Wanderfound

I'm getting plenty of use from my stations; with a docking port for refuelling, lab for science cleaning and a couple of nuke engines they make perfectly good interplanetary explorers after they've done their thing. A trailing docking port lets you add and tow as much mission-specific junk as you want later on.

Pretty much anything will fly in stock aero. So long as you have sufficient wing area and keep your CoL sitting on the back of CoM, the issue is mostly cosmetic. The wing strakes are very handy for fine-tuning wing profiles; they're designed to clip without z-fighting. Have a look at the leading edges of this one for an example:

We could definitely use some bigger jets to suit the Mk3 parts. Thirty-two turbos and this still needs to kick in the rocket main engine to lift off:

It could use a Kerbpaint detailing job, yes. Initiale is a bit short on pitch authority by my usual standards, BTW; you may need to mash the S key occasionally rather than just letting SAS hold pitch for you. Built it that way to try and make something tolerant of rough piloting. If you've got the tech, swapping the horizontal AV-R8’s for canards as elevators would make it more responsive. We really need some bigger stock jets; there are thirty-two Turbojets on the Cloudbreaker and it still needs the KR-2L lit to get off the pad.

Start smaller: KAX or the Mk IV Spaceplane pack. Or delete from B9 all of the parts that you don't immediately need.

Also: if you're having trouble, stick to low-impact mods that alter game aspects other than adding lots of parts (e.g. FAR, DRE, Kerbal Flight Data, Chatterer, Kerbal Alarm Clock, RCS Build Aid, etc). B9 is the exact opposite of this; ditch it for now.

It's easy with turbojets, a complete pain without. You're best off waiting until you've got the turbos. You can lock off some forward tanks with the right-click tweakables to ensure that the rearmost fuel drains first.

Need a low-tech, early game spaceplane with good cargo capacity? Here y'go... The Kerbodyne Initiale. Annotated flight test at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Initiale/story Alternate format at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/slideshow/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Initiale Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/sdmvihw8k0f5msp/Kerbodyne%20Initiale.craft?dl=0 No fuel lines used for early-tech reasons; pump fuel manually if not using Goodspeed/TAC-FB.

Cubic octagonal struts are also your friend here. You can create an attachment node anywhere you need.

Lately it's been about √5,000 for a suborbital part test (probe core, SRB, go), √10,000 for a satellite in any Kerbin orbit (a lightweight sat with an FL-T100 and an LV-909 above a pair of FL-T800 and an LV-T45), √20,000 for a robotic Munlander or interplanetary probe (basically the satellite with a larger tank and landing legs on a tricoupler with the LV-T45/FL-T800 stack tripled). For Kerballed stuff, a small low-tech (two turbojets, one LV-T45) spaceplane with a cargo bay runs to about √40,000.

As Specialist says, screenshots. Preferably in the SPH from square on side and above, with CoL and CoM markers turned on. We'll also need to know if you're flying FAR, NEAR or stock aero, and whether or not you use the Procedural Wings mod. The wings need to be built to suit the aircraft; we can't give good advice unless we can see what we're dealing with.

Sometimes, more is less. But at other times, more is just more. Meet the Kerbodyne Cloudbreaker. With enough thrust, anything is possible. Annotated flight test at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Cloudbreaker/story Alternate format at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/slideshow/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Cloudbreaker Craft file available at https://www.dropbox.com/s/2e3eq7xp84rvm9b/Kerbodyne%20Cloudbreaker.craft?dl=0

Sometimes, more is less. But at other times, more is just more. Meet the Kerbodyne Cloudbreaker. With enough thrust, anything is possible. Annotated flight test at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Cloudbreaker/story Alternate format at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/slideshow/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Cloudbreaker Craft file available at https://www.dropbox.com/s/2e3eq7xp84rvm9b/Kerbodyne%20Cloudbreaker.craft?dl=0

Sometimes, more is less. But at other times, more is just more. Meet the Kerbodyne Cloudbreaker. With enough thrust, anything is possible. Annotated flight test at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Cloudbreaker/story Alternate format at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/slideshow/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Cloudbreaker Craft file available at https://www.dropbox.com/s/2e3eq7xp84rvm9b/Kerbodyne%20Cloudbreaker.craft?dl=0

At the cost of extreme weight. The mass of stock wings is that of a lightweight glider; previous versions of FAR gave them a corresponding fragility (but you could still pull high-G stunts if you were careful about how and where you did it). In current FAR, the wings default to fighter-strength (and much heavier than stock), but can be wound back down to ye olde glider weight and fragility if desired.

Designed for FAR/DRE; it's unlikely to perform well in stock aero, unfortunately.

That's from ye olde FAR, too, before the tweakable wing strength was introduced. It could also do this: It's a lot to do with altitude; sea level aerobatics are much more dangerous than high altitude. And, of course, G spikes are more dangerous than gradually-applied forces. But these days, if you wind up the wing strength, you can get away with even low altitude extreme sillyness: FAR's reputation for difficultÅ· was always somewhat exaggerated, and it is much less difficult now that you aren't obliged to use lightweight glider wings.

Although it's not perfect, the immediate launch (i.e. within the first few weeks of a new game) window for Eve isn't bad. And if all you're sending is a lightweight probe with a thermometer and Science Jr, it isn't hard to pack over 8,000m/s of ÃŽâ€V onto a < 30-part / < √30,000 rocket. You can get a one-way robot lander to Eve successfully launched as your first mission after unlocking solar panels.

Ditto. I wouldn't want to do aerial surveys in a rocket, but they're a good source of easy science and cash once you've got fast aircraft running. Pulling 10G manouevres at Mach 5 in order to hit tightly clustered waypoints is tons o'fun to me. It's fairly easy to do several survey missions in a single flight, and when you get in amongst the mountains on a low-altitude one there's fun trench-run action to be had as well. And the only cost of the mission is filling the gas tank on a small single-turbojet plane.

I recently stumbled across an alternative to satellites for "science from space" contracts. Due to the part count limitations of the new VAB, I used robotic landers for my Mun and Minmus exploration contracts. After hopping between a few biomes, these lightweight landers remained on the Mun and Minmus, with some fuel remaining but not enough to safely relocate once more. But each lander has a thermometer, and "space above the Mun/Minmus" begins the moment you leave the surface. It doesn't take much time or fuel to pop a lander 5m off the surface, run a temperature scan and drop back down again. Done it half a dozen times with each of 'em so far, for about √50,000 per go.

Obscure references and dodgy puns, usually.

You can see plenty of my designs in the Kerbodyne thread. Some of it is based on fairly conventional airframes, some of it is designed to stretch the limits of the game for giggles. All of it necessarily represents the abstraction involved in any game or simulation; if you want to count rivets, I'm sure that there are plenty of grounds for nitpicking. But, as R.I.C. suggests, we're dealing with a spectrum here rather than absolutes. And the current stock end of that spectrum is a very long way down at one end of the band; for a demonstration of how far off, see http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/93779-SSTO-Spaceplane-Airplane-Design-Contest-II-Akademy-Awards?p=1416715&viewfull=1#post1416715

The introduction of tweakable wing strength in FAR has greatly flattened the learning curve; aero failures are now something that you only have to deal with if you're making ultralight speedsters or trying 20G aerobatics. The analysis displays are nowhere near as complicated as they look, although they are a bit intimidating. But the key factor is just whether the numbers are red or green, anyway; you could easily replace them with a few coloured plus and minus symbols. And designing by eyeball and flight test without ever looking at an analysis is perfectly doable as well.

If you want realistic-ish large aircraft, you need to go FAR/NEAR or cross your fingers and wait for the aero update. And, even in FAR/NEAR, don't expect a Mk3 to climb as easily as a smaller plane. They do work, though; the huge fuel capacity and hefty size means that you can afford to strap a monster rocket on the back (or half a dozen RAPIERs) and light them up at a lower speed and altitude than would normally be possible. There should be larger wings and landing gear in the next update. Hopefully, we'll eventually get some bigger jets, too.

I'm happy with things as is, but I wouldn't object to this.