Samwise Potato

@ShadowGoat That's the silliest thing I've heard anyone say in a while, and even more surprising coming from someone who was breaking the rules of another challenge to make it easier for themselves.

Challenge completed at Silver level, @Andetch Getting Gold would just be a matter of spamming attempts until I get a feel for how much the re-entry flip-outs slow me down, but frankly this challenge wasn't much fun and I don't feel like fighting this terrible SSTO much more.

Yeah, I can make a hypersonic car that "jumps" the length of a rally stage too. Pretty sure most people call that flying though.

They're still massively behind.

Something tells me such a vehicle might violate both the spirit and the rules of the challenge, though.

Just finished stage 3; the fear of crashing and having to restart completely is really starting to show in my stage times. Each stage is about 2 minutes slower than the one before.

Just a quick question; I assume we're allowed to refuel our tanks and refill our batteries between stages with no time penalties? Didn't even think to ask until I'd already used most of both to set a blistering time on the first stage, hah.

@1Revenger1 I think, repeat, think I've solved the problem. Built a completely new plane as identical to the last as possible (with an additional part for tail-strike prevention) and the new file's been uploaded to https://kerbalx.com/SamwisePotato/SF-J240-Daisy

Right, so the file on KerbalX is buggered up. I'll rebuild the plane from the ground up just to be sure, then re-upload. Give me ~30 minutes @1Revenger1 I'll throw in a strike-stopper and we can call it a variant.

Maybe we could get someone else to try it? Could be something weird about the file uploaded on KerbalX. Can whoever reads this grab a copy of https://kerbalx.com/SamwisePotato/SF-J240-Daisy and see if does the weird shaking thing for you too?

@1Revenger1 That's incredibly odd, and I can't reproduce it. Moreover, fly it as rough as you like, it should be able to take it

Hang onto that thought for a minute, I'll film a test flight and show you what the control surfaces look like on my end.

I have no idea where you've picked up shaking elevators from @1Revenger1, do you have a mod that changes the aerodynamic modeling or something? I can make a video for you if you want, but all the control surfaces are perfectly steady at subsonic or supersonic cruise. Your fuel burn rate rate numbers for supersonic cruise are higher than they should be as well (probably because you were cruising at 9 instead of 9.5 like recommended), and the only way to smash the tail into the ground at ~30 m/s is to go full pitch up and hold it. I could add a strike-stopper if you're having trouble with that, I suppose.

Geez, I gotta stop over-engineering my planes. First my Turboprop gets used as a Seaplane, and now my Small Regional Jet's in the Supersonic category, hah.

So I finished tweaking all the fiddly bits, here's a craft file: https://kerbalx.com/SamwisePotato/SF-Thor Really imaginative name, I know, but my naming convention for ships and subs is Norse deities and I'm running out of names, so... Also, I made a little video using one of the scenarios from Inter's Bombing Challenge to demonstrate what this sub can do:

@NightshineRecorralis Greetings from Spud Flight, makers of the Lupin! https://kerbalx.com/SamwisePotato/SF-A232-Lupin-II Once our engineers were done muttering dire imprecations about the marital status of your test pilot's parents, we sat down and had a go at fixing the main issues you raised: - We added flaps! No additional cost, no extra parts, just a little re-arranging of our wing structure. - As a bonus, the re-arranging solve the sound problem too! The engines have been moved away from the cabin for increase passenger comfort. - Fly it at any altitude you like, it's ridiculously efficient anywhere up to the service ceiling. The rules for this test specified that we were to submit the altitude/speed that gave maximum performance, so we did. You could easily cruise this plane at 7km if you wanted to instead, you'd just lose ~10m/s off the top speed. - The landing instructions might not have been entirely clear, we'll take the blame for that. We're not talking about the airframe at all, but rather the Angle of Attack on the landing. The smaller the AoA, the smoother the landing. Ideally, your direction of travel would be almost completely flat. However, we lowered the pontoons and raised the engines to make it even easier to land the Lupin without flooding the engines, and frankly, the prop blades shouldn't even get wet if it's done right. Finally, we made your test pilots a training video to help them understand our landing instructions:

I've found that ore containers get a little crazy when they're clipped too much. My submarines and underwater bases tend to grow rather large, since trying to put down a base of any significant size takes a massive amount of ore.

Even with just one or two reviews a day, we'd be caught up in a month, easy. The only reason it's so far behind is that none have been done in so long.

You're right, it does seem pretty simple. One EZ-mode sub coming right up. Oh yeaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, now you're speaking my language! Yep, that's 12 cruise missiles. They'll launch safely and effectively from ~100 meters under the surface, so you can rain destruction from long distances without risking your boat. Just in case you don't have anything else nearby that can get the GPS co-ordinates for you to target your cruise missiles, I stuck a disposable scout drone on there. Fast, cheap, and works equally well in the air or underwater. You're not limited to cruise missiles either, by any means. I've loaded it up with all kinds of missiles, rockets, and torpedoes with no issues. Want to put a big stock weapon in the cargo bay? Oodles of room. If I was doing actual combat scenarios with this boat, I'd add at least a couple gun turrets and a dozen torpedoes, but there's no chance of them exploding the boat when fired, so I didn't bother loading for bear in the pictures I took. Darn boat's already so heavy it wouldn't even notice another 20-30 tons of weapons. Since it's a heavy boat, it won't be winning prizes for speed (~12 m/s without diving while at max weight), but the agility is much better than you might expect thanks to big control surfaces, reaction wheels, and gimballing engines. It'll dive as deep as you want with no issue; 1368 meters (the deepest you can go on Kerbin) isn't even a warm-up. I've got a upsized sub with 24 cruise missiles that's basically two of these things glued together side-by-side, but it's just under the part count limit (~450 parts) and it turns my game into a 1 fps slideshow so I'm probably not going to be driving it to the bottom of the ocean to take pictures, sorry.

I would honestly be willing to withdraw my aircraft from the competition and sign on as an assistant judge if needed.

It has been, frankly, a miserable week for senior management here at Spud Flight. We arrived full of optimism for Monday test flights, only to discover that one of our junior managers had forgotten to secure the prototype hangar on Friday evening. Naturally, a marauding band of engineers took advantage and spent the entire weekend eating all the snacks in the building and adding extra bits and pieces to the test aircraft. You can imagine our consternation. Tuesday, the chief engineer was summoned to give an explanation. We discovered that not only had our engineers gotten unsupervised access to the prototypes, they'd also gotten unsupervised access to the company intranet, where all the design specifications and research into popular features of competing aircraft were logged. Showing great personal initiative, the engineers decided our prototypes needed more "cool stuff" like "really neat canards" and "awesome fiddly bits." Fortunately, we were able to talk them into undoing the changes by telling them the cost of the extra parts would have to come out of their snack budget. By Thursday, everything was back to normal. The careless junior manager was now an even-more-junior manager, the hangar had its supply of snacks restocked, and the engineers had taken all the "fiddly bits" off the prototypes. All tests were completed to satisfaction, and our entire management team camped in the hangar overnight to protect our precious prototypes from excitable engineers. Today, we're proud to present our entries for the Small Regional Jet and Supersonic Jet categories. --- --- We'll begin with our Small Regional Jet, the SF-J240; development name "Daisy." Our over-eager engineers felt challenged by the number of planes that have already been entered in the Small Regional Jet category, so they've built a plane that does literally everything its competition can do, except better. We heard you like short take-offs? We filled this prototype as full of fuel as it will go, then used a crane to set the prototype on top of a hangar. It launched right off the end with no problems whatsoever. We heard you like short landings? The test pilots turned the plane around and landed it right back on top of the exact same hangar. Of course, we tested it on a runway too! Minimum take-off and landing speed on flat ground is 45 m/s; you need less than 10 plane-lengths of flat ground for the SF-J240 to operate. Forget runways, you could land this thing in the airport's parking lot if you wanted. If you thought that was impressive, wait until you're actually in the air. At half-power it sedately sips fuel while butting up against the sound barrier, or if you feel the need for speed, full power will push you supersonic with ease. Are you worried about the fuel cost of all that speed? Don't be! "Daisy" can cruise at 545 m/s while consuming a mere 0.10 LF/s, better than the fuel consumption of some of its subsonic-only competitors. We can guarantee your passengers won't be affected by all that speed either. By employing a tri-edge swept wing to minimize air resistance and mounting our engines/intakes/fuel tanks as self-contained pods on the wings, we've protected the passenger cabin against the sound and vibrations other small aircraft suffer. We were going to build you a 32-passenger variant to test as well, honest, but it would only save you 550,000 and there was effectively no change in performance, so we didn't bother. If you absolutely, positively, must have a 32-seater... we can hack-saw eight seats out, I guess. SF-J240 Daisy - https://kerbalx.com/SamwisePotato/SF-J240-Daisy Category: Small Regional Jet (optional Supersonic Jet) Airplane Cost (no fuel): 19,564,000 Dry Weight: 12.182 t Max Weight: 16.182 t Part Count: 34 Parts Passengers: 40 Fuel Capacity: 800 LF Operational Ceiling: 13,000 m Subsonic Cruising Altitude: 7,000 m Cruising Speed: 285 m/s (half throttle) Fuel Consumption at Cruise: 0.09 LF/s Estimated Effective Range: 2300 km Supersonic Cruising Altitude: 9,500 m Cruising Speed: 545 m/s Fuel Consumption at Cruise: 0.10 LF/s Estimated Effective Range: 4000 km --- --- Sure, we can make a jet go supersonic on a pair of Wheesleys, but that's not fast enough to really excite our engineers, oh no. When 'merely' supersonic won't cut it, there's our entry for the Supersonic Jet category: the SF-S240 "Marigold." If you can break Mach 1, what's stopping you from breaking a couple more Machs? "Marigold" makes conventional aircraft look like blimps with its blistering cruise speed of more than 1100 m/s. This is the airplane for people who want to spend as little time in the air as possible. Business meetings on the other side of the world? No problem, your passenger won't even need to make hotel reservations; they'll be there and home the same day with time to spare. Vacation that can't start soon enough? Sure thing, your passenger can start their vacation on another continent in mere minutes. Could we go even faster? Yes, but we'll warn you right now, it's a bad idea. Once you're past 1150 m/s, things start to get rather warm in the cockpit, and holding that kind of speed for too long will cause damage to the aircraft's structure. Theoretically, the engines have enough cooling and thrust to touch 1500 m/s, but the rest of the aircraft will have long since melted. Spud Flight accepts no responsibility whatsoever if you decided to push past the safe limit. What keeps that safe limit around 1100 m/s? Price. If you want to (safely) push into higher speeds, the materials needed to construct the cockpit and passenger cabins alone will quintuple in price and double in weight. More weight means more fuel expenditure, and so on. Like its slower cousin the SF-J240, the SF-S240 features our twin-pod engine setup with all the sound and vibration dampening that affords. Also similarly, "Marigold" is an absolute joy to fly at any speed. Take-offs are ludicrously smooth at 55 m/s, and landing is simple thanks to air-brakes built straight into the wings themselves. Such an amazing combination of speed and responsiveness means you can take this jet to any small regional airport in the world, and we don't have to tell you just how lucrative providing a high-speed option between just about any two points on the globe could be. We actually consider it a selling point that there's not a lot to see out the window except for the wing and engine pods; seeing Kerbin pass beneath you at that speed and that height will leave even the most seasoned traveler feeling queasy. We would have removed the windows entirely, but apparently there's laws that require us to have emergency exits on our planes. Who knew? One quick note about range: Mathematically, the max range is 7,400 km, but since a noticeable portion of the fuel capacity is needed to reach cruising altitude and speed, we've calculated expected range using a reasonable post-ascent fuel load. SF-S240 Marigold - https://kerbalx.com/SamwisePotato/SF-S240-Marigold Category: Supersonic Jet Airplane Cost (no fuel): 29,814,000 Dry Weight: 13.600 t Max Weight: 21.600 t Part Count: 41 Parts Passengers: 40 Fuel Capacity: 1600 LF Operational Ceiling: 23,000 m Cruising Altitude: 20,250 m Cruising Speed: 1110 m/s (one-third throttle) Fuel Consumption at Cruise: 0.24 LF/s Estimated Effective Range: 6200 km --- --- Spud Flight is already rolling more prototypes out of the fabrication plant. We're currently preparing a Medium Regional Jet under the development name "Begonia," but our engineers are moaning and griping about it being a simple and boring plane to build. To keep them motivated, we're re-activating one of our epic design projects, code-named "Sunflower." It's going to be big... really big.

On behalf of the corporation Spud Flight, I am pleased to present our first two of many designs for KEA's consideration! It is a point of pride for us to be able to offer these aircraft with a promise that they have been over-built to a point where we have already and can at your request further surpass any design criteria you care to name with minimal alterations to the current prototypes. --- --- We lead off with the SF-A116, development name "Tulip." This light seaplane boasts extreme agility and fuel efficiency without compromising in any way on its other performance characteristics. Driven by a powerful and compact turboprop engine, the "Tulip" has excellent acceleration and a remarkable operational ceiling, allowing direct passage to any destination. Take-offs are a snap at any speed over 42 m/s, and landings are sublimely smooth between 50 and 65 m/s thanks to a set of small but effective flaps. With our cutting-edge cockpit design, all of our passenger aircraft can be flown by a single pilot, but we always make sure to have room for two so training new pilots on our birds is a snap. The massive field of view provided by this cockpit aids greatly in gauging wave height for any open-water landings. SF-A116 Tulip - https://kerbalx.com/SamwisePotato/SF-A116-Tulip Category: Seaplane Airplane Cost (no fuel): 17,434,000 Dry Weight: 5.685 t Max Weight: 6.935 t Part Count: 42 Parts Passengers: 16 Fuel Capacity: 250 LF Operational Ceiling: 8,000 m Cruising Altitude: 3,000 m Cruising Speed: 158 m/s Fuel Consumption at Cruise: 0.04 LF/s Estimated Effective Range: 950 km --- --- Our second design presented today has a bit of an identity crisis. It was a probably a mistake to send the same team that designed the seaplane SF-A116 straight into designing what was supposed to be our turboprop SF-A232 "Lupin." Is it a seaplane? Is it a turboprop? Nobody here is quite sure. What we do know is that it can fill both roles superbly. In fact, it does just about everything superbly. The "Lupin" is an absolute joy to fly, rock-steady at any altitude and able to make the absolute smoothest water landings you have ever seen. It lifts from 45 m/s upwards with ease and sets down so gently you're not even sure you've landed when you put it down between 50 and 65 m/s. Our test pilots assure me it's as simple as coming in at the flattest angle you can manage and keeping the plane level with the water at the initial moment of contact. Check out that view! With that much glass in the cockpit, you can see literally everything that's in front of you. SF-A232 Lupin - https://kerbalx.com/SamwisePotato/SF-A232-Lupin-II Category: Turboprop (optional Seaplane) Airplane Cost (no fuel): 20,794,000 Dry Weight: 8.065 t Max Weight: 10.565 t Part Count: 47 Parts Passengers: 32 Fuel Capacity: 500 LF Operational Ceiling: 8,000 m Cruising Altitude: 3,000 m Cruising Speed: 159 m/s Fuel Consumption at Cruise: 0.06 LF/s Estimated Effective Range: 1300 km --- --- I am also excited to be able to reveal advance information about two more prototypes we will have ready for testing soon: Expect to see "Daisy," a Small Regional Jet we may have made a little too fast for its own good, and "Marigold," a Supersonic Jet we over-engineered to the point where it has a +6000km range.

Well, all missions are done and the videos are up now. Not the best quality and some of them turn into a bit of a slideshow with the amount of debris lying around, but I think I got everything I was supposed to as well as most of the explosions.

Thanks for the effort you put into making these, Inter! I love doing scenarios of my own, but then I always know exactly where everything is and how to beat it, so a fresh set of challenges I know nothing about is so much fun to try. I'm going to be editing and updating this post as I complete each scenario; will use spoilers tags on each mission to keep this neat and tidy. Alpine Wind Desert Heat Mountain Pass Naval Blockade Path Sweeper Rogue Runway Southern Shores Undeserted Island Urban Menace