Challenge is COMPLETE and ENTRIES have been rewarded.

Dogfight Tournament Bracket!

Since the inception of Simpleplanes.com, the site has had a large chunk of its content devoted to planes of the military, from 1910s concepts to the hypersonic UAVs of the future. My goal with this challenge is to find the best looking AND best fighting military aircraft.

Think of this as a Dogfight Tournament AND a Challenge combined. All entries will be placed on the fighting bracket and will fight in single elimination type, OUT OF 3. So basically, you will be randomly placed on a single elimination bracket. Then you will fight your opponent 3 times, whoever starts as the camera player is chosen randomly, and then will alternate between these 3 battles. Best out of 3 wins. If wins cannot decide the winner due to simultaneous failures, I will decide through the visual judging points score (so it's better to make a good looking fighter than a crappy coward missile).

Since all XML is allowed and stuff, the tournament part is more of some happy fun and RNG.

Rules

This part is the most important part of the challenge. Thus I have chosen not to write an essay. Instead I have wrote an essay in bullet points.

• All crafts must be public successors to this post, to keep track; these will be used for judging.
• Your plane must be original, and it cannot have been uploaded publicly to the site BEFORE the challenge opened, unless you do adequate modifications and tell me beforehand. If you have an incomplete build as of challenge start, feel free to modify and finish for this challenge.
• XML modding, Funky Trees, etc. is allowed
• Your plane should not exceed 3000 mph.
• Planes must be kept under 500 parts, BUT it should be over 50.
• Your plane should fit in a 100 foot cube.
• Guns only for weapons. If firing your craft lags my game, your plane may be stripped of some guns.
• As my good man said, cheating is not a mistake, it is a choice.

Interested in joining (not even confirmed)? LEAVE A COMMENT so I can gauge how much interest is in this challenge!

Awards

Awards are broken up into Dogfighting and Judging. Dogfighting is the result your plane gets in the bracket. Judging is what rating I give your plane based on its looks.

Dogfighting Category

1st Place Dogfight: 30UPS + BONUS
2nd Place Dogfight: 15UPS + BONUS
3rd Place Dogfight: 10UPS + BONUS
4th Place Dogfight: 5UPS + BONUS
5th+ Dogfight: 1UPS + BONUS

Judging Category

1st Place Overall: 20UPS
2nd Place Overall: 10UPS
3rd Place Overall: 7UPS
Best Looks: 5UPS
Best Design: 5UPS

If you won every single possible award, you'd get 60 upvotes.

Bonus

The BONUS Category is used to incentivize as many people into joining the fighting bracket as possible. Thus, for every competitor that joins the challenge, the bonus will be increased so EVERYONE will get more upvotes.
1-5 competitors: Delete Challenge lol
6-15 competitors: 1 bonus
16-20 competitors: 2 bonus
21+ competitors: 3 bonus [EARNED]

Awards stack.

Specifics and Etc.

Rubric for Visual Judging

DETAIL 25PTS
- How detailed is the plane?
- If it's a replica, how well does it match the original?

DESIGN 5PTS
- Does this plane look like it's dogfight worthy against planes of its time?
- Is there anything special about this plane (custom gear, etc.)?
- How well do I think this plane will do in the challenge based on my player controlled flight?

UNIQUENESS 10PTS
- How unique is it, to me?
- I understand a WW2 prop plane or a Sopwith Camel won’t compare to a 6th Gen vectoring Goliath of a plane. So if everyone makes 6th gen planes and you make a biplane (with jets inside for a speed boost), you will get these points

USERVOTE 5PTS (after challenge ends)
- Assuming a standard curve, how many standard deviations is this plane upvote wise? Based on the STD, map out the range to 5pts.

PRESENTATION 5PTS
- How "good" are the pictures and description?

Dogfight Specifics

• Single Elimination
• Seed determined by upvote count
• MAX settings
• Random one out of the two fighters starts as player aircraft
• Alternates for 3 rounds, best out of 3
• Semifinal for 3rd place losers to decide 3rd place and 4th place
• Medium range
• If you shoot down your enemy but then they crash into you after, you still get the point as long as the game says.
• If you don’t manage to shoot down your enemy before crashing into each other, it’s up to the game to decide.
• If your plane crashes into the ground/water before the other, they get the point. Even if you damaged them and they were going to explode, but the AI decided a mud pie would be good, then you'd lose
• If you shoot and destroy each other at the same time, results will be told by the game as to who got Crit damaged first
• Time limit per fight is 5 min. At 5 min it will be declared a tie.|
• A tie may also be called if I think the match will not end (1 plane flies to 10mi altitude and doesn't come back, or 10mi away and keeps going that way)
• Since it's best out of 3, ties only matter if there is 1 tie, and 2 separate wins, or all 3 rounds are ties
• I don't expect it because of my low status on the site, but if this challenge ends up having too many entries that are made out of simple blocks and etc, I reserve the right to remove low-effort builds from competing in the dogfight IF there are too many.
• ALL VIDEOS GO ON YOUTUBE!

As I said before, in case of a tie, the plane with the higher points wins.

DATES

• 6/13: Challenge opens for submissions
• 7/4: Challenge submission window closes
• 7/5: Visual Judging grading begins
• 7/11: All grades finished, tournament bracket released shortly after, then battles start
• 7/18: If there are =<20 people, round 1 will be done by this date
• 7/25: If there are >20 people, round 1 will be done by this date

How do I know 7825 won't bail????

A quick search in the search bar will tell you there have been many attempts at a dogfight challenge before, but many end in the user giving up or ghosting out. I present this simple ultimatum. If the 1st round of bracket fights has not started by the planned date of 7/18 // 7/25, then I will delete my account. You can hold this against me. The only exception to this is if I have a family emergency.

Worried about me not having enough time? If I can make these GIS mods, I probably do have the time ;)

I'd rather have 20 people submit different low-quality warplanes than 2 people submit nice planes, not because I like nice planes, but because I like a good fight :).(but I wouldn’t want 100 low quality builds )

The plane in this challenge is my legal submission/example. It flies like a brick so I won't win anything at all :)

Good luck!