Wanderfound

I'd call it a reentry glider, personally. Which reportedly flew like a brick.

Depends on when you go. You don't have to wait for launch windows; it's just more efficient to do so. Have a play with this: http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/

I also play with FAR; with the right plane and piloting, you can get beyond 2,000m/s and 30,000m on turbojets alone, without the need for more than a couple of intakes (I normally use one nacelle/ramscoop combo per engine). Once you get your altitude high enough, it only takes a tiny amount of thrust to continue slowly accelerating. Climb slow, minimise your angle of attack, throttle back and shut down as many engines as possible (I generally build with an odd number of engines to avoid having to worry about asymmetric flameouts; at extreme altitude, the central turbojet is the only one left running). Give it a try; build yourself a basic plane with a single turbojet, a couple of ramscoops and a pair of delta wings. See what's the absolute maximum speed and altitude you can get out of it while you circumnavigate Kerbin. It will take some time to get there, but you'll be surprised at how much piloting influences flameout altitudes.

Minmus has perfect runways: the greater and lesser flats. Better than KSC. FAR does affect rockets, but in a good way: it makes aerodynamics matter. With FAR, nosecones and fairings are actually functional, instead of being the counterproductive cosmetic pieces that they are in stock. You do need to adapt your builds and flying style to FAR's more realistic aero, though. No more pancake rockets and no more "straight up to 10,000m then immediately slam it to 45°". Try that under FAR and you'll flip, break your rocket in half, or both. As with aircraft, you need to keep your nose fairly close to the velocity vector and turn gradually; start gently nosing over immediately after liftoff and gradually increase your lean over the first 15,000m of the ascent. I'd strongly recommend trying FAR/NEAR if you're getting into spaceplanes; if you don't like it, it's easy to switch back. Spaceplanes are even more fun when they actually behave like real planes.

Stick a few Vernors on the bottom, balanced around the CoM; they should be enough for a VTOL Mun landing. A few of the smallest radials would also do the trick. You can do a rolling landing on the Mun, but it's tricky and you'll have trouble finding a sufficiently flat landing strip.

Disagree. The air at 10,000m is still too thick for serious speed, and if your jets are flaming out below 25,000m then there's something seriously wrong with either your plane or your piloting. A well flown and built non-airhogging plane should be able to reach 30,000m before it chokes. Just below 20,000m is where I usually level off; ~35,000m is where I typically start burning oxidiser. Or shut down some engines, or throttle back a bit, or reduce your angle of attack.

Important question: are you using stock aero, NEAR or FAR?

TAC-FB feels a bit cheaty to me. Set up your tanks and fuel lines right and you don't need it.

Depends on what you mean by "better". Chutes are easier to land safely, wings are easier to land at KSC. It's KSP; do whatever is most fun for you.

Haven't looked at the download, but you deserve credit just for "I made a thing". That's the true Kerbal spirit.

Get into a low orbit. Accelerate. You'll end up in a higher orbit. Higher = faster. Higher is slower relative to ground but faster relative to a universal reference frame.

I don't have any trouble with it; although a low circular orbit has a higher speed relative to the ground, it's actually a lower orbital velocity than a high orbit. The only real issue with very low orbits is that there's no room "underneath", so you always need to raise your orbit above the station and let it catch up to you, instead of dropping into a lower orbit and chasing it down. That isn't much of a problem over the Mun, because the orbital period is so short that the station will catch up fairly quickly even if it starts just ahead of you. I typically launch my lander into a 8x8km orbit, match inclinations and then set a prograde manoeuvre that puts me within a couple hundred metres of the station the first time the lander comes back to the site of the prograde burn.

No atmosphere; 1m above the surface is a stable orbit. The only reason to raise it to 8,000m is that you're at risk of running into the side of a mountain if you don't.

If they're stations designed to be visited (refuelling depots and orbital labs) I usually place them equatorial and as low as possible (so, 70,000m over Kerbin and just over 8,000m at the Mun). If they're survey satellites designed to take science readings over an assortment of biomes, I use a polar orbit instead. The low altitude Mun station (lab/lander/fuel tank) is getting a lot of use; the attached lander can pop down to the surface and back while expending very little fuel. I just wait until I'm almost over the landing site I want, decouple and burn retro for a descent with very little thrust wasted fighting gravity. I usually get the horizontal velocity zeroed at about 1,000m above the surface and then give it a quick vertical burst in the last couple of hundred metres. You do need to be a bit careful not to clip the crater lips on the way down, though.

I have no idea of how it's happening, but it's a fact that as soon as I installed ATM everything went wonky, and as soon as I uninstalled it everything went back to normal. The space station one was particularly weird; it's an orbital fuel depot that doesn't even have an engine and the RCS was off. Time warp and it freezes as normal, but as soon as you come out of warp it begins to rotate on the long axis, and the rotation keeps accelerating until you turn the SAS on which gradually damps it out. Turn the SAS off, and it all starts again. May be a weird interaction happening somewhere; there are a dozen or so mods in play on my game (nothing too wild; FAR, TAC-FB/LS, KAC, Proc Fairings, EVA Parachutes, Enhanced Navball, Spaceplane Plus, Editor Extensions, Mechjeb, EVE with a basic low-res pack; I think that's all).

Climb and dive, levelling out at the appropriate altitude, with a fairly low-drag design. Pure air-breathers can crack 2,000m/s at altitude, and you can hang onto that speed for a fair time when you come back down. But yeah, there are complications however you do it. All part of the fun.

Possible culprit: I recently installed Active Texture Management and then had to uninstall it as it was making all of my craft behave in very strange ways (oscillating rolls on aircraft, space stations tumbling end over end for no reason unless I kept SAS on, etc.). I use FAR rather than NEAR, but it may be worth trying without ATM if you have it installed.

Atmospheric jet aircraft + an action group used to detach the parachute immediately after deployment. The ones that give me trouble are the high and slow ones; it's hard to fly a plane to 30,000m at subsonic speeds.

Nice plane; glad I was able to help.

I think I did get carried away by rhetoric a touch. It's certainly possible to come up with creative designs using B9 or Spaceplane Plus parts; they just don't force creativity on you the way that the stock parts tend to. I think the Lego analogy still stands, but with the added caveat that you're free to ignore the instruction booklet no matter which parts you're using.

That also works, but I was thinking of something that was generated with a periapsis of 65,000m or so. Slow aerobraking. I'd like there to be some missions with a sense of urgency to them.

I've tended to strap them onto my spaceplanes to do on the way to orbit [1]. Getting a spaceplane up to orbital speed and altitude can get a bit repetitive; having something to do on the way mixes it up a bit. [1] Including this interesting one: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/87950-Testing-times

Whereas I'd prefer exactly the opposite. I want a contract that requires me to test a booster while pulling more than three but less than five negative G's between eight and nine hundred metres off the deck at a speed just below Mach 1; that would be a challenge. But really, what we need is all of the above. Testing contracts, exploration contracts, rescue contracts, easy contracts, hard contracts. The more diversity the better; something for all tastes and all experience levels.

Yup. There have been plenty of complaint posts about the test contracts (and also plenty of approving posts), and they've tended to fit it into a few categories. (1) "I think they're boring": not everyone agrees with you, and this is why none of the contracts are compulsory. (2) "They're unrealistic": no they aren't. See the test pilot post above. (3) "I can't do them right": it's KSP. Things are supposed to take a bit of thought and planning, and probably fail horribly the first time you try. Also see point 1. I'm not seeing any good reason to kill the testing contracts. Personally, I find the "rescue a Kerbal" contracts both unrealistic (where's his spaceship?) and dull (they're all in the same stable, circular, equatorial orbits). Kerbal rescue contracts present zero challenge to anyone who is comfortable with orbital rendezvous. I've skipped all of the rescue missions after doing the first few; they don't provide any science, I have no need for more √, and there are plenty of Kerbonaut candidates waiting on the ground. For me, they're about as exciting as driving to work. But I don't want them pulled from the game; many people do like them, and they provide a useful easy introduction to orbital rendezvous. Now if they tweaked them up a bit, then they might get interesting for me. What I'd like to see are "rescue the out-of-fuel spacecraft before it crashes into Kerbin", with the targets coming in from all sorts of directions and speeds. Think about the challenge of snagging an out of control spacecraft coming in at crazy high velocity while returning from Duna or somesuch. Some could be Kerbals on EVA, some could be spacecraft with docking ports, some could be spacecraft without docking ports (extra fun if you don't have the Klaw yet), some could be atmosphere-grazing satellites in decaying orbits, etc. The contract system will work best if they include the widest possible variety of contracts, with a wide range of difficulty levels. Something for everybody, and everyone gets to focus on whichever bit of gameplay is most fun to them. That's the Kerbal way.

Siphoned off by gas-mining Vogons.