FleshJeb

I hope so. Wonderfully documented and the formatting is exquisite. It's like something you'd see from back when games had manuals.

I find "cool" comes from the restrictions you place on the design, and then the style evolves out of that. It gives a path to focus on, and narrows your choices. You find this a lot in art and poetry. (I'm thinking of you, iambic pentameter.) My personal restrictions (entirely vanilla, and minimum graphics settings): Must be very capable of doing a mission I pick. Performance comes first, because functionality is the coolest. Whether this comes as limiting dry mass, or making something aerodynamically sleek, or very survivable against heat. Must not do "everything". Craft that are under-specialized become an ungainly mess full of compromises. Must be easy to pilot and operate. Having a robust craft informs where you can place parts. Sometimes a craft or a set of craft are so fiddly or so fragile, you don't want to play with them, and this is the uncoolest. Every part has to have a functional purpose. Parts don't get thrown on because of aesthetics. There's an old axiom about getting dressed to go out: Put on all your stuff until you think you look good, and then remove one thing. Must be at least somewhat "realistic". The structure and shaping usually start with an impression of a real life craft, and I try to restrain my clipping to what is "volumetrically sane". On the other end of that, I think hyper-realistic recreations are boring and fly like crap. It's Space LEGO, and it's OK to leave things up to the imagination. As a result, I tend to come up with some fairly understated, but very sleek designs. And they move like absolute bats out of hell. Of course, I know a dude that builds some very spiky anime mecha, and another one that builds almost nothing but micro-craft, and they're super-cool, so do what you want. Pick the restrictions and parameters that make you happy, and your personal style will flow from there.

You can build your own struts with a pair of unpowered universal joints (servo-hinge-hinge), a lightly-powered piston, and a strut. Granted, that's 8 parts, but it's very possible. If you only need to constrain 2D movement, it's hinge-piston-hinge-strut.

1. Pictures ALWAYS help. 2. CorrectCOL is a fantastic, reasonably easy to use mod that gives you a more accurate picture of the aerodynamics as well as a stability graph for all angles of attack. (See my sig for links). 3.a. I'm not sure if the bug still exists, but cargo and service bays, and fairings should have their internal attachment nodes occupied by something of the appropriate size. For Mk3 parts, that's a 2.5m part. Otherwise the drag on the cargo bay is hellacious, even when closed. 3.b. Also an old bug: Don't use any of the above cargo parts as the root part of your vessel, because they will be super-draggy. 4. I set all my control surfaces to 5 deg or less, fly in precision mode (Caps Lock) and have no problems. Canards ARE highly recommended. 5.a. When using wings with AOA, make at a good amount of horizontal tail area unmoving, and with 0 AOA. This will damp out a lot of pitch problems. You can put the COL (as shown by CorrectCOL) right on the COM and have a very good plane. 5.b. I recommend flying SAS Surface Prograde for the above setup. The plane will tend to fly just a hair nose down, so you can add 5 deg of anhedral to that flat tail and it will damp your roll as well. If you've successfully balanced the plane to take out the phugoid oscillations, you can circumnavigate the planet without touching the controls.

Good memory, you are correct:

Orbits are this gorgeous ballet, but you only have to know about 10 things, and you have months to correct errors. Interfaces between mediums are where excrements gets really exciting--The margins are thin, and if your engineering is bad, death is instant. Amazing feeling, isn't it? If you're up for the challenge, you should try building one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-90_Orlyonok Getting it to fly nicely with the takeoff jets turned off was not easy.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say you and your niche have been missed by more than just me. Come say hi once in a while anyway, you flarping weirdo.

I like to use a deployable hydrofoil forward of the CoM. It will reduce the area of skin in contact with the water and give you a higher AoA, leading to higher speeds and an easier liftoff. It's a reasonable approximation of the "stepped" hull on a real-world seaplane. https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/62088/what-is-the-offset-in-a-seaplanes-hull

1) Good job on the diagnostics. 2) Post a pic with the CoM and CoL indicators turned on in the editor. 3) It could be the reaction wheels (I don't use them on planes), but it's more likely an aerodynamic issue. There's probably something very draggy up front, and when you depart a bit from prograde, it turns into a massive lever arm and flips the plane over. The stock CoL indicator doesn't show this, which is why I use CorrectCoL (link in my sig). 4) You've got SAS turned on to stabilize the plane, right?

The 88 is not a relay antenna; it won't talk to another 88. Listing of antennas: https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Parts#Communication This is an excellent resource for planning comms: Or this, if you prefer an in-game mod:

I'm going to give it a try for a couple of weeks. Last night was the first time in forever that I didn't feel like I was fighting with KSP to get things done.

I do that because it doubles my framerate.

I've spoken to a few old-school players that are just DONE. I've spent a good chunk of the weekend reading patch notes and rolling back versions to test them. 1.7.3 runs brilliantly, but the maneuver node editor is still kicking the crap out of my navball. I think I'm joining the 1.3.1 club so I can get rid of it and the atrocious re-skins.

I believe there was a big change in electrical usage for BG rotors in some version, but I can't find a patch note for it. I think the current model would reward the largest diameter, lowest RPM prop. The addition of Kerbal mass in 1.11 may affect the outcome of the challenge.

Generally speaking this is caused by the landing gear not being aligned straight up and down. (Use the Angle Snap mode when placing them on the craft.) Or it can be a case of them being too small, too large, or having the wrong settings. Pictures of the craft are the best way to get help when asking questions.

I've never played with anything but the default tolerance, but it's located here in your persistent.sfs file. You can edit it in a text editor like Notepad, but make sure you make a backup copy first. (This is from a 1.8.1 save) AdvancedParams { EnableKerbalExperience = False ImmediateLevelUp = False AllowNegativeCurrency = False PressurePartLimits = True GPartLimits = True GKerbalLimits = True KerbalGToleranceMult = 1 ResourceTransferObeyCrossfeed = True ActionGroupsAlways = False BuildingImpactDamageMult = 0.05 PartUpgradesInSandbox = True PartUpgradesInCareer = True PartUpgradesInMission = False EnableFullSASInSandbox = True }

The EVA pack used to work. I think the parachute and other things in inventory add mass now. I’m still on 1.10, about to roll back to 1.8.1 or 1.7.3. All the changes since are a net negative for me.

Congrats! If you post a picture here, we might be able to help with the ground stability. I tend to go with diamond-shaped layouts for the gear in this situation--One each front and back, and one on each wingtip. Electric propeller craft do work on Duna, and they take a lot less electricity than ions. Ions are super fun though, so enjoy yourself.

Yes, although they're about 1/2 as effective on Duna. It's not going to be efficient to bring enough power to keep the engine firing continuously, so bring a lot of batteries--They're very energy dense. This will allow you to timewarp to charge while landed and have enough power to hop between biomes, or return to orbit. You may also want to bring a single RTG for some nighttime charging (although they're heavy). Being a nerd, I'd plug all my options into a spreadsheet to figure out the most mass-efficient package, but if you just want a rough estimate, a single RTG, two big static panels on the wings and 3000-5000 electrical units worth of batteries should get you around OK.

Yes. it works very well. Use a LOT of wing, and put some small retractable landing gear out on the wingtips to take impacts--You will be landing at high speed, and bouncing over quite a few dunes as you brake to a stop.

Spectacular job on this. I did some reading and noted that the U.S. Standard Atmosphere assumes a CO2 concentration of 317 PPM. Do you have the ability and interest in re-running the simulation at the current 410 PPM? I'd love to see some graphs of the difference. Perhaps over a timespan of 30 years instead of 5?

Heck, you can land on Duna and Moho on ion drives. They're ridiculously OP.

Great job working the rescue into the overall story. That and getting the plane working.

@Cloakedwand72 The tank that's sitting at the CoL can be swapped out. Use one half the size, and then put another half tank in front of the cargo bay. You may also want to set the priority on the front adapter tank so it drains last. Cargo bays can also be very draggy, and the CoL doesn't show it. Make sure you close the internal nodes to get the minimum drag. I use 2.5m docking ports or 2.5m batteries. That's a very elegant craft; I like it a lot.