Wanderfound

Kerbodyne Korvette. No tech beyond tier 6 (turbojet). Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/pcouwetli7p1mh6/Kerbodyne%20Korvette.craft?dl=0

Whatever works for you; one big launch or two moderate launches. You could even ditch the transfer engine entirely; just dock a big fuel tank onto the front of the lander and then use the lander engine itself (presumably an LV-909 or Poodle, depending on the size of the lander) for the transfer. Whack a heat shield on somewhere for the interplanetary aerobrake. Make sure you tune your parachutes for Duna's atmospheric pressures.

You want to take: 1) A lander. 2) A moderately large fuel tank. 3) One nuke engine or one poodle engine. The nuke will have three times the range of the Poodle, but LKO -> Duna is only about 1,000ÃŽâ€V anyway. That's around the same as a trip to the Mun. So, you can do it with a small-medium tank and the nuke, or a large-medium tank and the Poodle. Duna's atmosphere is thin, but it's enough to aerobrake, so you don't need any ÃŽâ€V for capture or descent. Aerobrake into orbit, then drop your lander on parachutes with a bit of engine thrust to assist at the last moment. Leave the nuke in orbit and recollect it on the way back.

If this does restart, I expect the elimination of massless parts (i.e. cubic struts have mass now) is going to substantially alter car design.

Are you talking about part modding or just airframe design? If the latter: * Yaw problem = moar tailfin or pull CoM forwards. * Roll problem = moar wingspan or dihedral. * Pitch-up problem = moar lift at back or less up front. * Other forward/down problem = moar wing or less weight. There are subtleties beyond that, of course, but those'll do to start with. The X's and Y's relate to these axes:

I just took the KAX props for a spin. I did the obvious thing, built a pseudo-Spitfire with one of the high power prop engines on the nose. Fun, but: supersonic within seconds of leaving the runway. The power or speed curves might need a bit of a nerf. Or make the "bomber" engine larger and add a medium-power engine for small fast (but subsonic) prop planes.

If you don't have the overheat gauges disabled, their appearance is a cue to lift the nose. Alternately, Kerbal Flight Data gives temperature warnings as well as other useful things. 20km is when the jets start to lose power, but you keep accelerating (rockets off) until 25,000m or so if you've done it right. You will need a bit more oxidiser than before, but the jets have twice the thrust of old FAR, so you should be carrying less engine and wing.

In FAR or stock, a plane-only career is very doable. Basic jet spaceplanes are possible (but not hugely useful), and low-tech suborbital hoppers are very simple to build.

Kerbodyne Kretaceous. Heavy lift doesn't have to be slow. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/y34fne1fi05nvvf/Kerbodyne%20Kretaceous.craft?dl=0

The new flight profile: 1) As steep as possible to 10,000m. 2) Flatten off and accelerate to Mach 4 while slowly climbing to 20,000m. Steepen the climb if overheating, shallow it out if too slow. 3) Once over 20,000m, you will rapidly lose jet power. Light the rockets and pull the nose up hard as soon as you start to lose speed. You do need to push the heating limits a bit if you want to get the best out of your jets.

The girder nose isn't helping, but most of your drag is coming from the tail. Ignore the CoL marker; it'll just confuse you. Rely on the stability derivatives instead. Underslung engines still work, but you need to do them right. Small adjustments of position can have large effects on drag.

Or "space is not an appropriate environment in which to rely on the power of wishful thinking". Space travel and research are important things. Ill-informed misguided space boosterism does harm to realistic efforts in space.

No reason not to use the same ISRU rig on Duna and Ike:

Kerbodyne Kakadu. Grand tour specialist. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/c6avzg754sxibd0/Kerbodyne%20Kakadu.craft?dl=0

Full featured: Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/c6avzg754sxibd0/Kerbodyne%20Kakadu.craft?dl=0

Kerbodyne Kakadu. Grand tour specialist. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/c6avzg754sxibd0/Kerbodyne%20Kakadu.craft?dl=0

For anyone having trouble with FAR rocketry:

Not even hard:

Kerbodyne Kangaroo. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/cd5zy6ota4qd2ve/Kerbodyne%20Kangaroo.craft?dl=0 Requires Kerbal Joint Reinforcement - - - Updated - - - That sounds like a challenge...

The small gear bay is too short to use as a nosewheel with the medium gears. There was supposed to be a steerable gear halfway in size between small and medium.

The Mk2/3 adaptor is still a bit on the floppy side:

How to Read and Use FAR Analysis Screens You can design perfectly well just by eyeball and flight testing; the flight data isn't absolutely necessary. But it does help if you can use it. The first screen in Ferram is the static analysis screen. This gives you pretty graphs. It has two options at top: Sweep AoA and Sweep Mach. There are boxes at the bottom which say Lower, Upper and Mach/AoA. This page can produce two different graphs: if you press the Sweep AoA button, it shows the behaviour of your plane from Angle of Attack values between Lower and Upper, at the speed shown in the Mach/AoA box. If you press the Sweep Mach button, it shows behaviour at speeds between Lower and Upper at the AoA shown in the Mach/AoA box. The blue line is the Coefficient of Lift. It's good when this is high. The red line is the Coefficient of Drag. It's good when this is low. The yellow line is the Coefficient of Manoeuvrability/Instability. You want this to be angling down (like it is here), and it's best that the slope of the line isn't too steep and that its X-intercept (where the yellow line crosses zero) isn't too far above zero. The green line is lift divided by drag. It's good when this is high. This picture shows how the plane will act at Angles of Attack between 0° and 25° while travelling at Mach 2. Sometimes the lines split into two lines. This shows how the plane responds after a stall: you get a sudden loss of lift and increase in drag that lasts until you return your AoA to where the line isn't split any more. This is the same picture at Mach 0.8. See how the plane can stall at that speed? If you click the Sweep Mach button, you instead get a look at a bunch of different speeds with Angle of Attack held constant. This shows Mach 0-6 with a 3° AoA. The bumpiness on the left shows the effect of breaking through the sound barrier. The second page of Ferram is data and stability derivatives. This produces scary looking numbers. To get those numbers, you need to put in values for altitude and speed. All of the confusing letters that appear when you hover your mouse over the output numbers relate to this picture here: x is forwards, y is sideways, z is down. P is roll, Q is pitch, R is yaw. Don't worry about the Greek for now. If you hover your mouse over any of the numbers, it'll pop up a tooltip explaining what it refers to. Mostly, however, all you want to do is make as many as possible of the numbers green and as few as possible red. The one other useful thing on this screen is the "level flight" stuff up top right. If you set the analysis for zero altitude and the speed for whatever you think you can reach on the runway, you can find out how much AoA you need to take off (the "level flight" value). Try to keep that number below ten for easy takeoffs. Transonic drag and Area Ruling Go to transonic design and toggle the area curves. The green line shows the cross-sectional area of the aircraft as you move from nose to tail; the yellow line is a measure of how smoothly the green line is changing. Mach 1 Wave-Drag Area is the thing that you're aiming to minimise; if you manage to get the wiggles in the yellow line to the smallest amplitude possible, that is what you'll achieve. The lower the wave-drag, the less power you'll need to get up to speed. With all of these analyses, you should have your gear toggled up. See how much they affect the outcome here: How to Apply FAR Aero Analyses The pretty graphs: use these to check for excessive drag and regions of instability. AoA graph is the more useful of the two. Numbers: use the Level Flight figure to work on your takeoff speed and flap settings. For the stability figures, check takeoff (0 altitude and .35 or so speed), low altitude (5km and .8 speed), Mach 1 (speed obvious, 10km) and edge of rocketry (25km, Mach 4.5). You want green everywhere. You won't get it, at least to start with. Hover your mouse over the red ones and use the picture above to work out what the tooltips mean. Once you decode the x's and y's, usually they just mean something like "has a tendency to roll when pitching up" or similar. Sometimes the solutions are obvious (e.g. too much yaw slippage, add a rudder), sometimes they take a great deal of trial and error to sort out. With the transonic drag stuff, just wiggle parts about and see what happens. To achieve the lowest drag, "fill in" dips in the green line and "shave down" peaks. Video tutorials: https://m.youtube.com/user/TheWanderfound Illustrated tutorial: http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Tutorials/Hangar%20to%20Landing/story

Nukes are working just fine for me; no overheating troubles at all.

They should be working as you intend; nothing to do with the tech tree. Do you have the latest Module Manager installed? And Modular Flight Integrator?

If Dynamic Deflection isn't sorting it, another possibility is fuselage flex constantly altering the relationship between the cockpit and elevators, causing them to go berserk in response. How big and wobbly is this thing?