Chrysoprace

I did that with a mission where they wanted me to mine X ore on Minmus and land it on Kerbin. After meeting the mining objective, I just put together a ship that was nothing but a couple of large ore containers (and set them to spawn with X ore with a right click), a Stayputnik, and a couple of the smallest boosters with almost no fuel, and made it "hop" on the launch pad. Contract complete.

Also a spaceplane newbie here. Just started trying to mess around with them after I unlocked the Airspike and Whiplash. Like you, I want to figure it out on my own but still need some pointers. I get far more satisfaction from the "try stuff and see what works good" method than I do from looking things up. I have found this thread to be very helpful. In looking about for answers to my questions I have found that a lot of the information available is out of date, probably because it is from older versions. I thought it would be good to contribute to this thread with my findings and a few pointers that I found on my own. Maybe I can help some other spaceplane newbies. Firstly, a lot of older guides talked about cramming as many intakes as possible onto a spaceplane to increase operational ceiling, but my experiments showed that this is no longer the case - the increased drag appeared to be the main factor, making the extra intakes counter productive. In fact, in all of my tests drag seemed to be the single most important variable. The older advice for ascent profiles also seems to be obsolete now, presumably due to the new aerodynamics, although it is somewhat similar to the advice given above, just with steeper angles. Secondly, when staging your rocket engines, the most efficient point seems to be when the thrust from your air breathing engines peaks. This was true for my tests, where I just pointed the plane at 20 degrees inclination due east, got to a 100km orbit, and checked how much oxidizer and liquid fuel was left in my tanks. It may not be true for a more complicated ascent. I have not played with any Rapiers yet, so this is maybe only applicable if you are using a combination similar to my Whiplash and Airspike setup. Thirdly, I found it very helpful to put a waypoint at the spawn point on the runway. Just go to the SPH, click on a Hex or something, launch it, right click it, go to Kerbnet access, make a waypoint called “Runway” or “Land Here” or something, then recover it. This makes it far, far easier to get lined up with the runway after reentry. If you can get the waypoint aligned with your navball’s 90 or 270 degree line you are coming straight in. Lastly, a couple of my own questions. I have read about cutting throttle to keep the air breathing engines running longer at high altitude. Is this true and/or helpful? Are Rapiers and maybe Nukes actually better than a combination of Airspike and Whiplash? I understand that the total weight is less, but the Rapier is less efficient in both modes, and although the Nukes are super efficient they also seem heavy and weak.

Necropost, but this is still the case as of today. I built a science base on the Mun, fully expecting it to only operate just over half of the time, because even with many batteries there is no way it can make it through a Munar night. The only generation it has now is solar and I intended to add fuel cells later when I add some mining capacity to keep the lights on and the lab running. Switched over to it to see how much fuel it had during the middle of the Munar night and was surprised to see the batteries full when they should have been long dead, so as long as I stay away from it during the night the lab keeps producing science. It seems strange to me that the game can keep the lab converting data to science without also draining the power.

Sorry for the necropost, but I have the same question as others here. Maybe I am missing something obvious. How do you get things to land horizontally and right side up on the mun? I have my own base built on the mun, just a research station at the moment, and I have been laboriously connecting things by hovering with the main Poodle and maneuvering with RCS. It is a massive pain, driving would be far preferrable.

Could be. Looked again and I noticed that the ship they screenshotted was aerodynamic like a flying Winnebago.

Thanks Snark, that is not only informative and helpful, but also makes me feel better about not having done something so blatantly wrong that it doubled my flight time, but rather having accidentally done it almost optimally.

Thanks, so if I focus on Duna it will show future encounters that occur after the SOI transfer? If so that is extremely helpful. I am not home now and didn't take any screen shots but can load an older save and try to replicate it later on.

Hello, Relative newbie here. I just attempted my first trip to Duna and I ran into a couple of questions that I couldn't find answers to that didn't amount to "install a mod and let the game do it for you." First question: Is there some way that I am missing like a dummy to look at specific places on the map? Specifically, I can't get in close enough to my Duna encounter to make fine adjustments until I am almost there. The result of this is while I got my peri to an acceptable altitude, I could not tell that I was coming in low and ended up in a polar orbit on arrival. Second question: I followed the directions of a couple of tutorials because this was my first trip outside of Kerbin's SOI. They amounted to: Wait until Duna is at about 1:30 when Kerbin is at 3:00. Get into orbit. Put a maneuver at about 5:00. Pull prograde until you get solar orbit that meets up with Duna orbit. Fine tune until you get a Duna encounter. Make another node on the way to fix any small problems (like in my first question). This worked out fine apart from being low and ending up in polar orbit. However, the tutorials said that the trip should take about 70-120 days. I couldn't get mine below about 260 days. Any idea what went wrong? This isn't a super big problem, except that those same tutorials recommend returning when Duna is at 5:30 to Kerbin's 3:00, and on arrival Duna was more like 4:20. Thanks in advance!

Thanks for the input everybody. Very helpful. I will mess around with the designs a bit and see if I can figure out why the second plane is so incredibly stable when it apparently should not be. Perhaps the gimbaling on the rocket engine is working as a tail?

Hello! Latecomer to KSP here, didn't have a computer worth mentioning for the last several years, but more or less everybody I asked for game recommendations mentioned KSP and I am loving it. Anyway, I just started trying to mess about with some planes and have a few questions I can't figure out. This is the first plane I made - I just followed a YouTube tutorial because I had no idea at all where to even begin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHMIapk41iA This is the second successful plane I designed. Needed something with more range and a booster to get up above 18km until I get better engines later. Which brings me to my questions. 1) The first plane is very unstable. It is flyable, but twitches around and wants to nose down a bit at all times (I suspect this may be due to the air scoop on the bottom hidden in the picture). If I turn on SAS it freaks out. The second plane is steady as a rock, I can set a heading, turn on SAS, turn up the time to x4, and more or less stop paying attention until I am approaching my destination. Anybody know why? 2) The first plane wants to drift to the side on the runway, even when stopped with no throttle, even with brakes applied. A couple of other designs I tried were even worse about this. I got into the habit of throttling up immediately before it could get out of hand. This second plane does not, although it will drift forward slowly without brakes. Why? 3) When I made the first plane and took it out to mess about with it I discovered that the controls were backward to what I was used to. I use an old PS3 controller with a dead battery to play KSP. There was a series of failures to take off as I exploded into the runway because pulling back on the joystick was making me nose down (took a few tries to figure out that this was the problem and not something with the design). So I inverted the joystick in the options. Problem solved, the plane now flies more or less as I am used to from other simulators. Star Fox and X-Wing are simulators, right? Then when I took the second plane out I was having the exact same problem. The stick is still inverted, but this plane behaves in reverse of the first. What gives? Thanks in advance!