Solar Plane altitude challange

[Sandermatt]

How high can you go with a plane solely powered by ion engines.

Rules:

1. Stock parts only

2. No infiniglide, therefore no control surfaces or winglets. I wish they could stay in, but they skew all results too much.

3. No fuel other than electricity or xenon

I know it says solar plane, but if you want to do it with PB-NUK Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator to get independant from the sun you can do that (yes kerbal day lasts 6h and only during about 1 hour pannels have full efficiency, so daylight time is a problem).

If you want to drive onto a mountain you can do that too. If you want to drive a plane onto a mountain and start from it it is ok.

I advise to design your stuff in a way so you can run it in the background without looking at it all the time.

Ranking will be redone with the new rules.

1. esd 81m

Edited May 5, 2013 by Sandermatt

[sal_vager]

Would you mind showing us your attempt?

It'd help if we had something to shoot for

[Sandermatt]

1544m

My avionics package for some reason didn't work. I am sure this plane can be vastly improved. Both in design and piloting. I will continue to try to get higher but this is what I have so far.

Edited April 30, 2013 by Sandermatt

[Mindofscience3]

3,207m

Could have gone higher. Got bored.

[SmallChange]

Here's my attempt:

Topped out at 2257. How did you guys get your planes launched? I assumed rules were rules, so here's the launcher:

[Sandermatt]

About getting the plane launched, I did it with landing gear at decouplers. Once I have a better plane that can get higher I will post the relevant screenshots.

MondofScience seems to have had some other way as no stage separation is listed.

@MindofScience3 how did you start? And you have quite a lot of control surface on this plane, are you sure you did not acccidentally make use of infiniglide with it?

Edited May 1, 2013 by Sandermatt

[Mindofscience3]

Took off with my entire craft. it can probably land since it has wheels.

Take off: pull up until you start flying (around 45 m/s). Attempt to manually fly straight and not ride the wave too much.

@Sander: Infiniglide is inevitable with small craft, thought mine does exploit it a bit . Unintentionally of course. Will rework the design to have less infiniglide.

Edited May 1, 2013 by Mindofscience3

[Sandermatt]

Took off with my entire craft. it can probably land since it has wheels.

Take off: pull up until you start flying (around 45 m/s). Attempt to manually fly straight and not ride the wave too much.

If you adjust the control surface angle manually it will not need manual control to stay in the air. A lot of manual control leads to a lot of artificial acceleration. If you put the plane manually in a certain angle at constant speed could you then try to release the manual control. If the plane decelerates and moves it's nose downwards it was probably accelerated by the infiniglide bug.

[Mindofscience3]

If you adjust the control surface angle manually it will not need manual control to stay in the air. A lot of manual control leads to a lot of artificial acceleration.

Ends up where you pull up and do nothing else. ends up fairly unstable but it flies.

[Mindofscience3]

If you have control surfaces, you are infinigliding with a plane this small. it's just the way it is. if you can do it without control surfaces, then it's legit. Everyone so far has been infinigliding.

[Sandermatt]

If you have control surfaces, you are infinigliding with a plane this small. it's just the way it is. if you can do it without control surfaces, then it's legit. Everyone so far has been infinigliding.

Before I started this challange I didn't know what infiniglide is. So can you help me with it?

In my experience the plane always accelerated when I moved my control surfaces, the moment I hit the key (and I actually was able to achieve a multiple of the normal speed). If I moved the control surfaces downwards or not at all, nothing happened. I therefore assumed they only cause infiniglide when moved, not when stationary, was I wrong with that?

[Mindofscience3]

Infiniglide happens when you have a small plane and control surfaces. The way the surfaces work is by putting a force in a direction instead of being a lift. force -> movement.

[SmallChange]

Mindofscience, I know what infiniglide is.

Could I of infiniglided? Probably. Did I? No. That's why my craft has 4 ion engines on it. Couldn't even get off the ground with one.

I set the trim where it needed to be, and walked away. Thats why physics time acceleration is on. Oh, and "if it just was able to take off" chances are infiniglide. I didn't use control surfaces until the plane decoupled, so there was no magic acceleration on the tarmac from pressing up or down.

Granted, you just have my word on that. :/

[Mindofscience3]

Small, I was letting Sandmatt know. I believe you for taking off. Just saying that I tried your model and it (like every small plane) has huge acceleration from any control surface. Blame the game coding on this one. I tried with 3 engines and no flaps. nearly took off (back-flipped and uncontrollable crash). With flaps and trim and better game physics it may be possible. However, until then, it is more infinigliding regardless of what you do...

[SmallChange]

My bad, Mindofscience! I think I came off a little snippy there.

I had initially tried going with no control surfaces for just the reasons you mentioned, but it ended up being completely uncontrolable (Not spinning out of control, it just wouldn't turn). I did build one infiniglide exploit craft that could do almost 600m/s in thick atmosphere.. I have to laugh now, but then I thought I had built a perpetual motion machine! (The trick was to get is wobbling really good and then turn on ASAS. It would sustain the wobble and spike the G's up really high... something like 5-10 if I recall)

[metaphor]

I was trying to make an ion engine SSTO, but I guess it works for this challenge too. I just launched them off the runway, they had enough thrust (when I tilted the nose up, they accelerated faster on the runway).

Taking off

After more than an hour, 10654m altitude

Another design that didn't quite work as well

[M5000]

Would we, by chance, be allowed to use the KSPX ion engines/tanks? The engines provide slightly more thrust at the cost of a massive amount of electricity more, it seems.

[Sandermatt]

It seems to be too difficult to compare the individual results, if all are impacted by infiniglide. Are solar planes possible with the Ferram aerodynamics package?

[Ace_Of_Spades]

Do we get extra points if its manned?

[Ace_Of_Spades]

Hey o we get extra points for using a manned design

[esd]

Here's my pitiful attempt, using no control surfaces... but I noticed you didn't ban SAS or rover wheels, so I used the SAS to try and get some control (failed) and the wheels to kickstart the plan (success!)

Yup, that's a WHOPPING 81m. Enough panels to go forever, had it not chosen to eat turf.

[Sandermatt]

Rover wheels are fine.

There is nothing like extra points for manned, but I could mention it in a separate category. Still I am unsure how to do ranking here if many of the planes take the majority of their thrust from infiniglide effects.

About KSPX parts I cannot decide on them until I know their stats, but I would prefer if you would stick to stock parts.

[esd]

Perhaps then a "no control surfaces" category? The Kerbal equivalent of a paper plan with a rubber-band motor.

Not because I'm the leader (by virtue of being the only entrant) of such a category, of course! *whistles*

[FlashcrySamurai]

Here's my first attempt that was decently successful. As you can see, I had a whole xenon tank yet, so I probably could've gotten a bit higher if I had launched at a better time (I was running low on electricity).

The only control surfaces I had are the Delta-Deluxe winglets on the ends, which give very little control. On earlier attempts I tried to infiniglide with them, and couldn't really, so I don't think they had much (if anything) to do with the success. I angled the two extra ion engines up 1 notch, which let the plane fly with no extra input. I think I might be able to use canards instead of the winglets to completely get rid of any infiniglide accusations.

I took off using the ion engines at full power, then when I got to the end of the runway, detached them, and pulled up until I got gliding (which happened pretty quickly).

I'd love to hear if anyone has any suggestions or questions. This is my first challenge attempt, and my first forum post!

[Sandermatt]

This looks good.

Because you like suggestions, my 2 cents how you might get a little further:

If you flew in the other direction (270 degrees) you would have about 40% more daylight time, and it seems this was your limiting factor. But be careful, there are mountains that become a problem if you don't ascend fast enough. If by removing all control surfaces (your low number of them is nice) you cannot turn you could always just drive around using wheels and then start your plane in the desired direction.

Also you could probably save the weight from the battery, the buffer in energy may not be needed.