Run Silent, Run Derp: The Glider Challenge

[Reverie Planetarian]

Gliders.

There may be bugs and there may be glitches that make flying them and anything else with wings in Kerbal Space Program easier, but that doesn't erase the fact that making gliders in KSP is fun. At least, it's fun for me.

I've made a few designs that started as gliders for practicing proper spaceplane landings that I eventually realized made really good fliers in most respects, and could, thanks to the physics models for flight in KSP, do some pretty preposterous things-like breaking 400 m/s without a single engine or climbing over 10 klicks above the surface of Kerbin.

That's me, though, but I don't know about my fellow players here on this forum. So, I present something I hope nobody's done before, the Glider Challenge.

The rules are simple: make a spaceplane glider which must be capable of sustained flight without thrusters of some sort, and must take off horizontally. All engine parts must be jettisoned during the takeoff procedures and the craft must be able to do level flight for at least two minutes for it to count.

You must, some way or another, get the highest altitude and airspeed that you can before bringing the aircraft to a safe, preferrably non-parachute-assisted landing, all without an engine. Sticking with stock parts is encouraged, but not required: I've never downloaded any mods and I'm curious as to what others could do with them. Of course, that said, all parts must be used as-is: no editing their values.

Extra points for seeing how little you can tack on; I'm aware of how the flight modeling engine makes it really easy to just put wings atop wings and glitch your way into the air.

Be sure to take photos of your craft in flight, landing, doing whatever-show off what you can do without needing thrust to do it.

[SasquatchM]

I made this the other day while experimenting with gliders. It is capable of glitching as high as you want it, but because of it's fairly minimalistic build it takes a while to do it. As this video wasn't really meant for a challenge it doesn't show maximum altitude or speed. due to the design high speeds, although possible, are pretty dangerous to the Kerbal pilot.

<iframe width="853" height="480" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/qkf1eRiCRf0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

[iplop]

Here's a two of my favorite 'gliders':

I went to the north pole with this one ;D

Both of those are rather old. I haven't messed with canard powered flight in quite some time.

Tip:

ASAS = autoflap

Edit_1:

Here's one I just made(Finally broke my speed record!):

The trick to taking off without blowing up is: climb to ~10k m altitude before ramping up the speed too much.

From there, gradually lower your altitude until you're up to speed.

Unfortunately I accidentally retracted the landing gear while landing and crashed. :/

File if anyone wants it(it's rather simple): [ATTACH]32788[/ATTACH]

And none of my gliders count since they're either old screencaps without the correct screenshots or derped landings. ;D

Edited September 12, 2012 by iplop

[Reverie Planetarian]

Still though, pics and the like are always welcome.

Me, I'm still super-traditional: use launch stage, jettison launch stage, glide, no flapping.

...soaring and going around in circles to gain momentum to fly fast, sure, but no flapping.