Wanderfound

FAR allows some control surface tweakables that stock does not; it may be possible to set things up to detect if those have been altered.

Easily avoided, though. As currently implemented by mods, reentry heating is very easy to deal with. The Deadly Reentry mod could be more accurately titled "mildly hazardous if you're completely suicidal reentry".

That's buggy, then; most likely caused by an archaic version of ModuleManager somewhere in your Gamedata directory, blocking the FAR tweakables. You should only have one copy of the ModuleManager dll installed, and it should be the latest one. Do you have Kerbpaint? That has a very old copy of MM buried in a subfolder.

It's worth keeping in mind that the game was first designed to simulate rockets, then spaceplanes were added, then players started messing about with atmospheric aircraft on their own. The further you get from the original design, the more Kerbally the physics become. Due to the weight of parts etc., even a small and simple KSP plane is a very fast and heavy aircraft relative to the real world. 223MPH was pretty much exactly the Shuttle's touchdown speed, BTW. See http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/launch/landing101.html Concorde and the Tu-144 also came down at about 100m/s.

Flooded subways are the least of it; it's the political flow on that's gonna cause the most damage in the short term. For example: pretty much the entirety of Bangladesh is within a couple of feet of sea level. Their neighbours are large, nuclear armed, and have a long and recent history of military conflict. How do you think China and India are going to react when 100 million Bangladeshi climate refugees land on their doorstep? This is just one example. There are countless analogous situations all over the world. Climate change is a hazard multiplier; it makes all of the existing problems dramatically worse.

Not a new idea, either; the Mazda RX-8 had a similar trick, as did a few Japanese sportsbikes (Honda NSR250, Suzuki RGV250...all the little two-stroke GP replicas). Two keys; one for "daily driver" mode, one for "sports" mode. With the car, the intention was for it to be used when you needed to loan your flashy sportscar to your daft teenage sons. With the bikes, it was a result of restrictive Japanese power-to-weight laws on small sportsbikes. To make the bikes street legal, you had to reduce the power; the "fast" key was officially for use on racetracks only. The headlight was hard-wired on in "street" mode, hard-wired off in "race" mode. Of course, pretty much every owner hacked the system to get full power with the lights on within days of getting the bike. The low-tech version of this has been around for decades; in Australia, learner riders used to be restricted to 250cc or less, so it was a standard tactic to do things like graft an RD350LC head onto an RD250LC base. Hefty power boost, but the coppers can't tell unless they tear the engine apart.

As you may notice, pretty much everyone has their own preferred reentry and landing methods. However, from your post it appears that you're just talking about landing, not reentry. But it isn't really a problem. Just land at 100m/s; it's a perfectly fine landing speed. In fact, it's my standard landing velocity; I don't bother trying to get any slower than that. You shouldn't have any trouble coming to a stop on the runway without needing to resort to Sepratrons and the like. You wouldn't land a Cessna at 100m/s, but a spaceplane ain't a Cessna. Even a small SSTO is big and heavy and fast, and even non-spacegoing KSP planes tend to be very heavy by aircraft standards. They usually have a relatively high stall speed, and if you drop below that, then yeah: it's going to plummet and start accelerating like a falling rock. But they land just fine at 100m/s or even faster. Just make sure that you have the steering unlocked and brakes disabled on the front gear, be ready to do some very gentle steering and/or wing levelling on touchdown, and hit the brakes as soon as you've got it stably rolling down the strip. Get lined up with the runway while it's still several kilometres away, kill your throttle completely, get down to within a couple of hundred metres off the deck and glide in to the strip. Gently adjust your pitch to keep your drop rate below about 5m/s or so. The lower and flatter the approach the better, so long as you don't clip the terrain on the way in. Trying to cut speed further with a last-minute flare is just going to create more problems than it solves. Flaps can help lower your stall speed; spoilers can help in removing altitude without having to pitch down. But neither of these things are strictly necessary. If you're not sure about your aircraft, have a play with this one: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5l3go4mgfrz2egj/Kerbodyne%20Evangelist%20II.craft?dl=0 It was designed as a trainer, and is very light, very agile and very stable. The ailerons are set as spoilers, linked to the brakes; they're good for holding you down once you're on the strip, or getting you down the last few metres if you find yourself floating just off the deck.

I'm continuing to suck at aerobatics, but I may have an early contender for one of the landing prizes... Let's see how I go with a tune-up from Tetryds and a bit of extra reinforcement. Hmmn, not quite according to plan. Need moar struts. Jump for it, Bill! Parachutes are for wimps. Oof. Shame you can't expand these windows. Just hafta use two screenshots instead, then. One second between bail-out and cockpit destruction ain't bad. So do I get "walk away from" points?

The Kerbodyne entry is still a work in progress, but just as a teaser:

Cool. I'm gonna hafta step it up; looks like low-altitude subsonic aerobatics are the way to go. It's not my challenge, but I intend to keep pushing this until I get bored with it. Given how much I enjoy doing stupid and suicidal things with planes, that's unlikely to be any time soon. Any chance I can tempt you into having a go at one or more of the things linked in my .sig? You'd probably get a kick out of Speed Challenge II...

It doesn't wipe on accessing it, but it does wipe on quickload. As mentioned in the thread over there, I think the F3 readout wiping after loading is an advantage. It'll stop someone throwing their plane into a suicide dive, screenshotting just before they die, then quickloading before cruising in to land. Something that proves that the plane survived uninterrupted from manoeuvre to landing is a good thing.

Ferram: over on the Vomit Comet challenge, we're getting heavily inconsistent G readouts depending on whether they're measured by F3, navball or seismic/gravioli detectors. Which one is most likely to be giving an accurate measurement of what the airframes are actually taking?

F3 shot after landing if you can, though. We've established that gravioli/seismic readouts are a lot higher than the F3 figure, and the scoreboard needs a consistent measure.

Even with the nerf, you can still easily get both large and small jets up to extreme speeds: And adding a small amount of rocketry will push those to utterly ridiculous speeds:

Thanks. I'm looking forwards to giving it a shot at the Vomit Comet Challenge. I'd been using Goodspeed to balance the tanks, and I did manage to run them nearly dry (with the turbojet version); doing several Fine Print aerial survey contracts in a single flight puts a lot of air miles on. My more serious planes normally have lines arranged to drain the fuel from the rear lateral tanks first.

Cheers, thanks. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/t7arl456ss9wvbw/Kerbodyne%20Evangelist.craft?dl=0 It was designed as a trainer; swap the standard jet for a turbo if you want to turn it into a hypersonic aerobatics specialist instead.

I am. Streamline, streamline, streamline, and fly smooth. You can survive ridiculous speed at surprisingly low altitudes if you do it right.

There's an SP+/DRE/FAR pseudo-Concorde on the way...

...which is another reason why we're unlikely to ever see that sort of thing. They know that a large portion of us would get a giggle out of that, and the challenge thread with rapidly fill with "largest necropolis" contests. Remember the Kerbal Genocide ship...

FAR and Deadly Reentry were both in play. I'd also loaded from quicksave shortly before lighting the rockets, which zeroes out everything on the F3 screen. Still should've got something from the nose rockets, though; I deliberately threw it into a spin while they were lit, and you can see the effect of them on the navball G meter.

A plane can take off with a lot less than 1G thrust, and it looks like the game discounts static gravity effects. Getting it to clock 12G+ from aerobatics ain't too hard, though.

Last night's project... Meet the Kerbodyne ThunderLOL: Away we go. This looks like a good starting altitude. Only 9G, but...wheee! Dangit, retro-thrust G's aren't registering for some reason. Quite tricky getting it back under control, too. Dropping quite fast. Oh, sod it, time to bail out. Just deploy the EVA parachute... Oh, hang on, I removed that mod the last time I cleaned up my Gamedata folder, didn't I? Oops.

May be of interest; a not-too-technical explanation of what happened. http://www.stacken.kth.se/~foo/texts/chernobyl.html And for a little bit more detail: http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html

My inability to make this last bit of red go away is bugging me: Any suggestions?

Did you see this, BTW: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/92653-K-S-S-Kraken-three-masted-sailing-ship