Silverchain

I just had a look at one of the Mun canyons (equatorial, ~230 degrees E) and that's at least 4km across.

LethalDose, thanks for starting this poll. I'm very happy to see the overwhelming strength of interest shown!

Change of plans. Merry Go Round and the Keg arrived at Bop from Tylo. The ships separated and Keg shifted to a polar orbit to look for the Kraken. After spotting a likely looking dot on the ground, the Keg came in for a landing. While I was adjusting the trajectory in the map menu, suddenly the projected track started spiralling around. I soon discovered the ship had clipped a mountain, broken into bits and the lander can was gracefully soaring through the sky. Fearing imminent explosions, Jedson Kerman bailed out. After flying and bouncing and rolling some distance (it was very dark, too dark to judge where the ground was!) Jedson came to a stop. Interestingly, the Keg's lander can had survived (with only small damage) but when Jedson caught up to it it began to roll downhill and was soon destroyed. Ring of Bright Flame moved from its earlier landing site to join the now-stranded kerbonaut. At least there's a resupply of suit fuel now. I tried to bring one of the rovers up, but it wasn't working very well. So, a change of plan. I launched an empty crew transfer vehicle (bottom) to rendezvous with the Some Make Chaos in LKO, and that ship will now head for Bop. If it can survive the acceleration, it was kinda wobbly with the transfer vehicle stuck on top.

Part of my degree was about plasma fluid dynamics in the sun, and it was appallingly complex. I'd've liked five bloody minutes alone in a room with Lev Landau... KSP rocket science is about my level these days.

Do it long enough and you can start eyeballing delta-v. Remember a few log values and can interpolate the rest. If x is close to 1 then ln(x) ~ x-1 ln(1.5) ~ 0.4 ln (2) ~ 0.7 ln (2.71) ~ ln(e) ~ 1 ln (7) ≈ 2 Simples! I usually scribble ideas on paper, but most of my design is done using brute force iteration with a Python program; I give it certain constraints and it runs through every possible combination of parts* within those constraints to find the one that best suits what I want; then I work out how to put those bits together. The familiarity with the various parts and equations it's given me is more valuable than any specific result. *loosely speaking. Things would be implausibly slow if you really considered every part, so I selectively manually disable consideration of Mainsails for lifting off Gilly and so on. That could be automated, but it'd take lots of thinking.

Are the full stats for the new ARM parts available anywhere? Just wondering if the new big tanks keep the 9:1 ratio.

Alan Kerman, late of the Joy Candle, joined its crew and the Merry Go Round along with the Keg made an uneventful escape from Vall. Merry Go Round and the Keg refueled from the Two Thousand Hamburg Four high above Tylo. The prototype lander Red Rosy Bud also picked up fuel and headed to low Tylo orbit to try a landing. As a prototype it was missing some useful features such as science equipment and a transmit aerial, but the descent was surprisingly death-free. Derbas Kerman's delight at planting the flag is more than enough to overcome any worries about there not being enough fuel to make orbit again. (There isn't. Probably. Prototype. I'm not going to try, in any case; Derbas can wait for a rescue. There's another lander in high Tylo orbit somewhere.) The refueling process didn't go at all well, and stocks were low again, so I changed some aspects on the next mark of the Euryale and launched this one, the Some Make Chaos. In addition to the redesigned and hopefully more biddable fuel tanks it's sporting three MESS escape pods, which should double as Eeloo escape craft in case of a botched landing. Plan is to take this out to Eeloo and meet the Merry Go Round there once that ship has visited Bop and Pol. I suppose this is the last hurrah for the Euryale-class, and the whole venerable line of ship designs it represents, before the new giant parts change everything.

Undeterred by the loss of Richfen and the Conciliatrix' lander (and with a much healthier fuel load) the Merry Go Round (background) landed safely at Vall base. Tylo looks down mockingly from the heavens above. It knows who's boss. The crew of Merry Go Round and the staff of Vall base mourn their many fallen colleagues in true Kerbal style, with a big grin. Unfortunately Vall base is a) not much of a base, as there's no rover present and an awfully long way from the henge, so I don't think we'll be going there now. I'm racing against the asteroids.

Although the docking bug persists, I was able to transfer the Michigan J. Frog to Vall and land it safely. Also in Vall orbit, the Conciliatrix had brought a rover / lander module. At the last minute Richfen Kerman decided to fly it down, hopefully to find Vallhenge. Fuel was tight, so I flew a fast descent. I misjudged it. RIP Richfen Kerman, latest casualty of the tour.

At last, progress! After the BSC challenge testing ended, all ships from the last flotilla have arrived at Jool, mostly going where they were intended to. There were some slight problems with unexpected intercepts and intercept angles, and the hab Loyals March which was intended for Tylo orbit had to aerobrake around Laythe instead. The spaceplane Ring of Bright Flame brought a rover/lander combo to Bop, and it made a good landing. The rover set off exploring, heading for a large crater. The vertical relief on Bop is very very steep, and the horizon is close so it often feels like everywhere is downhill. The orbital tug Foxblade Feet brought another rover down to the first landing site, and then the spaceplane followed. The Feet was never intended to land directly; I tried to bring it down low, hover, undock the rover from the top and then move out of the way (which worked) but then I tried to land it on its engines and broke them. I managed later to dock the spaceplane to the downed tug and suck it dry of precious, lifegiving rocket fuel. When the Michigan J. Frog came to Jool, it accidentally ended up out of fuel and in a very high and slow orbit. I sent the newly arrived spaceplane Cane Sugar to refuel it. Unfortunately, a peculiar bug means that I cannot undock the fuel tank which is attached to the Cane Sugar, so the only way I can refuel it will be to transfer fuel via the tug section. I'd much rather have linked the two ships together, ditched the fuel tank and travelled as one unit! So, all is well. Next up I'll land the Merry Go Round on Vall, then bring it to Tylo, where the tanker ship Two Thousand Hamburg Four is waiting with lots more fuel. There's a couple of prototype Tylo landers in orbit there too, but I don't trust them, so I'll fuel them up and try them out uncrewed. It's been a long time since I landed there and it's hard to practice.

About looks - I was scoring on aesthetics, but as a minor component. However, I was scoring a bit more on clipping and stacking (ab)use, and when there are bits of parts sticking out of other parts (as on the R2's ram intakes, though the R2 is comparatively clipping free compared to some entries) I find it ugly too. Especially when the graphics engine tries to draw two or more pieces on top of each other and makes that shimmering effect. Yuck; to me a lot of the attempts to improve the looks of a craft by covering it with clipped panels and so on have the opposite effect. (I wasn't scoring too highly on either, as the Mallard has clipped-though-inactive control surfaces and has my final vote.) About flight performance - there are so many possible uses for a spaceplane so it's hard to say definitively "it needs to be able to fly well as well as simply making orbit and returning", but Laythe - as the only other world where airbreathing engines work - is a prime target for spaceplanes, and being able to fly well is useful there; unless you're making a pinpoint atmospheric entry directly over an established base on a good flat location then you need to be able to get to an island, potentially requiring a long atmospheric flight or suborbital hop, and find a landing site, which is not always straightforward. As an extended test to discriminate between the top ten or so entries I looked at I flew them on a (harsh) mission profile; a quick flight around KSC followed by a flight at low level to the Island Runway, landing, flight at high level back west to the desert, swoop down to buzz the Pyramids and then ascend to orbit. I wasn't looking at whether they could do that (some could) but at how they behaved on a half-hour flight in different conditions with unbalanced, unintended fuel levels - the top entries could all do things the right way, but what about the wrong way?

Should make them a more practical auxiliary engine for light spaceplanes. I'll be trying that.

I was sceptical of using external command seats on landers, until I saw this... ...at which point this was inevitable!

Rovers, borrowing* and precision driving, ably demonstrated by Jim Kerman in the spaceplane/rover Yojimbo! *the other rover is a modified version of a design by meyst.

I'm finished my testing. I've flown a complete takeoff-orbital rendezvous-landing cycle with (almost) all the planes and an extended practical flight test (~30 minutes) on the top ten or so. I've got a winner and runner-up chosen but haven't ordered the whole list yet.

I don't use Module Manager - I have only one mod installed, the Mk2 Cockpit IVA, which I manually set up specifically to avoid having to install Module Manager - and I've seen a lot of problems with action groups on the craft. I haven't seen any instances where a not-working action group randomly starts working after a program restart. I'd thought that the problem was caused by the bug/feature that group actions for parts that are attached with bilateral symmetry in the SPH don't survive properly when the root part is moved (which is 100% reproducible on my machine) but it sounds like there's more to it than only that one.

I agree. There's a lot of generally good craft entered but not so many good Aeris 4A replacements. Personally I wasn't inclined to weight on-orbit delta-v too highly, but the stock Aeris 4A has quite a lot (well, more than many entries) so any replacement should too. It's a very difficult thing to measure precisely, though, because getting a plane to orbit optimally is an art, and doing it reliably for fifty planes, well... it's not going to happen. And there's not really any way to get around it; you can't tell how much fuel a plane uses getting to orbit without flying it there.

I wrote a utility to selectively remove debris. I like leaving bits and pieces scattered around the outer system as memorials and points of interest, but I often get lots of lag-inducing junk scattered around KSC and in LKO so I get rid of that and keep the rest.

Have a look over at the BSC Challenge thread on replacing the Aeris 4a - among the entries there are some interesting escape systems including detaching cockpits, some gliding and some using chutes, and one which has an emergency plane, it's cool.

I believe every entry uses massless landing gear and all of them rely on it as an integral part of their function (even the VTOLs and mine still land on the gear) - the absence of mass on heavy landing gear is greatly more important than the absence of mass on tiny struts.

It is fragile compared to the heavier pods, mind. Don't hit the ground hard.

I'm down to a "short" list of seventeen after three rounds of elimination. My eyes feel strained staring at the screen!

Hey, who said anything about SSTO, anyway? The Aeris 4A is a spaceplane, and we all know how they launch. Aeris 4A SLS* Only a Dark Cocoon on the pad... (with jets spooling up prior to Mainsail and booster ignition) ...and going for orbit. That's an original Aeris 4A, with all its faults, so there's massive room for improvement. Swapping a nuke in would give it silly range, do some fuel balancing, change the torque and RCS supplies, drop some unneeded intakes as the return can be practically a glide, all sorts of stuff, could make a good ship out of it. Also the gimballed Mainsail tells asymmetric flameout just where to shove it. *Silly Launch System

I think it happens when you have an action group set to affect engines on both sides of the fuselage, but then move the part that the engines are attached to - because when you take it off to move it there's temporarily only one engine, the action group no longer affects the engine on the other side... @ssTalon - I'm not sure about biplanes; so long as the wings are widely separated it seems reasonable. People have proposed modern high speed (supersonic) biplanes, although I've no idea how or if it would translate to the screwy hypersonic speeds a spaceplane reaches! Same goes for wings above and below a fuselage, I can see that as a lifting body; it's only when people start stacking wings close on top of each other or clipping them together that it becomes blatantly cheaty to me.

Quite a few can get to the Mun and Minmus, and with navigating skill (something I'm not especially blessed with) a handful will make further. It'd be running on fumes and it's certainly not intended to go there but with the right burn and aerobrake I think my Ceremonial (1200+ ms-1 on-orbit delta-v) will make Duna orbit. There's craft (e.g. the Gecko, I made that 2160+ ms-1 on-orbit, or the Leisure) with much more disposable delta-v than mine. I believe your Kaeris does have the highest practical range of the challengers.