Wanderfound

Bulldozer? Pfft. Combat Engineering Vehicle, with flamethrower and petard mortar.

I don't think many people do like the current contracts that much. But it's recognised that they're just a placeholder for a more fleshed-out system to come, and people obviously have different preferences on how much flesh they'd like there to be. As with most things, it'd probably be best if the sandboxyness vs plottiness of the game was user-tweakable. Keeping the contracts both diverse and optional goes a long way to achieving that. Keeping easy mod access to the contracts will as well. I can see a thriving supply of custom modpacks featuring contract-connected plotlines. KSP as an interactive storytelling tool.

Methinks Ferram's flaps are going to be seeing more use for lining up slow deployment runs. It's also not clear if the VAB came down because of increasing force or due to the shifting of the aim from the door to the corner of the building.

Something that people are going to want as soon as .25 drops: a way to delay the ignition of SRBs without requiring active control during launch. This is to allow them to be vertically dropped from bomb bays and ignite only once clear of the aircraft. At present, you can kick them loose with decouplers, but the rocket will ignite simultaneously, which may not be adequate to clear the bay. Ideally, it's just a dll, MM patch or small part that will allow a tweakable ignition delay.

I don't see timewarp cost as a major downside. Obliging the player to pop out of timewarp and fulfil a basic contract every few months to break even doesn't seem like a bad thing to me. Or you could just make sure to stash some money in advance. Real companies do like to keep a constant cashflow trickle happening. Unpenalized timewarp renders fast-transit high-ÃŽâ€V transfers pointless. The stated intent is for a Tycoon style game. That usually does imply continuing expenses. Losing rep when workers are unpaid seems like a reasonable simulation of a closed-down inactive company. Perhaps add a tweakable to lose science as well or instead, representing the loss of skilled workers. This could interact nicely with the administration system; during long-mission downtime, do you focus on R&D, PR or fundraising? Or just keep everyone busy with a bunch of small jobs?

Hitchhiker or new SP+ crew cabin. I'd use an SP+ one, a bunch of big tanks connected by docking ports or decouplers for droppability and a single nuke. Send a loaded replacement collection of drop tanks to Kerbol first. Use cheap rockets to lift the tanks into orbit empty, then fuel them up with a spaceplane tanker. Give the whole thing a push up to escape velocity with a spaceplane tug before lighting the nuke. You could probably even get away with adding small wings to the crew cabin so it can glide straight to KSC on return.

Do not try to do this as an unrefuelled round trip. Send a big fuel tank there first, then follow it with a crew transport that has enough fuel for the one-way trip.

Why the low weight limits? Lead is about 11,000kg/m3.

Because, in reality, spaceplanes are much harder to build. "Moar boosters" doesn't work so well on things with wings. And, in-game, because spaceplanes provide such a huge financial advantage. They'd be even more overpowered if they were easier. Meta-game, it also appears that a lot of players run through KSP with rocketry to start with, then return and do it all again with planes. This enhances game longevity. Spaceplane design is (slightly) advanced Kerbalage, but that ain't necessarily a bad thing. All that said, however: yes, we want bigger cargo bays. But the ones we've got are a long way from useless.

Liquid fuel (LF) as used by the jets is the same as liquid fuel used by rockets. It's interchangable. However, rockets also require oxidiser (O). A normal rocket tank is LFO; an aircraft fuselage is usually LF only. At least until Porkjet's parts hit stock in a couple of days, anyway. Lovely lovely LFO lifting-body fuselages.

Yup. If you want it to drain back-to-front you need a pair of lines from front core to front lateral and a pair of lines from rear lateral direct to the rocket motor.

It's probably also worthwhile swapping the lateral Mk 1's for small LFO tanks and running fuel lines both directions between the main fuselage and the nacelles. Also, check the CoM/CoL relationship when the side and front tanks are empty but the rear one is still full. That's the order in which you've got 'em draining.

(Google Google) Actually, it looks like you're right about the tailplane angles. Cool. Build one like that and tell us how it goes?

P.S.: tailplanes absolutely do not provide downforce under normal circumstances. Lift vs downforce is a function of AoA (and shape a bit, but mostly AoA). Tailplane wings typically have a neutral or positive angle. In particular, your tailplane is made of AV-R8's. Those are all-moving control surfaces that will provide the bulk of your pitch authority. Use right-click tweakables to set them to influence pitch only. Do this to the canards as well. Set the wing surfaces to roll only. You don't appear to have any active yaw control (unless there's a rudder hidden beneath the tailplane), but that's no big deal. One might help a touch, though. Your other issue is CoM->dry CoM offset. As soon as you start burning fuel, your CoM is going to start shifting backwards. By the time the tanks are dry, it's going to be well behind CoL.

As Pecan says: the efficiency of intakes is a function or angle of attack, air pressure and speed. You can fly higher if you're going faster when you get there. Lose the steep climb, set a 20° pitch after takeoff, and hold that until 20,000m. Then level off such that your VSI reduces to about 10m/s climb rate. Your other issue is asymmetric flameouts. Consider switching to a design with a central air-breather and flanking rockets or RAPIERs. If not, carefully watch your air in the resources tab, and throttle back to maintain air supply and avoid flameouts until you shut the engines down. If you just want piloting practice and something to compare your ship to, use https://www.dropbox.com/s/lbnz9s8k9h7gwgb/Kerbodyne%20Benchmark%20StockAir.craft?dl=0

The other thing to keep in mind is that the SSTO's cost almost nothing to fly. You could construct an epic crew transfer stage in orbit with multiple flights.

Stock aero or FAR? A nuke-driven passenger spaceplane capable of reaching Kerbol shouldn't be too hard. If you want, I'll design you one for FAR. Getting fuel there is just a matter of a few big tanks, a nuke and a lot of patience.

A jet engine at full throttle will flame out (obliging you to light the fuel-hungry rockets) at a much lower altitude than the same engine at partial throttle. Ideally, you want to shut down to one engine, then gradually wind the throttle back just in front of flameout until there's no more throttle to wind. Flames imply high drag, but it doesn't matter much on jet engines. Flames during rocketry is wasteful, though. CoL: to a certain degree, lift is synonymous with drag. An object moving through the air will tend to rotate so that its centre of drag is behind its centre of mass. Think about which bit of the dart has the metal and which bit has the feathers. With KSP's overpowered torque wheels, it is possible to get away with CoL slightly in front of CoM, particularly in stock aerodynamics. Without the torque, any deviation from straight flight would eventually be magnified into a complete flip if not rapidly contained by control surfaces. Set your design so that CoL is overlapping but behind CoM, whether the tanks are full or empty. CoM closer to CoL = more manoeuvrable; CoM further from CoL = more stable. EDIT: just realised you were asking about throttled-down rocketry. I don't tend to do that myself, but it does give you more time in which your wings are generating lift, although the value of that will depend on your ability to avoid stalls.

One way to avoid the "end of the tech tree" problem is to have it continue with a near-endless succession of increasingly expensive nodes that contain nothing but science instruments. That would maintain game balance, require minimal programming work, and turn end-game science into more of a score-keeping mechanism than a grind for parts.

The best you'll get out of pure jets in FAR is about Mach 5.5 at 35,000m. And that only if you build and fly 'em right. Mach 4.5 at 30,000m before rocketry is plenty high and fast enough to reach orbit with tanks half-full, though. For example: Note the fuel remaning. That plane is running two RAPIERs and one Turbo off a single pair of ramscoops.

Same here. If I'm running out of room for action groups, "toggle intakes" is one of the first to go. It is useful to be able to close them when gliding at low altitude, though. It can make the difference between getting back to KSC or not when you're out of fuel.

I wasn't quite as quick as tater, but not that slow either. Suborbital within a few launches, orbital a launch or two after that, off to the Mun shortly afterwards. I crashed a dozen landers before I got one down successfully, and a few more before I got one back home again. Rendezvous and docking took me a while, though; that one I had to hunt up tutorials for. The reason that Duna station took over a month was because I launched it unfuelled in multiple bits, then constructed and fuelled it in orbit. That included restarts due to the classic "backwards docking port" screwup, plus a few occurences of faulty docking port bugs. Then, when I finally got them both to Duna, I carefully put the lab and lander into perfectly matched orbits...going in opposite directions. I think the lab crew had been orbiting Duna for a couple of years before the replacement lander finally got to them.

Ditto. The only time I fly rockets these days is when I need to construct an orbital fuel depot in a hurry.

Datapoint: I started KSP in a standard "go everywhere and get science" mode. However, that lost its appeal a bit after I spent months (early days, was still learning) getting an orbital lab, fuel depot and lander to Duna only to discover that there was nothing for them to do once they got there. These days, I rarely go beyond Minmus, and even that is mostly for giggles (ice racing on the flats etc). Science is much too generous. My preferred solution would be to expand the tech tree, though; make each node contain one part rather than a bunch of them.

No, they really don't. There's a big difference between "near instantaneous 45° change in AoA" and "altering vector by 45° over the course of a couple of seconds". There's also a big difference between aerobatics/dogfighting specialists and spacegoing hypersonic speedsters. But this has been hashed out at length elsewhere (e.g. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/93292-Realism-in-KSP-Various-Ideas-with-Pros-Cons/page5) and is not that much to do with .26. Probably best left for its own thread.