the_bT

I'm thinking of entering a different plane that doesn't use intake floats. It carries "only" 15 people pilot included (900 points I think) Anyways, how about entering twice, will both entries count or only one per player? I don't want to usurp two leader board slots Also I send a PM about something else to you gmpd2000.

You said Airlines, I figured they'd need an Airliner... TT-P220-17 Griffin II fitted with floats, 825 parts, 63 Seats, 5k or so fuel. You can make pretty much any decent plane float with enough radial Intakes. They swallow up to 70m/s impact velocity without damage so as long as your plane can make a controlled landing below that your fine. Taking off is a tiny amount trickier, the plane needs to be properly balanced. If you put floats to far behind COM you wont be able to pitch up. This becomes more of a problem with very heavy planes like this one. It can help to bounce the plane up and down a little (pull, push until the plane is forced a bit into the water, then pull as it bounces back up and take off). Beware, if you try to hard you will faceplant into the sea That's all I have found out about seaplanes so far.

I did it like this the last time I build a space station: (Was a while ago hence the asas module, you can switch that for a battery i guess) Once you are in a stable orbit and decouple the launch vehicle, you simply flip the thing around and control from the docking port. The I-Beams can also be strutted to the launch vehicle to increase stability. One thing I added later on was unfolding solar panels on both sides (like wings) and an antenna on the top as visual orientation references. That was after I almost crashed 40 tons of fuel into my habitat because I was flying upside down and didn't notice

See you, space Cowboys

Hi, a while ago I figured I should go back into my old savegames and see if the SPH crafts I built then hold up to what I build now. So I booted up all my KSP installs and tested the crafts I found. I decided to port the best of the best to 0.23, fix them so they work properly if necessary, invent a nice naming scheme and then share them all here. It took longer then I expected it would So roughly in the order they where first created: (All crafts are stock except where propellers are involved, these are from Firespitter) KSP 0.18.x TT P182-06 Griffin The first really large plane to work with any sort of reliability. The design was used ever since to explore Kerbin. It is remarkably sturdy for its weight, can operate from unprepared ground and is also very resilient against asymmetric flame-outs. TT P182-26 Bakuram The result of an attempt to develop the Griffin into a Cargo version capable of transporting the equivalent of one orange tank around. Problems with the Landing gear limit its use to paved runways when loaded, which in turn limits it usefulness to airdrop supplies. TT P184-92 Arcon The first working space plane to work reliably. Designed to be easy to handle in any situation. Capable of docking with interplanetary transfer modules. TT S184-27 Marathon Interplanetary transfer module for the Arcon space plane. KSP 0.20.x TT P200-38 Savoia / TT P200-39 Savoia S Build as toy to keep certain Kerbals occupied during downtime. Also available as seagoing version, but it's very hard to take off from the ocean without getting yourself killed. TT P202-58 Veridis Build to make ferrying Crew members to and from stations in LKO more efficient. Features 7 seats and is also more or less easy to handle, at least for its size. TT P202-85 Horbro / TT P202-86 Horbro S Study to make space planes simpler and more efficient. The craft proved to be very capable and was chosen as a testbed for seagoing spaceplane research. The Prototyp craft that resulted can take of from the ocean and fly directly to LKO, but the procedure is far from reliable. Landing on water although possible is even more difficult. Further research was postponed at that time. KSP 0.21.x TT P211-08 IIRR This plane was built to contend in the Kerbull races. It is fast and agile. It also features an ejection mechanism to safe the pilot should the need arise. TT S211-01 Loco Secret Project exploring a different kind of propulsion. All picture material has been classified. KSP 0.22 TT P220-17 Griffin II A late evolution of the Griffin design, this plane features 80 passenger seats and a quite impressive range (even though it carries far less fuel then previous Griffin designs). There have been reports of wings coming loose but the fatality statistics are well within normal Kerbal limits. KSP 0.23 TT P230-18 Bohem S The latest steps in the development of seagoing planes. This design is capable of operating from the surface any body of water sufficient in size. That includes reliable horizontal take off and landing of course. TT P230-27 Riga Build to explore the properties of VTOL Crafts. Medium range and the ability to carry light cargo or passengers in its open middle section. TT P230-32 Scimitar Prototype to test the capabilities of the R.A.P.I.E.R engine. TT P230-48 Polo Research plane to study the different environments on Kerbin. Has so far covered all known biomes except oceanic and mountainous regoins, most of which in a single mission. (Build in career mode, hence the nonsensical fuel tank arrangement) TT P230-65 Swordfish II A craft build to look like something one of our engineers hat seen somewhere at some time but couldn't remember where or when. We're pretty certain however it actually does look like it. A little... (It's a replica I know, but as it's a replica of something that isn't real I felt it doesn't belong with the other replicas) TT V230-55 HMLV / TT V230-56 HMLV-F / TT V230-58 HMLV-F2 The High Mobility Logistics Vehicle was designed to augment the ability to refuel crafts outside of KSC facilities. The vehicles feature an integrated booster system to allow for a brief time of flight as a means to avoid obstacles or touchdown on low gravity worlds. The system is however mostly used to do stunt jumps around KSC... TT P230-75 Sherpa Cargo plane to airlift HMLV's. Range is pretty limited as is ability to land on unprepared runways. Development is ongoing. TT V191-15 Santa Fe I / TT V191-16 Santa Fe II A pair of rovers intended as core of a mobile moon base. Replica crafts: Ju-52/3m and variants 3 engines and all metal construction what more is there to say? Well actually there is... I build two versions with floats. The first is powered by propeller engines but lacks power to take of from water. I fitted a SRB like any responsible Kerbal would. Thus it can take of from water but only once. The second version is powered purely by jet engines which do have the power to get the plane out of the water but in turn are seriously overpowered in flight. This version is actually the first pure stock vessel I build that could operate from water. I discovered structural panel based seaplane design right there and then Blohm & Voss p.111 Proposed but never build asymmetric Seaplane. Probably better this way. You can download the craft files here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16335634/TT.zip

I believe that to be a myth... True, Unity uses a tree like structure with its "Gameobjects", but what counts are the joints that tell the physics engine what is attached to what. And those do not follow a tree structure. (You can add joints between objects pretty freely in Unity, at least from what little I know about it) The reason why KSP is locked in its tree structure with ship parts is that a lot of other things depend on it too. Fuel flow or the way the VAB and SPH interfaces work for example. At this point it would be extremely hard to change that. We have Struts, they allow us to connect everything with everything if we so desire, its a reasonable compromise I think.

It flies better than I expected... To be fair, I didn't expect it to fly

Finally figured out how to make a working seaplane. Now I can recover splashed down Kerbals the hard way I'm not sure which version I like better though...

My first eclipse (v0.17):

I think as long as you can get it through the gates anything is legal. It's more or less the Kerbal equivalent of 70s formula 1. It's also about as lethal. The only difference is that Kerbal pilots never complain about that

I don't know if that counts as replica but have an unspecified steam locomotive: As anything built on Kerbin, it's capable (assisted by a pinch of SRB) to reach stable orbit with a little fuel left for maneuvering. It's also extremely tricky to fly. You know, manually pump fuel about on ascend while keeping the nose pointing the right direction to balance several counteracting asymmetries kind of tricky...

And now for something completely different!

You could land a probe core on the board at the base of each gate... Edit: Just had an idea, you can plant flags instead of landing probe cores. The carrier position was more or less chosen for looks, but with probe cores in place that would not be much of an issue right?

Ok, news from the Ker-Bull Track Technology Laboratories: A KerbTown powered Track high up in the mountains. I would say it's moderately hard, the gates are pretty close together and the turn at the summit is nasty Took a while to make the new Gates and Signs (and the carrier is still WIP) but setting the actual track up was pretty smooth... So smooth in fact, I think I might have overdone it a little with the signs Anyway, the download contains the plugin and the gates. All you need to do is extract the archive into your KSP folder. The Track will then show up in any and all saves you have! (KerbTown limitation for now) Shouldn't be a problem though, it's pretty far off to the north-west. The Track has it's own Launch Site which you can select in the SPH in the top right corner. Here's the download Extra points for everybody who can land on the carrier after doing a lap... I made it around in ~2:40 but forgot to take screenshots and crashed right after going over the finish line. PS: I have just noticed my gates look like frogs... can't be unseen argh...

I found out the KerbTown plugin can add launch sites. That would obviously make races far away from KSC a lot easier as there could be a runway next to the start. I figured Kerbull Racing doesn't want to build Runways all over the planet. We need some sort of Aircraft Carrier... Now I can't quite decide if this is awesome or silly: I think Kerbull Racing needs some sort of flag or logo

Hey, I decided to run a little test about that distance thing. Put something far off in the west, same problem (disappeared). Though I wasn't sure if I just couldn't find it. Had not marked the place... D'oh! So, second test. I placed static objects every 30 seconds while heading north-west at an altitiude of ~6500 m. Airspeed was about 300m/s so it worked out to about 9km between objects. Did this for like 20 minutes or so. Result: About 100km from KSC the line ended prematurely. I have 42 Instances in the config, only 8 show up in-game. I can make more of them show up if I increase the VisibilityRange parameter in the config. Maybe that is centered on KSC no matter what... I tried to land to leave and re-enter the flight scene to see if that does anything, but first crashed the plane trying to land, then the game trying to revert and now all static objects are gone >.< Strange things are going on here

Hey, I have been messing around with this a little. It seems to me, all static things I place will show up in all saves/scenarios, and that that is intended. Is there a way to make static objects placed with this plugin only appear in a specific save or scenario? If not (and possible), it would be a nice addition!

I'm not sure if landing legs make a great difference, I suspect (speculation!) the terrain is very slightly different for everyone because it probably has procedurally generated detail applied to it. I noticed that on the old course in the last version (which I speculate further) didn't have that added detail, that all gates would break when you had the terrain detail set to anything but default (thus altering the terrain slightly). On the other hand, if this is the case, maybe rover wheels and landing legs have something in place to compensate for that... Anyway, already did a little test of the plugin. A few things are apparent: 1. Things set up like that behave more or less exactly like the KSC Buildings. You can see them from very far away (10km+), they don't ever move. Which is good. 2. As they are no longer vessels, they do not show up with the purple markers, which is bad. But I don't know, maybe that can be fixed. How do you make the blue markers in the new Scenario? (for the short course) 3. They show up in all saves as I feared. Which is bad. 4. Setting stuff up is more or less straight forward once you have the assets in place. It's all explained in detail in a manual. I'm going to ask the plugin creator if he thinks there could be a way to limit some objects to a single scenario

Did a lap on the advanced course, made it in 5:16. Was not the cleanest lap, if it hadn't jumped out of the way I probably would have hit Gate 3. The Start/Finish Gate got a little messed up too. And for the record, I hate Gate 2 I found this in Add-On Development, might be a solution... Only problem with it seems to be that it changes all saves and cannot be confined to only one Scenario. Anyway, I'm going to investigate!

Reverting does fix broken gates. And they usually disappear after you are past. It's just a problem if you want to do more than one lap. If you try the track, I would be interested in your feedback. I seems a little easy to me, but on the other hand, I'm pretty good with flying

Meet the Spruce Moose: OK, technically that's three jumbos and 3 X200-32, but the weight is the same as 4 jumbos and 2 X200-16. It might be possible to lift even more but I ain't going to try it... Landing didn't went terribly smooth, but I had TONS of lag and the thing is a nightmare to control (and maybe landing with parking brakes on was not as good an idea as I thought) Damage was minimal, Pilot survived, I say that was a safe landing. Am I in or what

I made a track around the new mountains. It's WIP, several gates still tend to disintegrate randomly. Working on a fix for that This track is larger than the previous one was, around 10km between gates, 9 Gates total. I made it around in 17 min in the slowest plane I have (the one that I used to set it up). Fast times are probably around 5 to 6 minutes, maybe 4... Didn't bother to put it in a scenario, it's just an ordinary savegame for now. Download I'm still not satisfied with the amount of work required to set up a track and how unstable the whole thing is afterwards... EDIT: Tested with the stock Aeris 3A, got around in 6:29. Also almost every other gate went awol... damn.

I have jet to look around the mountains, was testing ways to set up the pylons when the new version hit. Thing is, right now the pylons are structural parts. They can stand on their own, at least on level ground, but will fall over when hit. I planned to set them up with a launch clamp or two and hack the complete setup into position by modifying the savefile. That did work but was cumbersome. I replaced a dummy vessel that I had driven to the site that the pylon should be. Unfortunately the pylon would inherit the attitude of the dummy which I couldn't easily fix without something breaking on load. Had ghetto solution for that though it might not be working in the new version yet (depends on a mod). Will see what I can do. EDIT: To elaborate on the Ghetto fix: As I couldn't keep the pillar from inheriting the attitude of the dummy, I made the had the dummy be oriented perfectly level/upright. That I did by suspending it with KAS.

Decided to give it a shot and try to make a pair of pillars to be used as gates. Doesn't look to bad I think: Don't know if the colors are the wrong way around, is that kind of thing standardized? Wouldn't be that hard to fix...

Standing back up after light clip would be epic though I'm not sure how well that can be realized... Just did a quick test with a launch clamp, was able to place it somewhere in the mountains pretty easily (hyper edit and then drove there with a small rover, then hacked the quicksave to have the clamp instead of the rover) Not in the same height as it was on the launchpad though, the clamp is as long as it was on the pad but underground. As it's just there to anchor the actual pillar that's ok I guess. Will do a second test with a bigger pillar, to see if that causes problems. If the pillars would be set up like this, uneven terrain is not a problem anymore...