DJA 1946 BDAc AI Dogfight Tournament

[Pds314]

47 minutes ago, Yeet_TheDinosaur said:

Just asking, but are only guns from BD Armory allowed? Or guided missiles are also allowed('cause some from 1950 used guided missiles)?

Thanks in advance for replies.

I'm pretty sure only Aviator Arsenal weapons are allowed. So dumbfire rockets or bombs (which the AI won't even fire at air vehicles in practice) would be but modern day missiles would be a definite nope.

On an aside, it would be nice if there were first gen tailchase missiles. Not necessarilly for this but just for BDA fights in general.

[Pds314]

Mini heavy derived from my second submission is FAST lol.

This is a perfectly-legal craft. It isn't a good fighter (or at least it would need a lot of tuning and a LOT of fuel, and odds are the reason it would win is that the other plane can't catch it because it's forced to stay supersonic at all times and it wins a head-on or simply outlasts its opponent until fuel starvation is reached), but it can take off, and with enough pilot skill, you can land it. It's 5258 kg empty, but around 6300 loaded. The wings will not rip while the plane is intact, but the fuselage definitely will if you try a supermaneuverability stunt at 420 m/s.

Edited July 4, 2019 by Pds314

[Me1_base]

3 hours ago, Pds314 said:

it would win is that the other plane can't catch it because it's forced to stay supersonic 

Nice tactic, but on the other hand, some of the potential candidates may cap their speed at 200m/s something to save fuel. I am talking about attrition.

3 hours ago, Pds314 said:

first gen tailchase missiles.

Maybe proximity fused rockets?

[Me1_base]

Unknown fighter spotted doing strange maneuvers

Edited July 4, 2019 by Me1_base

[Pds314]

13 hours ago, Me1_base said:

Nice tactic, but on the other hand, some of the potential candidates may cap their speed at 200m/s something to save fuel. I am talking about attrition.

Maybe proximity fused rockets?

That would be cool too. And probably more balanced as well.

13 hours ago, Me1_base said:

Nice tactic, but on the other hand, some of the potential candidates may cap their speed at 200m/s something to save fuel. I am talking about attrition.

Maybe proximity fused rockets?

Well it isn't unarmed though, and a plane at under 200 m/s would be easy to outrun and get into head on engagements with. They could cap their speed at 100 m/s but that doesn't mean they wouldn't get into head ons with a plane with much lower cross-sectional area and decent cannon armament.

Edited July 5, 2019 by Pds314

[Pds314]

17 hours ago, Me1_base said:

Unknown fighter spotted doing strange maneuvers

LOL. I guess there are some differences...
 

On 6/12/2019 at 8:35 PM, SuicidalInsanity said:

More or less? The A-Wing is something I could easily see a Junkers-Horten collaboration coming up with as a prototype in ~1950; there were a lot of wacky real-world designs for early jets, and I don't want to restrict people's ability to be equally creative (Y-Wing or TIE fighter I'd veto though). The request to build a period-ish aircraft in the rules is there mainly to prevent people from showing up to a early jets themed contest with something blatantly anachronistic like a Su-47 berkut knockoff.

 

Edited July 5, 2019 by Pds314

[Me1_base]

1 hour ago, Pds314 said:

some differences

hey how about ju287

[Pds314]

2 minutes ago, Me1_base said:

hey how about ju287

True, although I would hardly consider that a Ju-287 clone lol.

[Guest]

@SuicidalInsanitythx for the reminder, i will try to submit something(or two things :P)by the 9th.

[SuicidalInsanity]

I have received 12 entries, so we'll be doing a 4 round Swiss format.

Obligatory group photo:

Random stats
-Average mass: 5289 kg
-Most popular gun: Mk 108
-Average minimum endurance: 9.9 minutes

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

On 7/4/2019 at 2:36 AM, Yeet_TheDinosaur said:

Just asking, but are only guns from BD Armory allowed? Or guided missiles are also allowed('cause some from 1950 used guided missiles)?

Just Aviator Arsenal weapons.
 

On 7/4/2019 at 7:04 AM, Me1_base said:

Maybe proximity fused rockets?

Fun fact - the original draft for DJA I was considering allowing the BDA S-KOM rocket pod, and had completely rewritten the rocketlauncher code to enable the BDA AI to actually use the things (at present, the AI doesn't even recognize a craft is carrying rocket pods). They didn't make the cut mainly because their performance compared to guns, even with prox-fuzes, was awful. Also, I wasn't sure how to price the things.

[Pds314]

Intimidation 100

Edited July 12, 2019 by Pds314

[Pds314]

I'm surprised I'm the only one who used severely-swept wings. Like a few of the other small wings are swept, but it's just enough to be noticeable to marginally effective. Not the ~45 degree wing sweep I used.

Edited July 12, 2019 by Pds314

[Noir]

With the exception of @Pds314, the green and yellow/gold swept wing design, and the Luft46-esque designs, all other entries appear to be based on either 1st or 4th generation fighter designs.

I am slightly disappointed there is no Me-262 knockoff. I'm even more disappointed no one went for the good-ol' narwhal.  I was going to submit a second entry, possibly with a 40mm or 75mm, but couldn't build anything that could compete with my main one entry. Plus my game's performance and the constant stutters were doing my head in.

 

On an related but unrelated note: could we possibly have a "beauty contest" of some kind, were we vote for the best looking design?

[Me1_base]

On 5/29/2019 at 8:28 PM, Me1_base said:

https://github.com/tetraflon/misc/releases/tag/0.01
test aircrafts, download for free

YOU CAN TRY THIS ONE.

58 minutes ago, Noir said:

I was going to submit a second entry, possibly with a 40mm

 

[Pds314]

2 hours ago, Noir said:

With the exception of @Pds314, the green and yellow/gold swept wing design, and the Luft46-esque designs, all other entries appear to be based on either 1st or 4th generation fighter designs.

I am slightly disappointed there is no Me-262 knockoff. I'm even more disappointed no one went for the good-ol' narwhal.  I was going to submit a second entry, possibly with a 40mm or 75mm, but couldn't build anything that could compete with my main one entry. Plus my game's performance and the constant stutters were doing my head in.

 

On an related but unrelated note: could we possibly have a "beauty contest" of some kind, were we vote for the best looking design?

I could build a narwhal 262... though obviously it isn't gonna compete.

The green/gold swept wing design is also mine. It's loosely inspired by some 2nd generation fighters. Although with first generation tech and small size. As well as a lot of concern for just pragmatic functionality within reason. (I made a rule that I wouldn't build a giant straight wing turnfighter)

 

As for making a Narwhal be actually competitive, not especially likely. First, 75mm isn't guaranteed to oneshot. Second, 30mm and even 23mm and the higher end 20mm HE shots do enough damage that they aren't guaranteed not to oneshot. But 75mm is not gonna compete on a level playing field because low rate of fire and because the AI is too stupid to know how to use it.

Edited July 12, 2019 by Pds314

[Bob_Saget54]

7 hours ago, Noir said:

I am slightly disappointed there is no Me-262 knockoff.

Does it count if mine was inspired (if only slightly) by the Me 262 HG III?

Minus the swept wings of course lol

[Hinden]

12 hours ago, Noir said:

With the exception of @Pds314, the green and yellow/gold swept wing design, and the Luft46-esque designs, all other entries appear to be based on either 1st or 4th generation fighter designs.

I am slightly disappointed there is no Me-262 knockoff. I'm even more disappointed no one went for the good-ol' narwhal.  I was going to submit a second entry, possibly with a 40mm or 75mm, but couldn't build anything that could compete with my main one entry. Plus my game's performance and the constant stutters were doing my head in.

 

On an related but unrelated note: could we possibly have a "beauty contest" of some kind, were we vote for the best looking design?

Yeah, I am guilty, started with two 1st gen fighters, than they became a deformed drone, because I could not make the swept wing work, and sacrificed everything on the altar of performance (still one engine is only one engine ).

From left to right: 9th gen of my fighter design (sent in the 7th), MIG 15 knock off (challenge tail design based on MIG), Saab 29 knock off first design I made for this challenge.

Here is a picture of most of the craft I tried out (yeah there is one without wheels, gave up on it mid redesign ):


I had a lot of work in the last weeks, so just came back, I love this thread, nice designs.  

Edited July 12, 2019 by Hinden

[Alioth81]

Some background to my designs also some reasoning why they look this way.
The light fighter AL-18-Swift was a quick design inspired by the He 162 as a low part count agile fighter with 2x 30mm

Cheap procedural parts caused quite some problems during manufacturing

 

The 2nd entry was a challenge - My flyingwing design which was supposed to look like the Ho-228 failed, mainly because the AI completely mishandled the yaw aspects. In general I think the AI uses yaw not ideally in fights and I would love to set the PID values individually but not sure it would help.

The I tried a fast design that started like a Mirage III and ended looking like a Eurofighter - it was simply not fast enough compared to the agile AL-18 an tore itself apart after Mach 1. Often it would overshoot the agile AL-18 and get shot down immediately.

Finally I settled for big tandem wing design: the heavy AL-21-Dragonfly inspired by the French WWII prototype aircraft Arsenal-Delanne 10 but with jets and 3x30mm guns. Very agile, trigger happy, surprisingly robust but underpowered. To get it stable I had to add a lot of tail fins - as like the flying wing it doesn't really have a tail. The part count was inflated because I could not really use the procedural parts and used many empty Mk0 tanks. It does not reach super high speeds but thanks to its low wing loading it does not loose to much speed either - even in high G turns

[Pds314]

34 minutes ago, Alioth81 said:

Some background to my designs also some reasoning why they look this way.
The light fighter AL-18-Swift was a quick design inspired by the He 162 as a low part count agile fighter with 2x 30mm

Cheap procedural parts caused quite some problems during manufacturing

 

The 2nd entry was a challenge - My flyingwing design which was supposed to look like the Ho-228 failed, mainly because the AI completely mishandled the yaw aspects. In general I think the AI uses yaw not ideally in fights and I would love to set the PID values individually but not sure it would help.

The I tried a fast design that started like a Mirage III and ended looking like a Eurofighter - it was simply not fast enough compared to the agile AL-18 an tore itself apart after Mach 1. Often it would overshoot the agile AL-18 and get shot down immediately.

Finally I settled for big tandem wing design: the heavy AL-21-Dragonfly inspired by the French WWII prototype aircraft Arsenal-Delanne 10 but with jets and 3x30mm guns. Very agile, trigger happy, surprisingly robust but underpowered. To get it stable I had to add a lot of tail fins - as like the flying wing it doesn't really have a tail. The part count was inflated because I could not really use the procedural parts and used many empty Mk0 tanks. It does not reach super high speeds but thanks to its low wing loading it does not loose to much speed either - even in high G turns

Oh god it's like the K-10 Piglet on steroids. RIP everything. Since the K-10 was OP even with G force limits engaged.

Edited July 12, 2019 by Pds314

[Alioth81]

Some general thoughts about the challenge

First of all I think this one is really great and I enjoyed spending quite some time to get it done and I will love to watch the videos.

• I also love the advanced settings of this BD Armory version (but I know @SuicidalInsanity had beautiful icons for team A and B in a version. Where are they?)
• Some engines have not ideal point values. If you consider the available guns that are most likely used there are some frequent combinations like 60 points (2x 30mm, 3x 20mm, 5x 12mm) leaving 40/60/90 points for engines or 90 points (3x 30mm, 6x 15mm) leaving 60 or 30 points. or 80 points (4x 20mm, 2x 40mm) leaving 20/40/70 points. This means engines like the the Nibelung and Geist with 36 points are difficult to use and combine - making it slightly weaker and 35 point would make them suddenly more attractive The same goes for Kobold and Gremlin which could be 30 and the Phantom at 45 (or some engines could cover combinations with 23mm and 13mm).
• Also spare points could be used to reduce weight (e.g. 25kg per point or whatever is balanced). I know it is probably not important but I felt an intrinsic urge to use up the point budget
• Additionally I think it would be great to add a new cockpit part with an MM patch that is significantly lighter with resources and reaction wheels patched out (e.g. 300kg). I would prefer to use a modified inline cockpit because I enjoy flying my planes in first person and it would make for some great videos. But the weight benefit of a constructed cockpit especially for light fighters is enormous.
• If someone manages to get the G-force limit in BD-Armory to work I would prefer to fly with GLOC as this would be beneficial for the faster less agile fighters. Currently you can create fighters that turn with huge G-numbers
• Now something very low priority: no autostruts, only rigid attachment - with autostruts the destruction effects mods has some weird flame effects

 

@Noir regarding performance

I use the mod memgraph - it has a shortcut "ALT +End" on that increases the memory heap and reduces stutter on my system quite a lot .

If you use the adjustable landing gears try to use a file with this content to patch in your gamedata folder

@PART[KF-ALG*]:Final
{
        !MODULE[KSPWheelMotor] {}
}

it removes the motor aspects of the wheel which can lead to stutter

Less parts are also good

[SuicidalInsanity]

On 7/11/2019 at 11:22 PM, Noir said:

I am slightly disappointed there is no Me-262 knockoff. I'm even more disappointed no one went for the good-ol' narwhal.  I was going to submit a second entry, possibly with a 40mm or 75mm, but couldn't build anything that could compete with my main one entry.

On an related but unrelated note: could we possibly have a "beauty contest" of some kind, were we vote for the best looking design?

Given the surprise success of the RF-7 Crossbow in the last tournament I'm kinda surprised no one entered a 40mm armed craft. As for the 75mm, the only way that would ever be competitive with the other guns would be to give it flak ammo. 

For the beauty contest idea, I have no problem with that. Part of the fun of these contests is seeing all the designs (and paintjobs) that people come up with, after all.

On 7/12/2019 at 2:37 PM, Alioth81 said:

The 2nd entry was a challenge - My flyingwing design which was supposed to look like the Ho-228 failed, mainly because the AI completely mishandled the yaw aspects. In general I think the AI uses yaw not ideally in fights and I would love to set the PID values individually but not sure it would help.

Flying wings in FAR are hard. Especially when the BD AI is involved. Some lessons learned from my own flying wings - wing sweep in important, if only to get control surfaces back as far as possible for best leverage; split ailerons for yaw control should go on the wing tips, and lastly, to prevent outer wing tip stall during banking turns you'll need some combination of wing fences, negative pitch leading edge ailerons for dynamic camber adjustment and/or wing wash-in. You can't see it in the group photo, but my totally-not-a-Ho-229 has progressively regressive wing incidence - the wing roots have something like a 3 deg incidence, the tips are something like -1 deg.

On 7/12/2019 at 3:26 PM, Alioth81 said:

Some general thoughts about the challenge...

Thanks for the feedback.
-Team icons I spun off into their own plugin, since they are a nice QoL feature for anyone running BDA battles, and this way seemed easier to maintain than re-modding them into each successive version of BDAc. Plugin will be in a releasable state as soon as I can squash the last few bugs.
-Engine point values came out of the lessons learned from BAD-T III; in BAD-T's the idea was you can have speed or guns, but not both, but in III almost every entry had the 40 point falcon engine and 3x Hispano (speed and guns), so engines were repriced to both return to the speed or guns paradigm, as well as encourage greater variety in armament, and, now that BDA supports weapon groups, non-homogeneous loadouts. Which means that yes, sometimes craft will have points left over.
-Something like points for weight reduction could work, though 25kg per is probably too much.
-Having a light stock* cockpit is something I arguably should have done for DJA in stead of the point bonus, given all the other experimental stuff included; if nothing else, it gives a light fighter cockpit option to people who can't (or won't) use proc parts for constructed cockpits.
-G limits will definitely be turned on next tourney. Not sure about how to get the AI's G-limiter to work; that's part of the reason I added the speed adjusted secondary steer limiter.
-Autostruts are ok - mostly. The suddenly-the-plane-is-made-out-of-magnesium-and-thermite effect, from what I can tell, is caused by autostruts to fuel containing parts, but more experimentation in this is needed.

[Guest]

19 hours ago, SuicidalInsanity said:

-Having a light stock* cockpit is something I arguably should have done for DJA in stead of the point bonus, given all the other experimental stuff included; if nothing else, it gives a light fighter cockpit option to people who can't (or won't) use proc parts for constructed cockpits.

That'd really be helpful. Stock cockpits are really heavy.

19 hours ago, SuicidalInsanity said:

-G limits will definitely be turned on next tourney. Not sure about how to get the AI's G-limiter to work; that's part of the reason I added the speed adjusted secondary steer limiter.

For some reason the AI puts very little priority on obeying the limit. Its been an issue with my FAR caft, esp high-performance fighters. even with a 7g "limit" its hitting 12+ Gs.

[SuicidalInsanity]

Match 1, Round 1: @Alioth81' s AL-21 Dragonfly vs @Pds314's L-19 Weird duck:

 

[Me1_base]

2 minutes ago, SuicidalInsanity said:

Match 1, Round 1: @Alioth81' s AL-21 Dragonfly vs @Pds314's L-19 Weird duck:

 

Although Al21 is less maneuverable than expected,  shots are really accurate.

[SuicidalInsanity]

On 7/12/2019 at 3:26 PM, Alioth81 said:

(but I know @SuicidalInsanity had beautiful icons for team A and B in a version. Where are they?) 

They are now here. Team icons plus some additional feature creep that is out of scope for DJA but will undoubtedly be useful for any other BDA scenario, be it forums tournament or personal use - missile warning icons, vessel type differentiation (Is that enemy contact a boat? A plane? A tank? They all have unique icons).

Edited July 22, 2019 by SuicidalInsanity
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