mhoram

Have a look at the detailed results. It took 3-4 evenings, about half of the time for each round. ">" is only a sign that in this line my ranking is written, in this case third choice.

My second round of testing with the top crafts of the first round is finished. Details are availabe here. The second round candidates are sorted by their lack of flaws with the exception of Mako II, that showed a serious flaw which I did not see during the first round. Although I did not test all entries in the second round, I consider this ranking fair, because all planes beyond rank 10 contain at least one flaw in an important test category while the first 9 don't contain such a flaw. The second round test consisted of a testflight to a station in a 300x300 km orbit with a return to the spaceport and a more detailed evaluation of the construction. My ranking is: 1. Heagar - HOTOL II c4 2. derpenwolf - kerbos_2a 3. oo0Filthy0oo - Wholfine Hybrid 4. andrew hansen - Starlon 5. Giggleplex - R-2 6. Rune - White Dart 7. O-Doc - Gecko 8. barrenwaste - Aeris 4A-1 9. mrmcp1 - Aeris 4B 10-22: sploden - Aeris 4a Improved 08, ssTALONps - ARX-6E Volley, Cruzan - BSC Bolt, Silverchain - Ceremonial Go, prophecy - Icarus I, Kasuha - Kaeris I v2, minimatt - Mallard SSTO, Batz_10K - Mako II, tarmenius - Rasvelg, mareczex333 - Shade, ravenchant - Strela IV, ABalasz - X-901-AR, BlazeFallow - Y Wing 23-36: saplingpick - Aeris 4A RedoNE v2, Xeldrak - CR Atalanta, blspblackdeath - Dubble-V11, sirine - Leisure, wari - Peregrino, Rhomphaia - Phoenixhammer Mk1-R, UpsilonAerospace - Plover v2, breakthrough - Project A4C, kisshot - Rapid Mk1, LordFjord - Spacegull 5, Spartwo - Spearhead, Exothermos - Speedy Box, JABUSCUS - SSTO 1, NeatCrown - Wingspan 37-38: Mesklin - Spike, aarno - UFB T 39-42: Pds314 - Aereon 4B, regex - CSS-4A Cormorant, Blaster - KR100 Kodachi v2, Pauly - Lynx 43-51: astecarmyman - Aeris-Jumbo-Blitz, capi3101 - Auk Ia, xoknight - Buffalo, ThePseudoMonkey - Dionysus, kenbob - Firebee, 1revenger1 - Reacher, fallingintoblack - X-1 Gremlin, woopert - Xeno, briansun - XV-5V 52-53: mhoram - Airial Mk 2 (my own) Tigik - space plane (disqualified for usage of non stock parts) Thanks to Xeldrak for hosting again a great challenge with the help of Silverchain and Cruzan, the contestants for these excellent planes and all the work you put into reviewing the crafts! Good luck to the finalists.

Had the same problem with your plane. One wing is lower than the respective should-be symmetrical placed wing. This also results in a strut not connecting on one side. I am also unable to attach the four intakes after disassembling them. The RCS-block placement is however near perfect.

A while back I made the "Headlander", a plane that can land on it's top. (.craft)

Indeed there is a practical ceiling if you want to get the rocket into space. There are some theoretical bounds that depend on the engines used. Recently i held a Delta-V-Maximization challenge. You can find some ships there that try to maximize the dV. Tavert and Seanner used a trick to get an increased dV value for a single stage.

Feel free to test my Airial Mk 2.

I hope "VTOL abilities" a precisised description you can agree upon.

My first round of testing is over. My ranking is mostly based on - handling during and after liftoff with full tank based on a testflight with some maneuvers and landing(-attempts - docking torque - partcount - construction and partclipping For me a dockingport is essential in this challenge, since the Aeris 4a has one, so planes without one will find themself rather low in my ranking. Currently my favourite is "Batz_10K - Mako II" followed by "Heagar - HOTOL II c4". Detailed Results are available here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3flzn4ary9kycb9/bsc-evaluation-aeris4a-mhoram.txt I hope that I will be able to make some orbital testflights and landings with near-empty tanks.

Thanks for the explanation. Did not work with them yet, but they sound promising.

Quick question: What do you mean by that and why do you consider it a general fault?

Started with my tests. Here are the results of my tests. https://www.dropbox.com/s/3flzn4ary9kycb9/bsc-evaluation-aeris4a-mhoram.txt

@Siverchain Thank you for putting the savefile together. However your "BSC Spaceplane Save v2 (13/3/2014.2)" does not contain these two entries/updates that came after your post: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/71015-BSC-Aeris-4a-Time-start-voting%21?p=1020609&viewfull=1#post1020609 http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/71015-BSC-Aeris-4a-Time-start-voting%21?p=1021598&viewfull=1#post1021598

When I started with KSP, I really had problems with docking until I learned about the camera mode "Chase" that changes the view to match the currently selected dockingport/controlmodule. About the docking-mode I like the fact that it is easy to switch between movement and rotational control.

I created a second version of my Airial. See the original post for more info: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/71015-BSC-Aeris-4a-Yes-it-s-spaceplane-time%21?p=995988&viewfull=1#post995988 The changes focus mostly about the partcount that is reduced from 36 to 29. And in order to remove the tailstrike danger, liftoff velocity was increased from 80 to 90 m/s by placing the wheels a bit to the back. Added a docking-light

That is why I excluded it in the first place. Jet engines give an extreme advantage in atmosphere.

Well ... the only hard criteria are: - make the craft file available - publish a screenshot - give it a name Everything else depends on the people who test the entries and vote for them. Some find partclipping acceptable, some don't.

I have a different approach. As the goal of the challenge is to create crafts suitable for beginners, they should be usable without much information, so I don't include the craft-description into my rating (mostly). Handling, user friendlyness, docking performance, part count are my most important criteria. At the beginning of this challenge I already tried out most of the crafts, but since every now and then updated crafts pop up I stopped doing so. I hope that I will manage to fly every participants plane within the one week voting period.

If you need more dV in a single stage, you could combine a LV-N with multiple lower-ISP-engines and let the fuel to them run out. Tavert managed in my Delta-V Maximization Challenge to pack 9124 m/s dV into a single stage.

The goal of this challenge (besides that the contestants learn new tricks and designs) is to create a craft that fits the requirements of a majority of beginners. Allowing a great variety in the judges opinions reflects this goal. Each judge will come up with his preferences about a "craft [that] should be easy to use, simple and safe - stock craft are mostly for new players, they should not be overwhelmed by 10 action groups that must be used at the right time." (cited from Xeldraks BSC: Challenge Guidelines Mk.II) and hopefully the majority of the judges come up with a jusgement that reflects the needs of the majority of the beginners.

Indeed I did some tests in the game. For one I posted the result in this post and also did manual ascents with two other crafts that I did not publish. The results were quite near to the psopt-predictions. --- Edit 2014-05-08: Since I don't want to necro this thread I post this info as an edit, since it should be available as a reference. I made the source code to my multiple-stage implementation now available: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/79165-Aptor-An-Autopilot-System-based-on-Psopt It has some kinks that I was unable to solve (like how to select the best parameters manually?), but nontheless I think it is more appropriate to share it.

Edit 2014-03-14: Submit Airial Mk 2 (craft) This edit focuses mostly about part count. Mk 2 uses only 29 parts. With 29 parts it uses less parts than the original (39). It provides a normal dockingport and the RCS-blocks are placed so that according to RCS Build Aid the maximum torque is less than 0.01 kNm, meaning 0 unwanted rotation during docking-maneuvers. It provides less Atmo-dV for the jet engine (14004 -> 9667) and a similar (little bit less) amount of Vac-dV for the rocket engine (2298 -> 2129) The reason for this change in design was that the lessened atmospheric dV is still more than enough to reach space. Tanks are placed in a way so that the center of mass does not shift during flight. A single jetengine is used so that there is no flameout-rotation-hazard. With a mass of 11.6 ton it is by about 1/3 lighter than the original. Symmetrical rudder-placement was used for yaw-stability. Instructions for ascent: - Liftoff at 90 m/s - After liftoff go with a pitch of 45° - At altitude 20km lower pitch to 20° - When the jetengine flames out, start the rocket engines - When the apoapsis reaches 90km stop the engines - At apoapsis perform the circularization For landing set thrust to 40-50% Action gruops: 1: toggle jet engine 2: toggle rocket engines 3: toggle air intakes 0: toggle ladder Here is the first version of the Airial (craft) with its Galery.

Keeping attiute at prograde seemed to me the way to go at first. It works quite well for most rockets with a "reasonable" TWR in all stages. However this method does not work for rockets with a low TWR in late stages. See this post for an example craft where the attitude=prograde method does not work. It is an interesting idea, but I think that the calculation of "oberth losses" based on the thrust-altitude-distribution is quite a difficult task by itself.

I just looked over the code and realized that it is so fuzzy that I had myself problems understanding it. So I will do the hopefully better thing: describe the algorithm. The following parameters are used for the estimation: Time of pitchover tp Time when orbit is reached to > tp Target Orbit altitude ao > 0 Target horizontal speed vt = sqrt(PlanetMu / (PlanetRadius + ao)) The altitude at time t is approximated by alt = tanh((t - (t[SUB]o[/SUB] / 2)) / t[SUB]o[/SUB] * 4) * a[SUB]o[/SUB] / 2 + a[SUB]o[/SUB] / 2 The vertical velocity vv at time t is approximated by v[SUB]v[/SUB] = 2 * a[SUB]o[/SUB] / t[SUB]o[/SUB] * (1 - tanh((4 * t - 2 * t[SUB]o[/SUB])/t[SUB]o[/SUB])[SUP]2[/SUP]) As you can see, I don't use the time of pitchover for estimating the vertical components. I came to this tanh-altitude approxmation by looking at the ascent paths that the algorithm found during my initial examples (see the pictures in this thread). The velocity was chosen to reflect this altitude path. The horizontal velocity vh relative to planet rotation is 0 if current-time t < tp, vt if current-time > to and otherwise: v[SUB]h[/SUB] = ((t - t[SUB]p[/SUB]) / (t[SUB]o[/SUB] - t[SUB]p[/SUB]))[SUP]2[/SUP] * v[SUB]t[/SUB] I came up with this t2 approximation by guesswork and since it worked reasonably well, I did not improve it further. The angular distance from the launchsite I estimated by a simple euler integration via the horizontal velocity estimations. Again it worked reasonably well and did not need further improvement. The mass of the ship in each stage is approximated linear in time. That sounds reasonable. Thanks for the explanation @rkman thanks for the link

For the Psopt-approach, an initial guess is also necessary. I made this by approximating the 3d-altitude and velocity vectors. Are you interested in the actual code I used? I am also looking for a way to get my launch results to steer the rocket ingame. I came so far as to get my values (time, pitch, thrust) into the game via a socket connection, but had no time to improve it the last couple of weeks. I have read this minumum now several times here on the forum, but was unable to find an actual craft that could do it with this meager amount of dV. Do you have by any chance a link to the original thread where this was stated?

In my Delta-V Maximization Challenge tavert came up with a single stage roclet with 9124 dV. Using Jet engines will of course get you further.