Wanderfound

Hey, it was only 20,000m. Still got some accelerating to do before rocket time.

Unless you choose to click the FAR button on the toolbar, this mod presents absolutely zero data, either in flight or in the SPH.

Bones McCoy/ Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not an aeronautical engineer. /Bones McCoy

Reporting a suggestion raised elsewhere on the forums: there are quite a few people who would be very happy if Kerbinside included a racetrack. A perennial problem in the challenge threads is that of how to define track boundaries when racing. Personally, I'd also love it if there was something usable as an air-racing circuit (a collection of pairs of tall pylons, basically, perhaps numbered for easy route descriptions). Just racing to the island airstrip and back gets dull after a while.

You would rapidly run into part-count overload if you did it that way. It would be very nice if somebody built a Kerbinside racetrack, though. Especially if they did an air-racing circuit while they were at it...

Hard mode is certainly grind mode. I play with FAR, TAC-LS, permadeath and no revert/quickload, but I leave all of the money/rep/science sliders on default. Having to launch fifty satellites in order to raise the funds to upgrade R&D isn't difficult, it's just tedious. I agree that it would be a bad thing to change ship performance, though. I suspect that the best way to implement difficulty would be through the contract system. Reduce the number of easy contracts, bring on the "20 kerbal base landed on an asteroid, then moved to LKO" stuff earlier in the game.

Kerbal Flight Data: it provides all of the text that appears near my navball. Speed, radar altitude, stall, heat and overpressure warnings, etc. Essential mod. Alternately, the text at top of screen comes from Kerbal Engineer Redux. That isn't showing Mach at the moment, but they're highly customisable.

As well as a bit of intake and a bit of LF, pre-coolers have high heat tolerance and radiative properties. Having it there will allow you to spend more time at speed in the lower atmosphere before overheating the shock cone. Whether or not that is necessary for this ship is a judgement call, though. If you've got a comfortable heat margin already, swapping the intercooler for a Mk1 LF tank would sort out your excess oxidiser problem (and give you some LF reserve for atmospheric flight after reentry).

Minor point: Mach speeds vary with altitude (atmospheric pressure affects the speed of sound), and don't exist in vacuum. But, yeah, extreme hypersonic is fun.

I might, though.

We can give you better info if you provide screenshots of the ship, but as a general rule: To reduce your stall speed, reduce your wing loading. So, either more wing or less weight. Deploying properly set up flaps will also lower stall speed. As for increasing pre-stall AoA...that's a bit more complicated, I think. Lower stall speed will probably imply higher stall AoA, but there are some subtleties of wing shape involved that I don't fully understand. For the steepness of the pitch moment...the more rear-biased the lift on the ship (relative to CoM), the steeper the line. A steeper line implies more stability, but requires greater control force inputs to disrupt that stability (which is necessary for manoeuvring, and is also a bit necessary just for level flight). So, to shallow it out, either more lift at the front (bigger wings or shift them forwards) or less at the back (smaller tailplane or shift it forwards).

Thanks! Any chance of getting Thuds, radial intakes, solar and service bays into the next version? U

It is doable with just an LV-T800 and a Mk1 LF tank: The only stock example that I have at that size is RAPIER based, but would probably work with a turbothud setup:

LF √0.8 x 5731 = √4584.8 O √0.18 x 5539 = √997.02 MP √1.2 x 4 = √4.8 Total cost = √5586.62 for a fully-loaded Rockomax 64 plus accessories in orbit (not including the cost of the cargo). Obviously still some optimising to be done, though; excessive LF reserves at landing.

Speaking as a fan of early rocketry: hell no. I'd love to see primitive Goddard-style rockets in stock. But Goddard's rockets were not made of leather and wood. Even Congreve's rockets were better than that.

With the slight addendum of the more pitch stability you build in, the more pitch authority you'll need to overcome it. Overly rear-lifted ships are a nightmare at takeoff. Ideally, shift the wings back until the derivatives go green, but no more.

Red wuns go fasta. The satellite will suffice for a stock satellite contract, BTW.

Skylon is also supposed to be something like 90% fuel by mass, and built for 9,000m/s orbital velocity rather than 3,500m/s. It's a rocket with a jet boost rather than the Kerbal-style rocket-boosted jet. Ramscoops are draggier than shock cones, BTW. The shock cones are more heat tolerant, too.

Yeah, it's a basic Mk1 LF tank followed by an FL-T800; my standard Mk1 spaceplane layout. The stabilators are tailfins rather than AV-R8s. Standard small gear, with the rear gear mounted on hardpoints under the wings. Thanks for the help on the simulations; I'll have a bash at it tomorrow and get back to you if I'm still confused. What sort of values should you plug in as the parameters? What units are they measured in? I don't even bother to turn the CoL marker on these days; it's useless. Just get the pitch-up stability derivatives green and you're all fine as far as wing positioning goes. The yaw problem only seems to happen with delta-wing designs; I think it might be just a matter of the wings blocking airflow to the vertical stabiliser to the point that it loses yaw stability at altitude. Take the same design and shrink the wings and the yaw issues disappear: Cranking the wing loading that high makes it extremely unfriendly to novice pilots, though. Oh, and the service bay was for this: Congrats!

...on a plane that weighs more than a 747, and has an extreme amount of drag (thanks to all the ramscoops). Again: it's about drag more than power. Shave your intakes down to the minimum and you can halve your engines. Airhogging is not only ineffective now, it's actively counterproductive. Four jets will lift a hefty Mk3 in FAR. The excessive drag of stock will raise that a bit, but you should still be able to do a Mk3 mining-equipped SSTA with at most ten jets. Build slick and fly smooth and you'll shave it to 4-6 (which is not an unreasonable number of engines for lifting an extremely massy craft to orbit).

No, that's the "racist morons don't want diverse skin shades in their children's schools" case. The one you're thinking of is the Scopes Monkey Trial, as famously portrayed in the film Inherit the Wind. Incidentally, the pro-science side lost that case. And the descendants of the pro-gibberish side are still writing a lot of U.S. high school textbooks. BTW, worth a read for anyone interested in the present-day iterations of this nonsense: the judgement from Dover vs Kitzmiller. https://www.aclu.org/files/images/asset_upload_file577_23137.pdf

Cargo bays? Don't need 'em. Not much use for wings, either. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/8pvikithl95wdg6/Kerbodyne%20Minithud.craft?dl=0 (warning: high performance ship. Perfectly stable, but not designed for novice pilots)

Almost anything will fly in stock; FAR is less forgiving (but very much worth it if you spend any significant time flying in atmosphere). They're a little in need of updating, but see the FAR design tutorial in the third post of the Kerbodyne thread (linked below). There are also some FAR build tutorials on my Youtube channel. PS - for a basic but functional low-tech explorer, try this one: Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/ihkwtlb2u737stw/Kerboflyer.craft?dl=0

Any chance of a thumbnail tutorial from someone on how to use the aero sims? I really haven't the faintest idea where to start with those.

The same as most KSP players: none. Download the FAR zip, unzip it, install the contents [1] into your Gamedata folder. It's done in seconds. CKAN is more trouble than it's worth. [1] Mod makers differ in how they package their stuff; most put the relevant bit into a Gamedata folder in the download, in which case you can either merge it with your Gamedata folder or copy the contents of their Gamedata folder into yours. Read the OP of the mod release thread if in doubt about how to install.