Redshift OTF

It's not just about the challenge. It's the journey...

Beep beep! Here comes the **** mobile! Works surprisingly well and ate up stage 2. I even setup the KOS script to fire the afterburners when the craft is under 80 m/s and on the ground to give it an acceleration boost. Looks like pants though...

Oh wow, that looks awesome. Do the Junos produce thrust that small? How much?

@Azimech Heh, it looks like you are going down the "I want my car to survive every bump on the Dakar course" route. Same here with my next vehicle and with a lot of other people I think: I've added two small landing gears to each RV wheel in the hope the vehicle can take the most punishing bumps on the course and I'm not that confident that it will. We shall see. @mrmcp1 The bumps around the KSC are a great place to test your wheel strength. The bump on the road thing between the VAB and the launch pad is a great testing spot. However there are some worse bumps on the course so testing around the KSC is no guarantee of success. @SpannerMonkey(smce) Thanks for that info. That's really useful. I tested my buggy by dropping it from a VTOL and found that if it hits the ground too hard for a fraction of a second it looks like the RV wheels have clipped through the ground. Along with extra landing gear wheel I found having an I-beam piece under the car that can hit the ground before the wheels clip through can allow a vehicle to hit the ground over 60 m/s vertically and survive. I'm not sure why they coded the wheels like that but it's good to know. Lol, it looks like Diddy Triop riding that. Make mini Juno's either side for exhaust trails.

Heh, don't worry, I can take criticism. At least the craft is interesting enough to get responses! Regarding flight time, I was just going by what Mechjeb says. It says I have over 15 mins left of fuel at top speed and it had already flown for a minute and a half before that so I figured that was good enough for the 15 minute total flight time rule. Bear in mind that the craft will get lighter as it uses fuel which will make it go faster and this will lower the thrust meaning the craft shouldn't be burning the same amount of fuel later on. The heat shield ablator will run out before 15 mins but it seems to still protect the rest of the craft from heat which is its main purpose. I don't know how long it will last before its own heat build up lasts which would destroy it and expose the rest of the craft but its internal temp is 3300 K which is pretty big. Perhaps I should have enabled the heat debug figures in the menu to see how fast it was heating up but it wasn't something I could practically test. The main problem with the craft is you have to fly low to get that amount of thrust from a Rapier engine and as you can't really steer a plane at near orbital speeds you end up flying into a continent before 15 mins is up. And yes, you can fly the craft like a normal plane. A pair of control surfaces and 2 wing strakes are easily enough to fly something that weighs 8.455 tons. You can see the lift it generates on the runway as it is taking off. Hope that helps. I think the craft was in the spirit of the challenge any how. And it was interesting to see what the upper limits of a Rapier engine can do.

OK, finally managed to complete this. What a course! I had a lot of trouble with the wheels though. They randomly decided to clip off the surface of the ground making the car jump and jank around when stopped which meant I sometimes had to retract some or all of the wheels to get the vehicle at 0 m/s for the screen shots, particularly the last one. Or I had to roll away from the flag a bit to flatter ground. I rolled a few times which meant either trying to right the craft sideways while it was moving to save time or just shutting off the engine, retracting the wheels and rolling over which wasted time.

Added some rally lights. Feels more real now.

I'm guessing modded wheels might be more susceptible to seam glitches. Not sure though.

So if we hotkey thrust reversals so KOS can activate them we can have Goliath powered cars?

Uurgh, forget Drover 1. I tested it, was happy with it and then stage 2 wrecked it like it was a wimp. Oh well, here's Drover 2, forged from the lessons of the first along with the Fuel Doggy drone. Who needs Junos when you have a Panther.

I thought there was a separate results thread. But I can't see it now?

So I have decided not to use the Ute after all. At least not for my first run. I will be trying something a bit more serious instead: THIS is Drover 1. Powered by 4 Juno's I will be using Azimech's patented flap blocking technique and a derivative of Slam Jones's KOS script to ensure thrust is off when the vehicle is in the air. It has lights, ladders, a sat dish for random telemetry as well as an emergency parachute for those hairy moments when you don't spot the cliff in time. It's not 100% indestructible but it can handle quite a beating. Speed isn't great as I ended up adding too much stuff to it really but it averages about 75 m/s which I hope will be good enough for the challenge. It will be refuelled at each stage with small fuel tankers. So let the games begin.

Woah. That's just showing off.

Thank you! I figured you would be entering this crazy competition. What beast of a machine are you running with? It probably burrows through the earth or is powered by temporal anomalies or something. Or includes a house!

Ute, as in Utility vehicle, the Australian name for a pickup. Although I am from the UK I love the name.

Heh, thanks! The lads will be taking the Ute!

I think I'll run with this bad boy. Ignore the name, it's called the Ute! It's not a serious contender, just a laugh really. This should be like the wacky races.

Ooooh yeaaaaah.

How do I join this momentous event? I have a vehicle and am ready to go. Do I have to post lots of screenshots or do a video or something? Is there hat eating?

Thanks! I think if you use the same tricks I did you could do a faster one, especially if more engines are used. The main thing is the drag model is based on which attachment points parts are connected to while the heat model is based on which part is at the front. Adding a cone to a heat shield and then moving it back somewhere safe gives good heat protection without the heat shield creating much drag.

Here is my latest attempt. Top speed was 2016.1 m/s but it could probably go faster. It does have wings, 2 x Wing Strakes, but I had to move them in to keep them protected by the heat shield. They are enough to allow the craft to take off from the runway so they should count. As you can see from the video, thrust drops dramatically after 2000 m/s which extends the flight time beyond 15 minutes. Any questions or if anyone wants the craft file just ask.

I've got a craft that can run at sustained speeds of 1850 m/s without blowing up however it wouldn't be able to run for 15 minutes as it has to fly under 500m and would run out of fuel too quickly. Running on infinite fuel the only thing that stopped it was when it flew into the next continent.

Oh I see. Interesting little trick that! I might have to use it myself. If it is offset into the nose cone does it have the same effect or does the game take into account the position of the thruster rather than what it is attached to?

OK, what's the blob on the end of the nose cone for? Is it an RCS thrusters? Does it help with heat or drag?

Haha, with these Eve landers you are really spoiling us! I am a bit of a fan off the No Limits Offset feature so I can't complain that you used it although the craft might breach the "offend the majority of users on this forum" scale with floaty fuel tanks. It still passes the mission criteria though so it's a new record! Is this the limit though? For one Vector, probably yes but can a combo of other engines do the same job? Aerospikes can be jettisoned giving extra DeltaV on later stages although this challenge seems to be more about getting 1000 m/s as quickly as possible before the last stage fires. And like I said, if you get bored you can always go for the Category 0 option, a Kerbal in a seat in a service bay as long as it is below 100m.