Aegolius13

Are you sure you had all the engines on, and in the same mode (jet vs rocket) both times? I can't see your stats on the image, but 8 rapiers seems like it shouldbe enough to accelerate a plane that size pretty well.

You could also look at using a gravity assist from Ike to help with the inclination change. I have not tried this at Duna but it works great in the Jool system.

I find that if you do a big braking burn from LKO, you reenter steeply, but the parts so not get all that hot- because you've already lowered your orbital speed, and if you keep your plane pitched up you should not regain much speed. But a shallow descent usually works too. Where are you reentering from when youget this issue? If coming from somewhere higher than LKO, you mat want to bring your apoapsis down first, such as by making a few aerobraking passes.

It's not quite the same thing, but you could always set your opening altitude for pretty high, but wait to activate them via staging until you know where you're going to land. I.e., stage them earlier if you're coming down over mountains and later if coming down over water. You could also do a similar thing by creating an action group to disarm / arm them.

I'm not sure I'd call it a "launch" engine without running it at high throttle from the start, but that's just a question of semantics. I've done similar stuff with engines that are mediocre to poor at sea level, like the Swivel and Rhino. But I still don't see why the Wolfhound would NOT be just as good (or better) as a sustainer or vacuum engine. Yeah, its thrust may be overkill for smaller spacecraft, but that's true of the Poodle, or any engine for that matter. Just a matter of fitting the right size engine for the right ship (or clustering Wolfhounds for the really big stuff).

I would prefer things to go in the other direction -- more (and more balanced) differentiation from the existing engines. I bought MH largely for new gameplay features. It's a little lackluster in that department, but reducing new engines to just re-skins would only exacerbate that problem. I don't have a great idea on exactly what I'd like to see, but I think it would involve giving each engine a clearer niche. E.g., maybe the Kodiak should be more efficient than the Reliant, but more expensive and higher tech--or vice versa. I guess some of the problem is that these engines were probably designed to work with replicas of the historical rockets, rather than to mesh well with the existing engines. Kind of the same "realism vs. gameplay" argument pervading the Skiff v. Wolfhound discussions. And while the old engines could potentially be tweaked without upsetting any replica business, that might not sit well with non-MH players. Gotta disagree with that last bit. The Wolfhound doesn't have the TWR or atmospheric ISP to work well as a launch engine. I think it's a vacuum engine, just optimized for bigger craft than a Poodle.

If you have Making History, the engine plates make it much easier to work with clustered engines like this. But then of course there's still the lack of good LF-only tanks...

They provide an easy, good-looking and aerodynamically-sound way of using engine clusters, or engines with smaller form factors than your tank. Yeah, you could probably do the same things with fairings and girders and whatnot, but the plates just make it so much cleaner.

I guess they're slightly easier to fit inside a fairing? That's all I got.

Not sure what's going on, but you could just turn off CommNet entirely for this mission. And then pretend that your antennas are communicating with Kerbin.

For vacuum operation, where thrust and ISP are constant, I think you could do this with calculus. I can't put a precise formula down, but the basic idea would be: Acceleration=force/mass. Force is just the combined thrust of your engines. Mass can be defined as a function of time. E.g, starting mass minus burn rate(in mass/sec)*elapsed time. So, the acceleration at time t can be represented by the function a(t)=thrust/(m(0)-(burn rate)*t) Thus, to get the sum of acceleration over time (which is delta v), you can integrate that function with respect to t, from 0 to the time where your first set of rockets burn out. Then, repeat for the next set, or if you only have one set of rockets left, use the rocket equation. Note that it's going to be very complicated to get accurate delta v numbers in atmosphere, due to the change in isp and thrust with altitude. This is the case even with "regular" rockets that work with the rocket equation.

Are you using the "[" or "]" keys to cycle between the Kerbal and ship? That definitely saves some time versus switching via map mode or whatnot.

The 5m tanks should be great for mining ships. Low and wide is the way to go. Large orbital fuel depots also seem like possibilities. I agree they are probably got going to be that useful for launches. For really big rockets, it's usually more economical to build out with TwinBoars, SRBs and the like than to go with just a big core stage.

I would vote for this as the simplest. Often called "direct ascent" around here. A Duna mission does not take much more delta-v than a mission to the Mun and back, once you factor in the "free" capture thanks to Duna's atmosphere. Just add a little extra safety margin, put some parachutes on your lander, and make sure it's not horribly un-aerodynamic, and you should be good to go.