Fuel Economy Circumnavigation

[Traches]

PWing abuse for sure. What was your max L/D?

Haha thanks, at some point it's gotta be cheating? Then again, the longer you make your wings, the harder it is to fly, so I suppose it all balances out in the end.

Highest I ever saw my L/D was about 30 while gliding back to KSC, so comparable to a real world U2 in cruise if the wikipedia article is right. Fitting, that's what the first couple iterations of my design looked like before I switched to canards for a little more efficiency. I'm sure the design could be improved further if I actually knew anything about aerodynamics.

It's a good challenge, thanks for setting it up!

[Goozeman]

Haha thanks, at some point it's gotta be cheating? Then again, the longer you make your wings, the harder it is to fly, so I suppose it all balances out in the end.

Highest I ever saw my L/D was about 30 while gliding back to KSC, so comparable to a real world U2 in cruise if the wikipedia article is right. Fitting, that's what the first couple iterations of my design looked like before I switched to canards for a little more efficiency. I'm sure the design could be improved further if I actually knew anything about aerodynamics.

It's a good challenge, thanks for setting it up!

Use the static stability graph in the SPH FAR CAS screen to check. Multiply the green line's maximum by 10 and that's your max L/D.

[SunJumper]

You may purposefully eject parts, but whatever comes back to KSC must make a successful horizontal landing. Successful in the sense that you may not lose any remaining pieces of your aircraft.

You may not, of course, eject any fuel tanks, and the whole point of the challenge is to use ONLY a Mk1 Fuselage worth of any type of fuel. That is, you are limited to only 150 units of LiquidFuel. Monoprop, Oxidizer, Xenon, SolidFuel, etc will disqualify your attempt.

Also, no one else try it with FAR installed? I feel lonely.

Hmm, good point. If I were any good at building planes I'd do the following challenges:

1) Decouple the fuel tank with wings and mechjeb, and have it land the tank. Then land behind it.

2) Horizontal landing without wheels.

3) Decouple the cockpit once touched down but not stopped, and have everything survive.

Also, out of curiosity, can we land before the runway to quicksave?

[koshelenkovv]

Here is my entry.

1st try, so done on a wasteful way with major screwup.

Cruising at 30 km with 2 knobs on the throttle bar

Oops! CoM shifted back so much that aggressive nosediving flipped my plane.

As result 7.04L of fuel was wasted.

Score is 59.95 (54.20 + In Stock We Trust + Fast Craft + 3-Point Landing + Cheapin' Out)

Edited December 7, 2013 by koshelenkovv

[Traches]

Use the static stability graph in the SPH FAR CAS screen to check. Multiply the green line's maximum by 10 and that's your max L/D.

Which is why that "/10" is there in the axis label. I had no idea till you said something... I'm a smart cookie sometimes. Looks like it's just shy of 60, but at mach .83 where I was cruising it's closer to 40.

[Fengist]

Methinks you might want to reconsider some of the rules. I do realize that 'suborbital' hops are discouraged however, the 60km altitude IS sub orbital. With a light enough plane able to reach altitude quickly, this becomes more of a challenge of managing AP and PE rather than aerodynamics. Although I will admit, it took me 4 attempts to do this. My first attempt I blew past KSC runway only using 38 fuel and the next two were completely unstable and couldn't get them landed. As I said, in the title I suck at planes but I'm positive this is doable using less than 50 fuel. Feel free not to consider me for the leaderboard as I was pretty much suborbital the whole flight, but in the 'spirit' you're looking for, at 60km there's no atmosphere to hold you up or slow you down so aerodynamics become mostly pointless. Most of my time was spent above 40km.

The other problem is, if you go for a glider type design and put very many control surfaces on it, you end up with something closer to an infiglider. That was actually my first experiment. I ran out of fuel 3/4 of the way around and glided back to KSC.

This is completely stock with only 2 intakes oh and the MK2 fuselage comes with 7.5 mono, but as you can see, I didn't use any.

But, should you decide to score it:

91.41 + 1 (3 point landing) + 2 (In Stock) + 3 (Fast Craft) = 97.41

Edited December 21, 2013 by Fengist

[koshelenkovv]

In 0.23 jets working not like in 0.22.