Wanderfound

Or a cockpit... I've been using these for parasite landers rather than rovers, but they'd make a fine rover cockpit as well if you hang some cubic octagonals or 0.725m parts off each end to mount the wheels on. The canopy tends to clip through the cargo bay a bit, but so long as you set it to clip through the doors instead of the floor they shouldn't get stuck in place.

FAR allows the adjustment of wing weight/strength; default FAR wings are considerably heavier than stock wings (but can be adjusted to be much lighter, at a cost in durability). The change in wing weight has shifted the CoM behind the landing gear. As a rule of thumb for the wing mass/strength tweakable: .25 is light but very fragile (like ye olde FAR wings, before the mass tweakable was introduced), .5 is tough enough for anything that a sensible pilot should throw at it, 1.0 is overkill unless you're planning high-G aerobatics at treetop altitudes.

You might find this one useful for inspiration: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1558757&viewfull=1#post1558757

It's a known and long-standing bug related to KSP's dodgy symmetry function, similar to how action groups tend to disappear on parts placed with symmetry if they're moved. Just hover your mouse over each part of the ship and hit P; if the bug is taking effect, the colour will disappear when you do that. But if you then recolour it again, it should stay coloured unless you start moving parts around.

Yes, you can set a control surface to have a static pitch in one direction, but a toggleable deflection to the other direction. Angle it up while building, and set a flap or spoiler going the other way for landing. If you're unsure of if you've got it set right, run a FAR analysis with either the flaps or spoilers turned on in the analysis; the surfaces will deflect as you run the analysis, allowing you to see if you've got it right. Airbrakes are useful on Kerbin (they allow you to shorten reentry), but they aren't necessary. Similarly, the flexibility offered by opposing deflections is useful but not compulsory.

You can't set a control surface to flap/spoiler deflect both up and down. However, you can give it a static pitch in one direction, then use a flap setting to adjust it from down to level to up. However, you'd probably find it easier to set one pair of surfaces to deflect up, and another pair to deflect down. That way, you can trigger the up-deflecting one on one control group, the down-deflecting one on another control group, and both at once for airbrakes. And, as I know has been mentioned to you a few times, the easiest way to improve the Manticore's performance would be to convert it from a biplane to a monoplane. Sopwith Camels are cool, but there are good reasons why we don't use them any more.

...such as loitering near the exhaust of an NTR. Don't get me wrong; I'm about as far from anti-nuke as you can get. I used to work at a reactor, and I've published research papers using radiological techniques. My concern is primarily with keeping KSP fun, and I find the current implementation of NTRs un-fun to use.

Movies went to crap as soon as special effects and celebrity began to heavily outweigh scriptwriting and acting talent. Exactly when this happened is obviously subjective, but I'd put the turning point at about the release of Star Wars. There's still plenty of quality films being made, they just aren't coming from the profit-focussed Hollywood studios. Go hit your local arthouse cinema and learn to enjoy subtitles. Or take advantage of the internet and watch the classics: Casablanca, The Hustler, The Seven Samurai, Das Boot, Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, etc. For more recent stuff, check out The Station Agent and Pieces of April. Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man is worth the time, too.

As for this...the speed required to maintain level flight increases as the air thins. Climb quickly to 15,000m or so, but then pull the nose down to just above the horizon and crank it up to Mach 5 as you ascend to 30,000m. More AoA = more drag = less speed. Have a peek at the test flight screenshots on my revision of your design.

You need to adjust the speed on the analysis; that's set for only about 60m/s. Try it at Mach 3.

Prototyping large spaceplanes is a good way to run through your excess cash, yes. I wiped out twenty √100,000+ spaceplanes in a row due to landing-gear wobbles when I was first getting the hang of it. Killed plenty of test pilots, too; ejection systems aren't much use when your capsule gets immediately run over by ~100 ton of uncontrolled spaceplane.

Yup. Yes, NTRs are very, very good (although probably not quite as good in practice as they are on paper). But we don't use them. Why not? Because (a) they're somewhat dangerous, and ( the not-entirely-accurate public perception of them is that they're very dangerous. Accurate or not, that perception is still a real limitation that should be accounted for. At present, KSP LV-N's have the advantages of NTRs without the drawbacks. The already nerfed TWR is a partial compensation, but I don't think it's the best way to do it; all that achieves is to make them painfully slow to use. Give me a realistically high-thrust NTR, but make it expensive and don't let me casually fire it up on the KSC runway. A triple-thrust LV-N that can't be lit within Kerbin atmosphere and can't be returned to Kerbin after reaching orbit could work.

You always want to be using the latest version of FAR; the first couple of post-.25 releases had some serious aero bugs, and the pre-.25 FAR did not have the wing weight/strength tweakable. If you're flying with a pre-.25 version of FAR, your wings are about 1/3rd the weight of the ones on my design. This will substantially mess up the balance.

It's not so much "all or nothing" as "don't rush the release, if adding the cargo bays only delays things by a week or two then take your time and get them in".

Or strut/girder around it.

Was any part of the base constructed before the contract was accepted?

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/80842-Plugin-0-25-Kerbal-Flight-Data-%28Release-13-21-11-2014%29 Extremely worthwhile, should be stock. Kerbal Flight Indicators ​by the same author is also very useful.

The four engine version should be capable of a near vertical climb, if you pull the nose up gradually. The extra stability built into it will make it resist extreme AoAs, though. If you've cut it down to two engines, then yes, you will lose the vertical climb ability. Keep in mind that only a tiny handful of real world fighters can climb vertically; a 40° climb is actually very steep in real world terms. This is one of the reasons why overpowered planes are more fun to fly; you can get them up into the low-drag 25,000m+ zone much more quickly. Other possible problems: * Are you using some sort of PID tuner or other SAS damper? The pitch oscillation typically induced by the oversensitive stock SAS tends to cause a gradual nosedive. * Pardon the obvious, but are you certain that it was at full throttle and didn't have flaps or spoilers deployed? * If you've added docking ports in front of the lateral engines while keeping them in place, this would have shifted the engines back a bit, substantially altering the CoM/CoL relationship. Ditto if you've removed the lateral engines (but shifting CoM forwards in that case). Engines be heavy. If you have removed the lateral engines, then as well as halving your thrust you will have also probably increased the the CoM/CoL offset. A pitch-down tendency is exactly what you'd expect in that case; the shift gives the tail drag more leverage, encouraging the plane to straighten out its position relative to the airflow. But because planes always require some AoA even for level flight, a plane that is perfectly aligned with the airflow is a plane that is in a dive. (as always, screenshots be good when diagnosing aero issues; it would remove the ambiguity about whether the lateral engines are still there) Run a 0-25° AoA sweep in the FAR analysis tools at the speed and altitude you're having trouble, then experiment by shifting the CoM forwards and back and see what it does to the analysis (you may need to shift the wings to keep the CoL constant while doing this). You don't want the yellow line to inflect up, but so long as it stays angling down even a tiny bit you're okay. The closer it is to flat the more manoeuvrable (but less stable) the plane will be.

Yup. (stupid 10 char limit blah blah)

It looks like you're doing that by just angling a non-flap control surface rather than actually setting them up as flaps. Start with the non-angled version. Right click to access the control surface tweakables, then set it as a spoiler. By default, the spoiler will be triggered along with the brakes; go into the action groups and remove the spoiler controls from the brakes, and add them to a custom action group (i.e. 0-9). Now you can toggle them on and off whenever you like. If you want finer control of the deflection, set them as flaps instead of spoilers, but with a negative deflection (flaps default to deflecting down, spoilers default to deflecting up). Now set two action groups: one to increase deflection, one to reduce it. The animations on flap/spoiler deflection are slow; they require ten seconds or so to shift.

Already there; Aerospike landers.

Landing in unusual places is as much about post-touchdown behaviour as what happens before. Wide-set landing gear, tailstrike guards, and some Vernors or Sepratrons for retro-thrust braking. Find a good flat spot and you can safely touch down at 200m/s if you build for it. You won't get a lot of effect from airbrakes on Duna; the air is too thin to give them much grip. Use S-turns, loops or climb/dive cycles to ditch airspeed before touchdown.

Got a screenshot? Although this isn't how the terms are defined in the real world, in FAR the only difference between "spoiler" and "flap" is that spoilers toggle to full deflection and back with a single action, while flaps shift in three stages (requiring two action groups, one to increase, one to decrease). Either way, you can set the deflection to whichever way you choose. If the flaps are causing trouble, just deactivate them during reentry. Or consider setting up opposing surfaces to act as neutral-pitch airbrakes:

Cool; I like the ring-hangar. What's the blue thing on top?

G'day. Got into the mods yet? There's a lot available to improve the spaceplane experience if that's what you're into.