The Rocket Javelin Challenge!

[chickenplucker]

This thread is amazing. The refinement/evolution.... this is just very entertaining to watch

Edited August 25, 2012 by chickenplucker

[ggPeti]

I blew up a launch but a single advanced canard got shot out to outerspace, now it seems to be bouncing on atmosphere forever. What is the circumference of Kerbin along a straight line?

[ggPeti]

Never mind, it landed. Got 6.3 million meters, which is mindblowing. Should I upload pictures, or does such a lucky flight not count?

[NetBlitzer]

Wow, I had to b away from my computer all of yesterday, and now I get back to this? This... Madness?!

Treb, I love your thinking, but in truth, relying on a glitch just doesn't seem like the right thing to do. If I may, I believe that your glider must keep the booster and not use only control surfaces, or a majority of control surfaces. To keep it fair. I mean, my design was ridiculous and it only dropped 1 meter every 2 or 3 seconds, but that was using no control surfaces, AKA a perfectly fair glider. These... things... just seem out of hand.

[Trebuchet-Launch]

Put enough wings in the right places and you can do it w/o canards, too. I did it last night with the delta wings (still attached to the SRB).

EDIT: The interesting thing about using just wings is that you can do this with gliding (I made one that did endless barrel rolls around 2000m or so) but the traditional "turbine" doesn't seem to work on the launch pad. The glitch is more complicated than I thought. I originally thought it came from SAS/control surface interplay.

Edited August 25, 2012 by Trebuchet-Launch

[EndlessWaves]

EndlessWaves's rocket has an amazing lift/drag ratio, but my "Angel" superglider shames it. It has a vertical component of approximately .03 m/s, meaning it takes somewhat more than 30s of gliding to lose a single meter of height.

Was it a case of more precise centre of lift to centre of gravity matching or was the ratio of the two opposing wing tilts more important?

[Trebuchet-Launch]

The latter. I put a few winged decouplers into the dirt before trying a fair amount of dihedral. Despite people bringing up the infinite glide glitch, adding a bunch of canards won't miraculously create an infinite glider; I had one with more than two that would reliably angle down and dive into the ground like a bunker buster.

[kodemunkey]

So how do you get the camera to follow the javelin?

[EndlessWaves]

So how do you get the camera to follow the javelin?

Hit the ] key

[Core21]

here is my entry

on the runway:

http://imgur.com/h2kGR

endscreen:

http://imgur.com/A8vgU

[kodemunkey]

Hit the ] key

Thanks, though there's a lot of debris around my airfield at the moment.

[kodemunkey]

Also, how do i angle my launcher to launch my rocket?

[Giggleplex777]

Also, how do i angle my launcher to launch my rocket?

Hold shift and which ever way you want to angle it (q,w,e,a,s,d)

[kodemunkey]

Thanks, that helps a great deal.

[pebble_garden]

Not to resurrect a zombie thread, but I did manage to beat my old rocket javelin record and reach a 202.8 km ground distance.

Here's my video record: Recon Drone

[sal_vager]

14 days does not a zombie thread make, and anyway you added content to the thread with your video, rather than a simple "wow cool challenge!" people normally post.

Congrats by the way

[vexx32]

D: so far!

Best I've gotten is around 50km :/

[cardgame]

I think my best was ~40km and then I got distracted building magic turbines.

[Jason Patterson]

It's nowhere near the lead, but here is my entry for the spaceplane challenge.

My farthest launch so far has been to the east, a distance of 86942m.

[pebble_garden]

The Crab. I love it. Aptly named too!

[Jason Patterson]

Like an idiot, I forgot to save a copy of The Crab, and then I tinkered with it and destroyed it. Haven't been able to reproduce the thing yet. I did try paring it down substantially to drop mass, and I wound up with something similar to your ship, pebble_garden, though without the winglet and with a slightly different layout. I can get 160-something km with it but it is basically a ballistic trajectory, there's no glide at the end. It stinks, because the glider aspect of it works quite well, but I have yet to get it to reenter the atmosphere in any way other than wild tumbling. If I add a tailfin, it stays upright, but that just seemed to be too much of a copy.

[Clouds]

I just wanted to offer a way to decouple an SRB with no decoupler left attached: mount it directly on some other part (eg. a structural fuselage) and use jet engine exhaust to destroy that part (immediately after igniting the SRB).

Did you know that a burning SRB with literally nothing attached will overheat and explode?