Splashdown in a lake

[Darkshadow]

Adjusting your decay orbit to land in the ocean is easy, now try landing in a lake.

I thought of this challenge by chance after accidently landing in one, and realise probably deliberately trying to will be quite a bit harder for capsules but for the interest of more fun seaplanes, VTOL planes, flying boats or anything else you could thing of is also allowed.

[points] landing close to a lake

[bonus points] for using your existing orbiter

[bonus points] getting your craft to land at the bottom of the lake

[extra bonus points] for using stock parts

[super amazing points] for piloting only a capsule for the entire re-entry!

Please post your best shots, I\'m sorry I didn\'t screenshot my own.

[gabyalufix]

Did this by accident once, a while ago. My seaplane re-entered over a continent, and I didn\'t have fuel to bounce out.

I saw the lake right a few minutes before my glide plane intersected the geography.

It looked bigger from far away . . .

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=5577.0

[Goddess Bhavani]

I am just keeping the thread & discussion alive on the OP\'s behalf - my first time playing KSP and I saw a website doing a \'land speed record\' - max speed under 1500m altitude using C7 parts.

I thought to approach the problem the \'realistic\' way and use a small aircraft to do the job. Back then the competition only had slower conventional aircraft being posted and the top speed was anything from 200-300m/s.

This broke the sound barrier (for just a second) using an SRB and two small \'turborockets\' with minimal fuel load from the C7 parts pack.

Building this thing got me addicted to KSP because of the 'Chuck Yeager\'s X-1' feeling of going past Mach 1 for the first time on a redneck engineered rocket plane.

Since I had a strange habit of launching along the coast using the little islands as navigation points, my recovery point was a lake, or rather, a few lakes further downrange.

The then-record setting Mach 1 run got me so elated at getting the flight profile right, I forgot to disengage the inertial compensator (SAS) and the plane refused to turn causing it to land short of the lake. Then I cut in a video of a later flight which did not hit the target speed of 332m/s but was lake-landed smoothly and correctly.

The record was soon surpassed by out of this world parallel-mounted SRB only stacks that could hit almost Mach 2!

(I have posted this on other threads so ignore if you\'ve seen it )

p/s, though pathetically slow by later standards this little speedster was very fun to fly with 3 different stages. It\'s deliberately unstable so I can do a high-alpha stall to deploy the recovery parachute to land.

First stage - ASAS controlled vertical launch

Second stage - climb to 1500m on sustainer motors with flight controls in semi-automatic mode (SAS, with manual override for control surfaces)

Third stage - Fire SRB and terminal dive just as the fuel runs out.

[XSP-Xenon Space Programm]

nice try

[Darkshadow]

Thanks for your posts guys seems like lakes get more use than I imagined. Do you know of a way to get ships to sink in water? It would be cool if we could have a mission to the bottom of the ocean.

looking at the map I think the time I landed in a lake was one near the cost of what they call on the RP forum Forseti.

[RedDwarfIV]

Miles 52.

Would have been the first supersonic jet if the Americans hadn\'t reneged on their deal to swap information after they took ours.

USAF even claimed that they invented the moving tail fins [required for Mach 1. Ailerons just get blown flat.] There\'s a piece of movie footage which shows a British plane with movable tail fins taking off, and it was built around a decade before Bell X-1.

Also, \'Bell X-1\' sounds siller than \'Miles 52\'.

[Goddess Bhavani]

Miles 52.

That\'s my next topic of aviation history research. Definitely piqued my interest

[muskeg]

Using my custom seaplane:

It\'s built for this kind of job. I handled that ejecting pod quite badly though :-\