Claw

Yes, like posted above. You will burn toward your prograde marker NOT toward the retrograde marker. But do your burn when your craft is between Kerbin and the Sun. (Daylight side.)

This one? http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/52080-Basic-Aircraft-Design-Explained-Simply-With-Pictures Or was it in-game?

No sweat, hopefully it will be of some use. Well, it is stall. At least in the sense of how KSP can simulate it. If you can force it out of control, then it could be that your design is unstable or it could be that you have enough control authority. (Or both...) Generally speaking, I find that I want to be able to just barely be able to force a carrier plane out of control. Then it should have enough authority for payload carrying (assuming the payload isn't assisting). (EDIT: I should probably qualify that this also depends a lot on the payload.) Ah, sorry. I should have said. Look in the lower left corner at the trim indicators. You can watch the SAS do its inputs there. If it's all over the place, then your craft is a bit unstable. If it's way out at the ends, then your craft has just barely enough control to keep it in line. If you start to stress it, then you'll have problems. Yes, having them too close to the CoM can cause your plane to be unresponsive. It isn't the only thing, but it can be part of it. Being able to pitch only so far up or down isn't always a bad thing, since that can help keep your plane from going out of control. The fuel tanks are loaded under the wings to pull the CoM down. Conveniently with this setup, the CoM moves up as the tanks burn thereby making the plane easier to fly after cargo release. (I routed the fuel lines so the liquid fuel drains from the wings first.)

I know it switches automatically. Personally I find it easier to switch to orbit mode earlier when aiming for polar orbits.

Are you saying the nose comes up and it flips over backward? It could be a couple things. 1) It might be that there's enough drag up front and on top now that it's forcing the nose to flip over. Especially if it's happening after you add the booster, and the fact that you have that big ram scoop on the nose. 2) You don't have enough control authority. It's hard to tell because of the angle of your picture, but you might need more control surfaces further aft on the fuselage. If they are too close to inline with your CoM, they don't help much. 3) Also, turn on your Center of Thrust (CoT) pink marker and see where that lines up. It's probably a bit low after you load on the booster, causing your craft to pitch up. Here's something you can check, to see how borderline your base craft is. Try flying it again without the booster, but watch and see how much the SAS is working to keep the nose level. Do a couple of aggressive nose up/down maneuvers and see if it goes out of control. Also, be aware that if you move your CoL up too much to meet up with the loaded CoM, you might have problems later if your ship doesn't have enough control authority to deal with the shift after release. Here's an example of a piggy back space plane carrier I made a while ago. It's not nearly as big as what you're working on, but sort of demonstrates what I'm talking about. In this case, the CoL shifts up with the CoM because the space plane also has wings. However, I designed the carrier to be able to take cargo (satellites) into space on its back, but I don't have any pictures of that uploaded. Notice how the CoM is a bit below the CoL. That was so that when I load cargo up top, the CoM shifts about that much above the CoL and the carrier is still controllable. Also note the CoT relationship. Once such way to deal with all of that is to add a torque unit to your craft (can't see any in your picture but I'm sure you have at least one). That can help you from having to redesign the wings and control surfaces for this particular design. (Here's the rest of the album, but the other pictures probably aren't useful for design. http://imgur.com/a/mpA63)

Yes, the best bet is (as has been stated) to set up your polar orbit during launch. Bear in mind that because Kerbin is rotating, you'll actually have to point a little west, in addition to either north or south. If you leave the navball in surface mode and point the "surface prograde" marker right on north (or south) you'll actually be a bit off once you reach orbit. However, if you manually switch your navball over to orbit mode, you can watch the prograde marker and get the "orbit prograde" right on north (or south) and you'll be all set. Good luck.

Edit the first post and click "Go Advanced" From there you can select "answered" from the dropdown and save.

Wait, was that? Did I... What just happened? Amazing work!

Try reading through this. It gives a pretty good explanation of aero basics. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/52080-Basic-Aircraft-Design-Explained-Simply-With-Pictures After that, you can work through this tutorial. It follows the above thread. You build an airplane and play with the CoM/CoL relationship. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/65638-Basic-Airplane-Space-Plane-Aero-Tutorial There are lots od other tutorials out there too. Videos and other tutorial articles. Although you mignt need to dig a little. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/forums/54-Tutorials

You have to post the images to a sharing site like photo bucket or imgur.com Imgur is nice because you can make those nifty albums. Then you can post the links to images here. You do that by using the tags . Put the URL in between there and you're set. If you're doing the imgur album, it has a five letter identifier. You use the forum tags and put the five letter in between.

Yeah, sorry. I was just being difficult as they question was "do they work?" I'm sure we could debate for quite a while which engine is "better."

I'm sure someone will point out that they don't work in air-breather mode but do in closed cycle (rocket) mode. So I might as well be first. (I know that's what you meant, just heading off the "well if, but, then maybe")

Center of Mass should always be in front of the Center of Lift. I'm guessing that after you use up fuel and RCS, you CoM is behind the CoL. In the VAB/SPH, you can right-click on the fuel tanks and set them to their re-entry levels. This will allow you to see where the CoM is. Just remember to fill them back up. Also, the landing gear is massless in flight, so it causes the VAB/SPH to lie about the CoM position. So if your CoL/CoM margin is tight, remove the landing gear while in the VAB/SPH, adjust the CoM, then put the gear back on. Oh yes, and if you have a lot of draggy parts (like intakes) up front, it can also cause your craft to want to flip around.

Awesome! That made me laugh pretty hard. As a side note, be cautious with ALT-F5. It's a bit close to ALT-F4 which will have quite the opposite effect than what you are looking for.

It's not fixed to the altitude, but to atmospheric pressure. You can confirm that by watching the debug screen when an on-rails object gets deleted.

Yeah, an "escaped from sun" biome would be nice, in honor of Vger. (Voyager, for those who don't know Vger. )

I'm sorry Jeb is frozen. Your statement confuses me a little, because it sounds like you copied it from your original persistence file. Is this code block a broken Jeb, or a fixed Jeb? I ask because overall he looks okay. Make sure you are updated to version 0.23.5.464. Your issue sounds a bit more like what was broken before the hotfix. If you are updated, read on. There is a block missing from your code that is just after what you posted. It's the vInfo block and looks like this. vInfo { vesselName = Bill Kerman vesselType = 9 rootUId = 1342249348 } Make sure his vesselType is 9. Also, I would recommend editing your quicksave.sfs instead of your persistence.sfs. With the quicksave, you can quickload it. If you edit the persistence, KSP has to be at the menu or it will autosave over the persistence after you edit it.

Ninja'd! I would agree with you about it not being cheating, if there's a bug involved (mod or not).

Unfortunately, even 0.23.5 won't let you save if you're rolling over terrain. So if the game thinks you're rolling over terrain, well... As Taki said, make sure all of your mods are updated. You can check them here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/74457-ARM-Pack-0-23-5-Mod-Compatibility-Thread

Yes, I can confirm that the stock cupola does not designate the vessel as a station. It actually defaults to a lander...

Only if he hasn't left the mission. The game will only let you revert to launch if you haven't done other things besides that flight. If you ever leave it, then it's there till you recover or terminate. Since it's been 2 days, I'm guessing he's done other things.

Yes, this is the first step. However, sometimes KSP will still not fire the separatrons at the same time as the decouplers even if they are in the same stage (random bug and I don't know what triggers it). To fix it, you can rearrange the order of the separatrons/decouplers within the staging block. So per xcorps' example... If stage 3 consisted of 8 seperatrons (at the top of the stage) and 8 decouplers (at the bottom of the stage), then grab the whole lot of decouplers and shift them to the top of the stage. Try to grab them all at the same time. The order doesn't really matter. It's just a way to fix the random bug that sometimes pops up.

I would disagree with this on a minor point in that it can be more expensive to adjust the inclination if done at the wrong time. The worst case inclination change from Minmus can cost over 300 dV, thereby reducing a good deal of the dV you were trying to save. Inclination change done at the nodes is typically less than 20 dV.

Pecan is right. They will only group together if they were placed with symmetry. Sometimes if they become split, they will regroup when reloaded. But if you have 10 decouplers placed all over and they aren't done with symmetry, they will never collapse into 1.

Should probably also mention that if you use launch clamps, the weight of those things is included in the map number. You'll have to subtract out that weight after the fact or take them off before you launch to check the map.