Ultimate Aircraft Speed Challenge

[iamwearingpants]

The leaderboards

1st.) iamwearingpants, 7.8 points (39.041km - 5,002m/s), Apophis MKIII

We all know you can go fast in the atmosphere.

But those challenges were short bursts of speed at low altitude.

Here is something different:

Stay under 40km with less than 100m/s vertical speed, and try to get the highest velocity.

You are allowed to use C-7 and his new experimental, nothing else.

Also, you can fly into space when you\'re done, but you need to aleast get back to Kerbin afterwards

You can use your own ships

Points is the altitude divided by the speed.

Here is my record with the Apophis MKIII:

My landing:

I was going so rediculously fast I could hear the freaking wind sounds up there.

I\'m sure you can beat that! Go Go Go!

[Tim_Barrett]

Augh, derp. Time to explain speed records again.

Atmospheric speed challenges should be under 5km, where the air is most dense. This is completely different amounts of drag from 40km, 20km, and even 10km.

Anyway, I have about 850m/s under something under 5km from a challenge I did with another forumer awhile back, I\'ll go find it.

[iamwearingpants]

Augh, derp. Time to explain speed records again.

Atmospheric speed challenges should be under 5km, where the air is most dense. This is completely different amounts of drag from 40km, 20km, and even 10km.

The whole point of the challenge is to insanely fast where the air is just enough to keep you from flying into space.

I know it\'s high up, but that\'s nessicary

Watch this:

[Iskierka]

Space is defined as above the Von Karman line, which is 100 km on Earth.

When scaled for Kerbin, this comes down to around 30 km.

Your record was taken 9 km into space.

[Tim_Barrett]

Nevermind, all I could find were the results of my smaller spaceplane. Here it is

[gabyalufix]

Iskierka: That\'s an odd definition of the space line. Seems way too low to me.

Unless the atmosphere guage is log scale, it doesn\'t look to me like the atmospheres of earth and kerbin align with that scaling.

Earth air pressure is 100 kPa at sea level, and 0.000032 kPa at 100 km. Whereas the atmosphere guage is around half full at 30km above kerbin. While that 30-100 scale might work for orbital heights and other stuff, I don\'t think it works for the atmosphere, unless I\'m wholly off base.

What\'s the scale on the atmo guage anyways? Is it linear?

[Guest GroundHOG-2010]

Iskierka: That\'s an odd definition of the space line. Seems way too low to me.

Unless the atmosphere guage is log scale, it doesn\'t look to me like the atmospheres of earth and kerbin align with that scaling.

Earth air pressure is 100 kPa at sea level, and 0.000032 kPa at 100 km. Whereas the atmosphere guage is around half full at 30km above kerbin. While that 30-100 scale might work for orbital heights and other stuff, I don\'t think it works for the atmosphere, unless I\'m wholly off base.

What\'s the scale on the atmo guage anyways? Is it linear?

It makes sence to me.

Also this has already been done before, and I did it with these rules.

1. Only C7 Flight Pack, Silisko Edition, Stock, KW Challenger and Novapunch pack parts allowed.

2. All record attempts have to be made over the KSP Launch Site.

3. All record attempts MUST be below 1,000 metres.

4. There must be 3 pictures or a video included to get on the leaderboard. These are...

Two of two different passes(highest speed if possible)

and one of landing.

5. NO STEALING ANYONE\'s DESIGNS

It worked really well and a large amount of people got above real life mach 3 with tosh having the record at 1164.2 ms^-1

Source page here : http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=4386.0

[comradephil]

This is at 2% throttle.

Do I really need to prove it to you?

EDIT: I found an old screenshot of one of the earlier versions.

[Spearka]

Space is defined as above the Von Karman line, which is 100 km on Earth.

When scaled for Kerbin, this comes down to around 30 km.

Your record was taken 9 km into space.

you still get atmosphere to about 70km

#FACEPALM#

[Iskierka]

you still get atmosphere to about 70km

#FACEPALM#

On Earth, there is still measurable atmosphere at 10,000 km.

Are you going to claim that the ISS, at 300-500 km, is in the lower atmosphere?

The definition of space is the point where, ignoring coriolis effects, you need to go faster than orbital velocity to maintain enough lift to fly. Hence at that point, you\'re in orbit, not flying. On Earth, this is 100 km. Scaled for Kerbin\'s atmosphere and orbital velocity, this is around 30 km.

Iskierka: That\'s an odd definition of the space line. Seems way too low to me.

Unless the atmosphere guage is log scale, it doesn\'t look to me like the atmospheres of earth and kerbin align with that scaling.

Earth air pressure is 100 kPa at sea level, and 0.000032 kPa at 100 km. Whereas the atmosphere guage is around half full at 30km above kerbin. While that 30-100 scale might work for orbital heights and other stuff, I don\'t think it works for the atmosphere, unless I\'m wholly off base.

What\'s the scale on the atmo guage anyways? Is it linear?

The atmospheric gauge is a log scale - the atmosphere was long ago confirmed as logarithmic with altitude*, and you\'ll notice that with altitude, the atmospheric gauge is linear. Hence, logarithmic with density/pressure. See above for how the space definition works and gets scaled on Kerbin.

* For reference, scale height is 5 km, whereas Earth\'s scale height varies between 8 and 6km. Taking a lower-atmosphere average of 7.5 km, atmospheric density on Kerbin for a given altitude is equal to that 50% higher on Earth.

[Kosmo-not]

So I guess the goal is to get the lowest score possible? Here\'s my score of 0.0798

However, if the goal is to get the most points, then here is my score of 127,870