Wanderfound

These days I try to get the Mun and Minmus cleaned up in a couple of high-ΔV multi-biome disposable launches. Like this: OTOH, if I get a "base on Minmus" type mission, I'll usually do that by packing a nuke-equipped spaceplane with a dozen kerbals and doing a sightseeing visit. It's a handy way to make some money while training up a large crew

Monoprop fuel tanks are much more physically compact than LF/O tanks, especially if you go heavy on the radials. They're good for making very small landers and probes to fit within spaceplane cargo bays.

As others have suggested: a 1.25m based lander, a single Terrier for propulsion, no more than one of each science part (make sure to add a probe core somewhere so that it can be piloted by a Scientist, so the goo pod / Sci Jr can be reset) and around an FL-T800's worth of fuel (you can get away with half of that, but the big tank allows you to hit multiple biomes per trip). Avoid heavy luxuries. Reaction wheels are not needed, keep RCS fuel to a minimum (if you're using RCS at all; it isn't necessary), go easy on lights and solar etc. Put your refuelling station at 20km or so; not too expensive to get up to, but still enough room underneath if you need to rendezvous from behind. The highest point of the Mun is about 8,000m; anything above that is safe. OTOH, I don't usually bother with Munar refuelling these days. A single 9,000m/s ΔV launch can hit three Munar biomes or every Minmus biome. Launch two of those and your tech tree is pretty much done. So instead, I tend to rush through the Munar stuff, then send a gigantic tank of LF to Jool. Once that's in place, I can send off a RAPIER/Nuke spaceplane to hit every Joolian moon in a single trip. 9,000m/s isn't hard to hit; I'd usually do it with a lander made of 1.25m parts, with a single Terrier in the middle (under a fuel tank, Sci Jr, service bay full of science gear and the probe core, decoupler/heatshield/Mk1Pod) and four onion-staged lateral tanks designed to be decoupled on the final liftoff from the Mun (centre tank is FL-T200, outer tanks are FL-T400). Mounted on inline decouplers below those lateral tanks are a quartet of FL-T200s; these provide the fuel for the Kerbin->Mun transfer burn. Under the Terrier is a decoupler leading to a 1.25-2.5m adaptor tank, then two of the big red tanks. Under that is either a Mainsail or a Skipper and a few Thuds, and there are a few SRBs on radial decouplers for launchpad kick. Add a few struts and you're done; the main booster should run dry just as you hit Kerbin orbit. To demonstrate:

To get to the Mun: * Get into a 100x100km equatorial prograde Kerbin orbit. * Wait for Munrise. * Burn prograde at maximum throttle as soon as you see the Mun. Keep burning until your apoapsis reaches the Mun's altitude. You should now have a Munar encounter. * When you're halfway there, go to map view and double-click on the Mun to focus your view there. You should be able to see your future trajectory at Munar periapsis. * Bring up the navball and experiment with giving very, very small puffs of thrust (minimal throttle, quickly cancelled) in various directions. Watch your Munar periapsis to see how it responds to this. Use this to bring your Munar periapsis down to about 20km. * When you get to the Mun, burn retrograde at periapsis to capture and circularise your orbit. To land on the Mun: * Start with a small burn on the dark side of the Mun. Lower your periapsis to 10km. * Pick a landing spot on the light side of the Mun. As you approach it, point retrograde and light the engines. * The aim is to bring yourself to a complete halt a few hundred metres off the ground (as you get better, you can shrink this to a few dozen metres). If you're dropping too fast, aim your nose a little above retrograde. If you look like you'll come to a stop too high up, aim a little below retrograde. * Once you've stopped, drop the last bit vertically. Point retrograde, use as little thrust as possible to control your speed as you descend. Aim to touch down at below 1m/s. * A fast drop with a quick burst of full thrust at the last moment is the most fuel efficient way to do it. However, it's also the hardest to get right. Either make friends with the quicksave/quickload feature, or accept that you'll waste some fuel to gradually control the speed as you descend. To take off from the Mun: * Full throttle, tip yourself to just above the horizon and facing east immediately after takeoff. Pitch up just enough to avoid crashing into the ground. Cut the engines once your apoapsis reaches 10km, then circularise at apoapsis. To return from the Mun: * Point prograde and light the rockets when your ship is positioned directly between Kerbin and the Mun (assuming you're in a prograde orbit, which you will be if you launched eastwards). Cut the throttle when your Kerbin periapsis gets to 35km. * Dump everything except the capsule just before reentry, then ride the heatshield down. Don't open your parachute until you're safely subsonic.

A low-tech FAR option: Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/32tqilijw0igw7n/Kerbodyne%20Panther.craft?dl=0 As you can see, Panther-based SSTOs are possible, but the payload is minimal and the fuel margins are very thin. SSTO spaceplanes don't become easily practical until the Whiplash engines are available. Once you do have your Whiplashes, however, the game is yours. SSTO tankers can lift fuel to orbit at minimal cost; nuke/RAPIER spaceplanes can easily explore the entire system if refuelled in orbit and/or given small ISRU rigs.

Kerbodyne Panther Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/32tqilijw0igw7n/Kerbodyne%20Panther.craft?dl=0

Kerbodyne Panther Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/32tqilijw0igw7n/Kerbodyne%20Panther.craft?dl=0

As suggested above: replace the Terrier and LV-N with Poodles and run some stabilising struts from halfway up the core to the landing legs. I'd also add some nosecones to your SRBs, and strut the SRBs to the core. It also looks like there's nowhere near enough booster for the payload. The LV-N/Terrier/Poodle are good for orbital work, but they don't have the TWR for boosting to orbit. It looks like you're going to run out of high-TWR booster long before reaching orbit. Also: if I'm reading it right, you've never been to the Mun before? A lab is a very big and heavy payload. Go small to start with; walk before you run. Start with a minimal lander, then scale up once you get the hang of it.

Actually, it's because I always toggle the engines with action groups, so I frequently forget to look at the staging at all. That one looks like I did set it up for career players, though; staged activation works for spaceplanes when you don't have action groups to light the fireworks with.

That approach could cause problems in FAR, because forward control surfaces stall much more easily than rear mounted elevators. I've normally got moderate to high maximum deflection on the rear surfaces, with the canards set to about half of the rear deflection (and often some negative AoA setting as well). For the landing stuff, most of it's already been mentioned: 1) Make your wheelbase as long and as wide as possible. Rear gear just behind CoM. Make heavy use of the translation tool. 2) Make sure the gear are straight (use the rotate tool set to absolute mode), and make sure that the part they're mounted to doesn't flex. This usually means fuselage instead of wing, although small light craft with narrow fuselages may be best off with wing mounts. 3) Disable brakes on the front wheel, raise the brake torque to maximum on the other gear. Default brake torque is much too weak (except perhaps for front wheels on taildraggers). 4) For heavy ships, use more gear. Support the CoM. Add tailstrike guard wheels if you're in the habit of bashing the engines on the ground. 5) Drag chutes work. Place them vertically close to CoM, as close to the tail as possible. Trigger them after touchdown. 6) Retrothrusters work too. Twitch and monoprop engines are good for this. 7) Avoid steering while landing as much as possible, but stay on the runway. If you do have to steer, be ready on the roll controls to cancel any tipover. 8) Land as slow, shallow and straight as you can. Use the whole runway.

One shock cone per RAPIER is less than ideal these days; one intake per pair of engines is closer to the mark. But they have to be the right intakes. At speed, a single shock cone can supply three RAPIERs; stationary, it can just barely supply one. So, if you're running nothing but shock cones, using enough intake to keep the engines lit on the runway will result in having way more intake than you need at speed. Shock cones work best when mixed with some other intakes that can compensate for their runway weakness. You need to look at the stationary speed of the intake, the air supplied by the intake at speed, and the air required by your engines. The high-speed engines don't actually need that much air; the real air-guzzlers are the high-bypass turbofans (Goliath, Wheesley). Most intakes are specialised for high speed (e.g. shock cones) or low speed (e.g. circular intakes). Good low-speed intakes have a higher stationary speed; usually, these intakes aren't great at high speed, but there are a couple of crossovers. The most obvious of these is the intercooler; it has good high speed performance, but also sucks enough air to keep a pair of jets lit on the runway. As a rule of thumb, a shock cone is good for three jets when fast, one when slow. An intercooler will do two jets, fast or slow. This one is running a pair of Whiplashes on nothing but a single intercooler, and it'll keep the engines whirring happily up to the conventional jet ceiling: That's a FAR ship, so the flight profile shown may not work for stock (or for anything with sensible TWR in FAR; that 'un is rather overpowered), but the information re: intakes applies the same in stock or FAR.

Messing around with lower tech bits: Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/oo85ngzjqat7vv6/Kerbodyne%20Turbo%20Twin.craft?dl=0

Kerbodyne Turbo Twin Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/oo85ngzjqat7vv6/Kerbodyne%20Turbo%20Twin.craft?dl=0

1) Vectors do attach radially, although you'll need to whack a nosecone on top if you want sleek aerodynamics like the Thud. 2) Vectors and Thuds are balanced by science and funds. Thuds are a cheap low tech engine; Vectors are high tech and pricey. Thuds work very well for low-tech Whiplash spaceplanes (and Juno-powered suborbital hoppers). They're also good for lifters that are a bit too heavy for a Skipper but not heavy enough for a Mainsail, or for giving a Mainsail just a bit more kick.

Second on the Minmus recommendation. As soon as you get solar you want to be heading out of LKO, and if you can reach the Mun, you can also reach Minmus. The navigation is a bit trickier [1], but landing is much, much easier and the science rewards are 50% higher. Once you get the hang of biome-hopping, a single 9,000m/s ΔV mission can easily pull down 2,000 science. [1] Only a little bit. Either time your transfer to hit Minmus AN/DN, or just do a low-ΔV inclination correction when you're halfway there.

Yup; change it to normal cargo and you could easily lose two engines. The limiting factor is reaching takeoff speed before the runway ends [1]. If you're willing to strap some RT-10 RATOs on the wings, you can usually afford to ditch a couple of jets.y [1] You could also add more wing area, but my sense of aesthetics stops me from trying to double up the non-modular large wings.

The stock SAS is oversensitive; it's set up for rockets, not high-authority aircraft. You want Kerbal Pilot Assistant: use the included PID tuner to de-wobble your SAS. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/100073-0-25-Pilot-Assistant-0-8-Nov-24-Atmospheric-piloting-aids These settings should see most SAS-related wobble problems go away:

Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/xpxdx1egyatwz8y/Kerbodyne%20Herakles.craft?dl=0

Kerbodyne Stratotanker Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/cu5xkpw9cq0orh3/Kerbodyne%20Stratotanker.craft?dl=0

With a bit of gimbal and streamlining, you can launch chunky payloads without fins: Add some fins, and you can launch totally ridiculous things: But it's all about the gimbal. You can only get away with ungimballed thrust if it's countered by fins or gimbal elsewhere.

If you've done most of the per-biome EVA reports, you should have enough tech to get to the Mun/Minmus. A single 9,000m/s ΔV mission to Minmus can fairly easily pull in 2,000 science. However, if you need a quick science boost: parachute, probe core, science gear, RT-10, fins. Fire it off in any direction from KSC and you should be able to grab 50 science or so. Aim one at the ocean, one at the mountains, one at the desert, etc.

AoA settings cause the control surface to deflect in response to Angle of Attack. The value is a percentage of the AoA. Why this is useful is because it can greatly boost stability at extreme AoA. To do this, you would use negative AoA on forward control surfaces (e.g. canards) and/or positive AoA on rear surfaces (e.g. elevators). In effect, it gradually reduces the control surface deflection as AoA increases. Not sure about brake rudder, although at a guess it's for using opposed rudders as airbrakes on twin-tail ships.

Excessive AoA means one of three things: 1) The air is too thin; you're too high for the speed you're doing. 2) Too much wing loading; lose some weight or add some lift. 3) Too much stability. Shift some lift forwards.

These are more questions for the design thread: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/121176-Official-FAR-Craft-Repository If you post some screenshots and analyses (see http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/81848-kerbodyne-ssto-division-omnibus-thread/&do=findComment&comment=1341606 if you don't know how to do these) over there, we'll be able to help you fix your design. Wing strength is now tweakable part-by-part, and the default strength is more than enough for most circumstances. Hair-trigger wing breakage hasn't been a standard FAR thing for a long time. If you're still having those problems, there's likely to be something seriously wrong with your airframe or control surface setup.

If you're spinning, shift weight forwards. Pump some of the fuel in the rear tanks to the forward tanks before reentry. Beefing up your tailfin would help as well. If all else fails, a Vernor each side of the nose can work wonders.