Cunjo Carl

@Baricus I must have missed part of your post (or maybe it was added later), because that's a ton of progress! The hardest part is totally aim, but the good news is you don't actually need to hit the Kerbin SOI, just get within 50m/s of it with a maneuver node. If your pod doesn't have any propulsion, it's probably easiest to ditch it and fly the manuever on jet packs. You can actually reenter from an interplanetary trajectory without space ships using an *ahem* unintended feature of KSP that I hold near and dear by telling anyone I think will get a kick out of it. Simply set your trajectory to be between 100-1000m over Kerbin's south pole, go to the tracking station and wait until just after periapse, fly the kerbal and wait a moment for them to slow down a bit. Quick save and quickload if ithe kerbal's trying to spaghettify, then go to 4x timewarp and hold shift+W to bounce off the ground or sploosh into the ocean with style. Boy, that's a longer explanation than I remember. Nice tether! I dig the use of cubic struts as mounting points for two-part struts. Your picture spinning up makes it look like a very stiff joint is created. The map-mode picture may not outwardly look impressive, but I see an eccentric orbit with the Ap/Pe pushed 90 degrees from your position- that takes a ton of impulse! Sweet pic. It just takes a couple dozen repetitions to get that magic shot. I hope you and Edlu find it amusing to give it another go at some point! @DoctorDavinci I want to watch that movie so bad, but my Internet's on the fritz. Tomorrow I hope!

Ok. I think I've succeeded to make it quite approachable, but unfortunately it's probably a half-hour read at minimum. Er, I hope it helps in some way! Beware, Math within! Summary: For the sake of the effects that keep the plane aloft (thrust+lift), engines and wings are equivalently important. So much so, that an equal mass of wing and engine is the ideal, regardless of their relative efficiency. The only factor which would make us choose more of one over the other is their drag. Drag is hugely important, and highly nuanced. A low drag is often the deciding factor between a decent plane and a superb one. It's a thing I've struggled with a lot for other challenges, and would be happy to share tricks and heuristics.

While working on chores, my hind brain just splatted me through a quantitative analysis of low-altitude ion planes. Would anyone like the model? It's a little complex, and probably not worth it for calculations (trial and error is easier) but it can be nice to see how the pieces relate sometimes...

Woo! I've got a stock entry at 230m. I'm mostly posting so other folk can use the method if they want to try it stock. As far as hydrodynaics goes, KSP handles it almost identically to aerodynamics. In that regards, the wings all exhibit negligible amounts of parasitic drag when they're level to the medium, so I figured they'd be a great first try. Sadly, they all seemed to explode underwater and fling the camera into outerspace at light speed, so that one was a bust! These worked nice, though. Did you know that the best submarines in KSP are actually planes? The Bobber The Bobber burns through the skies in hunt for deep waters. It doesn't actually need to go far! With the aid of parachutes, it splashes down nose first, and jets slowly down into the water... Near the ocean floor, the insanely buoyant fuselage releases from the rest of the craft Launch! It breaches out to 230 meters, CANNON BALL! Though this particular launch went east, I've been aiming most of them south towards the eye of the smiley. It's only a couple hundred meters deeper, but still, how could you not want the deepest part of the ocean? Thanks for the challenge, @DoctorDavinci, this was a fun one! Edit: As an aero(hydro)dynamics note, don't neglect to put pointy things on the bottom end- that side's draggy too!

@sal_vager Say, could we get some feedback on the entries so far? I just realized I've been throwing entire pots of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, and I should probably listen for a splat before boiling up another round. Also, just my thinking, but it doesn't feel like this challenge needs direct competition (vis-a-vis the leader board) to be interesting/instructional/funny. However in liu of that graded competition, we could definitely use your comments and observations. It'd be handy to hear either general high-level stuff (like "more ships like these" / "focus on save files not ships") or specific stuff (like "This ship is a good size" / "Could you put one in space"). If the only necessary comment is "Just keep posting things, plz", I'd be happy with that too . In any case, Thanks for hosting! As for the documentation, I was just filming and writing talking points for the documentation of last week's ships. In the end was that first video helpful, or are the pictures/descriptions enough to go on? As a teaser for next week's ships, I've made one that reproducibly explodes superlumnially and sends the camera tumbling into the cosmos. Trouble was, it was just supposed to decouple some engines for another challenge... Finally, if you're still around @ZooNamedGames, I'll bet that old well-loved save would be handy if you still wanted to post it?

Sounds fun! Mind if I try this stock? I've got an 8m jump on this one, but I think I can design something from scratch to push it way higher. Maybe not 300m high like yours, but high enough to make a splash! From an earlier challenge, here's my island of Atlantis surfacing from the bottom of the sea. If stock is ok, please consider it a kick-off entry with a very low bar to beat! This one works by suddenly expelling the ore from several tanks and (detrimentally) inflating a heat shield. The next one? Hm. I'd need to hit the drawing board, which is a good sign. Let me know what you think about stock entries. Cheers!

@Baricus Welcome to the forums! Even without staging those are some impressive results. I believe the bar for deltaV is currently in the high 300m/s-ish so your 850m/s is more than enough to make a splash. Thanks for posting your WIP, my favorite part of the challenge forums is seeing how peoples' designs improve over time. 850m/s is a ton of deltaV by the way! Were you getting any whipping effects that were helping out, or was it just spinning bloody fast? Even a single stage with ~850m/s should be plenty for many different trips like LKO to Mun or Ike to Kerbin. Just like with rockets, staging adds to your deltaV, but often less than you might expect. At present, its primary role is for style points (though for me there is no greater calling). Also, if launching is being a pain in your side, I can recommend Hyperedit as a simple, convenient way to put your tether in space.The ability to launch a space tether is an engineering challenge all its own! They truly live up to the name "Wet noodle rocket". In any case, good luck!

So, if you were thinking about it the wrong way around, I wouldn't feel bad about it. I was, too! The situation reminds me of a Feynman sprinkler, where the answer is immediately obvious everyone, but everyone gets a different answer. Conservation of angular momentum with no torque paths to ground doesn't show up that often, so our intuitions can be ill-equiped for some reason! Where did my original misconception come from? Well.... turns out it was KSP! Or atleast the KSP wiki. In the description for the tiny reaction wheel it says: “ The placement does matter for reaction wheels. Generally speaking they can cause some problems if placed far from the center of mass. Imagine you are grabbing that point and rotating it. That is what the reaction wheels will try to do. You'll get offcenter rotation anywhere other then near the COM. — comment by C7, in his blog entry “Updated Information on SAS in 0.21.1” In retrospect, it might just be misleadingly ambiguous. I didn't try to scrutinize it or anything, it just sounds like torque works better near the COM, which sounds legit enough. (Except it's not) So for us that had intuition pointing the wrong way, how can we fix it? Well, torques are weird, so instead let's imagine our torque as two forces being applied L distance apart from eachother on a long rod in space (the best kind). In space you spin around the COM, and we can imagine putting these two forces either centered on the COM, or way at the end of the rod. Torque-Equivalent Forces on a Rod in Spaaaaace For both setups, the red and green points both apply F force and are are L distance apart from eachother. What's the resulting torque? Torque = Force * radius (from COM) ... In the first case, that'll be F*(L/2) + F*(L/2) = F*L, and in the second case it'll be F*3L - F*2L = F*L . Huh. Two very different situations, but the same resulting torque about the COM. Conceptually why? The forces centered on the rod both torque in the same direction and add together but they're quite close. On the other hand, the forces near the end of the rod wind up primarily fighting eachother and torquing the rod in opposite directions. However they're also much further away from the COM, so what little force isn't balanced out is amplified by the long lever arm. Because these two effects balance perfectly (physics ), the net effect of both setups is the same. So apparently angular momentum is conserved. Huh, imagine that . I hope that thought experiment helps other people as it did me.

I've made my next round, but haven't quite finished the testing/documentation. I kinda had my heart set on posting it this evening though, so I'll put up save and descriptions tonight, and edit in the more time consuming video later. I'll also be adding different models of a few of these crafts and doing some more in-depth stress testing with them next week. I had 5 or 6 ships in mind for this week, and decided to go with 5 or 6 completely different ones instead! This week's focus has been on piling up object collisions, which is a fun way to ramp up the lag. Ultimately, I'm pretty happy with the lineup. Slak (Linear collider) Sepratron Sinker A Ball of Unusual Size Rock Polisher Ball Pit Klaw Blossoms Reloader Exploder Save File: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4VfTCvq4M80bGtzMDZ5MnZuN0U All of the above ships are available in the SPH. For convenience sake, they've simply been added to the save file from last week. Enjoy!

Yep, the reactionless here refers to our charmingly reactionless reaction wheels, as you say. The rest is also along the right vein, and it's a wonderful thought exercise to map out exactly how the forces work out for the system. You probably already understand the following, but here's an interesting way to look at it: The reason it's a bit hard to discuss is that the fling actually happens when the force stops. The payload goes exactly how fast it was going the instant before release, and so does the tether. The action/reaction pair is only there while it's still spinning and held together, which is funny, right? Regardless, 'equal and opposite fling' is correct and a nice way to look at it, too! Another aspect, the spinning must be started up by torquing against something, which typically means a rocket in real life (though there are some fun exceptions). Once a tether is already spinning, most people have in mind that the tether will catch as many incoming ships as it launches off, so it'll keep transferring without needing any additional fuel. Sounds scary to me, but there you go. If you happen to be interested in the math, I'd be happy to sketch through it with you! It can be a fun way to see how pieces relate. In any case, glad it got you thinkin'!

Sounds like a plan! 1:03-1:37 is actually an uncut clip of an entire run. Most of my runs were winding up in the low to mid 30s, so this one should do fine. I think it's the big wings, and the vertical cannards which remind me of the gypsy moths' feathery antenna. I'm a bug guy, so it could just be me . Cool plane in anycase.

Oh, now that I read through the last couple pages of the challenge I should have picked up on that. I was just so excited about flying boats. And yes, as you say these use the hydrofoils primarily to lift them out of the water (and to keep the aerolift, which they can also get plenty of, from accidentally flipping them out of the water as I understand it!) Hm. I don't think I'll set any bars, but this challenge sounds interesting.

Give it a try! They're easier than they look. 1. The centrifugal force relative to the your craft's/Kerbal's velocity is m*v^2/r . So the longer you make a momentum tether, the gentler the centrifugal force for a given speed. Unfortunately, the longer it is, the greater the energy you need to spin it up. Fortunately both short and long can be made to work in KSP. "Moar struts!" 2. The good news is you'll never lose speed. If your payload is zipping around the COM at 100m/s, when you release it'll fly away at 100m/s. If you make your payloads heavier and heavier though, the COM will sneak closer and closer to it and that's where the loss is. 3. Aim is difficult. Here's my experience: [alt+F9] nope. [alt+F9] almost [alt+F9] so close! [alt+F9].... 4. Even with math it winds up being trial and error. For starters though, 100-300m/s is pretty average for a tether you just throw together 5. If you're just interested in the tether and not the launch, you can use a mod called Hyperedit to send your tether straight into orbit from the launch pad for your test. Alternatively, there are ways to make launchable momentum tethers using the mk3 parts, which has been pioneered by @LaytheDragon. Once again, pic taken from the Tether challenge page. Come on over! We'd be happy to hear about your trials, troubles and triumphs in flinging Kerbals to their uh... final destination!

This is totally a thing that's happening in real life, and it's amazing! Here's a charming and informative article about the crazy flying yachts that people have started racing with: http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/25/11771276/americas-cup-boat-design-team-oracle Also, @Heffy, welcome to the forums! That is a sweet barge.

We can take advantage of the very low maxtemp and skin mass of the basic fin. A single seperatron with only .8 fuel can explode it handily, freeing whatever is attached to fall gently down. If you load your basic fin with a bunch of empty seperators and put it in a service bay, you can seperate everything apart before launch and drop them whenever you please. The act of separation is very laggy, but the game handles it well afterwords. You can see the basic fin on the left. I just placed seperatrons in it, then shifted them slightly out. Launch! Only one seperatron on each fin has fuel. Normally I launch with the doors closed. Yay, ball pit! Bill and Val jump into 1000+ seperatrons, well more than a Kerbal deep. The alternative is @swjr-swis's ore tanks loaded in on .625 decouplers and pushed with sep.tns. Your plane looks strikingly familiar! It's just about identical to mine only two versions back. It flew nice, so if I didn't need to go crazy to get the speed benchmark we'd probably still have a matching set! I actually tried that, too unsucesfully. Your use of the .625 seperator and 4 seperatrons really works a treat! Thanks for the pics and craft file. Sporting @swjr-swis (tm) bomb racks has made this plane fit the challenge and hit its marks! Satisfied customer, 5 stars, would buy again. The path from 235m/s top speed to 255m/s was a long and arduous one. I got rid of all the fuel tanks except for the NCS adaptor (too draggy), got rid of the struts, flipped the wings (to move the COM forward), put one of the Junos on the main stack and shifted the other nacelle just above it, shifted all the wings up to bring the COM inline with the weird thrust, pre-tilted the wings. and shifted the tail back much further. The result was worth it, but boy it took a lot of trial and error for not too much improvement. My final version! It has the ore-tank bombs, and now a pair of vertical shuttle strakes near the COM to help it yaw. The only changes to the specs are: max speed now 252m/s and fuel now 1560. It accelerates like a boat, but it can pirouette like a ballerina! Edit: Just noticed your rules change, @He_162, and I think it's a good choice. The original specs were possible but took a looooot of work.

It's even possible to use a momentum tether to fling another momentum tether ('cause why not be Kerbal about it). I'll just repost this from @DoctorDavinci . It's fantastic! If you want to give the video a like, you can find the original posting here: Link. The link is being a bit weird, so just scroll up 2 posts from where it takes you. For anyone trying their hands at making momentum tethers, I can highly recommend this transfer from Low Ike Orbit to Duna for practice. It's got a gentle velocity requirement, a wide window and a destination you can land on with a skydiving kerbal.

I made a thing! I hope it's close enough to fit. It's a 2 Juno bomber, believe it or not. Those little Junos are exquisitely sensitive to parasitic drag, so the only place to put the bombs is in 1.25m service bays. Everything else (even the mk2 bays) are much too draggy. Unfortunately, even though 2 radial ore tanks can handily squeeze into a 1.25 service bay, they don't quite fit out the door! It would need a Kerbal to get out and jump on them, which come to think of it does sound like a rather Kerbal thing to do. It was frustrating because I found that I could make my bombers hit the performance benchmarks even with 4x 1.25 service bays, enough space for 8 bombs! But it just barely didn't work. So instead, I spent a bunch of time and learned how to load the service bays with seperatrons. Lots and lots of seperatrons- like 50 each! These could hypothetically be ignited and launched out, but I preferred to separate them before takeoff and drop them like millions of little feathery snowflakes. They delicately fall and for some reason explode like an inferno when they touch the ground. Well, it's KSP! The end effect has been outstandingly fun to play with, the only trouble is I feel kinda bad bombing anything, so I've gone for using them for plowshare activities like seeding reefs and tearing up concrete. Having spent many hot hours bouncing sledges off of too-well-rebarred concrete (it payed the bills), I feel it's an appropriate escalation and response. Specs 256m/s Top speed, level flight profile with bombs but no fuel. Fully fueled is 237m/s 4 Bomb bays, each with 40-60 sepratrons 1360 Fuel. Holla! 5s 360 degree horizontal bank, loosing 2/3 of the velocity. 3:30 Climb from sea level to 8km, with bombs but no fuel. Above all, it feels nice to fly. Understandably, it drops a bunch of speed during hard maneuvers, but it's stable responsive and quick to turn. Being mostly wing, it has a huge lift/mass so it can keep flight at quite low speeds, making it's easy to recover from stalls. The biggest downside is that it's pitiably slow to accelerate, so you need to keep a careful eye on your energy. Rebar Ripper Need fast? You got it! Just wait 5 minutes for it to speed up first So many crammed in such a small space... It's just like flying Delta. Oh, snap! Seperatrons scatter out for coral reef seeding. Sorry about those earlier bombs, atolls! The Rebar Ripper rips rebar. Potholes beware, you will be replaced. Your days are numbered. Since we can't use imgur, I've taken to using the KSP forum table for images- It's a little messier, but seems to work well enough. It's been fun putting kerbal smileys in the captions, but I may have gone a little overboard this time. Oh, If anyone's interested, I'd be happy to describe how to do the seperatron bomb bay thing! Yes it scales up.

How did I miss this? Great stuff, @DualDesertEagle! Not sure what the relative times are because the start/finish lines are loosely defined, but you've clearly got the slowest plane going so far! The shape totally reminds me of a gypsy moth if you've happen to seen one.

You guys are on to a good idea! There's a whole slew of real-life designs proposed for things just like that, working on a variety of different principals. They're generally called tethers, though the name can change depending on the use and mechanism. Here's a wiki article! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum_exchange_tether Wiki always wins. It's also possible to do this in KSP (much to my delight) and we've got a few flinging Kerbals across the cosmos right now. Thanks to @MiniMatt for linking it above. It feels like it, right? If there's no solid points in space where could there be to put the fulcrum? It turns out, though that the ship's center of mass behaves as the fulcrum. As the whole ship spins around its center of mass, parts of it can get flung away by centrifugal force, speeding away in a hopefully-useful direction. It's not altogether intuitive, but it winds up that it works! How you get the momentum tether spinning when there's nothing to push off of is one of the chief problems, and everyone's got their own ideas. KSP is nice to provide us with several excellent options to toy with, like the (non-physical) reaction wheels. This setup is my favorite because it's the most energetically favorable. The least energy/angular-momentum put in leads to the most fling coming out. For whatever reason, most proposed designs for momentum tethers seem to be fully symmetrical. Not sure why.... In any case, the counterweight design works, so if you had a mind to, you could go make one in KSP right now! I should add that many momentum tether designs aren't just for flinging things. They're for catching incoming ships, too. That would be a terrifying mode of travel. Cheers!

Believe it or not, there is a space drive proposed on this very effect of moving the mass around. Called the woodward drive, it moves the mass by moving an extremely intense electromagnetic field. Because of e=mc^2 that field will exhibit a mass at different places at different times so the ship can inchworm through space, always pushing/pulling off the heavy part. It, uh, probably won't work, but it's a fun thought exercise, and totally analogous to our Kerbal pump ship. Here's a wiki article! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodward_effect I will posit that Isaac Newton always wins, but mostly because he was head of the Royal Society at the time and got to write the history books (see Leibnitz). If you read the Principia (probably better not to, it's bizarre), Newton actually attributes the three laws to others, which was kindof a surprise to me. These days, in science, I feel like we can safely amend the statement to: "Wikipedia always wins". Have fun breaking KSP!

We've got our bases covered with just the ships, but we don't have any continuously-used, well-lived-in save files yet. I'm just another forum goer, but anything that's been in continuous use since 30 versions ago sounds stressful to me. Just to keep things easy for me, I separated my ideas into glitchy ones and non-glitchy ones. This week, I drummed up a few of the useful glitches into a compilation of ships that make unexpected (and hopefully technically interesting) effects in stock KSP. For any of these cases, the interesting thing is not the glitch itself, but the highly complex situations they create. We could create similarly complex situations without glitches, too, but it would be much more time consuming. You know, in the end, I think glitches is much too pejorative a term for these. I prefer 'developer unintended features'. They're endearing to the seasoned player and unnoticeable to the neophyte. These are not the glitches you are looking for </jediMindPowers> . If anyone happens to be interested in these glitches or others, feel free to message me directly to keep the thread clean and on-point. On to the meat! Here's the involved ships and effects, in the order as seen in the video. Most ships come in different sizes ranging from 500 parts to 2000, the upper limit of my hardware. I've attached the save file. Please forgive the typos! Here's the use and care instructions: All of the ships are as seen in the description above, with different varieties noted as different marks, and different sizes noted in the final number. Many ships work better from the runway and are loaded into the SPH as well. This save is career to avoid stock ships cluttering the ship-open menu. For any situations that are difficult to recreate or of interest size-wise, I made a save. Though cheats aren't required to use the Thermoset Iccarus, they are required to load its saves. Just before loading, turn on the ignore heat cheat. Just after loading, you can turn it back off. To setup the Simon Says glitch, turn on SAS and hold mod+Q,A,W to set the trim full (or near it), then separate and use Q, A or W to move in tandem with the probes. S, D and E can also be used, but will cause the movement to desync. Save link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4VfTCvq4M80UkdvVEhLOXBCek0 If there's anything you'd like expounded on, let me know! Otherwise, next week I'll be bugging KSP without glitches. Please look forward to it!

Great find, @Chocolat Oreos ! Thanks for making a challenge out of it. I feel like I'm getting away with something playing with this hidden little pod. That thing totally has enough deltaV to land back on Kerbin. However, they're just short of landing on the station. If you burn the RCS fuel first they'll have 1300m/s total. It's totally possible to land on the station with a careful set of Ike slingshots, or if you want to get tricky, any of those ships at the station can be used as a tug; I wonder if that's the intended strategy? I used bodylift mercury style to pop the ship up and soak up all the extra speed. . Ribly Kerman looks so stoked to be on Duna. I feel a little bad for stranding them there though.... I've never docked a ship, and don't intend to start now so.... Somebody Bring our Kerbals Home! Then maybe refuel their ship and send them out again.

I had this idea for an extra-heavy 1 Juno fighter I cooked up while doing chores. It's, um. It's apparently a good way to not make a quick fighter . Well, they can't all work out- just figured I'd share it before moving on to the next adventure. I'll keep an eye out though; I can't wait to see some ore tanks dropping!

Nope, the standard cockpits just look so dopey on a Juno sized plane unless you have some serious talent like @MiniMatt up there. So I decided I'd try for a little UAV look instead, and I think I got close. Oh no! I just read around and noticed it's been expostfacto'd. Ah well, other design rules should overtake this one soon anyways. Anyways, just 'cause it had so much fuel, I had decided to take my little UAV on a trip to the old airbase. I think it actually might have circumnavigated if I kept flying! <Offtopic> </Offtopic> These 5 second turns people are talking about. Are they full speed turns that actually turn the flight vector without just stopping it? If so, that's some crazy Gs! I did my 20s turn with (in effect) rudder and gentle banking keeping the speed high. Can I instead just pitch up 'till I'm facing backwards? That sounds a lot easier! @swjr-swis I love the shuttle strakes, it looks super futuristic!

Totally not worth it points-wise, but I kinda wanted to push the limits of low-weight. Points-wise, I think the optimal plane will actually be built with one or two Junos. Kinda like the stuff you see in @hempa2's Kerbal-carrying challenge. A panther burning in wet mode should make an exciting close second, though! (Here's an example 2-engine Juno)