Wanderfound

Kerbotruck (AKA "you don't need that much wing") Takes off with no fuss and room to spare: Easy through transsonic in a 10 degree climb: Tough enough to cope with a low altitude zoom-climb ascent: Keep the jets breathing until their altitude ceiling: Fully fueled to a 150km orbit: Superb heat tolerance permits an aggressive reentry: Tough airframe allows you to wash off speed with G's: Very stable and controllable at low speed: Easy lander: Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/pfq60n0yfspeihe/Kerbotruck.craft?dl=0

Kerbotour Deluxe: Rapid to orbit with no fuss and enough fuel to reach Minmus. Full scanning, mining, refining, science and long range comms rig. Refuels in less than a fortnight, over 4km/s dV when fuelled up. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/trxe1wgglc2muyk/Kerbotour Deluxe.craft?dl=0

Kerbotour Deluxe: Rapid to orbit with no fuss. Full scanning, mining, refining, science and long range comms rig. Refuels in less than a fortnight, over 4km/s dV when fuelled up. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/trxe1wgglc2muyk/Kerbotour Deluxe.craft?dl=0

Another Grand Tourer. Full album at http://imgur.com/a/w7zC1 Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/3toyhiaqcgeovu8/Kerbotour.craft?dl=0

Another Grand Tourer. Full album at http://imgur.com/a/w7zC1 Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/3toyhiaqcgeovu8/Kerbotour.craft?dl=0

A little fuel pumping before landing to ensure everything is balanced is sometimes necessary. It isn't hard to set it up with a stable CoM as fuel drains, though, and the Thuds have enough gimbal to cope with a bit of imbalance. That particular one was designed to land nose-high, on the rear aircraft gear, then drop down onto the main wheels. Mining rig inside, enough TWR to regain orbit.

It was a slightly extreme example... Normally I'll keep it at 20,000m/Mach 5 until I hit the west coast of the KSC continent. At that point, I'll throttle off and drop the nose enough that I'll glide in over the mountains at about 10,000m. After that I get lined up with the runway and drop it down to about 1,000m before another drop to treetop-height just before landing.

Alternately, to avoid the issue entirely... Keep it high and fast until you reach the KSC mountains: Then burn off the speed and altitude with some high-G S-turns: Then settle in for a nice slow landing:

I'd be inclined to build that as a pure delta, rather than a tailed delta. Add elevons to the back of the wings, shift them back a smidgeon, add a vertical stabiliser, forget about a horizontal stabiliser. Throw in some canards if you're short on pitch authority, leave them off if not. And, as noted above: lose some intakes. A single precooler or shock cone could easily feed those jets. But if you really want to keep it as a tailed delta, a t-tail mounted above the central jet would work.

You don't need to go big to go far, BTW. ...and the big 'uns are most useful for bulk delivery to LKO, anyway. Space-station construction and fuel tankers are where MkIII spaceplanes really shine.

Actually, I use O-10s quite often. They're dreadfully inefficient from a mass POV, but they're the best engines available from a volume POV. When you're trying to get as much ΔV as possible onto a probe while still keeping it compact enough to fit into a small cargo bay, the O-10 is king.

Yup; silbervogeling is allowed. You'll probably find that you lose a lot of speed in the process, although it may be worthwhile if you can keep it under an hour. (BTW: if it's taking ages and your plane is stable, crank up the time acceleration and switch to map view. The game runs much faster on a marginal PC when it doesn't have to handle the scenery graphics load; I can manage a circumnavigation in about twenty real-time minutes)

A more efficient turbojet version: I started with slightly less than full tanks, so the total consumption was 3142 units of LF. Score is (0.8 x 3142)/80 = 31.42. Still some room for optimisation if I reduce the fuel capacity.

Alternately: if your gear are perfectly vertical but you're still veering, it may be body flex. Mount your gear to the fuselage, not laterally-attached parts. Translate them outwards if you want a wider wheelbase.

Hypersonic passenger transport. Simple rules: 1) Circumnavigate Kerbin in less than one hour. 2) LF only, no oxidiser. RAPIERs allowed, but in open-cycle mode only. 3) Visual and autopilot mods okay (Mechjeb etc), but otherwise stock. 4) Must have at least two crew; pilot and co-pilot. No drone ships. 5) No heatshields or fairings. Your score is your ticket price: (0.8 x Units of LF expended)/Number of passengers. To demo: Full album at http://imgur.com/a/OJu0J, score is (0.8 x 4,449)/80 = 44.49 credits per passenger.

Basically, you just need to crack the transonic threshold and you're away. There are a few tricks: 1) Minimise drag. Get rid of as much surface junk as possible; anything that generates a red arrow when you hit F12 in flight. Cargo bays are good, service bays are good. Just using the part translation tools to visually hide things inside fuel tanks doesn't work. 2) Minimise drag. You want your fuselage pointing prograde during your final speed run; build in as few degrees of wing incidence to allow this. 3) Minimise drag. Keep the fuselage as narrow as possible, don't carry any more intakes than you need. Sensing a theme? However, also: 1) Level off for your speed run, and do it low enough that the engines are getting good rich air and you can maintain level flight with minimal AoA. Crack transonic, then climb. High powered jets can get away with climbing during acceleration, but lower powered ships need to level off. 2) As always: moar boosters. You can send a brick to orbit if you strap enough RAPIERs on it. However, a 2xRAPIER/2xLV-N build is perfectly workable if you do it right.

You've got a bit more speed to find yet... Note the 0° AoA, possible due to the slight wing incidence.

For the very early game, see http://m.imgur.com/a/0zCVG I usually head for the Mun and Minmus as soon as I have solar panels. Stick a probe core somewhere and you don't need a pilot; crew it with a scientist to reset experiments and you can clean out Minmus with a single set of science gear and reenter with just capsule/heatshield/parachute. It isn't too hard to build a Munlander with 10,000+ m/s ΔV, and if you do that you can hop to half a dozen different biomes in a single trip. Which will give you science returns like this: Strongly recommended: set all of your science gear to trigger on a single action group. And try to build it so that you can reset the experiments without having to jetpack all over the place.

I tend to do a lot of monoprop-powered satellites. They're less efficient than LFO on a mass basis, but they're more compact. As I'm usually delivering them to orbit via SSTO, space is more important than weight. A side bonus is that you have more freedom in craft aesthetics. No tube unless you want it.

Fairly trivial to do it on your second launch: http://m.imgur.com/a/0zCVG I'm sure that it's possible earlier if you try hard enough.

See above; if you don't want to get cheaty with heatshields and fairings, the shock cone or NCS is the best option at 1.25m. Why the 1.25m, though? The Mk2 parts have higher heat tolerances, and although they're draggy if you use them wrong, they can be very slick if you build right. The key is to set your wing incidence such that the fuselage holds a 0° AoA at cruising speed.

How fast can you go with a Kerbal aboard?

Demonstration with some passengers: Twenty passengers, 44 and a half minutes, 1165 units of fuel. Album at http://imgur.com/a/ee8KQ

If you want to do it in a reasonable time: * Use Whiplash or RAPIER engines (open cycle only). * Build to minimise fuselage drag; no exposed draggy bits, and build in a few degrees of wing incidence. * Climb to 20,000m. * Crank it up to 1,700m/s. * Throttle back as much as you can without losing speed. * Keep an eye on your heat gauges, climb and decelerate if you're about to blow. See http://m.imgur.com/a/H3z2y for a demonstration. You can make it more fuel efficient (but a bit slower) by using a Silbervogel suborbital skip; climb at high speed so as to push your apoapsis above 30,000m, coast through the low-drag high altitude phase, power up again as you descend, rinse and repeat. Try to make the "bounces" bottom out not too far below 20,000m. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbervogel For an even more fuel efficient but much slower version: use Wheesleys or non-afterburning Panthers. Similar flight profile to the non-bouncing version at lower altitude; get as high and fast as you can while holding level flight. It'll take ages, though.