leopardenthusiast

They actually often survive huge falls onto their heads if they actually it land. If they hit water, they never survive.

I go for 100km for craft waiting for their transfer window, waiting to be docked with something else, or only just launched into space, 200km for station-related things, and 300km for stuff that I don't need right now but will need later (old reusable landers, transfer stages, and so on)

I'm honestly shocked that nobody's done this yet.

That's hilarious.

Get 7-zip, it's free and it's good.

Amazing! Space looks nice now! Here's a screenshot I took: http://i.imgur.com/CEBobhR.jpg

I cut out your post because there's only one post after it before my post. I rate your trolling attempt at a 2/100.

You still have to make a launch vehicle capable of lifting the payload's mass, and your payload is going to be strutted to hell and back no matter what. Sure, there's the problem of the payload's drag being lost, but that's what fairings do. Since it was stated in the OP that the base would get the payload's mass, your launch vehicle would be pretty much exactly the same. Only your payload would be affected, and only until you popped the fairing open.

What if you added something before you could recover a craft from the pause menu? Something easy to do, but impossible to do by mistake.

I've been working on this for a day or two, and I think it's pretty good, so I'm posting it for all to see. The Seeker Mk7 was originally designed for search-and-rescue operations, in which it would fly low and shine floodlights at the ground to help find stranded spacecraft. When it was discovered that the lights didn't actually work, they were removed, and it was repurposed as a training aircraft. It has 450 units of LiquidFuel and two circular air intakes. These are shared between two Basic Jet Engines, which allow it to accelerate rather fast on the ground, though it won't be winning any altitude contests. A Delta Wing, Swept Wing, and Tail Fin on each side allow it to not be a brick full of fuel, and for control, it has a Small Control Surface on each side. The tail, mounted between the engines, has a Tail Fin with a Small Control Surface sticking straight up, and a landing wheel on the underside. Just below the air intakes, there are two wheels, mounted in a way that causes the aircraft to point slightly above the horizon when landed on a good runway. The nose has a single wheel, which serves as a shock absorber for when the plane tips on landing, which does happen in high-speed landings. Finally, there is a single RTG, mounted along the middle fuel tank, to power the fridge in the cockpit. Studies have shown that pilots tend to be less careful when their ice cream melts mid-flight. Imgur album here: http://imgur.com/a/CxY1U Download here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3yok66eb15dzeex/Seeker%20Mk7.craft To take off: 1: Turn the engines on. 2: Throttle up. 3: Wait until you're going fast enough to lift off. 4: Raise the wheels. To land: 1. Lower the wheels. 2. Set throttle to 33% 3. At about 100m from the runway, cut the engines. 4. Glide for as long as you can to reduce horizontal speed 5. Land gently 6. Slam on the brake until you come to a stop I mostly made this plane so that I would have something of my own to fly around. Please, tell me in excruciating detail exactly what you think is wrong with it so that I can make it better.

Roddin Kerman having some fun with my new plane, the Seeker Mk3:

I've been trying to build an SSTO. Since I couldn't think of a good name, I just called it Fred. This is the Fred SSTO Mk1. It flew... well... saying that it "flew" is a little generous. It was more like throwing a brick at the ocean. A jet propelled brick with a kerbal in it. Admittedly, this isn't even the real thing - it's a reconstruction. I had to make a new one, because I absentmindedly saved over the original. But this one "flies" pretty much exactly the same way. So here we have the Fred SSTO Mk2. Will it fly? WILL IT FLY?! from a different angle YES! IT FLIES! WE HAVE FLIGHT! Bit wobbly though, I'd hate to have to fly it to orbit. Let's take it in for landing on the grass. ...oh. Well. Glad there's nobody important in there... and that they survived, of course... How do we fix a wobbly spaceplane? Struts! Meet the Fred SSTO Mk3! Struts! Never enough struts! Let's try that landing again. You know, I'm starting to think that maybe this design isn't so great. At this point, I realized that I hadn't slept for 14 hours and decided to do something that required less thought.

What is that on the fuel tank, on the other side from the battery?

Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I can actually look at Kerbin without my framerate dropping now, and the new ASAS works great on my planes (though I mostly fly the Aeris 3B, which is literally just the Aeris 3A with an RTG put near the CoM, but others work fine).

[Operating System]: Windows 7 [Memory]: 8GB [ASAS Trouble (Y/N)]: No [Mods installed, pre-patch]: Many [Mods installed, post-patch]: None, clean install with all files deleted [Description of problem (keep it short)]: N/A I've only tried planes, though.

My first download was 0.13.3, which I played for about a week or so before getting 0.15.2.

Better than Deus Ex: Human Revolution, where your choices are orange, orange, orange, and orange...

What he REALLY needs to do is buy a smokeless navball and open that up. They're much simpler.

You don't even need a huge battery - if you slap two RTGs on your command pod, you should be fine. Even if you run out of power, it'll recharge reasonably fast.

I sometimes clip radial RCS tanks into spacecraft that aren't equipped to dock, though I haven't done it since I installed FAR, as it would lead to reduced drag and anything that I'm trying to make bearable to look at via part clipping is usually not going to have to be hidden away in a fairing (and by that, I mean it isn't a giant block of fuel and engines).

For the most part, you don't need to update FAR unless it's horribly broken or incompatible with something you want to install (for instance, I only updated my copy of FAR because it was incompatible with Procedural Fairings).

It's easier to get into space with a properly designed rocket, yes.

There's 5 fairing sizes and two fairing shapes, each of which adds a single part to the list, so it'd be exactly 7 parts added, and they can cover just about anything.

Depends on the size of your lander. I've put tiny little probes on the Mun with just an OKTO, some folding solar panels, an Oscar-B tank, an Ant, and four tiny little landing gears, but I tend to ride my transfer stage most of the way to the surface. You'll NEVER be able to put a 3-man pod on anything but Gilly unless you use ridiculous amounts of Ants, though.

You know what would probably help with end-of-runway-takeoff syndrome? A variation on the runway with a ramp. Maybe even make the angle and curve adjustable in the SPH. Hell, put a rocket on a rocketsled - most likely using SRBs for excessive T/W, which is all that really matters as long as your boosters don't burn out before you reach the end - and launch it off a ramp that ends at about 80 degrees and curves very gently, build up quite a bit of speed before you even lift off and start your main engines!