EpicSpaceTroll139

While I would hardly call it an airliner, this Kerbal Cessna I had lying around technically does meet the light specifications of two passengers. Passengers: 2 Range: ~1000km Speed: 190m/s (I hadn't quite reached cruise in the pic) Can tail strike?: My tail is supposed to be on the ground. +10pts Stalls at less than 30m/s. +20pts. Can fly without SAS, and fly level without trim. +30pts Belly landing? Gear do not retract! +40pts Can ditch without damage. +20pts Simple engine/fuel/intake: +10pts? Has no backup engine. -20pts Relies on main engine alternator. -10pts 190 + (1000/10) + (2*5) + (0/2) + 10 + 20 + 30 + 10 +40 + 20 - 20 - 10 = 190 + 100 + 10 +10 + 90 = 300pts Heck, I have a few other light planes that would beat this handily, but I thought it would be fun to enter it anyways.

I like this idea, but there should be some kind of provision for range points. Otherwise, someone could make a plane that has like 5 minutes of fuel and performs excellent in terms of efficiency, safety, and whatever else, but can't even really go 100km. However, this should be limited. Once you can go halfway around Kerbin with say 50km of divert fuel + 20 or so minutes of emergency reserves, adding more fuel would simply be a "fire hazard." Or did I just completely miss some range provision that was in there?

I can imagine it being able to get a pretty absurd score if you fly it how I think... Not sure if it would be fair for the challenge, but I would love to see it. Anyways, this is the OP's decision.

Ok I'll be entering the Super-heavy category with the PassTranz 106. So that gives 176 + (3200/10) + (16*8*5) + (2/2) + (10+20+20+40+20 +20 +10 +10 +5) = 1458pts That's 3rd place! Edit: I goofed up. I got 1302 points. Sorry people! The math on the original example in the challenge is messed up too though.

I have to second this. With the current rules I could haul this ugly and very unsafe monster out of my hanger and get 1600x5 = 8000 points just from the passengers. At which point it becomes "Computer Melter Danger Challenge" which isn't quite as fun. I don't particularly want to do that, but I could. Anyways, I have a question: can I enter into more than one category? I've just about finished a plane which can be either heavy or superheavy depending on the number of fuselage sections installed (might even be able to chop off sections and get medium too, but it would look weird and stubby). Got it Edit: @Rath2 more questions: 1: do batteries count as an alternative power source? I added 4k in extra batteries, which is definitely enough to power it until landing if the engines go out. 2: what kind of engine out fly-ability bonuses would apply to an aircraft with say, 6 engines? My plane can fly on any 3 engines. Is this equivalent to a 4 engine plane flying on 2? Edit2: ugh: that belly-land-without-damage bonus is almost within my grasp! The little glitch ridges between runway sections keep messing me up!

What kind of blade angles are you using for your helis? I've gotten the best results from angles of 5 deg, sometimes less. Beyond that the blades start to stall. Anyways, I've been working on the S-IVB stage for my Saturn V. Annoyingly the J-2 engine was about halfway in-between the size of a Mainsail and a Rhino, so neither of those looked right. I was able to get the shape and size right with a fairing, but gosh the white engine bell looks awful.

Hmm, maybe there were parts rubbing together other than the hinge? I've never had torque problems with the electric prop planes I've made, though I must admit, most of the ones I made were much smaller. I see shielded docking ports in there, what are those for?

Actually, with the case of a reaction wheel powered prop, you won't get anything more than the friction of the bearing in that regard. This is because the propshaft is spinning itself, unlike with a turboprop which spins the propshaft using blowers mounted on the fuselage. The only thing contrarotating reaction wheel props might help with is gyroscopic effects during maneuvers, however unless the propshaft has a really high moment of inertia, this probably isn't a problem in the first place. @MiffedStarfish the antennas are not clipped inside cubic struts, but rather into a tube of 8 thermometers.

Roller coasters and/or rocket sleds anyone?

I'll have to see if I have the screenshot somewhere (it might have just been on the Nonameships server, in which case it's overwritten and gone by now because I take excessive numbers of screenshots), but back in a version which had no angular velocity limit (iirc), I was messing around with a funny trick that involved rotating a mk1 lander can using q (or e) until it ran out of electric charge and then going on EVA with a Kerbal. The Kerbal would invariably get shot off at a minimum of a few thousand c, often several orders of magnitude more. Once I got shot out so fast that my Kerbal was at the edge of the universe on the first frame after the slight pause that came from passing Kerbin's SOI boundry. I don't remember exactly what the number was but it was something you'd get from the limits of binary. Like 2,147...E or something like that. So that would imply something between 1x10^27m/s and 1x10^29m/s depending on what my framerate was at the time. I have never repeated it, and I believe it is impossible now with angular velocity limits.

Yah, the asymmetrical wing design can help a fair bit, but when carried to the extreme like on this design, it can cause problems. For example, if the engine fails or is idled in flight, the asymmetric lift now has nothing to counter, so the plane will go into a spiral. I've set up the plane with contrarotating props now, but it doesn't go any faster because the only hub design I've got so far that keeps the props from breaking is also incredibly draggy (as in two exposed-2.5m-flat-faces draggy). I'll see if I can figure out some way to use radiators to cool it like your Jolly Jinn.

I thought that too, but for some reason the plane goes faster the closer the doors are to being closed (I've tested it). I'll check the drag values. Maybe Squad made the cargo bay aero physics smarter with 1.2.2?

I was cleaning up my SPH and VAB crafts menu to make it easier to find the replicas and other stuff I've been working on, and I came across this. The name is a spoof of the "Rare Bear" from the Reno Air Races, even though this plane doesn't look like it with the sleek nose. It can go a little over 110m/s (default aero), and the design looks like it has plenty of room for improvement. The engine compartment is only about half used, meaning either the number of blowers for the propeller can be doubled, or a second coaxial propeller can have its motor located there. Probably the latter, as the torque from this engine already is enough that the starboard wing had to be made 2 panels longer than the port one, and makes it hard to control at low speeds. I also have no idea if the number of blades on the prop is optimal or not. An interesting thing I discovered is that if the engine's cargo bay is completely closed, the turbine elements will overheat, but if it is open even a tiny crack, they won't. I wish I could close it all the way as this would have the minimum drag, but ah well. Having it open by a tiny crack is still a lot better than having it open all the way. I also took a break from working on the Saturn S-IVB to test out the flexible prop-rotor blade mount I mentioned earlier. It looks like it could work, but it's proving hard to make a torsion bearing good enough for use in an actual craft. Currently the blades need weights on their tips to keep from bending upwards into a cone, which makes me worried as to what gyroscopic effects will do with a tilting version, or even just during maneuvers.

Nice work, glad to see you back Perhaps on the 727 it's the tail? The tail taper and all 3 engines should be pretty close to the vertical centerline of the fuselage. As for the lag fest, any estimates on the number of parts in range there? Reminds me of when I parked all of the airliners I had at the time (totaling a little over 1850 parts) in front of the KSC for a photoshoot. It was laggy as [REDACTED]. I can't find original one, but I did find a picture of me playing "airplane bowling" afterwards with them. Anyways, I think I need to completely redesign the legs mechanism on my LM... Again... Ugh...* Been working on the CSM in the meantime *If anyone else with KSP mechanical contraption experience thinks s/he could make something like this work, feel free to PM me, I'd be happy to share the craft and give due credit on release. -MajorJim! is currently doing this. Thanks MajorJim!

Discovered that the engine with the biggest bell in the game doesn't look quite big enough to be a F-1. But the bigger problem is the massive tankbutt that prevents me from moving it out radially as far as I want. I might end up needing to make custom stock F-1 engines using fairings for the bell or something. Did some more testing of my E-50B in an attempt to figure out what needs fixing. Most flights ended like this And then there's this thing-that's-not-quite-a-sword-but-not-really-a-dagger-either. Don't ask why I made it. I really don't know. Maybe it would be part of some giant statue of a Kerbal knight.

Brilliant work! Robbaz needs to see this #becomeavikingtoday

After modifying the descent stage of my lander to accommodate the new leg design, I found that it was still having some problems. But now I've finally figured out what's been causing my problems all along. Struts (and possibly fuel lines) apparently have a collision mesh on their root end. Who knew? So either I'm going to have to figure out a way to turn around the struts on my leg (not likely since they need something for the other end to attach to anyways), or I need to adjust them so they don't contact the other struts or sides of the descent stage (will probably compromise looks somewhat, ah well). Anyways, I took a bit of a break from that to do some work on a new variant of my E-50, the E-50B. Changes include a vertically aligned rotor system, and a pair of wheesley forward motion jets. It has demonstrated a cruise speed of 120m/s, which is more than twice that of the E-50A, allowing transit times to the island of about 7&1/2 minutes. However, it is currently proving to be no more reliable than my Helene prototype (speaking of which, I'm going to remove that from KerbalX, it's a deathtrap, and I don't have any idea how to fix it). At certain speeds, various factors seem to result in pitch instability, or at least make it prone to pilot induced oscillations. This, combined with the fact that the rotors will self destruct when subjected to hard maneuvers, means it is often just one mistake away from falling out of the sky. There's also a weird roll-right tendency noticeable at high speed, and hard to counteract at high power (wet mode). I'm a bit perplexed, as the coaxial rotor system should cancel out any disymmetry of lift. My current hypothesis is that the draggier multiple-part turbine of the upper, counterclockwise spinning rotor results in it spinning slightly slower. Anyways, @klond the airbrake actuator reminded me that, while I haven't tested it yet, I have a concept in my head that might solve the problem of blade pitch on stock tilt-rotors. The idea is to attach the blades to the hub using some kind of elastomeric twist bearing (for KSP just some kind of part arrangement that has some give in the joints when subjected to torsion), with the blades being attached so that their default position is cruise pitch. The blade is set so that most of it kind of trails behind the bearing a bit. Like this: ___/||||||||||||||||||||||||||/ When trying to hover, the forces on the blade will be enough to twist the bearing so the pitch decreases to 5 degrees or so. As speed increases, the forces on the blade decrease and the blades move back towards their default position. This would probably only be viable on large prop-rotors though

^ugh mobile North American XB-70 Valkyrie?

Well, that was kind of my point haha. I haven't seen so many pictures in a post located outside a spoiler box.

This has got to be some kind of record post length lol.

Apparently the sideways docking port decouple force is enough to knock the legs out of alignment on my lander, making them near impossible to lock into position. Or well, it did that if I only decoupled one leg at a time. If I did them all at once, it was enough to completely bust the legs out of the hinge. So, I redesigned them with the docking ports facing radially, which while meaning I have to be more careful about keeping them from hitting other components inside the descent stage (mainly the fuel tanks and a balance weight), should mean that the decouple forces won't work to wrench the legs sideways. It should also conveniently bounce the legs out into the deployed position. I also replaced the strut that went the length of the leg itself with a fuel pipe to give it the thick, insulation wrapped look (sort of), and I'm considering replacing the ones that form the upside-down Vs on the leg mounts too. At this moment I realized I had made a careless mistake while building. I had built the leg such that its parts connected to the lower port, and the lander connected to the upper port. Thus, it docks in the retracted position, instead of extended. Not very useful for landing! Oops... Ah well, shouldn't be take very long to fix. With any luck, the legs will be working tonight. Edit: turns out there's not quite enough space in there for the new docking port arrangement, so I'm going to either have to figure out how to make the earlier arrangement work, or replace the fuel tanks and the RCS plume deflectors that are attached to them.

The antenna-thermo and antenna-solar bearings mentioned by @Majorjim! and I above are very lightweight and have virtually zero friction. Or are you looking for other bearings that keep the rotor as part of the ship?

Basic Turboshaft E-50A Triton This rotor and heli demonstrate the virtually frictionless, reasonably durable, and exceptionally lightweight antenna-solar panel bearing, which was originally based off Majorjim's antenna-solar bearing. These bearings are used in pairs, with each consisting of a disk of static solar panels (attached to the heli) with a small hole in the middle in which a communitron 16 antenna (attached to the rotor) spins freely. In the E-50 one of the bearings can be seen to be replaced with an experimental lower part count bearing which uses 4 octagonal struts instead of a disk of solar panels.

I figured I could improve my LM's legs mechanism by swapping out the RCS ball joints for axial antenna hinges. All seemed well until I reloaded it this morning to continue work. I needed to move the legs out away from the lander to do some work on them and the descent stage internals, so I did so like I had numerous times before. It was then that I found that the game had decided to reconnect many of my carefully placed struts. Most importantly, it reconnected several which led to the thermometer parts of the bearing, instead attaching them to the moving antenna part of the bearing, so they disconnect as soon as the legs are released. It should be noted that connecting the struts was not a simple task due to the fact that both they the parts they connect to must be moved only in a certain order and manner and the undo button must be completely avoided otherwise they all disconnect. They were the hardest part of this lander to replicate. This sums up my reaction pretty well:

https://kerbalx.com/Azimech/77I--Offshore-Mining-Platform-v10 Edit: ninja'ed