HueHue

The Dragon IV is the state-of-the-art in jet interceptors. With a maximum thrust of 450kNs and high-speed, high-altitude ram air intakes; the Dragon IV is capable of extreme speeds at extreme altitudes. Perfect for training kerbonauts or interception Kermunist bombers, the Dragon IV is as versatile as it is high performance. The Dragon IV carries the exclusive RCAF "Wide-Step" landing gear system, making ground rolls nearly impossible. Guaranteed against tail strikes, bird strikes, labour strikes and lightning strikes, the Dragon IV is a capable aircraft in the hands of experts and novices alike. The Dragon IV is also equipped with a state of the art zero-zero ejection system, allowing emergency ejects under any possible conditions. http://www.filedropper.com/dragoniv

Examples of planes you might want pictures of are the Saab 35 Draken, the MiG 25 / 31 Foxbat, the Blackbird, the English Electric Lightning and the F-105.

Jesus Christ man. What altitude did you achieve your top speed under power at?

How does the pilot get back out of the capsule?

Quick idea to cut down on processing power. I'm not a genius when it comes to programming and backend wizardry, so forgive me if I'm making a really stupid suggestion. What if you kept the planets and non-focused ships on rails, and only ran newtonian calculations on the ship you have focused?

Xeldrak, if you're going to be away for a few weeks, why not just find someone else to host the next challenge?

My SSTOs tend to crash or explode nearly as much as the Space Shuttle (huehuehue) so slapping a nuclear engine on it seems rather environmentally unsound. Thanks for the tips, all.

I still can't make a working SSTO for the life of me, is it because I feel bad about intake spamming and refuse to use nuke engines in-atmo? Any design tips?

Now hang on a minute. When I think tech tree, I think Victoria II. (Hearts of Iron 3's tech tree being so absurdly in-depth it's not worth even making a pass at implementing). A quick overview, you've got tech families. Military, Industrial, Cultural, all that fun stuff. You can choose the focus of your administration: this gives bonuses to some tech family research speeds (or point cost, if we go that route) and nerfs others. For example in this image, Bavaria has a Corporatist-Industrialist complex that gives very significant boosts to commerce and industry research while hampering your military and naval research. Each level of technology you research in a tree in a family gives you a specific bonus. Here I have Clean Coal selected as an example. Clean coal is a massive boon to coal and iron production, but also comes with two inventions. Inventions are a percentage chance over time of triggering. I've highlighted the invention of Proto-Existentialism to bring up that UI. Now how does this translate to KSP? We could have five families: crew modules, probe parts, engines, science and utility. Obviously there would be fewer inventions and trees than Vicky at first (Victoria II espousing a whopping 150 techs and over 500 inventions) but the idea would be the same. In Crew Modules, you could have the trees of Aircraft, Life Support, 1-Man, 3-Man, Lander. Etc etc.

Point conceded.

Friendly reminder that the only "trainer" plane that actually supports an instructor pilot is mine

Updated the scores. It's rather hard to define the edge between "really high-flying spy plane" and "suborbital spy plane", but Hejnfelt has provided me inspiration on that. If your Ap goes above 60km, OR you have a Pe above 25km, we'll call it suborbital. I'll let Hejnfelt's update slip by though, since the rule is new.

No no, it's fine to go slightly over 25,000m; the altitude is a minimum. The only rule on height was not going sub-orbital. By suborbital, I mean you're still flying upwards on a ballistic trajectory long after flame-out.

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As far as I can see, there's a difference between Mechjeb (which is a whole different ballgame I'm not going to really touch on here), Engineer, Protractor, etc etc and modded parts. And there's an even bigger difference between groups of said modded parts. An excellent example of a very balanced (admittedly quite small) parts pack is the RLA Stockalike pack. An excellent example of a very unbalanced mod would be the Orion mod. Is your Jool mission with Orion worth the same as someone else's who uses only stock parts? Let's cut the post-modernism crap for a second. No, it simply isn't. By using parts that are simply superior in every aspect (looking at you, KW Rocketry's Vespa) you dilute the meaning of your achievements.