Dr-Drunk

I don't know of any mods atm that do this but I'm sure someone else might be able to point you to one. However one thing that can help is that if you click advanced mode in the top left now, you can make your own categories and part lists for your convencience. I have a seperate one for wings and another for plane engines and the like for example. Takes some times to make these for yourself but once you've got them set up it works perfectly.

Loving all these rules guys! There's quite a few in this thread I would probably considder adopting myself for a more fun or realistic experience. Keep them coming!

Uploads screenshots to an image sharing service such as tinypic or imgur and put the links in your thread. As for a more direct answer, were there any other requirements such as: Have a science lab, have a viewing cupola or this outpost needs to have room for atleast 8 Kerbals or some stuff you might have overlooked?

Hey all! So I have a confession... I've played KSP pretty much since the earliest aplha and ever since then I have never designed a succesfull spaceplane. But recently, with the implimentation of 0.90 I've been looking into a budget way of bringing Kerbals into orbit to man my stations. As such, I present to you: The X-77 Precision! So named because it has never missed the ground once.... So this is the plane. After loads of tweaking the wings and thrust I atleast got it to fly but it still flies like an absolute brick. The turning rate is terrible and once I reach higher altitudes it becomes impossible to keep the nose pointed up wich sends the plane casually drifting down back towards the surface. It doesn't spin out of control or anything and can be landed relatively easilly but it's impossible to get it into space. Here's some more pictures to help with the troubleshooting process: So yea as stated.. The goal of this craft would be to take Kerbals into orbit to deliver them to my stations and bring back the Kerbals already there. It doesn't need to be capable of lifting heavy loads and doesn't need an insane amount of Dv. The furthest it would have to reach as far as my current plans go is a 800Km circular orbit around Kerbin where my furthest station is located. So if anyone has any ideas to help me improve this thing, please let me know! Mods used for this or that I can use parts from: B9 Aerospace FAR Karbonite KSP Interstellar Procedural Dynamics And some others that don't include usable stuff for planes.

Yea Air hogging used to be pretty good and would allow you to in theory fly up to nearly 69Km, practically an orbit. Thing is though, OP uses FAR wich has drastically nerfed Airhogging wich makes it impossible.

Turbojets need air to work obviously, so they won't work beyond 26.000M (the altitude your screenshot is at). If you want to fly any higher and possibly even go into space, your plane is going to need non air breathing engines. You can either use rocket engines for this or engines that can switch modes such as the FAR Sabre engines or the stock Rapier. You could also use the Aerospike but it's highly inneficient in space. So yea ... move over to engines that work on oxidiser. Ofcourse also make sure your plane actually has some of that LFO on board!

No it's not possible. For you to complete a contract the station or base has to be completely new. As such, you can't dock it to old stations or bases to fulfill requirements since this will untick the new station part of the contract. What you CAN do however is build a station that fulfills the requirements, get the contract money, and instead of de-orbiting or deleting it, hook it up to an excisting station of yours to expand it. You won't get any money for doing so but having some big stations around can be usefull in various ways.

Yea the fuel cost is deducted if you empty the tanks. Fuel doesn't seem to cost all that much though. On my standerd lifter wich often has about half fuel left on re-entry the recovery comes down to about 400 funds wich for a 2.5m rocket capable of lifting tens of tons into orbit isn't a whole lot. Pretty much 90% of your returns are on the actual tank itself, not the contents. Maybe someone should mod that to make the fuel cost more. I mean in real rockets it's mostly the cost of fuel that makes launches so expensive.

I do know KER has a phase angles option under the redevouz tab. That's basically the angle of seperation you're looking for. As for tools to help you find them.. Lemme do a quick looksie. Edit: Ok I found this. Not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for but it might help: http://ryohpops.github.io/kspRemoteTechPlanner/

Hahaha awesome rules everyone. I see that I'm not the only one with policies such as minimal space debris, no deleting, no quickloads to save Kerbals etc. I'd give a bunch more of you Rep points for your posts but I've just hit my 24 hour cap so I'll get back to handing them out once I'm able.

I use satellite contracts to put satellites I actually need in orbit. I'm using ScanSat so they're actually somewhat usefull then. Put them in the required orbit and once completed, move them over to a low polar orbit and leave them there. If it does get too crowded though.... I've sent up a few lander probes to fulfill those contracts before and then sent them on their way to the other planets. Once I run out of targets I geuss de-orbit or self-destruct them.

There, the probe is finally on it's way to Jool... Great submissions so far guys! Have some reps! And keep em comming all!

Hey all! So as I'm sitting here waiting for my 31 minute Ion Drive burn to finish........ I thought I'd start a fun little thread! So let's all share our own personal space programs rules to live by. They can be as real or as wonky as you'd like. I'll start off with mine: 1. Always respect the Kraken... If Kraken is not respected.. Kraken will kill you and everything you love. 2. Never let Jebediah near any mission of any sort of significance. 3. There is no such thing as too many struts. If neccesary, connect struts to struts for better effects. 4. A rocket isn't a good rocket if it isn't capable of achieving mach or re-entry effects on escape from Kerbin. 5. Mission Control is evil. Always check, check and double check contracts before accepting anything. 6. Upon completion of rule number 5, check the contract again before designing anything fit for the job. 7. Discarding nuclear engines in Kerbin's atmosphere is a perfectly viable waste disposal plan. After all, those green skins don't tan themselves. 8. KSC will do everything neccesary in the name of science. Every mission is to advance the future of all Kerbal kind. 9. Disregard rule 8 and defer to mission payouts for future missions. 10. Any damage to KSC assets, vehicles or facilities are to be brought into a direct deduction out of Jebediah's paycheck. So what's your rules to live by? Share them all here!

I solved the action groups problem with this: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/74195-0-90-%28Dec31-14%29-Action-Groups-Extended-250-Action-Groups-in-flight-editing You can set it so it doesn't unlock action groups untill you have the tier 2 and 3 SPH and VAB if you feel like you're cheating otherwise but overall it's great to have. Allows you to make action groups in flight as well. Even has a little window where you can click on any named group you made to make it do whatever you set it up to do. Especially great if you're building a station for example and you've only attached the solar panels later. Put them all on the group toggle solar panels and poof you've got a quick way to sort them all out. It also allows for 250 different custom groups that you can bind to keys as well. Highly recommend it, even though the GUI is a bit wonky at times.

Unmanned technology (or just probes for short) are great for ... well ... space probes. Higher levels of cores basically get pilot abilities much like leveled up Kerbals get. So they can hold maneuver nodes, prograde, retrograde, target etc. Some of the higher ones also weigh less or require less power so they all come with their own little bennifits. Personally, I use probes ALLOT. Literally every mission I send to anywhere is preceded by about 4 probes or so wich I scan the planet or moon in question with. They're also great for satellites and such obviously since you wouldn't wanna put a Kerbal in space on satellite duty. Edit: Ninja'd! But yea ... Like the previous poster said higher level probes have SAS capabilities. Some of the later and bigger ones also come with reaction wheels so presuming the craft you build is small enough they don't need dedicated reaction wheels or RCS to turn on their own.

Can be used as an improvised waffle iron! Optimised for 70% less waffle loss!

Situation will be resolved once Ender Dragon gets hungry. Mineshaft abandoned due to high levels of Jebediah Kerman.

I haven't test flown your craft yet but from what I can tell from the screenshots it would seem you're tail-striking. Atleast it seems to suggest the first bit of damage was there. One point in concerns to your design though.. You've got the CoM and the CoL awefully close to eachother for a 3 tank setup. I'd imagine that once the tanks start draining your CoM would move behind the CoL and leave you unable to control the aircraft verry well. Gonne load up KSP again and give your plane a shot so I'll get back to you in a bit. Edit: Okay so I gave the plane a quick testrun just now. (For future referance you might wanna include a modlist so people can actually load your crafts btw. ) Takeoff went well enough but the tail does go awefully close to the ground so I had to nudge it up ever so slightly. Personally I fixed the issue by moving the CoL back a bit and placing the rear gears slightly back. Hope it helps!

Both interresting aproaches to solve my problem here so kudos to you guys! I'm not much of a math wizard but I think I get the jest of it so I'm going to be giving both ways a shot here, given how I have a few of these networks to set up so plenty of chances to try different ways.

I think I saw an article on KSP on some indie game website. This was back when it was still pretty much a concept rather then a game. Once squad had made the game and released the early alpha though I jumped on it straight away and bought it. I've always been a sucker for space games and this was quite a fair bit different then all the standard space shooter or 4x games.

Have you made sure to switch off RCS and SAS on both craft you're trying to dock? This can help sometimes. Once they're both off and they still don't dock try a quick physical timewarp. (Just make sure it's really quick, as collisions tend to happen when doing this) If none of that works then yea... It's the usual docking port issues. The only way I see around that would be save-editing.

Thing is though, not considdering the rocket cartwheel maneuver, getting higher altitudes with rockets in FAR is easier. FAR can be more difficult to fly in if you don't know what you're doing but the reworked aerodynamics model actually makes it so that you need far less Dv to get to higher altitudes or an orbit for that matter. I believe in stock KSP the Dv required is about 4500 with 4600 suggested for margin for error. In FAR the number is closer to 3900 as long as the rocket has no flat surfaces and all. As for OP's question though. I suggest you just do this by trial and error. Adjust the thrust limmiter and fuel level of the booster and just note down the results to apply them in carreer. As others have already stated, doing the maths on the atmospheric drag is nearly impossible.

Hey all! So yea, I've just finished building up my KSP interstellar powerplant in orbit around Kerbin. Now I need a satellite relay network to go allong with it so I can beam power all over the Kerbin SOI. For this, I'm going to have to have a minimum of 3 satellites in roughly the same orbit so as to asure maximum coverage trough line of sight. I've been looking online for calculators to find one that could tell me how much height I need for a flat orbital period of for example 4 hours, or 6 hours or whatever. This simply so I can do a quick 2/3 maneuver and end up dropping the satellite at each apoapsis. I've been really struggling in finding such a tool though. I've found a few that did roughly what I'm looking for but they mostly require you fill in an already known apoapsis height. I need one instead that will tell me my exact needed apo and periapsis to go allong with a certain orbital period. Anyone have any math tips, calculator links or tried and testing techniques for deploying such a network of satellites?

Mine was to test the huge engine that comes with the B9 pack in an orbit around Ike. So yea... that means hauling a 30 or so ton engine into orbit without ever being allowed to actually use it. It took me about 3 attempts and I nearly bankrupted KSC in doing so but I did pull it off in the end. The contract also paid me about 10 million for pulling it off wich I'm now hapilly putting towards projects of my own such as lunar bases and the like.

By far the most common cause for aborting launches for me is forgetting to strut the whole thing together. I mean using KWRocketry, those Thor 2 SRB's will rip themselves right off the decouplers. Second most common reason would be forgetting random parts like solar pannels, batteries, control surfaces etc.