totm june 2018 Work-in-Progress [WIP] Design Thread

[EpicSpaceTroll139]

On 1/21/2019 at 6:00 AM, big boy said:

I am making some good progress on my >400 part stock (no Making History) Saturn V replica recently.

<snip>

Hey that's pretty good!  I like the detail!  

Don't be too worried if the lander has a high part count.  I recall from working on mine, that while I never finished the rest of the rocket, it became quite clear that the lander would be a large fraction of the part count. Stock leg secondary option isn't bad though.

Out of curiosity, do you plan to add spherical helium tanks at the bottom of the S-IVB?

(Sorry for the late reply... been busy getting back to college this week)

Edited January 23, 2019 by EpicSpaceTroll139

[Triop]

Working on a new stealth fighter.

Edited January 23, 2019 by Triop

[Phantomic]

here's a big ol' trap door mechanism made for a ginormous group project between myself, servo and many others. for said project, it required this thing for.... well now that would give it away but i did have to make it work upside down too,

the ore tanks are there for weight, moth mechanisms are 15 parts and i need 2 of each. this is just a proof of concept version and the real one will be much longer

@klond can you see anywhere i could improve? maybe use a smaller movement source?

nevermind we went with a different design, but i still want to do something with this

Edited January 24, 2019 by Phantomic

[klond]

16 hours ago, Phantomic said:

can you see anywhere i could improve? maybe use a smaller movement source?

nevermind we went with a different design, but i still want to do something with this

 I appreciate that you thought of me.  Servo's pretty good with that stuff cuz of all the swing wing work, specially since he's on the inside of this project already. 

 Sounds like you guys got ahold of it.  GL, can't wait to see what it ends up being.

[Kerbalwerks]

On 1/1/2019 at 3:59 PM, qzgy said:

How is your computer not melted yet?

Looks like its coming along well.

 

On 12/26/2018 at 8:12 PM, Kronus_Aerospace said:

Progress on the Azathoth Carrier has sped up massively thanks to 1.6. The body (hull?) is starting to take shape, and internal features such as the microfighter bay are well underway.

The Carrier itself is sitting comfortably at 2960 parts and 4600 tonnes. The design is basically finalized at this point, and with no more memory leakage issues I'll likely be able to complete it within the next month or so.

I'm estimating final part count to be around 4000, can't see it going toooo much higher than that at this point, of course that's excluding all of the aircraft that will go on this thing, which altogether will add another 650 parts.

@Kerbalwerks hOLY sMOKES. That Voyager looks incredible man! Under 1000 parts too.   

Been tweaking the Voyager and now up to 1100 parts, sigh but could not resist the extra parts for ascetic reasons.............anyway starting to get the KSP stutter when in the SPH, has there been a fix found for that?

[HB Stratos]

to be exact it´s a collab between:

@Kronus_Aerospace, @Servo, @HolidayTheLeek, Lunar/Nighthawk, @Phantomic and myself

(hopefully I haven´t forgotten anyone)

 

[big boy]

23 hours ago, EpicSpaceTroll139 said:

Hey that's pretty good!  I like the detail!  

Don't be too worried if the lander has a high part count.  I recall from working on mine, that while I never finished the rest of the rocket, it became quite clear that the lander would be a large fraction of the part count. Stock leg secondary option isn't bad though.

Out of curiosity, do you plan to add spherical helium tanks at the bottom of the S-IVB?

(Sorry for the late reply... been busy getting back to college this week)

Thank you for responding  I've found that Monopropellant tanks make especially good helium spheres for the S-IVB, but i have not added them yet.

Edited January 24, 2019 by big boy

[AeroGav]

@septemberWaves

I tried to recreate your lower stage airplane then graft my "scream chaser" upper onto it.    The hardest part was making the two subassemblies merge in SPH - the attachment system can be such an ass.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2u6gj1c8b35j3y3/piggyback.craft?dl=0

The scream chaser upper is indeed heavy,  but it's got plenty of lift and not much drag (the SRB only takes it up to 10km  & 440 m/s , it has to cruise on to orbit from there  with 60kn of nerv power).    In a shallow climb, your upper stage gets it to mach 5 air breathing no problems.       However, it starts pitching up when the RAPIERs go to close cycle mode because there's lots of thrust below the centre of mass of the combined vessels, especially as the lower stage gets light when all that LFO is guzzled away.    

For the second test flight I was going to  correct this by angling the RAPIER nozzles a bit in SPH,  and was planning to test this out in rescaled Kerbin system,  but  I realized i'd probably misread your intention so stopped work.      I was assuming you were using a flight manager/stage recovery mod so you can fly both halves of the airplane after separation, but i think your goal was to accomplish this without any mod,   and just get the lower stage zooming up at steep angle,  so that you've got time to circularize your orbit on the upper stage before the lower falls below 35km and is auto deleted.   In that case,  both stages need really high TWR and nuke engines don't make sense, nor do large wings on the orbiter.     KSP adding "fake difficulty" here.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2s8t3ix76nha50j/Almost FlyingWing.craft?dl=0

Also,  I had another attempt to make a satisfactory stock flying wing SSTO, but once again i chicken out and stick on some tailbooms.   To balance the fuel in the tailbooms, requires from front mounted strakes.      Still,   there is not much fuselage to this thing.    The main stack consists of a fly by wire hub, a mk1 command pod,  a service bay,  a nerv, and a panther.  

It actually has enough fuel left over to reach Duna,  so i started thinking about how to make it land on Duna without busting apart.      The main problem with landing an airplane on Duna is the tendency to spin out then flip when encountering rough terrain, so i tried to engineer in lots of "understeer" to the landing gear.   The main legs are much larger than the nose,  and the friction control is set to max on these and min at the front, also the rear gear are quite far behind the CoM.      This is something you are advised not to do, especially if your plane has no canards,  since it makes it hard to push the nose up and take off,  but i was desperate to get as much "understeer" as possible.    On Kerbin,  it is indeed unable to lift off until it hits the ramp at the end of the runway.   This is exacerbated by it's nose down stance on the ground ,  due to the rear gear legs being longer (i wanted to maintain penty of clearance at the back, since the other way to damage your airplane when landing on Duna is to tailstrike when trying to land a bit slower).

I put an oscar b in the service bay and a vernor thruster on the nose, which doesn't help it lift off on kerbin but does work well on Duna.

Finally, belt and braces approach,  we have some braking parachutes.    The drag at the rear of the airplane keeps it going straight on rollout no matter if you hit a bump.

This appears to work,   i did a quick save just above landing on Duna.   My first attempt resulted in the nose strakes busting off (i didn't deploy the chutes), but the next three were all good,  no damage landings, with various degrees of grace.

Work needed - this thing is not yet KerbalX ready.      

It's got a natural tendency to pitch up to 7 degrees with SAS off, which is a bit too steep at any point on the ascent from Kerbin, though is a good landing approach attitude on Duna.    If you try to remedy by selecting prograde hold,  it then pitches down to 1.5 degree AoA,  which doesn't give enough lift in the airbreathing flight.   The controls are a bit too sensitive to correct these tendencies  easily.   I should probably reduce control authority on the elevons and add some trim flaps to make it easy to control climb angle precisely on ascent.

 

[Phantomic]

here's the whole mechanism, built roughly to size. it was a little rough to synch them because the upper trap doors raised on the deploy whereas the lower turrets were "lowered" on the deploy, so the top would be deployed and the bottom would be raised

[septemberWaves]

36 minutes ago, AeroGav said:

I was assuming you were using a flight manager/stage recovery mod so you can fly both halves of the airplane after separation, but i think your goal was to accomplish this without any mod

Actually I am using a lot of mods (including Stage Recovery), but you are correct that I do not wish to use Stage Recovery for this particular purpose. My intended flight profile would send the launch vehicle to the same apoapsis as the orbiter (probably 27km above the atmosphere; that is my favoured parking orbit in my 3.2x scale save) and detach just before, so that the orbiter can circularize and then I can fly the launcher down to the runway manually (to pretend I am recovering it and reusing it properly, despite being in a science mode save). I am not at a point in my ongoing game where it makes sense to even experiment with this beyond just thinking about the concept, but once I reach that point I will post my actual in-progress system here.

[Jon144]

Hey guys, I released the engine I have been using as a subassembly for anyone who is interested in making their own propeller planes.

Download it: https://kerbalx.com/Jon144/Kestrel-M6-120

[sturmhauke]

So you're using LF/O with fuel cells for power, rather than RTGs? Interesting, I'll have to play around with that.

[Jon144]

3 minutes ago, sturmhauke said:

So you're using LF/O with fuel cells for power, rather than RTGs? Interesting, I'll have to play around with that.

Less parts, cheaper, less cheaterish. Just preference

[McFlyever]

On 1/23/2019 at 10:04 PM, HB Stratos said:

First of all, that thing looks realy good but:
1. only block 1 had no octoweba t the bottom, block 4 was the first one to make a succesful landing
2. As BigBoy said, there is no fairing around the dragon capsule
3. the Dragon V2 trunk seems a bit too long fow what is should be
hoping for some more landing videos soon...
-HB Stratos

Thx for feedback!

OK, thats right, buit i have to say, it´s not my goal, to build an 100% exact copy of the Falcon/Dragon. I try to build the importent things on it, to create a stable and playable version - with less than 400 parts.

1. I like the older confi more than the new style, also It´s better/easier to build 

2. To Many Parts around the Pod produces heavy Drag, i can´t remove that. On wiki i found this pic about this...? 

Spoiler

3. Hm okay, maybe i can reduce the size - my wish was an bigger trunk than the original, to bring a longer payload into orbit.

[kapteenipirk]

I know there are some other projects i should work on, but i really wanted to return to something a little more simple and fun.

And since i have been thinking about navy stuff recently, why not make some more navy aircraft...well...some is a bit of an understatement.

Most of the stuff will be carrier aircraft from 4 nations, with some float-planes and land-based aircraft on the side.

The float-planes will likely find their way on to the KNS sea-plane fleet, and the carrier planes will likely end up in the decks of my future carriers.

 

As is to be expected from the KNS project, all the aircraft will be simple, easy to use, with good performance.

 

Here's the ones im planning on making.

Spoiler

Some 1/72 scale aircraft models with a few papermodels (The SD A5M is my own design), and a little Lego microbuild of a Vought Kingfisher.

Back in the day i didn't really care too much about painting and decaling, i just loved building them.

 

And that's not all

Some 1/350 scale stuff, in plastic and paper form.

All of that stuff is quite recent, so paint and decals are actually there this time.

 

And last but not least

The Grumman duck, that is hanging from the mount where the giant airship used to be, before it's structural collapse due to me being lazy and not putting enough supports in.

 

I think this collection of models will make a sufficient enough catalogue, so don't expect to see anything that isn't shown here.

And as for larger aircraft, those are for another day.

 

 

To give you a better idea of what you can expect, here's a BF-109, landed on the VAB helipad.

 

Yes, my plan is to make every aircraft in the pack able to do that...i mean, what better way is there to prove that a plane is carrier capable .

 

 

Speaking of the BF-109, i have some plans that i might soon start building the UCS BF-109 i promised a long time ago.

I have been going back and forth over what kind of replica it should be, so it may take a while.

Hopefully, if the BF-109 ends up being a success, there shouldn't be such a large gap between UCS crafts anymore.

Edited February 2, 2019 by kapteenipirk
*PAINTING, not printing...i really need to sleep more.

[EvenFlow]

I guess you can call me Grunder Industries at this point or sth.

Will be releasing sometime soon. Still have to add some body panels, polish out the flight characteristics (although it flies well even now! All it needs is thrust.)

[Servo]

Today and Yesterday I built a pair of airplanes for no reason at all...

I modified my oldish F-84 into a F-84F Thunderstreak. Unfortunately, I had to increase the part count from 40 to 45. Unbearable, I know.

I blame the wings for being so strange. I mean, wide wings, significant anhedral, and slightly too large to be a single swept wing. Unacceptable.

No reason whatsoever, I can confirm. Stop being curious.

[Phantomic]

TFW your plane is already 250 parts without props

also i'm making a B-54

[Torn4dO]

I'm curious to see where this is going

[Phantomic]

finished it last night but the B-54 was the B-50 on steroids which was the B-29 on crack

Edited January 27, 2019 by Phantomic

[HB Stratos]

image not available @Phantomic

[Phantomic]

52 minutes ago, HB Stratos said:

image not available @Phantomic

right let me fix that

 

got it

Edited January 27, 2019 by Phantomic

[Triop]

On 1/26/2019 at 9:08 PM, EvenFlow said:

 

That jet on the left (the red one) looks F@$#% amazing !

Please tell me it is stock build...

As for me, right now I'm working on:

[Servo]

2017 was the year for solar panel cockpits, 2018 was the year for fuel tank cockpits. I bring you 2019: the year of the communotron.

\

I mean, who doesn't love flat black cockpits? 

I noticed that the B-2 was sorely lacking a modern replica, so I set out to fix that. This may get dialed back a smidge in scale - I didn't realize just how big the B-2 was.

This is as far as I got tonight, more progress to come.

[kapteenipirk]

Time for a little mid project update.

 

I have now completed a few more aircraft from the pack. These include:

Supermarine Seafire.

Gloster Gladiator.

Mitsubishi A6M Zero

Vought Kingfisher.

Bristol Beaufighter.

 

Id say progress is pretty good, and it seems that my goal of getting every aircraft (minus the floatplanes and multi engined planes) to land on the VAB helipad, seems quite realistic.

 

 

As for floatplanes, this time around, things went a lot smoother, and i was able to get the Kingfisher to work after only a single mod to the original design, witch in this case was a small extension to the main float.

Unfortunately the Kingfisher has the same problems as the Zeke (decided to name the floatplane Zeke, and the carrier version Zero), but not as bad.

 

You'll get to see the rest when i release the pack, witch should be pretty soon, as, as i said, progress so far is pretty good, and it's only gonna improve moving forward.

Right now i have a feeling that i should make some follow up packs to this one, one including some medium and heavy-bombers and flying-boats, and one including some navy jets.

The bigger multi-engined stuff will likely end up being made, but as for the jets, i just love WWII naval aviation so much more...hmm...come to think of it, a pre WWII pack with some biplanes on it would make for a lovely pack as-well, would go really well with a Kerbalized U.S.S Lexington, witch i have been wanting to make.

I dunno, just some ideas for what might follow. I will likely for now concentrate on WWII stuff, as i really want to try and make some kind of a KSP film/story set in WWII, and that will require tons more craft to be made, so much so that i will likely soon have over a 100 different craft operating under the KNS project.