Wanderfound

The big advantage of RAPIERs was always that they allowed you to carry one more jet (e.g. three RAPIERs vs two Turbos plus a rocket) and that they permit single-engine designs. I think of RAPIERs as a low-efficiency turbojet that compensates by being able to double as a low-efficiency rocket. I'm not at all bothered by a good turbo/rocket design being able to match the RAPIERs; I'd be much more concerned if it was set up so that Turbojets were totally inferior to RAPIERs. All RAPIERs all the time is dull; variety is good. Having that extra jet becomes more valuable in FAR, due to the more realistic takeoff runs. And for career KSP, the RAPIERs are now at the very end of the tech tree anyway...

Those RT-5s are nice and small...

BTW, Squad seem to have finally fixed parachutes. Mild deceleration on pre-deployment, gradual application of the G's on full deployment. All good. Am I right in thinking that it's now possible to keep them attached while on the ground for drag chutes?

About 30 sec is the "rocket to survivable impact" record (done before the changes to parachutes, probably not possible to beat now). I'm still interested in seeing who can do the best conventional jet aircraft to a normal landing on the island runway.

There should be a craft in orbit that was not placed there by you, that shows up in the map view or Tracking Station the same as other vehicles; that will be the Kerbals to be rescued, floating inside a broken command pod or similar. In the tracking station, if you mouse to the top of screen you'll get a bunch of icons to hide/show different types of craft. Make sure that you haven't accidentally deselected ships or something. The orbits that they're in are not all LKO; one of my first ones was orbiting up near the Mun.

Interestingly, I just took a smallish four-RAPIER spaceplane up for a spin. Take off, set it into a 45 degree climb and leave it there; by the time the RAPIERs switched modes, the apoapsis was already well over 100km. The new aero appears to favour ridiculously overpowered ships, so long as you manage to avoid melting your wings off during the ascent.

Anyone put together a list yet of which tech is in which node of the revised tree? My career game isn't up to turbojets yet, and I'd hate to make a low-tech demonstrator with one forgotten high-tech part in the middle of it... There's at least one set of swept wings early in the tech tree:

Assorted comments around the forums lead me to think that the RAPIERs may be giving asymmetric flameouts while the turbojets aren't. Haven't confirmed it for certain, though.

Indeed the case; two accepted suborbital tourism contracts, two pending survey contracts.

The Mk4 Spaceplane mod includes a large cargo bay with a rear ramp. For most planets, however, ramps are not necessary. RCS and Vernors make short-flight VTOL easy to do, especially in low-G, so you can hover back into position in a cargo bay.

Now onto my third attempt at unnecessarily downloading 600MB of game at 20KB/s.

Now that modders are getting more seriously into making contract packs, I thought it'd be time to revive this idea. There are plenty of players who enjoy this sort of aesthetic: Kerbal allows us to build ships with the Gerry Anderson look, which is awesome. But what we're lacking are contracts with a proper Thunderbirds theme. So what I'm thinking of is an International Rescue themed contract pack. What would it include? Anything that echoes a classic Thunderbirds episode. What were the plots like? * Some sort of disaster, natural or man-made, occurs. International Rescue must use some of their high-tech equipment to save the day. So, that's either a "deliver payload X to location Y before time Z" contract or a "drop item X on location Y before time Z" contract. These sorts of contracts could be long-range/light-payload (rocket), medium-range/medium-payload (aircraft) or short-range/heavy-payload (ground vehicle). Landed/airdrop/precise-airdrop/water-landing/etc add variety to all of these. * Generic bad guys hijack some bit of industrial infrastructure. Again, similar missions to above. Altering the targets (anything from Moho orbit to right next to KSC, anything from a tiny probe to a 500-ton monster) and descriptive text allows for a lot of roleplaying variation from a fairly limited variety of mission structures. * Giant machine goes haywire, threatens to crash into something. I don't know if this is actually possible to do, but if there's anyway to put a game-generated vehicle on an impact trajectory (especially if you can arrange for it to hit KSC), the contract writes itself. Doubly awesome if you could manage to make the impacting threat a gigantic slow-moving ground vehicle that has to be blown up or otherwise disabled before it reaches KSC. I'm no coder, so this isn't something I could put together myself. But it seems like most of it shouldn't be too complicated. Any takers?

Posting in the hope that someone at Squad notices: Patcher is not working (missing key). Launcher does not retrieve updates (hangs indefinitely). While I'm very happy to see the patches released, there's not much point releasing patch after patch if we can't download them. The only apparent workaround at the moment is to download the entire game from scratch. This is a less than ideal solution, especially over a slow connection like mine (where I am now re-downloading the game for the second time today, thanks to a crash two hours into the first attempt).

I'm thinking this might be very useful for plane-inside-cargobay trickery...

As they should. There's a reason why Skylon does't look like a 747 and why the Shuttle couldn't be pushed to orbit on jets.

This sort of grindy trickery really isn't necessary, but if you do need some easy science: RT-5 + Stayputnik + ScienceJr/GooPods + launch clamps + tailfins + parachute. Launch clamps are optional. Angle the tailfins a tiny bit to provide spin stabilisation (like on a dart or an arrow). If using launch clamps, angle the whole rocket to point it in the desired direction; if not, just push the nose over immediately post-launch before the spin gets too strong to overcome. Light rocket, wait for burnout, deploy parachute, collect science. You can reach at least half a dozen biomes from KSC by doing this.

Changing some of the early tourism contracts to "fly passenger X over location Y below Z metres" wouldn't hurt. It might be a handy way to introduce the existence of the Easter Eggs, too; send 'em to the Pyramids or something. I'm still wishing for aerial firefighting (AKA waterbombing) contracts.

You can fit a satellite in there, BTW:

With enough intake, your jets should be good to 25,000m. That 20-25km window is where you do your fast flying. If it was FAR, I'd also say that you want to do it as a series of suborbital hops (Silbervogel style), but I'm not sure how well that'll work in stock.

Given that it's pretty much indistinguishable from what the game does when the graphics lag, I turned it off. Nothing but annoying.

After building a basic jet, I took a couple of short-range tourist contracts. However, there are some problems. Although the tourism destinations are visible from the tracking station, they don't show up in map view during flight. In addition, it appears that even in the tracking station, there is no way to tell which destination belongs to which tourist. Am I missing something somewhere?

Due to the new aero, all of the old ÃŽâ€V and aerobraking calculators are now obsolete. You're going to have to do it the hard way: send a probe and test before committing Kerbals.

That should make the new fixed landing gear interesting to use.

Nah, it was on top of an SRB; I sent it up just to make sure that the minisat would deploy properly. - - - Updated - - - Might be of use to some people: Need a low-tech stock-aero basic plane for shuttling tourists around the place? Kerbodyne Startup. It really isn't that complicated. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/npi5rlt8jlxpxbu/Kerbodyne%20Startup.craft?dl=0 (BTW, as a reflection on the relative realism and difficulty of stock aero: I landed this by flying directly above the runway at 500m, putting it into a 100m/s vertical dive, pulling out of that about 20m off the deck before gently settling down without a bump and easily braking to a stop)

Need a low-tech stock-aero basic plane for shuttling tourists around the place? Kerbodyne Startup. It really isn't that complicated. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/npi5rlt8jlxpxbu/Kerbodyne%20Startup.craft?dl=0 (BTW, just as a reflection on the relative realism and difficulty of stock aero: I landed this by flying directly above the runway at 500m, putting it into a 100m/s vertical dive, pulling out of that about 20m off the deck before gently settling down without a bump and easily braking to a stop) - - - Updated - - - Those be some nice looking ships, y'all. Instead of building big cargo lifters for deploying space stations, I normally just make the spaceplane into the station itself. "Station with six Kerbals and a docking port" is otherwise known as "standard Mk2 spaceplane with a passenger cabin"...