Azimech

If you look closely, an elevon :-)

Good news: with just a few modifications I've increased the V4's running speed from an unstable ~8rad/s to a stable ~12.5rad/s, at 50% throttle.

Okay, this will probably sound weird to some but I'm not talking about real easter eggs in the game but something different: The RCS Ball A sort of technical easter egg (with the looks of an alien egg). Let me explain: They have a very high impact rating: 50m/s. This way it can be used where other parts fail. You can attach other parts to them. Recently I even made a chain with them. They have an almost frictionless spherical collider, perfect for building bearings, gears etc. They're not too heavy, not too light. I made a shotgun with these balls as ammo. They can withstand quite a lot of heat too! It's almost like Squad wanted us to find it and see what we can do with them. Even if it was unintentional: THANK YOU GUYS! @Badie , please pass the message for me :-) I'll leave you with the animation of my newest stock engine.

What you see here is the basic setup for a 7 cylinder two-stroke stock radial, with a planetary gearbox to increase propeller speed (unlike real life, they slow them down). The V4 used complete pistons with a bearing for the piston rod, this one will have fixed pistons to the rods to reduce part count, mass and improve reliability, piston guidance in the cylinders will be again provided by the RCS balls. It's obvious stock piston engines can't reach the speeds of turboshaft engines but they do deliver torque. Who knows. It will never be enough power to lift an airplane, it's just all way too heavy. But maybe it might propel a boat. In the above picture you can see a fairing base, offset from center. This is the cam. In the picture below you see a basic setup for moving the valves. Lots of stuff needs to be installed like followers, follower guides etc. I might use loose balls to run over the cam. The system will be desmodromic: no springs but balls on the other side will follow the cam to regulate the motion. The valves themselves won't have any problem opening and closing since they work like a butterfly valve. All the stress will be transferred to the bearings. In the last picture you see more detail of the planetary gearbox. The ring is fixed, the sun gear provides the input power, the carrier with planetary gears the output (only the top one is seen in the picture). I'm aiming at an eventual 1:1.5 ratio. This is my first attempt. The principle is sound, let's see how it will work in reality.

I remember @Yargnit showing me otherwise, I believe in the picture he showed me he used 1x1 steel plates.

I'll release it as a mod soon.

I've made a proton blaster by modifying stock parts.

Nice :-) Reminds me I need to continue work on my programmable music player (my own mod) and rebuild my tone generator/synthesizer. No, not real life, in KSP.

It should be possible to create something that rolls. I'll continue work in a few days.

My new engine: stock two-stroke V4 with double overhead camshaft, working clutch and two speed gearbox. A lot can be improved like valve timing and the gearbox. It doesn't like high RPM at the moment, currently it breaks above 11 rad/s. But ... it does deliver torque. Why not a V8? Part count. What you see here is ~560 parts. I hope to give it a big rear wheel and see if it will go. In the animation below you'll see the new clutch mechanism working. When the vehicle is ready, there won't be need to switch focus, all controls can be done from "root".

Little current project:

I've taken a break from turboshaft stuff for a while. My new engine: stock two-stroke V4 with double overhead camshaft, working clutch and two speed gearbox. A lot can be improved like valve timing and the gearbox. It doesn't like high RPM at the moment, currently it breaks above 11 rad/s. But ... it does deliver torque. Why not a V8? Part count. What you see here is ~560 parts. I hope to give it a big rear wheel and see if it will go. In the animation below you'll see the new clutch mechanism working. When the vehicle is ready, there won't be need to switch focus, all controls can be done from "root".

The stock GUI is a bit useless because of the refresh rate, which is way too high and only shows in deg/s. Go to debug menu -> Physics -> Aero -> "something with GUI". A much better solution is to install V.O.I.D. Look at the screenshots by selfish_meme on this and the previous page, when switched to the turbine, it shows up on the secondary HUD (next to the Navball).

As I wrote above, a cooling system might help. Indeed, one of my a few of my helicopters are hybrid variants and use the same principle of powering down the main rotor. My solution for stable flight is a stock autopilot. See the Titan manual.

Cool stuff! I was building a keylock a while ago. Too many projects, not enough time. I've never looked at the collider of that tank before. Shame on me.

Chains might involve Moody Physics™ which is the irrational brother of the now deceased Errordynamics™. Every time I've made a chain and let it loose in the environment, it would slither like a snake eating itself. I can only imagine these forces might have an effect on timing. But I hope not because I think your idea is awesome!

For these kind of applications I advice a cooling system. See this example.

Cool stuff guys! Maybe we can team up! As you remember, I made a drag strip early this year. Just without the excellent video! If you're interested, I've made the foundation for a drag racing mod back then. I haven't done anything with it since February. Take a look. I believe drag racing is one of the most kerbal forms of racing ... until multiplayer comes along. And now I know what klond was going to use the digital display for :-)

Prop pitch has an effect. Adjust and notice the difference. Longer wings help, I usually clip multiple ailerons together. This might seem like cheating but nothing stops you from mounting multiple ailerons at different locations. I just do it for aesthetics.

I just started a new Reddit sub aimed at people who love building complex mechanical stuff. https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalTechnical/

While I understand the scope of the patch, it has left me a bit indifferent. For the first time in years I find myself largely ignoring a new version and continuing work with the old one. And though I'm glad with the toggles for rover wheel motors since I'm closer to rebuilding my synthesizer, I do miss the options in action groups to just switch them on or off.

Link to album with animation, Imgur albums seem to be broken again.

That's ... hilarious! Now ... we need this: How else would we cut the thing loose from the KSC.

It's actually not about the precise engineering, using snap and the collider visualization tool you can have the most precise adjustment possible. All is fine until a load is applied in any direction. It's just KSP physics being wonky. If the load increases, the sphere colliders start to phase through but are slammed back due to a rubber bouncing ball effect. At some times this can create a physics feedback loop (let's call it harmonic resonance) and eventually the force overpowers the collider integrity. The solution is to snap multiple balls inside of each other, both for the shaft and the bearing surrounding it. I've seen remarkable improvements with this. Yes, the shaft becomes heavier but it also increases inertia. More than a year ago I discovered my large turboshaft engines running more reliably using the MK1 crew cabin parts for the shaft instead of the hollow structural fuselage parts, being 10 times less heavy. With the hollow parts the engines lost much more power due to high frequency vibrations. Come to think of it, it may also have contributed to phantom forces as demonstrated with the "Epstein drives" which have become popular in recent weeks. I've seen the effect years ago with shaft based engines, continuing to run even with blowers shut down. It can work both ways, robbing the engine of power since this phenomenon has the tendency to rotate the shaft at its harmonic resonance frequency. Increasing the amount of colliders may be less satisfactory with your thermometer bearing since box colliders have a built in higher friction value than sphere colliders of the RCS balls, Sputnik core or (elongated colliders of the) retracted landing gear housings. Fine example of an Epstein drive: https://kerbalx.com/JimmyR/Jebstein-Drive-11

Interesting! I tried the concept a while ago but wasn't convinced. It was on a whole different scale though.