Wanderfound

I'm probably wishing for fairies here, but what I'd actually like (apart from correcting the error and sorting the double-counted air mass thing) is to split the "turbojet" into two engines (ram and scram, both with zero thrust below the speeds at which such things work) and push the basic jet into something that has some use in getting up to speed. At the moment, once you understand how to construct an airframe, it's a bit too easy to get to orbit (especially in FAR/NEAR realistic aero). Adding a bit of engine variety wouldn't hurt, and the RAPIERs would still be there for folks who didn't want to bother with such things.

It's basically just a Kerbodyne Goblin with shrunken wings and a stretched fuselage.

Also worth keeping in mind: spaceplanes don't need a whole lot of thrust (it's fun to have it, but you don't need it). Basically, if you can get it off the runway, then it has enough thrust to go to orbit (so long as you're running Turbojets + rocket or RAPIERs). Getting off the runway typically only requires 70-120m/s (depending on design; streamlined things with minimalist wings require more speed than broadwinged craft). Lift with your wings rather than your engines, and don't leave the breathable atmosphere until you've cranked up as much horizontal velocity as possible.

Endorsed, I like this idea. It'd be useful on a launch-by-launch basis, but I'd really love the ability to see graphs and things tracking financial progress over time. Looking back and seeing the huge dip in the graph where that one rocket blew up on launch and took out the VAB could be quite fun...

Do you really, really suck at landing spaceplanes? Does your KSC runway now resemble the Somme battlefield? Well, Kerbodyne SSTO Division has just the ship you're after: the Kerbodyne Lancer. A shiny new VTOL SSTO with extreme performance and practical cargo lifting ability, as well as a landing protocol so simple that even Bob can manage it. No need for launch clamps, enough grunt to take off while the engines spool up. Keep the Vernors on until the ship develops enough momentum to maintain direction aerodynamically. Start pulling the nose down towards the horizon immediately post takeoff; aim to have it flying level by 15,000m. There's not a lot of control surface on this ship; keep the AoA below 10 degrees at all times and toggle the Vernors on if it gets squirrely. Perfectly stable and easy to fly if piloted appropriately. Landing procedure: begin by opening the parachute bay (action group 8). Deploy drogues first (action group 9). After the drogues fully deploy at 500m, deploy main chutes (action group 0). Give it a momentary puff of throttle on landing to soften the touchdown. Be careful not to completely halt your descent and begin climbing: the chutes will detach if you do. Craft file download at https://www.dropbox.com/s/ytae5eepzzm0uqu/Kerbodyne%20Lancer.craft?dl=0

The guys over at the AJE thread (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/70008-0-25-Advanced-Jet-Engine-(AJE)-v1-6-2-Oct-20) might have an opinion on that...

As I said: S-turns. Aircraft are essentially doing a controlled fall through the air; they don't naturally come to a stop on their own. You need to disperse the energy of the aircraft, either by using it in a series of banking turns in alternating directions, flying a complete horizontal or vertical loop, or doing a series of climb/dive manoeuvres. See the second post of the Kerbodyne thread linked in my sig below for a piloting guide.

Spoilers are for descent and downforce, not braking. They increase drag, but the slowing effect is slight. Use S-turns, loops and retro-thrust RCS or Vernors to slow in the air.

The KSP Turbojet is also apparently some sort of turbo/ram/scram/magic pony dust thruster. Real turbojets don't work at Mach 6.

I'm usually coming down on landing gear rather than parachutes, so the only time I'm not landing at KSC is when I have an out-of-fuel whoopsie. Those I usually recover, although I have occasionally considered using KAS and sending out a refuelling tanker. Overshooting the runway (stock landing gear brakes are lousy) and taxiing back home from somewhere in the west KSC paddock happens fairly regularly, though.

Nope, no idea. However, for the flaps and spoilers, FAR already does that. Use the right-click tweakables to disable the control surface in all normal axes and then set it as a flap or spoiler.

Cool, thanks.

Yup. Which is pretty much what I expect them to have done by the time .90 drops. In the meantime though, as mentioned at the start of the thread, you have a few workarounds to choose from (each of which has its own downside).

There is a serious need for a FAR-compatible basic autopilot that can manage "maintain this heading and altitude until instructed otherwise". Flying manually halfway around Kerbin to get back to KSC after an overshot reentry is a tedious chore. This sort of autopilot is stone-age tech in aircraft terms.

It does add something for some of us. Early in my new .25 career game, I had a launch go badly amiss immediately post takeoff. Just as I was about to hit the abort button to get Jeb to safety, I realised that the very large rocket was now headed straight for the VAB. So, instead of bailing out, Jeb stayed at the controls, fighting to keep the nose up long enough to allow the rocket to crash safely into the southern paddock, before finally ejecting the capsule and popping the chutes about two hundred metres off the deck. It was a near thing, but he made it; very dramatic, very fun. But, obviously, tastes differ. Yay for the difficulty settings and debug menu.

Ooh, one last request: make sure the Mk3 cargo bays keep the open-ended thing. I wanna use 'em as Battlestar Galactica style fly-in/fly-out hangars on my space stations.

Just a thought, that may be wildly impractical or not depending upon how the airbag mod works, but...have you tried sticking them in a cargo bay? Pretty much all of my ships have a least a small service bay, just so I have somewhere to stash fragile and unaerodynamic things (SAS, batteries, science gear, spotlights, etc) out of the airstream. The other issue may be rotation. Things placed with rotation as well as radial attachment (e.g. sticking Vernors on the flanks and rotating them 90° to use as retrothrusters) have a tendency to be highly vulnerable to FAR: it seems to see them as things that are stuck out into the wind. Are the rear airbag boxes that are tearing off mounted perfectly flush to the surface they're attached to?

Pretty much the only time I fly rockets from KSC these days is when I want to lift station segments that are too large for a cargo bay. I'll usually build the lifter from scratch when I do that, but I've done it enough that it's more a case of assembly than design. Big central core, onion-staged liquid boosters placed with 4x symmetry, some Sepratrons at the top of the boosters, maybe a few SRBs strapped on the outside if the initial TWR is inadequate. If I had to, I could probably slap one together in about thirty seconds. Lately I've been doing the single-design thing a bit with spaceplanes, too. Once you've got a good basic airframe worked out, it's very tempting to just tweak and stretch it into assorted close variations rather than design from scratch each time. Want to deploy a rover? Just flip the cargo bay upside down. Need a heavy lifter? Double the size of the cargo bay and add another pair of turbojets. Need a tanker? Swap the cargo bay for more fuel and extend the engine nacelles. Need a long range specialist? Change the Aerospike to an LV-N. Etc.

Despite my being a spaceplane partisan most of the time, I have to admit that Oafman is right. Eve is all about the crazy dense atmosphere; you want to get up above it as quickly as you can, to a place where your ÃŽâ€V expenditure isn't instantly nullified by drag. Spaceplanes are all about ascending slowly while accelerating laterally; if you're making a fast vertical ascent, wings are just dead weight. Worth a try, though. I don't know if anyone has ever managed a successful Eve ascent relying upon aerodynamic lift rather than pure rocket grunt. Make sure to post screenshots if you do.

For me? Sensible is sized appropriately to do the job. I haven't found anything to do that requires an aircraft big enough to trash the runway on takeoff. Even my bulk fuel tankers and heavy cargo lifters tend to top out at about 125 ton. But that's just me; plenty of other folks like to build huge things, and that's all cool. There is no one true way. Sure, Squad messed up a bit [1] by not smoothing out the initial physics drop and setting the destruction thresholds of the runway and launchpad too low, but I don't think that the basic concept of destructible launchpads/runways is a bad idea. If I stuff up a landing and slam a large aircraft into the runway at crash speeds, it ​should take the runway temporarily out of commission. If a design stuffup on my part means that my rocket slams into the ground the moment I try to launch, it should damage the launchpad in the process. That's what happens in reality, and I see it as something that adds to the challenge and immersion of the game if done right. The implementation just needs a little fine tuning. The nature of KSP is changing, from a pure sandbox toolkit to a tycoon game with strong sandbox elements. This is going to happen; it's been the stated goal from the beginning, and it's a direction that a lot of players are happy with. But Squad are maintaining science and sandbox mode, and pretty much all of the new elements are optional or avoidable. If you want to continue playing ye olde style KSP, you can. Nobody has to do a testing contract or watch a building explode unless they choose to. I play in the sandbox, and I also play career. Sometimes I enjoy the freedom of sandbox mode, but often I find that working within constraints is more interesting. It's a free verse vs haiku sorta deal; formal constraints can limit creativity, but they can also inspire it. They've both got their place, and there is no good reason to say that one is better than the other except in terms of personal preference. [1] Actually, a lot of the glitches in .25 make me wonder what the Experimentals team were doing for the few weeks they had the game. Did no-one try to launch a huge rocket? Why didn't anyone notice how OP'd Outsourced R&D is? Etc.

As others have suggested: we can't diagnose what we can't see. The more specific you can make your questions and the more relevant information you provide, the better an answer you'll get. For the pics, it's best to do them in the VAB, looking at the rocket directly from the side (i.e. not at a 3/4 angle that makes it hard to figure out exactly what's where) with the CoM/CoL/CoT indicators turned on.

Hmmn. Not quite sure what's going on there, then. It may be worth having a try at rejecting a bunch of the offered contracts and seeing if the game replaces them with Mun exploration offers. There may be a limit on how many contracts are offered at any one time. It's also probably worth having a look at your completed contracts tab in the Mission Control building, just to confirm that the initial "get to orbit" contracts were successfully passed rather than failed or expired. In the meantime, go rescue that poor floating kerbal from orbit.

Encouraging news for all spaceplane fans: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/98056-Upcoming-Mk3-parts-should-be-large-enough-to-accommodate-2-5m-parts-in-the-cargo-bay/page2?p=1505903#post1505903

The contracts you are offered are based upon where you've already been and what your reputation is. If it's taken 139 days to do the initial contracts...did you kill enough kerbals to trash your reputation in the process? Or are you using a reputation-burning strategy like Aggressive Negotiations? What contracts are on offer?

I vaguely recall reading something that said that the innate decoupler-ish abilities of docking ports have shifted in and out of existence in different KSP updates. Is it tested and confirmed that the decoupler-free trick works in .25?