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seanth

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  1. seanth
    I have been eyeballing the Elcano challenge in relation to my interest in naval circumnavigation without refueling or using ISRU.
  2. seanth
    Sure, but I fear getting trapped in a localized design optima. Sometimes you need to be willing to explore what seem to be terrible design ideas that lead to better overall results. I'm looking at you, thumbs.
  3. seanth
    One of the things I'm liking about this challenge is that there are a few ways to achieve a similar score. You can definitely drop the mass of your ship to try and get a high score, but you end up losing out on the momentum (mass*speed) part of the equation. I'll give an example: When I started work on Crick in My Neck(CIMN), it weighed much more than my first entry Watson on your Mind(WOYM), but it's power score was lower than WOYM's. Over the design iterations I was able to get the score to go from ~20k to ~40k. Squeezing an additional 20k out was more difficult. This probably is too much inside-baseball talk, and just goes to show what a nerd I am but I recorded various performance variables, paying close attention to thrust and drag when CIMN would reach 32.4m/s (the speed that early designs had the boat body up out of the water. Sometimes a design direction wouldn't be working out and I would have to revert to earlier designs. You can see how drag would go back up around iteration 15 and 25, and then suddenly drop again. That's because I would abandon a design idea and go back to what had been working better. In the end I had a ship I was pretty pleased with. Maybe it could have taken the lead in the Power score, but I didn't want to sacrifice the mass, and it seemed like it was time to work on the next design. So what I'm trying to say is there's more than one way to get really good scores here, and that's super cool! My approach is pretty tedious, and I'm loving seeing what other people are doing.
  4. seanth
    Not quite ready yet, but here's a sneak peak
  5. seanth
    Agreed. I'm hoping someone will take other people's designs and run with them that's why I like the idea of posting the craft files: give people a potential starting point. I could try and rerun the Crick in my Neck with minimal fuel to see how it does, but I think I'm going to test it out for distance instead. Just let it run overnight and see how far it goes. And then time to plan my next entry. I already have the name picked. Any guesses on the next name?
  6. seanth
    Yup. How's that sauce now? (I just know I will regret the smack talk) Are we going to scare away other people again?
  7. seanth
    Very nice. I like all the kerbals in there, too. It's like an adventure cruise ship. But.... Crick in My Neck, "go big or go home" attempt Part score: 78.886 * 109.2 / 62 = 138.94 Fuel score: 877.4 * 109.2 / 1.42 = 67,473.30 Momentum: 78.886 *109.2 / 1.42 = 6066.44
  8. seanth
    @Ezriilc and, yes, it took me over 30 design variations to eventually beat your score.
  9. seanth
    Ship name: Crick in my Neck Mass: 80.806 tonne; Velocity: 90.6 m/s; Thrust: 642.8 kN; Fuel usage: 1.04 L/s; Parts: 62 Mom. Part eff. score: (80.806*90.6)/1.04=118.08 Fuel score: (642.8*90.6)/1.04=55,997.77 Momentum/L: (80.806*90.6)/1.04=7039.45 Design consideration spoilers: I was able to push it up to 109m/s, and it gives me a larger score, but I feel like it's not as efficient. The 90.6m/s image has two Goliath engines without any throttling, and the third is set to 67%. You can see from the image I haven't gone as fast as I could. The fore-aft oscillations are too extreme. I can solve them, but it results in inefficiencies that mean I'm bleeding thrust to drag in the water. Still, feeling pretty good. I put the craft file up on github, along with a CSV file that tracks my testing of various craft as I refined the design, along with all the test crafts. Feel free to grab them and use one as the basis of your design. Crick in My Neck 3.25 has interesting stats and might be a good place to start if you can then solve the chine-walking and fore-aft oscillations. If you want to try out the Crick in my Neck craft file, make sure all the tail fins are deployed so the leading edge points up. For some reason I have found reloads flip the direction of deployment. Pump liquid fuel into the front tank before starting. That will help with fore-aft oscillations. You should completely rise up out of the water ~25m/s. At that point you can start adjusting the angles of things to find good settings. When the adjustable foils are completely out of the water, you can retract their deployment. https://github.com/kjoenth/KSP-Boat-Momentum-Challenge/tree/master/seanth entries
  10. seanth
    That is a beautiful looking craft! Tiny boat looks totally legit. It's got a Kerbal, is made with stock parts, and doesn't completely leave the water. I'd say get a screenshots showing speed, fuel usage, thrust, parts, and mass and you are good to go.
  11. seanth
    lol Ok. Regardless of whether I can match your score, I'll put something up tomorrow. This is proving to be pretty hard. I'm not used to building fast boats.
  12. seanth
    That's correct. I think all the other scores are done using tonnes, so might as well stay consistent. Might be another day before I get my submission up. I'm really pleased with it so far, but it just...can't...quite...catch you. I feel like I'm in some weird localized optima design-wise where I just can't seem to lick the various shimmies.
  13. seanth
    I was going to say I had never experienced chine-walking in my boats, but I just did. What I've mainly been facing is porpoising (really just the front end skipping and the oscillation builds up). I got the porpoising licked, and the speed shot up and, oh, hello chine. For people experiencing the bow-stern oscillations:
  14. seanth
    Been messing with my latest entry and am having bouncing problems above ~45m/s. I suspect I know what is wrong, but it's proving tricky to fix.
  15. seanth
    Yeah, I know. We're going on honor a bit, here. Besides, you made your craft file available (kudos on that!) so people of a certain mindset could double check if they wanted. But, yeah. Cheating is possible.
  16. seanth
    MEGANewtons of thrust. Lol. Math looks good to me. But does it have something _in_ the water? Those back fins look like they might be breaking the water's surface. Edit. Oops. Part score is off. 304.168*90.1/92=297.8863
  17. seanth
    Oh, I don't know. I did some estimates on fuel usage based on the change in time and mass between two pictures and it looks like 1L/s ish. The thrust is around 17.18tonne*10.65m/s2=182.967kN. I'm getting a ballpark score of 26,402.1381, which beats my example submission
  18. seanth
    Ok. Revised rules up, and my first submission walks people through the score. Got it, and adding it to the score list. Nice looking craft. I could almost calculate the fuel efficiency score, but there's no indication of fuel usage per second. You've got mass and acceleration--which I can use to calculate thrust-- and velocity. Want to post another image showing fuel usage to get a fuel efficiency score?
  19. seanth
    Ok. Looks like it's going to be (current Thrust*current velocity)/units fuel per sec (which is (momentum*acceleration)/fuel per sec Just momentum/fuel ended up with interesting (and realistic) situations where if a very heavy boat travelled very slowly, it would get a great score. Hopefully this calculation method will be a good intersection between realistic boat efficiency and fun (i.e. going fast-ish) Updating the rules and my first entry to show how to easily get the values now.
  20. seanth
    Sorry for the radio silence. I've been at work, and I wanted to re-read something that inspired the contest in the first place: "What Price Speed?" by G. Gabrielli and T. von Karman. Yes, that Karman. Part of his interests had to do with efficient movement of things...especially big things like planes and rockets. Hold tight. Nearly done testing, making sure the scoring makes sense. Somewhat related, I am totally up for a long distance+no refueling boat competition, too. (different challenge of course)
  21. seanth
    We could require the inclusion of a cargo bay (though it doesn't necessarily need anything in it. I'm indifferent on this point, though it would possibly disqualify craft people already have made and want to show off.
  22. seanth
    Oh I dunno. Efficient movement of something heavy, and doing it fast seems like a noble goal. Thus "Momentum Efficiency" But I'm totally willing to end this if the consensus is it should just be an efficiency challenge. So let's burn this one and have an efficiency challenge. Furthest fastest without refueling?
  23. seanth
    Some example scores using (mass*speed)/(parts*fuel per second): Unnamed: (114tonne *97.4m/s)/(4parts*165L/s) = 16.82 I guessed at fuel usage before engine shutdown. 13329L/81sec WYM: (35tonne*44m/s)/(80parts*0.86L/s)=22.38 Sure, WYM would beat that rocket monster, but honestly I sort of hope it would with it's fuel nomming
  24. seanth
    Well, one way around this is if we say you _have_ to use MechJeb. That way there can be a window showing max acceleration and current acceleration. If max acceleration is significantly greater than current acceleration when the screenshot is taken, that's a pretty good indicator that there is something fishy going on. I personally would love if we can use (mass*speed)/(parts*fuel per second)
  25. seanth
    I like the dual screenshot idea. That would probably make it harder to have a _very_ low fuel consumption like what happened with the example rocket boat this morning. I wouldn't say the challenge is just about raw speed. It's momentum. So a ship that is 100kg and traveling an 1m/s would have the same momentum as a ship 1kg traveling at 100m/s. I think this gives people the ability to adjust speed and mass to match what they are aiming for. The addition of the part #s and fuel usage just add more space for people to play in.
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