Samwise Potato

Indeed, but if Chad's interpretation of "no aero" is correct, then hydrofoils should be legal too, and I very much like to use them when possible.

I believe that's the point they're making, though I think it's turned into an argument about semantics now, and you've both interpreted the rules differently. Correct me if I'm wrong, but @sturmhauke has interpreted it as a ban on all aero parts regardless of how they're used on the boat, and @chadgaskerman has interpreted it as any underwater parts being by definition hydrodynamic parts, not aero. Since it's a matter of clarifying ambiguously written rules, perhaps we could stop sniping at other people and wait for @Pds314 to clarify. While we're on the topic, are hydrofoils legal?

I made a relatively detailed post on how to calculate range back on the first page of this topic, hope it helps you too:

Here's a quick little 32-ton hydrofoil I spent way too much time fussing with: https://kerbalx.com/SamwisePotato/SA-Gerridae

Eh, we knew the Bakhtak was a mediocre air-to-air combatant, that's the trade-off for having an airframe that can be recon/bomber/gunship/ground attack all in the same package. It's cheap, it's modular, and shoving more and fancier bits of technology into it is unlikely to improve its dogfighting enough to make the expense worth it. If that's enough to disqualify it as a Ground Attack Fighter, then so be it, we'll produce enough to meet your recon and light bomber needs while our design group comes up with a plane better suited for air-to-air. Thanks for testing it though Edit: Actually, with the new decreased range requirements, I'm fairly certain the Bakhtak would also meet the AWS and naval AWS requirements if we put an omni-directional radar on it...

For this challenge (and assuming you're using default settings and measurements); Take liquid fuel capacity (LF), divide by fuel drained per second (LF/s), multiply by velocity (m/s), then divide by 1000 to convert range to kilometres. To use the plane I posted above as an example, I would take off and immediately fly up to cruising altitude and speed. Once there, I'd use the resources pop-out to check my current fuel and fuel drain rate. If I recall correctly my plane would have something like 1900 units of liquid fuel left after reaching the altitude and speed I wanted, and would be draining something like 0.21 units per second in level flight. The first part of my math would then be: 1900 LF ÷ 0.21 LF/s = ~9047 s So now that I know I have approximately 9047 seconds of flight time left at this rate of fuel drain, I can multiply by my current velocity on the navball, IIRC 600 metres per second: ~9047 s × 600 m/s = ~5428571 m Which turns flight time into maximum distance flown during that time. I then divide total range in metres by 1000 to convert to kilometres: ~5428571 m ÷ 1000 m/km = ~5428 km So then that plane has a maximum flight range of at least 5428 kilometres.

Looks great, can't wait to fly it! I'm still poking away at contract 5, trying to do something unique with a box wing and ducted fans.

Well, we gave it a month to see if you'd still have a country and be able to pay us promptly and in full for any planes we sent you, so here's a multi-role bird to get some basic mission capability for your forces. https://kerbalx.com/SamwisePotato/SA-Bakhtak Now you might be thinking "Gee that looks like a really boring plane" and you'd be right, it does look like a boring plane. Boring wings, boring engines, boring wheels... but what it can do is anything but boring! Thanks to its incredibly modular design, one aircraft can complete an entire spectrum of mission types. Light Bombing? It does that. Recon? It does that. Gunship? It does that. Ground Attack? Oh boy does it ever do that. So how many can we put you down for? 100? 200?

My entry for Contract No.002: https://kerbalx.com/SamwisePotato/SA-Cygnet As is tradition at Spud Armoury, our intrepid engineers combat boredom by doing dumb things with expensive technology to see what happens. Sometimes they burn down the Space Plane Hangar, sometimes they all end up dyed blue for a week, and some preciously rare times, they discover a new practical application that shouldn't work but somehow does. While Dudgee Kerman was hiding in his office and complaining about the general unfairness of life, the rest of the engineers competed to see who could build the best backpack helicopter. Megwell Kerman made an important discovery when she accidentally left the motors on full power while testing her backpack. Even with the weakest motors and smallest helicopter blades we had on hand, the satellite dish she tethered the backpack to hasn't been seen since. We don't get educational channels on our televisions any more, but all the engineers agree that's a perfectly acceptable price to pay for such an important discovery. Now in possession of the perfect equipment to complete another contract those wet scientists keep sending in, Megwell and the engineer horde dug up an old military prototype and started shoving new engine technology into it. Thankfully we didn't leave it up to Dudgee to name this one, so we're proud to present the SA Cygnet. The team hopes we'll make enough money off selling it to get a new satellite dish, one that gets the motorsports channels instead of that educational garbage. As stipulated by the contract requirements: - Part limit 70 (42, and I probably could have got it to like 38? without impacting looks or function but eh, effort) - Stall speed at least 65 m/s (yeah it's a helicopter, just don't turn it upside down and you'll be fine) - Transport researchers or deployable equipment (there's a passenger cabin in there somewhere) - Range of 150km (700km+ if flown even slightly efficiently, cruising altitude ~1500m at 240m/s-ish) - Stowed dimensions 8m by 5m by 4m or less (7.6 x 5 x 2.7) - Design based on S-97/S-72/X3 (S-97 counter-rotation, S-72/X3 dual forward thrust, S-72 stub wings, S-97/X3 tail shape, etc.) Oh boy, this one was a lot more fun once I figured out that the smallest helicopter blades were more than enough to lift this craft. The medium blades were obviously my first choice because they look like the right size for a real world craft, but they would have blown the size limitations. I tried to fuss around with mounting them on hinges attached to the motors, but of course, hinges are a complete disaster and that didn't work. We shall never speak of it again. As a last resort I was going mount the maximum number of small blades on the motors and pray, but happily 3 each was enough. From that point it was just a matter of balancing fuel load, tweaking the stub wings, and simplifying the controls down into two action groups and two throttles. I strongly suggest reading at least the TL;DR on the KerbalX page before trying to fly the Cygnet, though you should be able to see pretty clearly how it all works if you look at Action Group 1 (helicopter mode), Action Group 2 (plane mode), Translate F/B (Juno throttle), and Main Throttle (controls the KAL which directs all rotor/blade functions). From here, I guess I get back into my first craft to tweak AoI and flap settings a bit, then dive into contract 005 and play with rotation servos.

I'll autostrut it and save on the part count if that's the case. Rotating the hinge really wouldn't do much for the looks of the plane when the wings are folded, but I'll do some testing and see what kind of reduction in hinge flex it gives. There's no problems with space for folding the wings as-is even with a Connector B instead of a C, because I can simply remove symmetry on the hinges and fold one flat and the other to ~20 degrees to fold it over top if needed. Four and a half metres is plenty of height to work with, width is the only real challenge ('cause hinges are pain). Edit: Rotating the hinge doesn't make the joint any stronger, and would require a fair bit of redesigning of the wing to meet size requirements when folded. The AV-R8 Winglets were the outstanding pick visually, as they let me get a shape close to the S-2 and S-3 tails with only one part per elevator. Ideally I'd use a Tail Fin or Big-S 1, yes, but neither really match the way the plane needs to look. Very true, I've already got the leading edge control surfaces for the sake of wing shape, and I'll happily set them up to do that, but none of the three crafts we're to draw design inspiration from had that capability. Can I stretch the design requirement that far, then? The planes were mentioned as part of the contract requirements, so I followed said requirements. If the contract author wants to change that, fine, but I'm not going to ignore contest rules as written. If I could though, I'd forget about hinged wings entirely and go for something far more effective, like a box-wing or vaguely diamond shaped wing that travels the entire length of the plane. Maybe even an oblique wing, or get fancy and use a rotor to turn an entire top-mounted wing segment. Max length 12m and max width 6m, so the stowed wing doesn't have to go perfectly straight forward and back; I could get 12.5 to 13m of wingspan depending on how chunky I'm making the wing. Perhaps the dislike of autostrut is old and forgotten like the challenges autostrut was banned in (primarily in ones where being able to pull insane Gs without breaking big multi-part wings was a bonus IIRC), but I generally avoid advanced building options and limit clipping to being for the sake of aesthetics unless explicitly allowed, just to save myself the hassle. A very good point I absolutely agree with. Your version is noticeably improved at cruising altitude thanks to the fine-tuned AoI. I'd wouldn't go with quite that much of an angle because I'd rather lose some of that speed to fix v4's tendency to pitch up when lining up landings, but you're 100% correct; even a small AoI change would make for an improvement. Sadly there's not much to be done about the hinges, as even your updated version suffers the same amount of drag and isn't breaking Mach 1 in level flight. The requirement was for a subsonic plane anyway, so it's no great loss. I don't see how you've made the wings more sturdy or reliable at all: There were no struts on the wings in the first place, the wings now flex far more when pulling high G turns, and there was zero risk of breakage to begin with (pulling out of max speed dives was part of my testing process, and 95% of the reason I scrapped the longer wings). As for my struts, they were engine to fuselage bracing to help eat some of the force when making landings with low horizontal but relatively high vertical speeds.

My entry for Contract No.003A: https://kerbalx.com/SamwisePotato/SA-Naval-Transport In order to satisfy an open contract for a passenger aircraft capable of aircraft carrier landings and take-offs, Spud Armoury engineers got together in a dirty basement and played rock-paper-scissors to determine which poor sap was going to have to work on an airplane that didn't even have guns! Dudgee Kerman, expert engineer and terrible rock-paper-scissors player, was said poor sap. Sadly, he's not very good at naming things either; SA Naval Transport is about as original and exciting a name as he's ever come up with. After getting mad and throwing a coffee mug at the rest of the engineering team, Dudgee gave the project as much of his attention as he felt it deserved and completely ignored it for the next three weeks. When the pilots who were scheduled to inspect the prototype and make test flights showed up, he sent them home and spent the day eating snacks in his office. Inspiration stuck late that afternoon, and Dudgee spent his evening and much of the night converting a passenger jet into a "naval" aircraft by chopping the wings in half and reconnecting them with a hinge, then adding thrust reversing to the engines. Job done, Dudgee fell asleep in the passenger cabin of his "new" creation and wound up being an unwilling passenger for the test flight in the morning. As stipulated by the contract requirements: - Part limit 70 (56, including some internal struts which could technically be removed if auto-strutting is allowed? I know some people think it's cheating, so I didn't want to assume.) - Stall speed at least 65 m/s (Recommend 45m/s as minimum speed, risk of tail strike if landing any slower) - carries 4-8 Kerbals (max 8 passengers and 1 pilot) - range of 750km (1500km+ when properly handled, cruising altitude 8000 to 10000m) - subsonic (in level flight, but a steep and lengthy dive under full engine power will break Mach 1. Throttle down as needed for safety.) - stowed dimensions 12m by 6m by 4.5m or less (11.9 x 6 x 4.2) - design based on Viking/Gannet/Tracker (folding wings mounted high on fuselage, engines under wings, cruciform tail) This was, frankly, a frustrating aircraft to design. Since the plane was intended to resemble the Viking/Gannet/Tracker and be no more than 6m wide when stowed, a folding wing design was mandatory. I've never had a good time using DLC hinges, and this craft was no different. I would have preferred to have at least a Wing Connector B as the folding portion of the wing, but DLC hinges are so weak that a Wing Connector C was all it could support without risking wing failure while pitching up/down at speed. I've spent the last couple weeks tinkering with docking ports, pistons, and various stock hinge designs in an effort to create the aircraft I wanted, but keeping it under 70 parts ruled out most of the stock hinges I could come up with, and other solutions involved what I felt was an excessive amount of clipping. Hopefully it's fairly obvious how the aircraft would also meet requirements for 003B by turning the rear two cabins into cargo space for science instruments and sticking a relay-capable antenna somewhere.

My flying wings usually have some form of vertical surfaces clipped into the body to provide yaw control, so it was interesting to try to build a wing without any vertical surfaces whatsoever. I ended up building a little pancake plane; 10km ASL is pretty straightforward with a Panther engine. In the screenshot, I was over 11km, still climbing, and still accelerating. Aside from being supersonic, the massive wing surface makes pitch control a cinch. Just dived from 10km to 100m, pulled out of the dive and and buzzed the SPH with no problems. Landing's probably the hardest part of the entire flight, since throttling down the engine causes a significant loss of horizontal stability, but the pancake design lands at an angle pretty easily if necessary. Having a wide 4-wheel base to land on also means it's pretty hard to tip it over if you come in anywhere close to correctly.

I'm somewhat confused by the "seaplane" criteria. It's a drawback to have an engine barely touching the water, but having the engine go completely underwater is fine?

Hi, @Runescope! Sometimes Guard Mode doesn't always pick the weapons you want it to, and will in some cases prefer a certain weapon over all others. I'd suggest taking the front-facing 50-cals off, and doing a test flight with just the turret. Guard Mode should choose it, and it will probably work just fine. If you watch people doing stuff with BDA on YouTube (especially BeardyPenguin and TAPEGaming's "Fall of Kerbin" series) you'll see instances where Guard Mode insists on selecting forward-facing weapons when rear-mounted turrets would be much more useful. Since I'm 99.99% sure that test flight with just the turret showed you Guard Mode could use it properly when it's the only weapon available, I've got a little trick I used to combine fixed guns and turrets on the same vehicle. For your plane, my personal work-around would go like this: 1. Remove the 4 front-facing 50-cals 2. Put on two 50-cal turrets with their guns pointed forward in relatively the same spots the fixed guns were. 3. Right-click on the front-facing turrets, and set their all their pitch/yaw to 0. This means they won't turn at all, and will just act like the fixed guns used to. You just have to do this to the two turrets you want to use as front-facing guns. 4. There's a little option in that menu as well that either says "Barrage: False" or "Barrage: True." You need it to say False on all of your turrets, including the one you want to move, for this setup to work. Use the button near the bottom of the menu that says "Toggle Barrage" to switch modes. And that should do it. You now have a plane that will use 4 forward-facing 50-cals and a rear-mounted 50-cal turret simultaneously.

Counterpoint: unpowered flight is still flight. Gliders are aircraft after all. Vehicles travelling more than a kilometre per jump seems excessive. Either way, I'm planning something similar to my original vehicle, but turned up to 11.