Fastest Plane under 1.000m. [WE HAVE REACHED MACH 5!, Tidus Klein at 1,714 m/s]

[m1sz]

I guess that intake can take as much air as it wants, it's not completely blocked, even if if's technicaly behind one. I guess that kind of fairing is OK.

The clipped landing gear, I think it's just because is partialy hidden with a fairing, need more pictures to see!

[Tidus Klein]

ya the gear is just blocked by a fairing. uuu do i have to do a run and then land or can i just takeoff and turn around instantly, This thing is a pain to fly that fast. and even harder to land.

EDIT: ok I landed it.... blew up some engines coming down but meh ... I also posted a pic of the rear landing gear.

All pics added to album.

Edited February 15, 2014 by Tidus Klein

[ihtoit]

is the B9 landing gear as indestructible as the stock gear, in that the latter loses physics the second you move to the launchpad or runway?

[Visari]

B9 gear is actually extremely fragile in current state.

It requires balance tweaks posted in the B9 thread and other places.

[TheHengeProphet]

The B9 landing gear on its own is quite robust. Its ability to connect to other parts, however, is quite feeble (without the fixes) and is quite prone to twisting in ways not condusive to travel.

[BubbaWilkins]

This is not an official entry since I have not landed it and did not break the current non-fairing record....but I'll get there!

I do have TV Pizza and Aerospace, so this might actually go a lot faster if I remove that.

Edited February 17, 2014 by BubbaWilkins

[Tidus Klein]

Yes I agree using half fairinged planes is breaking physics a bit. But it also makes the plane incredibly unstable, pushing your center of drag or COD heavily to one side ( why do you thing I have 4 small control surfaces on the bottom, when all i would need is 2?)

Now COD off center is no real problem when your flying at normal speeds at normal altitudes, but at these insane speeds so low a small control surface produces an insane 48 kn of drag, about the same for a turbo jet, and a drag chute at 28.

Another thing here is that I'm literally using less then half the engines of the current record holder and going near 200 m/s faster and I know my plane can go faster, I have had her up to 1760 m/s before losing control and blowing up do to insane G loads. and here lies the other problem,

In order to go this fast so low you have to to one of two things, MOAR ENGINES, or less drag. ether way you go once you start getting to the extremes of ether end your going to have problems be it structural and fuel related or COD off set,

The main problem with my end is its high instability and float characteristic, even with 7 SAS's the plane drifts to one side or side-slip and as soon as it gets higher then 3 degrees to direction of travel X( your past the point of no return. you could fix this with a vertical stabilizer, but then that's more drag..... now you see the dilemma/ Challenge, how fast can I go with out flying out of control with as little control surfaces as possible.

Edited February 17, 2014 by Tidus Klein

[m1sz]

Yes, one of the things I considered more genius is to change control surfaces for lots of sas modules, just to reduce drag, as it seems to do more harm at those speeds than some extra weight!

Also, I wonder why no one tryed to do a wider design, with all the engines covered behind the front, maybe it's just a ****

[TheHengeProphet]

Here is my entry. It's not a winner, but it reaches Mach 2 and is (in my opinion) the best looking entry yet.

I based this puppy on the F-19 Stealth Fighter, a fictional airplane from an eponymous game.

Video!

Final top speed: 692.8 m/s (Mach 2.045)

Fastest speed is at 5:43

Notes I have found while testing this thing:

Using stock landing gear instead of B9 landing gear gained me almost 20 m/s.

The brakes on the default landing gear are pathetic.

P-wings are hilariously robust.

Allmoving P-Wings have remarkably little drag.

If you want this challenge done without clipping, every entry in the challenge would be disqualified, as all parts "clip" due to collision meshes not being exactly what the visual entails.

It's very hard to go fast at this altitude, and I think I did just about the best I could with an aerodynamically reasonable aircraft.

I can't determine if FAR works on visual mesh or collision mesh...

Edited February 18, 2014 by TheHengeProphet

[Sevant]

Here is my entry. It's not a winner, but it reaches Mach 2 and is (in my opinion) the best looking entry yet.

Nice plane, excellent landing! I couldn't agree more about the stock gear--both for speed and wimpy brakes. I enjoyed your use of a wing to slow down on the runway.

As to embedding video, there is a button labeled "insert video" in the advanced post window. It will bring up a box for you to paste the video link into. Once you have done this and clicked "ok", you should see a line similar to this in your post:

[ VIDEO]

To keep the above text from actually embedding a video, I put a space between the first bracket and the word "VIDEO". In normal embedding, that space is not present.

[Sevant]

NOW I CLAM MY PRIZE!!!

Nice job Tidus!

OP: Is his run officially a new record?

[TheHengeProphet]

Nice plane, excellent landing! I couldn't agree more about the stock gear--both for speed and wimpy brakes. I enjoyed your use of a wing to slow down on the runway.

As to embedding video, there is a button labeled "insert video" in the advanced post window. It will bring up a box for you to paste the video link into. Once you have done this and clicked "ok", you should see a line similar to this in your post:

[ VIDEO]

To keep the above text from actually embedding a video, I put a space between the first bracket and the word "VIDEO". In normal embedding, that space is not present.

Thanks! Now I know how to use that feature.

The use of the wing to slow down was completely unintentional, as I had to land with the front wheel brake enabled, causing instability. I was so glad when nothing broke, as this was the fourth recording... The first flight had the better landing, but the plane just sailed off the end of the runway after braking the entire length of it.

[palker]

Finally managed to make a plane that can land although i had to sacrifice some speed to get there. I tried many different arrangements even tried to make a swing wing using KAS but nothing really worked so i had to add a piece of wing with low sweep near centre of the aircraft so that i can slow down for landing without that all landings ended in a flip and explosion. Max speed was 2.436 Mach which is about a half of the current record but well at least my plane still looks like an aeroplane. Anyway since i use TV PP i cannot go faster than 1100 m/s on jet power. The last two images in album show what happened when i swapped the central turbojet engine for ramjet and climbed into higher altitude. I almost circumnavigated Kerbin with it but unfortunately ramjet lacks electric generator so i run out of power just before reaching KSC and crashed.

http://imgur.com/a/ZSO5c

[m1sz]

Nice job Tidus!

OP: Is his run officially a new record?

Well!, I missed his new pictures. I think it's near the clipping border. Im worried about clipping engines, fuel, sas, anything that significantly reduces the size of the plane in order to reduce drag with FAR, and to give some bigger advantage, but this plane has new features wich are the ones that are giving him the speed edge. So my though is that yes, it's a new record.

Anyway, I dont want to be the only "ruler", you all who participated in this challenge has the word if you think this goes beyond the "standar and normal" clipping in this game (little clipping in few parts).

Ill update the leaderboard for now

[Tidus Klein]

The only part that's really partly clipped is the landing gear in the back, do to KSP clipping it when I was turning it to meet the ground right, and the engines are sort of do to again KSP not being good at putting thous small tanks on OTHER then that.......

(holds up trophy) I WOULD LIKE TO THANK THE ACADEMY....AND ALL THE PEOPLE THAT INSPIRED ME!........myself:D

[Sevant]

(holds up trophy) I WOULD LIKE TO THANK THE ACADEMY....AND ALL THE PEOPLE THAT INSPIRED ME!........myself:D

Lol

[Ten Character Limit]

[TheBobWiley]

Hi guys, First off, Ive never had luck building planes that A. can lift off before the end of the runway and B. stay straight while flying.

With both of these hurdles in mind I saw this challenge and thought, hey, I bet I could build a light plane to go in the "stock" category (no FAR).... Well here she is, I even grabbed first place while I was at it! - I will upload the video later tonight, takes forever to convert from FRAPs to youtube....

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Edited February 18, 2014 by TheBobWiley

[TheBobWiley]

And the proof! - I just noticed I dipped above 1,000m on take off, but my top speed was reached after I leveled out under the limit. I can redo it if needed.

[ihtoit]

errrr... what flight information system are you using? That certainly is not the stock resources box in the video.

[TheBobWiley]

I actually have quite a few mods installed, but none of them change the game play (like FAR). I was using all stock parts on this plane too. The resource panel is KSP Alternate Resource Panel. I also had Mechjeb to keep track of my plane's drag and air needs, as well as weight and TWR. Im pretty certain stock atmosphere engines can't go much faster under 1000m without FAR, I had 50 of them going on a plane and it maxed out at 380 no matter what I tried.

[Tidus Klein]

ha That's a cute little plane.....Nice job!

[ExPatriotMissile]

I was working on this challenge with stock parts in the stock flight model and noticed that a much higher velocity can be reached if the plane is shaken violently while under the control of SAS. This single engine craft made it to 400 m/s under 600m altitude, and I even forgot to empty the oxidizer! Is this a bug in the physics engine that other people have noticed?

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[TheBobWiley]

ExPatriotMissile, yes, both me and Hejnfelt accidentally utilize the bug you experienced. It is a part of the infiniglide physics bug. As the plane passes mach 1 in the stock game the planes begin to shake which makes SAS move the control surfaces really fast, which produce lift and reduce drag the more they move, thus going faster. The stock "speed limit" for air engines under 1000m seems to be right at 360 km/h without abusing any part of the physics bug. I built a super sleek 50 engine powered plane and without it shaking it could not pass 360 km/h, as soon as I nosed up and got the plane shaking it easily passed 400 km/h. This challenge is not good for stock unfortunately

[ihtoit]

I did a stock (on Vanilla .23 with FAR as the only addon), with no active control surfaces apart from the (slow and low) standard tailplane setup and Delta wings, couldn't get past 390m/s, period. Even as high as 10km. Didn't matter how many engines I added - managed to get up to 8 on a pair of Quads.

[lunait]

I found out a neat trick. Technically it's within the rules of the challenge. The trick is to partially hide the wings within the fairing, so that they don't generate any drag (but also no lift - however, the plane can still take off from the runway). Then, when you ditch the fairing, the wings start generating drag and lift. Since I've noticed that wings are often the parts generating the most drag at high speeds, this can actually help you quite a lot. (NB: This method only seems to work with static wings, i.e. not canards or control surfaces.)

Using this method together with the other tricks I've seen in this thread, I could get up to ~1400 m/s with this relatively simple plane seen below. I have not yet been able to land it, though.

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I've obviously seen people hide other things within fairings, but I don't know if anyone's using this trick specifically with wings yet, so I'm sharing it for the common goal of MORE SPEED!!!

Edited February 23, 2014 by lunait