskerman

Centaur Class Fleet Carrier My first carrier in a while, made from an old and unfinished follow up to the Bishop class light carrier. I'm quite happy with the deck shape and hanger, with space for 3 aircraft below deck with some space on the flight deck for parking. The Centaur class sits at 112 metres in length, a beam of 21 metres and a height of 25 and a half metres with a part count of 353. The Carrier is capable of ~25m/s in a straight line and is pretty lazy with regards to turning. https://kerbalx.com/chadgaskerman/Centaur-Class-Fleet-Carrier

Personally I think so long as you can find the centre of boyancy and trim to that, you can fairly easily add a lot of inert ballast so it's just barely positively boyant, and then only have to use a small amount of active ballast to drop it into negative boyancy. finding the centre of boyancy is a lot easier on something with a low part count due to there just being less points of force being exerted on the craft. Essentially the key to making a submarine is being able to locate the centre of boyancy and then add ballast, after that you can trim with hydrodynamic surfaces and/or ballast.

1b. Project 432 Slightly more refined than the TEK-46, the Project 432 features a far more aesthetically pleassing hull with a MK3 backbone surrounded by a set of six MK2 fueselages, creating a hexagonal cross section. Unfortunatley I have neither the patience nor the time to tune the ballast so it either ends up sinking regardless or remaining on the surface. I'd be more than willing to furnish someone with the craft file if they would like to work on it. https://kerbalx.com/chadgaskerman/Project-432 1c. Project 600 At a time where I was experimenting with using fairings for runways, it seem wise to see if it would work in other unorthodox ways, for example as the hull of the submarine. They great thing about fairings for this application is that you can just about get whatever shape you want, the downside, however, is the fact that fairing shells are abnormally boyant, and with no way to effectively measure the centre of boyancy, this too was a project abandoned.

1. Submarines 1a. TEK-46 The TEK-46 was one of my earlier experimentations with submarines, the layout is simple using a basic MK3 fuesalage turned its side to allow kerbals to stand out on deck easily. The majority of the hull is taken up by two long cargo bays containing a several hundred tons of ore in order to manage the boyancy. The Submarine itself also uses a propellor made from the breaking ground assets meaning the range is technically infinite, although at the disadvantage of not being stable in any form of time warp. Underwater the Boat is capable of ~17m/s whereas surfaced it can only muster ~15m/s. In total the craft only consists of 86 parts and weighs in at a hefty 456.5 tons. https://kerbalx.com/chadgaskerman/TEK-46

Looking Back on my various save files in KSP, I notice that quite a few of my designs often don't see the light of day, whether that's because I lose interest and work on something new, or the concept itself proves to be unworkable or otherwise broken. I'm making this thread to archive my efforts and document various methods I've used to build my craft. I'm also considering putting these craft on kerbalX if there's any interest even if they are below my usual standard of quality.

Original Post has been updated with new entrants. Surprised that this thread is starting to pick up again after a year.

I am looking forward to creating more aircraft carriers in a space game

what else are you going to make a propellor with exactly?

https://kerbalx.com/chadgaskerman/TEK-66-2-CGN working propellor, Kerbal boat program argument is null and void, furthermore, skill issue

hydrodynamic propellors

I'll give it a go, Difficult, stock +DLC

I think it's more of a function of speed at altitude over anything else. If you can optimise an engine and aircraft to fly it's fastest at 4.5 to 5.5km you can avoid all the tedium of a more direct approach in regards to piloting.

After the results of further tweaking, i'm eek even more speed out at sea level for the runs in between the various landmasses. I'm currently using a part edited ion engine to provide for the energy generation requirements, I'd need around 100 rtg's to comfortably satisfy electric charge requirements. I did, however for the sake of fairness add roughly 8 tons of ballast to simulate the RTGs

After a small bit of research and some more tinkering it looks like the optimal way to get more speed is using the largest motors with the medium sized ducted fan. As you can see I've used quite a few of them, as well as shrouding them in a fairing to reduce drag. All in all this gives me 352m/s at sea level and 331m/s at 2500m

Personally I think altitude will be slightly more important than speed, mainly due to the relationship between air pressure, thrust and drag which i think adds another layer to this challenge over your average circumnavigation. currently I'm getting 310m/s at about mach 0.95 after some tweaking of the rake of the propellors