Jovus

I'm not Mazon, but sexual recombination is a much greater driver of genetic change than random mutation.

One other thing I might try is Science Funding, which gives you funds and rep for each point of science you earn (without taking away the science). The idea is so that you can play in career mode, with monetary restrictions, but not have to do contracts. It doesn't work so well if you do contracts as well, though I think it's thematic if you squeeze in the first record-setting scripted ones and the 'explore' contracts. It might add a fun new restriction to your gameplay while at the same time freeing up your focus. (That's what I find it does for me, anyway.)

Laythe. That's it.

Steering losses are not necessarily negligible in KSP. The normal definition also includes losses due to non-optimal insertion into your intended trajectory. The standard 45-degree turn at 10km in KSP is exactly such a non-optimal insertion, and the steering losses involved when compared with optimal insertion can be several hundred m/s

I'd guess dogs, because Kryten is right. The pets we'll have in space will be the ones we bring there, regardless of what would be 'best'.

That's a very inflammatory title you have there. Why does this small graphical glitch bother you so much? Or is it something else?

Have you tried carefully to replicate it and then submitted a bug report? 'cause the devs can't do anything about a bug they don't have a note for.

One possibility: did you detach the other craft before attaching this one? If not, the center of mass you were targeting was of the asteroid and capture craft, which would put you off when the capture craft detaches.

Plus, we already have enough trouble with rocket launches from a stable platform where you can build as much supporting equipment as you like and the rocket generally continues to sit exactly the way you propped it up until ignition. I shudder to think what the instability of an airship might do to launch operations.

Career with science funding and mostly ignoring contracts because they're annoying. (Except potentially as a way to defray the cost of a thing I'd like to do for fun but can't justify for science.)

Obviously one is for proving to the public we went to the Moon by launching from KSC, and the other is just a cardboard mockup for the Apollo TV livestreams. Alternatively: the first rule of government budgets is "why buy one when you can have two for twice the price?"

Lobsters do indeed not undergo senescence. I've heard the same about goldfish, though I cannot confirm. Sharks, though - while it isn't confirmed yet one way or the other, imagine an ocean wherein the sharks just get more experienced every year. (This may be the ocean we have.)

Without seeing your plane I can't give detailed advice on how much rudder it really needs, but my gut reaction, especially since you've said you're using the Mk2 long adaptor, is "at least the small delta with elevon 1 on the end." As you can see above, rudders tend to be bigger than you think they should. This is probably because higher up there's less air flowing over the plane, and so less lateral pressure on the rudder to keep the plane pointed into the airflow. A general rule of thumb is to make the rudder way bigger than you think it needs to be, and then try downsizing until you're comfortable with the drag-stability tradeoff in your intended flight envelope. There are other solutions to yaw and spiral mode instability, but they're difficult at best to implement with stock parts, and some of the more interesting possibilities may not even be modeled properly by FAR. One other thing you'll find from Wanderfound's excellent thread if you're looking, but that you might miss if you aren't: FAR now has a wing strength/mass tweakable that you probably saw. The default 1 is really only necessary for the most extreme aerobatics; you can probably reduce this down to 0.5 with your lifting surfaces and 0.3 with your others without ill effect. (I've held a 9g turn for half a minute with my wings set up like this.)

I'm in the same boat. I've been trying to build my own, but I've gone through something like 5 rounds with Newegg about bum parts... Haven't played KSP in a few months. I finally got fed up with having a yellow timer just from putting a bare Mk1 on the launchpad.

I'll also say that 33km is actually pretty darn high for turbojets. I routinely kick the rockets on at about 22-25km (I don't mind the waste) and keep the jets on until about 28 or so to ram more air in. At a guess, I'd also say you have too many intakes. Yes, theoretically you're able to go higher, but you're also massively increasing your drag. (And no, turning them off doesn't decrease their drag in the slightest.) Around 2 to 2.5 per jet should be enough, methinks. The biggest thing is the ascent angle, as others have said. Get to 10km as quickly as possible with your plane. Then level off to about 5-20 degrees (depending on your acceleration) so you can hit the numbers eddiew posted. As for your sideslip problem, there's basically one solution: a better rudder. Better either means bigger (which increases drag) or further away from your CoM (which might be difficult depending on your airframe). Regarding tailstrikes, there are a number of possible solutions. One of my favorite is a pair of landing gear set right at the tail and elevated above the plane of the others, so that when you get enough pitch authority to lift the nose, you hit those instead of your engine.

Laie, I can't see what distinction you're making between what you wrote and I wrote. Can you expand that further for me? (I suspect we're in agreement, but I'm curious if I'm thinking about something incorrectly.)

Plus (at this point) R&D costs for new rockets, plus (though I doubt doubt this is a smaller factor) for some mission profiles it wouldn't work very well, and you might not save delta-V because of extensive orbital maneuvering. As a side point off the top of my head, I wouldn't be too surprised if the $/dV were cheaper in the first stages than in the latter stages, since RP-1 and storage is probably cheapter than hydrolox or hypergolics. That's all just searching for plausibilities, though. I can't say I know the answer, because I don't work in the industry (yet).

Yep, I know everyone helping out with the thread probably already knew that; I just figured I'd go the extra step to try to help a newbie out. Sorry if it came off like a correction of what you said.

Just to be clear, this isn't quite exactly true to real life. The stock (0.90 and earlier) simulation of atmosphere creates a lot more drag a lower altitudes than is realistic, so the turn to orbit tends to be much higher and more severe (also because the stock atmosphere is very unlikely to tear your rocket apart). When using a more realistic aerodynamic simulation on Kerbin, a pitchover for a gravity turn tends to be around 5 degrees when the rocket's moving at about 100m/s - which is usually below 2km altitude. In real life, a number of familiar rockets turn <1 degree at about 300 meters.Source (This would probably be more efficient in FAR as well, but KSP's control scheme doesn't make that easy.) 5 degrees, you say? That's hardly a pitch-over at all! And you're right. The reason it's called a gravity turn is because after that initial deviation from the vertical, gravity actually tilts the rocket further, helping to set the optimal trajectory to orbit.

There are a couple of possibilities. Most 'obvious' would be to make it some sort of plane, probably utilizing RT-10s for the thrust and (if you don't have landing gear) putting it on the runway with a lauch stability enhancer to allow takeoff. Perhaps easier would be to do this backwards, i.e. on the way down. Launch a very streamlined rocket, send it up to ~30km with SRBs, then with rockets on both ends manage the descent speed so that it is going that fast in that envelope.

Basically, the answer is that the gravity losses of burning straight up are much greater than the atmospheric losses of not doing so. Gravity is pulling down on your rocket at ~10m/s^2, which means that in order to go up burning vertically you have to thrust such that your acceleration is >10m/s^2. However, if you're burning sideways, you get all of that thrust, instead of subtracting gravity. Anything in between falls off like the cosine of the angle. It's actually even bigger a deal than that, since once you hit sufficient sideways velocity gravity actually helps you, which it never does when you're burning directly counter to it.

Are you kidding? Nobody likes turbulence, and people get downright upset flying through a thunderstorm. (Sorry, I couldn't help it.)

I generally shoot for a liquid-fuel starting TWR of around 1.4 and turn 5 degrees at 100m/s or so. Sometimes if my TWR is low, it'll be around 125m/s. I don't pay attention to the altitude, except that if I'm tilting over more than 40 degrees or so by 10km I'm going to end up too shallow. However, I've noticed that my turns have a tendency to be inefficient - they're slightly too steep. I'm okay with this, since the reason for it is almost always that I'm using SRBs for my first 1km/s or so, and their thrust isn't anywhere near as controllable. I lose ~200m/s delta-V, but I make that up in drastically reduced funds/dV.

If you don't want to lengthen your fuselage - because you need that diameter of cargo bay and don't want to add even more fuel - there are a couple of things you can do to help with your yaw problem. First, sweep those wings to at least 15 degrees. You're doing yourself no favors by having them straight like that. (In fact, were it my plane I'd go with a low aspect-ratio delta, probably.) Second, give them a touch of dihedral - no more than 5 degrees should be necessary. This will help with the spiral mode instability I'm betting you're experiencing, where sideslip leads to roll leads to more sideslip. Finally, take those wing extensions you have and turn them into winglets on the very ends and backs by making them vertical and moving them as far back as possible. You might even want a larger wing for this, like the small deltas. As an alternative, take off the nacelles and make up the extra fuel by extending the fuselage with Mk 3 parts. With swept wings (and possibly less wing; you have a lot), you don't need the extra 4 RAPIERs. Then you can have rudders further from your CoM.

Both your 'not long enough' and your 'too much fuel' problems will be solved by switching to the Mk 2 instead of Mk 3 fuselage. Unless you have some cargo bay I didn't see?