Wanderfound

This suggests insufficient pitch authority. One possibly relevant note: at hypersonic speeds, rearset conventional control surfaces lose much of their power. The wind is skipping past the top of the wing too quickly to notice the elevators. This is where all-moving control surfaces (e.g. canards, AV-R8's) come into their own. Some all-moving forward-set elevators (i.e. canards, in the real-world rather than KSP definition) will give you a lot more hypersonic pitch authority. You'll need to adjust your wings rearwards to compensate, though. Too much forward lift = very bad. If you hold maximum pitch up (i.e. hold down the S key) throughout, what happens?

Go EVA, recover Kerbal. Don't park too close to the runway.

BTW, the easy fix: lose NEAR, install FAR. Then run some analysis screens and post them here; we'll be able to tell you exactly what's wrong. Despite perceptions, NEAR is actually harder than FAR. Simpler != easier.

Exactly what is possible depends upon the design, but as general guidelines: * High AoA (i.e. 40° or so) in the upper atmosphere, but stop as soon as you start to feel the atmosphere through your controls. * Moderate AoA (i.e. about 10°) to level off. Aim to have the plane flying level by 30,000m. DaMichel's Kerbal Flight Data is very useful for this. Steepen your AoA as soon as the temperature warning goes yellow; try to keep it out of the red.

Pics of the ship misbehaving and dying would be useful. At what altitude do you lose control? What happens when you try to pull the nose up? How steeply are you reentering? Etc. It may be a lack of sufficient high speed pitch authority, but it's just as likely to be a piloting issue. I did a tutorial recently that you should find helpful, covering spaceplane construction, ascent, reentry and landing. It was intended for FAR, but NEAR is close enough not to matter too much. See http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Tutorials/Hangar%20to%20Landing/story You may also find the tips here useful: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1353890&viewfull=1#post1353890

I'm fine with extending the testflight deadline a bit if needed. No rush.

Quite happy with this one: Did somebody tell you that Mk2 cargo bays are too small to hold anything useful? Stop listening to that person. They don't know what they're talking about. Instead, come fly the new Kerbodyne Investigator. Long range, ample performance and two integrated exploration vehicles: probe and rover. Deployable, recoverable, highly capable. Explore the solar system for nothing more than the cost of the fuel. Simple lift off. And easy climb performance. Stable under time acceleration. Cruise to orbit on the nuke. 5,000m/s of ÃŽâ€V still in the tanks. Time for the first trick. Release the drone. A full science payload, 10G thrust and a decent chunk of ÃŽâ€V. Sufficient RCS reserve on board to refill the probe several times over. Use of thrust limiters recommended for fine manoeuvring; even at minimal throttle, this thing has a lot of kick. Action group 9 will disable the payload RCS during flight, while action group 8 toggles the probe's monoprop propulsion. Nuclear propulsion makes Munar or interplanetary travel easy. RAPIERs remain in reserve in case of the need for emergency thrust during landing. Vernors to soften the touchdown; simple to land in air or vacuum. And now for the second trick; open the payload doors... ...and drop the cargo. Rovey goodness. Able to self-right with RCS if flipped. Onboard probe core permits unKerballed operation. To recover: first park your rover near the rear of the bay. Raise the rover on its landing struts. Before lowering the plane's landing gear. Precise alignment not required. Use the rover's RCS to push up the last few inches. The rover has sufficient thrust to fly even in full Kerbin gravity. Retract the struts after docking, and redeploy the mothership's landing gear. Not bad aesthetically, either. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/akf8r1akrqoq1wy/Kerbodyne%20Investigator.craft?dl=0

Did somebody tell you that Mk2 cargo bays are too small to hold anything useful? Stop listening to that person. They don't know what they're talking about. Instead, come fly the new Kerbodyne Investigator. Long range, ample performance and two integrated exploration vehicles: probe and rover. Deployable, recoverable, highly capable. Explore the solar system for nothing more than the cost of the fuel. Simple lift off. And easy climb performance. Stable under time acceleration. Cruise to orbit on the nuke. 5,000m/s of ÃŽâ€V still in the tanks. Time for the first trick. Release the drone. A full science payload, 10G thrust and a decent chunk of ÃŽâ€V. Sufficient RCS reserve on board to refill the probe several times over. Use of thrust limiters recommended for fine manoeuvring; even at minimal throttle, this thing has a lot of kick. Action group 9 will disable the payload RCS during flight, while action group 8 toggles the probe's monoprop propulsion. Nuclear propulsion makes Munar or interplanetary travel easy. RAPIERs remain in reserve in case of the need for emergency thrust during landing. Vernors to soften the touchdown; simple to land in air or vacuum. And now for the second trick; open the payload doors... ...and drop the cargo. Rovey goodness. Able to self-right with RCS if flipped. Onboard probe core permits unKerballed operation. To recover: first park your rover near the rear of the bay. Raise the rover on its landing struts. Before lowering the plane's landing gear. Precise alignment not required. Use the rover's RCS to push up the last few inches. The rover has sufficient thrust to fly even in full Kerbin gravity. Retract the struts after docking, and redeploy the mothership's landing gear. Not bad aesthetically, either. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/akf8r1akrqoq1wy/Kerbodyne%20Investigator.craft?dl=0

Incidentally, stock landing gear can cope with hits well above 10m/s. Coming to a stop via main engine about 30m up and then rotating forwards and dropping onto the landing gear works; you can soften the hit with Vernors, but they aren't strictly necessary.

Since we're discussing rotational fake G... The research coming out of the vestibular labs suggests that for a spinning habitat to be viable, it would need to be the size of a small town. Small rotating habitats generate coriolis forces in the inner ear, which are, in the memorable phrase of one paper I read, "explosively nauseogenic". 2001 got the physics right, but as is common in SF, they forgot about the biology.

Try to think of Kerbin itself as the spaceship that you're trying to fly to Duna or wherever. Figure out what direction the planet would have to burn to make the Hohman transfer (i.e. Kerbol prograde to raise orbit, Kerbol retrograde to lower orbit). Set your exit burn so that you're thrusting in the same direction as the planet would be if it was flying itself.

Weirdly though, it's stock that's the main culprit here. I now tend to avoid going to places until the "Explore X" contracts appear. OTOH, Fine Print tends to push me to do things that I might not have done (e.g. land a base on an asteroid) instead of discouraging things that I may have done. And I'm still launching non-contract stuff: Scansat probes, refuelling stations, etc. But if I can make that Scansat probe into a Fine Print satellite that also does the first Munar orbit and fulfils a science contract, then win/win/win/win.

Vernors make for very good zero-mass low-G VTOL engines:

Yay! Time for the Kerbodyne Heavy Lift range... (BTW, if you can figure out how to make a cargo bay that is easy to drive rovers in and out of, there will be many happy Kerbonauts)

FAR and DRE are independant of each other, but they go very well together. The big difference in stock is that your engines keep pushing you throughout the dive; in FAR, jet thrust drops to zero before Mach 6. You might get a good dive in FAR if you came in from orbit, but you'd need rocketry to get up there without burning all of your existing lateral speed in the climb. BTW, follow up pic:

Can we add an achievement for doing it IVA? Do passenger cabins countas "useless cargo"?

Which is where DRE comes in. I'm actually finding the dive technique to be not that useful. You lose more to drag than you gain from gravity; you're coming down at much more than terminal velocity. Diving aids acceleration rather than top speed. I haven't had anything over 1,800m/s on FAR jets alone; current best is this:

While there's no way to skip getting fuel to orbit, there is a way to do it on the cheap. A good spaceplane tanker can put up better than a Rockomax 64 per flight for less than √1/unit. It's not necessary, but interplanetary is a lot easier if you can ditch the boosters, lift off with your transit stage and refuel it in orbit. OTOH, as has already been mentioned, you can get to the Mun and back for about √25,000 using nothing more than the first couple of tech nodes.

Should be fine, although you might lose some of the radial bits off the payload if you go too fast too low. In most respects, FAR is actually easier than NEAR. NEAR is simpler, but simple doesn't necessarily mean easy. The mach effects of FAR make it a lot easier to slow spaceplanes down during reentry. The only legitimately tricky bit of FAR was aerodynamic failures, and that is much less of a threat now with the new wing strength tweakable. As mentioned, I'd take Goodspeed over TAC-FB. They're both good, though.

You're a bit late on the submission deadlines, but if the other entrants want to test-fly (and possibly vote for) your ship that's fine by me. You could probably encourage them to do so by posting testflight reviews here of your competitor's submissions (hint, hint).

A useful resource: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/64362-Fuel-Flow-Rules-%280-24-2%29 The TLDR version is that fuel always drains from the farthest tank first, and you can use fuel lines to manipulate which tank is farthest. In this situation, though, you're getting screwed by a symmetry bug. The bicouplers seem particular prone to attracting them. You can do assorted design tricks to get around this, or you can just take the easy way out: TAC Fuel Balancer (good) or Goodspeed Fuel Pump (better, but a tiny bit more complex).

Other name: Cedric. (hey, it worked for Nissan...)

Yes, it is absolutely possible to make SSTOs work with Deadly Reentry in play. In fact, in many respects they're more important when DRE is in effect; the lifting surfaces of a spaceplane allow for much better descent control than a capsule, allowing you to reenter as fast or slow as you like. If you're burning up during ascent, you're accelerating too much at too low an altitude. Climb more steeply. Alternately, you may have DRE misinstalled. When things are burning up, what speed are you doing at what altitude? Also, however: what other mods are you using? Most importantly: are you using FAR (you should)? If you post some screenshots of your ship, we'll be able to diagnose the most obvious issues with it. I put together a tutorial the other day on spaceplane construction, piloting and reentry with FAR and DRE. See http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Tutorials/Hangar%20to%20Landing/story

Like your VTOLs, but don't want to be limited to oxygenated worlds? Sick of waiting around for nuclear rockets to finish their burns? Come fly the new Kerbodyne Cacafuego. There's nowhere it can't go. (note: Kerbodyne accepts no liability for damage done by VTOL exhaust to runways, helipads, forests, housing or biospheres. Look before you land.) Easy and stable VTOL performance. Instant-response rocket thrust provides a safety margin unavailable to jet-lifted craft. Smoothly converts to horizontal flight. Climbs well in either mode. Simple to orbit. Use VTOL Aerospikes for vacuum propulsion in order to enhance fuel efficiency. Interplanetary range provided through the use of drop tanks. These tanks are narrow enough to be economically and easily lifted to orbit by spaceplane, and the linear and trailing placement of the tanks removes any issues with docking port misalignment or flexibility. As the tank attachment point lies directly upon CoM, the train of tanks can be extended indefinitely without upsetting the vehicle balance. Dedicated science explorer microsat. Sufficient RCS on board the mothership to refuel the microsat several times over. Not a lot of fuel, but useful delta-V and impressive TWR (take a look at the G meter); you don't need a lot of thrust on a vehicle this lightweight. Drop off the probe on your way into a system and recollect it on the way out, or use it as an advance coalmine canary when planning an aerobrake. Very stable in the hover. Keep the Vernors on at all times while hovering; they're your primary stability aid. Weight balance is vital in any VTOL, but the lack of Aerospike gimballing ability makes it doubly so in this case. Keep your fuel load balanced, and tune the VTOL thrust by slightly adjusting the position of the forward thruster if you change anything in the SPH. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/1ovzen4998vylg2/Kerbodyne%20Cacafeugo.craft?dl=0

Now that I've started using Kerbal Construction Time, I have reason to park and refuel planes instead of scrapping and rebuilding them. So I made a Klaw-based refuelling truck; just drive up to the plane, hook on and pump away. Ditto for refilling the truck from a tank. Much easier than fiddling about with KAS fuel hoses.