Galane

BDArmory uses the built in heat to fail in KSP. Somehow it applies the heat permanently so BDA damaged parts don't cool off and recover. Even more interesting is BDA does that even when playing sandbox mode with heat damage disabled. So to work properly with current BDA, Aviator Arsenal needs updated to use its damage method.

Two small circular intakes to go with the two Juno jets. I have another plane, my Mewt Sparrow, with four Bumblebee engines. It goes faster, no issued with air supply to those engines. Some of these mods need more adjusting. Airplane Plus has another radial engine specified to have more thrust than the Bumblebee but it has a 2 blade instead of a three blade prop, and gets a slower top speed on the same plane. The Predator turboprops should be faster than these piston engines. Having the Bumblbees on the Sparrow does give it an old meets new style... Some of the Firespitter engines should be better but they're incompatible with BDA.

Taking the original, 1950's era, Vampirella into the 21st century. I built Vampirella, inspired by the de Haviland Vampire, then after testing it, went crazy on upgrades to make it Vampirella Advanced. https://kerbalx.com/Galane/Vampirella-A Vampirella (original recipe) has been submitted to Jolly Roger Aerospace for Plane Fight Club 5. The theme is Korean War era jets. You have until midnight, October 8th to enter, or until 40 planes have been submitted. Rules https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmujAVTHi2w Very important is the plane must be incapable of going supersonic in level flight over 8 kilometers distance when flown manually.

Mewt Sparrow is Alan Aerospace Recycling and Packaging's entry into the field of COIN (COunter INsurgency), FAC (Forward Air Control), and ground support aircraft. Four Bumblebee radial engines give it excellent acceleration but also great use of fuel. For long range flights you'll want to lengthen the wingtip drop tanks with another Mark 0 each (and set the flow prorities) along with filling up the twin Vulcan pod. Mewt is Maltese for Death. Whose afraid of a Death Sparrow? Pretty much everyone it's aimed at in anger. Mewt Sparrow is very amenable to field upgrades. Swap out the Bumblebees for a pair of Panthers and intakes. Replace the nosecone with a radome to support AIM-20's in place of the AIM-9's, and more. Want Vulcans in the fuselage instead of the Brownings? It can do that, just remember to change the ammo boxes. Alan Aerospace Recycling and Packaging will supply airframes minus engines and other equipment so the buyers may configure as they please. As equipped, it's ready for BDA dogfights. Drop the tip tanks when combat starts because they'll be almost empty. That improves maneuverability and adds a bit to top speed. You may have better luck removing the Vulcan pod or dropping it in flight due to the Brownings being able to fire nearly continuously VS the delays between bursts of the Vulcans. The B9 wings do seem a bit fragile compared to stock parts, but you could convert the inner wing sections to hold fuel.

You're attempting to dogfight with something like an X-15?

Seems legit. https://xkcd.com/970/

I've built a plane with two Predator turboprops in (pusher configuration) from Airplane Plus and two stock Juno gets. The props have built in intakes and it has two small circular intakes for the Junos. The props say they have a thrust of 80 KN while the jets are 20 KN. It'll get up to a bit over 130 meters/second. Crazy thing is, when pushed hard the props will flame out and the plane will speed up to over 160 until the prop engines relight. How do a pair of lower thrust engines on their own make the plane fly faster? The reason for adding the Junos was to try getting more speed, but it didn't do much except help it get off the runway at a lower speed and it climbs quicker. Looks like two turning and two burning aren't the answer for this COIN style plane.

Thanks. I'll give this a try. I've been doing major reworking of Mewt Sparrow to see what can be done with it. Has B9 wings now and many other alterations. Mewt is Maltese for Death. I just looked up words for death in other languages and that's pretty much the first one that wasn't *obviously* just another language's word for death. What could be more obscure? If I could find what the Boontling word for death is... Edit: It makes the thrust work with BDA but the blades still aren't powered. They only spin from windmilling through the air and seem to cause a whole bunch of drag. Could barely get the plane up to 200, and that only with a long level run or in a dive at full throttle. Any time the AI backed off the throttle it slowed down fast. (Much experimentation later...) It now has gimbal locked Panthers and circular intakes on the back and front of structural fuselage pieces set in the middle of two pieces of B9 wing. It also sports a dual Vulcan, droppable gun and fuel pod on the belly, four AIM-9 missiles under wing, and wingtip drop tanks plus an ECM pod stuffed between the tailfin and fuselage. Still has the six nose mounted .50's. Set to drain the tip tanks, then the belly pod before the main 400 unit tank, the tip tanks can be dropped for better agility once combat is joined. The Mewt Sparrow project has become a decent COIN, ground support and FAC aircraft that's able to do air to air battle in a pinch. More missile rails and/or hardpoints could be put on the wing to support targeting pods for air to ground ordnance.

It does handle aerial turrets pretty well. I tested with a Vulcan turret on my Angry Gnat drone and it handled firing off-axis with pretty good precision. I should build a bigger drone with four of those turrets to get 360 degree coverage.

What's the most powerful fuel burning prop engine that works with BDA?

Sounds like what Firespitter needs is a patch to fix those engines, and the wheel colliders for the ones that fall through the ground.

I'm just wanting to get the fastest speed out of a twin prop plane so I can pit a swarm of them armed with nothing but a bunch of .50's VS one modern jet armed with missiles and a pair of Vulcans. I tried to find a release/support thread for the current release of Firespitter but one doesn't appear to exist.

BDA's control of the Firespitter FS1TP turboprop is broken. The engine works normally until the BDA AI is engaged. It drops the throttle to zero yet the engines are still spinning and making the engine sound. The prop spinners are turning but the blades aren't. Here's a plane using the engine to demonstrate. https://anonfile.com/B6E02aceba/Mewt_Sparrow.craft May need Airplane Plus too. I used CKAN to install that and Firespitter, along with BDA, physics range extender, Editor Extensions, MechJeb + integration patch, Vessel Mover, and B9 wings. No other mods.

Anyone have a beefy computer and the spare time to record battles? No changes to the original structure other than swapping nosecones for radomes. Will the rotary bomb rack work with the AI to launch missiles? Stock planes from previous KSP releases, that aren't included with 1.3, can also be used. If an old one won't load, it's possible to do a find and replace of part names with a text editor on the craft file. To avoid complications it's best to replace parts with ones that are the same size. For example I fixed the low fuel problem on someone else's plane where he'd used a single FL-T400 and used a couple more of them on pylons for drop tanks. Replacing the rocket tank with a MK1 Liquid Fuel Fuselage was a simple matter of find and replace on the part names from their cfg files. One thing to note when doing this is if the part name has underscores _ they must be replaced with dots . in the craft file. Dunno why but that's the way it is.

Instead of building new planes for BDArmory fights, how about taking the stock planes that come with KSP and arming them? I've done a couple to see how well they do. Rules? Replace nosecones with radomes but no other structural changes from stock. Oxidizer can be drained from tanks on spaceplanes to save weight or shift CG. Same for fuel. AI, weapon manager and control authority and pitch/yaw/roll settings of control surfaces and engine gimbals are free to change. Set default altitude to 3000 and minimum to 500. Weapons. Any of the ones that come with the base BDA mod that you can fit on a plane and still get off the ground. No turrets or other guns that can change their angle, unless their ability to turn is disabled. If you want to mount a 105mm Howitzer, its pitch and yaw have to be turned off. Maximum number of missiles??? Could have it where everyone has to use the same loadout of six AIM-20, two AIM-9 and two Vulcans with two 20mm ammo boxes (as maximum, use fewer if you want to run out of weapons first) but that could get boring. In 2 VS 2 team dogfights I've done, the majority of the time the survivors still have missiles left and haven't used many bullets from that loadout. ECM pod highly recommended. It's heavy enough to be used as a center of mass adjuster. Should there be a limit on how many chaff and flare dispensers are allowed? If you've never used BDArmory it's a good idea to download some armed planes from KerbalX to examine their build and pit them against one another to see what works and what doesn't. When you've found some good ones, arm up some of the stock planes and fight them VS each other and to other people's planes. I recommend the ADF-01 Falken Crewed as an opposition force plane to try to beat. If your plane can manage to shoot that one down you're doing well. I've no idea how it flies so well. I've tried to make my own designs with the centers of mass and lift so close together, with controls cranked up to 150 and the aggressive AI steering settings, but I can't match it *and* make them fly that good. I have built one design that's close (Cranky Delta), two of it can beat two of the Falkens pretty often but I've not hit on a design that dominates the Falken. If you can arm one of the stock planes and shoot down the Falken with it, my hat is off to you. Unfortunately I don't have tons of time to run plane fights, nor does my PC have enough extra power to do video capture of games. It's a six core AMD FX (was that ever a letdown, barely better than the Phenom II quad core it replaced) with 8 gigs DDR3 but the GPU is an old 9800 GT with 1 gig RAM.

You can make copies of the cfg files and change their file names then edit various parameters in the files. Module manager not required. It's possible to scale and distort parts and combine two or more models into one part. you can add, move and remove nodes and many other things. You also have to change the internal part name PART { name = fuelTank4-2 And you'll want to change the title and description, perhaps even make your own manufacturer. To do those you change the lines from title = #autoLOC_500547 //#autoLOC_500547 = Rockomax X200-8 Fuel Tank to title = Rockomax X200-8 Fuel Tank There was a cfg pack called ReStock. It was started a while ago by Polecat EZ. I took it over for a while but hadn't done anything with KSP for about a year*. I've turned it over to Benjamin Kerman who is going to be making updates to the files to bring them in line with KSP 1.x.x requirements. *I sent two Kerbals to Gilly and Eve, planted flags on both and brought them back to Kerbin, after doing several trips to the Mun and a mission to Duna and back. Got a bit bored with it. So far all I've been doing with 1.3 is building fighter jets and battling them with BDArmory after launching one rocket to orbit.

Try it and see what happens.

I see you've made a giant original series Cylon head for KSP. You can make your own Cylon sound effects with the free Cylonix 18 channel digital vocoder for Windows. Back in the 70's that took a refrigerator sized rack of analog electronics.

I tried to make a classic Cylon Raider to do battle with but failed miserably. https://pastebin.com/gZ44pCqu Weighs a heck of a lot but apparently prefers to try flying upside down. Climbs well but then flips over when reaching the starting point for battle. Pitch control would need cranked down so much it'd likely have very poor maneuverability every way except in roll. Pretty much like the ones on the original TV show. Perhaps someone more astute with B9 wings can make one for atmosphere only flight, sort of in scale with the Viper. Too bad B9 Wings don't have a half oval shape to select.

20mm single barrel cannons could simply use the same bullets at the BDA 20mm Vulcan gatlings. That's the main gun I'm interested in, for WW2 and Korean War fighters.

The Viper from Battlestar Galactica, in its many forms, seems to be a popular KSP project. Mine is inspired by the original, and it's ready to do battle. The only way I could get the wings and fin to look right was to use B9 Procedural Wings. Never have used them before. Still had to stick on some stock parts to properly position the guns. Ammo boxes are stuck to the back wall of the cockpit, inside the structural fuselage. Pop the nosecone off the back for access. For atmosphere use only! Despite its takeoff weight, three Panthers have it in the air fast. Impressively maneuverable despite not using canards. Tends to be a bit fragile when hit by proximity missile detonations. screenshot14 by g_alan_e, on Flickr https://kerbalx.com/Galane/Viperish

Can we get a Tiny / Size 0 Radome? That would be great for small drones and for adding a RADAR pod to planes where it's flat out impossible to mount one of the big ones.

Take advantage of KSP's aero oddities and put the propeller between two V4's. That way twist on the crank is divided. What if you mount a prop on both ends of the engine? If you open all the cargo ramps, will it sink?

Reheat, what the British used to call afterburning. Cruder and less efficient than later afterburner systems would be after lots of R&D. Squirt some extra fuel into the hot exhaust and it's flame on! I nominate the name J-25 "Hera" for an afterburning J-20 "Juno". I took a look at copying and editing bits from the Panther engine cfg to a copy of the Juno cfg. Parts of it are straightforward, like changing the base mode to dry and copying the wet mode modules, but then there's all the numbers to model the performance for wet mode afterburning.

So just removing the Trumpet part has it working, but the guns are all seriously nerfed in 1.3? I do have some fresh logs and crash dump from adding this mod. Could take out BDArmory, MechJeb, physics range extender, module manager and vessel mover for a completely vanilla KSP then log the crash with just... wait. Would still have to have module manager and BDArmory bare minumum to use Aviator Arsenal.