Skydiver here! Done about 20 wingsuit jumps. Proximity flying is what you were referencing, and is usually done with a base jumper set up. It's also very dangerous! Skydiving itself is relatively safe, barring operator error!
Also, there are skysurfing boards. But those are very dangerous, provide no lift and only drag, and are dangerous due to the fact that you can easily give yourself a "horseshoe malfunction." That is, when you deploy your parachute, there is a chance the pilot chute can deploy between your legs like threading a needle. The results can very likely be entanglement with the chute (even if you cut your main chute away it can stay wrapped up) and subsequently death be rapid deceleration. Otherwise known as the "splat" effect.
drewnonstar I remember seeing those skysurfing boards when I was a little kid in the intro of the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers The movie! haha that's awesome that they really exist.
Scott Manley Impressive. Still waiting for a rocket assisted landing suit. That reminds me, you should make like a drop pod or rocket platform or something like that in KSP.
That was cheating. IMHO, you'd have to land on something not set up to provide a soft landing. If he didn't have those boxes, he would have had a pretty bad day.
Scott Manley - Says "fly safe" (Tries to land a surf board, from space, with no protection, in a miniature lake smaller than an inflatable family pool)
Stefan Spatz Benson, Arizona, blew warm wind through your hair My body flies the galaxy, my heart longs to be there Benson, Arizona, the same stars in the sky But they seemed so much kinder when we watched them, you and I...
I know that this Reply is over a year late but they are called Skegs and are much needed for control.I am glad that I ran across this one because I was born and raised in Hawaii. Love surfing! I am gonna try this one. especially since I am at 1.1.3 right now and got plenty of parts mods
This video truly accrues more evidence for my theory: Command Pods are actually hazardous components of a spacecraft. Kerbals survive better outside of them. Ergo, Command seats FTW :P
Watching Scott maneuvering through KSP's clunky crafting system with such elegance while it takes me half an hour to construct a bloody rover there's nothing left for me to do but to envy
DUDE! That was awesome. As an aside I have seen video of people jumping out of a plane with something that looked like a cross between a surf board and a snow board, it was sized in between and had places to shoehorn your feet into so you stayed on the board, at some point they pulled the cord for the chute and the board drops off their feet to dangle from a cord.
You got the name right, but they're usually not angled and boards typically have eith one or three. They also aren't used for turning. Their function is to prevent yaw. The rails (the sides of the board) in conjunction with longitudinal weight transfers are what's used to turn.
From an aerodynamic standpoint your skegs are in the right place but from a hydrodynamic standpoint they would make your board stiff as a.. well... board. The thruster has the twins roughly 6-8 inches forward of the single. I haven't a tri to measure because I drive a twin because I like the old school maneuverability - I have my own custom 6'4" design with a roundedpin tail and channel starting just aft of mid that progressively deepens as it goes aft, widening between the skegs and sloping down and away from the stringer and widening out to the rails so the stringer actually acts as the third skeg. It's a great design that I have used in 2ft beach breaks to 20ft Mexican hurricane to 6ft barreling Fiji tropical reef (double overhead hollow on the face because the water is only 2-3ft deep over the reef). I have been surfing for 40 years and have seen a lot of change in design and technique.
If you switch off the angle snap while placing parts, it'll place them adjacent to the surface normal of the object you're attaching it to. Makes figuring out the orientation of the thing you're attaching a lot easier.
I was going to suggest dropping it from a big aircraft rather than launching from the ground, like with the X-15... but then you dropped it out of orbit instead, which was awesome. I like how the pilot looks super calm while crash landing into the swimming pool. What a quintessentially Kerbal moment. XD
Thanks for building stuff like this! I have actually watched a lot of your interesting designs closely, as I'm ALWAYS afraid to overlap wing pieces and have parts clipping into each other because I assume it'll just make it explode. But like with the tail control surfaces you have overlapped here I see again that I can be much more liberal with constructing things than I allow myself to be. Keep up the Science and Gaming, thanks for the vids!
Cool idea :) The reason why he turned backwards during reentry is because Kerbals have low drag coefficient (0.1) so the drag was putting the ship's lowest drag part (the Kerbal) ahead of center of mass. And the rest, including fair stability in that position was due to how aerodynamics of control surfaces is screwed up. A control surface flying backwards acts in the opposite direction than where it should. I hope this all will go away with 1.0.
Hey scott, i think all you have to do when your kerbals are "paralized/dead in seat" is switch objects because it counts as out of the chair, and the control comes from the probe core, not the Kerbal. (a theory correct me if im wrong)
So, after watching this, I went back through your archive of KSP videos to check, and, it's confirmed. This is definitely the silliest thing you've ever done in the game.
When you said the shirt was White and Gold I was half expecting you to say that when you were at the pool you realized it was actually Blue and Black, it would have been quite humorous.
