ralanboyle

I have found jets to always been more efficient than props in KSP. I'd be interested to see someone prove me wrong. Also, I am glad you went for a heavy plane. Theoretically the most efficient plane for leaderboard 2 should be enormous. Now, I get to try again...

Alright, For some competition, I did a run. It uses 2.2 units of fuel and weighs 1546kg. That's a leaderboeard 2 score of 0.0014.

Alrighty @camacju; As you know, your first submission is disqualified due to the Command Chair. Your second entry is great. It earns 5.4 on the first leaderboard. Remember Scoring rule 1. All fuel you take with you counts. It earns 0.0048 on the second leaderboard.

Sure. If they unbalance the score then I'll give them their own leaderboard.

I enjoyed @Klapaucius's Inefficient Airplane Challenge but it made me feel dirty. So I've turned it upside down. Get from the runway to the Island airfield burning as little fuel as possible. There will be two leaderboards. 1. Overall Fuel Used. 2. Fuel Used / Take Off Mass. Scoring 1. Any fuel you take with you will count as used. So only take what you need. 2. Give me a shot of your ship in the SPH or on the runway stopped with a view of the fuel on board. 3. For Leaderboard 2, I also need its mass to be in the shot. The Rules: 1. Your craft must be Kerbaled and Command Chairs are not allowed. Use a Command Pod. 2. It must use a stock engine (non-electric) as its sole source of propulsion. No glitch/kraken/ladder drives. You can use trubo props, but you must attach propellers to the stock nodes and not use offset. 3. Don't catapult your Kerbal (there's another challenge for that). That being said, you can expend parts as needed and I won't give you a hard time if you break something on landing. In fact, as long as your kerbal survives, I'll count it. See rule 6 regarding Leaderboard 2. 4. For the purposes of this challenge I'll count any dry land on the island as acceptable, and I'll count "landing" as touching down. So, if it rolls into the water after landing, I'll give it to you. As long as Jeb survives. 5. No bailing out. Your pilot must remain in the Command Module until touchdown. 6. For Leaderboard 2: Due to mass calculation, you must carry all parts to the island. Losing parts on "landing" is acceptable. 7. Enjoy Leaderboard 1 Turbo Prop: @OHara 0.6 Leaderboard 1 Jet: @swjr-swis 1.65 @camacju 1.7 @ralanboyle 2.2 @ColdJ 4 Leaderboard 2 Jet: @ralanboyle 0.00050 @18Watt 0.0008 @Klapaucius 0.0011 @camacju 0.0014 @ColdJ 0.00287 Leaderboard 2 Turboprop: @ralanboyle 0.00017 @OHara 0.00020

Yes. This miscalculation was addressed early on.

Alright, alright, alright. No more shannannagans, just a good (crap) old fashioned prop job. No chutes, no high alpha, no silly drag. That big ass turbo shaft eats fuel. She's a big poodle that didn't want to get off the couch, but at the end of the day, she got there. She weighs 20,495kg and used 2,000 units (10,000 kg) of fuel.

@Klapaucius resources. For the second run, I used 840 units, Its the two 400 unit fuel tanks plus the 40 in the static intake. On the issue of VTOL/AOA. I'm unsure of the best way to define what you want. All airplanes are going to have an angle of attack while flying. Mine is just stupid high. On the issue of VTOL... I mean... It does not have the ability to Take Off or Land Vertically... so... In defining the spirit of the challenge. You could have a rule regarding the maximum angle of thrust relative to the horizon. It seems a little forced but it would keep people from doing what I did and force people to use horizontal thrust in combination with high AOA wings. Which would be entertaining. For those interested in some nerdy aerodynamics; Normally the Critical Angle of Attack is the angle at which an airplane stalls (AOA is the angle between the Cord Line of the wing and the direction of flight). Some airplanes can remain stable while above critical AOA (despite what the FAA claims...), this is called High Alpha. My airplane had an AOA of about 80 degrees for most of the flight despite having a Critical AOA of around 30 degrees. In aerodynamics much attention is given to the trade off between Horizontal verses Vertical Component Of Lift. But the trade off of Horizontal verses Vertical Component of Thrust is basically never discussed (except by nerds in lab coats). In a nut shell, Vertical Component of Thrust increases with the AOA of the engine. So, with a flat wing or fully symmetric wing in line with the thrust, the Thrust AOA and the Airfoil AOA will be the same. As the Vertical Component of Thrust increases, it makes the plane aerodynamically lighter which decreases the lift requirement. If you are able to increase your Vertical Component of Thrust at a rate sufficient to overcome the loss of lift caused by stalling, then you can maintain stable flight in High Alpha. The smooth transition is the hard part because the curve of lift required is not linear.

I bet it's possible to beat my score by around 50% with non-drunk optimization. Also, I bet the multi engine class could get silly.

@QF9E You are correct, my math was wrong...as usual. @Klapaucius, you can do the math on that first effort if you want. Personally, I'd rather just submit a new run rather than do math... @Starman4308, when doing my new run I went out of my way to not take any of your tips. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down; beat me, I will congratulate you. All, I am stuck in a hotel room for a few days. I am both drunk and bored. #pilotlife.

Alright, I took a quick run at this. I just put the Panther on wet mode and gave a plane enough drag to barely fly. There might be a much better solution to this... It weighs 22530 at take off and burns 9,778 units of fuel on its flight. So that score is 2.30.

Thanks, I'm pretty sure the boost-glide method will always be the most efficient way to get somewhere (in KSP) when limited to rocket power.

I am very confident the 1 hour mark can be broken by scaling up my design but I don't have the patience for it. Here is 40:25.

Okay guys, Here is my startup through orbit.

I generally use a two stage system, but both stages are piloted for easy switching and recovery.

Yes. I did the first phase of this challenge this morning. I did a small hop. Then a flight. Then 2 sub orbits. Then orbit. I don’t think unlocking the tech tree will be hard. But a couple of the surface returns may be above my skill.

Is the goal to unlock the tech tree? I don't think visiting all surfaces is realistic.

You have indeed. Congrats!

Okay, I got it done in 23:23 with reverts/saves. I got lazy so I didn’t edit the video just sped it up to 10x .

Might be fun to have two leaderboards. One for no revert/save and one with. If you added that I’d give this another go and try to get down around 30 minutes.

Yeah, I tried that. The time is about 30 seconds faster and fuel burn is slightly higher. It pretty much evens out. The Whiplash can lift a bit more off the pad without needing Ox.

I made a jet powered cruise missile that seats two. It is extremely efficient but not particularly fast. I forgot to take an engineer so I made the second landing without chutes. I did use them for the first landing so I didn't earn the Musk badge. That said, I did make it both ways and got crazy close to the Sniper award. Fuel cost/seat is 192. Launch cost/seat is 8,895.

@Pds314 You are seeing the same issues I saw. I had close attempts with lower tech and fewer setup flights but they were unstable and unreliable.

Ah, fixed it.

Sure, but it'll disqualify you from the sniper award.