SkyRender

You don't even need a particularly heavy craft for this. You just need to know how to feather the throttle to keep your effective lift very low, and bring enough overall fuel to account for the fact that a lot of your flight is going to involve fighting gravity. You could probably do it with a nuclear engine and a large fuel tank and just be smart about keeping thrust barely high enough to keep you going up.

Also significant is if there's any way for the gaseous elements to take a gaseous form. To wit: Titan is not much denser than the moon, yet has a very thick atmosphere. The moon has large quantities of elements that have naturally-occurring gaseous states (most notably its abundance of oxygen). Both have meaningful magnetospheric influence as well (in Titan's case, it's being shielded by Saturn's magnetosphere; in the moon's case, it has both the Earth's magnetosphere and its own). However, the moon is effectively inert since it lacks any form of transition process to separate those potentially-gaseous elements from their non-gaseous bindings (the most-commonly-observed method for that happening being vulcanism).

Probably Tylo has no magnetosphere (or a very weak one, or a neutralized one due to magnetic interference from neighboring bodies cancelling it out). For whatever reason, having a magnetosphere seems to be a key component to having a persistent atmosphere. More to the point, just because we've only ever observed large rocky bodies having atmospheres in our solar system does not indicate that all large rocky bodies absolutely must have an atmosphere. Our sample size is extremely limited and confined to our solar system on top of that.

I don't know if the mod to make it do something is still around, but you could set up a GPS satellite array. That's an interesting challenge unto itself that will teach you an awful lot about how GPS works. EDIT: Yep, it's still around!

A good script can make any concept work well. I can see a fun KSP movie being made, probably focused around Jeb's dreams of one day being the first Kerbal to set foot upon the Mun. And when he's done that, on Duna. And when he's done that, on Jool (expressing that desire just before the credits roll, for comedy effect).

My proud tradition of silly and pun-like portmanteau names continues in 0.24, with my interplanetary missions: Dunaverse Ike Liker Eve Ent Horizon Silly Gilly Dresperate Mohotivated Joolific Laytheargic Vallting Tyloptic Bop Hopper Polpit Eeloosive

For the quiet parts of the mission, this would be fairly appropriate: .

I am so glad you don't have to do all of that in KSP to build and launch a rocket...

Definitely . Love that song.

That's a known issue with the 64-bit Windows build. There's currently no real way for the devteam to address it, as it relates to timing issues in the Unity engine itself.

I think a less cruel version would just be to make it so that experimental parts have slightly tweaked parameters out of spec (ie. 10% heavier and 10% less effective than the non-experimental version). The added challenge of experimental parts should be adapting to their limits, not in testing how patient you are with Revert to Launch.

TAC Life Support is pretty well-balanced at this point. The added weight to your missions from life support is usually pretty minor, at least if you're not launching off to Eeloo on a 20-year mission or something.

Literally the same day I decide to re-install TAC Life Support, an update comes out for it. Amazing.

Yep. In fact, that was what made me realize that the model broke down: the plane continues to spin out of control with the parachutes deployed. It's only when full deployment happens that anything even resembling a return to order takes place. And even then, the craft will have issues if you try to take off again. EDIT: Yep, NEAR has problems, all right. I suggest to the original poster that a switch to FAR would ironically be less complicated than trying to deal with NEAR at this point. It'll up your jet engine requirements slightly, but it will also cut down significantly on the whole "plane becomes an uncontrollable mess" problem.

Is it just me, or is NEAR really, really unstable? Craft will fly unerringly as long as you keep pointed fairly close to the velocity vector, but as soon as you veer even slightly too far in any direction, the whole model just breaks down and craft will go into a permanent uncontrollable spin that even parachutes can't completely put a halt to. I'm pretty sure that's neither the expected nor desired behavior, and I'm fairly sure that FAR doesn't have this particular issue (certainly not to such an absurd degree, anyway).

Well, I've discovered a large reason why NEAR might make you hate spaceplanes, and that is that its simplified aerodynamics model compared to FAR breaks down something awful the moment you start to spin out. FAR at least gives you some shot of recovering your vehicle when that happens, but with NEAR, it actually gets unphysical in the way planes go out of control. You literally cannot get your plane facing any sane direction during a spin-out with NEAR if it's aerodynamically stable otherwise.

Oh. Well, that's news to me. I guess that, NEAR, FAR, wherever you are, there's an aerodynamics mod out there for you.

NEAR? You mean FAR? Anyway, the allure of spaceplanes is that you can get about twice the payload to orbit for the fuel consumption. That, and the challenge of designing a good spaceplane is far greater than that of a good rocket. With better aerodynamics plugins like FAR, you actually have to build your craft fairly aerodynamically as well. Meaning you can't put mostly-flat surfaces along the leading edge (ie. the front-side of the craft) and expect to have any sort of stable flight past mach 2 (and it'll be shaky before then even at that). A good tip for a balanced spaceplane is to place the fuel mass on the sides of the fuselage, and have the central part of your spaceplane have no draining of physical resources at all. If you use tweakables to empty and refill the fuel tanks, you can gauge when they are at the point of least resistance (ie. the center of mass does not meaningfully shift at all as the fuel levels change), meaning your craft will fly the same at a full tank as it does on an empty one. Besides making sure you have enough aerodynamic and control surfaces, and making sure center of lift is slightly behind center of mass, that's all you really need to know to make spaceplanes easy to build in KSP. EDIT: Oh, one last warning: gauge your center of mass/center of lift balance before you add landing gear. Even though their mass is listed as fairly significant, landing gear is actually physics-insignificant, meaning it will throw off your center of mass reading and give you an inaccurate result.

Ah, it's my old arch-nemesis...

Seeing as I'm a human, not a Kerbal, I'd have quite a task of riding in one of their rockets. They're not even 1 meter tall, you realize! But if I were a Kerbal, I wouldn't have any hesitation about riding one of my rockets. They're all pretty darn stable, and have reasonable margin-of-error fuel levels. Might be a bit leery of some of my larger spaceplanes, though. Even when they do have rock-solid CoM/CoL from start to finish, they also tend to have too little lift for their mass and are thus very hard to land safely.

And here I was just theorizing about "reactionless" drive systems not that long ago... That's an interesting way of doing it, to be certain. It remains to be seen if it will be practical in actual space flight, of course.

Because it weighs 0.3T. The regular Clamp-o-Tron weighs 0.05T. That's a lot of extra mass for something that's meant for an ostensibly light craft like a spaceplane.

Presenting the Airbus Kerbin. Escape Velocity's premiere "liesure-liner" spaceplane, the Airbus Kerbin takes passengers into low-Kerbin orbit. Seats 24 passengers plus the pilot. Action Groups: 1 - Solar Arrays 3 - Ladders 0 - Switch Modes Ascent Profile: At full throttle, reach the end of the runway and pull up sharply (but not too sharply!). Gradually tilt up to 75 degrees, and hold until ~7000m. Begin tilting downwards so as to reach 45 degrees at 10,000m. Continue to gradually tilt down as you go, aiming for a stable 15- to 20-degree tilt by 20,000m. Maintain altitude between 20,000 and 22,000m while attaining a speed of 1,400m/s minimum. Once up to speed, switch modes with 0 and point towards 45 degrees, cutting throttle back to 75% to prevent engines from exploding. Raise apoapsis to 75km, then tilt to 0 degrees and keep apoapsis around 70,500m minimum as necessary. Circularize at apoapsis. Be sure to save a small amount of fuel for landing (50 liquid fuel recommended). Post-orbital insertion. And the return landing.

That spaceplane's 34.308T when empty, so it's around 2.6 times heavier than your Laythe craft. Of course, it's kind of irrelevant given that the goal here was to see how much I could do with 1 orange tank equivalent on Kerbin, not on Laythe. I'd say a payload fraction of 25.88% to LKO with RAPIERs alone is nothing to sneeze at.

So I still need to land this thing, but it was pretty fun overall to build. I wanted to see how many crew cabins I could put into orbit using only one orange tank's worth of fuel overall, and without resorting to massive shenanigans involving intake spam. This was what I came up with, aided greatly by the significant mass drop the RAPIER received recently. I kinda sorta forgot to load it with Kerbals before sending it up, though... Anyway, it was built using one of my favorite tricks of centering the fuel load with the rest of the craft's center of mass, so its CoL/CoM positioning never changes. Meaning landing it should be no big deal once I get around to it. EDIT: Well, I landed. It was one of the trickier landings I've done, mostly owing to the fact that I started my descent a bit too early, but it worked out in the end and everything landed intact. EDIT 2: Here's some vital statistics on the craft: Airbus Kerbin: 109 parts in 1 stage 2880 liquid fuel + 3080 oxidizer + 7.5 monopropellant on-board Initial mass: 62.788T Dry mass: 34.308T Fuel mass fraction: 54.64% Payload mass: 16.25T (Mk1 Cockpit + 6 Hitchhiker Storage Containers) Payload fraction: 25.88% Fuel per Kerbal: 115.2 liquid fuel/123.2 oxidizer