Wanderfound

No luck on that front, I think. Normally-arranged mid-wing FAR designs have their CoL too far back for stock, and small-winged ships struggle for lift in stock.

The heating changes have made FAR significantly easier. You can crank up the speed a lot higher before lighting the rockets.

Yes, but it usually isn't worth the trouble. OTOH, a rocket-boosted Weasley makes a good early-game suborbital tourist ship.

Spaceplane parts are much more heat tolerant than most, and their vulnerability to heat effects substantially decreased in the recent update. You'd have to be making a deliberately suicidal reentry to have any chance of toasting one now.

Yup, just had a poke; the thrust and lift nerfs have really hurt it. It works if you do what I suggested re: wings and wheels, but not as well as it used to. It now needs a good length runway to take off, and struggles to reach any decent altitude. You could add some more wing; it could also benefit from changing to a two jet / one rocket design (basic jets in wingroot pods and an LV-T45 on the back; Mk1 LF tanks for the pods and an FL-T800 or equivalent for the main fuselage). My quick poke was enough to remind me of why I don't fly in stock, though, so I'm afraid you'll have to revise the design yourself for now.

Obligatory West Wing scene: And Blind Willie himself:

Not noticed, actually, since the only time I fly in stock is when FAR is out of action. I'll see if I can whip up something for the stock flyers, though. OTOH, any takeoff problem is likely just due to the increased weight of the Mk1 LF tank shifting the CoM forwards. Moving the rear landing gear to just behind CoM (and maybe shifting the wings forward a smidgeon) should sort it out.

I highly recommend the Anomaly Surveyor contract pack, BTW.

...which is why I once again spent four hours yesterday redownloading the entire game. This is not cool; the Patcher/Launcher problem is the sort of thing that deserved an emergency ASAP fix, not to be left unaddressed through four updates. At the very least, an in-game warning that they don't work is required.

Jet fuel consumption has doubled, but heating is much less threatening. Pull the nose down further and keep it in the high jet thrust altitudes until you're on the edge of cooking; maximise your speed before lighting the rockets.

Could be a bunch of things, but to eliminate some of the obvious ones: * How are your control surfaces set up? You should have the rudder set to yaw only, the canards to pitch only and the elevons for roll/pitch. Double-check; it's easy to accidentally set your rudder to respond to pitch controls etc. * Is the steering unlocked on your nose gear? * Is the rear gear placed just behind CoM, so you can lift the nose without overloading the tail? * Were the wings placed with mirror symmetry turned on, or did you eyeball it? * Are you flying with or without SAS engaged? A few stability derivative screens (see post #3 in the Kerbodyne thread linked below if you're unsure how to do these) would also be handy in working out the issues. One done for 500m / Mach 0.5 for starters.

Also noticed: Mk1 LF tanks no longer suck.

To counter that, Mk1 LF tanks were buffed. They're no longer the red-headed stepchild; you don't need Mk2/3 parts for efficient LF tankage anymore.

Kerbodyne Express. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/alcykezwh6ytq21/Kerbodyne%20Express.craft?dl=0

The post above provides the technical info you'll need, but for the basic concept: You know how burning prograde raises the other side of your orbit, while burning retrograde lowers it? And when you go to the Mun or Minmus, you burn so as to place your apoapsis ahead of the target, at the place it's going to be when you get there instead of the place it's at right now? And how when you leave the Mun or Minmus, you want to burn backwards along the orbital path of that moon so as to bring your periapsis in towards Kerbin (because you're burning retrograde relative to Kerbin, even though it's prograde relative to the Mun)? It's like that, just bigger, with one complication: When you're figuring out which way to aim your initial burn, you want to think of it as if Kerbin itself was the ship. So, if the planet is closer to the Sun than Kerbin (e.g. Moho), you want to leave going backwards along Kerbin's orbital path. In other words, solar retrograde. If the target is higher than Kerbin (e.g. Jool), you want to exit Kerbin burning along its orbital path: solar prograde. Kinda like what you do when you're returning from a moon, just on a bigger scale. That calculator linked above will give you phase angle and ejection angle. Phase angle is the "where it's going to be when I get there" bit. It tells you what day to do the burn on. Ejection angle is the bit that aims your escape to either solar prograde or retrograde; it tells you where in your orbit to light the rockets.

As well as the small stuff like missing parts (medium size nosegear etc): * Clouds. * Visual customisation of ships ala Kerbpaint. Colour choice should be a basic tweakable on all parts. * RPM-grade IVA instrumentation. Pretty IVAs are useless if you can't fly from them. * Main view basic info like that provided by Kerbal Flight Data or KER's HUDs. Having to switch to map view to monitor your apoapsis is ridiculous. * ÃŽâ€V data in the VAB/SPH/in flight.

A new entry for the low fast flyer contest, basic jet division: Mach 1.23, altitude 359.2cm (and increasing, showing that it's not a crash pic).

Kerbodyne Admiral. Just the thing for keeping your nuke spaceplanes supplied, wherever they are. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/afv5rhtjkhipi9s/Kerbodyne%20Admiral.craft?dl=0

No matter how you do them, ion ships are painful to fly. The TWR is just too low for anything except the intended use (i.e. ultralight long range probes). Even then, you're generally better off just making the probe a bit heavier and sticking to LFO.

I quite like this new one: Kerbodyne Dunajet II. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/0pk2n0p75sn1qv7/Kerbodyne%20Dunajet%20II.craft?dl=0

Kerbodyne Dunajet II. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/0pk2n0p75sn1qv7/Kerbodyne%20Dunajet%20II.craft?dl=0

Kerbodyne Dunajet. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/vntd4jdvei5ylls/Kerbodyne%20Dunajet.craft?dl=0

Why limit it to deltas? That doesn't add to the creativity required, it just limits the design possibilities.

It's not normally a problem. Attach the nuke to a tank with a fair bit of thermal mass, attach the wings or tailplane to that part to help with radiative cooling. The nukes are often getting a bit hot by the end of the circularisation burn (because they've been continuously lit since 20,000m), but you can just throttle down a bit at that stage if it gets worrying. That isn't usually required, though; you can run them at 90% heat without trouble.

You don't really need rover wheels; landing gear and a trickle of nuke thrust do nicely. What you can do is make a small nuke spaceplane docked to a big fuel tank, and send that to Duna. Glide down to target, rove around a bit, fly back to orbit, refuel and repeat. An amphibious Eve rover shouldn't be too hard to land with airbrakes and chutes, but making it fly probably isn't practical. You'd be pushing it through boiling soup, in pressures that high-isp vacuum engines can't handle, without jets.