Claw

You can turn on/off brakes in the tweakable menu in the VAB. You can't change the stat in flight (stock KSP). Some people also report turning off SAS helps control, but if you prefer it on then drive it that way. Just make sure your rotation keys are different from your driving keys.

Make sure you are also looking at the CoM marker with the landing gear off the craft. They are massless in flight and hence cause the SPH to lie about the CoM location. This could be a factor if your msrkers are very close together. The out of control you are describing sounds like a CoM issue, but I believe you when you say it's in front. In which case, you would need to move the vertical tail back more or make it bigger to offset the drag you're experiencing on reentry. (That's probably the easiest.) At 18k you might not have enoug airflow to make the rudders effective enough. Also, as wacky as it sounds, you can fire up the TurboJets around 20k (not necessairly full throttle). The thrust vector authority may be enough to stay under control till you get down to 10-12k where the rudders are more effective. By the way, flying wings don't spin recover very well because of the lack of rudder. Sometimes you can rock them in pitch and get the nose down to get speed. KSP areo is pretty rough here too, but then again modeling the chaos of a spin is very complex to begin with. Also, spin recovery only works if you're actually in a spin. If it just flips around and falls flat (or backward) out of the sky then it won't help much. After it goes out of control, does the plane keep rotating? Or does it flip, then sort of hesitate for a bit. Then as the prograde marker swings around, it keeps going out of control? I'll try flying it again when I get home tonight.

Thanks. Capi, Your yaw control might be the cause of that. I'm not at my computer now either, but look at where your rudders are in relation to the re-entry CoM. Also, if your plane is too neutrally stable (the lift marker nearly centered in the mass marker), then that will cause difficulties too. Sometimes changing the reentry angle helps. Try starting out sort of pancaking in (30-45 AoA) to bleed speed, then flatten back out before you get to 18km. If you're already doing that, then try coming in shallow. Also, watch what the yaw trim indicators are doing during the oscillations. With a ship that massive, all that inertia can be hard for the SAS to stop. In which case you can give it a little yaw input at the right time to keep the SAS from over correcting and fishtailing.

Like RoboRay said, you don't have to edit the file. You do have to manually copy the file over though. If you only edit the file, it will not show up in the other editor. "VAB"/"SPH" just tells the game which editor to revert to out of flight mode.

Alternatively, you can copy the .craft file from you saves/ships/sph directory into the saves/ships/vab directory. Then you can open the file in the VAB and continue to build the rocket from there. However, this method won't allow you to build a rocket and slap the plane on the side.

Looks like you are already on your way to making a space plane. There are a lot of design ideas out there and a lot of them work. So just keep experimenting and try things out. RAPIERS seem less popular because there is a fairly small niche area for them. They look like they should be ideal for space planes, but with the current balance they are outperformed by a lot of other engine combinations. I suspect that will be ironed out eventually. I enjoy the way they look (even if they tend to overheat a bit).

Great job and congrats. Some of the RCS ports look like they might be blocked, so be patient with docking. Good luck!

Holy wow. It took me a while to complete this. Here is my entry, the Stingray. My goal was to complete as many of the challenges as possible with one glider, so it took me about five iterations to settle on this. I ended up getting rid of any aerodynamic control surfaces since I grew tired of dealing with infiniglide craziness. It is all stock parts and aero, except for using MechJeb to show stats (it was unused for navigation or flight). Completion Challenge: I hope I made it! Stability Challenge: Completed trip to the island in 5:22. (Could probably go faster, but it took me long enough to make this thing as it was!) Agility Challenge: About ripped my hair out trying to land on the helo pad as my first challenge to tackle. Featherweight Challenge: Basic Weight - 0.225t Swift Challenge: Max speed was 158m/s. I'm pretty sure it wasn't in a dive as I tried to stay between 900m and 1000m while doing the speed run. Dragon Challenge: I managed to load it up and carry 1.455tons of craft above 2km. It still wanted to climb, so it could probably do better. Payload Challenge: 1.855t max weight, 1.63t of cargo if you want to count the decouplers (1.58 if you don't). I think that was about the maximum weight I could carry. Any more and it would stall out. I think I lost count on the number of tries, and it took me about 20 minutes to get there. Duckling Challenge: Crazy physics. That's all I can say. Look Ma: That was harder than I expected. It doesn't turn very quickly... I must say, I've done a few of these forum challenges but this is the first one I ever posted. I thought the idea was awesome. Thanks for the challenge!

You can also try putting four engines on an action group to shut them down. Then put the last three on a different action group to shut them down. That way, when you are at the point where you would normally kill the TurboJets and just run the nukes, you can just shut down the first four engines and keep running the three (which will also be getting more intake air per engine) to get some extra thrust. It might take some practice to know when to switch. Just don't forget to shut them down (or throttle modulate some more) to prevent going out of control. Also make sure the three engines you choose to run are all in line (your two outboard and the center). I would say that your initial climb of 60 degrees seems a bit steep for the surface TWR the Auk has. Maybe start out more around 45 degrees and let the speed slowly build. I recommend being around 200 m/s at 10km, but you don't have to race to get to 200m/s either. Believe it or not, the extra speed give you more lift, which leaves you more thrust to accelerate and climb faster. You can try that and see if it gives you any extra fuel. Climb profiles can sometimes be design dependent, so you can just run a few different ascents and see how it goes. Incidentally, I tried running a test with intakes after one of our previous conversations. I tried closing unneeded intakes during the climbout and I didn't really notice any drag losses during the climb. So you might not need the extra intake complication (at least in KSP 0.23).

Adding large yaw stability won't fix the wing flex, which is the real source of the instability. The wings are twisting which is causing asymmetric lift, leading to an out of control craft. You can add more rudder and it will probably allow you to control the craft, but that doesn't actually solve the problem and potentially adds more parts. Wing flex is also costing lift and causing parts to break. Having more yaw control won't fix that. Case in point:: It has two reaction wheels and no vertical tails and it flies just fine because I eliminated most of the wing flex. Before I put in struts, it veered off the runway or flew crooked (when I didn't crash).

It's because holding shift activates the arrow keys on your numeric keypad in a way that mimics the other arrow keys. -From the main menu, go to: Settings->Input->Misc. -The first section in "Key/Button Bindings" is called "Camera" -Under the camera section, remap the "View Up/Down/Left/Right" keys to something other than the arrow keys (maybe your WASD keys if you aren't using them). Now you can hold SHIFT and use your numeric keypad. EDIT: I also remapped the WASD keys to the numeric keypad. Just realize there are other events like docking and EVA that will need to be remapped also. Otherwise you will have a surprise later if you've remapped the camera keys to WASD.

Well, that isn't what I said at all. With two reaction wheels and the fins you have, I think you have enough yaw control. You can add more yaw authority and that might improve takeoff, but I don't think that will solve all your problems.

Capi, Long story short, you have enough yaw authority but your wings are too "flappy" because they are overloaded and improperly strutted (not necessarily moar struts). When I flew it, one of the right wing sections broke off but it was still flyable (so plenty of authority). Eventually, all the bouncing around broke off the central TurboJet. Amazingly, it was still flying. Anyway, here's what I did to help with wing loading/bending. Hopefully you aren't color blind... If you look at the red arrows, I showed where I moved the flight control surfaces to offload some of the force from the wings. Basically I moved them inboard (closer to the fuselage) in some key places. The green arrows show a couple struts I moved around. So I moved the one between the engine nacelles so that it connects the nacelles together instead of connecting it to the wing connector. Also the oval on the wingtip is slightly misleading. You have many struts crisscrossing underneath the wings, but they are largely ineffective. If you add vertical struts in between the wing sandwich (indicated where the green oval is), it will strengthen up your wings a bit. Let me know if that part doesn't make sense. You could probably remove some of the crisscross struts, but I didn't really mess with that. (So you don't need moar struts, just play with moving them around some.)

Ahh, I figured out what was going on. There was a corrupt .craft in the directory. So that was causing the load screen to mess up. Which I guess still leaves me with the question. What is the maximum number? Guess I'll have to try and find out.

So apparently you can't have more than 90 .craft files in the SPH folder. I copy a file into the directory (#91), and the SPH will not open the "load" window. I can go over to the VAB and it still works fine. Back to the SPH and the load window won't open. Go and delete one of the files (without restarting KSP), and the load window opens fine. Anyone else notice this? Is there a setting I can change? I know I can do more file management, but I am hoping there is an option to let me have more than 90 .craft. (I tried searching for variations of "maximum number of .craft files" but it only came back with various plugins.) Thanks!

Fuel lines are on the second page of the propulsion tab in sandbox mode.

I haven't tried to dock more than one port with MechJeb, but perhaps you can try to let Jeb get you most of the way there. Then turn it off and realign your parts so they are set up the right way. Then turn Jeb back on and let it get really close. Take over manually once it's nearly there and try to finish the job. (Quicksave is your friend...)

Huh, this looks pretty sweet. I also like hiding things in the decouplers. Although there isn't a ton of space in there. You can get in to some of the items if you spin the camera around and zoom in just right. But you can't get to them with EVA. More recently I've keeping things stuck to the outside, but I build smaller probes or parts that can be jettisoned when done.

Yeah, that's more accurate. I meant this but didn't really say it that way. Sometimes it's hard to make examples without being overly specific. Can't store more than one of the same kind of science experiment done under the same conditions.

Edit your original post and click "Go Advanced."

Do you have a cat? They can be evil. (Seriously, I don't know. I haven't seen this yet.)

Yes, what Jouni said. It is vector math. Speed is directionless, vectors are not. When you "use" dV, it is not directionless. If you do a theoretically perfect inclination change, your speed didn't change but your vector sure did, and it took some dV to do that. dV is a measure of how much you can move that vector around (make it longer, shorter, or "turn it"). Yeah, it's more complicated than that, but I guess I think of dV as a measure of "how much can I move this particular ship around."

Hopefully you didn't take that as a poke at your design. I was just meaning to say that there are lots of ways to design things and I was trying to give another example that gave similar performance. And actually I like your design. Sort of reminds me of the Tron solar sailer before the sails open (or maybe flipped around).

Yep, this is the idea. Except I aim to be around 32km when I'm reaching for these speeds. It makes it easier and less gas hungry (at least for my particular designs). I'm usually only going about 1000m/s at 23-24km, but it's all in how you prefer to fly. I can achieve what Kasuha demonstrates above with a single TurboJet and two radial scoop intakes (no ram intakes). I would argue you don't have to "intake spam" to get performance like that. Typically I use no more than three intakes per jet engine, but you certainly can use more and have better performance. Again, it's all up to how you want to design. That's the awesome thing about KSP!

Ahh, so it sounds a bit more complicated than just "making a rocket in the SPH." If you can repeat the same laggy results, then post more details about what you did and what is around you so that maybe others can duplicate. If it is a bug, then it might be worth submitting.