Wanderfound

Piloting guide updated: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1353890&viewfull=1#post1353890

Green is good because: Each one of those numbers relates to a way in which the plane can be stable (tends to return to pointing the right way) to unstable (tends to move towards pointing the wrong way). Because of things in the math that you don't need to care about, sometimes the good side is a positive number and sometimes it is negative. The green and red show you which side of good or bad it's on; zero is always at the centre of the colour spectrum. When you hover your mouse over the numbers, you'll get a tooltip popup telling you exactly what it relates to. Interpret that, and you'll know whether it's saying "yaw problem", "roll problem", "pitch problem" or "not enough lift" problem. If it's a yaw problem, add moar tailfin or pull the CoM forwards. If it's a roll problem, add moar wingspan (or dihedral). If it's a pitch problem, move some lift away from the nose and towards the tail. If it's a lift problem, lose some weight or gain some wing. That's really all that's required for a basic plane. Because examples are helpful, have a look at http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1961865&viewfull=1#post1961865 Pull that one apart and see if you can "reverse engineer" it. If you want to understand more of the real-world "why" those things work, you're probably best off starting to dig into Wikipedia articles on aircraft. Like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihedral_(aeronautics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_wing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_rule If you go through those, don't freak out and freeze as soon as you get to a bit you don't understand; just read on and take in what you can. Then, afterwards, go back and drill down (click links etc) into any of the bits you didn't understand that you think might be interesting or important, and see if you can get your head around them then.

Fairings can help with drag in FAR, but you need to make 'em as long, skinny and pointy as you can.

Not so much faults as tweaks. 1) Why the torque wheels? You don't need them; the capsule torque is more than enough. 2) How do you have your control surfaces set up? Does it stall or flip out of control at full stick? What sort of sustained G-load can it manage in a turn? 3) Did you remember to drain the monoprop from the cockpit and the oxidiser from the Oskar B's? 4) What wing mass tweakable settings are you using? 5) Did you remember to raise the brake torque on the rear landing gear? 6) What sort of speeds is it taking off and landing at? 7) How does it go on the track? http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/123650-Kerbinside-Air-Race

If it's not for you, that's fine. But if you do want to persist with it, have a look at the third post in the Kerbodyne thread linked in my .sig below.

Not yet, no. However, the flight profile is still fairly similar, with just a few changes: 1) The altitude ceiling for jet thrust is substantially lower. Level off to crank the speed at about 13,000m instead of 20,000m. 2) You now need to manage your heat. Kerbal Flight Data is very useful for this. Accelerate until you get a little bit hot, then climb. If the KFD heat warnings go red, cut throttle and immediately climb as steeply as possible (because you're about to explode). 3) It's no longer worth the trouble to gradually shut down engines. By the time you reach an altitude where that is necessary, your jet thrust is trivial. Instead of trying to squeeze out as much altitude as possible, switch to rocket mode as soon as you lose the ability to accelerate (usually at around 25,000m or so). If you have a look at the Imgur albums of some of the recent ships, you can see the flight profile demonstrated there.

You can grind or gift yourself the Kerbin science if you want, but there is absolutely no need to. You can reach orbit with minimal tech and no building upgrades; you can reach the Mun and Minmus not long after that. Once you reach Minmus, you can grab as much science as you want. Some demonstrations:

I'm no longer a working scientist thanks to ill-health, but this is me: https://sydney.academia.edu/CraigMotbey - - - Updated - - -

Pre-1.0, I would regularly use the nukes as takeoff boosters for my interplanetary SSTOs...

Haven't the foggiest; if I was launching a small payload like that in my career game, I'd probably just stick it on top of a large SRB and eat the extra expense. That or stash it in the cargo bay of a spaceplane, to be dropped en-route to somewhere else. The only flight cost apart from the payload is the tiny amount of fuel consumed; one FL-T800 for LFO, plus a sniff of LF for the airbreathing portion of the flight. The craft file is at https://www.dropbox.com/s/bki39ohbj7vr40i/Kerbodyne%20Jetlift.craft?dl=0 It would probably improve the design to ditch the intercooler and put the engines and fins straight onto the LFO tank. It has more than enough LF and intake, engine heating isn't a problem, and the weight reduction would give a bit more margin in oxidising thrust. At the moment, it has just barely enough O to deorbit after reaching LKO.

As always, if y'want more realistic aerodynamics, Ferram is happy to provide them. Even in stock, the fairings do achieve what they're supposed to be for: they protect fragile payloads from destruction during a hot/fast ascent. The point that this is rarely necessary is more down to the low-intensity nature of stock heating than anything else (as well as the low ÃŽâ€V requirements of LKO permitting inefficient-but-safe steep ascents). Given the level of squealing recently on the forums about the "impossibility" of flying even in the kindergarten-simple new stock aero, I can understand why Squad is keeping aero failures and reentry heating as unthreatening as they are.

Fairings are not supposed to benefit stability, and drag reduction is at best a secondary purpose. They are designed to protect a fragile payload from heat and aerodynamic damage. Like this:

It is accepted practice here for the established users to do what they can to answer basic questions, so that Ferram doesn't have to spend all of his time doing so. And this is a basic question. When you're filing a bug report, you need to provide reproduction steps structured like the method section of a scientific paper. In other words, steps that are so clear and unambiguous that a mindless robot could reproduce them. Not "do the usual stuff and it'll probably happen", but "set up an install with no unnecessary mods, take this .craft file, do these exact steps in this exact order, and it will produce the outcome shown in this log file 100% of the time". As described in the permanently stickied post at http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/92229-How-To-Get-Support-%28READ-FIRST%29

The Shuttle came in at extreme pitch, but it didn't hold that posture aerodynamically; it used the OMS as a stability aid. To replicate that in KSP, slap some Vernors on and activate RCS.

The most immediately apparent issue I see is that your engine placement is likely to burn your tailplane off... BTW, a vertical SSTO example:

Looks fine to me...

That math only applies if you're dropping engines with each stage, however. My interplanetary rockets tend to make heavy use of drop tanks. The same engines are running from LKO to Duna and back, but there are several staging events along the way. No sense in lugging empty tanks about, or carrying landing legs and science gear on the return trip.

Tried launching as a single vessel that decouples into two once airborne? You don't have to make a super-fancy thing; just strap two small aircraft to an SRB.

Spaceplanes can fairly easily be made to work with TWRs much lower than that. But the ascent path is not a straight line. Climb above the thick/hot/draggy lower atmosphere, level off and/or go into a shallow dive while you crank up the speed, then climb. Jet thrust increases with speed (up to a point) but decreases with altitude; you need to balance the two against each other. Climb too fast and you won't have enough thrust to accelerate; climb too slow and you'll cook. So climb fast through the thick atmosphere, and slow through the thin.

If I'm early enough in the game to still be bothering with the Mun, typically the only science gear unlocked is Goo, Science Jr, Thermometer and maybe Barometer. Those alone are enough to pull over 1,000 science from a single Minmus visit.

If you're trying to do a fuel-efficient jet circumnavigation of Kerbin, you don't do it by flying level at Mach 5. You want to imitate the Silbervogel; a ballistic climb to the edge of space followed by a succession of "bounces" off the lower atmosphere, with the engine completely throttled off 90% of the time. That's another one that works better in FAR than stock, though.

That's very much on the high side for a Muntripper. A budget version for me would be under √30,000; a "luxury" version about twice that. Shave your payload weight. A sensibly sized munlander doesn't need more than a single LV-909 for an engine, and if you take a scientist as crew (easy to do, just stick a probe core in the service bay for SAS) you only ever need one of each science gizmo.

Backwards-facing intakes will suck less air than properly oriented ones, but it's not really a problem in this application; you'll only be needing them at relatively low altitudes, anyway. Turbojet landers with up-facing intakes work just fine:

Don't bother; closing intakes makes no difference to drag now, in stock or FAR.

A long-range demonstrator: Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/lc3abgswoipa73u/Kerbodyne%20Muttonbird.craft?dl=0