Fearless Son

Rune, on that topic, how does this interact with drop tanks? Like, supplemental fuel tanks on decouples or pylons hanging from the wings or body, attached with fuel lines to the main fuselage, and dropping the dead weight of the containers after draining them. Kind of want to see what the balance is between the added drag and the added fuel, at least in the early part of the flight.

The payload in question attached to a spent booster from a previous mission, preparing to burn to a sub-orbital trajectory: The probe burned to deorbit the booster, then it turned out to have enough delta-v left over to do another mission, this booster in a much higher elliptical orbit. Ran out of LF/O, but had enough monoprop to do the job anyway:

First spaceplane in this campaign returned from its first successful mission: Still unlocking the tech tree, so my part options were limited. Four Whiplash ramjet engines pushed this thing to a high acceleration during a steep ascent through the lower atmosphere, then when the air is too thin for them to operate a single Dart toroidal aerospike engine begins a low slow burn until the craft is in Low Kerbin Orbit. Once there, it dropped off it's payload (a small probe with an attachment arm meant to deorbit debris) and deorbited after one orbit. It had sufficient fuel to cruise back to the airfield on its Whiplashes, and because airbrakes are not yet unlocked it had to make due with drogue chutes to stabilize and slow down breaking on the runway.

Playing around in this nimble little twin turboprop:

Took a quick jaunt to the Mun's Farside Crater to gather some science and crew experience: Enjoying the Making History parts so far. The capsule redesign means I need fewer total parts to get the same effect (built-in batteries, monoprop, RCS, and reaction wheels make it great for small craft like this.) The Cub engines are ideal for this: they are stronger than the Spiders, less fuel-hungry than the Thuds, and since they are radial I can put them close to the center of mass and get something that torques well under thrust and has excellent balance when executing a landing burn. The payload container on the bottom of the craft mounts the landing legs and carries the scientific equipment, with some spare space devoted to small fuel tanks which are drained into the upper tank after landing to top it off. Once it is ready for takeoff, the payload bay remains behind, Apollo-style, and thanks to some solar panels, an antenna, and a cheap probe core, it can serve as a little science-station for transmitting data back (if I get a contract to gather science data from the Mun's surface.)

I was about to say, that was one White Base-looking SSTO you built there.

For when what you need to land is a tank.

I suppose it would work if you left the doors open and sat the Kerbals butt-to-butt with their heads sticking out either end. But if you are doing that then why even use a stowage bay instead of just sticking the seats elsewhere?

Depends on how you orient the seats. @Cupcake... does a lot of things with EVA seats in service bays to save weight, you should check out some of their designs for inspiration.

I had considered applying, as someone who has both manual testing and SDET experience, lots of work in C# and familiarity with Unity development. However, I am not interested in relocating at the present moment, and I only speak a handful of Spanish, so that puts a kibosh on that.

I tried making a plane that looked more like a conventional tail-dragging light plane, but I just could not get it to balance its center of mass and center of lift well. The problem was that the center of mass was too far ahead of the center of lift, which made getting the nose up difficult. Would have worked well with more thrust. I had to end up with this instead. "Anchor" is a good name for it though, I think I will call it that.

Started a new career game since Making History came out. Made a nifty little low-tech science-gathering plane. All aero parts are from the first node in the airplane branch of the tree. Can be launched from a minimum level hanger and airfield to nab some readings for quick contract money and science. From the look of it, I think lower drag might help. Some of those structural wing parts that are there for looks might need to go, unfortunately.

Still exploring the new content, but I like what there is so far. The inflatable airlocks alone will revolutionize surface base design! Same with the folding rover wheels. I love that I can compact this stuff for launch and extend it at destination. And as mentioned, the new structural panels will enable many snazzy-looking new designs.

I find it is a good site for running quick tests of aircraft. Its rougher terrain and shorter runway mean a craft needs to be able to reach lifting velocity much more quickly when taking off. Likewise, it can be a challenge to land on, especially for heavy craft with high stall speeds. The short distance between there and KSC also means that missions to cross that distance do not take very long to execute. After all, how frustrating would it be to fly halfway around Kerbin only to realize your plan lands like a brick after spending all that time in the air?

That always felt weird. I would like a system that automatically adds toggle markers to any landmarks the player encounters in a career. KSC, obviously to start with, but either on Kerbin or elsewhere I would like discoverables tracked to aid in navigating back to them once they are first reached.

Of course! I would buy it even if I was not interested in playing it's gated content. KSP has given well over a thousand wonderful hours over the years, and I bought it when it was cheaper than it is now. I am happy to kick more dollars Squad's way if it means they can make more awesome content.

Ooooooooh, this has me excited! The parachutes have been a long-desired feature, particularly for minimalist escape-pod reentry vehicles (ablator and tiny engine to get down to lower atmosphere, then the Kerbal pulls their suit-chute!) The part color theming is really nice, and I look forward to seeing how people can make more striking looking craft now. The pre-naming as well will get rid of an annoyance I have where parts never auto-name or set their icons right until I manually correct them after detaching. All in all, a most quality update to look forward to playing!

Rather than a retro-rocket, I recommend you stick a couple of Junos on the back of your shuttle, or maybe Wheesleys if your shuttle is really big. The reason being that those are relatively light and fuel-efficient jet engines which would allow your shuttle to cruise to a landing through the air (even if they do not provide quite enough thrust they give you more control) and they are capable of doing reverse thrust, which higher speed jet engines do not support. You can set them to reverse thrust while breaking and slow you down rapidly, and since they just use intake air (heated via liquid fuel combustion) as propellant, they ultimately save on mass compared to retro-rockets.

"My Kod..."

As always, the evergreen answer on these forums is, "Moar booster!" (Seriously, some lifting liquid fuel rockets with their own fuel supply on detachable points should take it a long way toward orbit.)

Not by much. The deployable panels will be destroyed by any atmospheric forces strong enough to cause enough aero-heating to make them necessary, and since the panels only work while deployed they just become dead weight while attempting reentry. However, I have included the small fixed panels in spaceplanes. Mostly because they are light, and the planes tend to heat up while on ascent. I like having a way for them to bleed off that extra heat once they exit the atmosphere, since they can no longer air-cool their engines. I suppose I could just wait until they radiate out naturally, but I like option to use them for suborbital flights, and starting a reentry descent with a bunch of heat built up from the ascent makes me nervous. This goes especially for Whiplash-driven spaceplanes, which tend to have a more aggressive ascent profile than R.A.I.P.I.E.R.-driven spaceplanes due to them needing to build up more speed in thicker parts of the atmospheric where more heating happens. That would be it. One does have to be careful about their placement. I keep them on the dorsal side of the plane, toward the back and well away from any dragging edges. The heat-flux works both ways, and placing them where they would be exposed to more atmospheric heating makes the plane heat up faster, which is the opposite of what I want. There is obviously a balance because they only bleed heat from the parts they are directly attached to, so any heat elsewhere in the craft has to travel through each part between them via contact convection to be dispersed, so it cannot be too far from the center of heat build up.

@Snark's guide is indeed very good, but I if I were to amend it with my own experience, I would add emphasis to the use of the translation controls (H, N, I, J, K, and L.) Turn RCS on and practice with them a little, as being comfortable with them will save you a lot of frustration. If you can get your velocity zeroed near your target, and your docking ports are facing parallel directions, you can translate laterally until they are lined up and just use a little forward translation to bring them into a dock. One other thing that the guide does not mention is remember to deactivate your SAS just before your docking port makes contact. Your SAS in stability mode will try to keep the ship facing the same direction. However, the ship needs to change it's facing, at least in a minor way, to get the docking ports lined up. The magnetic forces in the docking ports will do this automatically for you if they are close enough, but those magnetic forces are relatively weak and cannot overcome most SAS torque forces. Otherwise your ships will just end up bouncing off each other without connecting. So at the last moment let the stability go and allow the magnets to take over. So long as you are close enough and slow enough, this should be enough.

Actually, no. I had forgotten my first exposure to KSP. The first time I was exposed to KSP was when Extra Credits did a "Games You Might Not Have Tried" episode that mentioned it. The problem was, I had forgotten that was in the episode. I only realized that was my first exposure after rewatching the episode years later and recognizing KSP in it. But the first exposure to KSP that I remembered clearly was when it came to Steam, along with it's little animatic of the Kerbal engineers shifting through boxes of spare parts before digging out Steam's cam-crank logo. That caught my attention, and the rest was history.

In my case, it is usually, "What did you do in KSP this last weekend?" I often wait a couple of days before getting to a point that I feel like sharing would be worth it. When I show pictures of a mission, they are usually just after I finished it, but had it ongoing for a while.

I think Randal Monroe's experience is instructive here: