Claw

haha, sorry. At least you can do it with normal editor clipping, tends to cause less physics attacks. If you use ALT+F12, be warned. I also find that for most applications, I really only need 3 intakes (6 at the most) per engine. Obviously you can get more air with more intakes, but it gets to where you have to double the number to get much of an improvement.

Sorry, I suppose that was a little misleading. I meant that I havent found a map that shows if there are separate water cutoffs. Although I think your explanation changed how I look at the maps now.

Ahh, the ninja brings up a good point. I hadn't thought of it that way before. So maybe grasslands water is different than shore water, is different than ocean water, etc...?

I think this is by design as where the water is seems to effect if you get the science or not. If you keep gathering science just east of KSC, you only get so much. If you go further out in the ocean, you can get more science. Land on the other side of the planet, different water biome. You can also get different water science from small lakes. I haven't found a map of this yet though so I don't know where the boundaries are.

Pictures are good (which I know you said you'd get to), but if you want you can post the .craft. I find it easier to give specific advice with unusual problems like this.

Right click on any controlling part (probe core or pod) and select "Rename Vessel". You can select the craft type from the popup.

This plane (the bigger one in the pics) was designed as a piggyback spaceplane carrier, but ended up being able to pull 15+ Gs without going out of control. (Just one more stock example.)

bsalis brings up all great points. Also watch out for misfeeding fuel as that can cause your plane to go into a spin, but that sounds less likely if your plane spins both left and right. If you are building a small plane, be wary of the CoM/CoL relationship. The small gear bay is massless in flight but not in the SPH. This makes the CoM marker in the SPH lie about its position, and it typically shows it too far forward. So if you have small CoM/CoL margins, the CoM might actually be behind the CoL. If it turns out to be an intake drag problem, here is an idea on how to intake spam that isn't a complete eyesore.

As long as there is a probe core and power anywhere on the ship, you can control it. Note that your station could show up as debris depending on the circumstances for your kerbals leaving. Best case, you will have to turn off the debris filter to find your station. Worst case, if your debris is set to 0 your station might be deleted. It will not be marked as debris if there is a probe core attached before your kerbals leave.

Also, the landing gear causes the SPH to lie about the CoM (they are massless in flight). So you may want to remove your landing gear if you are dealing with very small CoM/CoT margins.

Warping during SOI transitions is a risky endeavour (I once flung Jeb interstellar during a return from the Mun at high warp). My guess is because of all the calculations that are skipped during the big leaps in orbital steps. If you consider at 1000x warp, the game is calculating position and velocity 1000x less frequently. 10k warp is even worse. This means the SOI transition may occur much later than it should. Gravity is pulling the wrong way and not hard enough, velocity vectors are going astray, etc. I find warp values of 50 or less tend to keep the errors down during transition. Although that doesn't really resolve the "surprise" SOI transition.

I didn't say it that way! Besides, there are no poor piloting skills, only piloting skills that don't match the situation. (Or maybe that should be a situation that doesn't match piloting skills...) Anyway...Congrats on getting it to orbit!

Pictures will help a lot. Try to include a side shot with the CoM, CoT, and CoL markers on. What is probably happening when you fire the rocket is what Sirrobert said. The LV-T30 will be pretty powerful if your ship is small and will cause it to go out of control. You want the Center of Thrust (CoT) pink marker to line up with the Center of Mass (CoM) yellow marker. As for the out of control on reentry, thr CoM is likely shifting back during flight because you burn fuel. The Center of Lift (CoL) blue marker needs to stay behind the CoM during atmospheric flight. You can test the CoM's location by right clicking on the fuel tanks while in the VAB. When you right click, there is a slider that lets you adjust the fuel load. Set up the fuel configuration to match your reentry fuel condition and make sure the CoM is in front of the CoL. (Remember to put the fuel load back when you're done.) Also make sure your plane is pointed mostly at the prograde marker during reentry (or slightly nose up) and not sideways, top first, or backwards.

Here are a couple pictures that will hopefully help. Put your mouse directly on the face of the decoupler when putting on the next part. Then you can stack parts underneath the first radial part. Adding a second decoupler won't work since KSP builds craft in sort of a tree structure. You can always branch out, but branches cannot reconnect to other parts except with struts.

(As we hijack the thread...) Yeah, Nao is right. Wings backward are fine but control surfaces backward are not. And yes, control surfaces increase lift all the way up till 90 deg AoA. So if most of your craft's lift comes from control surfaces, you can get all kinds of wacky response out of it. (This is the one thing in stock aero that I wish would get fixed ASAP. The rest I can live with for a while.)

Yeah, this is really easy to recreate if you aim at the back edge of the Mun's SOI, as if you're aiming for L5. You can try to arrive behind the Mun and your orbit will show no SOI change. As you approach, it will suddenly switch to the Mun's SOI. I'm not sure what piece of the code causes this, but I agree that it can be an unpleasant surprise.

Try this. I couldn't find the video that helped me when I was trying to get to the Mun in the demo, but this seems pretty close.

No sweat. The best lift angle for wings is 25 AoA. Past that they lose lift. Also, I don't really want to fly up at 25 AoA because it's a lot of drag (most lift is not always the best place to fly). I try to keep high altitude AoA down around 15. Once above 24 km, AoA is less of a factor for wings and more so for engines and keeping that upward trajectory. And at that point I usually tend to decrease my AoA. (At least for my standard "to-orbit" profile.) Okay, I'll take your word on this one. I almost always use ram intakes and I can get 13t into orbit with 1 TurboJet and 2 ram intakes. (By the way, I usually avoid it but personally have nothing against "air hogging")

After seeing your craft, what I would say here is that you're probably not suffering from an intake problem. It's probably more of a flight profile problem. It appears that you have three TurboJets and seems you have plenty of intakes. Generally, you'll want to get up to the 20-25km point as quickly as possible. That's where your engines will produce the most thrust and the atmosphere is pretty thin. I try to hit 350 m/s at 15km, and 650 m/s at 20km. Start to shallow your climb to keep accelerating as much as possible in the 20-25km band. You'll want to be at least 1,000 m/s around 24 km. Make sure you keep climbing up though though because if you start to descent it becomes a pain to get climbing back up. At some point you'll need to start throttling back so that your engines don't flame out. You may even want to consider putting the two outboard engines on an action group to shut them down (toggle them actually, so you can use the same key to turn them back on). That will prevent asymmetric thrust flameouts which will cause your craft to go out of control. If you shut down just the outer two, you'll have more air available to the center one and you can keep the throttle up higher. I usually aim to be around 1,600 m/s at 30km. Keep working the speed up as you climb, but try not to stagnate at one altitude for too long or you just end up wasting fuel. It becomes a balancing act of flying fast enough to keep intake air high, but not stagnating and burning off all your fuel.

If you're going to pull out snippets of quotes and provide information, at least don't make it sound like we are lying. In your own post you said that my comment of AoA doesn't matter, then go on to make it sound like forward facing intakes are worse because of AoA. I get your point, but 1 forward facing intake is still more efficient than 1 rear facing. Your craft is a fine example of getting around that. 16 intakes is on the "air hoggy" side, but is a fine method to overcome the efficiency problem. You can achieve the same results with two forward ones. I'm not discounting your methods, I'm just saying that this game offers more than one version of "correct".

Ahh, here is an example of one of my dual craft configs. Although this is piggyback style.

Yes, I mean the same thing. If your chase plane is too powerful, use tweakables to lower the thrust output for takeoff. Docking ports are fairly strong when pulling, so it's probably better to slightly undershoot with the thrust and let the tanker do most of the pulling. I did try switching between craf with one on the ground like you're asking about but was unable to. I really thought I used to be able to do that in 0.23.0 but it seems really finicky now 0.23.5. I will try it in 0.23.0 later and see.

Yeah, it might be trying. Although sometimes if you're too close to the transfer MJ gives wacky results. Just make sure all of the nodes are deleted before you set up your transfer node. Sometimes MJ will drop nodes off in random places and you won't even see them because they're off on another part of your craft's path.

A wobbly connection isn't really too big of a deal unless it's causing you actual steering problems. If you're unable to turn and aim at all, then you'll want to do something different. But like I said, that shouldn't cause a huge dV swing in the node. The node dV doesn't care about ship config.

I would agree that the flex in the docking port might cause your blue marker to jump around. Although that still doesn't explain to me the change from 900 m/s to 4000 m/s on the dV requirement. I think the 900 m/s comes from the fact that he's starting out so high already. MechJeb and KER are somewhat redundant, but I don't think having them installed should cause issues like this. If you're using MJ to develop nodes, you might have two nodes superimposed on top of eachother and when you're passing your 900 m/s node you're reaching the second node, which possibly requires 4000 m/s. If you're using MJ to develop the node, click on "Delete all nodes" first, before you have it create a new one. Also, another reason there might be two nodes is if your departure date is early. I can't remember when the first (cheap) Duna transfer is, but I think it's day 58 or something. Of course that depends on which clock system you're using. But if you are way out on the phase, it's going to cost you a lot more to get there. If you have two nodes superimposed, it will seem like your first node is completely normal.