Fighter Jet Speed Test

[TheEpicSquared]

I'm definitely going to try to beat @swjr-swis when I get home. I have some ideas cooking in my mind...  

[DarkOwl57]

5 hours ago, swjr-swis said:

Well, to be fair: 2km/s is really just under orbital speeds, he's not asking that much .

I had already done an attempt with an earlier, less stripped variant (the b2; the entry I submitted above is the b3). The oxidizer tanks were still full and the RAPIERS were left to switch when out of air, and it dipped into space for a spell, but remained just short of going fully orbital. Then I noticed in the thread that you specifically asked for airbreathing only... so the space parts were further stripped and RAPIERs forced to stay in airbreathing mode, and the b3 was born.

To be clear, the pictures here are not submitted as an entry, it needed the RAPIERs to switch after all; just to show that higher scoring entries are definitely still possible (notice the 61.7G), so get cracking:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

Lol.

Me as a kerbal: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-

Gene: What's happening?

Me: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

*5 years later*

Me: HHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

[TheEpicSquared]

Well, I've finished my entry, but Imgur is giving me a hard time so I'll have to embed all the pictures here instead of linking to an album unfortunately. I'll do it later today or tomorrow, as I need to get some homework done now.

[DarkOwl57]

19 minutes ago, TheEpicSquared said:

Well, I've finished my entry, but Imgur is giving me a hard time so I'll have to embed all the pictures here instead of linking to an album unfortunately. I'll do it later today or tomorrow, as I need to get some homework done now.

Okay. You can have two entries, but only 2 per category MAXIMUM. If you do 3, then the jet with the lowest score will be taken off.

You can do more than 1 in another category. (i.e. (Insert name) Has an entry in Single Engine, Single Engine Cheats, and Double engine, and they have 2 entries in each.)

Edited September 26, 2016 by DarkOwl57

[TheEpicSquared]

3 minutes ago, DarkOwl57 said:

Okay. You can have two entries, but only 2 per category MAXIMUM. If you do 3, then the jet with the lowest score will be taken off.

You can do more than 1 in another category. (i.e. (Insert name) Has an entry in Single Engine, Single Engine Cheats, and Double engine, and they have 2 entries in each.)

Ok, so I can keep improving my craft, but the lowest point crafts will be removed, leaving the 2 highest points? I see. That's a good rule - I think you should add that to the OP.  

[DarkOwl57]

2 minutes ago, TheEpicSquared said:

Ok, so I can keep improving my craft, but the lowest point crafts will be removed, leaving the 2 highest points? I see. That's a good rule - I think you should add that to the OP.  

Yeah, I did that to make sure that no one can like just dominate the world.

[DarkOwl57]

21 hours ago, max_creative said:

Too bad no mk2... At least I'm good at making things go really fast and overheat and explode and cause Kessler syndrome in the atmosphere. That actually happened. I am never going to attempt to do a midair docking at supersonic speeds...

AHAHAHAHA HOW DID I NOT REALIZE WHO YOU ARE?!?!?!? I am a HUGE fan. Love your stuff.

#RaiseDresAwareness

Aight, so quick report. I added an honorable mentions tab for ALL categories. Also, I added some rules that were discussed. Now, after that little housekeeping job, I need to get the new design I'm testing into production.

Edited September 26, 2016 by DarkOwl57

[swjr-swis]

Ok, time to add an entry to the single-engine board.

• Name: SpeedFighter6 (still horrible with names)
• Top speed: 1519.3m/s  (1519.3 points)
• Highest G-force endured: 99.4G  (99.4 points)
• Parts: 51  (no points deducted for staying under the limit)
• Cheats used: none  (5 points)
• Total score: 1618.7 points.

Link to album: http://imgur.com/a/ZriO9

Link to craft file: https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/SpeedFighter6

Pics (more in album):

Spoiler

 

[DarkOwl57]

10 hours ago, swjr-swis said:

Ok, time to add an entry to the single-engine board.

• Name: SpeedFighter6 (still horrible with names)
• Top speed: 1519.3m/s  (1519.3 points)
• Highest G-force endured: 99.4G  (99.4 points)
• Parts: 51  (no points deducted for staying under the limit)
• Cheats used: none  (5 points)
• Total score: 1618.7 points.

Link to album: http://imgur.com/a/ZriO9

Link to craft file: https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/SpeedFighter6

Pics (more in album):

  Reveal hidden contents

 

There we go; nice job.

HOW DID YOU GET 99.4 G'S??? Did you blow up the entire world?

[TheEpicSquared]

The engineers at Squared Aerospace re-designed the FastyMcGoFast and turned it into the FastyMcGoFast Mk2.

The most notable changes are the tail fins, the wings, and, most importantly, the cockpit - changed from a Mk1 cockpit to a Mk1 Command Pod with a nosecone.

Link to Imgur album: http://imgur.com/gallery/6hliD

Parts: 27 

Scoring:

1,525 (for top speed) + 22.2 (for max G-force endured) + 5 (for no cheats) =

1,552.2 points (I think )

 

[DarkOwl57]

7 minutes ago, TheEpicSquared said:

The engineers at Squared Aerospace re-designed the FastyMcGoFast and turned it into the FastyMcGoFast Mk2.

The most notable changes are the tail fins, the wings, and, most importantly, the cockpit - changed from a Mk1 cockpit to a Mk1 Command Pod with a nosecone.

Link to Imgur album: http://imgur.com/gallery/6hliD

Parts: 27 

Scoring:

1,525 (for top speed) + 22.2 (for max G-force endured) + 5 (for no cheats) =

1,552.2 points (I think )

 

Posted on the leaderboard. And great job!

[swjr-swis]

5 hours ago, DarkOwl57 said:

HOW DID YOU GET 99.4 G'S??? Did you blow up the entire world?

TL;DR: make your plane over-controlled, and yank back on the stick at exactly the right combination of speed and altitude.

 

You need to tune your control surfaces way stronger than would be preferable or comfortable for regular flight. You want to try to slam your plane to present the bottom of its main wings into the airflow as quickly as possible, making it into one giant deployed airbrake. So try give them high authority and a large arm relative to the CoM so you get lots of torque.

Normally that's a very very bad idea as a) you would black out and it would possibly kill you, b) it tends to result in spontaneous craft disassembly (which would probably kill you), and c) aircraft maintenance crew will hate your guts even if your plane survives (and they may plot to kill you). But in KSP and with a little help from 1.2.0 autostruts, we can disregard these things.

My process, with a RAPIER craft (other jets have different optimal altitudes):

• Get up to 20km, and speed up to Mach 3+ first. Don't waste too much time optimizing your top speed, just up to whenever you stop accelerating.
• Then start diving at a 45 degree pitch-down while keeping as much speed possible (follow prograde, or at least stay close to it)
• You start picking up a bit more speed as you dive, but at one point you'll notice the lower thicker atmosphere starts slowing you down again. Keep going, this is not your layer yet.
• At around 8km, pull up hard, as if going into a loop; keep holding until the G meter drops. You will have lost some speed, but the thicker air makes up for it by allowing you to make a tighter turn.
• The optimum altitude varies depending on the craft, and sometimes around 5-6km results in more Gs while others between 8-10km. So try several times at different altitudes, it can vary 20-30 Gs easily.

You want to still be flying as fast as possible when you initiate the turn, obviously, but since it's the control surface effectivity that will most directly affect how much Gs you're gonna pull (how quickly can you present your plane's belly into the airflow), the air density where you turn is almost as important, maybe more. So you need to find the optimum balance of air thin enough that it doesn't slow you down too much due to drag, but still thick enough to let your control surfaces slam your plane around.

Happy G hunting, and pack a probe core for when your kerbal blacks out.

[DarkOwl57]

2 hours ago, swjr-swis said:

TL;DR: make your plane over-controlled, and yank back on the stick at exactly the right combination of speed and altitude.

 

You need to tune your control surfaces way stronger than would be preferable or comfortable for regular flight. You want to try to slam your plane to present the bottom of its main wings into the airflow as quickly as possible, making it into one giant deployed airbrake. So try give them high authority and a large arm relative to the CoM so you get lots of torque.

Normally that's a very very bad idea as a) you would black out and it would possibly kill you, b) it tends to result in spontaneous craft disassembly (which would probably kill you), and c) aircraft maintenance crew will hate your guts even if your plane survives (and they may plot to kill you). But in KSP and with a little help from 1.2.0 autostruts, we can disregard these things.

My process, with a RAPIER craft (other jets have different optimal altitudes):

• Get up to 20km, and speed up to Mach 3+ first. Don't waste too much time optimizing your top speed, just up to whenever you stop accelerating.
• Then start diving at a 45 degree pitch-down while keeping as much speed possible (follow prograde, or at least stay close to it)
• You start picking up a bit more speed as you dive, but at one point you'll notice the lower thicker atmosphere starts slowing you down again. Keep going, this is not your layer yet.
• At around 8km, pull up hard, as if going into a loop; keep holding until the G meter drops. You will have lost some speed, but the thicker air makes up for it by allowing you to make a tighter turn.
• The optimum altitude varies depending on the craft, and sometimes around 5-6km results in more Gs while others between 8-10km. So try several times at different altitudes, it can vary 20-30 Gs easily.

You want to still be flying as fast as possible when you initiate the turn, obviously, but since it's the control surface effectivity that will most directly affect how much Gs you're gonna pull (how quickly can you present your plane's belly into the airflow), the air density where you turn is almost as important, maybe more. So you need to find the optimum balance of air thin enough that it doesn't slow you down too much due to drag, but still thick enough to let your control surfaces slam your plane around.

Happy G hunting, and pack a probe core for when your kerbal blacks out.

But How did you do that with no cheats? The lack of Unbreakable Joints would just shred it to pieces. I think.....

2 hours ago, swjr-swis said:

and c) aircraft maintenance crew will hate your guts even if your plane survives (and they may plot to kill you). But in KSP and with a little help from 1.2.0 autostruts, we can disregard these things.

hahahahaha

[swjr-swis]

26 minutes ago, DarkOwl57 said:

But How did you do that with no cheats? The lack of Unbreakable Joints would just shred it to pieces. I think.....

I'm doing this in the 1.2.0 pre-release, default settings. I am using autostruts, I did say that, but those are tweakables on the parts, not cheats.

I recorded a short video of a 102G turn, if you want to see, but you can also download the craft and try; that's why I make the craft file available, allows people to verify the results.

 

If you prefer to consider autostruts a cheat in the context of this challenge, mention it in the rules, and feel free to move my entries to the cheats leaderboard. I have no problem with that.

[tjsnh]

The SpeedSingle. Small, light, fast.
Easily sustains 1300m/s (Mach 3.75) , can be pushed a little farther but it explodes from heat if you go much past 1350.
No cheats of any kind, fully stock. 6.3T , 17 parts.
Strict interpretation of "Mk1 Parts Only" with the learjet cockpit and no advanced wing parts. This is a nerfed version, I re-arranged the control surfaces to deliberately cut maneuverability at high speeds, as the original had a tendency to instantly explode if you threw it into a 10g turn at 1200m/s .....

Craft

I made a version of this, the SpeedDouble, with two engines but it overheats and explodes about 15 seconds after taking off the runway.

Suggestion for the challenge - mandate use of the regular turbojet engine, as it would prevent "manned missile" designs like this one (or at least make it harder).

=================================

For fun - in KSP 0.9 before atmospheric heat caused rapid unplanned disassembly, this simple design was able to break Mach 6 on pure air breathing power due to an oddity in the way KSP calculated frontal drag off of the forward-most part (an antenna in this case)

https://kerbalx.com/tjsnh/Speedpipe

Edited September 28, 2016 by tjsnh

[DarkOwl57]

12 hours ago, swjr-swis said:

I'm doing this in the 1.2.0 pre-release, default settings. I am using autostruts, I did say that, but those are tweakables on the parts, not cheats.

I recorded a short video of a 102G turn, if you want to see, but you can also download the craft and try; that's why I make the craft file available, allows people to verify the results.

 

If you prefer to consider autostruts a cheat in the context of this challenge, mention it in the rules, and feel free to move my entries to the cheats leaderboard. I have no problem with that.

I don't really know what auto struts does... so it's good I guess.

[swjr-swis]

2 hours ago, tjsnh said:

The SpeedSingle. Small, light, fast.

Another entrant! Now things get interesting.

 

1 hour ago, tjsnh said:

Strict interpretation of "Mk1 Parts Only" with the learjet cockpit and no advanced wing parts.

But if it uses the Whiplash engine from the Supersonic tech (containing Mk2 parts), is it truly strict? Surely we'd need to restrict ourselves to Juno and Wheasly only...

 

39 minutes ago, tjsnh said:

Suggestion for the challenge - mandate use of the regular turbojet engine, as it would prevent "manned missile" designs like this one (or at least make it harder).

Any of the jets can be made into a manned missile, limiting the selection would not stop that. In fact, the Whiplash (the regular turbojet you suggest) became the 'rocket' engine of choice for a lightest craft to orbit challenge not too long ago.

[DarkOwl57]

2 hours ago, tjsnh said:

The SpeedSingle. Small, light, fast.
Easily sustains 1300m/s (Mach 3.75) , can be pushed a little farther but it explodes from heat if you go much past 1350.
No cheats of any kind, fully stock. 6.3T , 17 parts.
Strict interpretation of "Mk1 Parts Only" with the learjet cockpit and no advanced wing parts. This is a nerfed version, I re-arranged the control surfaces to deliberately cut maneuverability at high speeds, as the original had a tendency to instantly explode if you threw it into a 10g turn at 1200m/s .....

Craft

I made a version of this, the SpeedDouble, with two engines but it overheats and explodes about 15 seconds after taking off the runway.

Suggestion for the challenge - mandate use of the regular turbojet engine, as it would prevent "manned missile" designs like this one (or at least make it harder).

=================================

For fun - in KSP 0.9 before atmospheric heat caused rapid unplanned disassembly, this simple design was able to break Mach 6 on pure air breathing power due to an oddity in the way KSP calculated frontal drag off of the forward-most part (an antenna in this case)

https://kerbalx.com/tjsnh/Speedpipe

Ok, so what's the maximum G's you were able to get?

[DarkOwl57]

I can't put you on the leaderboard until I get a total score from you.

 

Process:

1. You put up the "Total score" info, which includes speed, maneuverability, part count, etc. (See @TheEpicSquareds entries for kind of a scoring base.) (Thanks dude)

2. I review the craft, and check the rules to see if you got the scoring right

3. I put it on the leaderboard. (If it is in the top 5 of course.)

Edited September 28, 2016 by DarkOwl57

[DarkOwl57]

6 hours ago, tjsnh said:

I made a version of this, the SpeedDouble, with two engines but it overheats and explodes about 15 seconds after taking off the runway.

You could put that into the cheats column.

[tjsnh]

4 hours ago, DarkOwl57 said:

Ok, so what's the maximum G's you were able to get?

At-speed, or does g-load at low-speed count?

[DarkOwl57]

4 minutes ago, tjsnh said:

At-speed, or does g-load at low-speed count?

Maximum G count. (As recorded by the mission log (f3))

[tjsnh]

After a little flight testing to push performance to the absolute limit, updated scoring for SpeedSingle :
Top speed without exploding 1452m/s
10.5G load (I'll call it 10g)
17 Parts
No cheats.
1462 Points.
(Unscored, but got pretty high in a max-power 45degree climb after going ballistic from running out of air)

Edited September 28, 2016 by tjsnh

[DarkOwl57]

1 hour ago, tjsnh said:

After a little flight testing to push performance to the absolute limit, updated scoring for SpeedSingle :
Top speed without exploding 1452m/s
10.5G load (I'll call it 10g)
17 Parts
No cheats.
1462 Points.
(Unscored, but got pretty high in a max-power 45degree climb after going ballistic from running out of air)

Nice Job. P2 on the leaderboard.

[red dragon areospace]

Here is my (somewhat late) entry, the Phoenix 3. (1 and 2 had... issues.)

Top speed is 1956 m/s

Top G load was 21

9 parts

Cheats (infinite fuel and ignore max temp)

1977 points

I don't know if this matters but only the cockpit survived the water landing