FleshJeb

Have you seen this? https://kerbalx.com/Jett_Quasar/Colossus It inspired a one of my boats.

This is wonderful, thank you. Will you be building a seven segment display with the upcoming light strips? You've inspired me to start working on my KSP land surveying equipment again,. And since nothing is complete without a good "your mom" joke: Your mom's a horologist!

@haltux The problem is that you're planning that transfer from interplanetary space, and not from Kerbin orbit. It's missing out on the considerable savings of the Oberth effect. If you do the planning when Kerbin is in the position where you've got your node, you'll see a lower number. Is your ship currently outside of Kerbin's sphere of influence? It seems so from the orbital velocity shown on the navball.

I would use a combination of the Breaking Ground DLC and the Kerbal Attachment System mod. BG has robotic and moving parts, and KAS has winches and cables. The alternate to BG is the Infernal Robotics mod. I'm not very familiar with either mod, otherwise I'd be more specific.

The amount of whitespace relative to useful area is a tad excessive. For perspective, I browse old.reddit.com on my phone and it's fine. That was a link. This is an underline. <-- Basic usability anyone? I think this is what I have on my home machine: https://userstyles.org/styles/147582/kat-s-kerbal-space-program-ksp-forum-tweak The rest are here: https://userstyles.org/styles/browse?search_terms=kerbal&type=false

@Reinhart Mk.1 @Spricigo Thank you. Knowing me, the range was probably at least Minmus, but it has the cargo capacity for self-refueling. I tend to design spaceplanes, make sure they can get to orbit, and then never look at them again. Tax?: I'd have to rebuild it. I lost something like 2000 craft files when work upgraded my workstation. I'll be happy to do that this weekend if you like.

I've gone to 85km and back out on a single stage with no heatshields or fairings. Heatshields and fairings have a high absolute temperature tolerance but they transfer heat extremely slowly, so once they're hot, you die. The trick is radiating heat at a rate that allows you to survive. Parts such as most nosecones, structural wings, control surfaces, and precoolers radiate heat at 95% perfect emissivity (default 60% for most parts), and they transfer it extremely quickly. (Big-S parts transfer heat at 1/2 the rate of structural wings, so if you use them, you usually die.) Some parts have extremely high insulative properties, such as service bays. In the example below, I have two service bays in a row. The front one is white hot. Step 1: Transfer heat by chaining together parts with high heat transfer rate, and high radiative rate (see the individual part cfg files, and physics.cfg for defaults). The NCS adapter and small nose cone on my example below have multiple Type E structural wings attached and offset back. (There appears to be some heat occlusion going on when surface attaching, because some of the parts that are at the same level of the craft tree experience different heating depending on position.) Step 2: Picking your flight path. Heat is radiated as a function of efficiency * (part temperature - ambient temperature) ^4. (Stefan–Boltzmann law) Ambient temp makes a big difference (See the spoilered graph). We'll pick two cases, and ignore efficiency because it's the same in both cases: At 180 km, the ambient temperature is about 210K. A part at/near 2400K (most nosecones' max) is radiating heat proportional to (2400K - 200K)^4 = 2.3x10^13. At 120km, the ambient temp is about 140K. (2400K - 140K)^4 = 2.6x10^13. That's only 11% better, but heating is a process over time. Ambient space is 4K, so all your parts started at that temp. When they've heated up to 1200K, Being at 140K means you're radiating 31% more heat. Integrated over time, you can dump a lot more total energy the faster you get into the cold layer, rather than trying to bleed orbital speed in the hot layer. Cold is life. Jool atmo graph: In the example craft below, the main wings have angle of incidence. 1-3 degrees was good, 5 degrees resulted in them heating up too much and exploding. From low Jool orbit, I burnt 100m/s retrograde, flipped to prograde hold and upside down. The trajectory started flat, and rapidly transitioned to almost straight down. When I'd had enough of that, I flipped it right-side up, waited until past the periapsis, lit the Sparks and NERV, and powered out. In the process, it retained most of its orbital energy, and just redirected the direction of that energy (and the shape of the orbit) with the wings. It's very slippery, and presents a minimal cross-section to the atmosphere Aerodynamics is fuel AND life. This run went to 110km and came back out: This is the 85km run, and with a more robust design, I could definitely go lower: https://imgur.com/R3pg9sz There are certainly other ways to do this, but I had an enormous amount of fun, learned an amazing amount, and consider it the highlight of my KSP career.

Never, EVER use Rigid Attachment, it turns your craft into glass--Hard but brittle. The only justifiable use case is for mechanical contraptions using Same Vessel Interaction that require tight, consistent tolerances to function. The issue in this case is that the full ore tanks are so dense that they overcome the attachment strength. They're not really suitable for structural uses. It would be better to build a chassis out of girders and hang the tanks from that chassis.

Allow me to disagree ;-)

Do you mind if I build you a sample plane when I get home from work? If you tell me what you'd like it to be able to do, I can design to those parameters. I can explain why I make the design choices I do, and how to pilot it. Where is it supposed to go, what does it do (science, refuel, passengers) when it gets there? In the meantime, read this. Gav doesn't cover Mk3 planes, but it's got very good general spaceplaning information:

That gear should be more than enough. Also, Bewing is correct. Set the Spring to 0.5, and the Damper to 2.0 on all gear. It will land more gently and bounce less. The rear gear should be closer to the COM. If you do that, set the Spring on the front gear to 1.0. The plane should be sitting lower to the ground for stability. Unless you need to get into a downward facing cargo bay or something. Autostrut Grandparent everything. It should help against the landing impact. All the wheels are automatically forced to Heaviest, so don’t worry about them. Those Matt Lowne style planes are very hard to get right, BTW. edit: regarding the image link. Paste the address that says Direct Link, that includes the file extension.

I have a standard fuel tank, driven by a standard starship drive section: It refuels by sitting on top of the miner: I've since redesigned the tanker to survive deep aerobraking into LKO from Minmus. Which means it can also do Vall to Laythe.

Lock the pivot on the claw if you haven't. If it's still floppy, I think you can turn on Autostrut: Grandparent for the 'roid. The way I always used to do it was bring landing legs to stabilize and set up some tension against the asteroid, once it was clawed. Nowadays, i think you have to turn on Same Vessel Interaction for the asteroid and the legs. It was always a challenging problem, the trick is to use basic principles of engineering and geometry to make the connection more robust. KSP has flaws as a simulation, but I've never encountered a situation where making something fundamentally structurally sound didn't work.

I make MechJeb do the burn, and I stare at the screen angrily until it's done.

(Sorry to jump on OP's thread) In this case, I'd build the props with the blade edge facing forward in the UNdeployed position, and an action group to toggle it. As soon as you light the rocket, hit the AG and they're in the minimal drag configuration.

My rule of thumb for Kerbin spaceplane SSTOs is 0.33 to 1.0 "lift units" (see part descriptions) per ton of craft. A lot of people will find that rather high, but it makes them easy to fly and land while fully loaded. Since gravity on Eve is 1.7x Kerbin, but the air pressure at sea level is 5x, that translates to 0.11 to 0.34 "lift units" per ton for the same flight characteristics (if my assumptions are correct). Since you're new to planes, I can HIGHLY recommend this as a primer: You've chosen a very challenging task, so my advice is to keep it as simple and symmetrical as possible, and minimize mass and DRAG at all costs. Don't go for "pretty".

The Wheesley config contains the line: "flowCapMult = 1.0" The Panther, Whiplash, and Rapier all use "flowMultCap", which is correct, per the API docs (https://kerbalspaceprogram.com/api/class_module_engines.html#aca13d25ad5b3e9d217fdf8903ae81ba6). Neither the Goliath nor the Juno set this value. While I realize this is extremely minor, I'm still going to redact my opinion of the quality control effort.

I’d like the IP sold to Wube Software. I’m done trying to play a great game concept with mediocre developers. I expect KSP 2 to be an absolute train wreck.

This is Pierce Brosnan's fault.

I'd use two hinges and make a Z. I'd collab, but I'm on an even worse machine now, and I hate loading KSP with only 4GB of RAM.

Welcome back. I missed you!

Wing shape makes no difference to KSP aerodynamics. As long as the center of lift is a little bit behind center of mass, it will be fine.

Grant Imehara (Mythbusters) just passed away from a brain anuerysm at age 49. Seemed like such a good dude. EDIT: Somebody already covered it, never mind.