Dumb Missile Launch Contest

[dbmorpher]

After experimenting in liquid snack technology Jebediah accidentally spilled the leftover nuclear waste on the stockpile of TT18-A Launch Clamps completely dissolving their molecular bonds.

The DOD (Dumb Ordinance Division) was absolutely outraged at the knowledge of the incident. The DOD needs a new missile and fast! Newspapers talk of a growing war between Kerbals over a limited supply of toothbrushes.

It is your job to design the next generation of dumb missiles, get to work!

Rules

1. Only stock parts

2. Only parts allowed are wings, 1 command pod and 1 solid rocket

3. No manually controlling the rocket by any means (SAS, Control Surfaces, RCS)

4. All rockets must be launched on the ground at a 0 degree angle at the Runway

5. Minimum of 3 pictures are needed (1 before, 1 during, 1 mission report)

6. No FAR or other physics altering mods

Scoring

1

Ground Distance * ----------- * Bonus = Score

# of Wings

Bonuses

Thin Air: 1.5 Fly over 10,000m high

Yeager Breaker: 1.5 Break the speed of sound (340m/s over land)

Keepin' the Snacks In: 2 Don't do a flip

Unmanned Advantage: 3 Fly over 22,000m

BraMost: 5 Reach a speed of Mach 3 (1020m/s over land)

X-treme: 10 Enter outer space (69,000m)

(Bonuses are added together)

My Attempt

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Distance: 8,574

Height: 10,020

Speed: 557

Bonuses: Thin Air and Yeager Breaker

Score: 6,430.5

Leaderboard

1. Fengist: 100,847.5

2. Deathsoul: 39,318.75

3. Vindelle_Sunveam: 16,787

4. dbmorpher: 6,430.5

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Honorable Mention

Cantab for trying to break math

*Will consider a FAR leaderboard*

Edited May 24, 2014 by dbmorpher

[Captain Sierra]

Can I not slap a nose cone on the front of it?

[dbmorpher]

Sure you can do that, I don't see why though. With the current flight model nosecones are useless.

[cantab]

Shameless loophole abuse entry

Ready to launch:

Wings? Where we're going we don't need wings! by cantab314, on Flickr

Proof that it got off the ground, if only by about 1 1/2 metres.

Catching some air by cantab314, on Flickr

During its one second flight it unsurprisingly did not flip. Figures, in case you want them.

The figures by cantab314, on Flickr

So, I make my score 91 * 1/0 * 2 = infinity points And I expect a requirement for future entries to include at least one wing.

[Captain Sierra]

Sure you can do that, I don't see why though. With the current flight model nosecones are useless.

Not entirely. They have reduced drag coefficients compared to everything else. While they do increase drag, they also help keep the nose end pointed to prograde.

@cantab, TROLLOLOLOLOLOL

[QuesoExplosivo]

No, technically 1/0 is undefined, not infinity. (The number of wings is not a limit approaching zero).

Math pedantry for the win!

[patfree14094]

This is my go. I don't think I spilled anything on it this time.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[Fengist]

Ooooh kay. This challenge was a LOT more difficult than I expected. But, here's the results.

Ground distance = 121,017m

Wings = 6

Bonuses = 8 -Thin Air, Yeager Breaker, Keepin' the Snacks In, Unmanned Advantage: 3 Fly over 2200m.

So, total score is: 161,356

I'll put some notes on how I managed this and what happened at the end. Here's the selfies.

Pre Launch

Flying Backward over KSC

For some reason, it started wobbling and settled in to a slow left hand turn, luckily avoiding the mountains.

Splashdown...

Ok, I imagine some will come up with a much better score because I've seen what's possible. This is just the best I managed in oh... 50 or 60 odd launches.

I stumbled onto the technique quite by accident. But once I saw how well it worked, I started tweaking. First, the two wings on front and the two in back are rotated 3 clicks (I think that's 36 degrees). The benefit this gave was that it got me off the runway well before the end. This allowed me to start my climb much earlier and thus spend more fuel climbing rather than sliding on pavement. I tested this with multiple rotated wings and it easily got off the runway at 80 m/s. This also allowed me some pretty nice altitudes (see pic below.) The problem I ran into with higher altitudes, it would start to pitch and roll uncontrollably due to the loss of atmosphere. The middle wing I found out I needed as a stabilizer to keep it from rolling during the climb.

By playing with those basic ideas, I discovered that if I were able to control the flight so that it was in a roughly 70 degrees climb when the engine died that it would stall out and almost perfectly start flying backwards. It also meant, if I could pick the angle of the stall, I wouldn't flip. This took some SERIOUS pixel by pixel tweaking of the wing locations. Quite maddening.

Once it stalled and started flying backward, since the wings were rotated, it would pitch up making the middle wing the lift. Thus, I ended up gliding backwards back toward KSC. Most of my attempts ended with me smacking into the mountains behind KSC. The entry, for some reason, started wobbling and then went into a very slow left hand bank, I didn't mind. Beat my other distances by a good 30,000m and I landed in the ocean south west of KSC.

Anyway, that's how I managed it. The shots below tell me that all of the requirements are probably beatable but I question the 69km one. Not sure if it can be done. I managed just over 42km but that's a long way from 69.

My best altitude using the method described above.

And my best speed.

Edited May 23, 2014 by Fengist

[Deathsoul097]

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Bonuses:

Thin Air: 1.5 Fly over 10,000m high

Yeager Breaker: 1.5 Break the speed of sound (340m/s over land)

Keepin' the Snacks In: 2 Don't do a flip

Unmanned Advantage: 3 Fly over 2200m

Bonuses come out to 8.

Distance is 31,455.

4 wings were used.

8 * 1/4 * 31455 = 62,910.

Not the most amazing score, but easy enough and fun to do.

(EDIT: Don't mind the glitch displays, that's just VOID being buggy. It adds no parts and gives me no advantage in a challenge like this.)

[dbmorpher]

Ok so currently

cantab has u

patfree14094 has 1528.5

Fengist actually has 100,847.5

Deathsoul actually has 39318.75

Sorry I had a mixup with the bonuses I meant for the Unmaned Advantage to take place at 22,000m not 2,200. My bad.

From now on also please calculate your own score and just as a reminder bonuses are ADDED

Updating the leaderboard

[Deathsoul097]

Ok so currently

cantab has u

patfree14094 has 1528.5

Fengist actually has 100,847.5

Deathsoul actually has 39318.75

Sorry I had a mixup with the bonuses I meant for the Unmaned Advantage to take place at 22,000m not 2,200. My bad.

From now on also please calculate your own score and just as a reminder bonuses are ADDED

Updating the leaderboard

Why did my score almost half?

[dbmorpher]

Sorry Deathsoul that was my mistake, I wrote down the bonus for Unmanned Advantage wrong

[Vindelle_Sunveam]

16787 = 19185/4*(1.5+2)
(mach1+noflip)

this is a very difficult and fun challenge, good work on the rules

EDIT : Mute or muffle the audio Edited May 24, 2014 by Vindelle_Sunveam
Edited the video audio, because it had speech from a video I was watching XD

[dbmorpher]

Wow Vindelle awesome stability!

That puts you at number 3.