Foxster

The craft looks stable regarding fuel. The dry CoM is actually forward of the wet. First guess: the airbrakes are forward of the CoL and close to the CoM. That might cause some stability problems when deployed. I'll have a fly and see what happens... I think it's draggy at the front. That blunt front end, the RCS, ladder, canards and Divertless Supersonic Intake are all adding to the drag at the front end. You will also find it flies better if you move the tailfin back, plus turn off roll and pitch on it. Similarly on the canards and flaps if you turn off yaw. Questions: What is the Whiplash for? Why so many intakes? Update: Yup, I'd say it was too draggy at the front. I tweaked a few things to streamline it, plus a few more bits and pieces, and it flies fine now... Craft file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/owm2lxjf3mqrdkg/LaythePlaneMk1 Fox 2.craft?dl=0

Hi, mate. And g'nite

That depends entirely on how good your craft is. Somewhere over 6800 dV certainly. Staging is pretty much your ordinary affair. You drop tanks and engines when empty. Getting the crew onto the surface and back to the capsule on top of the craft can be done with a disposable lander can (maybe attached to your disposable science stuff) on the bottom and transferring the crew from it to the capsule.

Forget how much dV you need to make orbit. This is not the thin atmosphere of Kerbin, this is the gloopy purple monster. So, it's not about stacking stuff until you hit a magic dV number and you are good to go. Oh, you can do that if you like but your craft will balloon into a unwieldy behemoth. What you need is a thin craft with the minimum number of stacks, where you have eliminated anything at all that adds drag and mass. You will need engines with optimal isp for a thick atmosphere, generally that means Vectors and/or Aerospikes. You will also fly to orbit differently than at Kerbin. You need to get out of the thick part of the atmosphere with low losses as quickly as possible but not so quick that you start to pile on the drag losses and then risk heatplosion. On Kerbin if you can't make orbit you bolt on some more engine+fuel. On Eve you figure out what you can take away and how you can get good at flying to orbit. Check out the Eve challenges and the craft there. Oh and don't be afraid of putting two craft down. One with your science and rover that is never going to get off the surface again and an orbit return craft. And don't plan on that doing anything else other than making orbit. Your mothership will need to rendezvous with it for the crew to EVA over along with the science.

Well apart from having to manually adjust prop pitch for airspeed.

You might just want to double check the deployment of each individual prop. If you missed one then thrust will be unequal.

I've taken it from orbit to land and back to orbit with loads of dV to spare. It's easy.

It took me less than that to figure them out and get a working craft. It took around the same amount of time for me to decide I didn't like doing it. Some of us happen to like the simple bolt-on nature of KSP's jet engines, rockets and wheels. We don't want all the extraneous stuff of reality. So by all means maintain all the fiddly bits...but make them optional.

This is one of those hard to answer questions. If you are flying a brick to orbit and/or flying it badly then no. If its a half-decent design and you can fly it reasonably well then yes. Pictures would help. Here's one way to do Laythe...

I think this was one of the less great bits of BG. It generates little science for all the effort required to trigger it and, as you discovered, triggering it at all is sometimes bugged. I have de-orbited a large craft with near-full tanks directly at an experiment on Mimus and missed the site by a couple of meters and still got zero science. I don't think it would hurt if this experiment could be triggered with much smaller impacts - say a Kerbal jumping a few meters.

You can certainly use them for that. They have an adjustable number of attachment nodes Kinda depends on the craft though as they can be draggy. For optimal streamlining I taper the back end of a craft and surface attach conical bits and then attach the engines to the bottom of those.

Solar power is not totally useless at Eeloo but you need more panels, meaning it's probably most useful on satellites. A rover can go a very long way on fuel cells and a fairly small tank of fuel.

I posted some stuff above but basically: Make props auto-pitch for best thrust, hide some of the other settings by wrapping them into a throttle setting and making them stageable. Maybe also with options for the existing settings available as non-defaults to fine tune performance for those interested in such things. This doesn't need to mean reskinned jet engines as someone implied. I'd like to see them balanced with the jet engines. Maybe as low thrust but low/zero fuel consumption engines available early in the tech tree.

If I was to put myself in the shoes of the game designer I'd say this has been rather half-baked. The look and even the functioning of the parts are great. What is missing is some polish. I'm really hoping that's the case and that a mopping-up build will sort things out. I think some other's ideas around there being too many parts are probably right. It has added to physics issues (see the mess under time warp). Small, medium and large prop engines (electric and LF) with props attached that just worked as the rocket and jet engines do would have been well received by a lot of players.

To fly: Launch Hit T - SAS on Hit space - toggles engines Take off and have fun Adjust the throttle with the usual keys If you want to improve speed then adjust the prop pitch with the up and down arrow keys. 100 is good for take off, then 90 and at higher speeds 80. You can check the prop pitch by right clicking any prop and checking the Authority Limiter value. Craft file download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rvynpj780k9z6hg/Prop plane 7.craft?dl=0 PS: Flies beautifully on Eve!

It is exactly this that the unnecessary over-complication of prop engines stifles. If someone is goofing around and throwing things together to see what they make then the ability to throw on a prop engine that works out of the box can only help.

Post again when you've played with them. Basically though, KSP is not RL and doesn't try to be. There is no need to make rotor+prop planes as complicated as they are. If folks do want that complication then make the stuff for that available via Advanced Tweakables options. I can make them work now. I understand enough to make decent flyable planes but it still leaves the question of why most players would bother. They have a level of complication outweighing any advantages. Getting rid of the clutter would not have to make them re-skinned jet engines. Look at the electric rotor engines: you can't run jets on electricity alone. The LF rotor engines just need balancing against the jets, say making them more efficient but lower power than the jet engines.

Here's a few things that would make using the rotors and props much better: A PAW option for the props of "Auto pitch". On by default. This would adjust their angle (currently adjusted through Authority Limit) automatically to produce max thrust. Turning this off would allow manual adjustment of this and I'd be fine if that could give up to, say, 10% extra thrust if manually adjusted optimally. Rotors placed in symmetry to have opposite pairs set to reversed spin and blades mounted to them inverted. It is a huge pain to manually sort this all out and doesn't feel like the parts in the rest of the game. Get rid of some of the settings on the rotors and replace them with a simple link to the throttle. So torque limit and authority are hidden and just raised and lowered with the throttle. Make the rotors stageable like the other engines. Build Heisenberg torque compensators into the rotors like the jet engines apparently have. Have them turned on by default and an option to turn them off for the purists.

What I did with my little craft was to offset the torque by having opposite pairs of rotors spinning in opposite directions, which means all the props of the reversed rotors need inverting. I'd guess for your craft that means pairs on opposite sides of the craft but not sure. Might need the four rotors equally spaced at 90° and the opposite pairs removed from symmetry and reversed. Unless Squad gets kinder with us, you will need to get the hang of adding all the props to an action group to adjust their pitch through the Authority Limit setting. Your craft will barely fly without regular adjustments to this for height and speed.

Here's a craft to try: https://www.dropbox.com/s/p4m0dbacugp5vss/Quadcopter 2.craft?dl=0 To fly: Right click any of the spinning props so you can see it's PAW and pin it. This will make adjustment of the Authority Limiter easier. Set SAS on Adjust the props' Authority Limiter with the up/down arrow keys. You'll want to increase it (up arrow) to about 120 to take off You'll need to fiddle with the props' Authority Limiter for different heights and speeds Have fun

It's more that they don't, to me, feel like the other engines and mechanics in KSP. Other engines you just bolt on, hit space bar and off you go. I'm sure in RL there's quite a bit more to both a rocket and a jet engine than that. Wheels you also just bolt on and KSP figures out what direction they should rotate and steer. But with rotors and props there are a bunch of settings to be made before they will work and then you need to constantly fiddle with them in flight. I'm sure that's all very accurate to RL but it doesn't feel Kerbal. I still think there needs to be dummy mode, where prop pitch is automatic and the other settings are set so that out of the box you can stick a rotor and props on the front of a plane and it'll fly.

Yup but a VTOL could do the same job.

You could make a VTOL with jet engines that would fly easier and have better MPG.

I agree completely. If they were a lot better for all the effort then great but they are worse than the jet engines in every sense I can see. The new engines either need a "dumb mode" or the default settings for the engines + props should be set so they just work out of the box.

Umm. Gotta say I'm a little underwhelmed. This would have been a great opportunity to introduce some easy to use prop engines but we got something that seems way over-engineered. I threw this together... It didn't seem unreasonable to expect the engine to work like the other KSP engines i.e. set the throttle, hit the spacebar and off we go. Alas, no. I had to go and map the throttle to the engine in action groups. No idea about staging yet because it was just at full throttle on launch and spun around and RUDed. Even when launching with no throttle and babying the throttle so as to avoid RUD from torque it doesn't have enough power to move the craft. I guess I need to map the blade pitch to some other keys? That's all very painful. What would a KSP nub do with these "engines"? Update: A little further along. I mapped the pitch of the blades to some keys. Still no thrust no matter what pitch. Spotted that by default "Deploy" for the blades is set to Retracted, so they were never going to generate thrust. Toggled that and now the craft clumsily can get off the ground. Torque is messing with the craft making it almost unflyable. Guess there's something else needed to sort that. Maybe a free-spinning rotor between engine and fuselage? Update 2: Got it to fly by putting another engine + props on the back end and inverting the props. Still hard to fly because you need to constantly adjust the prop pitch and throttle. I can see zero advantage to this compared to a jet engine and loads of downsides.