Plur303

I'm very impressed with all the recent creations. I was gone since Friday at a friend's wedding and am pleasantly surprised at all the new ships.

With an older system like yours there is no reason to get a new graphics card. I would buy a used card that is 1 or 2 generations old for cheap. It will still be a huge upgrade for you and a fraction of the price of a new card.

Awesome! What intakes are those? Those look like something that would have been in the movie. I also love the liberal use of quantum struts.

That is an awesome pod racer. I think you should get rid of the quantum struts to the cockpit though. I think the floppy connection is what makes it so much of a challenge. If it is rigid it is essentially just another airplane. That's not what I wanted this challenge to be about. I want REAL POD RACERS!!! I have found that a b9 airbrake placed on the cockpit creates a bunch of stability. The added drag creates tension on the cables and keeps the cockpit in line behind the engines. I agree that the worst looking ones are going to be most suited to racing and that is why I'm hesitant to make this a challenge about time around a track. Somebody is going to make some butt ugly pod racer that "technically" follows the rules and win. Meanwhile the most beautiful and most faithful recreations of a star wars style pod racer will be handicapped because they carry a little extra weight in parts. Things that I have found helpful with stability are: 1. The B9 F119 Turbofan Engines with smart thrust vectoring 2. Make sure the engines are placed behind the center of mass of the ship 3. Airbrakes on the cockpit 4. Have the mounting point of the cables to the engines behind the center of thrust 5. Hide small aerodynamic control surfaces inside the engines

Awesome idea. I will be trying this out and I hope you keep working on it and make an improved version.

I worked on that a little last night. I built a plane that can drop probe cores with parachutes as I fly a path. I can then go back and name each of those probes "pylon1", "pylon 2" etc. and map out a course. I'm just having a hard time finding an interesting course. I'm thinking of making one that goes out around the islands and the airstrip near KSC. The only problem with flying to the islands is that it is a pretty long distance and very boring... I want some terrain in the course to make it interesting. Unfortunately everything within about 20 km of KSC is flat...

Neither do I. I have small control surfaces clipped inside the engines so they are invisible. That's what makes them flyable. I just kept them invisible for aesthetics purposes.

Here is the video

There is plenty of structure. Pod racers have a very specific layout and look. This is much more specific than a general rocket or spaceplane challenge. I will add some restrictions if that will make you guys happy.

Try and build one and you will see it is quite a challenge. You can't just slap one together like you can with a rocket.

This is a challenge to see who can build the coolest pod racer inspired by Star Wars Episode 1. There are no real rules for this challenge. It is just for fun. Use whatever mods you want. I found Kerbal Attachment System (KAS), B9 Aerospace, and Quantrum Strut mods all very useful in my pod racer. Since I'm catching flak for my lack of rules I will add some restrictions. Rules: 1. Cockpits must attach to the engines with the Kerbal Attachement System and nothing else. No rigid connections. 2. Engines must only be connected to each other with Quantum Struts Prize: Completing a functional pod racer is its own reward. Maybe if I feel up to it I will create a course to race through by placing pylons and uploading a savegame everybody can load. Then we could race through the course and compare times. Craft file for my pod racer: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/pod-racer/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0aTVEZRgW0]

Best of luck. I would love for you to prove me wrong. I just don't see how it can be done. It takes approximately 12,000 Delta V to reach Eve orbit from the surface. Maybe less if you can land on a high peak. ISP and air resistance is what kills you on Eve. The high pressure wrecks the ISP of any engine but the Aerospike and the dense air creates lots of drag so you need to keep your speeds slow on ascent. I participated in this challenge and landed within 1 km of the launchpad but since I quicksaved my F3 report only showed my max altitude at 188,000... So I'm not posting it. It's not that great of a rocket anyways.

Sorry. But that is simply impossible with a rocket or stock parts. It is hard enough to build a staged rocket capable of leaving Eve's surface and achieving orbit. And if you are even going to attempt it you definitely want wings to exploit the thick air on Eve. Wings work better on Eve than anywhere else in the game besides Jool. The thicker the air the better wings work. And then there is the whole problem of how do you fly and land the massive rocket capable of leaving Eve's surface... Getting it there and landing it in one piece are huge hurdles in addition to leaving Eve. Best of luck, but I'm telling you right now that a vertical SSTO from Eve is literally impossible with stock parts. And even if I'm wrong and it is technically possible, good luck transporting the massive ship capable of doing it to Eve and landing it in one piece... It is going to be a absolutely huge and ridiculous monster of a ship.

I decided to post some evidence of my performance decrease. Here is the same station and docked spaceplane in the same position over Kerbin with the same graphics settings. I usually play in 1920x1080 fullscreen but did these in 1600x900 windowed so that I could use the windows snipping tool and catch the FPS displayed by FRAPS. 19.1 22 FPS This is what I would consider the average, not a high framerate taken at the right time. 20.0 18 FPS This is also what I would consider an average, not a low FPS taken at the right time I'm seeing about a 20% decrease in performance. My system is CPU: i7-950 GPU: HD-6870 RAM: 6 GB 1600 MHz Running on a 256 GB Samsung SSD

My game loads faster and moves into the VAB faster but gameplay is much lower FPS and the textures currently look like crap. So I am saying performance is worse. I care more about gameplay experience than loading times.

If I remember correctly the winner did not win a trip into space. They won an entry into a raffle drawing to have a chance at winning a trip into space.

Somebody who is capable of flying to Jool, landing on a moon, and returning without using mechjeb. So many people on this forum pretend they are good at this game but I'm convinced quite a few of you couldn't even make it to the Mun without Mechjeb holding your hand.

Are you using a Mac or Alienware? Those will have better graphics than normal computers.

I agree. Those new Duna textures are amazing. You must be running the game on a Mac because those graphics are amesome! Maybe when I figure out how to use Mechjeb I can make it to Duna.

No stopping on the gravel runway? So why even slow down why not just touch and go at 200 M/S?

I agree with this. The payload should not be any part the ship itself involved in achieving orbit. It should be dead weight. Perhaps you can decide on some standard payload that everybody must deliver into orbit. Otherwise people will just make the "payload" consist of useful mass like spent fuel tanks and engines.

You should play the tutorials. They teach you how to circularize orbits. It's not difficult.

It's far easier to just disable flow on tanks you don't want to consume. Considering how slowly Xenon is used this should not be a very big pain.

Perhaps some of your intelligence got in the way of noticing I was talking about people participating in challenges using mechjeb, which is by no means single player. I know it was buried deep in my comment in the 2nd sentence. I'm sorry to have expected you to read that far.