Cirocco

3 kerbal SSTO spaceplane mission from runway to duna surface and back to runway without ever refueling. I'm thinking of creating an updated version of that spaceplane now that we have the new MkII parts, though I have learned that MkII parts are really big for the amount of fuel they carry. Probably will be a MkII core with regular small sized tanks on the sides.

This is a solid description of the speeds you should aim for, I go by roughly the same profile. One addendum though: when climbing up with a spaceplane, don't be afraid to go to 45 and even 60 degree climbs in the first stages of your ascent. I tend to have my designs climb at 45 degrees (60 if the engines have the neccesary thrust) until about 15 km or even higher before I start levelling out. in terms of inclinations: start at high angle until at least 10 km up, then possibly shallow out if required and follow Spatzimaus' speed table.

not really. We're finding inconcistencies and exploitables. Might still be a long thread, but a helpful one.

the ones that I need? Just one: KER. Can't decently estimate delta-V and properly build efficient rockets without it. Ones that I like (read: use) EVE for clouds and just generally nicer looking planets procedural fairings for coolness puproses ... that's about it really...

I hopped onto the KSP train in 0.22 I think. Back when I was just getting into things, I remember that rockts were SUPER wobbly, especially the ones you made by docking several parts together in orbit. adding more than two fuel tanks on top of each other in a rocket? better get those struts out! don't even start with me about how ugly my spaceplanes looked back then

I'll have a look at the calculator, but even "between 140 000 and 148 000" is already a big help, otherwise I probably would have spent a ton of time trying to aerobrake at lower altitudes.

that seems like roughly the orbit I'd be aiming for (I probably would prefer a slightly lower one, but this is close enough). What height was your periapsis when aerobraking?

I'm planning to do my first ever jool mission soon by sending a mothership with a crapton of probes and sattelites to the joolian system, so I was wondering: if I aerobrake on jool istelf, what depth should I (roughly) aim for if I want to have my apoapsis end up somewhere in the region of laythe's orbit? thanks in advance guys.

you can always slap on an adapter to small size and add a regular nosecone. Or a shielded docking port, that's what I tend to do

Yeah procedural fairings is really nice. I don't use FAR or DRE and I still like to put fairings on my stuff simply because of roleplay purposes

there's several combinations of adaptors that will do the job, as brainlord has already mentioned. there might be mods out there that have parts for it, I don't know of any though. Another way to make it more visually pleasing is taking a large to small adaptor, place it on the large tank, then clip the MkII part through the adaptor straight on to the tank.

Dude, when first starting spaceplanes, it's a pretty big achievement if you manage to actually land the thing on your first flight. Took me several flights (read: semi-controlled long-duration crashes) before I could reliably put a plane on the ground without explosions. Kudos! as for the brakes: no idea what the hotkey is, I just always press the "brakes" button which is the brown exclamation point inside a circle next to the horizontal speed indicator. EDIT: ninja'd.

right, I built an even lighter version of Bill Zarr's SSTO plane: test flights show it can do a 100km orbit and come back on 36 funds. I made it in my career mode however and seeing as I am playing on permadeath I didn't want to risk a kerbal's life. A few sidenotes: -even though it only has two delta wings, this thing actually starts to suffer from infiniglide effects in low altitudes because it's so light. - it only has 1 radially attached ant engine just behind the cockpit glass. So yes, it does have an unaligned center of thrust, but the cockpit itself has enough torque to compensate. Also, a quick check showed that while ion engines are super efficient, xenon gas is pretty expensive. No way you can use it for a "cheap as possible" challenge. So yeah, I really think 36-38 funds is the limit of what you can do in stock without exploits. P.S.: It occurs to me now that I did equip it with a probe core, guess I might be able to do it.

veeeery nice. I have some ideas to possibly make it even lighter, will try to replicate and improve once I get back home to my gaming PC

oooooh, now THIS I find intriguing. I've never tried ion-based spaceplanes before... I do foresee some structural difficulties in putting several ion thrusters in a cluster. And possibly electricity problems when having to manouver/de-orbit on the darkside of Kerbin, but ion-spaceplanes may prove as an interesting method of cheap travel to orbit and back.

Impressive. that's my target to beat right there . I know my Sparrow can do orbit and come back on less than 300, but that wasn't a 100km orbit. I'll check when I get home from work how she performs exactly.

I'm really torn on this one. One the one side, it seems like a great idea to add to the administration building to mitigate staging mishaps and the sort. On the other hand it also seems a bit silly since you do have the revert function in case of really bad mishaps, and if your are playing on ironman and the game throws a rocket-breaking bug at you, you should not have to pay in-game for bugs or things completely beyond your control (like the launch pad blowing up due to heavy vessels).

Depends on exactly what you mean. You said after recovery, so if you're just referring to fuel costs: my go-to kerbal rescue craft is a small 2-seater SSTO spaceplane which can make a 100km orbit, do some orbital manouvring and come back on about 300 to 500 funds. inital build/launch cost comes in at about 25 000 though. I posted a pic of it on the "what did you do in KSP today" thread a while back, I'll see if I can find it again. EDIT: found it: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/29533-What-did-you-do-in-KSP-today?p=1480307&viewfull=1#post1480307

Didn't have too much time for KSP yesterday since I went to go do sporty things. Started design on my second-generation sience/money milker sattelites. I wanted to kep the design light and efficient so I started with a simple ion probe. Because I wanted to be efficient, I added a shroud to allow aerobraking. (I don't use FAR or DRE, but I really don't like aerobraking without at least some form of shielding. Call it roleplay puposes) But that meant I couldn't use the main ion engine until after aerobraking (since it and its powering solar panels would be hidden in the shroud). Adding another ion engine would severly limit the TWR, so I added a fuel tank and a small LFO engine as transfer stage. But those aren't very efficient ... it was just before I was about to add a nuclear engine that I realised that things had kinda snowballed away from the whole "light and efficient" idea... I'm starting to think it might be best just to not aerobrake, not use a shroud to keep the probe light and just expend that extra delta-V on the ion engines. Those things are super efficient anyways.

whoops, my bad then. Mods, feel free to close this one.

Happened only a few hours ago: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/oct/28/antares-rocket-explodes-nasa-launch-pad-orbital-science Thankfully no loss of life, but still... Damn....

Welcome to KSP

-build several ion-powered science/funds milking sattelites and put them in orbit around Mun, Minmus, Kerbin, Duna and Ike. I don't really like my current generation sattelites: they're powered by an ant-engine and none of them have too much fuel left for manouvering. Hell, the ones around Ike and Duna are even defunct: their fuel doesn't flow to the engine and they're stuck in near-equatorial orbits. -build an interstellar probe (probably ion-powered as well) and send it into deep space -build an SSTO spaceplane with a lot of cargo bays to deliver several of said probes to orbit in a single run -get a probe over to the Joolian system (without the use of ion engines because I want to use it as a trial run for a manned mission), land on one of the moons and come back to Kerbin. I haven't decided yet which one, Laythe seems like a good candidate. Either that or Pol. Basically I want one that is not too easy, but I'm not going to go for a Tyole return on my first visit. Bop seems a little too forgiving, it might lead me to underestimate the requirements for manned

Dude, it took me literally weeks of design and testing to perfect my Eve return vehicle, Eve is a hellmouth. A pretty one, but a hellmouth nonetheless. I used countless "simulations" (read: hyperedit, quicksaves and reverting) to try and get a lander with hardened pod, as light as possible, that could make it from sea level to orbit. Eventually it came back at 160 tons and I could reliably make a 100km orbit from sea level, but I don't use FAR or DRE. After I perfected the lander, I never flew the actual mission though. And then when I did a fresh re-install at the start of 0.25 it got deleted... Ah well, I still remember the main principles behind it, and I think that with the current new parts (it was built in 0.23) I might be able to make a better one. So yeah, Eve is very, very hard especially with DRE (dunno if FAR mikes it harder or easier. Probably easier on the ascent but harder on the descent).

Did my first interplanetary mission of 0.25: round trip to Duna with a stop around Ike. Went allright, had to do 1 quickload because of an immense change in orbit after a time-warped SOI change and had to deal with several minor issues along the way, but overall my intrepid trio of explorers came back unharmed and with a few thousand science points. Some of the issues included: - the two sattelites that were to be deployed appearantly didn't have fuel flow from the toroidal fuel tank to their engines. They are in orbit around Ike and Duna as intended, but their orbits are near-equatorial instead of the intended polar orbit. They also cannot be de-orbited so they're stuck floating in their orbits forever... (or until I send up a next-generation ion-powered sattelite and delete them from the tracking center) - the lander had less TWR than expected on Duna surface (or rather, I underestimated the importance of a decent TWR) so it ended up being a lot less efficient than it should have been. Still had plenty of fuel to get home though. - the re-packed chutes on the lander did not deploy properly upon arrival at Kerbin, had to be opened manually. Fortunately there was more than enough time to do so. - because I landed in the water and the return module + lander was quite high, it toppled over in the water and said toppling made the top of the module smack down into the water at a speed in excess of 8 m/s, destroying one of the material bays in the process . Still, a plethora of science and funds was gained. Launch cost was just shy of 200k, payout was near 2 million. I have now accepted a contract for something I have never before attempted in my entire KSP career because losing kerbals scares the ever loving s*** out of me: go to Jool (and preferrably come back). Wish me luck.