Temple Airstrike Challenge

[spacehead3]

@epicman81 turn up the brightness, man! That's a cool drone design though. 

[Hodo]

26 minutes ago, spacehead3 said:

@epicman81 turn up the brightness, man! That's a cool drone design though. 

He is just sending a Kerbal to plant a flag.. its a night time launch.. you know... special forces style and all. 

[KingDominoIII]

Here's the album:

https://imgur.com/a/bL1u5Jt

Direct hit: 100 pts

Collateral damage:  0 pts

Unguided weapons: 0 pts

Attack altitude: 10 pts (10,200m)

Mission time: -38 pts (37:33)

External stores: -5 (1 weapon)

Radar cross section: -8.35 (3.3+5.6+7.8)

Heat signature: -10

Cost savings: 10

Total: 58.65

 

Edited December 11, 2018 by KingDominoIII

[spacehead3]

@KingDominoIII nice! Looks like you forgot the heat signature penalty however? Should be 58.7 pts I think. EDIT: I see why you were confused by the wording of "during the strike", that's my bad. The intention was no afterburners during the entire flight.

Edited December 11, 2018 by spacehead3

[KingDominoIII]

1 hour ago, spacehead3 said:

@KingDominoIII nice! Looks like you forgot the heat signature penalty however? Should be 58.7 pts I think. EDIT: I see why you were confused by the wording of "during the strike", that's my bad. The intention was no afterburners during the entire flight.

Ah, yeah I'll fix it.

[a10t2]

I couldn't help myself and took another run at this, swapping out the Panthers for RAPIERs and eliminating the second missile to cater to the challenge scoring a little better.

https://imgur.com/a/T3LDRio

• +100 Direct Hit
• +23 Attack Altitude
• -21 Mission Time
• -5 External Stores
•  -13.2 Radar Cross Section: (0.5*(3.1+11.2+12.1))
• -10 Heat Signature
• +10 Cost Savings

Total: 83.8 points

Edited December 12, 2018 by a10t2

[spacehead3]

6 hours ago, a10t2 said:

83.8 points

Whoa! 

[a10t2]

8 hours ago, spacehead3 said:

Whoa! 

You could do a little better: one more point for altitude, 1-2 for time, and the five for a cargo bay. But the absolute maximum is probably just over 90.

[Pds314]

I made a 2x Juno-powered light fighter-bomber-supersonic trainer using FAR, the idea being that Junos have equal per area dry thrust to panthers.

It's nice and fast. ~440 m/s ASL and up to 470 m/s at 13 km, above which the air is thin and cold so the top speed reduces. It's surprisingly light at just under 2 tonnes (constructed cockpit) without armaments, giving it a sealevel TWR of about 2.

It's nice and maneuverable. At 300 m/s, it will do a sustained 13+ G turn. At 420 m/s it will rip its wings if you try to use the keyboard pitch control. If Val faints in a flat sustained turn at significant speeds, she will quite simply never wake up.

Sadly, my bomb aiming skills at targets a good 15 or so kilometers away from 10 kilometers high away are.. less than ideal. I'm lucky if I don't hit the crater wall behind the pyramid, and the BDA bombscope is definitely not perfect, and this is not helped by the bomb starting supersonic, losing speed to become subsonic from drag, and then falling back through supersonic again before impact. Nor is it helped by ~2.5 m/s worth of coriolis effect by the time it hits on a bomb that's airbone for almost a minute. That's an error of something like 70 or so meters just from Coriolis. It is possible BDA does compensate for this with it bombscope but I don't know that it does.

Edited December 13, 2018 by Pds314

[spacehead3]

15 hours ago, a10t2 said:

You could do a little better: one more point for altitude, 1-2 for time, and the five for a cargo bay. But the absolute maximum is probably just over 90.

I think I have an aircraft that's fast enough to beat you, but I'm struggling with successfully deploying a missile at hypersonic speeds.

[KenjiKrafts]

Could I use a boat / submarine? @spacehead3

[spacehead3]

2 hours ago, KenjiKrafts said:

Could I use a boat / submarine? @spacehead3

Well, @Kuznetsov Space program did launch his plane from an aircraft carrier here, so I'll allow that if you start from East of KSC. But the final weapon must be launched from a plane, it can't just be an ICBM.

[Pds314]

Question on mission time: 

If the aircraft lands before the payload has hit the target, is the touchdown or detonation time the relevant measure?

I'm thinking of making a craft that sends a glide bomb, rocket glider, or ballistic missile out after zoom-climbing to 24 kilometers. It will almost certainly be able to land well before its payload does.

Edited December 13, 2018 by Pds314

[KenjiKrafts]

7 hours ago, spacehead3 said:

Well, @Kuznetsov Space program did launch his plane from an aircraft carrier here, so I'll allow that if you start from East of KSC. But the final weapon must be launched from a plane, it can't just be an ICBM.

Well no I have a missle carrier 

[Pds314]

7 hours ago, spacehead3 said:

Well, @Kuznetsov Space program did launch his plane from an aircraft carrier here, so I'll allow that if you start from East of KSC. But the final weapon must be launched from a plane, it can't just be an ICBM.

But can it be an ICBM or long range cruise missile launched from a plane?

Edited December 13, 2018 by Pds314

[spacehead3]

Y'all bring up some good questions. Its all for fun so I don't want to limit the possibilities too much, but in the interests of keeping scoring somewhat even, let's go with this:

1. The final weapon must be launched from an aircraft.

2. Mission time will be measured as touchdown of the aircraft OR impact of the weapon on the temple, whichever is last.

@Pds314 @KenjiKrafts

[a10t2]

13 hours ago, spacehead3 said:

I think I have an aircraft that's fast enough to beat you, but I'm struggling with successfully deploying a missile at hypersonic speeds.

The missile deployment from the RAPIER model was only "successful" in the sense that nothing blew up. It flopped around like a landed trout until it got below ~1.2 Mach.

Edited December 14, 2018 by a10t2

[Pds314]

Do ion engines produce heat signiture? And do they qualify as space-grade parts?

@spacehead3

Edited December 14, 2018 by Pds314

[spacehead3]

15 minutes ago, Pds314 said:

Do ion engines produce heat signiture?

@spacehead3

That should probably count as a rocket engine, but i totally want to see how you're planning on doing it with ions lol!

Well, @a10t2, I got you. Barely.

Album

Direct Hit	100
Attack Altitude	24
Mission Time	-24
Radar Cross Section	-15.25
Heat Signature	-10
Cost Savings	10
TOTAL	84.75

Edited December 14, 2018 by spacehead3

[a10t2]

1 hour ago, spacehead3 said:

Well, @a10t2, I got you. Barely.

Oh man, I really don't want to be "that guy", but surely this isn't stock?!

It's super sexy regardless, and you should really get some points for using FAR. Or separate categories maybe.

[Pds314]

6 hours ago, a10t2 said:

Oh man, I really don't want to be "that guy", but surely this isn't stock?!

It's super sexy regardless, and you should really get some points for using FAR. Or separate categories maybe.

It looks like a stock plane with pure aesthetic paint mods.

[spacehead3]

1 hour ago, Pds314 said:

It looks like a stock plane with pure aesthetic paint mods.

Yep! 

@a10t2

I wasn't sure how FAR would effect the scores when I created the challenge, it looks like they're pretty even actually. 

[Hodo]

3 hours ago, spacehead3 said:

Yep! 

@a10t2

I wasn't sure how FAR would effect the scores when I created the challenge, it looks like they're pretty even actually. 

FAR is considerably more difficult to make a functional aircraft.  EVEN more so if you use Advanced Jet Engines or AJE mod, which replaces the stock overpowered jet engines with more realistic jet engines for FAR.

[Pds314]

On 12/14/2018 at 7:40 AM, Hodo said:

FAR is considerably more difficult to make a functional aircraft.  EVEN more so if you use Advanced Jet Engines or AJE mod, which replaces the stock overpowered jet engines with more realistic jet engines for FAR.

Well, the stock engines ARE overpowered but unless you're using fuel economy as the metric the stock supersonic engines don't have unreasonable thrust or TWR or thrust density. Indeed, they're more like the cutting edge of 80s hardware. Modern fighter engines first manufactured in the 2010s well exceed the Panther's thrust output without being any wider than 1.25 meters.

 

TBH I kinda wanna make a super basic mod. All it does is replace the stock engine stats with something vaguely reasonable. So like double the fuel burn of the Panther, R.A.P.I.E.R., Whiplash and Juno, and cut the thrust output of the high bypass engines to 1/2 or maybe even 1/3 what they currently have and make them a bit lighter.

Maybe while I'm at it make rocket tanks and engines have reasonable masses too.

Edited December 15, 2018 by Pds314

[spacehead3]

32 minutes ago, Pds314 said:

TBH I kinda wanna make a super basic mod. All it does is replace the stock engine stats with something vaguely reasonable. 

You could do that in a few minutes by just editing the .cfg files.

 

And regarding FAR, I think in most aspects it's actually a lot more intuitive for plane building than the stock system, which essentially calculates drag based on part count. FAR *does* make control much more difficult, so you really need a fly by wire mod like Atmosphere Autopilot if you're going to do fighters with very low stability.