Lisias

It's what I try to do with my Kerbals. But now and then, some get killed. Deadly crashes are inherent to the game, and the main reason it's insanely funnier than Orbiter. But yet, this must be done without getting labeled PG13 or something. It's not your idea the problem (it's a nice idea). But it happens to be tricky to implement.

Nope. Blowing and smashing Human Beings doesn't appears to be a mentaly healthy way to spend weekends. This may even impact the brand - KSP needs to be playable by kids of all ages, not only by PG-13 audience. So I think this Add'On would be have some reserves on Forum.

Unplanned uncontrolled landings.

I had trouble on sleeping last night. And remembered this:

No. He's saying that a German citizen is only governed by German Law - and no other. You don't agree with German Law? Don't do business with German People. It's not different from USA, British, China or Venezuela - you can't impose your country laws on foreign citizens - and this is for mutual protection.

In the name of the Holly Kerbol that Enlighten us all, I claim my rightful place as 1st on the Scoreboard. (before @qzgy takes it for good, damn it!! ) 2.82s. https://kerbalx.com/Lisias/Triops-Dragster-Challenge-Mark-15

I finally did something fun on KSP after some weeks. Boy, I'm happy with this stunt. (Triop's Kerbin 1K Drag Race Contest)

Nops. It's a glitch on RACE!. Sometimes, the Physics Delta-Time makes it miss the line crossing. Just a bit faster, or just a bit slower, ande then the line crossing happens inside the detection window. You can try to mangle with the "Max Physics Delta Time" option on the Main Menu/Settings to see what you get. — — — POST EDIT — — — In time…. MOAR BOOSTERS Edition : 2.86s !! :-) http://kerbalx.com/Lisias/Triops-Dragster-Challenge-Mark-1 Boy, the worst part was to trim the escape system to land exactly on the end of the runway.

Old cage.

Just some disagreements on how to interpret things. It's healthy, it's what drive us ahead and make us do better things in the future. I like this M.O. because it's similar as what NASA and the Pentagon does in real life: a call for applications, then they take every applicant and test themselves. It's how we, as "designers", see how the thing will be really used, and then have to adapt. It's an additional challenge: it's not enough to do the "best" craft, I need to do a craft than the client (you) can use himself to reach their goal. There's a fabulous history about how the X-15 won the proposal, besides the Douglas D684 being a "better" applicant!

What did you used as "wheels"? (damn! I didn't though on that… a wheelless car!)

This caught my attention. It's somewhat unrelated to the Contest, but yet it worths to be mentioned. There's a thingy called "FixedUpdate" on the C# side of the Add'Ons. This thingy is called about 50 times per second (20ms intervals), if I remember it correctly. This is the heartbeat of the simulation, anything that happens in less that this heartbeat is ignored, and anything that happens between such heartbeats is "rounded" to one of the heartbeats. This is also one of the reasons powerful machines appears to perform bad on KSP - the FixedUpdate is the Critical Path of the simulation - it goes bad, everything else is irrelevant. Mangling with this, I realized that if you mangle with it, the game can run faster but physics gets brittle, or physics can run smoother but the game runs cranky. You can mangle with it using Settings on the Main Menu, General, and using the slider called "Max Physics Delta-Time per Frame". Mine is 0.04 at this time, and @qzgy's craft is essentially a 4th July show on reload. I will mangle a bit with this and get back to this post soon. — — — POST EDIT — — — So I come to this. I used 0.03 on the Max-* thingy (the lowest value possible), and boy, this vessel are now the best 4th July fireworks I ever watched on KSP. Then I tried 1.12 (the max value on the slider), but the keyboard stop answering on the game. Don't now if I found another bug, or if this is just a Kraken Food. In a way or another, I didn't bored to get into it and gave up. In all situations, "Revert to Launch" summons the Kraken's Holy Rage on the vessel. So…. I tested it on 1.3.1 . Guess what? It worked fine. It stayed on the airstrip without my intervention, the thing just works and by its own. I think he got bitten by the new wheels module from 1.6.1 , by the way. Yeah, blame Unity on this. But Reverting to Launch still summons the Kraken's Holy Rage on it. So I stand by my opinion. @qzgy 's entry is as valid as mine. They followed the rules by the letter (I kind of twist it a little… hehehe) as @Triop didn't specify the KSP to be used. It can be seen as a loophole on the rules, but mine is also, so… P.S.: I used the Mark IV version, didn't bored to download the newest version to try it. I was trying to understand the physics differences, not to second guess the run so I gone for the more "problematic" version.

Well, the rules said: And such it did. So I agree with @NBDesigns, the first place it's his. His craft ended the run with more parts than mine! how about a second contest with more demanding rules? This is fun!

Here: http://www.newyorkconvention.org/implementing+act+-+china http://www.newyorkconvention.org/implementing+act+-+canada You need to read each country's specific New York Convention rules. Australia, Canada, New Zealand and UK are also working on an agreement between them: CANZUK. It's offtopic, but since you mentioned one of these countries, I though I worths mention it. [cut off an unrelated piece of information. Really, I should try to avoid answering this kind of subjects while working. Constant interruptions while arguing does not promote cohesion... Sorry.]

ShadowZone is not Scot Manley!

Today, I have this whole episode on my head. I watched it too much as a kid I think.

The age of the setup is irrelevant. What really matters is the market share of similar machines. A lot of "new" machines performs similarly to the top notch rigs of 2011, and if you want a slice of that cake, you need to keep the entry point low enough. The Gaming is, now, a harsh and disputed Market. You earn money "up there" or "down there", but if you are on the middle, you will be squashed. Back on our day, there were more people willing to upgrade because we were used to do the upgrade ourselves. We were used to build our own rigs from scratch, and even the ones that bought it ready to use, were buying products assembled using similar components we were used to find in the shelves, so it could be upgraded. Nowadays? Notebooks are not upgradeable. Macs are not upgradeable. Most PCs are not upgradeable (Intel NUC anyone?). And they are still useful to day-to-day tasks, so there's not a need to fully replace the whole thing, so people just don't. That's life. We need to cope.

Something like the old BBS Door Games? Sounds interesting.

It's not sustainable. Try to run more than 10Km with your vessel and see for yourself. On mine, I lowered a small bit the front wheels so the fuel tank could do some negative body lift, but this is not sustainable as the speed increases too much as it would over-stress the wheels sooner or later. Not an issue on a Dragster that would accelerate for only 1.000 meters, but anything more than that you will smash your belly on the ground for sure. You managed to get away with small fins due the craft's low mass. [Not quite, see below] I had to shove 5 on mine to keep that thingy running straight - and just took the hit for the drag. As the front wheels gets more traction than the rear ones due the pressure caused by the speed, the friction starts to be an issue and the tail starts to overtake the rest of the vehicle - so I would never reach that extra speed anyway. Wheel friction would help me a bit, I think. But I had run out of time for playing and published what I got. I think I could eliminate the center fin too (and so, save a little bit of drag) - but didn't had the time to test it. — — — — POST EDIT — — — — I tried the Mark IV of yours. My observations appears to apply to it, the thingy started to "bank" up to 10° from left to right and back over the wheels, half the track it was running on only two wheels (rear and alternating one of the front ones), and ended up off track before the end of the runway. Due the huge count of parts, this can be a glitch on the physics due my machine being not par to yours, so I tried to use Time Control to see if I improve things, but apparently it got worse. Krakens attacked your vessel, it always explode when I revert to launch (and so, I cannot activate the Time Control before the wheels start to kick as rabbits).

News from the Front. I found another source of Kraken Food on my "production KSP". Unfortunately, the parts being affected are Stock ones, so I need to address this. At least is deterministic, by reverting the patches to the last public release things works; by applying back the new patches some parts borks again. It will be a boring but easy (long) debug session - deleting Add'Ons one by one until the problem goes away. Boring weekend ahead. (re)opened issue: https://github.com/net-lisias-ksp/TweakScale/issues/21 — — — — POST EDIT — — — — After some time playing KSP instead of just testing and fixing things I came back to this. What's happened is essentially what I had talked about previously: TweakScale needs your help in order to proper help you. The Add'On author choose to add TweakScale support on his parts in a terribly broad way: @PART[*Cone*]:FOR[RetroFuture]:NEEDS[TweakScale] { MODULE { name = TweakScale type = free } } This stunt essentially shoves Free Scaling in every part on the GameDatabase that has "Cone" in the name!This not only mangles the prefab, but also corrupts craft files and savegames, as they are "tainted" by this misconfiguration Once you delete the Add'On and Module Manager rebuilds the cache (and the GameDatabase), all your TweakScaled parts gets rescaled terribly wrong! So, when you load your craft and savegames after installing such Add'On, a lot of parts are wrong (There're more patches like this! The thing is way "greedy" on this). So you "fix" them, and now your parts are incompatible with everybody that doesn't have that Add'On too. And when you uninstall the thing, your crafts and savegames became "corrupted", as the original "type" is back to be effective and Kraken knows what would happen - one of my crafts got the Cones so big that the craft ended up inside an 'egg" - unflyable. And this includes the savegames. Yeah, I need to fix them all on my installment due this. It worth to mention that this same stunt when applied on a non visual feature (as resource consumption and mass!) would summon the Sacred Rage of the Krakens on your KSP. This has potential to be very nasty if you don't use the latest TweakScale hat withdraw itself from such parts! I opened a new issue to address this problem. I expect this to happen again, unfortunately. https://github.com/net-lisias-ksp/TweakScale/issues/34

Yeah. Drag scales exponentially and inertia linearly so your thrust scales (more or less) logarithmically. Since this is a short run, inertia plays a bigger role than drag on the first hundred meters. I would had TweakScaled the tank to 1.25M if mods would be allowed, that would had saved me some drag and inertia. Keeping the vessel on the ground is not hard - I choose a triple stack adapter exactly due this - the upper engine is slightly stronger than the lower ones, pushing the wheels into the ground. This stunt works for speeds up to 800 or 900 m/s, when then the wheels collapse. On higher speeds, you need winglets to keep your craft on the ground, but things became tricky - it's hard to trim the control surfaces to keep the vessel on the ground without smashing it on the ground as speed increases and the wheels get more stress due the increasing negative lift.

I think I need... MOAR-BOOSTERS. :-)

MOAR BOOSTERS!

I'm an idiot! Give a peek on Principia too - hell of a project, they are reimplementing orbital mechanics using C++. So they solved this issue for sure!

That's unexpected. Do you bored to test them individually? It's sometime since I used FMRS, and it didn't "stuttered" my setup at that time. Can't talk about the others.