RocketBlam

If the Kerbals survive, it's a great design! If they don't... probably needs work! Maybe.

That's nice work. I'm always envious of people that can design a plane that looks like a real plane. I can't. Just curious though, it looks like you're using TweakScale (for the solids on the wings), which is fine, but I would think you would use it also for the ones that are made up of the 0.625m parts... you know, shrink down some of the bigger white tanks. Anyway, it looks nice.

I for one am embarrassed at some of the responses to this player's thread. He does what most of us have done: posts a thread about a craft that he built, and is proud of, and the way some of you have responded is not what I ever hoped to see in the Kerbal community. Since I joined pre-1.0, we've been a forgiving and pleasant bunch. Is that changing? If any of you are over ten years old I'm sure you've heard the term that starts with "if you don't have something nice to say...", so I won't bother repeating it. I guess the first guy was trying to be funny about the XL fuel tank, but it didn't really come across that way at first, and the other two are just snarky. It was unpleasant, even to me, and I'm not even the OP.

I had the same idea, I just never actually worked on it.

If I were going to pretend to eat something, it would be, like, a hamburger.

I think the only part that has received nearly unanimous agreement of its uselessness is the micronode. Other than that, every part seems to be used by someone, for something. And that's fine with me. This isn't a "we must remove this part!" thread, it was just a thread to see if there was some agreement about less useful parts. And there isn't much.

I'm not exaggerating: I think The Martian is the worst book I've ever tried to read. I hated it. His nerdy speech got old fast, the "funny" parts weren't funny at all, and the thing was written with prose you'd expect from a Facebook post. I honestly have never hated a book like this before. I don't want to insult anyone, if you liked it that's fine, but God, it is awful.

I'm not complaining just to complain.... I think I've been pretty fair about KSP on these forums, and I love the game, but these stock fairings... I'm trying to be kind here, they just don't work right. As I said, Procedural Fairings works a lot better, and it's just a mod. So, I get the impression that Squad wanted to do it their own way, rather than just copy a mod, but every time I try to use the dang things, I come up frustrated. BTW, I did end up making a reasonable fairing with it, but it was much more difficult than it should have been. It doesn't have to be fully automatic like Procedural Fairings, but.... when I click to end a segment, especially when I've made it as long as it can possibly be.... dang, it should end the segment! I don't understand why it doesn't!

Don't trust him. That ship is rigged to explode! Hehe, just kidding. They're ALL rigged to explode.

There have been a few really difficult missions, but hauling a class-C asteroid into the orbit of Bop from Kerbin ranks right up there.

How is Factorio? I'd never heard of it, it looks kind of interesting.

I don't know if this has been said, but every time I try to use these stock fairings, they are just a pain in the butt to use. Right now I'm trying to build a very simple fairing, but KSP won't let me do it. I click to end one segment, and it won't register. I have to build an absurdly wide fairing to even get the thing to work. And what REALLY bothers me about this is that the procedural fairings mod they used to have (and maybe still do) worked SO much better. You didn't even have to build the fairings, they were automatically generated, and you could modify them if you wanted to. These stock fairings... I'm sorry Squad, but they just don't work right. I guess I'll just download the procedural fairings mod again, because this is really miserable.

Is there some plugin that tells you what biome you're in?

I thought there was a closer biome, but it was night time and I couldn't see it. Wait around for daylight? Are we not Kerbals?!? I'm actually looking forward to a mission to the polar caps, but I can tell you, I'm not doing it on Wheesleys.

It's just the "moderate" setting, except with saving turned off (although "revert" is left on, because I tend to make stupid mistakes that cause catastrophes in the early parts of the missions).

Well, I say "mission", but it wasn't a mission from mission control. It was just me flying to a new biome to get more science. But I mostly agree with you, flying to certain altitudes and doing scans there is not really that rewarding.

I just flew a mission that was, strangely, quite rewarding. First, let me tell you a little about myself. I'm the guy who did the Kessel run in 12 parsecs. Actually, I've played through the campaign, I think, 4 times now, in various versions. I've returned Kerbals from the surface of Eve and Tylo. I've visited every single planetary body, and returned Kerbals from everything except the sun and Jool. This is not to brag, just to show you that I've basically done it all. But this was a pretty exciting mission, even though it all happened below 11,000 meters on Kerbin. I figured I'd go hardcore mode on this run-through, so I have disabled save and reload. Also, science and money are somewhat reduced. So here I am, pretty early in the tech tree, and I need to earn 45 science so I can research the Stayputnik probe, and batteries, so I can at least fly by the moon. I'm sort of stuck in a rut, is what I mean. I have already gotten all the science I can get from the atmosphere and from the space near Kerbin, so the only way for me to get science is to troll the various Kerbin biomes for science. So I've done the Highlands, Shores and Grasslands. The next nearest biome is the desert, and I had to fly all the way across the sea to get to it, with only the Wheesly jet engine. I time-warped through some of it, I admit, but it was still strangely rewarding just to fly across the sea to a biome on Kerbin. It was exciting to go that far and land on basic wheels just to get 12 science from a few basic experiments. Anyway, the good news is... I made it!

The Amazotron XS2 This is my first, and so far only, single engine VTOL aircraft. It even gets into orbit, or it did in .90. I used Infernal Robotics for the engine vectoring. Unfortunately the file won't load any more. Time to try again!

It's pretty fun, but you probably want to do your roving after you return, not before you take off. The weight of all the fuel actually makes the thing pretty fragile, and the wheels tend to fall off.

The best way to make a spaceplane that can land on other planets is, in my opinion, make it a vertical lander, like this. This is just some VTO rocket I have an image of laying around. This one doesn't even have legs! It just lands on the wings. If I want to land on another planet, or even most of the time on Kerbal, if it has an atmosphere, I build it like this. Build it so it can fly like a plane, but lands on legs instead of wheels. I do it for these reasons: 1. Finding a nice flat place to land on is hard. Tail landers can land in a lot more places, and more safely. 2. You can use parachutes to land, which saves a lot of fuel. Remember to bring an engineer if you want to use it more than once, so he can repack the chutes. 3. If you want to land on a non-atmosphere planet, it's easier. The wings will do you no good whatsoever whether you land vertically or horizontally, but it's a lot easier to land vertically with no aero effects than horizontally. 4. When you come back to Kerbin, you don't have to try to land at the runway. Just land wherever. As long as its not mountains, you'll be fine.

Yes, in fact you can manage the heat load pretty well by adjusting your angle of attack.

Kamaro ZR1 Single Stage Rover to Orbit.

Kamaro ZR1 Inspired by this thread, I have designed a SSTO rover. 0-70 (thousand meters) in just... a few minutes. Then when you land, why, you can just drive around for a while. This is actually one of the better SSTO's I've made. It achieves 100k orbit with about 500 D/V to spare, and has plenty of LF for flying around when you come back. You have to use the landing gear (instead of the wheels) when you take off, since they start to melt at around 60 m/s. However, you could conceivably land on them.

I notice if I don't limit what my control surfaces do, my plane gets wobbly and does weird things, like turning a little when I bank, or banking when I turn.

I designed this to retrieve Kerbals from orbit. It's the earliest SSTO I can manage in the tech tree. Basically what you need to research is the Swivel engine, the FL-T400, the HECS command unit, the reaction wheel, the radial chutes, the nosecones and the Fuel Ducts. Although you could actually do this just as well without the FL-T400 tanks, and use the smaller ones. It has about 4100 D/V, which will get you to a 100k orbit with basically only enough fuel left to de-orbit.