Wanderfound

Both Goodspeed and TAC-FB are good mod solutions, but yeah: stock fuel transfer is horrible. Not just balance, but time. Filling or emptying a craft with a lot of small tanks takes forever.

All of the above: no. If you're using air-breathing engines, the game defaults to keeping the landing gear brakes on until the engines have finished spooling up. It's intended as a feature; it's to maximise effective runway length. It does occasionally glitch out and fail to release when it should, though.

The tilt didn't just disappear, the CoL moved. When you rotate it, the indicators (and the air, if you do it in flight) stop seeing the wings as wings and start treating them as vertical stabilisers.

I'm almost certainly going to be disappointed, but I'm hoping that the possible delay is in order to make the collision meshes move with the doors. Do that, and loading ramps are next...

One more (rather more obscure, somewhat mod-related, understandable if ignored) ladder issue. The obvious place for a spaceplane ladder is leading straight to the cockpit. Unfortunately, that's also the obvious place for a canard. No problem, then; I'll just set the canards as spoilers so they rotate out of the way when I put the parking brakes on. Neat and elegant. Problem: even though the visual element of the canard rotates, the collision mesh doesn't. You can't climb through it, and you can still stand on it. It's easy enough to solve by just shifting the ladder back and walking on top of the canard, but it is a bit disconcerting to watch your Kerbals standing on air and walking through the rotated canard.

A bit. Not entirely, though. If you dig back through the thread, you'll see that "your planes aren't quite as easy to fly as you seem to think they are" is a bit of a recurring theme. And Pecan has me working on a project to make demonstration spaceplanes at each stage of the career game tech progression; hence the restriction to tier 5 parts. (and, just in case it wasn't clear, the accompanying "advertising" text is for comedy value; not intending to slight anyone) The conventional non-turbo jet limits it to a ceiling of 20,000m and a top speed of just over Mach 1, but that's more than enough to get some practice in. Anything above that is mostly just a matter of flying as smooth and straight as possible, anyway; even top-notch fighter jets have to slow down if they want to dogfight without shattering their airframes. And it is extremely fun to fly.

I'm purely guessing, but I expect that it's a value that represents the speed at which the intake reaches peak efficiency. Intake air is a function of speed and AoA as well as altitude; have a look at the required/available air percentage figures reported by Mechjeb/FAR/Kerbal Flight Data and you'll see the available air rise as you increase speed while holding altitude. This is partly why a lot of my ascents tend to have a bit of an S-curve pattern; climb until the air runs out, dive a bit to get to maximum speed, then climb again. The air runs out a lot later on the faster second run.

Yay! Thankyou. While you're feeling helpful, though, there is one more leeetle problem... Mk1 -> Mk2 stock adaptors. Colouring 'em only gives you a hint of shading along the back edge. Something amiss somewhere?

While I have no interest in getting in the middle of this fight, you probably should have included the note "emphasis added by regex" on that quote. I don't see any bold text in the original, and adding it substantially alters the tone.

I believe we continue to have a friendly difference of opinion. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1394563&viewfull=1#post1394563

Just to prove that neither mod pack parts or intake spamming is necessary for a quality spaceplane: Runway to orbit in 4 minutes, 5 seconds. All stock, two intakes feeding three engines.

BTW: an example of the fun you can have when you combine Spaceplane Plus with Raster Prop Monitor. Yes, those screens all work; they ain't just decorative. Including the camera feeds. Hyomoto's MFD is also worth getting to make the interface a bit more user-friendly.

Folks: I don't want to clutter up Ferram's thread by spruiking my designs here. However, I can't think of a more appropriate place to mention this. For the 100th post on my design thread, I built an atmospheric trainer that was specifically designed to address the problem of people being scared away from FAR on the grounds that it's "too hard". Starting your flying practice with a hypersonic spaceplane makes about as much sense as putting a teenage learner driver in a race-tuned Ferrari. Hopefully, this plane should provide a more user friendly and less discouraging introduction to realistic aero than the explosively unstable designed-for-soupmosphere things that most people seem to begin with. See http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1401723&viewfull=1#post1401723 if you're interested. (PS: Ferram, if this irritates you in the slightest, let me know and I'll delete this post)

Would you like to learn to fly in atmosphere that isn't made by the Campbell's Soup Company? Does your career mode game require an aircraft as early as possible in the tech tree? Did you try taking a Dementia for a spin, only to discover that it's quite easy to rip your wings off when you have more than five G's of thrust on tap? Did you perhaps fail to realise that a Bugatti Veyron isn't necessarily the best choice of car for a learner driver? Are you frightened of Ferram? Well, we've got the plane for you. Introducing the Kerbodyne Evangelist. A sturdy, lightweight, easy to fly aerobatic trainer that uses no mod pack parts, and nothing higher than tier 5 in the tech tree. If you can't get the hang of this one...well, okay, maybe you're better off with rockets. But give it a try before you abandon all hope. Simple, classic design. Takes off all by itself; absolutely zero control inputs required. Extremely nimble and forgiving even at low airspeeds. Tolerates extreme G-stresses (positive and negative) and large angles of attack. Note: "easy to fly" does not mean "impossible to crash". "Sturdy" does not mean "unbreakable". It's a trainer, not a LOLplane. Although it's definitely capable of inducing LOLing once you learn how to fly it; she's a sweet little beast that is perfect for adventurous aerobatics. First time up with this, I managed to successfully survive dipping the landing gear in the ocean pulling out of a 10G dive and bouncing off the runway while flying sideways. The Evangelist is immensely forgiving, but it still has limits; this is deliberate. Anything you do that breaks this plane will also break any other realistically constructed aircraft. If I built something completely indestructible, all that would achieve is to teach y'all more bad flying habits. The idea is to let you have fun while you discover what you can and can't get away with. Craft file available at https://www.dropbox.com/s/t7arl456ss9wvbw/Kerbodyne%20Evangelist.craft?dl=0 Optional paint job by Kerbpaint. Requires no mods whatsoever. Designed to fly in FAR/NEAR, but will probably work nicely in stock aero as well.

This is just straight up learnin' rather than a puzzle, but this is the first resource that I used to point my Introduction to Neuroscience students towards. Scicurious' Neuro 101: http://scientopia.org/blogs/scicurious/science-101/

Kerbpaint. No version number, and stashed in a subfolder. Until I deleted that MM copy, it seemed to be responsible for disabling the advanced control surface setting options provided by FAR. And don't fret, I'm not actually bothered by any of this. It just seems a bit strange that even cluey folks like Ferram are still bundling old versions with their mods. As always, thanks for the mods. You guys are a large part of what makes KSP so awesome.

It's still there in my (current) version; looks a bit nicer now, too. It's a long way up the tech tree if you're playing career, though.

I don't want to pick a fight with you, Kasuha, however: see my post above. Yes, KSP should allow you to stick 20 command pods on a ship if you want to. But that ship should be substantially outperformed by an equivalent build that ditches the 19 redundant pods. At present, in stock aero, the 20 intake-per-engine plane is better than the 1 intake-per-engine plane. The game actively encourages the construction of silly unrealistic things and actively discourages the construction of sensible things. This is backwards to me. Silly is fun, silly is fine, but sensible should have value as well. I'm not the dictator of KSP, and you're entitled to your view just as much as I am. But you asked why we think intake spam is bad, and this is why.

I know that you emptied the tanks; my point in mentioning the dCoM indicators provided by RCS Build Aid was that it removes the need to do that, and allows you to simultaneously view dry and wet CoM's. But, whatever. The spaceplane community here are, in general, exceptionally helpful. And O-Doc builds very nice stock aero planes. You've just substantially reduced your chances of getting help the next time you ask for it.

Woo! Yay for O-Doc! Kerbeers are on me.

Appropriately aimed Sepratrons on the cockpit and fuselage work for this...sometimes. I've lost plenty of pilots due to having their eject capsule steamrollered by an out of control 100 ton spaceplane.

I'd rather not see this, actually. Not unless they nerf the unrealistically overpowered EVA packs and get rid of the "infinitely refuelable EVA" thing. The "get out and push" tactic is cheesy enough already.

Sarbian has updated the FAR plugin so that it no longer happens, BTW.

It seems like almost every mod has an archaic version of MM bundled with it, including ones that are so old that they don't even have a version number (Kerbpaint SP+ config, for that one; that's a user hack rather than an "official" mod though, so it's understandable in that case). Every time I re-do my Gamedata folder I have to play "hunt the MM dll's". Even the high-profile constantly updated mods (e.g. FAR) have old versions of MM. I wonder if it's possible to set up MM so that it hunts down and exterminates old versions of itself?

Might not be the culprit, but I recently had a "control surfaces ripping off in vacuum" issue. Turned out to be caused by an outdated version of the optional Mechjeb FAR plugin.