Wanderfound

Sorry, got mixed up with what someone else posted. Not sure about the landing thing. You do often need to do a bit of (very gentle) steering during touchdown, though.

Next time, drop the nose on the Velociraptor 2 and build speed. So long as prograde is above the horizon you're all good, and as you go faster your climb rate will increase. Aerospikes off and SAS on is right. Imagine a doubling additive sequence; 1,3,6,10,15. At about those altitudes in thousands of metres, start winding it up as fast as you can (full throttle all way, "wind up" by pitching down) until you get to the next Mach number. Mach 1 not below 1,000m, wait for 3,000m before getting too close to Mach 2, etc. Of course, with things like the Goblin and original Velociraptor, you can ignore this and just point at the sky. The later planes are better performing than the earlier ones, but part of that is due to the advantage given by Porkjet's lifting body fuselages. I use spoilers for downforce and drag after landing; I rarely use them in flight. They're linked to the brake button. I did have some reports of the Benchmark spinning out on reentry. Was it wobbly in yaw on the way down? Part of the reason for the chunky pitch authority is that when FAR nerfed the engines a lot of my old high-drag planes started to dive at altitude. I got into the habit of stacking on as many canards and moving winglets as possible. I hate struggling for height. With most of 'em, it's easy to turn down the pitch authority up front or remove a pair of canards and shuffle wings about. I encourage customisation.

With the spins on reentry, did you quickload or recover? What were you doing with the controls, throttle etc when it happned?

Nobody's offended; I was just asking what my fellow competitor's intentions were. Don't want to be the only one going for the hard sell. Most of the selling points are already in my original post, though.

A good happy feeling isn't quite enough to get me to design something from scratch for you, and you won't find many landers with a Kerbin TWR of 1.5-3 (did you actually mean a Munar TWR?), but I'll toss you a few shots of my current standard lander:

I think you'll find that quite a lot of people got there before Leif. Iroquois, Comanche, Apache, Arapaho...

I have never seen anyone even suggest such a thing. The closest that I've ever seen is the argument that destroying potential unknown biospheres through carelessness or deliberate exploitation is not a wise or ethical thing to do (which is something I agree with). Where are you getting the "we don't deserve" stuff from?

BTW, guys: I have been getting feedback from multiple sources that my planes aren't quite as easy to fly as I think they are. Obviously there's a bit of an over-familiarity problem on my part. I'm good at designing planes that suit my preferences, but it looks like I need to learn how to make them more friendly for a general audience. I would very much like to have a genuinely easy to fly design to point beginner pilots towards. Think you could help me with that? You can be my market research / customer satisfaction team. In return, I could probably give you some design tips if we work on the designs together. Maybe even come up with your own planes and then swap 'em back and forwards between us for polishing. Want to grab whichever one of the designs here you think is currently the closest to a good trainer, and then let me know what about it needs altering to make it easier? Think we should keep it stock, or go ahead and use the soon-to-be-stock SP+ bits?

So, folks: how should we go about this? Just leave the entries to passively appeal as they are, or should everyone post a "why I should win" message?

Bit hard to tell who you're referring to here, but probably: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/55905-0-23-5-7-3-EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements-NEW!-VolumetricClouds!

Yay! Kinda... For the yaw: had you remembered to unlock the steering on your front gear when you were building it? If it was the Benchmark, the steering should be unlocked unless you messed with it. Was the SAS on?

Okay: ran the test. Took the same plane out on the runway twice, once with all control surfaces except the advanced canards set as spoilers (which is how I normally have it), once with no spoilers. Fired them up, killed engines and hit brakes at the same spot. The spoilered one stopped about ten metres earlier. FAR in operation. Not a huge amount, but not totally trivial either.

Edited to withdraw: sorry, that was more hostile than it should have been. My apologies; got some personal stuff going on that's leaving me a bit short-fused.

Not really my experience. My spaceplanes aren't small, and I prefer small-wing delta designs. But they'll glide quite happily at speeds only a little over 100m/s, and I usually come into the runway virtually flat from treetop level. Possibly the SP+ lifting bodies that I tend to use are helping me out here.

The main reason I'm not using AJE is that I like it when other people fly my designs. If I swap to AJE, I'll massively narrow my potential customer base.

Hmmn...are you flying with FAR, NEAR or stock aero? Everything here is designed and tested for FAR; I have no idea how they'll perform under stock. And have you read the piloting guide linked in the first post of this thread? If you check the original release thread (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90344-Kerbodyne-Velociraptor-light-cargo-express-SSTO-for-Spaceplane-Plus-and-FAR) you'll see that it worked for both me and GoldenPSP. The only handling flaw I found with it was a slight tendency for the nose to climb at high speeds and altitudes; this can be compensated for by either switching on the Vernors or just climbing less steeply to begin with. I'm not arguing with your perceptions, but I would like to identify and hopefully solve the issue for you. It won't climb vertically like the original model; the removal of the turbojets means that it has less than half of the air-breathing thrust. But as the original had more than twice as much as it needed, it should still work fine. Try climbing at 35-45 degrees until 10,000m, then pull it down to 15-25 degrees and keep it there until the apoapsis gets over 70,000m. Flick the Aerospikes and Vernors on (the Vernor starts toggled on, so all you need to do to activate them is turn on RCS) and close the intakes as soon as the RAPIERs switch modes. What exactly do you mean by "fiddling with the throttle"? You should be keeping this one at 100% the whole way up unless you're trying to squeeze the last bit of altitude out of the air breathing mode of the RAPIERs. The airframe shouldn't have any trouble so long as you keep if flying straight and try to get over 10,000m before you exceed Mach 2. Keep it smooth; set your pitch and level your wings and then don't touch the controls. It should climb smoothly unless you try to take it too high before building sufficient speed; small-winged streamlined planes like this need a bit of velocity to maintain lift once they get into the thin upper atmosphere; small wings let you go faster, but they also mean that you need to go faster. What altitude were you at when you started having trouble, what speed were you doing at the time, and what pitch were you climbing at? Did you have the SAS on? You should with my designs, because I fly with it on and design the planes accordingly. And did you use any of the FAR flight assistance toggles? They're sometimes helpful, but they often cause more problems than they solve.

Have a look in the Challenges forum right now for some good examples: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90337-Economic-Fuel-to-Oribit (yes, the link does have that spelling; don't blame me)

Congratulations! You are having a classic new-to-KSP experience. Virtually everone starts out by stranding dozens of Kerbals on the Mun, crashing or stranding countless "rescue" ships, and utterly failing to dock with anything. It's all part of the learning process. My first half dozen Mun landings turned into impact craters. My first "successful" Mun landing saw the legs flex just enough to let the engine strike the ground and explode. The one after that tipped over. By the time I finally got the hang of it, I think there were about twenty Kerbals on the Mun and another fifteen or so stranded in orbit (including one who had accidentally departed the Kerbol system and was on his way to interstellar space). My first successfully orbited SSTO spaceplane crashed on landing. Try to appreciate it as much as you can; once you do get good enough to be able to casually perform all these tasks, that part of the game is done for you. Eventually you'll be able to pop down to the Mun with 100% reliability and complete ease, but by the time you get to that point an uncomplicated Mun landing is about as exciting as catching the bus, because you've done it a hundred times already and there's no tension. It's still a fun game; there's plenty of other stuff to do (look around at all the people who've been regularly posting on these forums for years; this is a game with serious staying power). But there's nothing quite like your first successful docking or Mun landing (or interplanetary trip, or SSTO, or spaceplane landing, etc.). There are plenty of guides and things out there, but try to give everything a good solid try before going to the tutorials. Repeated failure is an integral part of the KSP experience, and the view from the top of the mountain is always best when you've walked there yourself. The tutorials will still be there if you need them after you've had "just one more try". Don't rush; make the most of it while you have it. You may miss it a bit once it's done.

Unfortunately, for a large proportion of the suggestions, the only honest comment I could make would be "that sounds like a completely terrible idea to me, and I'm very grateful that it has no chance of ever making it into the stock game (because it's an obviously terrible idea). However, there are a handful of other people who are into the same terrible idea, and here is how you find them". Is that really better than "BTW, there's already a mod that does that; you can find it over here"? And in what way is the second version less helpful than the first?

And I like Procedural Fairings because there's no such thing as a stock fairing at the moment, and I don't want to go to the hassle of fighting with B9 bugs just for a couple of parts. I don't care whether they're procedural or not, I just want to be sure that there'll be stock fairings in the final game, of a wide enough size variety that you can use them for what they're used for in reality, e.g. getting your horribly unaerodynamic Moon/Mun lander off the launchpad. I don't use Procedural Wings, but that's mostly just a matter of aesthetics; I prefer the look of the SP+ bits. I also find clipping together a couple of pre-shaped wing panels takes much less time, thought and effort than fiddling with PWings settings. Regex and Alshain have got it right about part count, though. Not all of us have a flashy new specialist gaming rig.

Woo! Congrats. The Benchmark was designed and flight tested in FAR; I have no idea how it handles in stock aero. And I do tend to like a fair amount of pitch authority; I hate it when I have to struggle to lift the nose during ascents. For less pitch authority, lose either the canards or the winglets and shuffle the wings forward a bit.

My impression is that spoilers substantially enhance braking on the ground, but I haven't actually run a comparison test on it. I'll do a back-to-back test with spoilers on or off later and report back.

Spoilers are also activated by the B key, by the way. I use them mostly for downforce and braking after I've touched down.

Yah; sorry. I edited my post when I realised that we weren't actually disagreeing. The reason you're snapping the wings is the speed; Mach 0.98 is faster than any plane could manage until Chuck Yeager did his thing. It might feel slow, but it isn't. I normally come in from orbit with engines off at ~Mach 7, keep it at 20,000m until I've slowed below Mach 2, then gradually drop down to about 2,000m to wash off the rest of the speed. I don't try any sort of manoeuvring until I'm thoroughly subsonic. And I never hold down the keys; it's always tap tap tap. Then it's back up a bit to get over the mountains west of KSC, maybe turning the engines back on for a few seconds if I've left it too late and need to climb steeply, then drop down to below 1,000m (engines off again) as soon as I can. Once the speed is down to 150m/s I'll turn them back on with just enough throttle to maintain that speed until the runway is in sight, then it's throttle off again all the way to landing. I like to glide...

Looks like cargo bay, SP+ inline docking port, drone core, adaptor and then maybe a non-SP+ shielded docking port. No cockpit, no pilot.