Aeroboi

To add to what @The_Cat_In_Space said. What I did first time was browsing all the pages of the releases thread, 100+ pages and download all of them plus putting them into seperate folders. For instance I have a mod folder with only 1.3.1 compatible mods as for 1.7 and so forth. You can also use CKAN Using CKAN you can search for mods. Look for orion drives or extraplanetary launch pads, just click as if you were to install even if you have already and the CKAN window will prompt a recommended mods list based on the mods set for download/installation. By all means a alternative orion mod or a wanted plugin is listed, do yourself a favor and take a look at this. Remember that many ksp mod versions listed as version1.4, 1,5 and 1,6 respectively also work on 1.7 or vice versa. Usually I go to the last page of the release thread and the opening thread to see if there are any compatibility issues. AFAIK all orion drive mods are standalone and do not incorporate well into extraplanetary launchpad.

50Ton's wow, I think I could do that. Such planes would have substantially more wings i'd presume, eventually you'll be adding so much wing's that another rapier is similarly in weight.

True, and the stayputnik is the first probe core in the career game. Historically the stayputnik (sputnik) was faired so it didn't suffered drag problems as you do on early rockets using them. Fins or no fins it throws off balance and makes launching a stayputnik probe rocket harder, which is what you want new players to avoid during the early career process. These people don't come here so it's possible anyone might share that opinion. As to what it is good for. They are used as bearing due to their rounded hitboxes used for stock propeller planes, the none MH old stockish version of it. Satellites, yes seriously. There rounded shape is very cosmetical, use a few bundled together to make a figure, imagine... The thing is, use the stayputnik but only if it is a faired rocket, otherwise stay away from it unless your sure to have a lot of bottom fins.

I always use extra fuel cells just in case. Furthermore I would like this. Still, it seems very kiddy that a engineer can fix a solar panel infinitely. For that matter, when one breaks he kind of needs to have another replacement set into his backpack. That would be infinite solar panels, can you imagine. With some tape to fix a tire I kind of still can.

Nothing big, so not to complicated and just to my liking. I always disliked I had to first make sure it was night to begin with, then actually launch the vessel to activate the "lights" to see how it looked like. Then to make it worse, actually fly the vessel to make sure if the angle of the lights was properly adjusted. I have the light setting for nighttime as darkest as possible (some setting in the main menu) as I like to simulate night landings. That's not everyone's cup of tea, it is mine. Using the "Illuminator mk1" which is the greater spotlight you can use a angle to see the ground below, another light at another angle to see the ground at a angle in front, and one or more up to the headlight shining directly forward, mind you these can be landing gear lights. With this you can rotate the ship in the VAB and SPH to see the light effect on the ground directly on the editor floor. You can also rotate the ship any way to see all angles of the vessel as they would look in space. @GoldForest Whenever you agree, may I suggest more stock lights to be incorporated and a all lights on/off in the editor to complement the whole idea further.

The thing with autostruts set to "root" or "heaviest is that both can be on any of both vessels (the smaller or larger one) So if many of the wing pieces are set to "root" and "root" is the mk1 cockpit then the "root" allocation will change when you decouple. You said the carrier plane breaks. Well, I might be wrong but I think it's best to autostrut something to a part that is heavier then another heavy part. For that matter, using "heaviest" autostrut will change it to what's heaviest to begin with. But what if you decouple 2 planes where the heaviest part on the 1st stage is much lighter then on the 2nd stage as in your case. I believe many of the wing pieces on the carrier plane are set to heaviest which is the large fuel tank on the rocket plane it carries. That means a strut line is drawn from the lower wing horizontally to a center point above the vessel. That means the wings of the carrier plane are strutted on a X and Y axis. In other words, in the X relationship it's bolted on the fuselage, in the Y relationship it's held up on a cord which is the rocket plane above. If you decouple both vessels the heaviest part of the carrier plane will change to the Mk1 liquid fuel tank or mk1 cockpit presumably. In that case there is a strut line across the width, nothing is holding the wing up on the Y axis. Couple that with very wide wings, consequential physics oscillations due to re-strutting and things will break. Try to test out the carrier plane first. Also, make smaller wings. I have never used wings that large, do you want to fly very high? If wings fail, you should place each wing segment seperately and then use the move and rotate functions to get them to the right place, instead of segmenting them together, while you could do that I would only segment 3 together and then attach a new set of 3 to the fuselage and drag them using the move tool function to get the desired wing shape. The problem if you glue every wing piece together that the connection point of the whole wing is at the fuselage and you will get a lot of flexing.

It always happened to me when building in the VAB and driving from the runway is much more neat. Is your navball set so that the nose is pointed 90 degrees? If not I suspect your default probe core is upside down, inside the service bay? Is that a VTOL? I can't see the underside so I suspect engines are underneath... Tip. Go to action group menu in the editor, select front docking port and put "control from here" on any of the 0 through 9 number keys. Then you can just hit i.e. "1" to control from that point.

Something I want to try, maybe if I can spare some time. Clipping ION's in fairing or service bay is ok?

well, your fuselage is always horizontal so never vertical. So yes that is what I mean. When you attach 2 other tanks in 2 way symmetry to the center tank then it's called parallel attached tanks or boosters if you put it on decouplers. Depending on type of plane, mk3 in your intended case the best solution for aerodynamics is to put engines at the back. If you build the type of aircraft your speaking off I assume your using the Goliath or wheesley's under the wing. Best is to scale amount of engines based on engine per mass. So if you got a lightweight airplane using 1 engine to lift 10 tons then a 100Ton airplane would need 10 of these engines. Do you?

May I suggest 4 in 1. Plane, rocket, rover and... boat. Better yet, a 5 in 1, add a submarine to the above and you have all. Why not, at least that would make it the greatest challenge.

Use this mod Install it, activate it using the ksp toolbar and do a retro burn. Watch where the red arrow ends using map view, if it's over the ksc then your good. Using a space plane (like the shuttle is) you can use a pitch angle, using the flat body into the wind to aerobrake. Doing so will cause the trajectories mod ground marker to shift due to drag, skimming and deceleration and also due to roll and yaw. If the marker overshoots the ksc try to level off or pitch negatively with the nose to the ground with the intention to shorten out the trajectory to get your aim back to the ksc. As long as your nose is able to pitch +/- ~20 degrees you should have enough controllable stopping power. If your space plane fails to do these maneuvers, for instance, if your nose doesn't want to pull up in the atmosphere you should try to move the wings more to the front. This causes more drag at the front allowing the nose to pull up, but beware, moving the wings to far forward and your shuttle will flip backwards in the atmosphere. When doing so try to calibrate col/com as you should always. In most cases a well equipped shuttle should be able to do a retro burn at the other side of the planet for a few dozen m/s of Dv and be able to navigate to the runway using pitch control in the atmosphere.

What I like about fuel cells is that aircraft typically are combustion engines, not electrically driven. So a aircraft without combustion that has no solar panels and/or thermo electric generation makes little of an airplane unless the aircraft is obviously covered in solar panels. But that's impossible since solar panels have to be attached to the bearing. Or just place extra solar panels on the wings for cosmetics and make it look as if it's so. In any case, if part of the bearing isn't shielded (makes for a not so fast propeller plane) you can dock a claw to it to refill the dumpling tanks. I've seen people put solar panels in radial around the bearing casing, can you attach a claw to a solar panel

Can you post a picture of a craft your working on right now? In any case I'm very experienced in building large SSTO's. To be blunt, in fact it are heavier SSTO's that are more efficient, assuming you can make one efficient. The reason being is the involvement of weight and drag. Drag reduction is done through proper coning and placing every non fuselage, wing or landing gear part inside a cargo bay. Every structure from 1.25m to 5m has a cross section. Of course for 1.25m the cross section is 1.25m squared, unless your fuselage is on a pitch angle causing the wind to hit the underside of your fuselage tanks. Using a small incline of rotation of the wing chord line (wing indcidence:use internet search) makes sure the fuselage and nose stay at prograde causing a 1.25m cross section to stay close to 1.25m squared. The thing with the drag model is that it scales up from 1.25m to 5m but the cool thing with weight is that it has momentum associated with it and the heavier the vessel the more momentum. That means the vessel wants to retain speed as it goes because something very heavy is less easier to deccelerate through drag then something lighter. Therefore it is more efficient the heavier your space plane is. In any case it is far easier to break 400m/s due to the high momentum of a heavier space plane. Try to use as few stacks as possible (stacks of fuselages) If you want to design a spaceplane and you only need 1 stack in the middle then stay there. If you need more then 1 engine on a one stack space plane you can use the adapters. It is better to use 2 way adapters then to attach another fuel stack. I"ve made this https://kerbalx.com/Aeroboi/Hearts-Chevron-96-Cargo-Lifter-2375MC Maybe that's a bit to excessive but it's a example. How large a craft were you thinking off exactly? Other then for large space stations, mothership modules the space plane above is overpowered for normal applications. For most uses normal 2.75m or 3.75m one stack space planes using mk3 cargo bays can tug anything into orbit you need for a mission. IIRC you can pack a tightly packed eve lander inside a mk3 cargo bay. What kind of cargo do you intend to haul?

You can also enable "part clipping in editor" in the cheat menu. Then you can add let's say 8 engines to a engine plate, then move them in or to the side so the attachment is clear and then attach another set of 8, 6 or less so you can clip the whole engine plate if you desire for a almost similar drag penalty and fuel flow still works

I would start to recommend autostrut use. If you have *one stack (*one serial stage without boosters that is) it is best to only use grandparent on that length between the parts and every exterior part to root including the rear end which are engines presumably. That stiffens the vessel over it's length. When using a parallel stage on top of the serial (a pair of boosters) it is best to use grandparent to the tank directly attached to the tank, or decoupler (also set to grandparent) The other tanks or parts should be welded to heaviest with the fwt and aft parts set to root. When adding a parallel booster make sure you place the first fuel tank in or close to the middle of the center stack so the grandparent connection of the pair is connected through the center. Don't use rigid attachment when used under stress like flight and high twr rockets. Rigid attachment is best used for very loose constructional pieces that tend to flex like on a rover or base. I consider myself a expert at wing design especially using larger space planes. I have a space plane that takes close to 1.5 Kiloton to orbit using massive wide Big-S wings. https://kerbalx.com/Aeroboi/Hearts-Chevron-96-Cargo-Lifter-2375MC Always strut wing pieces to the heaviest part. Make sure that the wing pieces are moved (move:tool) as much away from one another as possible without leaving a gap. If you attach a Big-S wing straight on you will always be able to move one away from the other before the gap occurs. There's also a slight uneven alignment so use rotate to mirror the other. If wings are close to each other during stress they tend to fall off. If the wing construction isn't wide then the stress is within limits, in that case seperating wing pieces away from each other shouldn't be necessary. Beyond that there's a secret but annoying workaround to large wing design. That is placing each wing piece seperately from the other. Let's say the whole wing would want to be attached to a center fuel tank then the first piece is placed. Instead of placing the 2nd piece on the first piece you place it directly to the tank and then use move and rotate to place it as you want, expectedly as it would if you connected it directly. Continue until the wing is made. Remember you can hold Shift while dragging a part to offset it to unlimited range. If the wing is placed to much forward you need to move each wing piece one by one until the center of lift is in the proper direction. This may seem tedious but I've got a hand in it, as you will with practice.

Besides craft aesthetics my experiments (based on heat tolerance values and use) The most heat resistant part is a inflatable heatshield, also a deflated heatshield. If your stack is 1.25 , 1.875m or 2.5m it can rest behind the deflated heatshield. It isn't as aerodynamic as a fairing but not bad and should help your incentive to aerobrake. While it looks ugly I once managed to clip a fairing under the heatshield by dragging the heatshield out, build the fairing within tight margins and then lower to see if it's build right and then repeat. There's a slight threshold at which the point of the fairing goes to far to the top where it will suffer heating damage. That's probably directly under the node when the heatshield is inflated. Another method I found is that you can place empty 2.5m ablator heatshield within a 2.5m stack to redirect the bow shock if heat cripples away with the checkerboard shrouds. Besides that the best use are the ablator heatshields and ultimately the fairings. If using a winged craft to aerobrake enough wings and good attitude hold of 90 degrees should be good enough on 2400K parts if aerobraking and a fairing is capable of 2700K. The biggest issue is earo capture which involves interplanetary encounter speeds and is done with heatshields often. Fairings being able to withstand more heat should work better but have a lot of drag that goes with it so you need a wing or rear fairing design or anything else that drags to counteract otherwise your craft will tumble I expect.

You could add stageable ION's each carrying the required batteries (EC) for the Xenon consumption and then stage off to the next stage where each stage carries enough batteries to consume the Xenon of each next stage. Also have each stage carry it's required wings as in the video above. Batteries are very energy dense and you could couple it with some static solar panels to reduce the total required batteries on each stage. All you have to do is manually unlock each xenon tank and battery of any subsequent stage, honestly, that is cumbersome, maybe there's a mod that can do this automatically because asparagus on ION seems not to be working. If it's possible (I'm not sure) perhaps the length of the challenge is to get a Kerbal away from Laythe as far as possible.

1: I beg to differ, what is considered more realistic, based on rocket style. All truss mounts are based on some engine mount option. The truss mounted are more notorious for Soviet style rockets. Also, realistic is not what everyone wants, someone wants the lego style play and the stock mount or Porkjet based aero faired rear ends. It's all up to the player. Who cares what Squad decides what option is the default one, logically it would be the stockish version since things are often legacy based not "realism" 2: It already has, it's the third option unless you see it as grey or that you can clarify what black/white stripe layout you prefer alternatively. 3: Yes, and much more type variety of SRB's you can think of, the current selection is scare, and if one thing remains ancient stock alike it's the variety of Solid rocket boosters, I'm amazed we're still where we are with the current selection, therefore I have best hopes for the future

While I would recommend Mechjeb to begin with for ease of game play I do have some stock tips. Always have SAS stability hold "ON" Always try to tap W,A,S,D, instead of trying to hold it. That means try to hold W for 0.5 seconds, release W then press again for 0.5 seconds and keep tapping to slowly pitch over. Otherwise immediate control inputs can cause a rocket to flip or pitch wildly causing aero drag and Dv losses. Whenever I create a Eve rocket I keep trying to aim for a specific speed at a specific altitude and then hold prograde from there on. If it happens I arch to high I have to aim for a slower speed a a lower altitude. For instance activating prograde hold at 16km with 600m/s @ 30 degree pitch gets me close to 90km Apoapsis near orbital velocity when nearing 60km altitude on a specific rocket. Your rocket has a best launch profile also and the launch profile differs per each design, try to find yours, write it up somewhere so you know how to launch the rocket the same way.

Some rockets and space planes have ~100+ engines so real particle calculations would really cripple big launches, no fun and a game is to maintain game play.

I would suggest this since 1 kerbal launch vehicles often need less less parts or stage complexity so for a very early learner who practices Eve launches it is advised to try this. Honestly, it doesn't matter much if you really want to try. 3 kerbals is one extra pod or a larger one meaning a different launch vehicle, either 2.5m sized or 1.25m sized with asparagus like yours is but with extra engines, also like your's is. If your willing to attempt 3 kerbal launch vehicles like your doing for a first time eve launch vehicle then it involves somewhat more engineering compared to a 1 kerbal launch vehicle. Idea... In the VAB take off the whole lander part including the stages during the part of the accident. Activate CoM and CoL markers and activate RCS build Aid mod to view wet/dry com markers (yellow and red CoM orbs) Is the red orb below the Center of lift? If so you need to find a way to lower the center of lift during that stage, for instance use small elevons at the bottom. Either way have some fins near the bottom even if the CoL is close to the CoM. Even if the dry CoM is close to the CoL the dry mass of the engines plus the CoL location could swing the vessel around. Remember that a rocket without fins also has a center of lift due to body lift even on Mk1 fuselages. For that matter the height of the asparagus tanks themselves could alter the aerodynamic difference. Also, struts also induce drag albeit little. I see you have quite a few on top. Remember that the parent part creates the drag, that is the part where the strut part is first connected to. Is it the Mk1 capsule, if not try to attach them from the heatshield to the pod. I believe that isn't possible directly so place something between the heatshield. Also know you can activate "Autostruts" in the main menu "general" settings that can strut a part by right clicking it and then use the autostrut function in the context menu.

What I mean is that a "GE9X" for instance isn't a scale higher then 3.75m is opposed to 2.5m so another 3.75m turbofan engine would really be a class apart. Also the rapier is a prototype and indeed non fictional. I should have been clearer. When I uttered fictional in context of the rapier it is that it has never flown yet, hence fictional towards actual space flight. On that basis of those pointers I made my conclusions. Note that I'm not against fictional stuff or prototype stuff. It just doesn't cope with the game well and IMO many of these parts can make the game to easy.

Rapier only. I think LV-N's are never justified for payload orbiters unless they're interplanetary or Liquid fuel only. The weight involved on each LV-N in order to push the last couple hundred m/s into orbit doesn't scale with a pure rapier based space plane. Whenever I try to optimize a Rapier only space plane and try to attach LV-N's to it while swapping LF/OX with required LF tanks any added LV-N's usually cripple me for getting larger payloads to orbit. On that particular SSTO I used 4x4 adapters on a 5m engine plate set to "quad" each holding 4 for a total of 16 rapiers each with a tapered front end for optimal aerodynamics. Building larger/heavier also means more weight per cross section of aerodynamic drag and that SSTO weighted 2.7 Kilotons with cargo. Building heavier while keeping stack count low means less rapiers per ton to go past 400m/s in a dive plus the square cube surplus is a bonus with it.

Right, didn't know about the old values but I'm from v0.90 As for the vector, I ment it's cross to thrust section. Also that it combines with superior gimbal while being overthrusted for a mk3 space shuttle replica so what is it? On top of that it has very little drag and can be surface mounted without a nose cone on top (clipped or non clipped) with very little drag. On top of that they're great as Submarine ballast while being able to increase ballast through staging. All in all my reference to the Vector OP'ness is based on this and whatever they do with the Vector it should remain a superior class engine, to my taste only having lower thrust of about 500kN.

I'm not much against the old Wolfhound stats. Most parts that were formerly introduced had it's complaints like the Vector for instance. Somehow the Wolfhound is stats beyond believe. I'm not against it since it is a replica and most modded engines have stats based on prototypes that are leaps ahead like atomic engines and sorts alike. So how would the old Wolfhound cope outside the realm of KSP? If anything, a engine with similar stats (415ISP) that is a Hydrolox engine would be considered realistically scaled, it's just that there is only LF/OX in the game making such a engine arbitrary. If that is what a Wolfhound engine is to represent Squad should listen more closely as the community clearly expects some alternative fuel resource to backup the engine stats. As of now I see the Wolfhound as a exceptional engine for Tylo SSTO's. As it happens I made a few for a soon to come Grand tour science mode While being OP, having the old Wolfhound stats could justify other applications for this engine, as being said this is SSTO's with higher payload fraction especially on early SSTO's and better Eve upper stages. If this is against the wishes of many players they can just not use them or leave them out of the challenge rules.