Wanderfound

Looked at the quick piloting guide linked in the first post of this thread? Or had a play with the Goblin? That one can hit a 70 x 70 orbit in about three and a half minutes under FAR... More practically, the Velociraptor and Velociraptor II are serious cargo planes, and they can make it to orbit in about five minutes if you fly them right. Either of them could have their cargo bays stretched to double length without substantially reducing performance, so long as the wings are adjusted to keep the mass/lift relationship right. PS: wait till you see what I'm working on. Kerbodyne has an engines division as well...

Unless they ditch some of the unpopular parts... It'd be good to have diversity in spaceplane aesthetics, though. At the moment, anything built with stock Mk3's looks bodgy Space-Shuttle-ish, Mk2s look bodgy 50's jet-ish, and most things built with SP+ tend to end up as some variation on an SR-71 (much prettier, but still a bit same-ish). Multiple cockpits (or an aesthetic tweakable) per size would be wonderful. (not expecting anything like this before game completion, though)

Like this? http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/88933-0-24-2-Hangar-v1-1-1-1

If you give FAR/NEAR a bit of time, it shouldn't take too long to adapt. Don't be afraid to abuse F5/F9 while you're doing it; think of it as simulator training. Feel free to use the "rate this thread" thingie up top, BTW.

I'd highly recommend RCS Build Aid for aspiring spaceplane engineers. Apart from making it vastly easier to balance your linear RCS ports properly, it is very useful to be able to view CoM and DCoM (dry centre of mass, i.e. after the fuel is gone) at the same time. Try to keep the distance between CoM and DCoM below one metre; spreading your fuel load laterally rather than longitudinally will help with this, as will focussing the bulk of the fuel mass as close as possible to DCoM. Have the CoL overlapping but not in front of the rearmost of the two CoM's. Arrange your fuel lines to drain the rearmost tanks first, so that any in-flight CoM movement doesn't put CoL in front of CoM. If that happens, your plane will try to fly backwards. With the RCS ports (not counting Vernors, those are for aerobatics and high-altitude stability, not docking), you want them balanced well enough that the torque is below 1kNm; your SAS can compensate for that easily. If you're building with SP+ (which everyone will be soon, if the guesses about the upcoming mod-integration announcement are right), the small cargo bay is very useful for hiding SAS units, batteries and other non-aerodynamic bits. Strut if things are flexing or breaking, but don't overdo it or your part count will explode.

With both of the solid booster planes, I engineered them so that the divergence between CoM and DCoM was <1m. CoL is just off the back of the rearmost of CoM/DCoM. They're perfectly stable, fuelled or empty, and I've taken them both to orbit to make sure they perform (see pics). This doesn't mean that they're sensible, though. Anyone flying them in FAR with aerodynamic failures on will have to be very careful with their manoeuvring while the rockets are lit if they don't want to tear the wings off. Even flying in a straight line is dangerous if you do it at too low an altitude. I built them just to see if it could be done. The Munacy needs at least one of the SRBs lit to get off the runway; the Komet (name inspired by the Me163, obviously; the K-syndrome was just a happy coincidence) can take off with just aerospikes and RAPIERs, and you can turn the aerospikes off once you're in the air. They're both very heavy planes to start with (you'll notice the wings sag a bit when they first hit the runway), but a huge percentage of the mass is solid rocket fuel. Once the boosters are used up, they're actually quite light and nimble. I'd be interested to see what is the max speed someone can get them to while remaining in atmosphere. See if you can crank them up to high speed and altitude before you light the boosters and let me know how it goes.

Is the Komet insufficiently crazed for your tastes? Are you a stock parts purist? Come and kick the tyres on the Kerbodyne Munacy. No test drives without a down payment (life insurance policies accepted). All stock, no mods required. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/xq442v2xb16uuvl/Kerbodyne%20Munacy.craft

We need an open fireplace to stick in the background as well. Hey, it gets cold in space.

Decided that your Kerbodyne Goblin is too sedate and sensible? Then you need a Kerbodyne Komet. The pictures speak for themselves. Fly at your own risk. Requires Spaceplane Plus and FAR/NEAR. Craft file available at https://www.dropbox.com/s/7uqozdd2o9d1i8s/Kerbodyne%20Komet.craft

Likewise. I've been using rovers as nav beacons, mostly just because it's easier to drive them into place then get a Kerbal out to plant a flag. And with the rovers, you can mount spotlights on them for visual cues without labels. For instrument landings, swap your target between the two end-of-runway beacons. If they're both at 90° (or 270° if you're coming from the other way), then you know that you're in line.

That's my guess, too. Having it out there does kinda highlight how much better the stock bits could be. C7's work was great for the time, but things have moved on since then. If so, let's hope it gets expanded at the same time (bigger cargo bays? Pleeeeeeze?). Ain't nothing wrong with SP+, I just want more of it.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/86419-0-24-2-NEAR-A-Simpler-Aerodynamics-Model-v1-1-1-7-25-14

There's something going wrong somewhere; they work just fine for me (FAR, many delta-based designs in both stock and SP+, e.g.: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread). Maybe Module Manager issues? Can you give us screenshots of an identical plane with stock vs SP+ deltas? It might confirm whether your problem is restricted to SP+ or is a broader issue. EDIT: semi ninja'd...

No idea if this would work in Kerbal, particularly in stock aero (I'm a FAR person), but the only way to do it in reality is with a "corkscrew". Angled wings aimed upwards but perpendicular to each other and a very rapid spin in the appropriate direction.

And, of course, for extra difficulty that often requires extreme solutions to overcome: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/84689-0-24-%2A-Realism-Overhaul-ROv6-0-Alpha-10-Update-11-August-2014 and http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/55145-0-24-2-Real-Solar-System-v7-1-7-27-14 Probably more giant tanks than you want, though. If you're having fun blasting aircraft through atmosphere at ridiculous speed, have a go at http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90354-Spaceplane-speed-challenge-shortest-elapsed-time-from-runway-to-orbit

Should be easy to test: put stock deltas on in SPH, screenshot, replace with SP+ deltas, compare.

Ain't my fault if folks want to fly in soup. If you've got aerodynamic issues and you haven't installed Ferram, you've only got yourself to blame.

Depends; stock aero, NEAR or FAR? Screenshots of the plane with CoM/CoL/CoT indicators on would help.

Yes, it would be nice if we had some other planet available that could support human life. If we had the option of establishing a viable self-sufficient colony on some other planet or in orbit, it would probably be a sensible thing to do, if only as insurance against an unexpected comet. But there isn't. It sucks, but that's just the way it is, and wishful thinking won't change that. The universe is unforgiving like that; it doesn't care what humans want or believe. This world is the only human-friendly planet that we have for the foreseeable future. It's not the sort of problem that you can solve by throwing money at it, either. Yeah, if we committed an insane amount of resources, we could probably keep a handful of humans alive on Mars. But they wouldn't be self-sufficient, and that makes them useless as an insurance policy: shortly after Earth dies, so do they. Plus you'd probably lose the entire settlement several times over while we worked out the bugs. Resupply missions won't prevent that; the nature of survival in space is such that you usually can't wait around six months for the supply ship to show up with the parts you need. When stuff goes wrong in space, you've often only got minutes or seconds to deal with it before you're all dead. The problems of the Plymouth colony (almost wiped out) or the Viking settlements in Greenland (were wiped out) are trivial compared to the hazards of Mars. The problems we face on Earth are solvable; the difficulty isn't the technical ability, it's organising the political will to do so. Overpopulation is not a problem; gratuitous wastage of resources is the problem. It is entirely within our ability to feed, house and educate every human on the planet today. We just choose not to do so. It turns out that Malthus [1] was wrong; Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution [2] saw to that. The idea that population growth inevitably outstrips the food supply failed to account for the impact of technological advancement on agricultural productivity. This process didn't stop with Borlaug's development of dwarf wheat; it's continuing with the development of GM crops [3], hydroponics, cell-culture meat and other technologies. The idea that population growth is inevitable and endless just isn't supported by the facts. See https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies for some entertainingly presented data. Basically, as soon as you extend education and civil rights to women, reduce infant mortality and make birth control available, birth rates drop to around about replacement level. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that most women prefer not to have fifteen children if they're given the choice. Current projections see the human population levelling off around about the close of the 21st century. Comets, if we survive long enough to see the next big one coming, will have to be dealt with by interception and diversion. This actually isn't that hard; the tricky bit is seeing them in time, particularly the long-period comets from the Oort cloud, because they can come in from all sorts of weird angles and are unexpected by definition. This is yet another reason not to waste our resources on manned space flight. We desperately need 360° coverage by dedicated comet-hunting orbital telescopes. But comets, mega-volcanoes and such are black swan events that are a relatively low risk in the near future. The biggest threat facing humanity today is climate change, by a very large margin. If you aren't terrified by the climate situation, then you don't understand it. As with famine, poverty and ignorance, we have the technological ability to solve this problem [4]; what we lack is the political will to do so. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution [3] There are genuine problems linked to GM, but they're all to do with intellectual property and profiteering bastardry by some large biotech corporations. The bulk of anti-GM scaremongering is anti-scientific nonsense. [4] Well, we did if we'd got onto it back in the 1980's when we should have. The best thing we can hope for now is to try and minimise the damage and hope that the worst-case scenarios don't come true. This is not a good bet; so far, the trend has been that the nasty side of the error bars is the situation that comes to pass. For the last thirty years, if you want to find out what the future held, what you should've done was listened to the climate researchers who were being dismissed as hyperbolic scaremongers at the time. They've been right almost every time. There's been a lake at the north pole during summer for ten years, and the Siberian methane clathrates are bubbling to the surface as we speak. In a sane world, we would have shut down the coal industry twenty years ago.

I figure that the cupola is for IVAs from your space station or rover rather than during ascent. Not much of an IVA view when you're pointing straight up anyway.

Fortunately, there's a node on top. Decoupler + nosecone.

Committed to stock-part planes? Wish you had a heavy tanker like the Spaceplane Plus crew? You need a Kerbodyne Pteranodon. Keep it to about a 30° climb so you can build some speed before you get into the stratosphere. Flick the Vernors on (Action group 0) to help lift the nose during liftoff, but keep them off from then on until it's time to burn oxidiser. All stock; no mods required. Craft file available at https://www.dropbox.com/s/2lzdhljgvsn0mk5/Kerbodyne%20Pteranodon.craft

Not universally; you should have seen some of the epic flamewars on the Mensa and rec.arts.sf usenet groups back in the day. Clever doesn't always mean nice, and a smart douchebag is worse than a dumb one.

No idea about deadly reentry, but I've managed to launch some fairly ridiculous things with FAR installed. I find that with the more ungainly stuff you need to be very careful on your gravity turn; don't even think about approaching 45° pitch until you're well out of the lower atmosphere or the top-heavy drag will mess you up, and pitch over very gradually when you do. You can make up some of the loss of the delayed gravity turn by making the circularisation burn a smooth part of the launch. Once you're up into the almost-zero drag stratosphere, even unruly rockets can be set to 0° pitch without much problem. Just hold the "time to apoapsis" at about 10 seconds until you've got your periapsis above 70k.

Thank you thank you thank you; muchas gracias. Enjoy your family visit, if that's a thing that's possible.