Van Disaster

As a different example, here's one I threw together in 15 mins as a demo for someone: Notice how much dV it has left over... that was the smallest usable tank for that one. That by itself is a bit useless, but all my small spaceplanes look like that. That's a SAR version for rescuing stranded Kerbals. Occasionally the game likes to throw them in orbit, for some reason. I've no idea why that wing design is so successful - I started throwing parts together to make something that looked wierd and it just worked - but it's not at all unstable no matter what the fuel use is. I use TAC fuel balancer a lot, that is pretty essential - I'd quite like it to be programmable. As the planes get bigger you're more likely to want to use delta wings instead of straighter ones.

At what altitude? you might simply be stalling. Stock designs generally don't work in FAR, but then they generally get into trouble at takeoff rather than in flight. Pictures are worth a thousand words, as ever.

This is approaching meme levels, but there is a mod which does something like this; you "fuel" the dockyard with materials, and then it will teleport a ship from the launchpad to itself and eat the materials in return. Having the thing pop up in a dockyard model would be rather fun.

Step 1: Install FAR. Your planes can then look like planes, you can design them using 100 years of aviation knowledge as a reference, and you get to choose what control surfaces do. I seem to do ok with one intake per jet; I let the plane accelerate at 21km or so until it's hit 1500m/s and then pull it up to 10-12 degrees & light rockets. NERVAs work fine, you'll want a 1:1 ratio with jets ( unless it's a tiny plane, then I'd use one NERVA & two jets ). Make sure the rocket thrust is aligned with the centre of mass, it's less important for the jets. Wings. Wings are light, usually you can't have enough wings. You're attempting to fly level at around Mach 5, at 70,000 feet, on a planet 1/6th the diameter of Earth ( and I think 1/6th the atmosphere height? I forget where Earth atmosphere actually ends ); you're also hauling enough rocket fuel up to that height to see you the rest of the way. You need much bigger wings than you probably think you need.

It always helps to see shots from the SPH of your troublesome aircraft. Most people's shots I've seen who're having issues with flipping need lengthier fuselages, and to check their CoT isn't way off from CoL/CoM ( if it's a spaceplane you definitely want CoT as near to CoM as you can ). The other thing is to try and keep as much drag as far back as you can or you'll get more unstable with speed. As an example: I was having some problems re-entering a plane which was stable up to 1.5km/s ( pretty much the limit using FAR jets, at that point transition to rockets and you're almost out of the atmosphere anyway ) because re-entry speeds were destabilising it and it'd just go into an unrecoverable flat spin every time. The issue was solved simply by keeping the jet intakes closed until very late on ( with a decent design you can pretty much glide halfway round the globe or more on re-entry ) and adding some tiny speedbrakes at the very rear.

Shielded docking port works nicely as an airbrake too. If you're launching with mechjeb, *don't* start it's gravity turn until the atmosphere thins out a little - you'll be presenting the side of the rocket to the airstream instead of the much smaller nose. If it did a gentle turn it wouldn't matter so much, but it is a bit violent about it.

Docking is a fairly fundamental skill for the game I would wonder what you're going to do with a station without being able to dock with it. Anyway you can use Hyperedit to put anything in orbit, providing it doesn't collapse on the launchpad. A slightly less hacky way would be to use the Orbital Construction mod which does the same thing, only requires you to "fuel" a construction yard in orbit first so you still have to do launches. That won't help if you can't dock to fuel it, mind.

The ILS panel should be explained in the help - I did notice from a brief try of MJ2 that it lacks a lot of the info MJ1 has though. If you're nosing into the runway then tap S to keep the nose up/flare a little, it won't turn the autoland off. Well it shouldn't.

Well, making a launch consume fuel would presumably not be hard at all. Making that fuel appear in the new ship's tanks would be significantly harder, I'd imagine. Obviously a plugin can add/remove fuel ( fuel balancer is the obvious example of filling/emptying tanks ) but working out a suitable fuel fill & what type of fuel it needs is another matter.

The mod emptying tanks when it moves the structure off the pad would be a pretty nice touch, yes.

I did some tests on the ram intakes ( using the stock ones this time instead of Taverius' ); as expected with one intake and one of your turboramjets, it flamed out completely at 149%. Throttle down a little and thrust reappears, throttle up fully again and the engine flames out completely once more. Either that or the engine info panel is lying about the 0 thrust, but I was losing speed pretty rapidly. The air intakes are reporting airspeed 100m/s faster than the main UI is reporting surface speed, don't know what that's about. It seems constant with density though.

The shuttle is a terrible example of a reusable spacecraft, and it's not even SSTO a spacecraft that can haul cargo to space and crew to do something with it is a handy thing to have sometimes - for building space stations, for instance - but a bit pointlessly complicated for just throwing satellites up. It does seem a bit strange that nobody has built a reusable basic launcher before now - NASA had the shuttle, the Russians are happy with old designs and had a funding crisis, and ESA I guess just lacks the initiative. There are other countries with space programs though... I don't tend to launch anything over 100t so I don't really need massive launchers - I put 100t into orbit earlier with a two-stage launcher ( which was basically my 50t one with more fuel and bigger booster-stack engines ) which is one 3.5m KW main stack with two 3.5m KW liquid booster stacks set up ala Falcon Heavy. I could just rework the fuel pipes & make that a SSTO, but... it fits the flight profile far better as it is. KW ullage motors pull the side stages away quite happily even when it's tipped over the wrong way.

Depends on how long it's going to take; I spent some of today doing touch&go's on Mun from Kerbin & back, iteratively improving a spaceplane design, so that's not exacly a complicated mission . However if it takes a large amount of time to get anywhere then I'll forward plan, because I never seem to just have one mission going so I can't just keep fast-forwarding. I will however decide I want to go somewhere *now* even if it's at the worst possible phase angle and build something to manage, instead of waiting for the efficient time to launch... so that's sorta winging it.

With my shallow deorbits that would drive me face first into the hills west of KSC I tend to bring the plane down to 3km at the hills & attempt to get it subsonic, and then either check the ILS to see if I'm lined up or just click the autoland - which will put you in a nerve-wracking dive for the deck, possibly. Even then it likes to either nosedive into the runway or chop the wheels off at the runway start so I never leave it totally automated. I usually deorbit to put perapsis about 15km over KSC which gives me the chance to use a variety of descent profiles; I've recently started to deorbit earlier & try an even more gentle re-entry to practice for when things start exploding if you mistreat them. It's possible to bounce off the upper atmosphere with the right AoA ( and FAR, anyway )

I have pretty uncomplicated rocket designs - for a large rocket usually a main lifter stage with a payload attached, and a pair of radial tanks with some small propulsion. Radial tanks go when they're empty, and the payload is thrown out when it's where it's meant to be; hopefully there's enough fuel left to deorbit the lifter. Given my lifter gets to obscene TWR levels when it's low on fuel ( to the point where I worry about it breaking payloads ) I'm not inclined to make matters any more complicated, so any heavier loads would probably get bigger engines on the side tanks, and more fuel on the side tanks too. I have been trying to drop stages while I'm still reasonably vertical but rotating the rocket so the outer stages are still horizontal when the turn starts makes that less necessary.

They're pretty good. Even with all the excess weight of a plane ( and entering orbit with 3500+dV in the tanks! ), was easy to gently make my way down. Final moments were with orange radials, but that's only because it has to land on the wheels. TBH though the orange radials are also ok for medium weight stuff if you don't want to lug heavy 1m rockets around. Pics are from that "get to Mun & back" mission challenge thing in General, which has only gone halfway so far. Goes against instincts to go back...

I don't actually understand why you'd want a SSTO rocket for a launch platform - as razark said you can recover all the parts anyway if you go for a Falcon Heavy sort of design ( which is working for me with KW parts pretty well ). I'm not talking about shuttles or dedicated vehicles like miners which are their own payload, but something to put a discrete package into space. Spaceplanes on the other hand don't use fuel to counter gravity drag ( much ), just considerably greater aero drag but with far greater fuel efficiency also. "Multi-stage" spaceplanes are sorta handy if you want to get one in orbit with full rocket tanks ( just put enough fuel in drop tanks to get it circularized ), but I suspect you're talking of Shuttle type vertical launch vehicles - and once again, what's the point in the complexity of making those winged?

Step 1: add warehouse part to station Step 2: add spacedock part to station ( if you have an existing station just stick it on the side of the warehouse ) Step 3: ship spare parts to station. They're heavy. They're resources that live in tanks like pretty much anything else. Step 4: Construct vehicle as normal, add spaceborn part Step 5: Launch vehicle as normal ( so whatever you build has to stand up in Kerbin gravity ), follow prompts. I used the original a bit, but usually my creations would fly to pieces during launch. I'm hoping that's been fixed. It's a really convenient if roundabout way of launching awkward shaped things - you still have to do a bunch of launches to get enough parts up in space, but then the final product should emerge without needing a launcher. As I said though, it still has to withstand launchpad gravity...

Ferram, it starts spitting ( the actual spitting animation ) enough that twin engined planes spin out, so it's a fairly drastic loss of power. I don't particularily mind, I'll just transition to pure rockets a bit earlier but it did seem like it might be a buglet. localSol; over 1460m/s-ish (ground) in Kerbin orbit the turbine sound will start spooling down irrespective of inlet air, which I always assumed was a transition to pure ramjet. I didn't notice any spooldown noise coinciding with my flameouts but there's a lot of transitions going on at that point for spaceplanes.

I'm also noticing I'm getting flameouts with 150%+ Air Req, but I'll have to investigate that a bit more I think.

I pull out the bits I really don't use, but I'm happy with the mods I have. I pretty much exclusively use KW for rocket parts, for instance ( other than the bits it doesn't have ). Being able to use one part instead of many multiples of others ( wings for instance ) makes such a difference.

Here's an odd one: if I hit Ctrl-Z in the SPH & get my parts back, the CAS dialog expands & refuses to minimise again...

Return?! they moved out for good!

They are HOME parts - you have to toggle the inflatable bits.

FAR moves the CoL rearwards with speed ( I suspect more specfically when you go supersonic, as it should ) - I made some hinged wingtips to cope with that on one aircraft, I just make heavy use of TAC fuel balancer usually. Thankfully if you mess up at 25km you have a long time to get out of your spin Posted somewhere before: the big one with the Mk4 fuselage is obviously the heavy lifter. Not sure if it can lift more than 25t if I added more fuel, I suspect it might be near a thrust threshold - maybe with some alternative rocket engines. B9 mod lets you do ludicrous stuff: I think that used 50t of fuel or so getting into orbit . Was a tanker, had some horrible issues on re-entry and needs a total rebuild with recent B9 versions, but it's possible to make some gigantic winged lifters.