Wanderfound

At least you're not alone: Kurt made the same mistake. http://youtu.be/vBTkZ8EWRa8 As he says, always read the contract.

I'm kinda amused by the idea of Kerbal Laboratory Simulator. Research labs blow up plenty often already (uni labs tend to have OH&S standards on par with a Chinese coal mine; I saw several researchers blasted or poisoned into hospital during my time as a scientist); adding Kerbals to the mix should produce something akin to Terry Pratchett's alchemists.

Are you running TAC-LS? The life support clock starts as soon as you reach physics range, IIRC. Take too long and you'll have an uncontrollable ex-Kerbal.

Congratulations on launching your first SSTO spaceplane. Don't feel bad about the panels; my first one hit the runway so hard on landing that pieces of the resulting debris made it to the ocean...

Your CoL is a whisker in front of your CoM. It's not surprising that it's responding well to inputs: that's what a forward CoL does. The further forward it is, the more agile the plane is; the further back, the more stable. The reason why you want CoL behind is that CoM is the inflection point where "agile" rapidly starts to become perpetually unstable. When CoL is in front of CoM, any diversion from straight flight gets amplified in a positive feedback loop, and eventually the plane flips backwards. When CoL is behind CoM, any diversion gets gradually damped out and the nose returns to the prograde vector. You got away with it for a bit because you only had CoL a tiny bit in front of CoM and the (unrealistically powerful) torque from the SAS was probably able to partially compensate. But you were riding it on the edge, so as soon as things got tricky the torque was overwhelmed.

They didn't, though. The thrust reported by the NASA team is much lower than the original version. My money's on an experimental cockup (for NASA; I wouldn't be shocked to hear that the original was straight up fraud). The dubious result from the control should have been enough to kill any publication at least until it was replicated properly. Science by press release is immensely dodgy; the NASA crew should shortly be receiving a well-deserved spanking.

While Fuzzy's manner certainly justifies the tone of the responses he's getting, there is (or at least was) a known "can't dock" bug: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/78863-FIX-Dock-Undocking-Bug-in-0-23-5?p=1145499&viewfull=1#post1145499 I got hit with it repeatedly in .23, and it was as frustrating as all hell. Spending forty minutes repeatedly attempting to nudge an ungainly jumbo fuel tanker into a space station only to eventually realise that the port is malfunctioning was severely not fun. I haven't seen it happen since the release of .24, though.

And, yeah: as shallow as possible on reentry. Keep your nose a bit above the horizon the whole way down. Don't dive.

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.

I'm running KSP on an old and rather battered laptop. I get half a dozen "hardware failures" every mission.

Could be a ship design problem, could be a piloting problem. If you like, have a go with this: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/89092-Kerbodyne-Scattershot-a-simple-and-easy-to-fly-beginner-s-SSTO-spaceplane That plane can certainly get to orbit with ease (under FAR, anyway; haven't tested it with stock aero). I designed it specifically as an easy-to-fly trainer. Get to 20,000m as fast as possible, then level off and crank it up to Mach 4 while you slowly climb. By the time you hit 30,000m, you want your climb rate to be around 10m/s and your angle of attack as low as possible. Shut off either the turbojet or the RAPIERs once the air supply gets low; don't let the RAPIERs switch to closed cycle yet (use action group 2 to shut them down if they do, action group 3 to switch modes). Keep the shut-down engines off until you can't accelerate or climb any more (should be somewhere a little over 30,000m/Mach 4.5), then pull the nose up to 45 degrees, switch the RAPIERs to closed cycle, activate all engines and go to space. Flick the RCS on if the handling gets squirrelly (worth doing in advance as a precaution just before you start the final oxidising burn) or if you need to recover from a mistake, but keep it off otherwise. Your apoapsis should hit 70,000m with the tanks still half-full in less than a minute of oxidising burn if you're flying right.

My cargo bays tend to either have a rocket nosecone at the front or are shielded by a Procedural Fairing (no, not stock, but not a spaceplane parts kit either). And the FAR menu accessed from the space centre screen allows you to tweak which parts suffer drag, how much drag they suffer, whether that drag is affected by orientation and whether that part shields its contents or not. But, as usual, each to their own. I like the challenge of making something usable from stock bits, but that doesn't mean anyone else has to.

I fly spaceplanes almost exclusively, and I don't use B9 (just downloaded Spaceplane Plus today, but I don't expect to use it much; sure, they're pretty, but all your planes end up looking kinda the same if you use those parts). While a stock cargo bay would certainly be a sensible addition, it isn't that hard to build your own from parts. And the standard control surfaces work just fine. If you're having trouble controlling your plane or the control surfaces are tearing off, the problem is in the design, not the parts. Mod-kit planes are like putting together a Lego model according to the instructions. Stock part planes are like being given a bucket full of random blocks and making something new and cool.

The core of the idea appears to be making the tech progression more realistic. Parachutes date back to Leonardo Da Vinci.

Doesn't happen to me; it may be worth posting a report in the support thread.

TAC-LS is fun but fairly cruisy; a standard size life support container will supply a few Kerbals for about a year, and once you move up the tech tree you unlock recycling gizmos that let you turn waste back into supplies. The real killer is running out of electricity; it drains constantly due to the need to run the heating and CO2 scrubbers, and it isn't really possible to pack on enough batteries for more than a day or so. Stay within low Kerbin orbit until you unlock solar panels.

There are more efficient and elegant ways to do this, but for a simple version that works: A big enough booster to get into orbit + a high efficiency rocket (LV909, LV-N, Poodle) with enough extra fuel for a couple thousand m/s of Delta-V. Get into a 100x100 equatorial orbit, wait for the Mun to appear on Kerbin's horizon, burn prograde until you get an intercept. Send an unmanned probe first (with solar panels or a lot of batteries) if Kerbal fatalities bother you. You'll almost certainly mess it up the first few times; all part of the fun.

I'd be putting my money on experimental error, actually. It's rather reminiscent of that FTL "discovery" from a few years ago; that one turned out to be a miscalibrated fibre optic lead. (another GURPSist here, BTW; loves me a bit of Banestorm)

Don't get too excited, folks: http://space.io9.com/a-new-thruster-pushes-against-virtual-particles-or-1615361369/1615513781/+rtgonzalez

It depends in part on your definitions of "airhogging", "efficient" and "silly"; you can get a 100+ ton payload up with something that still looks like a real plane. I generally limit myself to one airscoop/nacelle combo per engine (not as limiting as it sounds, as I usually shut down as many engines as possible and concentrate the air once I'm at 30,000m; this gives the D7's pair of turbos eight ram/nacelle combos to draw on), and make up the slack with radials if necessary. But yes, there is a performance tradeoff for aesthetics and realism. I'm happy to pay it; not everyone is, and that's all cool. One of the greatest strengths of KSP is its open sandbox nature. Everybody gets to play the game that they want to play, not the game that some marketing wanker thinks you should play. - The other reason for setting your intakes to a few action groups is that this allows you to use them as air brakes during reentry. Open intakes to slow down, close intakes to speed up. They have a dramatic influence on drag.

The other option is to build the wings around the engines, as the D7 does it: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/88628-Kerbodyne-D7-Heavy-X5-a-heavy-lift-SSTO-spaceplane

If you're attaching directly to wings, you could use pylons. Or, if they're close to centreline, attach them to the fuselage instead. Turn off angle snap and use the rotation controls and you should be able to get them where you want them. Be careful of off-centre thrust, though.

Tried 'em with post-nerf FAR? Fuel efficiency is still high, but Ferram halved the power.

While I'm not disagreeing that this isn't how it should be: have you tried it with ye olde test pilot trick of spin recovery parachutes?

"Adequately stable" is in the eye of the pilot, of course, but as others have said your problem is most likely poor design. There's also the point that even a well-designed spaceplane is likely be not quite as nimble as an equivalent conventional plane, simply because it's burdened with the extra mass of equipment required for space. Also keep in mind the relative speeds involved: conventional planes don't spend a lot of time at the edge of hypersonic like spaceplanes do. Give this one a go: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/89092-Kerbodyne-Scattershot-a-simple-and-easy-to-fly-beginner-s-SSTO-spaceplane I designed it with the intention of making something decent looking but easy to fly into orbit; if you struggle with this plane, it's likely that your piloting needs some work as well.