Wanderfound

Echoing Alshain. I can fit into an SP+ bay a lander and transfer stage good enough to reach the surface of any body in the Kerbol system. Compact design is just one more constraint to deal with, and it ain't that hard.

A lot of the non-FAR players seem to have a rather exaggerated view of FAR's complexity and difficulty. I suspect that this is often due to installing it once, launching a plane designed for stock (i.e. awful aerodynamic design), doing something silly with it (e.g. AoA 0° -> 45° in a fraction of a second) and crashing. (enough of that, though; way off topic) As they approach scope completion, more and more of the updates are likely to be about integrating equivalents of the most popular mods. SP+ and Enhanced Navball this time; Custom Biomes and who-knows-what next time. The opportunity to put my Gamedata folder on a diet is one of the things I most look forwards to with each coming update.

Planning on a revised version of the cargo bay flooring for the stockified cargo bays in .25? The dimensions should be slightly different than SP+ due to the symmetry fix.

The main change to the SP+ parts is that they've made them all symmetrical (SP+ bits are a smidge flattened on the bottom). This should hopefully improve the usable space inside a bit.

I'll probably just rebuild everything from scratch. The sizes and weights of the stockified parts are likely to vary enough from SP+ to mess up the RCS balancing and aerodynamic tuning a bit, anyway. Looking forward to it; my design thread is going to suddenly shift from 90% mod to 90% stock...

I'd agree that we could really use some larger wing pieces, for convenience if nothing else. You can build fairly large and effective things with the current sizes, though:

Needs more multiple-pick options. There are a lot of folks running simultaneous career/sandbox saves.

From https://mobile.twitter.com/Maxmaps/status/518040350716600321 "Main design and goals for 26 fully on paper now. Will write blog about it post 25 launch. Expect biomes on all bodies."

Seconded. A Mk1 bay should be perfect for .675m microprobes and satellites, too. As mentioned elsewhere, a Mk3 bay has another use: fly-in fly-out hangars for small spacecraft on space stations. Leave one open end facing the surface of the station, and you can launch BSG-style...

Yeah, I know. Writing for the lurkers.

Takeoffs for FAR users: * Estimate or experiment to discover what speed you can reach before the end of the runway. Enter this speed in Mach on the Data & Stability Derivatives analysis screen. Leave pressure at 1.225 and temperature at 20. Select whatever flap setting you want to use, if any. * Look at the "level flight" figures on the right of the screen. If the AoA listed there is below 10° or so, you should be able to rotate and lift off easily so long as you haven't messed up your gear placement. If the AoA is less than the resting ground pitch of the plane, then it will self-launch as soon as it gets to the right speed. To demonstrate: That's showing that this plane, when the flaps are set to 2, requires a 5.7° angle of attack to maintain level flight at 110m/s.

That's basically what a delta-deluxe winglet is. Can you reverse engineer from that?

The problem with the SP+ bays is that they aren't sized for 1.25m-based spacecraft, they're sized for 1.25m-and-not-an-inch-more. You can't put lander legs on a 1.25m core and carry it in an SP+ cargo bay: the feet will clip through the floor, and you'll never get it out again. If you want legs, you have to slim down to .675m for the bit you mount the legs to. Even RCS thruster blocks are too bulky to fit without protruding (no collision mesh though, so at least those are just cosmetic). Just a 10% boost to cargo bay size would solve most of the problems.

Like this: http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ It provides a graphical representation of the speed and efficiency of interplanetary transfers at any time desired. No more waiting for transfer windows if you don't want to.

Delete away. Any pre-built vessels using the deleted parts will become inaccessible, though.

Just for a counter vote: hooray for the pulldown menu. No more endless clicking just to switch between two modes.

Biological experiments: can't cope with too much in the way of G's, require a constant power supply and an occasional EVA checkup or they die.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/91229-Kerbodyne-Dementia-Porkjet-Memorial-Edition

My laptop is already struggling as is, unfortunately.

It also has an irritating bug where the paint sometimes disappears from half of your symmetry-placed parts in between the SPH and runway (I think it's related to the similar action group bug in the stock game). Leaving the paintjob as the last thing before heading to the runway should help prevent this. But, yeah: fun.

I'm not particularly fussed about 2.5m bits, but it would be nice to have room for 1.25m + radial goo pods or lander legs or winglets. Bugger the Mk3 pseudo-shuttles, just double the size of the SP+ stuff. At the very least provide an extra-large cargo bay and an adaptor to mount it to Mk2 fuselages.

Ooh, just had a thought: cargo bays used as small launch hangars on space stations. If you want, you could even do it Battlestar Galactica style: keep the doors permanently shut, but line up a few bays and leave one end open to space. Come zooming out at speed. Dangit, we really need a double-size version of those bays. Not Mk3, just bigger.

Trim. Most likely, you set some trim on the way up, which the SAS can compensate for, but shows up when the SAS is off. Alt-X to clear trim.

As before, I agree entirely, but also as before: you can do this now (albeit not as easily as it could be). Start a Career save, use the debug menu to give yourself ridiculous amounts of √ and Science, unlock the entire tech tree. You've now effectively got a Sandbox game with all the features of Career.

DaMichel's Laythe Wing used a similar trick (but with basic jets instead of rockets). It's good on Kerbin, but for low-grav VTOL I prefer Vernors. The skinny landers require a bit more care than a conventional wide lander, but they're more stable than they look. I design them with all of the heaviest bits at the bottom, and the light weight of the whole thing gives the cockpit torque a lot of authority. It is worthwhile hunting down a flattish landing spot, however; they're fine on normal bumpy terrain, but they'd struggle with a steep hillside. Definitely much easier to land than a Porklifter, though: ...which should work to remind everybody: these cool new spaceplane parts? They're useful for more things than just spaceplanes. Get creative.