WaveyD

I don't have a youtube account, I don't have this that or the other. Sorry. I tihnk I can make a video with the nvid game thing. Not sure where to upload it though. Maybe it is finally time to make a youtube account haha. The craft is kinda....well lets say it works half the time. There's some random factor in the ascent. Sometimes the two burns work out nice...you do have to stop the second burn and you will find yourself in a nice circular orbit...other times it's the offspring of a giant chicken. I think the tank priority can be played with. Currentlly the bottom tanks go last, which is great for re-entry but tends to make the landing phase a bit wobbly. Let me consider how to do a vid...

Not really a submission because i can't do the video but... https://kerbalx.com/WaveyD/Vertical-Orbiter Full throttle, SAS on, custom action 2...as soon as craft lifts hit pro grade follow. Should take you into orbit on its own, just needs the throttle cutting as it gets circular (roughly). Re-entry needs a minimum peri of 30k. Any lower will produce too many G's. Deploy the air brakes for re-entry, custom 1. Toggle the vectors off, custom 10. Toggle the panthers on, custom 9. As soon as you can full throttle and use the panthers to control rate of descent. Plenty of fuel so take your time, start early, it takes a while to kill the speed. Below 100m/s might be good to switch from retograde follow to radial out. Helps with hills. How to time the re-entry is tricky. Max G should be around 3, room for 5 kerbals.

No. I was just joking about my flying wing. Seeing as the wings on my craft are polyhedral, inverted gull wing (hence its stupid name) or just painted pieces of a cardboard box which a child sat on...it has some stability in yaw. It has a component of a vertical stab, that's the use of the curved wing, it is a vertical stab. The roll instability is balanced out between anhedral and dihedral. In kerbal, if you have the same amount of wing anhedral as dihedral, at the same angles but inversed then you don't gain roll instability. That can also be balanced such as half the area but twice the angle from horizontal. The angle of incidence of the various parts of the wings is to force the lift centre onto or near the mass. Anyway, because the inverted gull gives some stability in yaw, in the little green men classical sense, it isn't a flying wing....but I say it is a flying wing. It was just rhetorical. The design of the wing was for small ssto craft originally. Works well. I should add that the original didn't have the million control surfaces, didn't have gimbal, just used the wheesley. The inspiration I thought it might add was in the KAL controllers. For example...the craft may have some stability in yaw but if the control surfaces initiate roll in the normal way you get a boot load of yaw, I think it was because of the cog. If you look at the KAL linked to roll you can see it changes the deploy angle of both left and right control surfaces in the same direction roll left or roll right, I think it was up. However, the normal roll authority control will move them in opposite directions as normal. The result is that one side moves down for roll and the other stays at zero (roughly speaking, depends on the amount of *hedral). This gives roll but with drag only increased on the one side....countering the 'induced' yaw. Lots of little touches can be added. The slpit flaps must also lose their normal control authority when yaw is applied otherwise any pitch or roll input will counter the split and reduce the yaw. Also when the split flaps are used they tend to produce some roll which is countered with some trim on the other surfaces. It's far from perfect but a lot can be done. It was just a challenge to make a flying wing, without gimbal, without RW and stock/breaking ground. The one I posted here is a bit overdone. If I get time tomorow I'll put the original on kerbalx....it's quite neat and clean. https://kerbalx.com/WaveyD/ANGULL-ONE Here it is. The KAL roll mentioned above I think is in later versions, there is some trimming out of the roll to prevent yaw but not as extreme as I remember. Without thrust gimbal it is less forgiving if you get too much yaw but it's ok. Swap it for a panther and it's a big jump better, especially with SAS on.

Not a submission to the challenge but might add some inspiration. It's sort of a flying wing....why must all wings be completely flat ? It can fly at very severe angles of yaw. The thrust is limited but increases with control input. Can fly with or without SAS. Fairly sure I left the cockpit RW off but it shouldn't be on and isn't needed. Have a go, don't worry about speed, don't worry about yaw, imagine your a seagul...steal tourist food ! I can't rememeber the custom actions, I think one is to cycle after burner, others might be gimbal on of for the engine. https://kerbalx.com/WaveyD/ANGULL-V5

Haha, I guess so. It's a nightmare. They aren't springs, they don't give until you reach a certain force and then if that's maintained the give all the way, more force just equals faster to the end of travel. They do shape shifting quite well though. However, on the Mun there's just not enough gravity, the vector exceeds the track width with ease. The momentum of moving parts are very happy to do the same also. I gave up trying to turn on Mun and worked on straight line. You can tie multiple servos together, each with different torque so that only one moves at a time hits its limited travel and transfers the torque to the next stronger servo etc. Quasi stepped load of crap spring. However, you can get a good long throw suspension-ish thing. It's a something to do when listening to podcasts

Active Bendy Rover An ongoing work in banging head against wall. The idea was to make a rover which could handle higher speeds on Mun and not flip. So far it works pretty well but only on Kerbin. Not really fast in any sense but whatever speed you can get out of it on Kerbin it wont flip even on slopes. Of course you can flip it on certain terrain but it's an improvement. The passenger section translates to the inside of the corner and the inside wheels are pulled up and inward bring the COG closer to being directly over the inside wheels. The outside wheels extend and push down. The passenger section also rotates to try to maintain ground clearance. The motor sizes, torque, transverse rates also change while steering. The hinges provide some nice suspension when you get the settings just right. However, 'just right' tends to often mean 'that bump' and other bumps are not so right. To get it working on the Mun i have to tune the 'suspension' to the gravity there. The biggest current headache is the lateral transfer not just flipping the thing to the inside of the turn Kerbal X page https://kerbalx.com/WaveyD/Active-Bendy-Rover To compare with or without the hinges just disable the controller. I like making it because it's fun but sometimes i think it's no better than a rover without extra suspension which is lighter because less parts and lower. Oh and if i try to put damping into the KAL i only get a range of 0 to 1 which gives 0 to 1 on the hinge instead of the 0 to 200. I have several versions with various heights etc....by far the best performing on the moon is the one with a kraken drive for downforce but if you manage to flip that and the drive is pointing up in the sky it's a very very long accident.

I never know that speed, too busy trying to dodge the lights at the corners

At what speed does the Skipjack's wheels leave the floor ?

Yeah i steer clear of mods. I tried a few and it i found the game loses its challenges. You can always link thrusts through a KAL to the inputs but never to the SAS which is annoying but that's the game. I'm always looking for novel ways to control VTOL craft without the need for any reaction wheel. However, as with the VTOL BUG above I often tend to have it on SAS only just for a calming effect. I'm quite keen on using the thrust plates at the moment. Mount a servo, mount a cargo bay with some junos inside and the craft continues attached to the 'non staged' and 'without shroud' other end of the thrust plate. Allows free rotation of the cargo bay independant to the rest of the craft. With that left right, front and rear you can get pitch/roll and yaw from it. Fuel supply is an issue though. Doesn't not seem possible to pass fuel across a thrust plate. Of course the panther engines have gimbals linked to SAS but they are a bit big. I know there's solutions out there with mods but I have a strange attraction to building stock. It's all good.

VTOL SSTO Tail sitter Mass: 10.56t Cost: 49,760.0 No. of Stages: 2 Crew Capacity: 1 Part Count: 34 No. of Struts: 0 Root Part: Mark2Cockpit Built in KSP: 1.12.3 Size: 3.51 x 9.36 x 6.2 Resources: ElectricCharge, IntakeAir, LiquidFuel, MonoPropellant (No thrusters), Oxidizer KSP DLCs: Breaking Ground Kerbal X page: https://kerbalx.com/WaveyD/VTOL-SSTO-TS A lot of explaining on the page but to be brief it's a nice sports car kind of SSTO. There's some very simple steps to getting into orbit and because of the nature of them it is very easy to get quick consistent results. A small change on the craft followed by the same steps to orbit give good feedback in apo reached, delta v remaining etc. Neat and tidy. Lots of different flap settings, control authorities for each phase of flight. Re-entry is the most tricky to be consistent with, the thing tends to glide a long way at high speed sitting right up high. A small difference in AOA, a small difference in energy at re-rentry, a small difference in angle and you over shoot by an ocean....lucky that it has the Juno engines which were only added to get the craft off the floor from stationary. Rapier too sluggish from a standstill. It's a small craft so after re-entry, with all of the LOX gone and not much liquid fuel left it's very light and will happily fly around on the two Juno alone with only a small helping from the canards to compensate for a heavy nose. After you get the landing procedure right it is very easy to land safely every time....just not so easy to be accurate about where you land. Also lacks a method of exiting the craft after landing but at that time i though simply survival was enough. Tip, set parachute to instant deploy.

I count anything that takes off from a launch pad as vertical take off. I made a plane with sepratrons pointing down and another set pointing forward. Take off from the pad was fine and with practice...and a little luck...you could land back on it too using the forward facing sepratrons as dead stop brakes. Nice use of that cockpit, i can never use it, everything i make with it looks awful. By the way i notice you say you can use the craft without SAS...you are still using a reaction wheel ?

Updated with details. Think it's ok for a 1st post. I've made a few. This one uses robotic arms to gimbal the engines. Lands on the engines too which is a little tricky. Added some panels next the engines to give better than 7m/s part death (not in pic). Transitions to horizontal flight and back etc. VTOL Bug Craft Details Mass: 5.65t Cost: 25,610.0 No. of Stages: 2 (There's no staging required) Crew Capacity: 1 Part Count: 71 (Well...pretty lights are nice and 12 KALs...hmmm one or two must be spare) No. of Struts: 0 Root Part: Mark2Cockpit ( Best with the glass clear obviously, facial expressions are important) Built in KSP 1.12.3 Size: 5.58 x 3.57 x 5.66 Resources: ElectricCharge, IntakeAir, LiquidFuel, MonoPropellant (The cockpit tank...not used) KSP DLCs Making History / Breaking Ground (The second DLC correctly describes early flight testing) Kerbal X craft page https://kerbalx.com/WaveyD/VTOL-BUG Kerbal X download download VTOL BUG The thrust axis is below the mass which helps with those tiny wings. This next one uses lift engines in cargo bays. Nice way to vanish the drag once closed. VTOL Full Flap Wings Mass: 7.71t Cost: 32,851.0 No. of Stages: 2 Crew Capacity: 1 Part Count: 41 No. of Struts: 0 Root Part: Mark2Cockpit Built in: KSP 1.12.3 Size: 7.0 x 3.11 x 9.47 Resources: ElectricCharge, IntakeAir, LiquidFuel, MonoPropellant KSP DLCs: Breaking Ground Kerbal X craft page https://kerbalx.com/WaveyD/VTOL-Full-Flap-Wings Kerbal X download download VTOL Full Flap Wings Also used the big shuttle flaps for wings which with the lift engines leads to some very short take off runs but in normal flight they have to have minimal deflection or it just stops dead and falls like a leaf. Simple is the way to start i think. This one (below) again used two juno per cargo bay, KALs hidden in there too. Once closed and after burner engaged -> 1000m/s. VTOL Fuel Balance Mass: 6.93t Cost: 27,401.0 No. of Stages: 2 Crew Capacity: 1 Part Count: 35 No. of Struts: 0 Root Part: Mark2Cockpit Built in: KSP 1.12.2 Size: 6.94 x 3.11 x 9.47 Resources: ElectricCharge, IntakeAir, LiquidFuel, MonoPropellant KSP DLCs: Breaking Ground Kerbal X craft page https://kerbalx.com/WaveyD/VTOL-Fuel-Balance Kerbal X download download VTOL Fuel Balance The problem is always control at speeds where the aero isn't working. Without thrust gimbal you have to rely on reaction wheels which is annoying or thrusters which need either mono prop or oxi. You can change the thrust limits via KALs linked to pitch/roll/yaw bang bang but the Juno's do not do anything quickly so a no go really. I have a weird hatred of auto strut so i tend to make small craft and as you start to add tanks with oxi add this, add that suddenly you are adding more lift engines or more arms and and and drag and it becomes a monster. Small craft like these the cockpit RW is enough. The little craft at the begining of this post has RW SAS only, stability just to calm things down, the pitch/roll/yaw comes from thrust vector alone, you can use it without any RW but the work rate is high. Works well after much toying around. The biggest VTOL tips i could give is to be very careful with COG/thrust vector and the amount of authority you have to control the orientation of the craft. A very small movement of the thrust vector in relation to the COG will produce an ever increasing roll/pitch/yaw rate and as it increases your ability to counter it does not, very quickly you are upside down. If you can can counter it before it gets too much then you have to stay on top of it which reduces your ability to do other things and increases control work load. Chances of a crash go up massively. So best to achieve a very neutral craft in the hover, one that sits there on it's cushion of air. Next, the COG shifting due to fuel usage. You can take care of this by placing your fuel in the centre of your craft so that the COG doesn't shift at all. Another method is to have a KAL running across time changing the thrust limits of the lifting engines. You would need a KAL for each type of engine. So the craft directly above you would have a KAL with a length of the burn time for the panther (oh ! and a 3rd KAL for after burning...change of thrust limit now X3) and a KAL with a length of the burn for the 4 Juno. Each time as if only that engine set was running and at full throttle. Whever these engines are running, that KAL is also running, toggled on/off. The play speed of each KAL is then linked to the main throttle. You figure out thrust limits for full fuel and no fuel and set them into the KALs. So as the KAL runs from begining to end it goes from one thrust limit to another but you have to double the change in the thrust limit because the two KALs will average out. It works except there is always an error which will increase with time depending on what you are doing, how fast and how high. However, it gives a good enough window. Obviously if you only have 1 set of engines which are used for both horizontal and vertical flight then you only need 1 KAL and there's no average so simple full/empty thrust limits. Also do not go vertically up or down too quickly unless you have taken into account the aero of doing so. A nice big delta wing craft will pitch nose up in a disturbing way beyond a certain rate of climb in vertical flight...opposite with negative climb rates. When travelling in that orientation the rear of the craft has more drag than the front. Of course the easiest way is to just throw huge RW wheels at it. My craft are on steam workshop. Just search vtol bug and the 1st craft in this post should show up. If not just ask iI think i can dropbox.