Wanderfound

See upthread. Failure to complete "deactivate controls" is usually caused by trim being set to non-zero values. Alt-X to clear. You don't need to shut anything down, just cancel trim, zero throttle, toggle off SAS and RCS and don't touch the keyboard for ten seconds of in-game time. The other major cause of contracts failing to complete appears to be people trying to deploy satellites into orbits that are correct apart from being in the opposite direction which they're supposed to be. The little spinners on the required orbit show required directionality. I haven't had any problems with this mod that didn't ultimately come down to user error.

99% of my Kerbalage is with FAR, so I'm not as much use for stock aero. Basically, for stock air, throw all considerations of realistically sensible design out the window. You can make almost anything fly in stock: However, the ease of stock air flying drops off sharply with size. The main flaw of stock is that it applies mass-based drag to every part, regardless of position or orientation. So, every part you add to a stock plane increases drag, no matter where you put it. So, that is stock lesson #1: minimise your part count. If you want to make big stuff, try to do it with "bigger" instead of "more" as much as possible. Big stuff is still possible in stock, but it is difficult, and often relies upon part-spamming clipping trickery. For piloting, barring the influence of things like Deadly Reentry, faster is always better. Ideally, you want to work out a flight profile that sees your air-breathing flight hit maximum speed and maximum altitude simultaneously. For both FAR and stock, I recommend this experiment: build a small, basic single-turbojet plane, and try to figure out what its top speed and flight ceiling is. Just take it up as high and fast as you can, and fiddle about to see if anything you do can increase those numbers. It should teach you a fair bit about the influence of piloting on performance.

Remember that Fine Print is being integrated. Satellite deployment, aerial and rover waypoint exploration, space and planetary station building. Contracts for all of 'em.

1) NEAR, FAR or stock air? 2) Have you read posts #2 & #3 in this thread?

Apologies for the obvious question, but: were you flying at 3000m above sea level or 3000m above the mountains? I had a similar very low altitude waypoint in the mountains west of KSC. Doing it required finding a hidden valley with a 2900m floor and then scraping the treetops.

What I'm planning on sending up as a Mun station:

What's the altitude?

Hyomoto, is there anything you can do to integrate FP waypoint tracking into your MFDs?

Seconded. Maybe RPM integration that requires a downwards camera? The aerial survey missions are great, but they have the potential to be a lot more diverse with just a few tweaks. How about barometer/atmospheric sensor readings at particular locations?

I'd been using that trick as well... There's a mod called aviation lights that is nice. Their lights are prone to burning up or breaking off if you really push it, but I don't mind: the lights are small and expendable and they make good coalmine canaries during a hot reentry.

If you want to turn fast, you need a broadwing design. Either chunky rear deltas and nose canards or mid-mount swept/structural plus a tailplane. I'm liking the look of the new swept wings with a pair of the also new needle-skinny swept wings along their leading edge. Wind down your maximum control authority a bit, and consider having a play with regex's PID Tuner.

Try flying your original design as-is except for removing the stacked intakes. It may work.

Sometimes accidentally. I just had to abort a satellite deployment mission when I realised that I'd forgotten to put a decoupler between the payload and the end of the bay. I also experimented earlier with using cargo bays for unsecured passengers (no command seat). Not recommended.

I appreciate that Ferram has been working hard, so please consider this a vote rather than a demand, but: Please fix the wing strength tweakable UI. It's unpleasant to use at the moment; picking the exact spot on the slider for 0.4 instead of 0.39 or 0.41 is a nightmare. If possible just adding a set of +/- increment buttons would do it; you could click near the value you want, then fine tune by increment. A "set default wing strength" would be even better, though.

regex's PID Controller is good for this as well. Halve the default value of pitch clamp and it'll stick much more solidly. You may need to toggle SAS to manoeuvre if you overdo it, though. Season to taste.

There have been some clues that larger/smaller/taller/shorter landing gear may be in the works. See the SP+ thread.

Getting sick of constant laptop crashes, and Kerbpaint appears to aggravate the problem. It's a mod in desperate need of update and overhaul.

BTW, one of those orange things in action:

I'd still be keen to have a play with it; I'm wondering how many biomes I can dive bomb in a single flight, and just how tricky it would be to use the things on Minmus...

This has three different types of SP+ elevons on it. Roll stability looks okay to me:

Those spinners are very hard to see. Making 'em a smidge bigger wouldn't go astray. EDIT: actually, it appears that most of the hard-to-seeness was the fault of Active Texture Management,

Basically, you've still got a stock aero plane. You don't need stacked intakes (1-2 per engine is plenty) and you can't casually use wing segments as body panels without messing up the aero. The wing boxing and intakes (mostly the intakes) are causing an insane amount of drag. The drag is the red line; in the Mach sweep (the second image, which you'd be better off doing with Upper set to 5 or 10) it should be barely distinguishable from the zero line. Build it as if it were real plane: only one shock cone per side and maybe a couple of structural intakes under the wings or nacelles behind the cones. Lose the boxing, extend the wingspan by putting one structural wing piece between the deltas and the tanks, reduce the dihedral to no more than 5° or so if any at all and give it at least as much vertical stabiliser ("rudder", except the rudder is only the bit that moves) as the example plane I posted upthread. One really big fin or several medium size ones, either will work. If you want to attach things off centre, go for high or low mount wings. High mount tends to increase stability, low mount tends to increase manoeuvrability. Shorter wingspans can be achieved through the use of strakes and canards, but be aware that there's a price to pay in terms of roll stability.

"Failure to design in a manner that adequately accounts for the effects of body lift" is not something for Ferram to fix. They're working fine for me.

While you're at it, have a look at what the CoM does on the Mk2 plane when the front tank is empty but the rear is full. Your dCoM is balanced, but your 1/2dCoM might not be.

BTW: there are an assortment of landing techniques that can work, but for myself I don't use much if any landing flare. This is only for flying in FAR/NEAR; the lousy gliding abilities of stock aero change the situation somewhat. If you need to sharply pitch up at the last second to avoid smashing into the ground, you're coming in way too steep. With a bit of practice, you can set your descent rate to 5m/s before you're over the runway and just gently cruise in for a three-point touchdown with the nose level. As well as being more elegant and easier on the passengers, it also removes the substantial risk of over- or under-doing the flare. DaMichel's Kerbal Flight Indicators mod is very useful for this; just get the prograde marker onto the end of the runway and keep it there while you monitor your drop rate. It's not a carrier landing, you've got a long runway, use it.