North Pole Land Speed Challenge

[Guest doughbred]

Yay! It\'s finally hear!

OK so the very few of you will remember I started a discussion on doing a Land speed challenge. Well, we never came to a final. But, I have a solution; simplifying it, though it will still be hard. FIRST, you will build any type of vehicle you want. On the rear there has to be a rocket that has to take you to the north pole. You will then land the vehicle and drive it as fast as you can. Then you will leave the vehicle in the north pole for the kerbals to die. Impractical? YES, it is a challenge to land a rocket powered car on the north pole, from orbit. We have also never came up with a practical solution in any discussion, thus leading to a possible storm of kerbal body parts. BUT should anyone manage to even land and successfully land and drive there vehicle on the north, you must post your top speed, or the fastest you have gotten prior to any failure. Prior to landing on the north pole, you should consider testing the vehicle that will be on the ground on the runway first. For anyone else who does not want to go to the north pole, there will be another cup for going off the runway, and on the flat grass.

Do I sound impractical and stupid? YES!

Rules:

-This is not a race

-There are no regulations- RCS propelled however is even allowed, but is a specialty.

-Please post all your sources of propulsion (rocket model, number of rockets, fuel tanks)

-You may post multiple attempts

Cups

-North Pole

-KSC Runway

-KSC flat grassland (expected to be the post popular)

-RCS propelled, north pole

-RCS propelled, KSC flat grassland

note: to get of the runway, build a vehicle shaped like a ramp.

[Ted]

It seems incredibly laborious to get there etc, just for the purpose of what could turn out to be a very short race.

Furthermore, there are too many independent variables to make it an easily repeatable challenge (it would take too long to make amendments to the ship and then repeat the challenge).

Maybe if you made it a bit simpler people would be interested?

For example, if you found a piece of flat land closer to the KSC, you could do the challenge there?

Hope I helped

[Guest doughbred]

It seems incredibly laborious to get there etc, just for the purpose of what could turn out to be a very short race.

Furthermore, there are too many independent variables to make it an easily repeatable challenge (it would take too long to make amendments to the ship and then repeat the challenge).

Maybe if you made it a bit simpler people would be interested?

For example, if you found a piece of flat land closer to the KSC, you could do the challenge there?

Hope I helped

Yeah, I think this will turn into a shorter race.

[Foamy]

It seems incredibly laborious to get there etc, just for the purpose of what could turn out to be a very short race.

Furthermore, there are too many independent variables to make it an easily repeatable challenge (it would take too long to make amendments to the ship and then repeat the challenge).

Maybe if you made it a bit simpler people would be interested?

For example, if you found a piece of flat land closer to the KSC, you could do the challenge there?

Hope I helped

You can already test your design on the runway or near the KSC; it\'s only for the final run it has to be on a perfectly flat surface.

[Ted]

You can already test your design on the runway or near the KSC; it\'s only for the final run it has to be on a perfectly flat surface.

True, I might give this a go then, as a \'proof of concept\' that the challenge is doable.

Update: I modified the Aerospike engine to be much more fuel efficient, got to the North Pole, my vertical speed was far too high and I made quite the splat. :-[ Will try again soon.

[Foamy]

I had quite a bit of fun playing around on the runway the other week but since then built a new pc which is still waiting for a GPU. If it weren\'t for that I\'d have attempted a north pole run by now.

[Excalibur]

If I may, here\'s my entry from a previous challenge...

---

Excalibur Exoatmospheric Proudly Presents:

EE Hyper Streak Unlimited Land Speed Record Car

---

We\'ve seen quite a few attempts at attaining the highest speed possible whilst in contact with the ground. We\'ve yet to see any evidence of any machine achieving over 500m/s (feel free to write to us if you know otherwise).

As a result Excalibur Exoatmospheric have developed the Hyper Streak. Not the most balanced Kerbal vehicle as it\'s primary propulsion system consists three RD-170 rocket engines fueled by C7\'s lightest one metre fuel tanks (750x0.9). However apart from this oversight not a single .cfg edit can be found, and all other aspects of the vehicle are balanced.

We also switched the Ground Interfacing Tackle (or G.I.T.) from Tosh\'s standard cart to Tiberion\'s landing gear parts due to stability issues. Good brakes too.

Due to this modification we soon realised that the vehicle could not handle anything but the smoothest bumps without launching itself skyward. This led us to seek a perfectly flat environment and we found that in the polar regions...

This led us to develop the Hyper Streak\'s pièce de résistance... the abilty to launch as a suborbital rocket, fly to landing as an aircraft before pursing the land speed record as a \'car.\' Due to around 2 hours of intensive testing the vehicle is very stable in all modes of flight... just be sure to make your landings with lots of turbine power, you may land nose-first at high velocity otherwise!

On the pad..

Separating second stage liquid boosters...

Gliding in before powered landing at the Southern ice cap...

Successful polar landing...

Conversion to LSR vehicle...

Ready to rock and roll...

Hard acceleration to top speed...

Final velocity before engine cut-off...

Jeb accidentally locked out the controls during testing of a new water speed record prototype based on the Hyper Streak. This resulted in the untrained occupants being launched straight up under full thrust. The following image was taken of the errant craft just after MECO...

Don\'t think we\'ll be seeing those poor saps again any time soon...

As I said this isn\'t necessarily a balanced vehicle, hence the \'unlimited land speed\' category.

Further development pending to break the 500m/s barrier. If anyone has beaten this figure without .cfg edits or ridiculous mods and have the pictures to prove it - please let us know!

Stay tuned.

[Excalibur]

The above post was made with 0.14 so I thought I\'d make a similar design in 0.15.2 to look for any significant changes. Here\'s the result of the first test run.

http://youtu.be/PW01fXTbiGw

Using reasonably balanced mods and a bit of care, I think well over 500m/s should be achievable.

[Guest doughbred]

The above post was made with 0.14 so I thought I\'d make a similar design in 0.15.2 to look for any significant changes. Here\'s the result of the first test run.

http://youtu.be/PW01fXTbiGw

Using reasonably balanced mods and a bit of care, I think well over 500m/s should be achievable.

Well then, first submission ...

[Excalibur]

Shame you don\'t count the first post as my submission, but as it\'s old I\'ll let you off.

I have to point out though that the second run did reach 462m/s before falling over (look carefully in the HD video) and would probably be better to class it as KSC grasslands.

Otherwise I look forward to seeing more attempts from other people!