Wanderfound

It'd be nice if it was. Clouds.dll is a regular feature in my crash logs as well.

Something based around this seal (with perhaps a Kerbodyne colour scheme?) would be lovely.

Action groups disappearing during craft sharing is a known bug. Inability to re-establish them is a bigger thing, though. Search your Gamedata folder for extra copies of ModuleManager and delete all but the latest. Kerbpaint in particular has an archaic copy buried in a subfolder that is known to cause problems with the FAR-derived control surface tweakable options.

The other way to fly to space with a lazy pilot: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/94490-The-Hands-Free-Mission-Challenge?p=1433461&viewfull=1#post1433461

So, PJ: are you planning on continuing development of SP+ post stockification, or are you moving your focus elsewhere?

I predict media team and release for much later than I want it. The Experimental crew are taking their own sweet time about it. The Hype Train's boiler needs a refill.

Each to their own, but I tend to the opposite approach: dive to 25,000m (adjust height for reentry speed), get level, aim for KSC and start doing S-turns when it's at 200km. It works once you get the hang of it. You only need a tiny amount of pitch; use trim or precision controls and ride the g-meter, not the navball.

This tells me that you probably haven't spent much time in uni chem labs recently. The sound of exploding grad students could be used as a metronome at times.

Spaceplane Design for FAR/NEAR 102 1) Decide on a basic engine/fuselage/wing configuration. How many engines and what sort? Mk 1 or 2 fuselages? Full length for all engines, or nacelles for some? Swept or delta wings? Wings set high, low or centred? Mid-mount or rear? Canards? Tailplanes? 2) Build the core fuselage first, with engines but without detailing. Then make the sides: additional fuselage sections, engines, intakes, nacelles, wing pieces, control surfaces. Engage symmetry and slide this piece up and down the core until you're happy with the CoM/dCoM position and relationship. If you can be bothered, remove the intakes and engines and replace them in order to control the air-demand priority: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/64362-Fuel-Flow-Rules-%280-23-5%29 3) Tweak the wing position, add or remove canards and stabilisers. Get the CoL placed right. Adjust the control surface tweakables. 3a) Check the aerodynamic analyses. Continue wing-fiddling until these are right. 4) Add accessories; batteries, solar panels, science gear etc. 5) Add landing gear, fuel lines and struts. 6) Place RCS thrusters. Balance. 7) Place Vernors. 8) Action groups. 9) Paint If you need to go backwards through these stages (e.g. moving the wings after placing the RCS thrusters), it's safest to re-do from scratch all stages starting from the earliest returned-to stage. This will avoid a lot of the quirks of the SPH symmetry function. Fuel Pumping Get familiar with the fuel flow rules: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/64362-Fuel-Flow-Rules-(0-24-2) The TLDR version of that is that fuel comes from the farthest tank first, but you can manipulate which tank is "farthest" by use of fuel hoses and parallel tanks. My normal arrangement on a fuselage + outriggers design is to run fuel hoses at the nose from the lateral tanks to the core. This makes the rear-lateral tanks the farthest (and therefore first-drained) from the core engines. I then add a pair of fuel lines from the rear of the core directly to the lateral engines; this forces them to draw via the core, making rear lateral the first tank to drain for them as well. This arrangement ensures that any initial mass shift will be forwards, enhancing stability. After the lateral tanks drain, the core will burn from front to rear. In some circumstances, particularly on single-fuselage planes, it can be worthwhile to lock off a forward tank as a "reserve". Just use the right-click tweakable to disable fuel flow, and remember to reenable it when appropriate. All of these balancing tricks become superfluous if you have TAC Fuel Balancer (good) or Goodspeed (better) installed. Goodspeed in particular allows for all sorts of pumping/balancing possibilities. dCoM Hunting Get RCS Build Aid. Seriously. You need it. Anyway, now that you can see your CoM and dCoM (dry, unfuelled centre of mass) markers at the same time, you want to start bringing them together. You want to get the CoM/dCoM offset down to 1m or less. Fortunately, it isn't too hard to do. The markers update live. Build your tank/engine/intake/wing combo, engage symmetry, and slide them up and down the fuselage. Watch the CoM/dCoM relationship change as you do. Spread your fuel load laterally, not longitudinally. Mid-mounted engines provide more flexibility in fuel placement. If you're carrying cargo, place the CoMs under the middle of the cargo bay. Think about the location of CoMs in relation to landing gear and takeoff rotation. Get your weight balance right, then fiddle about with CoL. When adjusting more precisely, remember that parts without fuel move both CoMs but parts with fuel move CoM much more than dCoM. Structural fuselages are useful, as are partly-full tanks. Weight a long way from CoM has a big effect, weight close to CoM a small effect. You can design perfectly well just by eyeball and flight testing; the flight data isn't absolutely necessary. But it does help if you can use it. The first screen in Ferram is the static analysis screen. This gives you pretty graphs. It has two buttons down at the lower right: Sweep AoA and Sweep Mach. There are boxes to the left of that which say Lower, Upper and Mach/AoA. This page can produce two different graphs: if you press the Sweep AoA button, it shows the behaviour of your plane from Angle of Attack values between Lower and Upper, at the speed shown in the Mach/AoA box. If you press the Sweep Mach button, it shows behaviour at speeds between Lower and Upper at the AoA shown in the Mach/AoA box. The blue line is the Coefficient of Lift. It's good when this is high. The red line is the Coefficient of Drag. It's good when this is low. The yellow line is the Coefficient of Manoeuvrability/Instability. You don't want this to be above zero, and it's usually best when it's angling down like it is here. The green line is lift divided by drag. It's good when this is high. The picture above shows how the plane will act at Angles of Attack between 0° and 25° while travelling at Mach 2. Some of the lines split into two lines. This shows how the plane responds after a stall: you get a sudden loss of lift and increase in drag that lasts until you return your AoA to where the line isn't split any more. This is the same picture at Mach 0.8. See how the plane no longer stalls at that speed? If you click the Sweep Mach button, you instead get a look at a bunch of different speeds with Angle of Attack held constant. This shows Mach 0-6 with a 3° AoA. The bumpiness on the left shows the effect of breaking through the sound barrier. The second page of Ferram is data and stability derivatives. This produces scary looking numbers. To get those numbers, you need to put in values for temperature, altitude (air density) and speed. Don't worry much about temperature; just use 20 for sea level, 0 for low altitude and -20 for high up. For altitude, use these numbers: 0m = 1.225 kg per cubic metre. 5,000m = 0.45 10,000m = 0.16 15,000m = 0.06 20,000m = 0.02 25,000m = 0.008 30,000m = 0.002 All of the confusing letters next to the output numbers relate to this picture here: x is forwards, y is sideways, z is down. P is roll, Q is pitch, R is yaw. Don't worry about the Greek for now. If you hover your mouse over any of the numbers, it'll pop up a tooltip explaining what it refers to. Mostly, however, all you want to do is make as many as possible of the numbers green and as few as possible red. The one other useful thing on this screen is the "level flight" stuff up top right. If you set the analysis for sea level pressure and temperature and the speed for whatever you think you can reach on the runway, you can find out how much AoA you need to take off (the "level flight" value). Try to keep that number below ten for easy takeoffs. How to Apply FAR Aero Analyses The pretty graphs: use these to check for excessive drag and regions of instability. AoA graph is the more useful of the two. Numbers: use the Level Flight figure to work on your takeoff speed and flap settings. For the stability figures, check takeoff (1.125 pressure and .35 or so speed), low altitude (1 pressure and .8 speed), Mach 1 (speed obvious, pressure up to you) and edge of rocketry (0.01 pressure, Mach 5). You want green everywhere. You won't get it, at least to start with. Hover your mouse over the red ones and use the picture above to work out what the tooltips mean. Once you decode the x's and y's, usually they just mean something like "has a tendency to roll when pitching up" or similar. Sometimes the solutions are obvious (e.g. too much yaw slippage, add a rudder), sometimes they take a great deal of trial and error to sort out. Yes, these do affect the analyses. FAR allows some options beyond stock here. You can activate or deactivate axes, adjust max deflection and set flaps and spoilers. With the axes, think about what each control surface is intended to do. Control surfaces should be as far from their axis of rotation as possible, and as close as possible to the other axes. So, elevators at front and rear on the centreline, ailerons out to the side, flaps and spoilers at mid-centre, rudder right up the back, maybe some elevons mid-wing if it's a rear delta design. It's usually best if a control surface has one job only; you don't want inputs for one thing affecting something else. Maximum control authority is basically the thrust limiter for your control surfaces. Too little, and the plane won't do what you tell it to; too much, and the plane becomes a hair-triggered bomb waiting for an aerodynamic failure. How much is largely a matter of personal taste. Generally though, you want the values on rear surfaces to be higher than those up front (canards etc.). Manoeuvrability and stability are two sides of the same coin; improving one degrades the other and vice-versa. Forward-mounted control surfaces are better for manoeuvrability; rear-mounted control surfaces are better for stability. Mid-mounted surfaces should be ailerons on the wingtips and pure flaps/spoilers near the centreline. Flaps add drag and increase lift. Use them to lower your stall speed at takeoff and landing. Spoilers add drag and reduce lift. Use them to lower your plane to the runway without needing to pitch down. In either case, the control surfaces need to be right on CoM or balanced either side of it. If this isn't the case, activating the flaps/spoilers will also cause an alteration in pitch. Don't bother with flaps unless you need them for takeoff, and be sure to set a pair of action groups to raise and lower them. Do consider spoilers; they make landing much easier.

Spaceplane Piloting 101: 1) Get to 20,000m however you like. Especially with larger planes, a shallow ascent path (vertical speed kept to about 100m/s the whole way up) is most efficient, but fast overpowered sport things can often get away with a vertical climb to 20,000m. The more horizontal speed you have at 20,000m, the easier you'll find things above 20,000m. 2) When you get to 20,000m, level off and build some speed. You want to pile on as much horizontal velocity as possible while you make your ascent to 30,000m. Keep your angle of attack (the angle between where your nose is pointing and the direction in which the plane is actually moving, shown by the prograde marker when in surface mode) and climb rate low; by the time you hit 30,000m, they should both be around 10 or so. A low angle of attack reduces drag and helps your intakes work better. The low angle makes you climb slower, but that's okay; you need that time to get up to speed. As you go faster, the angle of attack required to maintain a given climb rate reduces, but as you go higher, the thinner air means that the angle of attack required to maintain a given climb rate increases. If you do it right, these two factors will roughly balance each other out and you should gain the necessary speed and altitude in a single smooth climb. However, a plane with some aerodynamic or piloting flaws may need to bounce up and down between 20,000 and 30,000m a couple of times while building speed before the final push. 3) Somewhere between 20,000m and 35,000m (exactly when depends on both plane and piloting), you'll start to run short of air. Don't switch to rockets immediately. If you've got multiple engines going, shut some down to concentrate the available oxygen into the ones you keep running. If you've already shut down as many as you can, throttle back a bit. You can dramatically increase your jet-only altitude by doing this, and once you get up to serious height the thin atmosphere means that you only need a tiny amount of thrust to accelerate. 4) Keep this going for as long as your plane and your patience can tolerate. A well-built and -flown plane should be able to get over Mach 4.5 and 30,000m in a single attempt on jets alone. Once you've wrung as much speed and altitude out of the jets as possible (you want at least Mach 4 and 30,000m), light the rockets. If you have both jets and rockets, don't shut down the jets immediately; the thrust of the rockets will drive a ram-air effect that kicks the jets back into life for a while. Keep the rockets burning until your apoapsis exceeds 70,000m, then shut off and coast until it's time to circularise. Point prograde and close your intakes while coasting to minimise drag. 4a) If you've got nuclear rockets, shut down all other rockets above 35,000m as soon as your apoapsis is a comfortable time margin ahead of you. Reengage boost rocketry if necessary to stop the apoapsis being passed, but otherwise fly on nuclear alone. A good plane and pilot should be able to get the apoapsis to 70,000m with less than a minute of rocket power. Done properly, it requires very little fuel. But if you try to brute-force it from lower speeds and altitudes, the atmospheric drag is going to drain your oxidiser tanks before you get anywhere near orbit. If you're having trouble with design rather than piloting, give http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1434926&viewfull=1#post1434926 a try. * Send a Kerbal to the beach at the east end of the runway. Plant a flag. You now have a landing beacon. Set this flag as a target. * Burn retrograde until your trajectory intersects the ground on the west side of the KSC home continent. * As you descend, keep your nose within 10° of prograde and immediately correct any stall. You can afford a much larger AoA at higher altitudes, but you should still avoid stalls and close to prograde as soon as you start to feel the atmosphere through your controls. * Pull up as sharply as you dare. Aim to level out at ~25,000m. * Check your distance to KSC. If it's over 200km, slowly descend in order to hit 6,000m at the mountains west of KSC (which are about 5,000m tall). If it's within 200km, begin S-turns to wash off speed and altitude. * S-turns. First, decide how urgent the turn is and whether you also want to drop altitude. If the turn is urgent or you want to drop, stand the plane on its wingtip, keep the nose on the horizon and pitch up (carefully). If less urgent or you want to maintain altitude, roll to ~45° and pitch/yaw the nose around, monitoring climb rate and controlling it with pitch as you go. * Make sure the flag is still set as target. If your prograde and target markers coincide, you're heading for the end of the runway. If they aren't on a bearing of 90° while you're doing this, you're coming in at an angle. Fly to the side until the target indicator is at 90°. Then fly towards it. * Get lined up, low and slow as soon as possible. As soon as you're over the mountains, start doing S-turns and drop to the deck. Pull it down to <150m/s and <500m altitude, then point at the runway and level your wings. The shallower the approach the better. Keep engines on minimal throttle to hold speed constant. * Avoid any drastic manoeuvres over the runway. You'll probably overdo it and make things worse. * Watch your VSI (vertical speed, to the right of the altitude meter) and keep it to 5m/s or so. Triggering spoilers will increase it; balance the spoilers will gentle pitch-up. * Don't be afraid to wave off and go around again if it gets messy. Also remember that the paddock beside the runway is an easier landing strip than the runway itself. * Be ready to hit the brakes and do some delicate steering as soon as you land. Stick to the middle of the runway if you're using it. Trigger RCS and Vernors and use the "N" key for retro thrust.

Ooh, idea. Take multiple launchsites, a tweaked version of Fine Print, multi-player and destroyable buildings. Given the right players, you now have Kerbal Thunderbirds: Competitive Rescue. Think you can knock Team A's rescue plane out of the sky and swoop in with your net VTOL in time to "rescue" the cargo yourself? Or did your decoy plane already succeed in leading Team B into Team A's flight path before they ever got close?

Destroyable KSC: certain. Repairable KSC: certain except to pedants. Upgradable KSC: almost certain. Planet-wide construction (or at least at a substantial number of set locations): to be fervently hoped for.

Build some and find out, then let us see how it went.

Why have Squad scatter runways about when you go and build them yourselves? Pack a construction crew and supplies into a big cargo plane and head out across Kerbin. Destruction is just construction in reverse, and we've already got building destruction on the way.

I'm thinking an unmanned bomber that splits into a multi-warhead cruise missile cluster after deploying its payload might have some promise. Should get the whole thing launched and done in a minute, too. Gravity bombs or a dozen downwards-pointing RT-10's? Hmmn...

That is a major thing; making mods unnecessary. Some basic part additions, UI fixes and aerodynamic improvements and I could empty out most of my Gamedata folder. This can only have a good effect on stability and speed. Most of the mods I use are either basic UI improvements (Kerbal Flight Data, Editor Extensions, RCS Build Aid, etc.), small part packs (Spaceplane Plus), gameplay polish (Ferram, Deadly Reentry, Fine Print) or basic aesthetics (Chatterer, EVE). All of this is stuff that should end up in the stock game soon enough. Good to see that they're starting to do it.

It's fairly easy to tweak the Brutus to carry one of the Ranger landers along with a Microbus (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1431743&viewfull=1#post1431743). Put that rig together and you can go anywhere.

Yup, one per category. - - - Updated - - - Cool. Stock aero or FAR?

Is it possible to make them follow-ups to prior satellite deployment missions? No craft spawning required...

Any reason why we don't have satellite retrieval missions as well as deployment? Or retrieve-and-replace?

First up, everything that Fine Print has already implemented. Aerial surveys, rover waypoints, varied-orbit satellite deployment, etc. Stay away from stock-provided vehicle designs, but use the contracts to guide design; i.e. "must have a solar panel, radio, probe core and gravioli detector" or "must have accommodation for six Kerbals". In addition: 1) Aerial firefighting. "Fly to point X before time Y and drop part Z (firefighting foam tanks) on locations A, B and C". 2) Urgent orbital missions. "Craft A is out of control and plummeting towards Kerbin! Launch and rescue before it burns up!" 3) Satellite retrieval missions. Or retrieve-and-replace. 4) Urgent Kerbinside delivery. Take part A to location B before time C. Add this to the firefighting, aerial surveys and rover contracts and you're halfway to Kerbal: Thunderbirds. 5) Commercial sport: aerospace racing. Pass point A, get to point B before elapsed time C. Add waypoints for handling challenges. 6) Targeted science missions. Get scientific instrument A in place at location B for time C. Locations on ground, in air, in orbits of all shapes. 7) Multi-part satellite/station construction missions. 8) Some way to crowd-source challenges from the forums into the game as contracts.

While we're at it, folders for Quicksaves as well. I'm continuously forgetting which save belongs to which mission.

Yup. You'll need a well-timed screenshot of the scrape and another of yourself stationary and intact on the flats afterwards, though. Done in a vessel capable of getting itself from KSC to Minmus with no refuelling outside Kerbin SOI.

Let's have one more go. Briskly up as usual. Quite briskly. Love a supersonic climber. Up. And around. 4 minutes 27 seconds. Flip. Back down. Dive to get down quick. And keep the gas on through the turn. Throttle off and turn to slow when the target gets near. Dump some more altitude and speed in a hurry. Line it up. And down. 23 minutes, 23 seconds. Sorry, Jovus.

Woo! Picked it day one.