Cunjo Carl

He let go of the ladder and hit the timewarp button instantly afterwards, so the Kerbal and the craft still had the same velocity. Hope you don't mind me answering the question, @Concodroid, I was just watching and noticed that myself, so I was excited to give the answer. For others that haven't yet, ^ ^ ^ ^ watch that video ^ ^ ^ ^ It's super informative. The one piece I'll amend is I believe physicless parts now have mass, but that mass is applied at your craft's COM. Just something I found goofing around in 1.05.

You got it! The potential for silly-brick-ness is nearly unbounded. I'm happy you like it! With the exception of that very chilly speedrun, those videos have been great fun to make, and I'm glad you've enjoyed watching them. I'm posting rather slowly, so if you're interested in someone with a similar style, I can heartily recommend Turbopumped, who's been pushing the boundaries of big and small, and also times their hits of video and hits of music together. Here's a link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29l0YgxA_6c . On an unrelated note, as requested, the Spin to Win badge is finally up! After you're done bricking, you should go check it out.

Oh! How perfect! It seems the wheesley and the goliath are the only two stock engines that actually have the reverse thrust ability. For stock players, was it your intent the challenge would be run with specifically these, or is there a way to trick KSP by using the action groups? The verbiage kind of hinted at it. If not, there's a cute trick in KSP for small backwards propelled aircraft. The following shows a setup for allowing engine exhaust to pass through a short section of fuselage, which could be useful for extending the challenge to other engine types. You can point engines backwards through a plane and count on the plane to not explode due to a mechanic called exhaustDamageDistanceOffset, which varies between engines. It's a little silly and pretty fun. A simple setup with an SRB is shown in this video at the linked timestamp: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaYb5AiSY3M&t=2m18 This isn't a submission (it doesn't follow the rules), but I thought the technique might encourage some interesting designs. I think I'll give a shot at it with a wheesley plane tonight! Edit: Ha! This is much harder than it looks. Even flying a plane backwards has been tricky, but I've been trying to make a plane that can fly stably in both directions by taking advantage of the fact that beyond a couple of degrees tilt a lifting surface turns into a dragging surface. So if you tilt the 'front' and 'back' wings differently, you can be stable in either direction, just by changing your fuselage's AoA! It, uh. It hasn't worked yet, but I've atleast managed some wobbly backwards flying. Tada! Fun fact: Jeb aint bothered by nothin'.

Oh, I just clipped a bunch of things inside the rockomax hub, and KSP's lovely but silly physics took care of the rest. In there is a vector, a rapier, a flea, and 13 dawns plus enough fuel cells to keep them humming. It's a bit crowded . The rocket fire slips right out of the hub because of a mechanic called exhaustDamageDistanceOffset, where the damage from rocket fire doesn't start until a little ways after the rocket nozzle. For general amusement's sake, I took advantage of the effect in a video I made for a challenge a while back. Here's a link that'll hop strait to it, at 2:18. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaYb5AiSY3M&t=2m18s The plane shown has a flea SRB pointing through a mk1 cockpit and a little fuel tank. The rocket fire explodes the fuel tank, but the cockpit is fine and the plane flies away happy as can be. It's a bit bizarre, but hey that's what makes KSP fun! I love the rocket-in-a-wrapper design philosophy you've got going. It can actually be pretty useful... and mysterious. This is the best phrasing.

The brick takes flight from a flame internal, a roiling of spirit projected into our somatic world. But why? What can it mean? Great Brick of Mystery

@hempa2 I'm noticing that most people are landing their planes legit (wheels, chutes), while I deposited my Kerbals through 'creative crashing.' If you feel like promoting controlled landings, feel free to toss an asterisk next to my spot on the leader board! Not a suggestion, just a thought. I'm happy to see the challenge getting a lot of entries!

Ah, that's an odd one, and it involves some gentle clipping. Because of how KSP handles drag, it doesn't actually improve aerodynamics much, infact it may be a detriment! It looks good though, so I did it :). 1. Place a cubic strut on the back of your fuselage. You can use symmetry to put in however many struts->engines you'd like. Use the rotate tool to twist it out a bit. 2. Place an engine on the bottom node of this cubic strut, and a nose cone on the top. 3. Wiggle things around using the rotate and translate tools until they look good. It's handy to know that turning off angle snap also lets you rotate/translate more precisely. Here's a picture where I opened up the assembly so you can see the pieces. If you have additional questions, I'm happy to help. Have fun flinging kerbals at the island!

@zolotiyeruki Along those lines, If you'd like you can post a few pictures of your craft and we can help debug. Struggling through designing difficulties is part of the joy of KSP, but it's also an experience easy to overdo, huh! The most common issues for me have been: Occluded air-intake/engine, going too high, having superfluous things hanging off, and going too high. I listed going too high twice because it's super easy to do with the Juno. Trust me, I've been there with the "why doesn't my Juno go faster" struggles! Juno spaceplanes - The Spacecraft Exchange

I'm just going to toss out a guess here, but hopefully @Van Disaster can correct me if I'm wrong. If you keep the same airspeed but go to a higher altitude, you'll need to assume a higher AoA (angle of attack) to maintain enough lift to keep a level flight. As you increase your AoA beyond 4.5 degrees, your lift induced drag will increase relative to your lift. So it's not the higher altitude per-say, but the greater AoA that causes the most difference. Though this makes good hypothetical sense to me, I haven't actually tested out your plane, and I don't have a quantitative knowledge of how AeroGUI handles the calculation of L-I-D. Still, hopefully it's nice food for thought? Totally unnecessary for having fun with designing, but for a mathematical description of LID, we can crack into the KSP physics files... Edit: Slightly lower AoAs are better, more in the 2-3ish degrees ballpark should be optimal. I took into account the reduction of lift due to the tilted direction of AoA, but not the increase in drag. I'll be posting new plots when I have a chance to photo them tomorrow.

That engine is beautiful. Just. WOW. Watch out for the terrible ISP on those Junos. Their tiny size and extremely gentle air usesage is enticing, but that ISP will probably be a huge problem for any endurance challenge. Of course I'm using them anyway in the other endurance challenge because they're so cute, but hey that's me. I think I'm gonna go watch your engine test video again....

@EgoReaper Jr I was just rewatching your video when I noticed it was your first post in the forums. Welcome! Sweet video- I love the style. Dry bearings are a pain, aren't they.

That slider shouldn't affect distance much. It just affects at what point KSP will start lagging your game to fit in the additional physics calculations for bigger ships. If you push the value too high you can get phys-warp-like floppyness at 1x speed with the trade-off of tasty lag reduction! It's handy for enhancing some glitches too, but shouldn't do much to stable planes. Speaking of stable planes, I've grown accustomed to the gentle drone of mine running in the background over the last few days. I'm positively buzzing with excitement, but even with time warp it could still be a while before I have the final results. I've been writing some simple KOS scripts for autopiloting, altitude maintenance, avoiding mountains, and tweaking throttle for fuel savings. KOS's built in autopilot is impressively strong and versatile! If anyone has requests and it's within my skill level, I'd be happy to drum something up. It'll be a fun diversion while waiting for this thing to run out of fuel. Also, I'm happy your 1.1.3 is quite stable, but mine has been crashing constantly! I have 20 crash logs from the last week and a half alone. It's kindof a truism with PC games that mileage may vary when it comes to stability, and this patch has been a particularly rough one for my computer. Still, I've been saving often so not too much time gets lost.... except when it does .

BDarmory was a requirement? Oh, typically part mods stated without context infer optional mods not mandatory ones. You might just toss the word 'required' in front of the mods for any others wandering in. I likely won't be continuing in this challenge using the mods just from a personal preference for stock parts. I enjoy the creative challenge required to accomplish a goal with the limited options. There's a ton of joy to be found in playing with the wild and interesting parts found in mods too, it's just not my thing at the moment. You gotta admit, even after the great exhaust damage reduction of v1.1 those stock vectors just tore through the fuel tanks! It still makes me giggle. I'd be happy to share the ship file if you were interested in grafting some cannons on it? It can laugh off the recoil of two full-blast vectors, which is pretty insanely heavy! Cheers.

Eh, everyone has their own style. I think it's to their credit that people generally prefer style to performance. It makes for fun reading! I like your flight quite a bit, especially with the broad almost glider-esque wing design. However, I don't think it's a distance record breaker yet, because I've seen a 12 Circumnavigation with a high and fast plane! http://imgur.com/a/L9L6d I'm personally going for the hang-time record. My design should loiter around in the air for a Kerbal fortnight. Now I just need a way to make my computer stable for a Kerbal fortnight....

I just did some experimentation, and it seems complicated! I used KER to monitor my horizontal speed, and periodically checked ground distance traveled using F3. Simply hovering without any lateral velocity doesn't cause any excess ground distance traveled regardless of altitude (tests at 0, 2, 10km). So, I believe that rules out @Aetharan suggestion that it's sidereal angle unless I'm misunderstanding. Another finding, when traveling in a straight line (and ignoring climbing/decent), ground distance covered seemed to accrue about 2-3 times faster than horizontal speed for low (<10m/s) speeds, regardless of direction. Weird. More experimentation is needed.

My silly-caption-generator is apparently off tonight, so writing that Imgur album was tough! Oh well, I had a blast getting these two poor Kerbals out to the old airfeild. I managed to fit in 2 Junos, so the plane pushes at a TWR of 4! To boot, it weighs in at only .95 tons because I thought fuel needed to be included in the 1 ton limit. It has an Elevon 4 for its primary pitch control, and uses a tiny reaction wheel for its yaw and roll control. To reduce torque, I put the little Kerbals right over the COM, which unfortunately makes the craft highly "maneuverable" at speed (explosively so, in fact). The plane is designed to run out of fuel just before it reaches the island, so it can be maneuvered to glide in for its final descent. It launches VTOL and lands with creative crashing, my favorite way. Oh, and last up I wound up using FAR, because I had it on for another challenge. I present, the: Tarmac-Friendly Tarnation This was a fun challenge, thanks for hosting it, @hempa2! The score system is a bit confusing though... Time is in the denominator, so a high score is good. However, weight is in the numerator, so then a high weight is good? Instead, maybe this formula would be a good choice: Score = 1000*numKerbals/(Weight*time) . This way, players are encouraged to design for many Kerbals, low weight and fast. Example for this case: 12.80 = 1000*2/(.953*164) Oh, here's the plane close up- I wouldn't suggest this design if you're aiming for score (in any system), but hoh-boy I love the 2 engine style!

Thanks, that confirms it then. If you're going east at around 1700m/s, nearly 2/3s of your weight is actually countered by centrifugal force spinning around Kerbin. Only the last 1/3 needs to be held up by wings, which is nice. Perhaps not worth the cost of maintaining the high speed, but it's a fun effect.

I wonder if somehow Kerbin's Sidereal rotational velocity (the speed the ground spins at) is getting added in? I know the Highest Speed Achieved is affected by it, so if you simply put a plane on the runway it's already considered going 175m/s. If this is the case, then going west should result in less distance traveled than would be expected. Might be worth a try? Edit: Also, @Gman_builder, what's your take on engine clipping for this competition? I'm considering making a high flier that largely uses centrifugal force in lieu of lift. I'm happy in either case, just asking!

I just made a nice post on the previous page with some very Kerbal inventions, if you haven't seen it yet! This stuff wound up in a separate post by accident. Alright, so now I'm just about done. I think I've hit a lot of fun possibilities, except for whatever it is that makes DualDesertEagle's plane go so slow. Which I'm still not sure about. I've been playing with various mechanisms for a while, but haven't found anything to come close. Mind if I tinker with your plane to see what makes it tick?

Pardon the earlier post-in-progress! I've been watching SGDQ while assembling this, and was just barely able to submit and save progress before Twitch ate my browser. I wasn't really planning to return to slow planes. I'd already hunted down and came to understand most of the mechanisms and design tradeoffs involved, so the only thing left was taking the time to build it. For me, unless I'll learn something or it makes me laugh, I've got to move on! With this in mind, unwittingly while doing dishes, I designed a plane with predicted 'low 6s takeoff', and christened it the "Fin to Win." ... Fin to win? Welp, I guess it's happening. Fin to Win: I'm quite happy with this, but of course we always have our eyes set on improvements, so let's give a couple ideas their due! The Fosbury Flip: The Cheater Effect: Well, perhaps improvements was too strong a word .

For sure! The frame is just my mach 5.6 design from before. This revision has 40 rapiers clipped into eachother on the bottom, as compared to the earlier 7! To feed these (at takeoff) is 24 shock cones clipped up into the heat shield. It definitely needed the long lever arm of the strakes to maintain control due to the much greater weight and more backweighted COM. They also reduced drag according to FAR, which makes sense come to think of it. I often use strakes to reduce drag, but didn't on this one yet for style reasons. This design should probably get a few more wings clipped on, which is what I would do next to push it faster. I suspect now that clipping's allowed, other people's designs will rapidly surpass this one! I like it though. I'll keep it! Wheesleys would be awesome, but they cut out at a quite low altitude from what I remember. I tried to take advantage of their unexhausting speed for the hypersonic circumnavigation challenge, but it didn't work out. It may warrant some double checks, though!

For sure! It took me ages to figure out this one at first. Ohhh.... You're engine clipping! In retrospect it makes sense, you haven't written one way or the other, but 'No Engine Clipping' is just one of those defacto rules that goes assumed unless stated otherwise, so I think everyone's been playing by that because you can't see the engines in the Aurora's pics. Full clipping can lead to some bizarre looking ships with incredible abilities, but I'll just use it to make my Penguin go a bit faster. Ante up'd! mach 5.85.

Ah! I was looking high and low for that part last evening. Thanks for the lead, please accept some cred for sharing the simultaneously poignant yet esoteric knowledge! I had even found the right folder, but apparently missed the name. Fortunately, I found what I was looking for, and it's what I remember from when I stumbled across it a good while back. Even though the engine precooler doesn't have active cooling (ala v1.1+) it does have some lovely thermal stats, which can help to cool down the things its attached to. I suspect others can explain better, but I'll post the values and my comments after the // thermalMassModifier = 1.5 //(meaning the core is 1.5 times slower to heat than expected! Nice but nothing special) skinMassPerArea = 2 // (high? Heat that conducts in to the part conducts in through the skin mass. Also, should bump the radiative cooling, but not the conductivity -> based on attachment port size) emissiveConstant = 0.95 //(this is very high, max is 1. This is the primary way it will shed heat. ) heatConductivity = 0.24 // (twice default, so it can quickly pickup heat from its attachments) TLDR: No "active" cooling on the precooler, but very nice radiative cooling! It's like off-brand active cooling

@Gman_builder Would you mind posting your Aurora's craft file? I'd love to tinker with it.

OP typically refers to the person who made the first post of this particular topic "Opening Poster" , in this case @Gman_builder, the host of this challenge. It can also occasionally be used to refer to the first post of a topic "Opening Post", and the context will typically make it clear when this is the case. Finally, it's used commonly in other gaming communities to refer to something "Over Powered" in a game that was made so strong it disrupts enjoyment of the game. The KSP forums are being actively improved to help with the many confusing acronyms. Already, on many systems, you can hover your mouse over an acronym in the forum and see the words it stands for pop up! It's a very recent addition, so I'm not too surprised if it's not working on your end just yet. Please look forward to it! Also, I'm glad to find another enjoyer of ridiculous rockets! Smooth sailing, and good luck keeping the kraken away.