Wanderfound

Having another go with it; it does seem less glitchy than last time so far.

But should they splat or splash? Just what is inside a Kerbal, anyway? Might have to drop a few from orbit to find out. For science!

Did you post a review of anyone else's plane? As I said, your design looks nifty but it doesn't appear to be the sort of thing that is likely to work in FAR. And I don't fly stock unless someone's going to pay me to do it. Spent enough time slogging through the soup back when I started.

I had fun with this, Sirine. Feel like running a sequel with more tightly focussed categories? E.g. "best FAR sportsplane", "best stock cargo lifter", "best SP+ executive jet", "best long-range science explorer" etc. The more tightly focussed they are, the better the chance that all of the people interested in that category will have the time and interest to review all of the entrants. It's probably best to split them all into stock vs FAR categories; very few craft work well in both, and not many folks are willing to fly outside of their preferred aero model. A bunch of categories would also let compulsive designers like me & Hodo enter a bunch of different things without overcrowding a single contest.

Reinforcing Biohazard: the mod is great in concept, but the font is microscopic. Have mercy on us vision-impaired sorts?

Yup, I think the braking thing is linked to the landing gear. Looks like they never considered rocket-powered takeoffs when they introduced them. I ain't saying it's not buggy, I'm just saying there's a reason for it.

Seconded. Everybody I've shown the game to is surprised to find out that reentry heating doesn't matter in stock. When I finally got around to installing DRE, I was astonished at how non-deadly it was [1]. I haven't bothered adding a heatshield to anything yet; I frequently deliberately burn the canards off my planes just for fun; I can easily get Mun landers with exposed tanks/materials bays/goo pods/lander legs/etc back down to Kerbin intact (nosecones and struts: not just for ascents). FAR is a much bigger threat on reentry than DRE is; I lost quite a few Kerbals due to aerodynamic failures removing the bit with the parachutes on before I got the knack of that. Attempting to reorient a fragile Mun lander while doing Mach 10 = Not A Good Idea. [1] Yes, I know that I could wind up the DRE settings up to crazy suicidal levels if I wanted to; not the point.

I'm willing to forgive that as a slip of the tongue; I see "interstellar" accidentally substituted for "interplanetary" on these forums on a regular basis.

Reinforcing this: the cameras are awesome, but they're a sod to place right. Anyone know of an RPM-compatible camera mod that lets you adjust the aim of your in-flight cameras from within IVA?

Not without back-end hacking that I know of, but you could probably get the same effect by using maximum deflection flaps/spoilers and hooking them to action group toggles.

First I've heard of pressure related pain/nausea in amputees. At a guess, I'd suspect that it's related to circulatory impairments causing blood pressure spikes. Have you seen Ramachandran's work on phantom limb syndrome? Not quite the same issue, but possibly related.

Umm...those are nearly all fast rolls and relatively low AoA pitching. I can manage all that in FAR with unstrutted eggshell SP+ wings. Change to stock wings with the CoL in the middle instead of the tip and add some struts and I can pull substantially sharper stuff than that without wing snapping. Sure, you can break the wings off doing not-too-extreme manouevres, but only if you fly badly. The thing that rips wings in FAR isn't high AoA, it's trying to go from 0° AoA to 30° AoA in a fraction of a second. Only specialist aerobatic planes can handle anything close to that in the real world, and a hypersonic spaceplane is pretty much the opposite of an aerobatic specialist. It's dragster vs sportscar; Skylon is designed to go very straight, very fast. It's not supposed to do combat manoeuvres. The design priorities of a dogfighter vs a top-speed specialist are sharply opposed. FAR allows full-throttle vertical-climbing takeoffs; you just have to either get the nose up as soon as you leave the ground (before you've got too much horizontal speed), or pull the nose up over the course of a few seconds. It's go-fast-then-slam-it-into-a-handbrake-turn that causes aerodynamic failures. Planes like curves, they don't like angles. Just after flicking into a 180° roll, immediately post takeoff: 10G pulling out of a dive at 500m, maximum elevator deflection: 6G inverted banking roll, >45° AoA: Negative 8G at full throttle, mid-Immelman: That plane only has two struts per wing; I deliberately left it fragile because I intended it as a trainer. If I was building an aerobatics specialist and went crazy on the strutting, it could tolerate much rougher treatment than that. I did eventually snap the wings off that, but in order to do it I put it into a full-power dive from 20,000m and then deliberately slammed it sideways just off the deck. It still took a couple of attempts to make it die. I do agree that it's a bit easier to break wings on large planes than it should be, at least from a game-for-fun POV, but that's more to do with KSP than Ferram. If they'd give us decent sized wing pieces (either larger, or tweakable, or procedural, or weldable) so that we didn't have to build jigsaw wings and strutting became unnecessary, that'd be a good thing. Pretty much every flyer struts their wings anyway; why not make the strutting reinforcement a given? It'd improve the aesthetics, ease the engineering learning process and reduce part counts. I don't see any downside.

Yah; I should probably mention that I'm 40 years old, nearsighted to the point that without my glasses anything more than an inch counts as "far away", and on meds that occasionally mess with my focussing ability. But I'm sure that I'm not the only one. KSP draws a geeky fanbase, and it's not like the stereotype of geek-with-glasses doesn't have a foundation in reality.

Yup, "turbojets" at present aren't actually turbojets. They're some sort of weird fantasy turbo/ram/scram hybrid. The only reason I have turbojets on my designs at all is that I like the whistling sportsbike sound of them. If they'd fix the RAPIER effects so that they didn't sound so horrid, I'd never use a turbojet again. I'm perfectly cool with them fixing the jets (i.e., much less thrust, realistic air intakes, and turbo/ram/scram as separate things), and I've been attempting to encourage Ferram to go back to the 2/3rd nerf he originally wanted instead of the current 1/2. At the moment, I can easily get a large cargo plane up to Mach 11 and escape velocity without leaving Kerbin's atmosphere. I don't think that I'll have any trouble building effective SSTOs after they bring the jets closer to reality.

Were you disgusted when you realised that there were ordinary people flying the same plane you were? Do you want to prove to everyone on campus that your Daddy has more money than theirs does? Do you enjoy knowing that everyone around you thinks that you're a hyper-privileged twit? Then you need a Kerbodyne Princeling. Just like the Graduate, but better. Now with extra vectored thrust capability to help obscure the fact that you're not as good a pilot as you pretend to be. Extra-zoomy. Sir Kerb-A-Lot would approve. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/xrjclv9p6q98qgc/Kerbodyne%20Princeling.craft?dl=0 All stock; parts up to tier 8 used. Designed for FAR/NEAR.

I'm generally on the "yay! Realism!" side (although not of the "yay! Compulsory mathematics!" faction) but I do think that most of these issues could be resolved by having the realism things as switchable difficulty options. Let everyone play the game that they want to play; this is why the modding community is so great. KSP seems perfectly able to handle the full range from pseudo-Orbiter to computerised Space Lego. That said, the big problem with things like current stock aero isn't that it allows sillyness, it's that it actively punishes realistic builds. A big part of the reason why FAR is so popular is that, in stock aero, if you try to construct a sensible plane it just won't fly very well. I don't care if other people want to build things with fifty intakes and wings stacked ten deep. I do care that I'm often required to do so if I want to make something effective.

While I understand that this isn't a realistic option, there's really only one properly Kerbal destination for this:

Nice. Just to confirm: you got that thing from the KSC runway to Minmus without any refuelling after leaving Kerbin orbit? No Hyperedit or refuel-at-Minmus? And surely you have at least one crash picture to share...

Spent enough time playing around with the Evangelist? Think you're ready to move up to a proper spaceplane? Dad still won't let you borrow the keys to his Goblin? You need a Kerbodyne Graduate. Affordable, simple technology (nothing above tier 7) that is still plenty cool enough to show off in the university parking lot. Why settle for taking your date to Blueberry Hill when you could show them the stars instead? (note: Kerbodyne accepts no responsibility for piloting errors induced by attempting to stuff two Kerbals into a single-seat spaceplane) Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/scjhnok4elpl9tw/Kerbodyne%20Graduate.craft?dl=0 No mods required. Intended for FAR/NEAR, but might work in stock.

Kudos regardless. You've enhanced the cool factor of my SP+ planes substantially.

Yes, it is stock; I've been designing a line of stock-only planes for a tutorial. Regardless, thanks heaps for the mod. Kerbpaint is near the top of my "why the hell isn't this in the stock game already?" list.

You get that it was locked for a reason, right?

This is a great concept, and I'd love to use it, but...well, see upthread. As well as some bug-squishing, it needs to default to off and never appear in any way unless actively invoked. When I tried to use it, it would constantly intrude when I didn't want it to, and frequently failed to work properly. It's a shame; as I said, it's a great concept.

I've resorted to keeping a "parking lot" folder outside of the game directory. The only craft that stay in the save file are the half-dozen or so that I'm currently using regularly.

Unfortunately, my standard station resupply ships tend to be built like this: Even my small Mun landers tend to have at least five tanks. Small tanks are a lot better at keeping the mass spread laterally, which is important for both reducing lander height and improving spaceplane balance.