Wanderfound

A similar size design will work without the canards, but it makes it about as much fun to fly as the real thing (i.e. it flies like a brick, but you can glide it to a high-speed landing if you judge your reentry just right and don't try anything fancy). Adding the canards makes it much more user friendly.

You're a bit caught in the middle there; that's a Mk3 size ship built out of Mk2 parts. The Mk2 parts have nice aerodynamics, but they aren't very efficient from a mass POV; a Mk2 fuselage holds exactly as much fuel as a 1.25m rocket tank of the same length, but is heavier. You do want nukes for a long-haul ship, but you have to build to accomodate them. This means lots of pure LF tankage; you should be carrying just enough oxidiser to lift your apoapsis out of the atmosphere, before shutting down the high-TWR rocketry and using the nukes to circularise. And not too many nukes; they're heavy. Self-sufficient long range ships don't need to be huge. You can do them in a Mk2 airframe if you're willing to tolerate the inefficient small ISRU converter: Or you can go big (this one's a bit old, I'd set up the intakes a little differently today): Remember, if you're carrying ore tanks, you can launch with them full then process the ore into LF for your nuke once you're in orbit. Major issues with ISRU ships are power generation and cooling. You need a bunch of the mobile panels, plus usually a fair amount of fuel cells. A couple of small radiators for cooling is usually plenty. If you're planning on landing off-world, you need to build for it. Wide and long wheelbase landing gear plus drag chutes for atmospheric worlds; Vernor VTOL for low-g airless landing. Also, though: don't aim to have huge range after reaching LKO. Aim to have maximum range after refuelling in LKO. Set up an orbital gas station, keep it filled with spaceplane tankers. Without an LKO refill, you're inevitably hauling masses of empty tanks across the solar system. If you manage to hit LKO with 2,000m/s delta-V (not too hard, the demo ships above do it) you can skip the orbital refuel; just land on Minmus and start mining. That's a lot of time and hassle just to avoid having a basic space station around Kerbin, though. It also looks like you're burning a bit more fuel than you should thanks to your ascent profile. I normally try to get my RAPIER ships up to maximum non-melted speed (about Mach 4.5) while just below 20,000m, then I climb up to the RAPIER jet ceiling (around 29,500m) before lighting any oxidising rocketry. Some ships work best with a low-AoA low-drag float to 30,000m; others prefer a sharp zoom climb from 18 to 30km, sacrificing a bit of horizontal speed in favour of some vertical momentum at switchover. In either case, though, the fireworks stay unlit until the jets choke.

It does, but you need to use the rotation tool and the mouse, not just rotate it with the keyboard.

Just beat me to it... Kerbodyne Shuttle Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/ho9fv7xmqi9g99g/Kerbodyne%20Shuttle.craft?dl=0

Kerbodyne Shuttle Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/ho9fv7xmqi9g99g/Kerbodyne%20Shuttle.craft?dl=0

Reading the forums on an iPad, selecting a thread in the Unread Threads stream always takes me to the first page of that thread (instead of the most recent replies). This happens regardless of whether I tap on the thread title or the "x number of replies" bit, requiring a second tap and loading delay to get to the most recent replies. So, suggestion: make at least one of these default to taking me to the most recent reply.

Gravity tuns are gradual. Pitch over 5-10° as soon as you leave the pad, then follow the prograde marker the rest of the way. If your ship is built right and your nose is on the prograde marker, booster separation goes smoothly: But if you keep having trouble, well, that's what Sepratrons are for:

To demonstrate a few ways to mount Junos: That's a FAR build, but the same basic concepts will work in stock aero. Jet engines don't require fuel lines, BTW; they draw evenly from all LF tanks on the ship, regardless of where they're mounted.

Seconded. The key to tricky landings is to set up your approach as low, slow and shallow as possible. Get down to a few hundred metres of altitude while you're still several km out, slow down to the minimum possible speed at which you can maintain level flight, and gradually ease it down so that you're at most twenty metres off the deck as you cross the end of the runway. Don't be afraid to wave off and go around again if the approach doesn't feel right. Practice with smaller ships first; see if you can get it so that the lip of the runway just grazes your wheels while you're flying level at extreme low altitude. Repeated touch-and-go landings (i.e. throttle up and take off again as soon as your wheels contact the ground) are good practice as well.

Look down the bottom left when you're in the SPH/VAB; there's a symbol that will be a hexagon if angle snap is on, a circle if it isn't. Clicking that will toggle between on and off.

I did see that you'd already tried some multistage designs; the point I wanted to raise is that it's easier to do one of those if you abandon jets entirely and launch with a much steeper profile than is typical for a spaceplane (notice that the apoapsis is already at 85km in the pic where I'm dropping the wingtip boosters?). If you're circularising on a very low TWR engine, you need to give yourself time to do it, and you can't afford to hang around in the draggy bits of the atmosphere. Staged airbreathing can be made to work, but it's usually harder to do one of those than a conventional airbreathing SSTO. You can get fairly extreme ΔV out of them though: Vertical-launch oxidising reentry gliders are much easier to get right than one of those, however, especially if you're going low-tech.

You need at least Panthers (and preferably Whiplashes) to build a useful airbreathing SSTO spaceplane. But if you care more about the spaceplane than the SSTO part, dump the jets entirely and build it as a reentry glider. Perhaps something like this: http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Sidewinder/story That one probably uses higher tech than you'd like, but a similar concept based on lower-tech boosters should be doable. And, if you wanted, you could even stick a Juno or two onto it just to make cruising back to base a bit easier.

Kerbodyne Panther II Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/7s9vavtyyqm2z4x/Kerbodyne%20Panther%202.craft?dl=0

Kerbodyne Panther II Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/ud888t76p9tewof/Kerbodyne%20Panther%20Twin.craft?dl=0

Kerbodyne Panther Twin Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/ud888t76p9tewof/Kerbodyne%20Panther%20Twin.craft?dl=0 (edited to correct craft file, wrong ship linked originally)

Dragchutes and retrothrusters. Design for it and you can roll to a stop within milliseconds of touchdown.

Previously, FAR provided semi-realistic aero while stock was an absolute joke. Now, stock provides semi-realistic (but extremely simplified) aero, whle FAR provides almost-flightsim aero. Stock is tolerable, and perfectly adequate for rocketry; FAR is still recommended if you're into aircraft. For FAR rocketry, you just need to remember that every atmospheric stage must have some method of maintaining stability. Usually, this means either fins or gimbal. Do that, and you can launch ridiculous things, even in FAR:

Another perspective: the tutorials have been missing or flawed for most of the history of KSP's development. Most of the players here got into the game without using them. Yes, the tutorials should be fixed. Yes, they would be a good introduction for newbies. But... A large part of the fun of KSP is based around trial-and-error discovery. Most of us here started launching rockets withut the faintest idea of how orbital mechanics work. But, after playing for a while, progress is still made, and the self-driven nature of the discoveries adds to their value. There are little discoveries all along the way: "orbit means sideways, not up?" "lower is faster?" "ooh, that's why spin stabilising works..." etc. For a lot of us, those are the best parts of the game. While I admit that the substandard tutorials are a flaw, I'd encourage you to have a bash without them. Discovery is a lot more fun than instruction, and you have a large supply of Kerbals to experiment with.

I'd be avoiding the tri-adaptors and 1.25m tanks entirely. 2.5m pod : 2.5m -> Mk3 adaptor : Mk3 LF tank : Mk3 -> 2.5m adaptor : 2.5m ->1.25m adaptor : LV-N. Omit the lower two adaptors if you don't care about engine-side aerodynamics.

Panther-based SSTO spaceplanes are certainly possible, but the payload and fuel margins are very thin. Spaceplanes become much more practical once you have the Whiplash engines. Panther: Whiplash: Those are both built for FAR, but the basic principles in stock aero are fairly similar these days.

The other factor: are you after sustained level flight at high altitudes, or efficient circumnavigation? For sustained level flight, you want lots of wing area and a very gradual climb. For efficient circumnavigation, you want minimal wings and a Silbervogel technique: zoom climb (i.e. gather speed at low altitude, then pitch up into a steep climb that takes you above your level-flight ceiling) to a suborbital altitude, then circumnavigate the planet in a series of "bounces" off the atmosphere, with your engines powered up only in the troughs of the bounce. Edit to add: just noticed the post above. Keep the nose a few degrees above prograde, so that your bounce bottoms out at a higher altitude. You may also find it useful to stick one of the small curved radiators on top of your fuselage near the wings.

BTW, as a demo of a Mun rocket that works:

Considered a ventral tailfin that you decouple just before landing? It's worked in reality... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_X-15