Electric Prop Dogfight Tournament [BDA] [DLC]

[Pds314]

Craft Restrictions

1. No missiles. This is a gunfight.

2. No more than 100 parts per aircraft. 

3. Excessive unreasonable clipping is discouraged. Necessary clipping like to make coaxials is allowed.

4. No electric charge generators of any kind. Use batteries.

5. Absolutely no magic reaction wheels, including cockpit torque.

6. BDA, stock, and DLC parts only.

7. Put the Kerbal in a cockpit. that is obviously a cockpit. Not a lawnchair strapped to the fuselage. It can have a lawnchair, just, you know, put the lawnchair in a custom cockpit. No drones.

8. No more than 100 points per aircraft.

Point system

The point value of a craft is a function of its engine configuration and armament. Factors like craft weight will not be considered.

Motors

Powerful electric motors are more "high tech" and so will be worth more points. Specifically, the "motor size/power" slider will be used to determine cost by SQUARING it. Note however that a motor size/power rating below 10% but above 0% will be considered 10% to limit motor spam. All other Breaking Ground robotics parts are free, including KAL, but no outside slider range bug abuse.

 

Large motors cost 8% the square of their size/power rating.

Medium motors cost 3% the square of their size/power rating.

Small motors cost 1% the square of their size/power rating.

F.E.

A large motor at 20% power will have a point value of 32.

A medium one at 30% power will have a point value of 27.

A small one at 50% power will have a point value of 25.

Weapons

Missiles are prohibited at this time. Turrets must be locked straight ahead if used.

 

GAU-8 cannons cost 30 points each.

Hidden Vulcan cannons cost 20 points each.

.50 cal fixed guns cost 2 points each.

.50 cal dual guns costs 1 point each.

M230 chainguns cost 15 points each.

External vulcans cost 20 points each.

Abrams mainguns, Goalkeeper turrets, Howitzers, Oerlikon cannons, laser turrets, etc are prohibited at this time, as they would most-likely either be useless or extremely overpowered.

Building advice

1. Don't build something you can't fly. The AI definitely won't be able to.

2. Don't build something with lots of assymetric torque. The AI is much worse at compensating for that than you are.

3. Test your build against the dummy aircraft. It is unimpressive by design, worth only 40 points, doesn't have a cannon, and is meant to be something to shoot at that could, theoretically, kill your plane if you let it shoot at you for long enough. If your plane can't shoot it down, or worse, gets shot to bits by it, your plane has no chance against another competitive aircraft.

4. Keep in mind that you might want to increase prop pitch after taking off. This could be done by tying deploy on the blades to landing gear. There's a whole host of other possibilities though.

5. Guns will not shoot your own prop blades. But this means firing through a prop reduces rate of fire. Especially if barrage mode is on (seriously turn it off). Firing through multiple props with lots of blades, especially big fat ducted fan blades, reduces it even further.

6. By no means are you restricted to conventional designs. If you think it might be viable, you could submit a tiltrotor or an autogyro or something if you wanted. Keep in mind, however, that the AI doesn't play well with user-defined directional controls and such.

Tournament format

Battles will begin on June 1st. They will be 2v2, 3 rounds per combat, double elimination.
Planes will begin at 5 km apart as set using the competition mode.
Pilot G limits will be ON.
 

Edited May 3, 2020 by Pds314

[Pds314]

A bit of a test to see if Gyros are in fact able to fight.

 

[Pds314]

A test battle between a fast plane that turns slow with a small gun and a slow plane that turns fast with big guns. Who will win?
 

 

Edited May 3, 2020 by Pds314

[Pds314]

Can tiny planes with tiny engines compete despite their lower power output?

 

[The_Stinky_Broccoli]

to make this easier can i use airplane plus?

[Pds314]

10 hours ago, epicfailure2020 said:

to make this easier can i use airplane plus?

No. Unfortunately this would severely mess up the challenge. I have no way to balance AP+ parts with the scoring system and it would defeat the point of using stock props.

At that point it would just make more sense to do a BAD-T style challenge instead of using stock props.

Also this thread is two and a half months old, and a month and a half past my original projected competition start date with no responses besides yours so I kinda doubt this challenge will actually reach takeoff speed so to speak.

Do feel free to create your own prop plane dogfight challenge with AP+ though. I will create an entry if you do.

Edited July 22, 2020 by Pds314