SkyRender

Ooh, I like those numbers indeed. Much more realistic, and much better justification for investing in RTGs!

That's a known issue, it's been around pretty much since EVAs were introduced. The only solution is to time-warp during the camera swap. Or switch to a different camera type than Auto, I guess.

If that's a price you're willing to pay, indeed. There does seem to be a general lack of appreciation for just how much you pay for having a "cool" spacecraft design that's less practical in this thread, however...

A picture is worth a thousand words when diagnosing rocket troubles... But for general advice: keep your profile aerodynamic (ie. don't have any protruding structures on it, especially near the top), try to use a gimbal-enabled engine if you can, and stick a quadrio of steering fins near the base of the rocket. Also, during ascent, be sure that you keep pointed fairly close to the prograde (yellow circle) marker. You can't just violently pitch around in the new aero model unless you have some serious wings on your craft, and that has its own problems too (such as inducing quite a lot of drag).

And if he cut the superfluous wings off, it'd probably get there with 450m/s left instead.

Okay. So that raises my second question: why do you expect "cool"-looking craft that are not aerodynamically sound to fly well? The 1980s sci-fi spacecraft designs that you appear to be mimicking don't fly very well. It doesn't make sense to complain that something which would fly poorly in real life also flies poorly in a simulation.

No offense, landfish, but that looks like a 1980s sci-fi movie prop more than it does like a proper plane. Why would you encase your fuselage with superfluous wings? Why not just use a more aerodynamic fuselage?

Or to put it another way, it demands a new kind of creativity with spaceplane design: functional minimalism. Personally, I've always found those spaceplanes built up with a billion wings as some sort of artsy shell to be ugly. They fly now as they would in real life: horribly. Just because they look like something out of a sci-fi series or film doesn't mean they're in any way, shape or form practical. Usually just the opposite.

You can still make some pretty ridiculously small SSTOs in 1.0.2. Even with all of the changes, that thing can still reach orbit just fine, and it actually looks like a plane to boot.

Hey now, I design my SSTOs to look like proper planes too... But I have noticed a prevalence for making them more like rockets with extra-large fins than actual planes by many, it's true. Probably because the word has not yet spread that wings actually do something useful in stock aero now.

More testing with the turbojet shows that it remains a viable option even if the RAPIER is clearly superior. Take this little darling I made for single-tourist to-orbit-and-back contracts: It has 360 liquid fuel and oxidizer reduced to 352. It can easily reach a stable orbit and return with a bit of fuel to spare. My test flight with it was quite a roaring success, with a contract complete and no casualties. Just one caveat: land in daylight, or you'll run out of power fast! A few batteries on there would fix that, of course... EDIT: Wow, I just noticed that this is the smallest SSTO that can bring a Kerbal to orbit so far in this thread! That's gotta count for something.

Life support is one of those sticky wickets for KSP. A number of other features really do need to be present for that to work, most notably some sort of overview system that lets you track at a glance the current profile of each and every mission. We have a framework for that with the tracking station, but it would need considerable expanding for life support to work. We'd need at-a-glance knowledge of how long each ship is going to last with current life support supplies, if nothing else. The VAB/SPH scene would also need a new widget to tell us how long the crew can be expected to survive on what they have. And of course, you'd see a lot of players who don't use life support complaining that their Kerbals are dying on their long missions because they didn't give them enough LS. Getting the Engineer's Report to correctly assess your life support needs would be quite a trick indeed, given that the editor has no way of knowing where you're planning to send that thing (or when, for that matter).

The atmosphere in 1.0 had the scale height a bit off (it thinned out much too fast), while 1.0.2 feels a lot closer to correct now. It's not FAR, but the skills a player learns using FAR will carry over to it nicely. If anything, you end up being even more cautious since FAR aero causes craft to flip out even more easily than the new aero model does!

This was a triumph. I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS. Still need to refine the ascent profile a bit, but it did get into orbit! Just barely, granted, but that's better than not at all.

I admit I didn't really read that particular post in the topic; my bad. Generally I find that the out-of-control flipping is due to a lack of fins more often than a lack of gimbal-enabled engines. Your case was a surprising exception to that trend!

So far the only SSTO spaceplanes I haven't gotten to orbit in the latest version are the ones that I cut the fuel budget absurdly low on. Trying to get 6 Kerbals into orbit with Mk2 spaceplane parts for under 1000 LF and equivalent oxidizer is almost entirely infeasible, but good fun as well. If nothing else, it teaches you a lot about the most effective angles of attack for your final burn up to orbit.

I can think of quite a few past releases of KSP that had far more upset surrounding them than 1.0. Let's see... There were the open-to-the-public experimentals for 0.15 that swiftly resulted in SQUAD recruiting an actual testing team instead of letting the community as a whole test the game. There was quite a bit of upset about the delay between 0.18 and 0.19, particularly given how much changed between 0.17 and 0.18 versus how comparatively little changed between 0.18 and 0.19. There was quite a bit of derision thrown about when 0.23.5 came out, mostly because of the assumption that 0.24 was delayed to work on it. They survived these upsets just fine, despite quite a lot more fuss being raised at the time (especially for 0.19; I don't think I'll ever forget the rage I saw emerge when that version came out). There are more voices now, but the overall quantity of actual complaining is far lower relatively speaking.

KSP: teaching entire generations about why arrows, darts, and rockets all have fins on their back ends! Seriously, though, unless you have a huge rocket or insane gimbal range, you're gonna need fins to keep from flipping out of control every time you point slightly off prograde.

Some tweaks to usefulness would certainly come in handy for Kerbals. As it stands now, Pilots have a huge early-game advantage until you get SAS-enabled probe cores, scientists have an edge mid-game until the tech tree is fully unlocked (their ability to clean experiments is not to be underestimated!), and Engineers are end-game deities compared to the other two types. That's not so much a balance as it is a progression.

Thanks for being on the ball about keeping KER up to date and working, cybutek! It's been my go-to mod for ages now, and I don't see that changing unless SQUAD implements basically all of KER's functionality into stock.

I kind of hope 1.1 is mostly a quality-of-life update. There are a lot of small features they could implement that would make the experience much better. For example, key bindings for common actions at the Space Center like rejecting/canceling contracts, the ability to specify contracts that you don't want to see pop up (by type and location both), a fix for the problem where action groups do not respect symmetry when parent parts are moved... Little things like that would really make things easier on the player. I would think a little flashing "check here first" arrow over Mission Control the first time you start up a Career mode file would be a helpful addition for newer players too; that sucker's tiny for something so essential!

The prevalence of Kerbal rescue missions does seem to be much higher now. I once had the entire list of potential missions be rescue contracts. Granted, I had to engineer it that way a bit, but it took surprisingly few rejected contracts for it to work out that way.

I did some testing on this just now and discovered a few interesting things... 1.) solar panels are horrible heat radiators: the Gigantor XLs only bleed off about 1 degree per second of heat over the rest. 2.) What you hook up directly above your LV-N has a HUGE impact. An engine precooler, paradoxically, will allow the engine to overheat super-fast. By contrast, a Mk3 Fuel Fuselage Short section will cause the engine to overheat much more slowly (as in, over 20 times slower than on a precooler; it was kinda nuts).

The thing is, as far as engines go, it IS a broken mechanic because no sane engineer would OK sending up an engine that is prone to melting itself (or worse, its fuel supply container) within minutes of ignition and well before its fuel supply is spent. One of the main reasons why nuclear rocket motors never had any launches into space in the real world was because they couldn't get the heat dissipation levels down to an acceptable amount. Were the project ever revived, you can be damn sure they'd have to solve that issue before they got put into use.

Take a look at the Temp Ext. value for those screenshots. If that's the external temperature of the item, then it matches much more closely with what the Kerbal experienced. I think the other Temp value is the overall temperature of the item.