Wanderfound

Also keep in mind that a lot of FAR flyers are spaceplaning, where the most fuel efficient TWR is whatever is the minimum number of jets required to get up to flight speed before the end of the runway.

Only probes... ...and rovers... ...and drop tanks... ...and landers... ...and interplanetary boosters... Yeah, useless.

Sit down and do up your seatbelt as it spins up. Or hold on tight to the ladder if you're moving from the hub to the wheel. It's not that big an issue.

A lot bigger than you think. See http://www.brandeis.edu/graybiel/publications/docs/187_sensmotor_adpt_highrotation.pdf Undersized (as in, "not as big as a small town") rotational habitats are intensely nauseogenic.

For demonstration: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/101944-Kerboduna-Part-1 That's with FAR, however. Stock soupmosphere would make it harder.

Tried adjusting the zoom on your browser? They should adjust to fit if you bring it back to 100%. Let me know if that doesn't work, though.

Need a science station around the Mun? How about a science station around Laythe? Or how about a station that can go do its thing around the Mun, then reposition itself to Laythe before heading off to Duna? The Kerbodyne Scitug. Send your Kerbonauts on a voyage of discovery. Details at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Kerbodyne%2025/Kerbodyne%20Scitug/story Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/59hhrloo5eguqny/Kerbodyne%20Scitug.craft?dl=0

Okay... First up, most of your wing surface is behind CoM, so the increased mass will have shifted CoM backwards, closer to CoL. This is why you're getting pitch-up problems at altitude (the red numbers in the "Down Vel Derivatives" bit). The horizontal stabilisers of the tailplane no longer have sufficient leverage to hold the nose down in thin air. To fix this, you need to increase the power of the tailplane, or reduce the lift in front of CoM. You can increase the power of the tailplane by making it bigger, but you could also do it by increasing the distance between the tailplane and CoM. You can do this by either lengthening the fuselage or shifting some weight forwards. The easiest way to shift weight would be to lighten some of your wings. At present, they're set at default toughness (I assume) of 1.0. This is more than strong enough for anything short of vigorous and determined suicidal flying. 0.6 will still allow high-G aerobatics, and 0.3 is plenty strong enough to go to space if you fly carefully. If you'd rather keep the super-tough wings, you'll need to either add some weight up front, make the tailplane bigger, extend the tail or strip the strakes from the front of the wings. One of these solutions alone may not sort it, but a few in combination should get your numbers green. You're also getting roll problems at moderate altitude while flying (relatively) slow. This are the red numbers in the Lateral Derivatives. You may choose to deal with that by just gaining some speed before climbing, but if you want to slow cruise in thin air you'll need either longer wings or a bit of dihedral. Angling the tailplane tips up by 10° or so would probably sort it.

SRBs are certainly the wise budget choice, but they don't imply high TWR to me. Instead I use the SRB thrust limiter to set launch TWR at 1.7 or so. As well as allowing the main liquid engine to be run at full blast from launch, it extends the SRB burn to the time when the main engine has burnt enough fuel that a relatively low thrust engine can maintain the ascent. Makes turning a bit easier, too. While I certainly appreciate the appeal of overpowered ships... ...I don't see much use for them apart from giggles. Which is a perfectly good reason for them in itself.

Requiring high TWR is a ÃŽâ€V killer all by itself, however. You need more engine mass and less fuel capacity in order to achieve it.

kcs123 referred to these, but to be explicit: Not video, but probably what you're after: http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Tutorials/Hangar%20to%20Landing/story and: (that's a stock aero vid, but it's a nice demo of how dihedral works)

Eh? 1) Launch spaceplane, build speed and altitude until apoapsis exceeds 70km (periapsis will be somewhere around 30km at this stage). 2) Immediately go into transfer burn. 3) Complete transfer burn, with periapsis still at about 30km. In a flat-climb spaceplane ascent, your periapsis is often fairly close behind you when your apoapsis breaks out of the atmosphere. If you go straight into a transfer burn (without waiting to coast around to apoapsis to circularise), you'll be burning much closer to Pe than Ap.

As before: if you post some screenshots of the analysis screens, we can work out what you need to do to fix it. It is most likely a mass-balance issue; all of your ships are likely to have their CoM further back than they used to (because all of your wings and control surfaces are much heavier), reducing the power of the rearset horizontal and vertical stabilisers. The jerky SAS is a KSP problem rather than FAR; stock SAS code is much too sensitive for high control authority craft, and it got worse with the last update. A PID tuner such as the one included in the http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/100073-0-25-Pilot-Assistant-Atmospheric-piloting-aids-0-9-1-2-%28Dec-7%29 mod can fix it. Cutting the kp values to 1/3rd of default generally works for me.

You're both half-wrong and half-right. Vertical ascent = massive gravity losses. Near horizontal ascent that leads directly into a transfer burn = minimal gravity losses. The most efficient way to do it is with a gravity turn that ends almost flat, but pops you into space at about the same time that the Mun comes over the horizon, so that you can go straight into the transfer without a circularisation burn. Maximum Oberth, minimum gravity loss.

Gear vertically aligned, and mounted to places that don't flex (i.e. not wings unless they're well braced); SAS on; steering unlocked on the front gear (only). Do that, and you shouldn't have to touch the steering during takeoff.

Lately? Satellite deployment. I get a real kick out of trying to see how many different orbits I can drop satellites into in a single flight. One equatorial, one polar, one Keostationary, one Munar... Throwing a bit of RCS propulsion onto the satellites themselves helps a lot, mind you. Don't need a lot of thrust when the whole ship only weighs a few hundred kilos.

6,293m/s ÃŽâ€V in LKO, with a not-very-big and not-very-specialised ship I threw together in a few minutes: But, of course: FAR. Choice of aerodynamics model has a substantial influence on spaceplane possibilities.

Leaving aside the mod weirdness issues... Any ablative heat shield is going to be a fairly high-drag part. Any object moving through atmosphere is going to want to rotate to place its centre of drag behind its centre of mass. Achieving aerodynamic stability when you hit the lower atmosphere at Mach 7 while you've essentially got a drag anchor strapped to your nose is not going to be easy. Retracting the wings is likely to make things worse, not better. Rearset drag to balance the heatshield would be helpful.

VTOL isn't compulsory for Duna, but it does make it a lot easier, especially if using FAR. Thinner atmosphere = higher stall speed; bumpy ground = bad for fast landings. A bit of VTOL (doesn't need to be 1G Kerbin-grade, a few Vernors will do) allows a landing at Kerbin-normal low speeds.

Vertical ascent = bad. Very flat ascent that leads directly into a Munar transit burn = best. OTOH, the Mun and Minmus are cheap enough to get to that hyper-efficiency is generally unnecessary. So, I'd normally circularise into a 70x70 orbit before heading Munwards, unless I happen to notice the Mun breaking the horizon just as my apoapsis hits 70km, in which case I may just leave the throttle on and go direct. The real fuel saving to be made on a Mun trip is in learning how to land efficiently. Come in as flat as you can; try to hold your altitude at a constant small distance (i.e. <2,000m) above the surface while you completely negate your lateral velocity, then burn as little as possible during final descent. Every unit of fuel spent fighting gravity is a unit wasted.

The ~ was there for a reason. LKO to Jool is 2,000-3,000m/s of ÃŽâ€V, depending upon patience and finesse; aerocapture from interplanetary speeds can be done at Jool, but is tricky to get right if you're using DRE and spaceplanes (i.e. no ablative heatshield). Jool to Laythe is another 1,600m/s or so, and again can be finished with an aerocapture, but is again likely to require a bit of thrust from a novice pilot: the margin between escape velocity and reentry burn-up is rather thin. Trying to go directly from Kerbin to Laythe without the Jool aerobrake is well beyond most non-veteran Kerbonauts. Do it perfectly, and you can manage an LKO to Laythe orbit trip (even with DRE in play) for <4,000m/s of ÃŽâ€V, but a first-timer is very unlikely to do it perfectly. OTOH, build it right and it's fairly easy to get a spaceplane to LKO with better than 5,000m/s of ÃŽâ€V still in the tanks.

Duna is lowest ÃŽâ€V of the interplanetary trips, but the thin atmosphere means that you'll want parachutes or VTOL thrusters for landing. Laythe has an oxygenated atmosphere that makes it as easy to fly on as Kerbin, but you're looking at ~5,000ÃŽâ€V just to get there. For a Duna demo, see: http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Kerboduna/story and http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Kerboduna/Kerboduna%20II/story For Laythe, see: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4v4rkcnvk7pk0rp/Kerbodyne%20Kosciuszko.craft?dl=0 and http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Kerbodyne%2025/Kerbodyne%20Kosciuszko/Laythe%20Landing/story

Screenshots time: post FAR stability analyses, at 0m/Mach0.35, 25,000m/Mach5, 30,000m/Mach6. We can probably sort out your issues, but not if we can't see what we're working with.

All the basic needs in one economical package: the Kerbodyne Essentiale. Crew transfer, satellite deployment, aerial survey: all covered. Flight test at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Kerbodyne%2025/Kerbodyne%20Essentiale/story Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/9tq68lj35v8kdmr/Kerbodyne%20Essentiale.craft?dl=0

A decent spaceplane can put fuel to orbit for < √1/unit.