Strategic Bomber Procurement (Reboot!)

[Kernel Kraken]

16 minutes ago, Joseph Kerman said:

Not a strategic bomber, but should do.

 

I like the twin booms! I was thinking about making my next SSTO like that.

[Laie]

@qzgyI almost missed your monster bomber. It's wild!

@Joseph Kerman: purty!

@panzerknoef @Kernel Kraken so,this is my last word on the matter: 10 Minutes.

The fastest landing that actually happened on the runway was 10:02; getting it down to 10min required more saveloading than I'd like to admit.

For anyone who wants to beat this: don't only consider top speed but acceleration; getting to 1500m/s quickly will work better than reaching 1700m/s after a long while. As a corollary, you shouldn't shed much airspeed during the attack run. This one accelerates well and does a tight turn, but watching 10-15 seconds tick away between touchdown and finally slithering to a halt was outright cruel. If I ever try this again, I'll bring braking parachutes.

Praised be @Boris-Barboris for his assistant, this would never have happened without -- even so, aiming for the runway at mach3+ with WASD controls was hard enough.

[Kernel Kraken]

Just now, Laie said:

@qzgyI almost missed your monster bomber. It's wild!

@Joseph Kerman: purty!

@panzerknoef @Kernel Kraken so,this is my last word on the matter: 10 Minutes.

The fastest landing that actually happened on the runway was 10:02; getting it down to 10min required more saveloading than I'd like to admit.

For anyone who wants to beat this: don't only consider top speed but acceleration; getting to 1500m/s quickly will work better than reaching 1700m/s after a long while. As a corollary, you shouldn't shed much airspeed during the attack run. This one accelerates well and does a tight turn, but watching 10-15 seconds tick away between touchdown and finally slithering to a halt was outright cruel. If I ever try this again, I'll bring braking parachutes.

Praised be @Boris-Barboris for his assistant, this would never have happened without -- even so, aiming for the runway at mach3+ with WASD controls was hard enough.

Holy crap fine. I can't make fast things anyways, so it's doubly as impressive!

[Laie]

1 hour ago, Kernel Kraken said:

Holy crap fine. I can't make fast things anyways, so it's doubly as impressive!

Fast isn't hard: lots of engine for little mass, streamlined, that kind of thing. Leaving a few bombs at home and carrying only the basic six would certainly help (I still bring 18). Paging @AeroGav who will probably first chime me for putting a cockpit up front. For purposes of the speedrun it's not *that* bad, as you can barely get up to speed before you have to slow down again. But it prevents this plane from scoring for circumnavigation in high-altitude hypersonic flight.

Under the new rules that's 220points for payload, 120 for airspeed, -25 for maintenance, 190 points on various bonuses (including the F and doing my own maths), makes 505 points.

Though I'm not sure what to make of "gotta go fast" -- I'm already determining airspeed at 3km, just below will be virtually the same for 20x the points? I've let that be for now. Or is standard airspeed to be measured at best altitude? In that case that'd be another 50 pts.

Also, what's payload? Do I have to disentangle the bombs from the decouplers or do we simply consider mass shed? I've only counted the naked bombs for now.

[Kernel Kraken]

19 minutes ago, Laie said:

Fast isn't hard: lots of engine for little mass, streamlined, that kind of thing. Leaving a few bombs at home and carrying only the basic six would certainly help (I still bring 18). Paging @AeroGav who will probably first chime me for putting a cockpit up front. For purposes of the speedrun it's not *that* bad, as you can barely get up to speed before you have to slow down again. But it prevents this plane from scoring for circumnavigation in high-altitude hypersonic flight.

Under the new rules that's 220points for payload, 120 for airspeed, -25 for maintenance, 190 points on various bonuses (including the F and doing my own maths), makes 505 points.

Though I'm not sure what to make of "gotta go fast" -- I'm already determining airspeed at 3km, just below will be virtually the same for 20x the points? I've let that be for now. Or is standard airspeed to be measured at best altitude? In that case that'd be another 50 pts.

Also, what's payload? Do I have to disentangle the bombs from the decouplers or do we simply consider mass shed? I've only counted the naked bombs for now.

How much the bombs weigh times how many bombs=mass of the payload. For each ton, you get 14 points. If its not whole, you can round it or keep the decimal. I couldn't find the origional speed challenge so I made a new one, I'll get rid of the old one.

Edited October 24, 2018 by Kernel Kraken

[panzerknoef]

2 hours ago, Laie said:

@qzgyI almost missed your monster bomber. It's wild!

@Joseph Kerman: purty!

@panzerknoef @Kernel Kraken so,this is my last word on the matter: 10 Minutes.

The fastest landing that actually happened on the runway was 10:02; getting it down to 10min required more saveloading than I'd like to admit.

For anyone who wants to beat this: don't only consider top speed but acceleration; getting to 1500m/s quickly will work better than reaching 1700m/s after a long while. As a corollary, you shouldn't shed much airspeed during the attack run. This one accelerates well and does a tight turn, but watching 10-15 seconds tick away between touchdown and finally slithering to a halt was outright cruel. If I ever try this again, I'll bring braking parachutes.

Praised be @Boris-Barboris for his assistant, this would never have happened without -- even so, aiming for the runway at mach3+ with WASD controls was hard enough.

I've got a craft which can get up to 1700 in no time and reaches mach 1 even before the end of the runway... But it just exploded before it goes anywhere far enough or high enough. I don't think I can beat your record, congrats!! 

[sturmhauke]

26 minutes ago, panzerknoef said:

I've got a craft which can get up to 1700 in no time and reaches mach 1 even before the end of the runway... But it just exploded before it goes anywhere far enough or high enough. I don't think I can beat your record, congrats!! 

LOL, yeah going hypersonic at sea level is inherently dangerous.

[Kernel Kraken]

3 minutes ago, sturmhauke said:

LOL, yeah going hypersonic at sea level is inherently dangerous.

Forget at sea level, hypersonic speeds without melting anywhere is hard.

[Kebab Kerman]

14 hours ago, Kernel Kraken said:

Forget at sea level, hypersonic speeds without melting anywhere is hard.

Hypersonic, but underwater.

 

If anybody manages to do that, they are conspiring with the Kraken. Not that that's a bad thing, of course...

[Confused Scientist]

Also keep in mind that the speed of sound in water is 1498 m/s. So, if your airplane catches fire, at least if you slow down the water will cool you off.

[Kebab Kerman]

47 minutes ago, Confused Scientist said:

Also keep in mind that the speed of sound in water is 1498 m/s. So, if your airplane catches fire, at least if you slow down the water will cool you off.

Well, there's one thing that will go well for ya!

[Joseph Kerman]

On 10/24/2018 at 10:40 PM, Kernel Kraken said:

I like the twin booms! I was thinking about making my next SSTO like that.

Yeah.

It's also VTOL...

[Kernel Kraken]

On 10/25/2018 at 10:27 PM, Joseph Kerman said:

Yeah.

It's also VTOL...

I believe that's ~+20 points if you decide to enter it, too. 

[Laie]

Trying something different for a change... I can load it up with a 100t bunker-buster and it works as one would expect from the looks. I can stick in 360 bombs and still -barely- take off and make it to the target area, struggling on afterburners all the way. However, once there I can't for the life of me fire 40+ decouplers at a time without shattering the wings. And dropping them piecemeal just looks sad.

[sturmhauke]

44 minutes ago, Laie said:

However, once there I can't for the life of me fire 40+ decouplers at a time without shattering the wings. And dropping them piecemeal just looks sad.

I'd suggest turning the decoupling force to 0. That way they don't explode, they just let go and gravity does the rest. And I don't think there's anything wrong with dropping them sequentially either.

[sturmhauke]

I was away doing other nonsense very serious kerbal missions, but now I'm back to this. I loaded my "Kerploder" bomber from earlier in the thread full of bombs and tried to fly it over the ocean, but it's not really up to the task. The Goliath engines overheat after a while, meaning I have to throttle down. Plus they don't go much past Mach 1 or 3 km altitude anyway, so the trip takes forever. Between that and the inherently limited cargo space, I'm looking at a total redesign.

[Laie]

22 hours ago, sturmhauke said:

I'd suggest turning the decoupling force to 0. That way they don't explode, they just let go and gravity does the rest.

Zero force doesn't help. Neither does turning off autostruts on the payload (and using real ones instead for even MOAR parts). Unbreakable joints? Not really unbreakable, as I find out. It's most insidious that I can decouple them parked on the runway, or just after takeoff, but not after making a turn and coming back at the VAB.

22 hours ago, sturmhauke said:

And I don't think there's anything wrong with dropping them sequentially either.

Define "sequentially". I can hammer the spacebar only so fast, the game enforces a limit there -- presumably to prevent accidental double-staging. 360 Bombs spread over 10 stages already makes for quite a long trail on the ground.

[sturmhauke]

Hmm. Yeah I dunno then. Maybe the physics engine doesn't know how to properly calculate the sudden drop in weight spread across so many parts. I might experiment with a rolling bomb rack and see if that works, or just explodes on takeoff.

[Laie]

Well, "rigid attachment" on the wings is what makes it immediately catastrophic. Apparently the game reconsiders all joints when staging, and with rigid attachment the wings come apart at the second or third iteration. Without, they become misaligned but stay together -- doesn't really help, with wing pieces angled any old how the vessel just becomes uncontrollable.

Edit: KJR to the rescue...

I don't know what or how or why... KJR stalls the game for 10+ seconds every time I stage a set of bombs, but it keeps the plane together. That won't make good videos, but may yield a screenshot of a nice bomb carpet pattern. BTW, this is dropping them as quickly as I can.

Edited October 31, 2018 by Laie

[sturmhauke]

How are you attaching your wings? Is there:

• a single wing root that the other pieces are attached to?
• multiple rows of wing pieces that are attached to the fuselage but not each other?
• something else?

One thing I've done a few times is to build a web of hard struts and pylons to hold pieces together. It's ugly and potentially uses a lot of parts, but it works fairly well.

This isn't a bomber, but a crazy contraption to get a full orange tank to orbit using only a single Twin Boar engine. I used the hard struts and 4 pairs of orange drop tanks to build a spaceplane for the task. Before I added the struts, the wings got too deformed like you were saying. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/JVWF5

Spoiler

 

[Laie]

7 minutes ago, sturmhauke said:

• a single wing root that the other pieces are attached to?
• multiple rows of wing pieces that are attached to the fuselage but not each other?

Both, for reasons you probably understand quite well. It's supposed to be a supersonic plane, strutting it up like the Wright flyer is totally out of the question. I'll take note of the technique, though, there might be situations where I'm less averse to doing it.

For the record, my plane works well as long as you have a reasonably small number of large bombs: no sign of trouble at all. That only started when I went over the top with part count.

 

[sturmhauke]

45 minutes ago, Laie said:

It's supposed to be a supersonic plane, strutting it up like the Wright flyer is totally out of the question.

Can I interest you in the Gospel of Moar Boosters?

[sturmhauke]

9 hours ago, Laie said:

Edit: KJR to the rescue...

I don't know what or how or why... KJR stalls the game for 10+ seconds every time I stage a set of bombs, but it keeps the plane together. That won't make good videos, but may yield a screenshot of a nice bomb carpet pattern. BTW, this is dropping them as quickly as I can.

I've been using Lightworks for video editing. You can do stuff like speed up specific sections or remove frames, for instance. So it might take some work, but you could edit your footage to remove all that stuttering.

[sturmhauke]

I'm working on a modular system where I can hotswap the preloaded bomb bay on the runway, and also refuel the bomber. The technique is similar to one I used on my Jool-5 mission, for the launch vehicle to carry the interplanetary ship to LKO.

Spoiler

 

[Gaarst]

Here is my entry: the B-22 bomber, no proper name yet. (Download link here)

More pics here:

Spoiler

It's a supersonic capable bomber with a loaded ferry range of 2200 km, so probably a combat radius of about 1000 km. Default loadout is 16x 900 kg bombs (full small ore tank + decoupler) for a payload mass of 14.4 t, all internal; it can probably carry more on external hardpoints but I've never tried. It has a crew of two, a takeoff mass of 48.8 t, 102 parts and can cruise at 210 m/s @ 5000 m or Mach 2.05 @ 15000 m, top speed is probably over Mach 2.5 I've never tested it.

Flight instructions: 1 to toggle afterburners, 2 to toggle bay doors, pull up at 75 m/s, try not to crash.

Loosely based on the Tu-22M3 "Backfire" Russian bomber.

 

As for the scoring, here are the objectives it qualifies in:

On 10/16/2018 at 6:29 PM, Kernel Kraken said:

Bonus Objectives

Math Is Not Fun: +100pts for not making me do the math.

More BOOM: +14pts per every ton of payload stored internally, +6pts per ton stored externally.

Swift payback: +2 pts per m/s top speed at an altitude of 3 km (for instance, if aforementioned KB-68 Vanquisher top speed at 3 km is 200 m/s, total points for this: 400 pts). The speed test is to be performed with the full payload and fuel, so perform it as soon after takeoff as possible.

Engine maintenance: -1pts per Juno, -2pts per Wheasley, -3pts per Panther/Goliath, -4pts per Whiplash, -10pts per RAPIER engine. Rockets carry no penalty but, remember, they may not be used for takeoff and certainly are a bad idea.

Part maintenance: -0.02pts per part (bombs included) (calculate at end of construction for simplicity, example bomber has 400 parts which thus equals -8pts).

Airshow maneuverability: +10pts if the Bomber can execute a horizontal turn, with or without payload, with a peak force of 10Gs or more at an altitude between 100-300m.

Gentle giant: +20pts if the Bomber with full payload, at cruising speed and an altitude of 3 km, can maintain a prograde velocity vector within 5° of its level indicator.

You feeling lucky, VAB?/Dynamic Demonstration of Force: +10pts if the Bomber can successfully destroy the VAB, using a part or the entirety of its payload (but not by crashing into it). For this subchallenge only, the bomber may use another loadout than Small Holding Tanks.

Service ceiling: +15pts if the Bomber can sustain level flight at an altitude of 12 km.

Inspired shape: +2pts if the Bomber has a swept wing layout, similar to that of the B-52.

• Math is not Fun: + 100 pts (math is fun)
• More BOOM: + 201.6 pts for 14.4 t of payload stored internally
• Swift payback: + 750 pts for 375 m/s top speed at 3000 m
• Engine maintenance: - 12 pts for 4 Panthers
• Part maintenance: - 2.04 pts for 102 parts
• Airshow manoeuvrability: + 10 pts (it can pull north of 18 gs when empty)
• Gentle giant: + 20 pts
• Feeling lucky, VAB?: + 10 pts
• Service ceiling: + 15 pts
• Inspired shape: + 2 pts ? Not sure about that one, it has swept wings and was inspired by something, but not the B-52

Total: 1092.56 points (1094.56 if inspired counts)

Album with the screenshots as proofs of the objectives: https://imgur.com/a/kZhsK56