One Sepratron - furthest flight

[Ultimate Steve]

This challenge is simple: How far can you fly on one sepratron?

 

 

 

Restrictions:

1. You may not consume or create any xenon, liquid fuel, oxidizer, monopropellant, ore, or ablator while you attempt this challenge.
2. The only source of thrust may be one sepratron. You may adjust the thrust limiter or propellant capacity as much as you like.
3. All decouplers and launch clamps used must be set to zero impulse as to not provide thrust.
4. To compete in the Manned category, you must have a Kerbal onboard. There is an unmanned category as well.
5. Launch clamps may be used, but you may not have the launch clamps drop the vessel from an outrageous height. Try to keep it below 10m, don't abuse this.
6. No Kraken drives of any type allowed, this includes ladder drives, K-drives, and anything else the community has come up with since them.
7. No powered rover wheels, no driving to increase distance.
8. You may not use propellers powered by reaction wheels.
9. In general don't try to exploit anything.
10. Scoring is judged by total distance travelled and ground distance covered (not sure which one is more accurate) in the F3 menu. Beware, quickloading will reset these values, so try and do it all in one run!
11. No using modded parts. Informational (KER, Mechjeb, etc.) and visual (EVE, SVE, PlanetShine, etc.) are allowed.

Leaderboard:

• Manned:
  • @Magzimum - 6.5/6.7km - "SepatrEgg" which used a service bay to minimize drag on the Kerbal.
  • @vyznev - 5.8/6.1km - "Kerbat" which had really cool wings!

 

• Unmanned:
  • @Marschig - 50.8/52.7km - Very streamlined design similar to most of the other submissions.
  • @vyznev - 24.0km/25.0km - Interesting design with a cone at the back to reduce drag. 2 fins.
  • @DoctorDavinci - 9.6/11.2km. Three finned okto plane.
  • @Geonovast - 9.1/9.7km - A really cute lightweight glider centered around an Okto.

 

Enjoy! Have fun!

 

Edited December 29, 2017 by Ultimate Steve

[Geonovast]

 

Eh?

[DoctorDavinci]

 

1 hour ago, Geonovast said:

Eh?

Eh!

 

 

[Geonovast]

How come I got 2km knocked off my score?

[Ultimate Steve]

2 hours ago, Geonovast said:

How come I got 2km knocked off my score?

Ahh, sorry, my mistake. Fixing now! Don't know how I managed to not see that!

 

 

[Ultimate Steve]

2 hours ago, DoctorDavinci said:

Eh!

Eh!

Also I'm 100% sure distances over 20km are possible, I tried just for example but today our internet has been slower than ion engines and I physically cannot upload the pictures to imgur right now.

 

[Geonovast]

2 minutes ago, Ultimate Steve said:

Also I'm 100% sure distances over 20km are possible,

 

I'm sure they are too.  Honestly I just didn't wanna mess with it that much.    I was kinda surprised when I got what I did on my second try.

[vyznev]

Eh. 

Ps. Craft file here.

[vyznev]

So, after doing the unmanned version of the challenge, I decided to try a manned version. And it was awesome!

I hereby present to you the Yves Rossy, a.k.a. The Kerbat:

Disclaimer: Some of the screenshots above are from practice flights, since it turns out it's hard to focus on flying and taking cool screenshots at the same time. 

Full imgur album here. Video below:

Craft file here. I'm not 100% sure that the thrust limiter setting on the sepratron in the craft file matches what I used in the flight shown above, but everything else should be the same.

For those who'd rather not watch the whole video (or browse through the whole album), the final distance for this flight was 6,074 m (total) / 5,775 m (ground distance).

Edited December 26, 2017 by vyznev
replace broken imgur album embedding with a few selected images and a link

[sevenperforce]

5 hours ago, vyznev said:

So, after doing the unmanned version of the challenge, I decided to try a manned version. And it was awesome!

I hereby present to you the Yves Rossy, a.k.a. The Kerbat:

Disclaimer: Some of the screenshots above are from practice flights, since it turns out it's hard to focus on flying and taking cool screenshots at the same time. 

Full imgur album here. Video below:

Craft file here. I'm not 100% sure that the thrust limiter setting on the sepratron in the craft file matches what I used in the flight shown above, but everything else should be the same.

For those who'd rather not watch the whole video (or browse through the whole album), the final distance for this flight was 6,074 m (total) / 5,775 m (ground distance).

Oh my god. That's....cute?

In the most epic way possible.

[vyznev]

6 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

Oh my god. That's....cute?

In the most epic way possible.

I know, right? And it was all because of laziness. 

The first version only had a single pair of basic fins, but it had the glideslope of a brick, so I decided to add more. And since I was too lazy to rebuild the wings from scratch (and not shameless enough to just clip a bunch of fins into each other and call it good enough), I decided to add another pair of fins on the outside of the first pair. And then, since it still didn't have enough lift, I added a second pair of fins to the first pair and got... this. 

[Marschig]

50 780 m.

 

[Whambo]

 

Edited December 27, 2017 by Whambo
original link did not work

[Magzimum]

We're working on it! We're working on it!  Need to get a little further for a soft water landing!!

[vyznev]

2 hours ago, Magzimum said:

We're working on it! We're working on it!  Need to get a little further for a soft water landing!!

I know the feeling!

This is from one of my not-so-successful test runs. Came down way too steeply for this one.

[Magzimum]

I proudly present you all the SepatrEgg. It's a Kerbal in an egg-shaped box, powered by a single Sepatron.

(Details of the flight in the spoiler)
 

Spoiler

First our proud Kerbal, in this case good ol' Jeb, climbs aboard the Egg.

His vision is negligible, and he cannot even close the visor of his helmet because the reaction wheel is in his face. However, no parts were clipped into others in this craft.

Launch is a little violent - but mostly for my pc as you can see in the weird picture. Nothing goes *BOOM* though, so for Kerbal standards this is quite a civilized launch.

Apoapsis is around 522 m altitude. I did not catch that in a screenshot, but it is mentioned in the F3 report at the end.

The max altitude is significantly lower than the Kerbat. However, this Egg glides better. It gains 5-6 m for every 1 m that it loses altitude.

Towards the end of the flight Jeb even managed to get nearly 7:1, as you can see in the KER readout!

 

The Egg only stalls at speeds of below 20 m/s, so nothing breaks on splashdown.

Jeb however seems relieved to be out of the Egg.

Total ground distance covered: 6,526 m.

Great challenge.

[PrimoDev]

@Ultimate Steve

Hello ! I tried to make my "Challenger" the most efficient ! Here's the results : https://imgur.com/a/5zXIf

 

Edit :

Hi again I just decided to give it a last try by changing the wings and I beat my own high score  ! https://imgur.com/a/jSb3e

Edited December 30, 2017 by PrimoDev