Cirocco

ooooh, nice one, I should do that myself. next idea: set up a base near the dead kraken to mine its corpse for reality-bending space-magic.

The theory of having as a debug option in the same way a "hack gravity" option seems okay, but I wonder what it will do to the code. If it doesn't cost any extra effort to keep the old aerodynamics in as a debug,sure, go for it. Otherwise I'd say just throw em out completely. Having them as a mod is a nice option, but I think the main reason why a lot of people stick to the stock model is because they don't want too invasive mods. I run stock aero, but I'm not doing it because I think it's better than FAR or NEAR. I keep it because it's a part of the game and I just don't like very invasive or extensive mods. As to the reasons for that? I'm not actually sure. Mods require maintenance and I'm lazy, for one. I also have this irrational idea that getting FAR would actually make it too easy to achieve orbit with stuff (your rockets require less delta-V) which would be equal to cheating in my book. Especially on Eve return missions. (don't get on my case about that one, I said it was irrational ) Third thing I can think of that might have an impact is that I want to be able to compare my creations with those of others when they post crafts/mission reports. And again I have this irrational thought that since the majority of players run stock*, I have to do the same. So yeah, in short: if it doesn't cost additional effort, keep the old aero model in some way, sure, but otherwise I'd say just throw it out and replace it with a better stock one. *note that I don't actually know if the majority of players uses stock or FAR/NEAR, especially when it comes to spaceplanes. Hey I *said* it was irrational

Wow, just had a look at the results... that's a lot bigger disparity then I expected. I do wonder a little why that is. I know many engineers are men, but I know the gap (thankfully) has been closing for a while now. And I also know for a fact that a large part of gamers are women (probably a far larger part than most gamers would think). I would have guessed at at a 70-30 or something ratio. I wonder why it's *this* skewed. I am male btw.

impact speed of the tail/engine section or the top section? seeing as it toppled over, the top section would probably have hit harder. The actual "landing" with the tail section... I think nothing was officially released but judging by the pictures, i'd say pretty slow. In the ballpark of 10-20 or so m/s maybe? The tweet says the engines were trying to fight to get the rocket straight again, so I guess they'd be firing pretty hard. This is all pure speculation and guestimation of course. Extremely hard to tell without a timestamp on the pictures.

couple other ideas I've been toying around with: - send a probe into interplanetary space (note, I am not responsible for kraken attacks on vessels of players who attempt this) - send a sattelite in very low Kerbol orbit (don't forget to add the heatshield) + sacrificial Kerbol impact probe

hope: international coalition, possibly using hardware from private companies such as SpaceX (in fact, any mission more than likely will use at least *some* hardware made by private companies. NASA doesn't build its rockets all by itself, they subcontract a lot of other companies) more realistic guess: NASA, with SpaceX hardware. I love every space agency out there, but I think through combination of money, experience and wanting to be the first, the Americans have the biggest chance. Others such as India or China aren't far behind, but I'd give the advantage to NASA. small addendum: it would be kinda hard for SpaceX as a company to be the first on Mars. It's extremely unlikely (though not entirely impossible I suppose) for a single private company to build and produce all the hardware needed for such a mission. Especially without government funding. Like someone on this thread already mentioned (I forgot the name, sorry): NASA and SpaceX are very much intertwined. SpaceX may be a private company, but it's main (if not only) customer is NASA. And they themselves depend upo NASA facilities for launch.

mind you, it's REALLY got to suck knowing that the solution to the problem would possibly (probably?) be trivial if only you could walk up to it and metaphorically give it a kick. But that's kinda hard when your probe is about 500 million kilometers away.

ooooooooh that sucks. Hitting the bullseye like that only to fall to what is probably just bad luck. as far as re-establishing contact goes: the article says that nothing can be done to bring the probe bck to life, so I wouldn't get my hopes up

You certainly don't have to constantly shift fuel manually, I never do it. You can direct which tanks drain in what order through proper application of fuel ducts, however I'm afraid I'm no expert on fuel flow mechanics in KSP. The thing I alway tend to do and which has served me very well is to interconnect all my tanks with two-way fuel flow. To clarify: say I have a plane with 1 center tank and 2 side tanks (one on each side) like this: tank1 ---- tank2 ---- tank3 then I would use fuel lines to connect tank1 to tank2 and tank3 to tank2, but also put fuel lines connecting tank 2 to tank 1 and tank 2 to tank 3. Doing this, I've never had any problems with draining tanks, assuming that the dry CoM and the wet CoM don't lie too much apart. (another possible configuration using slightly less fuel lines is connecting tank1 to tank2, tank2 to tank3 and tank3 to tank1 again). Mind you, all this assumes that your dry CoM and wet CoM don't lie far apart. If they do, you need to either adjust the design or take additional measures to balance the plane throughout the flight. and of course there's always the fuelbalancer mod.

oh man... so... damn... close. Well, at least they actually got the rocket on target by the looks of it, so the software seems to be in order. Hopefully more hydraulic fuel will solve the problem. Looking forward to the 29th! hopefully all goes according to plan then.

yup, I have a PS3, but really I almost never play any games on it anymore. Last time I fired it up for actual gaming was during my last playthrough of Mass Effect 3. Don't have many games for it either.

Set up comm sattelite constellation around kerbin (I probably won't be doing this anytime soon as I don't run remotetech, but the idea remains on the books) Large space station in kerbin-stationary orbit, about a quarter planet ahead of the KSC (so somewhere around the horizon when viewed from KSC). This would act as a refuel and crew rotation outpost for large, re-usable interplanetary vessels. Would hold crew quarters, a lof of fuel tanks and a lab + a battery of small MkI capsule return-to-Kerbin pods so you can easily return sience to Kerbin and reset the science equipment on the docked ships. These can also act as escape pods in case of emergency. Large, re-usable interpletary motherships. These would be capable of transporting a large amount of kerbals (20-40) for colony rotation, as well as have a ton of science equipment and a complement of around 6-9 docked probes/sattelites. Would also have their own dedicated landers/crew transports to bring crew to and from colonies on the planets below. Redirect a class E astroid to Kerbin or Munar orbit and colonize it (probably Munar orbit for me as I'm already planning to have the big staging area space station for kerbin) Not sure about this one yet: colonise class E asteroid, send it to interplanetary space on a circular orbit around Kerbol (probably somewhere between Dres and Jool or something). Could act as staging area and general deep-space stand-alone colony. This would take a HELL of a lot of fuel though. Or hyperedit. General space stations in the Jool system, Laythe being the obvious primary candidate. Floating base would be amazing, but I'm not sure if I would be able to pull it off and crew rotation would be really difficult.... Unless of course you build a transport boat and build the base close to shore... Refuel station in high Jool orbit seems like a no-brainer.

Holy Kraken some of you guys are completely nuts mods I run: -KER: the info given is REALLY handy -EVE: clouds! hell yes! -RCS build aid: invaluable for building VTOL craft and extremely handy for large spaceplanes. -procedural fairings: they just make ships look so much nicer, even if they don't serve any purpose seeing as I run stock aero -Hyperedit: for testing ships and stuff on-site before launching the actual mission so I can iron out the biggest bugs Just having to keep those five mods up to date already annoys me. I can't imagine having to keep 50 or more mods up to date. (where do you guys even find that many?!) some other mods I've been considering: -scansat to give me more incentive to launch sattelites and find easter eggs. Really want to build a Mun base near the armstrong memorial, probably something near the dead kraken too. -remotetech (maybe. I like relay sattelites, I don't like signal lag) -trajectories (not sure about this one for reasons explained below) -kerbal alarm clock -KAS I always struggle a little with trying to find a nice middle ground between having the programming do stuff for me and do it optimally or doing it myself, but probably sub-optimally. I like optimal and sleek design and missions, but I dislike not doing it myself because then I don't learn as much.

sattelites usually go "celestial body/ class / sat / greek letter" for example, the first sattelite designed to collect science put in orbit over the Mun is "Mun S-sat alpha". The second communication sattelite in orbit over Kerbin would be "Kerbin C-sat Beta" For mission crafts I usually go for vaguely appropriate references to mythology or an adjective describing the type of mission. For example: my Eve return vehicle was called Orpheus (because it was going to hell and back) and an SSTO spaceplane personnel carrier was called Charon (because it ferried people between space and KSC). If I ever make a sun-diving probe it would probably be called Icarus. My first long-range SSTO spaceplane was the KSS (Kerbal Space Ship) Dauntless and the first inter-planetary one was the KSS Intrepid. I'm considering naming one of my future Mk III super-heavy SSTO's the KSS F*CK YEAH! because of the amount of headaches the design process is giving me.

haha, this one made me laugh. +1 to you good sir/madam.

Yup, this is what I was thinking: light stuff that wouldn't later the CoM in a very meaningful way. And if it does, I can just mess around with the placement of my 4 nuke engines, those things are so heavy I should easily be able to tweak with them. Though now that I think about it: passenger segments would also be an excellent idea.

Q: Quantum !

as someone who routinely (tries to) create new heavy and super-heavy stock spaceplane designs without trying to slip or exploit too much, I can assure, it's more than two hours before I can get one doing exactly what I want. Granted "what I want" usually entail interplanetary travel without a refuel, but still. SSTO spaceplanes take huge amounts of my time. I would more than happily throw all my designs away for a better aerodynamics system.

Perhaps "Nye" for N? Just a bit of a wink to good ald Bill

as just about everyone here has said: just bite the bullet and overhaul the model the way you want it to be. If previous spaceplanes still work, great. If they don't ... well, you're playing a beta for a reason. I like spaceplanes. Like, a LOT. But I would happily throw all my designs out the window for a better stock aero model. I have some small experience with FAR myself, but I use stock at the moment. It took me less than a day to get used to the new aerodynamics and figure out how to adjust my designs. Hell if anything it will give people who are a bit bored with the game a good excuse to get back to the designing table!

Sounds like it. I run stock and when I did my Duna flight lift was a giant pain in the butt, had to more than double my initial wing surface. I think it has to do with the way FAR calculates lift. A wide plane will have more lift in FAR, even with small wing surfaces. In stock, only the wing surfaces count so I had to cover the entire plane in wing surface to essentially create a flying delta wing.

Nice! this is exactly the sort of scale I was talking about. I was messing around with spaceplanes more myself yesterday and came up with a very similar design: use the cargo bay to push to cockpit (and thereby also the dry CoM) forward. I just need to figure out what to put into the cargo bay now. Rovers, science equipment and sattelites are good contenders. As for the TWR: I personally use 12 jet engines on a lighter design and 4 nuke engines near the CoM. Two on each side, one above and one under the wing. The jets provide just enough TWR to lift off and I'm hoping 4 nukes will be just enough thrust to circularize. If it isn't, I'll replace a couple turbojets with RAPIERS and use the rocket mode to give it a bit of a boost. Aaaaaaaah, good old RATO. Love it to bits and a great solution for heavy planes that have trouble taking off. Might just resort to it myself. Quik note: even though it won't be an SSTO anymore, you *can* make it a 100% recoverable by adding chutes to the SRB's and setting them to deploy at minimum altitude (50m). That way they should splash down in to the ocean before they leave the 2,5 km physics bubble. I know, right? MkIII parts which are designed to look like heavy-duty parts are, ironically, the hardest ones to use when designing heavy-duty SSTO spaceplanes.

yup, that's my biggest issue. I've considered extending the nose forward artificially, possibly through the use of cargo bays. Currently my designs don't incorporate cargo bays yet, sacrificing payload capacity for additional fuel storage, but it looks like I might incorporate them anyway. Extending the nose with structural elements is a no go for me as it's too much of an eyesore. yup; that's the idea I'm currently thinking of as well: nukes more forward attached to very small fuel tanks and have em leech off the main tank. That should move the CoM forward a bit. I'll have to see whether the fact that it would then (probably) fire over the wing would damage the wing surface or impede the thrust in any way. well that's rather the thing: I plan to go interplanetary with my spaceplanes. Building a cargo hauler to LKO is easy. Building a spaceplane that goes to Duna, lands horizontally, does sciency stuff and comes back to the runway all without refueling? THAT's a challenge. Mind you a single spaceplane that does that would, while cool, be able to do little else other than that specific mission profile (maybe a laythe mission. Maybe.) so I'm considering letting go of that idea.

what manner of sorcery is this?!

oooooh, I didn't know that. Thanks for the factoid