Wanderfound

For runway stability: * Unlock steering and disable brakes on front gear. * Gear perfectly straight and vertical. * As wide a wheelbase as possible. * Gear not mounted to parts that will flex (e.g. wings, unless they're very well braced). And, of course, try to take off and land as slow as possible.

Bigger wing pieces would make it easier, but they certainly aren't a showstopper.

As a stopgap solution for now: when moving large stuff that was assembled in orbit, don't push, pull. Let the thrust work to keep your docked sections in line.

See posts #2 & #3 in the Kerbodyne thread linked below, particularly this tutorial: http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Tutorials/Hangar%20to%20Landing/story

Echoing what others have said: reusable stations and multiple contracts per mission. Either spaceplanes that can return for 100% recovery... http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Spaceplane%20economics/story ...or use a station contract to pay for the launch of an orbital fuel depot, or interplanetary tug, or the rover that you'll use for waypoint contracts, etc. Stations without labs are easy to do as Mk2 spaceplanes; just add passenger cabins until you hit the required crew capacity. Labs can be built into Mk2 spaceplanes or carried by Mk3's, but you're often better off building the lab into an interplanetary tug: Hook some fuel tanks and a lander on the back, then head off on a Grand Tour.

You can do it in one node. Once the orbit "flips out" start playing with prograde/retrograde and see what happens.

BTW, folks: if you want to take one of the new aerobatic ships for a spin, why not try http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/106723-Kerbodyne-Aerobatics-Championships ?

It's not for a direct burn, it's for a Hohmann transfer. For any Hohmann transfer, there is a phase angle between the location of your exit burn and the location of the target at the time of the burn that you have to get right for the transfer to succeed. Basically, you need to raise your apoapsis to the height of the target orbit, but you need to do it in the right place so that the ship and the target arrive there at the same time in order for the target's gravity to capture the ship. For the Mun, that angle just happens to be roughly what you get when you burn at Munrise. It's an easy visual cue that allows Mun transfers without navigational aids; you can do it with a Tier 1 Tracking Station fairly simply. Although you burn straight towards the Mun, that location isn't where you go: instead, you swing into an extreme elliptical orbit, with the apoapsis 90° off to the left of the direction of the burn. It's at this apoapsis that you eventually encounter the Mun (which has itself orbited around to that location by the time you get there).

If you're docking large craft, point the docking ports towards each other while you're still far off, timewarp freeze the inactive ship and control the smaller, more agile ship during the docking. Disable SAS on the inactive ship. If both ships are huge monster wobbly space stations, then they'll still be hard to dock, but that's as it should be. Despite all the above, docking ports could use some beefing up. Wobbly ports is the main cause of space station jiggle; they're much less rigid than they should be, and no easy way to reinforce them.

Another entry from Team Kerbodyne Racing. Full flight with annotations at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Challenges/Kerbodyne%20Aerobatics%20Championship/Dragonfly%20Aero%201/story Aero: 15G, Mach 1, 104m. 406 points. Art competition entry: Best crash: Dive in. It's got tough wings, pull up hard. Oh. See, the wings are still intact! Until now. Oops. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/mtkp3asx6k2lx0l/Kerbodyne%20Dragonfly%20Aero.craft?dl=0

As in the first post: * G's must be measured by navball. * No time slowing (new rule, although I would've thought "hacks and cheats" covered that). * Must post craft file. * Must enter both parts (not explicit before). * Separate leaderboard for rocket-powered craft (new rule). * Must have pilot, wings, HOTOL ability. Pilot survival post-manoeuvre is going to have to depend on the honour system. If possible, post a few screenshots displaying the recovery to stable flight. Let us know it you're using FAR and have disabled aero failures. As always, if you want to treat this as a minmaxing rule-stretching contest, go for it. Personally, however, I'll be zooming through the mountains in a sweet-handling sportsplane. Whoever has the most fun wins. - - - Updated - - - An initial entry from Team Kerbodyne Racing: Cruise on in... Up a teensy bit... Then up a lot more. Oops. Still, all good. Calm and easy level flight, but might want to head back to the workshop for a bit. 14G, 166m, Mach <1. 314 points. And an entry for the art prize: And an early entry in the newly-declared "best crash sequence" contest (same rules as the art prize): Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/8jfcvimcq8p3ea5/Kerbodyne%20Aero%20SR.craft?dl=0

We need screenshots to see what's wrong. Show us what you're doing as you try to complete the contracts.

F3 is no good, you could've done it at altitude. And the 15G cap is deliberate; this isn't a max-G contest, it's a mountain-scraping contest. Everybody should be able to hit 15G if they know what they're doing, and everybody should be able to get within a few metres of the hillside. The trick is in doing both at the same time. I expect it to come down to a handful of entrants, all doing 15G within 50m of the mountain, with the speed acting as the tiebreaker. Rockets on a separate leaderboard, navball G's, no time-altering mods.

Navball G's only. The various G meters give sharply varying results. I suspect that we may need to ban rockets, or at least have a separate rocket division.

Should be fine, although it'd be nice if someone would check them side-by-side with Kerbal Flight Data to make sure they're consistent. Make sure that the navball is in Surface mode if you don't have a Mach number readout.

Time for a new contest. Build yourself an aerobatics ship, head out to the mountains west of KSC, and start buzzing the ridgetops. There are two aspects to the competition: artistic and aerobatic. For the artistic contest, enter a screenshot with the flight info toggled off (F2). Make it a dramatically posed shot of your plane doing something insanely dangerous in the mountains to the west of KSC. This contest will be judged purely by public acclamation: when you put in your own entry, say which of the already-entered images is your favourite. For the aerobatic contest, you also want a screenshot of your ship doing something insanely dangerous above the mountains to the west of KSC. You'll also need to install Kerbal Flight Data so that we can all see your radar altitude etc. The aero contest will be scored on points, derived from three aspects: 1) G-forces. Every point of G visible on the navball at the time of the shot gives twenty points. 2) Altitude. Every meter below 200m on the radar altimeter gives one point. Entries above 1,000m radar altitude not permitted. 3) Speed. Ten points for Mach 1, twenty points for Mach 2, etc. Rounded down; Mach 0.9 gives no points. Multiple entries are encouraged, as is the posting of screenshots from failed attempts. Post a link to the craft file of your ship with your entry. Separate leaderboards in the aero contest for stock vs NEAR/FAR, united leaderboard for the art contest. No non-stock parts, no hacks or cheats (including time or physics altering mods apart from FAR/NEAR). Ships must be winged, crewed, entirely jet powered (separate leaderboards if anyone really wants to fly rockets) and capable of HOTOL. Contestants must submit entries for both parts of the competition, and may not vote for their own earlier entries in the art prize. I'll post a demonstration entry shortly, but just as illustrative inspiration for now:

Another high performance interplanetary offering: Kerbodyne Stratos N. Annotated flight (with ultralight probe demonstration) at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Stratos%20N/story Alternate format at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/slideshow/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Stratos%20N Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/6z1znm6xfjf3b1l/Kerbodyne%20Stratos%20N.craft?dl=0

The Kerbodyne Peregrine. High-tech high-efficiency orbital delivery. Annotated flight test at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Peregrine/story Alternate format at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/slideshow/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Peregrine Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/ddherowy2x7vrvc/Kerbodyne%20Peregrine.craft?dl=0

That sets up DRE to give a reasonable level of challenge within FAR aero. At the moment, the enhanced upper-altitude skin drag of FAR (new in the latest versions) sees craft slowing down to below Mach 5 long before they reach an altitude where heating becomes an issue. Even if DRE is set to hard, there's no danger unless you're making a suicide dive. At the moment, we can tweak DRE's back end settings to compensate. But it would be nice to have a single toggle that returned FAR DRE to roughly the same level of threat as it had before the recent changes in FAR.

Two bits of news: 1) Getting my laptop OS rebuilt and upgraded next week. Hopefully, this may give me a more stable game and therefore more ability to do stuff with mods. 2) I may, if lucky, get a telecommuting job that will require a fast 'net connection and an IT upgrade. Streaming possibilities if it happens.

If you time accelerate (normal on-rails time, not physics warp) for a moment the oscillation will cease.

Echoing earlier posters, a built-in single-click FAR setting would be a very nice thing to see in the next release.

More science is coming from contracts than exploration, though. Personally, I'd nerf Outsourced R&D and buff Fundraising Campaigns and Unpaid Interns all by a factor of ten, heavily reduce the payout for satellite contracts (I can do half a dozen √50,000+ sat missions off a single √15,000 launch) and substantially increase the payouts (in both √ and science) for achieving interplanetary exploration milestones. Incentivise exploration over commercial launch grinding. I'd also add a couple more steps to each building upgrade sequence. The cost and capability jump between upgrades is huge; it needs more granularity. Give players a sense of continual progress rather than game-halting cliffs.

I always think of him as Rusty Hat, personally. Congrats, R.

A bit of cosmetic clipping here and there (e.g. the structural intakes at the wing roots in the pic I posted upthread) won't do any harm. But you won't get any non-cosmetic benefit: hidden things still generate drag if they're not in a cargo bay, and clipping wings into each other won't magically double their lift.