Lisias

THIS is rocket science!

Attend an aerobatics show. You will se some there! (this is the famous Curtiss Pitts). The drag came from the aerodynamic forces that make the thing fly - it's not related to the material the wing is made of. As badly as the usual single wings, as @steve_v answered here:

Firespitter is my favorite, but it has some small issues with KER and some other mods (the guy properly modeled a propeller engine - pun intended - and so mods relying on stock, mass reaction engines, gasps). If by some reason this is a problem (rarely are), try KAX. Both are working on 1.4.x series, I'm using them normally.

I think you have a very interesting opportunity here. Go the Microsoft way, "Embrace and Extend"! If possible, allow your plugin to publish the craft into Workshop too, but filling up the dependencies correctly - and add a nice link to Kerbal-X on the Workshop's craft description. Some precautions need to be taken, as if this stunt "sticks" this can raise your site's hits and, so, costs. But *this* would add value to Kerbal-X users that also want to go Steam's Workshop. The Workshop is here to stay, the best measure you can take is make your plugin a must have in order to use that.

That said, frankly… I understand that it's the first version of the feature, that they have their hands full at the moment, but... The current Workshop feature is pale, almost pathetic when compared to Kerbal-X plugin. (sorry being blunt, but frankly - bitter medicines are best to be taken in one big gulp). They should had limited the feature to stock only crafts, and then worked out a decent parts database so the plugin can figure out correctly what is being used. Simply shoving up all my GameData listing as dependency is not enough, and to tell you the true, will do more harm than good. IMHO, as they had gone Agile (as it appears), they should really go Agile. The first version of anything is always a MVP (Minimum Viable Product): steam users that don't thrust Kerbal-X or do not want to be bored by installing mods will not need it anyway, and users that use mods will have a bad time handling dependencies without Kerbal-X. So… I think they tainted a good feature by delivering more than was really needed, and insufficiently implemented. Nothing new, really. It's exactly that way everywhere. People do what people do.

If you know Kerbal-X and know how to install their excellent mod (and are willing to take the burden to keep things working as KSP and other mods change versions), there' no reason to use anything else for Crafts. If you are on Steam and don't want to mess with these things, there's no reason to do not use Workshop. Different people, different users, different solutions: one size doesn't fits all. As long Squad don't shut doors on our face, I don't mind they opening new ones.

Remember my seaplane? Well… I made it! She splashes down: And she takes off again: Well… Mission accomplished.

Got fed up of rolling over and added some wheelies to a rover made of parts pulled out of the trash bin next door. It worked. I managed to fullfill some surface contracts on rough terrain without loosing significant parts!

Yes, that was an issue. It's the reason I used a forward strake wing and rearranged the engines position on the Z axis. (MechJeb to the rescue, this mod have an option to visualize CoL, CoM and CoT live!). That helped, but only below Mach 1.3 or 1.4 . Drag appears to not be an issue, neither Engine Torque (I almost zeroed the torque - see the KER window on the SPH screenshot). My current guess is Inertial Decoupling (I had read somewhere else that KSP appears to simulate this, and this vessel is light), and lift generated by the hull (the cyan vectors on Aerodynamic Forces Display) - if the craft "shatters" enough, one (or both) these issues kicks and the craft spins so crazily that would make Chuck Yeager proud (yeah, I watched "The Right Stuff"). The huge TWR (almost 2.0) saved my butter more than once. I think I need bigger control surfaces, but for this challenge I was unable to use TweakScale so I didn't bothered to try. Control Surfaces on the main wings didn't helped at all, au contraire - using canards *and* wing-tail appears to give some good results on short length aircrafts - at least under Mach 1.4 (they can be the reason the aircraft became unstable at high speeds, it's hard to synchronize both sets of control surfaces, MechJeb's autopilot can't handle them…). I intend to further investigate this thesis. p.s.: The Landing Gears need trimming too, but I didn't fix them, as they're not needed for the challenge… p.s.2: I fired up the thing again, and noticed that the shattering starts when the Atmospheric Efficiency approaches 100%, and become progressively worse as it goes above 100%. ps.3.: I had a hunch and set the Max Physics Delta-Time pre Frame to 0.03 and the vessel became slightly easy to control. The shattering is gone, and a slight oscillation is happening now. It's easier to make her loose the equilibrium, bank too much and stall (what is the name of this in EN? Can't remember) above Atmospheric Efficiency 150%. So that "shatter" was rounding errors while rendering the Physics calculations. Still, no AutoPilot can handle her - but now I can "see" things going through the tubes. So, yeah. Autopilots can't handle pitch on canards *and* stabilizers at the same time.

Just to follow up: It didn't worked. I need to reverse engineer some control-surfaces mods to try that stunt I pulled out from my hat few months ago.

Well.. I converted a modded X-1 style Juno powered craft: Into a stock only version for a challenge, and boy… This baby gave me a run for the money.

I see your point, I had to heavily rework the craft! I managed to get it faster, but terribly unstable. Interesting, I need to better investigate the changes some mods do on the parts and/or game physics or I will err again. Anyway, here comes my (proper) entry: ~611 m/s on a controlled descent, 565 m/s @ 5322 meters high (sort of) level flight - it's extremely hard to keep this babe flying straight, she's highly unstable above Mach 1.3 or 1.4, and Inertial Decoupling haunts us after that. Craft here (Kerbal-X).

The option for uploading a ZIP/RAR/whatever is intended to publish prebuilt binaries when applicable. The usual practice of creating a "tarball" (at that time, the best packaging option was still tar and it stuck until nowadays) with the source needed to compile the project, but when non UNIX systems become prevalent and so a very few percentage of the userbase were able to compile the thing, "binary tarballs" started to be distributed in parallel.

Yup, sure can. And more than once!

Hi. If anyone would help the OP on Kramax Support, I wrote a quick&dirty HOW-TO about how to build/maintain FlightPlans. (any suggestion or correction will be, also, appreciated - I only took Private Pilot lessons when youth, never touched Flight by Instruments except on Simulators).

I need to make an ADDENDUM to my rules set: <ditto> <ditto> <ditto> <ditto> <ditto> Scare the sheet out of the tourists. Due rules 1 and 2, my reentry profiles and landing procedures are… not for the faint of heart. I didn't noticed before because both Jeb and Val appears to be BadAsses . But the poor's tourists…

What's a real pain in the SAS, but… it's the inevitable consequence of feeling impotent due lack of knowledge. While being locked up to a distributor (regardless being the one I use or not) disgust me as the fellow guy, there's nothing on the KSP's architecture that demands such lock up. It's perfectly possible to Squad to lock themselves inside a walled garden if they wish, but it's easier not to do so. There's current ~3700 Steam users playing KSP right now, and today we had a peak of ~4600 - but there're at least 10.000 KSP users there, as in March the logged user's peak playing KSP was 10.156. It's a reasonable amount of people, it's logical to please them. Sometimes, you don't need to thrust someone's good faith: it's enough to thrust his/their common sense. I wonder if it would not be a nice move to publish the API they implemented to access the Steam's services to allow an implementation of such services using the current used tools. (assuming they abstracted the services enough to avoid publishing some NDA'd details, if there're any). I just checked KSP's page on GoG, and they appear to support Cloud Saving's there too, by the way.

Whoops… My bad! I will fix this.

It wasn't meant for this Challenge, but it happened that the thing performed very well for this task. Still trimming it, but I got ~540m/s ar 15.000 Meters high in level flight. Not enough to enter the boards on a decent place, but not bad anyway - way better than I was expecting at least.

Well… Finally I finally took by acts together and bought Mission Builder. And then I realized that I have some new facilities around to explore, and decided to map some of Kerbin using Scansat using what is still my best Science Plane until now. This photo depicts it on the mission to map a route until Dessert Launch Complex, and from there I'll go for Woomerang. This little beauty, after being tech updated, is just my best plane to date: 8.800Km of autonomy with piston engines @ 10.000 high doing ~165M/s, or 15.000 meters of Service Ceiling using also the Junos (but the fuel consumption goes through the roof). Well, this mission will not gain me any money or significant science (if any) and will took easy the rest of the day. Time to use Alarm Clock and start doing something productive of my day in parallel. EDIT: Somehow, I forgot to activate the Speed Control, the throttle was decreased Turing knows why (I suspect that there're some glitches on MacOS keyboard handling and window focusing…) and I only realized it when I heard she crashing on the Desert - ironically, almost on the Dessert's runway. =D Well… Reverting to SPH. I'll try this stunt another day!

Today, even the Beach Ball of the MacOS halted for some seconds. Dude… I never, ever saw this happening. #comeBackJobs

Floor 13th: You're living on a simulation.

I lower my expectations. You still have some expectations? I already waved all of mine! =P

Creating a Flight Plan is easy: it's a text file (cfg) with the waypoints defined and named. Here is an example: KramaxAutoPilotPlans { Kerbin { FlightPlan { planet = Kerbin name = Area 110011 04 description = Area 110011 04 WayPoints { WayPoint { Vertical = true IAF = true lat = 2.565522 lon = 222.078328 alt = 5000 name = Area 110011 IAP } WayPoint { Vertical = true IAF = true lat = 5.889763 lon = 224.461531 alt = 3333 name = Area 110011 IAF } WayPoint { Vertical = true FAF = true lat = 9.933673 lon = 227.381973 alt = 633 name = Area 110011 IF } WayPoint { Vertical = true RW = true lat = 10.292532 lon = 227.642941 alt = 333 name = Area 110011 FAF } WayPoint { Vertical = true Stop = true lat = 10.641632 lon = 227.898901 alt = 333 name = Area 110011 STOP } } } <More FlightPlans here> } } Where: Vertical : maintain the designed altitude. You are flying on a Air Corridor. Keep this altitude. IAF : initial approach fix Marshalling Point. It's where you change your bearing to match the runway's It's where you start your Landing Approach FAF : final approach fix It's where your ILS' Glidescope change to fine tuning you into the runway (that yellow bar) It's where the Final Approach starts and you are committed to Landing. This flight segment ends with a landing, or in Missed Approach. Currently, Kramax doesn't handles MAP (Missed Approach Points) The MAP would lead you away from the Landing Circuit, and from there you go to IAF to start over. You aim for touch down to somewhere after RW! RW : start of the runway Not a goot idea to touch down before this... Stop : end of the runway And even a worst idea to still be rolling after this! This wil allow you to create flight plans to anywhere on anyplace. I recently bough MH, so I'm on it anyway - but any help is appreciated. To learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_approach

It's irrelevant for the original problem right now, but it worth to mention: be aware of the "Control From Here" Menu Option! When you have more than one control station, sometimes the auto-crew option (or mod, I don't remember if I using a mod…) puts your Pilot on a secondary control seat, and not the one you intended. And then all flight controls became "rooted" on the seat.