GarageBay9

I tried to use parachutes to land on Jool. Yeah.

The truly proper Kerbal way is to build a replica of the SR-71, spend 90 minutes in real time hand-flying it around the equator of Kerbin at approximately Mach 4, and then at the last second, crack up the landing at KSC, killing two of your senior Kerbonauts, losing you all the science, and ruining the entire record attempt. /I am not the slightest bit bitter, I swear.

I am cracking up like crazy over here. The A-Team music was the icing on the cake.

Please... PLEASE tell me I'm not the first to post this.

Let's see... - Have an SR-71 replica I managed to accidentally put out of the atmosphere during one flight. 1.2km/s with turbojets is a seriously awesome ride. - My son whipped up an engineless helicopter in .22. Huge radial spirals of advanced canards from a single capsule, and apparently the SAS torque from the capsule was enough to spin them to create lift. Totally uncontrollable. Totally kerbal. - My current project has been design after design trying to get a atmosphere-breathing SSTO-VTOL with a cargo bay to work. I pretty much concluded that it's impossible with stock parts, and ended up adding the pivots from the Infernal Robotics pack. That was... closer, but still not enough. There just isn't a way to get above the weight - thrust - fuel curve without either being so small or so massive that it's worthless. And what makes it harder is that the moment you burn enough fuel or attach some cargo, the center of gravity changes and your carefully tuned thrust balancing to hold a hover is totally shot. It basically requires some kind of computerized assistance to both thrust-vector and thrust-balance your hovering lift engines, or it's impossible to fly in more than one mode and impossible to land. Multiple throttle axis to control different engines might be enough as well, but that's kind of hacky.

I think it would be neat, once costs are implemented for parts, to have a hybrid system where you can spend a little science to research different efficiency upgrades for parts, and then you can spend a scalable premium to upgrade the quality of certain attributes on a part by a certain percent (up to a limit). Being able to spend a premium to decrease weight, increase thrust, or boost fuel-consumption efficiency would be killer for really tight rocket building. It might also make it feasible to get ship designs working that are just under the efficiency curve with current parts - but you'd have to pay the extra. Right now I'm trying to make a SSTO dropship spaceplane that can also hover and land vertically to pick up mining base components and move them around. Besides fighting with the thrust-vectoring issues to just keep it in the air and controllable, the biggest issue I'm running into is that I'm just below where I need to be on the TWR and fuel consumption curve to make it work. The vertical ascent engines can lift it but eat too much fuel, and the forward flight engines (using RAPIERs right now, tried a few others) don't have quite enough thrust.

I'd like to see suborbital / atmospheric research included. The X-1, X-15 and later transonic / supersonic / hypersonic and high-altitude research programs were crucial to NASA's progression from the pre-Mercury era to the success of the Apollo program. Plus, it'd be a really cool way to do science. And watching Jeb grin like an idiot at the equivalent of Mach 3 is awesome.

Curious to see the changes to research. Just started a massive Duna base project with Kethane, so I'm a little bummed to start over, but I'll save my ship designs. They took the most time.

This whole thing started as a joke about Jeb having a ÃŽâ€v tattoo.