life_on_venus

Fleetwings presents: Fleetwings SFB "Mercury" Privet Comrade! We would like to present to you our small flying boat of 24 passengers. By combining canard design and sleek airframe in no way derived from secret jet bomber, we create aircraft with exceptional performance. Canard mean is capable of takeoff 70m/s on land or 60m/s on water. Landing is just glide with no engine until aircraft reaches water, be gentle. Lack of horizontal stabiliser mean pitch instability is not so good if you are manhandling of the controls, but for competent russki pilot is no trouble. Range is approximately 400/0.06*100/1000 = 666.6km, purely coincidence and in no way reflecting of pitch characteristics. Test conducted at 7000m altitude, where engine begins to lose power. Price is approximately 20,186,000 per aircraft. If you are interested for purchase please contact foreign trade minister below: https://kerbalx.com/life_on_venus/Fleetwings-SFB-Mercury

By the way, has anyone seen HarvestR's new game, balsa? It's an aircraft design game similar to KSP. The challenge could work there too

If I remember correctly, FAR could produce graphs of drag at various cruising speeds and altitude, without leaving the hangar. If we could make something similar for KSP's stock aerodynamics, we could calculate the thrust needed to maintain that speed and therefore fuel burn. Combining this with the fuel onboard gives you the range, crusing speed, and altitude. In fact, it might be easier to generate these graphs inside of KSP with a small mod or plugin, then export all the data to a spreadsheet that will automatically identify the optimal cruising speed and altitude.

You read my mind! ^

That isn't quite what I meant The design was a good one, but it wasn't the best solution to what the airline wanted at that particular time, with compromises where necessary. It was the best because it used like 5 parts in a really unrealistic manner, because KSP currently has limited aircraft parts

Yeah, those categories sound good. Maybe we should go old-school KSP and create a set of .cfg edited parts all entrants must use. I'm thinking various generations of jet engines with slightly better power/efficiency, and so on. I don't think KSP has the variety of parts to make so many competitive designs. We saw this with the previous challenge - there was 1 design for small jet that was simply the best, and couldn't be improved upon

Yes, that sounds really good actually. What are your thoughts regarding the categories in the current challenge? I know in the reboot they added 3 categories (S/M/L hopper), but I'm wondering if some categories should be added or removed for the reboot. Large hopper, for example, doesn't make much sense because in real life these small city airports only operate smaller planes. Equally, I think turboprop and seaplane could be turned into S/M regional prop, with extra points for operating on water, snow, gravel, etc. Finally, we've seen most passenger 747s retire and A380s are going the same way. Since jumbo jets are becoming obsolete, what about replacing it with an Ultra Long Haul category, where you can enter either a traditional jumbo or newer widebody aircraft and compete over cost per passenger mile (with hard minimums for range and speed)? Edit: To clarify, a system of: S Helicopters S/M regional prop S/M hopper S/M/L regional jet M/L Ultra Long Haul

What about a tiered system? A design company starts at tier 1, where they can submit 1 plane at a time. As more of their planes sell they get the ability to submit more designs, and larger ones such as jumbo jets

Personally I'm not keen on the idea of a full business simulation, it requires a huge amount of commitment and takes the focus away from design. That said, there should definitely be points scored for reusing subassemblies, developing variants of the same aircraft, and specialising in a particular segment. I just can't imagine most people putting the time in to run a company

Hey Pds314, Sorry I don't see any entries to this challenge yet. If it's not necroposting, I have one for you: https://imgur.com/a/Vr0ldpD Granted, 7.1 m/s isn't what you'd call a blistering pace, but I thought this was a decent first attempt. Powerplant is two medium motors at 100% torque, although you quickly run out of battery running them. The speed was quite unstable, even when the batteries were charged the craft was hovering around 6.5 m/s

I'd be cool with discarding the backlog. Besides, with the changes coming in KSP2, those airplanes might become completely irrelevant

I definitely think there should be a cost relief for designs that share the same layout. Otherwise, people will just build all-new, purpose built aircraft for each challenge. With this restriction they would have to build up a fleet of broadly similar, realistic aircraft. Obviously this restriction wouldn't apply for seaplane, supersonic, jumbo jet as these are very specialised aircraft

I'm not sure how well that would work, but a system that lets entrants score themselves would be useful, e.g: Jumbo Jet 4000km range requirement, -1 point for each 10km below, minimum 3800km Medium Jet 120 pax requirement, -1 point for each 10 pax below, minimum 100 pax Turboprop £5,000,000 max, +1 point for each £100,000 below, maximum +5 points Small Jet +1 point if complete wing shared with medium & large jets etc. ### Perhaps a perfect design gets a score of 100, anything below 60 would be a "bad" design. This would allow entrants to rate their prototypes and improve them until they have a production-ready version. Maybe prohibit submissons with a score less than 70 to cut down on the number of submissions?

It looks like there's a decent chance of that happening. Also, I believe the KSP2 devs mentioned something about improved aerodynamics, which may mean a wider variety of viable aircraft, and more realistic ones too!

I'm curious how everyone found the Jumbo Jet challenge, I struggled to achieve the 4000 km range required. Any tips for that?

That's sad to hear, but thank you for the time and effort you put into this challenge. I really enjoyed looking at everyone's submissions and making my own, even if I couldn't compete. Perhaps the challenge can be revived for KSP2. Judged submissions would obviously be really cool, but some kind of scoring system could be made public so we can see how our designs stack up to those of others!

Hi again, I haven't done anything with the new robotics parts yet, but I'm definitely going to take a look. I think given the low friction of these new bearings, it will make compact, lightweight, low part count engines more viable. I'll try out some small 2 and 4 engine planes with maybe 2 junos per engine, and see if I can get a useful payload capacity. I think it might be time to revisit geared systems as well - if not for efficiency then for fun. But if I'm not mistaken, should the efficiency of a turbine stage increase as the turbine edge speed approaches that of the blower's exhaust stream? Remembering KSP's angular speed limit of course

Fleetwings SH "Hustler" Category entered: Small hopper, Small regional jet Craft file link: https://kerbalx.com/life_on_venus/Fleetwings-SH-Hustler Cost: 22,532,000 Cruising speed: 180+ m/s at 3000m. 45 degree climb from runway Range: 800/0.10 * 180/1000 = 1440km Sales pitch: Small enough to fit on a helipad for the tightest urban airports Phenomenal rate of climb ensures a safe, quiet altitude is reached quickly Thrust reversers and airbrakes mean landings can be done steeply Endurance for 3 missions plus reserve means less refueling time Twin cabins allow faster turnaround of passengers and luggage Airplane can reverse itself from remote stands, saving time to call a tug Good cockpit visibility ensures taxiing is not an issue Twin engines increases safety when flying over water With excess fuel and ample power, the SH "Hustler" can pull double duty as a small regional jet

Is the waypoint manager file broken? I was going to go and plant a flag Edit: I think I found it

If you want a stable bearing for a helicopter, check out the "JFRB" (I think?) bearing some guy posted a while ago. He's a bit argumentative but his hinge works kinda well

Ohh cool, I may play around with it

Azimech, I really like the way you've used stock models and textures here, I imagine it uses hardly any RAM? Triop, your roll cages are very cool as well. Any chance we can have them in a range of colours for different teams?

Yeah I just had a few minutes playing around just with rotating wheels and using rover wheels to pull the thing and it is a lot of effort

Ah I guess so. Mind you, I'm not that good at the setup myself. I'm really liking Azimech's config edits though, it seems more exciting than just sticking on some batteries and rover wheels that make no torque. And seriously, the regular rover wheels only go 30m/s, which is less than 70mph. Here in England that's the speed we drive normal cars on motorways surely a space agency could come up with some kerbin-only wheels capable of 100m/s?

Would Turboshaft powered cars be eligible for something like this? All of my old designs may not work because I just reinstalled CKAN and changed some mods around, but thinking if I can whip up a tuboshaft powered car then I'd imagine it would be pretty easy for others to do as well. Plus then we would have things like engine bearing failures and all that good stuff! I would of course use landing gear as my front wheels to provide precise steering control.