STOL Challenge 8/2024 Results:

Congratulations to the winners of the STOL Challenge.

The top 3 winners are

1) Scout 180 by @Tingly06822 is a well-built plane, with a detailed cockpit, including details lettering and livery - awesome. But, zero mass and zero drag make the plane toss like a balloon while landing.

2) PC12 by @Apollo018362 - Another beautiful build, and nice to fly, but again it loses some points because of Zero mass & zero drag in this plane causing it very hard to land.

3) PZL 104 by @XProAerospaceAircrafts - this is a very low part count and details, compared to the above two, but earns good points on STOL capability.

Runner-ups:

Rockwell-XFV-12 by @MIGFOXHOUND31BSM26

Martin-Aeronautics-X-11-Outback by @MartinByrde

V-280-Valor by @LimeAir

An-2 by strangerfromtheinternet

Conclusion:

I saw the beautiful and proportionate building works, but sadly, most of "the winning planes from first glance" did not achieve as many points as I thought due to this simple mistake. Most of you overly remove the mass and drag and set it to zero, which makes the plane fly like a feather. But the worst thing is without the friction force, there is nothing to stop the plane from flying. Without weight, it is weightless like a hydrogen balloon tossing the ground. it keeps flying and flying unrealistically. This makes my heart broken. Scout 180, PC12, and many planes fall into this trap.

Some other planes like the V280 Valor have great potential to become a winner, but the rotor mechanism needs more work to fix. There are some other cool-looking builds, but literally, they even don't fly.

The results of this challenge did not produce a clear winner in my opinion. Anyway, thank you all for joining and hopoe we could lean to improve in the future.

I am posting the prizes in 2-3 days (as the spot light is limited to six or so per day)

All entries: https://www.simpleplanes.com/Airplanes/Successors/dhq85v

To The challenge page https://www.simpleplanes.com/a/dhq85v/STOL-Challenge-CLOSED