Airplane Racing: Blazing Wings Championship Series

[leafty]

Blazing Wings Championship Series

For experienced airplane pilot, here comes the BWCS, a series of aircraft races that will put your piloting skills to a challenge. Who will become known as the fastest and craziest pilot in Kerbin?

Rules for the first race:

Track: Proxy Call - Download save folder here

1) The track presents a start, a finish and a bunch of checkpoints in the form of giant gates. If you played Trackmania, this goes by the same rules. You have to go through the start, then through all checkpoints in any order and lastly through the finish to validate your time. Start, checkpoints and finish do not have an orientation, you can go through them in any direction. On the image, you can see the order I used for my own submission, but you can choose any other.

2) Your score is the time it took you to get from start to finish, valid only if you get through all checkpoints in the process.

3) Your airplane has to be intact until you pass the finish gate. You can crash after, but Jeb will not be happy.

4) Use the persistent trails plugin to record your race. Use maximum precision. Stop recording a couple of seconds after you go through the finish gate. Don't forget to save.

5) One stage, stock parts, no FAR. (May change in future races.)

6) You can use your own jet-powered aircraft, but keep in mind that the gates are not very large. Jet-power only (no rockets, no RCS, no R.A.P.I.E.R.).

Submission:

Post your persistent trail file (located in [...]\Kerbal Space Program\GameData\PersistentTrails\PluginData\Tracks) and your craft file if you used your own. Optionally post timing screenshots if you can, if not I will compute your time myself. I will close submissions when no more new entries come in, after a decent amount of time (at least 1 month).

Notes:

* In the save file, you will find an airplane, named Dart. This is the one I used for my own submission. It has a thrust limiter to make it go slowly and action group 1 to toggle the jet engine.

* Each gate in ~190 parts, you may want to lower your graphics settings, though I did not encounter any significant lag during my tryouts.

My entry: 01:27

Persistent trail file

How I measured my time: I took control of the finish gate, put the camera near the start gate with the replay ghost just before it. I hit play and took a screenshot when the plane got through the start gate. I then recentered the camera on the finish gate and waited for the ghost to go through it.

I crashed quite a few times before I was able to do it. That minute and a half of piloting was quite intense.

Fell free to suggest your own tracks for the series. By the way, I used hyper edit and Alt+F12 cheats to place the gates.

Lastly, I may have forgot one thing or two in the rules, so please ask if something is unclear.

[Darren9]

Could you allow B9 and FireSpitter, oh and also P-Wing (in a separate "mod" class if necessary), and adding FAR on a small tight course isn't necessarily an advantage - you can stall and fall out of the sky a lot easier

[jmiki8]

Looks like Red Bull AirRace Too bad, my computer would probably explode as i approached the gates.

[leafty]

Could you allow B9 and FireSpitter, oh and also P-Wing (in a separate "mod" class if necessary), and adding FAR on a small tight course isn't necessarily an advantage - you can stall and fall out of the sky a lot easier

I fear it might be unbalanced, and I don't know how many people will try this, so if they are enough participants willing to try to have a go at a separate mod class, I will gladly allow it. And yeah, with FAR, I feel it's hard to not stall at such slow speeds.