Flight of the Trollaris

[Felsmak]

Introduction:

So you thought you’d have to assemble a spaceship capable of taking Kerbals to Jool and land them on Tylo in order to be cool? Sure, that is cool and the same goes for other common achievements such as circumnavigating Kerbin or building a Kerbal ISS, but I'll tell you about something else that's cool: flying a robotic aircraft to the airbase island - with ion engines!

That's right! Even a seemingly trivial achievement can be super-cool. All it takes is that you waste enough time reaching your destination!

Anyway, let's cut the small talk and get to business, shall we? Allow me to introduce you to the slowest aircraft ever flown, the Trollaris! Also known as the snail, the cash shredder, and the flying pitch drop.

Takeoff:

Beautiful, isn't she? On this picture, you can see her taking off after long wait for decent weather. That's much easier said than done, however, as the Trollaris suffers from a crippling inability to navigate any airspace windier than the average cave.

Transit:

After a successful takeoff, the Trollaris slowly climbs towards its final cruising altitude of 600 meters, where the slightly lower air resistance will allow it to travel at speeds up to 20 meters per second.

Final approach:

After a long, boring journey, the Trollaris has finally reached its destination and is now descending towards the runway. However, as dull as the flight was for mission control to watch, it was by no means uneventful. In fact, the flight almost had to be ended when it was discovered that the control tower was cheaply built and had to be replaced.

Landing:

At last, the Trollaris has landed safe and sound on the runway of Runway Island! Money well spent. Lives well sacrificed.

The plane was perfectly lined up during the final approach, but I lost a ton of style points when I forgot to turn off the engine, causing the plane to skip over half of the runway before stopping instead of rolling smoothly along it.

Thus, I got no cool landing pictures, but it was a very cool flight indeed!

[Geschosskopf]

That IS a very beautiful plane, combining elegant simplicity with graceful aesthetics. Who cares if it only does 20m/s? It's still quite cool . Besides, you got it down safely, My incarnation of Airbase Island is plated with aluminum several feet think from planes that got there but couldn't land correctly.

[Felsmak]

Thank you! I'll try to send it to Laythe someday - plenty of time to enjoy the view!

Heheh, well at least that's true to the Kerbal spirit.

[Tex_NL]

Only 20 m/s? I'm pretty sure it can go a lot faster. What you got there is a classic infini-glider. You can get significantly more speed from the infamous infini-glide bug than you get from your thruster. I doubt you can run the ion engine at full power for any length of time.

Still, it does look good.

[nhnifong]

Oh don't pop his bubble

[Felsmak]

Only 20 m/s? I'm pretty sure it can go a lot faster. What you got there is a classic infini-glider. You can get significantly more speed from the infamous infini-glide bug than you get from your thruster. I doubt you can run the ion engine at full power for any length of time.

The thruster worked fine, actually. 20 m/s was roughly as fast as it went while moving entirely on its own, but I would occasionally boost it a bit by diving. I've never heard of that bug, though. I'll look it up!

Oh don't pop his bubble

Are you insinuating something?