KerikBalm

Add some wing incidence to decrease how much you need to pitch up, and you'll save a lot of drag from the fuselage Also, I can't help but feel that the wings are too small for that fuselage:

I have no experience with stock Eve SSTOs, that's something that has eluded me - even after stock rotors came out. IIRC, some have been able to do HLHR SSTOs from the tallest mountain on eve (7 or 8km), I don't know if 10km makes a VLHR viable. Myself, I have done *reusable* Eve ascent craft, with rotors, from sea level, carrying 18 tons of payload in a medium mk3 cargo bay with a cargo ramp It's HL HR, but the horizontal speed is negligible. It's got plenty of TWR, and climbs quite steep. vertical launch and tip forward vs horizontal flight and pull up- not much difference These would start the rocket powered climb at 10.5-11 I'm, and as I said, the horizontal velocity at the start doesn't contribute much to the final outcome. If I could start at 11km, I could drop the rotors, the blades, the batteries, a lot of the wings and have something that performs better* So at 11km, you definitely have some options. I don't know if vertical launch SSTOs become practical at that altitude, but I am sure that some kind of reusable system with significant payload can be made to work at that altitude

@Andrew1233 I didn't say you have to go supersonic like the concord: just that you go too slow. Airlinerd cruise at 250-270 m/s at those altitudes, you're going about 100 m/s - that is way too slow. My comments about hypersonics only meant to imply that I can't give you any rules of thumb off the top of my head for wingloading or TWR for those sort of planes. As for the altitude: kerbin's atmosphere is about 80% to scale. 8500m on kerbin has the same pressure as about 35'000 feet on Earth. Regarding rotors, I said subsonic, not transonic, but yes, you can almost go supersonic with rotors: And that was a tilt-rotor VTOL carrying a 36 ton rockonax 64 fuel tank as payload

You are going way too slow to be flying in air that thin. I don't really play much with the high bypass turbofans. I do a lot of air launch to orbit, but those are with hypersonic spaceplanes. When I do play around with subsonic aircraft, it's mostly using electric rotors, for operation on Duna, Eve etc.

I added a gas giant, "Soong", for it to orbit. Here's my modified system at Stock scale: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/tis6c6bzmam4kwo4oycyk/KBCS.zip?rlkey=zfs4kdti2ok3ysnp54mop1s4r&st=ljiaer6r&dl=0 Take the whole thing*, or just take Soong and Brumo * The whole thing changes the stock system up significantly:

Today, I ditched sigma dimensions, and just moded my custom system to 4x manually, after playing at 6.25x with KR&D. Managed to get fully stock reusable spaceplanes taking >100 tons to orbit at 4x I also got to a point that I was pretty happy with my 'Brumo' moon, but then accidentally posted the ksp2 rather than ksp1 mod forum

Ooops, meant for ksp1

So I will release this soon, and I know there are already some titan analogues out there (Huygens from JNSQ, Tekto from OPM), but whatever, I wanted to make my own. It uses a high-res heightmap (8192 x 4096) that is a (mostly) composite of real terrain data. Respect to anyone who can pick out the real world locations used to make most of this heightmap: There is one section there that made heavy use of the spot healing tool from photoshop Here are some screenshots at 1x rescale (I normally play somewhere between 3 to 6.25x rescale), from a few different iterations:

Clever, I'll have to make use of that sometime. I don't have the screenshots, but I finally figured out what the problem was with my normal maps (or at least a way to make them work, I don't know why they weren't working before) for a new planet I'm working on. Its meant as a titan analogue, and thus has many similarities to Tekto. Previously my personal planet mods all focused on the inner solar system, and thuse would be compatible with OPM, but no longer. I added a Saturn analogue (can't get Kopernicus rings working, the textures don't show up, need to figure that out), that just uses a texture of Saturn. Jool's smaller sister I'm calling Soong. At the moment, it only has one moon (I think I will move Minmus and Ike there to keep it company): Brumo Brumo's stats are more like Titan than Tekto's: 0.14 G (vs 0.25 of Tekto), and 1.5 atmospheres at sea level (vs 1.25 of Tekto). The Mk2 lifting body parts + a few control surfaces are perfectly sufficient for touchdown at 10-20 m/s. The heightmap is still WIP, there are large flat plains (from the sides of the heightmap) that I plan to add some more features to (respect to anyone who can identify what this heightmap is derived from) The color map is even more WIP: Titan may have polar lakes, but Brumo has polar seas (bonus: much easier to avoid artifacts at the poles). Its got mountains, drainage channels, rivers, lakes (well, one, more to come), bays, a cryovolcano (smaller ones to be added). I also plan on adding: undersea mounts (so you can make offshore mining bases like this): Undersea trenches and ridges, some polygonal terrain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterned_ground https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygonal_patterned_ground https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto#Surface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(moon)#Chaos_and_lenticulae sand dunes; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon)#Dark_equatorial_terrain And, why not some mesas too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_Valley It's a really high res heightmap (8192x4096), about 4x most heightmap resolutions (2048x1024), so I want to pack a lot of detail and interesting features into this "medium-sized" moon. I say medium-sized, because it is proportionately sized - bigger than Mun, but about half the size of the giant moons of Jool (Laythe and Tylo), which are significantly bigger than duna and moho, and are proportionately much bigger than the moons of Jupiter.

So its been some time since I made a planet, but I am trying to make a titan analogue (Tekto is nice, but not what I'm looking for), and I'm having the same problem. I don't remember what I did last time. Can anyone tell me what needs to be done to generate a proper normal map from a heightmap?

My main use of the Kal was for differential torque/throttling of engines/motors for quad copters and similar vtols. Anyway, I consider it better than making history. Robotics open up so many possibilities (particularly with underwater exploration, which may not be expected), and surface features add a little something to surface exploration (I love the animated geysers and cryo volcanoes)

Ignoring his lack of understanding of what combustion is - you are, and I guess he is, describing a resistojet rocket https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistojet_rocket They are pretty bad, but better than cold gas thrusters. I wouldn't use them for more than RCS - or maybe station keeping on a small satellite

I prefer 6.25x, ie 2.5^2. It's easier to multiply orbital periods and dV requirements by 2.5x than... checks sqrt 6.4= 2.529822 I would have there be various difficulties Difficulty: rescale factor: orbital period and approximate dV multiplier Easy: 1x: 1x Medium: 2.25x: 1.5x Hard: 4x: 2x Expert: 6.25x: 2.5x Or maybe, depending on bodies and part stats: Easy: 1x: 1x Medium: 4x: 2x Hard: 9x: 3x Hard would be close to "real" scale, and would require parts with stats quite a bit better than those found in KSO1. In all cases, I wouldn't scale the atmosphere up by more than 1.25x Not true, you can make orbit in RSS with stock parts, payload fraction is terrible though. 1x scale is still much easier than real life - compensation is partial at best. I find 3-4x rescales to be about right for balance purposes. 6.25x gets to the limit. With a 350 isp LFO engine (poodle), you're getting a proportional dV less than that of a hyrdolox engine, while being saddled with poor mass ratios due to heavy empty tanks, and poor rocket TWR. For saves where I enable KRnD in KSP1, I play at 6.25x

I don't fit any of those. I don't have a positive opinion of the product as is, and I don't have confidence that they will sufficiently remedy the situation. I hope they remedy the situation. I'm not going to be on here much, spreading the pessimism, because that may become a self fulfilling prophecy. I'm not going to blow smoke and say everything is great, because if the devs believe it is, that's not good either. So, I think it's best to sit back and be generally silent. Give praise where praise is due, and greet disappointment with silence.

^this^ As far as control, I haven't really made any helos that I would describe as "nimble" Quad copters are technically helicopters, you can make an ok control system with the KAL controller modifying rpms of the 4 rotors. I've made workable quad tiltrotor cargo aircraft that are controllable enough to land on top of the VAB, hangar roofs of the island airfield, etc. They are ponderous and require patient and gentle maneuvering in hover mode Other than quad copters, I do contrarotating rotors, Kamov helo style. With enough reaction wheels, they can be fairly nimble Another thing is the speed we expect from the helos. IRL, most helos fly slower than 200mph/320 kph, or less than 90 m/s. Really slow in ksp when you get used to jetting around at >mach 4 Helos don't do well at high speed, and retreating blade stall should also manifest in ksp