klond

'Stopped in to say hello and found this video that tickles all my fancies. What a treat.

I have been called! But life and work has squeezed out my KSP time. Good luck everyone.

Don't worry about the why. Keep doin you so I can keep admiring these beauties. Looks like a lot of work. I can't tell from here if tweakscale is involved, but I like that the car and the kerbal are proportional. Impressive.

As a fellow blimp builder, I love it. Nice and big and fully functional.

IDK! 'Will find out soon. We'll still go through with it anyways, just for the pics.

'Been away for a few weeks. Had thyroid surgery but I'm all healed up now. @Castille7 and I are plugging away on a floating oil rig / drillship. 'Wanna see if we can figure out how to get ore off the ocean bottom. Meanwhile I think he's still cranking on the next (5th?) installment of his construction site series.

He/it looks pretty cool in the getting-up transition - almost like he's ready to sprint at the starting gun.

Nice cockpit there!

Thank you. I was wondering what the heck I was doing wrong. That's too bad cuz I like their 2400 degree max temp.

Going off of all the info and photos in this thread, plus a few hours of testing, I want to share some info. I built a lil drone plane. The body is made of intake ramps. At one point I had over 200 drains and 27 intakes. I still had trouble getting over the mach hump. Frustrating. So I copied boomchacle's plane in a smaller version. I think I remember seeing a chart where the shock cone intakes were the best at high-speed AND high-altitude by far. I hit 2900m/s before the core overheated but it took awhile to get to that speed by skimming the top of the atmosphere, bouncing between 34 and 38000m. I read Pds314's new posts, looked up overclocking as it relates to KSP (using controllers to go above or below the operating parameters of parts), and set out for testing with my new-found information. Also shoutout to Pds314 as he's been innovating since before I got involved here. I thought maybe since he said we can go negative and suck in air, maybe we can suck in fuel and/or ore too. Sure can! (this is 100% cheating BTW). I think draining ore gives more thrust than air (I would think so, cuz we're ejecting more mass). I put 8 drains on negative ore, and ONE on positive. So only ONE drain for thrust. So by manipulating a controller you can get it to produce wild curves (add a point, force a long straight line, then drag it around) that go above and below the max limits of the item in question (see pic below). The maximum/minimum points on the curves seen below are well off the scale, at 25% and 75% respectively, which gives me a maximum for me of about 911 drain units instead of just 20! I tied the controller position to the main throttle so I could achieve/tweak this positioning myself. I added a second controller to re-enable draining every 0.1 seconds as they shut off automatically constantly (thanks again, Pds314). When it's enabled it fills the ore tanks, then nearly instantly drains it, but it repeats this multiple times a second. Essentially infinte fuel anytime if used for ore/fuel . 'Had to add a heat shield here to prevent explosions. Also, look at this awesome plume when using intake air at 900-some units output instead of 20 (I'm zoomed way out here, looking at a plane similar to the first picture up above). These screenshot are for informational purposes and not meant to be competitive. I hope others can use this info to best the current air-drain record, with or without controller manipulation.

We should do this while we can (1.9.0) cuz I got a feeling this will feature/bug will be buttoned-up quick.

Yes! I forgot about this. On early blimp versions I had upwards of 100 large reaction wheels to turn the blimp while being supported in the air by k-drives. This extra part count hurt me at the time and I ended up using sideways k-drives and jet engines to turn instead. Something def. going on there.

Thanks for posting. I'm not sure I'm ready for a discussion this deep right now but I want to share what I have. Although I have little evidence to back up my claims. On the subject of mass effects on legs @Bubbadevlin I think was the person to point out to me/us a year or two ago when he made a big leg-powered fan VTOL that leg forces are indeed in direct relation to craft mass. The answer at the time was to separate the propeller/turbine from the main craft (as one would do on a turboprop), but put the legs on the spinning part so that the main craft could be edited without effecting leg performance since getting power sometimes meant running the legs right up against their boom limit. Warning: rambling I have had problems with K-drives the last few patches, mostly with my blimp. When I ascend to 200ish meter above the KSC I lose the gentle push the k-drives give and the they go hyper and out-of-control. I'm assuming this is the force that is wanted by others, but not for me and a gentle blimp. The blimp still works at low altitutes, but this has me shy away from any further k-drive stuff for now. Multiple k-drive in action pointing in different directions don't act as I would expect. If I put 3 pointing forward and 3 pointing up, I should go forward and up, but weirdness takes over. I can't explain it better than that. More testing needed. I was not able to replicate the 8.4 second wheel stress you mentioned at the runway. Must not count in the low-level-effects zone. Tru dat. But you can hang other stuff from the craft that will be pulled by gravity, by stock hinge or unpowered robotics parts. That's how the blimp stays upright. The whole thing hangs from the top of it's center of mass. Don't tell anyone tho That's all I can think of for now. Good stuff man.

Yeah the KerbalX page had the the little taste of video I was craving. You can lean these bad boys over pretty far.

DC9-like regional jet. 6.662t minus some fuel. 282*(~6.5\2) = 916.5

Pretty sweet. Very insect-looking.

That's crazy. I'm honored.

Got it on 2nd try. No sandtraps. I went left to avoid first mountain, then straight-on. Disclaimer: we sent out an engineer and technician to raise the vehicle suspension .1m. Final stage complete! - 25:29 (26:10-00:41) Edit: Vote for Jeb

Sounds nice and difficult without being impossible. Maybe post a sandbox save file with a pile of random Vanilla parts on Kerbin/Mun/Minmus. Maybe do points for most crap returned/burned-up or cheapest flight etc. That's the best reason!

First 1/2 of vid is running on the starter motor for demonstration. Lots going on here. Lots of time spent and many craft revisions to get here. This 90 degree v8 has a flat-plane crankshaft, like what is used in the new Ford Mustang GT350s, Ferraris, and McLarens. I honestly chose flat-plane because it was easier for me to program the camshaft timing, since it's more like two 4 cylinder engines stuck together (it still took forever, and it's probably still not ideal). The camshaft runs at 1/2 of the crankshaft speed, like in a real car. Two things allow this to happen. First, I created a weird mechanism to gearless-ly and efficiently drop RPMs by half (I'm very proud if you can't tell). It took lots of youtube scouring to find a "gearless gear." KSP gears have been good, but are inefficient. A timing chain for the camshaft was right out - We can do wonderful robotic tank track/chains, but not at more than a few RPM. Second, I transferred that power up to the shared camshaft by 4 remote linkages. The fuel lines are here just to visualize the 1:1 transfer. The camshaft pushes on lifters. These lifters here have free-rolling, um, rollers on the ends for high efficiency, like in some expensive and high-performace cars. Same Parts Interaction is enabled on staging to allow camshaft and roller to collide. There are no rockers. When bumped by the camshaft lobes the lifters themselves make room for the turbines to blow on the pistons at the correct time. The lifters are set to "spring return" at a rate of 5/100 in the hydraulic cylinder context window. This is all one craft. The cylinders are attached to root, but the pistons are attached from their pins to the crankshaft journals by strut-connectors. I didn't want to use connectors though because of their weirdness upon duplication or reverting (ctrl-z) - I never know if they'll attach correctly on other folks computers. Around and around we go. So this also leaves us with two different output speeds to choose from on the transmission end - crankshaft speed (100%) and camshaft speed (50%). I put this in a car, but didn't get over 3.5m/s, so it's a tech demo for now. Good info time. Shift-move on the KSP snap grid is .1m on the XY plane. A crankshaft arm of .1m radius gives us a .2m stroke. This nice small stroke has never worked for me though. It provides very little power but makes for a tight package (can still be used if electrically powered though). A .2m radius (.4m stroke) is nice. A .3m radius is what I chose here. Bigger diameter = more torque. Well, it's supposed to - doesn't matter here since there's no load. The smallest DLC piston total movement is .8m. It can extend/retract further when forced, but is not meant to. With all the stretching and flexing of high speed moving parts you don't want to be hitting the maximum top or bottom, so to me a .6m stroke is ideal to stay smooth and still leave a .1m cushion on either side of the stroke. This is probably TMI, and I could go on and on but I'll stop here. https://kerbalx.com/klond/v8

This is still one of my favorite crafts of all time.

You been busy. Dat, ummm, dat everything tho. I mean, where to start? I'll just pick something. The giant gun on rails. It's massive, it pivots, it sits on rails, it's got it's own ammo, it loads, it fires. This is what we're here to see. However long it took was well worth it. KSP history in the making.

Fun section! I re-installed OrX - started fine, but timer didn't stop at the end Stage 4 complete - 26:55 (28:51-1:56)

Got a new RTG flown in and installed last night so we're good to go (spawned new car). Listening to clips from Daryl's House while driving. Stage 3 complete. 22:54 (23:17-0:23)

Mmm, good idea. Stage 2 complete - 44:56 (45:56-1:05) I'm using the .sfs file now cuz OrX loses my time when I get flung out the vehicle.