Wanderfound

A quickie to celebrate my rejuvenated computer: Kerbotrainer. Just an updated version of my standard fast jet trainer. Friendly to novice pilots, and a bit of aerobatic fun for the more experienced as well. Story at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Kerbotrainer/story Alternate format at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/slideshow/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Kerbotrainer Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/eqo5b7v5ef89g8s/Kerbotrainer.craft?dl=0 - - - Updated - - - BTW: my laptop has gone from being so dodgy that I needed to remove both the NASA and Squad parts folders just to get it to install properly [1] and crashing almost every time I quickloaded or reverted [2], to now happily running B9 and E.V.E. without crashing or needing to wind the graphics down at all. Yay for having mates who are IT professionals. [1] Remove parts, start game, wind graphics to minimum, restore parts; without that, it wouldn't start at all. [2] And often whenever I changed scenes, or switched vessels, or sometimes just for no reason at all; I spent almost as much time restarting the game as playing it.

Or, if you want to keep a vigorous amount of control authority, use a PID tuner. There's one included in the Kerbal Pilot Assistant mod. Cut all the kp values to 1/3rd of default, chop the scalars to 1/2.

Okay; just got my laptop back, with all the crap scrubbed off and a shiny new 64-bit OS installed. I'm still running x86 KSP due to the total borked-ness of the Win64 veraion, but regardless: my game should now be much less crash happy and much more mod tolerant. It's also coping with much higher graphics settings than it would previously. So, a reversal from the usual position here: recommend me some mods. Already installed: Kerbal Flight Data Kerbal Flight Indicators Kerbal Pilot Assistant RCS Build Aid Scansat TAC-LS Goodspeed FAR Mechjeb (with FAR plugin and Mechjeb Embedded) Enhancd Navball Environmental Visual Enhancements (anyone wanna recommend a good config pack for that?) Hyperedit Kerbal Alarm Clock Chatterer Would be installed if they were working at the moment, but apparently aren't: Kerbpaint Raster Prop Monitor (with Hyomoto's MFD) Firespitter Already considering: Kerbal Construction Time RemoteTech B9 MkIV Spaceplane System What else?

Unfortunately, the Admin strategies are still poorly balanced; Fundraising Campaigns and Patent Licensing return very little money. But this is how I raised the cash for my Tier 3 R&D: http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Spaceplane%20economics/story & http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Satshot/story

Other way around, I think: positive back, negative forwards. Forward-swept wings: Kerbal version:

Dihedral wings: Anhedral wings:

Around about 0.25, IIRC. If it's not designed as an extreme aerobatics specialist (which get 1.0-1.25 depending on wing loading), I've been tending to use 0.4 for myself and 0.6 for stuff I release to the public.

Yup; that's my point. It's quite easy to build a FAR plane that can do stunts that would turn a real-life fighter jet into a cloud of shrapnel, yet we still regularly get folks claiming that "FAR is too hard, your wings break off as soon as you touch the controls". For example, from yesterday: While that perspective might have been defensible back before the wing mass tweakable came in (still wrong, IMO, but not totally unreasonable), it very much isn't the case today. - - - Updated - - - Actually, you can: But I'm in agreement with the general theme of what you posted, nevertheless.

In fairness, FAR used to be fairly difficult, due to the combination of aero failures and ultralight eggshell wings. Low altitude manoeuvres were things to be approached very, very carefully. Now, however, with tweakable wing mass, that issue is almost entirely gone. Unless you deliberately build an ultra-fragile ship, it requires actively suicidal piloting to snap a wing. Build something designed for high-G aerobatics and you're more likely to break the fuselage before the wings go: And, again, it required actively suicidal piloting (low altitude supersonic >15G aerobatics) in order to make that happen.

That...is unlikely to be fun. The higher levels of the building upgrades cost millions of √ each; it will take quite a lot of grinding about in LKO to get them all unlocked before going further afield. The first Tracking Station upgrade to get the conics isn't too expensive, but as mentioned above it isn't too tricky to get to the Mun without it. Get into LKO, burn prograde at Munrise, cut the engines as soon as your apoapsis reaches the height of the Mun's orbit, and do a small correction burn as soon as you enter the Mun's SOI in order to set up your Munar orbit. Getting back is similar, but do your burn when you're pointed retrograde along the Mun's orbit (i.e. when Kerbin is directly overhead, if you're in a west-to-east Munar orbit) and cut thrust as soon as you hit Munar escape velocity.

Absolutely no. If I wanted a SF-fantasy game (which I don't), I'd go play Elite or something.

As with everything in Star Wars, Lucas pinched the idea from elsewhere:

SSTO rover deployment/recovery provides some fun: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1558757&viewfull=1#post1558757

As Alshain says; very hard to do, not a lot of benefit, but maybe an interesting challenge. If you're willing to loosen the requirements a bit, wingtip rudders work well and maintain most of the tail-less aesthetic:

I've been arguing for a while that the tech tree should be extended with a substantial number of increasingly expensive nodes that each contain one advanced scientific instrument. Something to keep the science chase alive, but not something that you feel obliged to unlock before heading interplanetary.

Endgame: play Career until I get bored of it, then mess around in Sandbox until the next update comes out.

Counterpoint: you can get away with off-centre cargo bays if you use them for things that land with the craft (SAS units, batteries, Goo pods, PB-NUK's, landers or rovers that return to the cargo bay, etc) and things that are so lightweight as to be trivially disruptive (e.g. your basic ultralight satellite: probe core, solar panel, antenna, small monoprop tank and not much else). I often use passenger cabins to drag CoM forwards or back, though, if there's some reason I can't do it by shifting lateral tanks/engines. Slashy's right about the need to put cargo bays near CoM if you want to transport serious mass.

Would I like to see the jets improved, bringing them closer to reality? Yes. Will I be hugely bothered if they aren't? Not so much. The aero stuff is in your face and impossible to ignore while flying; the engine stuff, for me at least, doesn't break immersion to anywhere near the same level. But, yeah: if I was lord and master of KSP, I'd get rid of the magic ponydust turbojets and replace them with a broader range of more realistic jets. Perhaps not to full AJE degrees of detail, but with reasonable fuel consumption levels and a separation between turbofan/turbojet/ramjet/scramjet, and a fix for the problem of "your jets are a heavy point-source stuck on the back of the plane". There was a proposal a while ago to redistribute some mass from engines to intakes, to give the jets a more realistic weight distribution: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/92819-An-arguement-for-a-simple-intake-jet-engine-tweak Sounded like quite a good idea to me.

Yeah, but this is a Kerbal phonetic alphabet. I'd expect to see things like "L as in Launch...no wait, turn the engines back off!" and "P as in Photon"...

I've been having some fun getting unconventional designs working in FAR lately... http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1654465&viewfull=1#post1654465 http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1652100&viewfull=1#post1652100 http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1659593&viewfull=1#post1659593

Weird. I found some things challenging with flying Duna (slowing down takes forever due to the low friction, and bumpy landing strips + low-G lack of traction make for tricky landings), but lack of lift absolutely wasn't a factor. Sea-level Duna atmosphere is no thinner than moderate-altitude Kerbin atmosphere. Might be another stock vs FAR thing, though. (see http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/101944-Kerboduna-Part-1 for the mission report if curious)

While the reputation of FAR's aerodynamic failures as high-difficulty was reasonable a few versions ago, the inclusion of tweakable wing strength in recent updates has almost totally negated that factor. A reasonable plane built with default-strength wings can safely pull 10G manoeuvres at low altitude; a craft designed as an aerobatic specialist can do a lot more than that. You only get hair-trigger fragility if you tweak them down to ultralight glider equivalents.

Keep in mind that the tumble itself can produce flameout; as your intakes rotate away from the airstream, they stop delivering air to the engines.

1) The people running the website are idiots, who hire marketing firms based on overly simplistic metrics (i.e. pageviews); 2) The people running the marketing are scum. Who get paid on a per-view basis, with no connection to sales, so they don't care how irritated the viewers are. OTOH, the people running those particular websites are both idiots and scum. Pushing pseudoscientific quackery is not a victimless crime.

Stock, NEAR or FAR? Screenshots from above and the side in the SPH with CoM/CoT/CoL indicators turned on would be helpful, as would some stability analysis screens if you're using FAR.