1.02 Kollier Trophy (reset for the updates)

[MostExcellent]

You should post the flight results screen, because you may not necessarily have screenshotted the highest altitude

[MunGazer]

I presume that by "manned" you mean some kind of command pod rather than a command seat inside the cargo bay?

Also the "level flight" criterion is a hard one, because you can sustain stable altitude for a long time but slowly losing speed, and this usually occurs at an altitude 1-2km higher than an altitude where both speed and altitude are stable. This effect occurs at the altitude range where most of the altitude entries will be places, thus confounding the results.

Yeah, I raised that issue earlier, and Slashy addressed it in one of his posts - but for some time after that he didn't add what he said about it to the rules list; you'd have to go back and find it in the thread. Hold on - I'll paste it into this post in just a sec.

As for your "manned" question, that is a good question, my assumption would be that yes, as long as there is a Kerbal on board you'd be good to go but ultimately Slashy will dictate.

Edit: Ok, here is Slashy's earlier post regarding what constitutes level flight for this challenge:

All,

I'm comfortable with you folks having a "gentleman's agreement" on what constitutes level flight. I don't want to make the rules so stringent that they turn off entrants who maybe don't have the skills to maintain tight tolerances.

I'd say we can generally tell the difference between someone who's zoom- climbing/ diving and who's operating in good faith.

If I miss an entry that looks suspicious, just hit me up on PM and I'll have another look at it. It will be strictly confidential and nobody will ever know who requested a review of a particular flight or even if the review was requested or if I just decided to review it on my own.

"Level flight" to me means that it has achieved an equillibrium state where the altitude and speed will not degrade over time.

This is your competition and I'm just housekeeping (and shamelessly stealing all of the tribal knowledge you're generating ). It's in your own best interest to keep it fair.

With that said, time to update the leaderboard. Good job and excellent entries!

Best,

-Slashy

- - - Updated - - -

One issue with the altitude records: how to differentiate genuine level flight from a screenshot taken at the apoapsis of a zoom climb? Perhaps two screenshots, ten seconds apart or so?

I'll give an idea of what I did, although it was of my own accord to support that my craft had "equilibrium" for my submitted records. I used a method where I got into my state of relative equilibrium, and took a screen shot every few moments while holding a particular altitude, and showed how over time (not really a standard yet for time, just relying on the samples taken to give an indication) my speed didn't degrade. In my imgur album for my original submissions, I have three sets of three altitude/airspeed samples, mainly because of the varying performance due to different levels of fuel on board. But of course, I was being very strict on myself and trying to hold a high standard in the interest of being fair for the competition, or should I say challenge. I wouldn't say everyone has to do it to my standard just to make an entry. I guess it's just big boy rules. If someone comes along and squashes me down the list another notch with a highly questionable entry, I'm not worried about it for my own ranking, I just hate to see a bunch of kids get discouraged with their design and feel as though it's not competitive because, for instance, someone managed to clip 52 air intakes completely inside of a Mk. 1 fuselage (reference earlier Microsoft Paint drawing).

Edited May 4, 2015 by MunGazer

[Redshift OTF]

Interesting challenge. Perhaps if we agreed that the surface speed only counts when your vertical sped is +/- 10m/s? Here's my entry:

1559 m/s. It could probably do the Ironman challenge as well but waiting for a horizontal speed kills a lot of the fuel and I don't usually have enough to get back.

[MunGazer]

Interesting challenge. Perhaps if we agreed that the surface speed only counts when your vertical sped is +/- 10m/s? Here's my entry:

http://i.imgur.com/LzrmvUp.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/ihDvk0T.jpg

1559 m/s. It could probably do the Ironman challenge as well but waiting for a horizontal speed kills a lot of the fuel and I don't usually have enough to get back.

I like it and it looks legit to me, doesn't appear to abuse clipping at all.

I'd agree +/-10 m/s vertical speed for screen shots is reasonable. I was saying 5 m/s before but that can be a real pain in the tookus sometimes.

There hasn't been a specific rule set forth that I'm aware of that says for how long you have to maintain stated record speed, the closest thing mentioned was that it has to be shown to be in equilibrium with altitude and won't decay over time. However, it is implied that the "time" variable in this context is of course limited by fuel on board at the least. I know I could go a bit faster in my Sojourn for short sprints during which I could take a screen shot at a slightly lower altitude for better thrust and thus airspeed, but won't do it simply because of the notion that I would be accumulating heat at an unsustainable rate, and that would mostly violate my own personal standard.

Regarding "time", again in the context of this "equilibrium" that's been stated as required, it is a variable that hasn't been defined. It could be anything from as short as one screen shot to as long as a matter of seconds or minutes documented via two or three screen shots. Perhaps this could be yet another difference to implement as a difference between open class and ironman, since Slashy did say ironman was supposed to be more strict.

Edited May 6, 2015 by MunGazer