XOIIO

Now that I am a bit better at flying them I got similar results, although I had a bit less liquid fuel and half as much oxidizer. I am going to swap out the engine nacelles, I hardly see them used. What ascent profiles do you guys use? I pretty much get to a 50 degree angle as fast as I can upon liftoff, wait to 20km, nose down, and try to keep level and get as much speed as I can, then nose up 90 degrees and rocket until my AP is good. (mix of a couple tips ive seen and trial and error.)

Oh yeah, the new setup. The middle skinny section is longer than I would like but not much I can do. It seems R.A.P.I.E.R's need less intakes, even though they have less thrust, I wonder if changing to just two of those would be better or not. It would look less cool, that's for sure, and they do eat a crapton of fuel in rocket mode.

Well, going better with Icarus II, I did the stacking, 5 ram intakes for each engine, I may need to add another one or two, not really sure. This is an example of my best flight, by the time I get up to 1200 M/s on jets I'm practically out of air even with all these intakes, then I aim straight up best I can to get into orbit. Once I get my AP to 80km, I let mechjeb take over the circularization. It usually looks like this. Anyways I've learnt that I need to lower my refueling station from it's 250km orbit, to something like 100km. I ran out of fuel after the hohmann maneuver, I would need an extra 60 or 80 fuel to be safe with the station at it's current orbit, I think changing the RCS tank to fuel, and using two 40 unit containers of RCS fuel would will work out better. Anyways since I was going to revert the flight anyways, I used infinite fuel, here is a shot of it docked with my refueling station. It should work great when my station is lower and I have a wee bit more fuel to play with, enough for my mistakes to not matter much. I'll do all that tomorrow. It's a shame the air intakes are so inefficient though, having to use this many seems a little extreme, especially when SSTO's are pretty much the only thing that is being made in the SPH. edit: hmm, scott manley's seems to do much better, I'm not sure if something has changed since 0.18 perhaps, or maybe I just suck at it, but he has a fair bit of fuel and his ship is smaller as well as having many less intakes. Have intakes changed or something? I was below .9 air much faster I'm sure, though I may be cutting the engines out too soon. I'll see tomorrow.

I've decided it's not really feasible to get it into orbit without stacking ram air intakes, and it does make it look cleaner, I just wish the buggy texture wasn't there :/ Most of the community seems to support it though so may as well cave in and join. Now I just need to get good at getting into orbit. I made a second version of this with a bit more fuel, 550 or so if I recall correctly.

one of the problems I'm having is making bigger wings that look good. The wing connector doesn't line up with the whole thing, and you can't put it in the same direction as a wing without it going through and/or looking bad :/ I'm also wondering the point of adding just liquid fuel when you can take some from the rocket engines anyways. For now I only want it to get to orbit, interplanetary missions with stock parts won't really be good I think. I cant find a way to use the mk3 fuselage and cockpit that looks good because of this wing problem. Big gaps in the middle of the plane between wings look bad too. I want to stay with stock parts but I think the game has just too far to go with spaceplanes as it stands now :/

Problem is I really don't want to stack ram air intakes, I've also seen people line multiples up in a row, I can't figure out how they do it. That would be a bit more acceptable, but still borederline on cheating in terms of design. I ended up lighting the rocket because I ran out of air. Adding 5 more ram intakes got me a bit higher, to 40km before I ran out, but looks fugly. Even at low levels the ram intakes never get 100% for some reason. I am going to make a new one that is bigger, your first one is nice, thats somewhat what I wanted to do at first, now I need something different. hmm

I didn't realize how... beta this game was before buying it lol. Don't get me wrong it's still epic, I've had it less than two weeks and played 101 hours lol, but there sure is a lot to come.

Heh, just noticed jeb's face in the last image, priceless XD

Hey folks, I finally wanted to give SSTO's a try, and came up with this design, it's a couple hours work in total, I traded out a R.A.P.I.E.R for the toroidal as the rapier just wasn't being as efficient, and I call this Icarus. No real reason, except the mythological link to failure, which is what I was expecting XD A couple things were important, namely style, and that I didn't really take any shortcuts having parts clipping into each other, such as multiple air intakes. It also has a thermoelectric generator, small battery pack, in line clamp-o-tron as well as a communications antenna (the collapsible one), and two parachutes because I won't be able to land these for a long time XD It also has Mechjeb, if you don't use that I can upload one without. I'd love to hear what you guys think, and give it a try. I have gotten close, but not actually into orbit, but I am notoriously bad at getting into orbit, I'm not sure if maybe I am doing it wrong or I just don't have enough fuel. I am hoping it is my technique, because I'd hate to have to make the craft any longer. Good news is I was able to glide it over a kilometer to a fairly high island to land safely with parachutes, I can't imagine planes do well in water. Anyways, on to photos and downloads! https://www.dropbox.com/s/cgx2hysr2ym3p1w/Icarus.craft I want to make something similar with the mk3 cockpit as a space taxi, but there just doesn't seem to be enough variety in parts to make it look good. I'll try more once I get smaller craft down though. I try to stay away from mods that add totally new parts because if support for them drops, or the game changes you need to wait for an update or lose your vehicle, unless KSP differs from other games and has some back support for it somehow.

well, much to my dismay after a two-three hours real world time letting mechjeb pilot my rover at 4x, having to monitor it for some sections of the journey, and manually pilot others, turns out the ice caps are no different from the rest of the world, and didn't get me any science extra :/ Wasted all that time sigh

Same. I'm surprised that happened.

I always thought it would be neat if you could see in through the windows, instead of the opaque blue it currently is.

yup, to my dismay I found that out after sending a prove to jool. I found out that a: it's a gas giant and b: I got nowhere near complete transmitting the data, I would have needed way more power XD

But when can we kill space hookers? I've been playing for less than two weeks, maybe around one, but based on the update history I think they do a pretty good job. Maybe releasing one or two small tweaks in between might be nice, it would help keep interest for the people who have trouble waiting but I think it is fairly satisfactory, that being said I haven't had to wait for an update yet.

hmm, don't think i have gotten to the radial decouplers you speak of, it must be part of heavy aerodynamics, which is what this mission is for unlocking. I do need a better solution though,this cage is dropping me to 6 fps even on map mode. Can't wait to ditch it.

My previous experience with duna lends me to think that chutes won't do much, and I am sending this unmanned. I have a crew of 3 already stranded in a broken down ship, this is to "rescue" them and to then transport them around to the ice caps and other areas of interest.

edit: Hmm, I had that wrong, I was thinking seperatrons were the other kind of decoupler that detaches from both sides. I guess you just aim them towards your rocket to do it. Could be an issue with part count for some people but I will have to give those a try. I figured all the tiny engines were just liquid ones for landers.

Interesting idea, some sort of datalogging mod would be neat.

Yes, however if you want to do a run of the mill asparagus design, seperatrons won't work.

I've come across this issue a lot since using mainsails and rockomax jumbo tanks for most of my rockets, the hydraulic detachment manifold just doesn't have enough kick to push the tanks away far enough, often times the middle of the asparagus stage will get it's engine or tank destroyed by an impact. In fact, the very baseline radial decouplers (I think that's what they are called) are better, because they are further away, but even then you are gambling. I'd like to see a rockomax sized decoupler strong enough for these tanks added in. Until then I may make a small mod to add another decoupler with more explosive force, but I'd really like it in vanilla.

I need the cage because there isn't a good way to attach the rockets to it without very obvious radial attachment parts on the sides,and I decided to leave the SAS on the rover. It's currently in orbit waiting for it's engines. I just wish I could use decouplers without fairings so that I could have three LV-N's instead of two.

Well, one thing's sure this thing won't go up with it's engines, however even just the cage and lander are tough, that assembly weighs a bit over 62 tons. I'll also only be able to have two LV-N's powering it, three and the fairings damage the other engines, usually taking out two or all three. I will send that up with two rockomax jumbo tanks to dock onto the main bit, but getting that main bit up is proving troublesome. With four mainsails, three around the outside, feeding the inside, then being dropped when empty (a one stage asparagus basically which is what I do for most things) got it closer to orbit, but it started dropping before it was even halfway there, it would never have made it :/ Two most difficult parts are going to be launching this thing and landing it :/

Oh, really? Well darn I wish I had known that XD Can you collide with them? I think I recall seeing somewhere mention that you don't.

On kerbin gravity this one can turn at 14 M/s or so, higher and one side will start to tip over. I plan on only using brakes for parking. I sent a four wheeled rover to eve, one of the challenges there is because of the gravity you always start rolling, and can get fast quickly. I got up to 30m/s, I didn't dare brake or turn, or even slow down, I just waited to go uphill to slow down first XD