Wanderfound

In that spirit, I would like to suggest that KSP adds orbital scanning, resource mining, girlbals, reentry heating and a bunch more plane parts. Oh, and fix some bugs and rebalance the career game, too.

Shouldn't be too much of either unless you go for one of the ultra hi-res options (e.g. Astronomer's Visual Packs). But my general point is just to try it and see.

I'd throw in EVE, Planetshine and Distant Object Enhancement. If it crashes, pull one back off.

1) Angle snap off, place elevons but don't release the part. 2) Tap the ASDW keys a couple of times to rotate it, release the part. 3) Alt-click to clone. or 1) Angle snap off, place elevons. 2) Angle snap on, rotation tool selected, rotate elevons. 3) Alt-click to clone. Method #1 is generally faster; it's done in seconds once you're used to it. You'll also find that some wings allow you to place elevons with angle snap on, while some don't; it's generally easier to just get in the habit of assuming that it needs to be off. And if you're planning on having wings with anhedral/dihedral, place the wings level first, attach the control surfaces, then angle the wing.

Yup; low, slow and smooth is the key to landing. Until you get the hang of it, you're usually better off powering up and going around again rather than trying any last-second hard manoeuvres. Keeping the jets on at minimal throttle is useful for reducing spool-up time when you need some power; try to get down to landing speed before you reach the runway, then apply a touch of thrust to hold that speed constant. For reentry, I usually just keep the nose 5-10° above prograde until I'm back to level flight at 20,000m or so.

It would be very nice to have a mod that I could point new spaceplaners at with just a "install this, leave it on default settings, it'll sort out most of your SAS problems". It looks like that's what you're planning for the new mod, though.

Shortly after starting KSP, I became seriously ill. Mostly this sucked, but the one bright point is that it meant I had six months of nothing to do except play KSP all day. So, I had a somewhat compressed learning experience. Still, I spent a week or two learning how to get to orbit reliably, then a week or two of crashing into the Mun, then a week or two of failing to rendezvous, etc. etc. Rendezvous and docking was probably the trickiest for me, although that was almost entirely due to ignorance. It's the only bit that I had to resort to tutorials for. But like most of the game, once you understand how it works, rendezvous and docking is a very simple thing.

The one addendum to that is related to wings. If the planet has atmosphere, you can get to orbit with a TWR much less than one; the wings do the lifting while the thrust is devoted to increasing horizontal speed, same as on Kerbin.

You can get a medium size Mk 2 spaceplane back off Duna with just a nuke or two for thrust (see my vids posted upthread for a demonstration). You'll need a longer than usual takeoff run, but that's not a problem when you've got an entire planet to use as your runway. Laythe is easier, due to the ability to use jets; if it'll fly to orbit on Kerbin, it'll do it on Laythe. As for Eve, forget about it. Unless you're using some sort of near-infinite fuel mod (like the fusion plants Scott Manley used in his last series), you won't be getting a spaceplane back from there; the ÃŽâ€V requirements are just too high.

As everyone else has said before, but also...you don't actually need airbrakes. Slowing down in FAR is not that hard; sure, you can glide halfway around the planet if you're at 20,000m, but if you drop down below 5,000m you'll start to bleed off speed quite rapidly. Throw in a couple of S-turns and it's not at all difficult to drop from Mach 2 to landing speed just in the time it takes to reach the runway from the mountains west of KSC. If you have a look at this vid from the 35 minute mark to the end, you'll see some slowing techniques both with and without the use of airbrakes.

I'm certainly giving NuStockAero a try; whether I stay with it instead of FAR will be based entirely upon "which one is more fun?".

...but occasionally you do. This was for FAR, so it won't be directly applicable to the OP (who is using stock aero AFAIK), but as a demonstration:

As everyone has said above, plus one more point...design your ships right and they should be able to hold pitch and heading themselves, with no control input apart from SAS. If you have to actively hold the nose up, you could probably use more pitch control authority; if you have to actively hold it down, you probably need to shift your CoL back a touch.

Arguable; my stuff is all stock parts, but designed to fly in FAR. They don't work in stock aero, so I call 'em mod craft.

In the proper Kerbal spirit:

Ooh, nifty. Is this aimed at FAR, NuStockAero or both?

As mentioned, the plane is Kerbal Pilot Assistant (highly recommended as a PID tuner even if you don't need the autopilot; stock SAS is horrid) and the bottom right panel is Blizzy's Toolbar (for those mods that don't use th stock toolbar). The mods showing on Blizzy's thing are mostly just shortcuts to my most commonly used Mechjeb features: the ÃŽâ€V readout, manoeuvre planner, Smart A.S.S., etc. Off the top of my head, the current modlist: Kerbal Flight Data Kerbal Flight Indicators Kerbal Pilot Assistant Ferram's Aerospace Research Deadly Reentry Environmental Visual Enhancements Mechjeb Raster Prop Monitor Enhanced Navball Kerbal Alarm Clock Goodspeed Distant Object Enhancement Planetshine Chatterer Kerbal Engineer Redux TAC Life Support Scansat Final Frontier Stage Recovery ...plus another dozen or so small mods (enhanced IVAs, single-part packs, contract packs, etc) that tend to come and go. The first four on the list are absolute essentials for anyone into spaceplanes, IMO. The demo plane was designed to fly with FAR and KPA; it has enough control authority that SAS will make a mess of it if you don't use a PID tuner like KPA. - - - Updated - - - Also note: I have a strong design bias towards fast, low-drag ships. That's good for going to orbit, but it does impact low speed handling a bit. Keep it above 100m/s unless you want to fall out of the sky.

Yeah, but that's Max. I'd love to watch him try to land a spaceplane under any conditions.

One of the great advatanges of spaceplanes is that you can more precisely control your descent. Drop until things start to cook, then level off and wait for the speed to bleed off before descending further. It works in FAR/DRE; it should work in the new aero.

Mach tuck is a thing that happens with FAR, and all-moving tailplanes can help to overcome it, but they are by no means necessary. If you have enough control authority to pull the nose up when you want to, you're fine.

Early or late, fundraising is all about stacking missions. You don't just fly to orbit to rescue a Kerbal; you do a parts test on the way up, launch a satellite when you get there, fulfil a "science from space" contract, then bring your rescued Kerbal back down on that spot that has a contract for surface samples etc. This is probably from farther along than you are, but as a demonstration, see http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Spaceplane%20economics/story

Re: floppiness. Have a look at some of the Kerbodyne designs. I don't use KJR. The small ones are often unstrutted; the medium size ones usually have a pair of struts at the front (lateral tanks -> docking port or cockpit) and another pair at the back (lateral tanks -> tail fuselage). That's generally enough to stop fuselage wobble unless it's a very long ship. The only ones that get extreme strutting are the Mk3 designs; even that requirement should hopefully go away once the new wings and landing gear appear.

With a tri-fuselage jobbie like that, it's usually much easier just to put pairs of core->lateral and lateral->core fuel lines up the front. With that, the lateral engines will start by draining the core rear-to-front, while the central engine drains the lateral tanks rear-to-front. Any weight shift you get is forwards (and is likely slight due to the laterally spread fuel load).

If you remove parts that are needed for a craft in flight, that craft will not load: it'll be removed from existence. Your best bet is just to restart career after 1.0 is released; a lot of players (myself included) do that with every new release.

I actually like watching Max play; to my POV, he's amusingly incompetent and generally pleasant to listen to. Kinda KurtJMac-ish. My only problem is Twitch.