Lt_Duckweed

It does not. The wings will behave entirely normally.

Considering the number of blades you are using, you can almost certainly drop one size down on the rotors and use the medium rotors. This will let you use 16 rtgs instead of.... 100

Essentially, there are a number of different parts in the game that can under the right circumstances produce lift to drag ratios MUCH higher than what is possible with standard wings. The very simplest is the small retractable landing gear. Simply roll it 90 degrees so it is sideways, then angle the front upwards about 30 degrees. This particular one can give a lift to drag ratio about 3x higher than what can be done stock (stock max supersonic/hypersonic lift drag is in the range from 4.3 to 5, depending on mach number, with the landing gear trick it is nearly 15. They range anywhere

More specifically, nuclear engines are one of the parts that cause it to stutter, don't know if there are others but thats the biggest offender for me. To add to this, there will be 3 numbers in each row. First number is currently exposed area of that face of the drag cube (taking node occlusion into account), second number is how streamlined this face of the drag cube is (0 is infinitely pointy, 1.00 is a flat plate, anything bellow .45 is good, bellow .3 is really good), the third number is the total area of that face of the drag cube. So you can compare the 1st and 3rd values to see

Yes, it is modeled. In fact, at subsonic speeds, backface drag is nearly as bad as frontal drag.

As long as you build a well optimized craft, just barely dipping bellow 120km and then going back to orbit isn't all that difficult. Speed of sound is very high on Jool so heating isn't nearly as bad as you would expect, and 120km on Jool is the equivalent of about 8km on Kerbin so even Nervs will work reasonably well (and you should use nervs for the high delta v). Basically you want minimal wing area so you can preserve as much speed as possible, use fairings as nosecones, and try to get town to 120km while still at 2000m/s or so, then ignite the nervs and burn back to orbit. As a

It sounds like the effect of the rapier cone is strongly tied to the rapiers/ton ratio of the craft. I was only getting a 2% decrease, but I was also taking off from the runway at nearly 44 tons on a single rapier.

That's where ksp gets tricky. L-I-D is the drag that comes as a result of the fact that in ksp the lift from wings is parallel to the wing surface, not the velocity vector. This vector gets decomposed into actual lift, and lift induced drag. The actual drag listed in the action windows for wings, or displayed via the F11 arrows, is considered to be parasitic drag. The true lift induced drag will be both of these drag values added together. The true fuselage parasitic drag will be quite low. On the setup I've been toying around with: Cruise altitude: 22300m at start of cruise. Crui

What AoA are you using? Hypersonic lift/drag ratio of wings begins to fall off after 5 degrees AoA so if you are using, say, 10, that would degrade your l/d ratio, while also having you flying at a higher altitude, meaning more drag and less thrust for a lower top speed overall.

Quick question, would having some wings in a bay be against the rules? Basically, be able to open the bay for some extra lift during takeoff, but be able to close them away during cruise to have a lower cruising altitude (depending on the exact craft dynamics a lower cruising altitude can be counter intuitively more efficient). They wouldn't be physically clipped, just located within the bay.

That's exactly what this is about lol. On a lot of my more optimized sstos/planes in general (intended as exercises in theory more so than any practical craft) I am pushing takeoff mass per rapier well north of 40 tons, some even as high as 50+. I ramp up the hills to the west, then accelerate down the hills and across the flats before climbing onto the runway from the side at a very shallow angle, then take off at the end of the runway much like any "normal" plane would. This allows for very high fuel fractions and thus very high dv.

Removing the node via module manager will do nothing to reduce the drag. Drag in ksp is calculated off of "drag cubes" which have surface area and "pointiness" factors for each of 6 different faces. Each node on a part is assigned to one of the 6 faces. Drag cubes can only ever be modified by node attatchment, NOT by deleting a node in the part deffinition. When you node attach two parts, the drag cube faces tied to each node are compared. The ways this can turn out are: 1. The smaller face (by surface area) is removed entirely. The larger face has the surface area of the smal

Question, one of the rules mentions that you must take off from the runway. But it mentions nothing about the takeoff run needing to be entirely on the runway or not. So my question is: as long as I spawn on the runway, and my wheels leave the ground for powered flight on the runway, does the location of my craft between these two events matter?

For cargo bay occlusion, ksp does not care about where you attached the part, only that it is physically inside the bay. You can attach parts anywhere on a craft and offset them into a bay and the bay will shield them.

I'm fairly certain this s a visual UI only bug. Stratz and I saw something very similar with our Jool craft, where the blades still had drag listed in their part windows, even though the bay was closed. But it was purely visual, the blades were actually producing no drag, but when you closed the bay it didn't update the UI correctly.