Wanderfound

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/88628-Kerbodyne-D7-Heavy-X5-a-heavy-lift-SSTO-spaceplane All stock parts, ~40 ton to orbit and back for about √5,000 (just an example, I get that you'd like to design your own). The idea that SSTO spaceplanes are restricted to light payloads is a myth.

Hard to tell with the low-res, but it looks to me like the ports on the station are installed backwards.

I'm not sure what Slashy was getting at, actually. But I generally don't tilt my main wing section, so if there is an issue it wouldn't have come up for me.

Dihedral means that the wings are angled up; the tip is higher than the root. Anhedral means that the wings are angled down; the tip is lower than the root. Either of these will affect the banking/rolling (rotation around the longitudinal axis) behaviour of the plane. Dihedral promotes stability; the plane will naturally tend to return to level flight after banking. Anhedral promotes agility; the plane will bank rapidly, and tend to keep rolling once it gets going. Setting anhedral or dihedral on wings will also affect the height of the CoL. Dihedral raises it, anhedral lowers it. If you look at the plane I linked to upthread, there is a substantial amount of anhedral on the canards (the little wings on the nose). This was done partly for aesthetics, but also to compensate for the raised CoL caused by the high-wing design. The tail also functions slightly as a dihedral wing, due to the fact that the rudders aren't perfectly vertical.

How to fly a spaceplane to orbit: 1) Get to 20,000m however you like. Around a 45 degree climb is probably most fuel efficient, but jet engines use so little fuel that it doesn't matter much. If the plane has enough power, I usually climb at 75 degrees or so just to get it done quickly. 2) When you get to 20,000m, level off and build some speed. You want to pile on as much horizontal velocity as possible while you make a slow ascent to 30,000m. Keep your angle of attack (the angle between where your nose is pointing and the direction in which the plane is actually moving, shown by the prograde marker when in surface mode) and climb rate low; by the time you hit 30,000m, they should both be around 10 or so. A low angle of attack reduces drag and helps your intakes work better. The low angle makes you climb slower, but that's okay; you need that time to get up to speed. As you go faster, the angle of attack required to maintain a given climb rate reduces, but as you go higher, the thinner air means that the angle of attack required to maintain a given climb rate increases. If you do it right, these two factors will roughly balance each other out and you should gain the necessary speed and altitude in a single smooth climb. However, a plane with some aerodynamic or piloting flaws may need to bounce up and down between 20,000 and 30,000m a couple of times while building speed before the final push. 3) Somewhere between 20,000m and 35,000m (exactly when depends on both plane and piloting), you'll start to run short of air. Don't switch to rockets immediately. If you've got multiple engines going, shut some down to concentrate the available oxygen into the ones you keep running. If you've already shut down as many as you can, throttle back a bit. You can dramatically increase your jet-only altitude by doing this, and once you get up to serious height the thin atmosphere means that you only need a tiny amount of thrust to accelerate. 4) Keep this going for as long as your plane and your patience can tolerate. A well-built and -flown plane should be able to get over Mach 4.5 and 30,000m in a single attempt on jets alone. Once you've wrung as much speed and altitude out of the jets as possible (you want at least Mach 4 and 30,000m), force the nose up to 45 degrees and light the rockets. If you have both jets and rockets, don't shut down the jets immediately; the thrust of the rockets will drive a ram-air effect that kicks the jets back into life for a while. Keep the rockets burning until your apoapsis exceeds 70,000m, then shut off and coast until it's time to circularise. Point prograde and close your intakes while coasting to minimise drag. A good plane and pilot should be able to get the apoapsis to 70,000m with less than a minute of rocket power. Done properly, it requires very little fuel. But if you try to brute-force it from lower speeds and altitudes, the atmospheric drag is going to drain your oxidiser tanks before you get anywhere near orbit. If you're having trouble with design rather than piloting, give http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/89092-Kerbodyne-Scattershot-a-simple-and-easy-to-fly-beginner-s-SSTO-spaceplane a try.

5m/s isn't docking, it's ramming. If you can't get it down to below 0.5m/s you've got no chance. Ideally, you want to be moving at 0.1m/s at the moment of contact. See http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/89294-Rondevousing-ness-ity?p=1326300&viewfull=1#post1326300 for how to do it.

We need more detail. Screenshots, preferably. What speed, what angle, what size ship, what mods, are your docking ports installed correctly, etc. If you have the docking ports lined up, the ship in line with the port, you approach at less than 0.3m/s and turn off your SAS when you get close, it should connect. RCS makes it easier, but it isn't absolutely necessary. Similarly, aids like the Lazor Docking Cam aren't necessary, but they do simplify things.

Incidentally, for an example of the prettyness made possible by the mod packs (Spaceplane Plus in this case):

Don't forget to hit "R" to activate the rescuee's jetpack.

PS: be careful with low wing designs. CoL lower than CoM = unstable. Use a raised tailplane to compensate.

Place your wings vertically on top or bottom then use ASDQWE to rotate them (in 90° increments; if you hold Alt, they'll move in 5° steps instead). Disabling angle snap may also be useful for fine-tuning position. See http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/89092-Kerbodyne-Scattershot-a-simple-and-easy-to-fly-beginner-s-SSTO-spaceplane for an example.

While it should be obvious that there's a bit of a fundamental difference in design philosophies between me and Slashy (), I should point out that my advice is based on the assumption that FAR is in play. Aesthetic design has much less influence under stock aero. And, as always: build whatever you want. It's a game; so long as you're having fun then you're doing it "right".

Very keen to see this; the stock gear is inadequate for large cargo planes. A larger and stronger set of gear would be very useful.

I find flying in FAR easier than stock, because it makes planes actually fly like planes. And my doctorate is in psychopharmacology, not aeronautics. But, as you say: each to their own. One of the great strengths of KSP's sandbox nature and the modding community is that everyone gets to play the game that they want to play.

Incidentally, the early models of the KTM Duke (the first production supermotard; basically a motorcross bike with street racing tyres and suspension) had a tacho that was marked in BPM: beats per minute. Doof doof doof.

Eh? All of my big stuff is lifted by spaceplane in pieces and assembled in orbit. Wobbly docking clamps aren't a problem if you make a tug that can pull instead of push. Wagon train to the stars...

You've just re-invented the recoilless rifle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recoilless_rifle They have some uses, but they also have plenty of disadvantages.

FAR makes planes fly rather than swim. Never going back.

If you install the Crowd-sourced Science Logs mod, does it affect the sandbox?

I've been reading the GURPS forums for too long. Whenever I see "RPM" I read it as "Ritual Path Magic". Keep this quiet, or I'll be thrown out of the International Brotherhood of Bikers; I should be reading it as "revolutions per minute".

Streamline, streamline, streamline, and come in shallow and nose-first. My Mun/Minmus landers these days have aerodynamic nosecones and heavy strut reinforcement, and I never pop the chutes until I'm thoroughly subsonic. A couple of cautious aerobraking passes aren't a bad idea either.

Okeydoke; sorry for that.

And a general design tip: if you're trying to build a hypersonic spaceplane, make something that looks like a hypersonic spaceplane. Aircraft are shaped the way they are for a reason.

Gotta say again, though: give FAR a try. If you don't like it, getting rid of it just takes a single click. Incidentally, Mechjeb is very useful for flight data even if you never use the autopilots. Climb rate, angle of attack, total drag, air available/required, current thrust; you can have all of this data constantly available. And it isn't "cheating"; it's been a hundred years since anyone flew a plane without decent instrumentation.

Yup, a flag or parked rover on each end of the runway works nicely as a navigation beacon. But without them: KSP is on the east coast of the continent that vaguely resembles Africa.