Wanderfound

It's a classic. Try to see if you can make it through the whole movie sometime; 80's cheese at its finest. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/megaforce/

Be nice, folks [1]. I think we've established that although big images don't bother everybody, they do bother some. We want to keep this so that everybody can participate, regardless of their bandwidth. I remember when I had to browse the net with images turned off all the time, and it sucked. The folks on image-heavy sites never heard me complain about it, because I just wouldn't go there. Perhaps post compressed images here, along with a link to a different site where you can post as much super hi-res stuff as you like without the slightest chance of bothering anybody? Imgur, Photobucket, etc; there's no shortage of freely available image hosting options available. Quite apart from the Wheaton's Law reason to do this, it's also in your own interests: if you bug people, they ain't gonna vote for your designs. First law of politics: don't needlessly antagonise the voters, even if you think they're full of it. [1] Pre-emptive; everyone has been fine so far. Just getting in with the flamewar vaccination in advance.

About to test it out; expect me to promote it heavily to the spaceplane crew if it works out.

Amen to that. I wouldn't be here if they weren't.

They're gorgeous even without RPM. Seems like a crazy decision to throw away something that good.

Not just roads...

The lack of accounting for gimballing roll has made Smart A.S.S. useless for spaceplanes under power lately; you get an increasing oscillating roll that rapidly becomes lethal. It seems to have been fixed in the dev build, though. Very handy for long-distance cruise control when you misjudge your reentry and have to fly halfway around Kerbin to get back to KSC.

No love for the Hypecycle?

More fun with SRBs:

What should we do with the "all stock" categories once .25 drops? Allow stockified SP+, or continue to exclude SP+ and relabel them as "retro"?

BTW, everybody: don't let the existing entrants scare you away from posting your own stuff. Even the worst design here still beats one that was never entered, and you never know if the voter's perceptions are going to match your own. And putting it up for test-flying and critique is likely to give you some clues on how to make it better. I certainly intend on polishing my stuff up still further before the contest is done. "It's an honour just to be nominated" etc. etc.

Any landing you walk away from, right?

These are just sillyness, but have a poke at http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1359869&viewfull=1#post1359869 and http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1360020&viewfull=1#post1360020 In spaceplane terms, SRBs are heavy. Those two designs are something like 90% mass in SRB fuel.

Care to give us separate craft files for the two versions and edit them both into your entry post? We're trying to keep the thread organised so that it's easy to find each contestant's designs.

Can it be done? Certainly. Should it be recommended as an approach to someone who's already having problems? Probably not.

It isn't just one person; there are quite a few limited-bandwidth regulars. Ain't gonna name 'em, because I don't want to start a lynch mob. I've got fast broadband now, but this is the first time in my life that I've ever had that. Previously, I was stretching my budget for slow and expensive internet that had a monthly limit measured in MB, not GB. And I'm old enough that I came to the 'net back when you'd chew someone out for bandwidth-hogging because they didn't trim superfluous quoted paragraphs from their all-text email replies. Since I'm going to be revising and resubmitting all of mine post .25, I won't bother updating the existing screenshots, but I may crank up the quality a bit on the revised versions. But they're staying as JPEGs. If you want to see them in full glory, download the craft file and take it for a spin.

As detailed at http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/93779-SSTO-Spaceplane-Airplane-Design-Contest-II-Akademy-Awards?p=1418918&viewfull=1#post1418918, that's entirely up to the voters.

Pecan: there's a "best vertical SSTO" category; included with you in mind.

See http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1402927&viewfull=1#post1402927 for a good basic spaceplane and http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1402927&viewfull=1#post1402927 for an atmospheric trainer. And http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/entries/1646-How-to-fly-a-spaceplane-to-orbit?bt=6775 for a piloting guide.

Mechjeb is nowhere near smart enough to fly a spaceplane on its own. If you want to fly, you need to learn to fly. Have a look at the design contest in my sig; you should find some good stock-aero trainers there. O-Doc's stuff is particularly nice.

Listen to Pecan. If you try to fly a spaceplane as if it were a vertical rocket, all you get is an inefficient overweight rocket. Flown like a spaceplane, however... How to fly a spaceplane to orbit 1) Get to 20,000m however you like. Around a 45 degree climb is probably most fuel efficient, but jet engines use so little fuel that it doesn't matter much. If the plane has enough power, I usually climb at 75 degrees or so just to get it done quickly. 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 a slow 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), force the nose up to 45 degrees and 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. 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.

Hypetrain/plane/ptrane engaged: .25 is in Experimentals, expect it to drop within a week or two. Looks like the SP+ crew is going to have some redesigning to do...

Looks like you've definitely got something buggy happening, then; best to post this over on the Support forum. Does it still happen if you go in a ship without Mechjeb installed? In the short term, you could probably nudge him into place with another EVAing Kerbal (without quickloading, so as to avoid invoking the bug on the second EVA; you can't grab hold of him, but your can push him if you're careful), or use RCS to position the ship's crew hatch right on top of him. If you actually bump him into the door, does he get the usual "press F to grab hold" option?

Is there a reason why the manoeuvre planner for interplanetary transfers doesn't have a "bugger the transfer window, I want to go today" option? It would be very useful to me.

Ideally, they'd set up as much as possible to work like Kerbpaint: if you use it, you get funky colours, but if you don't, the design goes back to default with no redesign required. I'd love a mod that would automatically detect and remove mod parts; it'd make designing a lot easier. Some designs will break, but not most, and the broken designs wouldn't have worked in stock anyway. Especially for those that part-clip things, stripping back to stock is a pain.