Jovus

Can I? 'cause that would be awesome. I'll go try that. Thanks!

One change I would very much like is the ability to activate and target antennae even without a current connection. I know this is being discussed already, so I'm not asking for the mod creator to make this happen. Rather, I'm asking what module I should be looking at to make the necessary changes myself. (I'm not familiar with C#, but I doubt it'll be that hard to figure out.) Would it be, as seems likely, in ModuleRTAntenna?

Flight report for an unmodified Kerbodyne Skua: First, I should say (and it comes as no surprise) that it performs as advertised: a very nice plane all around for getting light cargo loads up to LKO and doing orbital rendezvous. Well done, Wanderfound. There are just two things of note, and one suggestion. I noticed on the way down, around 30km going Mach 3 there is a touch of instability with a not-exactly-empty plane. Nothing unresolvable, but I had to be more careful with the inputs than I at first thought (amounting to, for a moment, almost having to worry about half as much as flying my own planes). On the way up the handling is great; however, the monoprop tank doesn't allow LF/O to flow across, so the rear RAPIER chokes as soon as it exhausts the fuel in the adapter. I don't really see a use-case for that much monoprop, so what you could probably do is just replace it with an LFO short tank (or a short cargo bay, though the weight difference will probably be more extreme). Its low-altitude, low-speed is if anything even better than the Gull. ...now I need to see if I can recover from the Hell Kraken, or if I'm just waiting for 0.90 to come out.

Sounds more like a landing gear problem than a pitch authority problem. Place your rear landing gear further forward, because what's probably happening is that when you try to pitch up with that gear on the runway, you're fighting against a strong lever arm due to gear placement and the plane doesn't lift. Then, when you go off the end, the runway is removed from underneath, and your violent pitching up causes the plane to tear itself apart. As an aside, the plane you have now is going to want to yaw all over the place in the air, and it's only going to get worse as you go faster. You need one or more of: bigger rudders, more rudders, rudders further back. Finally, I know from experience that at high altitude and speed rear delta designs like that are going to want to pitch up away from prograde; you probably want to place another pair of canards on the nose for the pitch authority to fight that tendency (and then move other things around to compensate for the change in CoL).

FYI, setting MultipleAntennaMultiplier will increase the range linearly according to the (1 + the factor given) * (number of extra omni antennae). So setting it to 1 will double the range if you have 2, triple if you have 3, etc. Personally, I have mine set to 0.2, which requires a lot of extra weight on the probe for omnis to replace even the most basic dishes. (3 to reach to KEO from LKO, and only just barely.) That said, I'm playing with stock Kerbol, not RSS. Either way you probably want to pick up the configs for RSS, so the antenna ranges make sense.

Hodo, I definitely can land at lower speeds; I just also can usually land at speeds up to 150m/s, and I don't see any reason to wait if I can keep my vertical speed under control and have enough runway. I pretty much never land with a vertical speed greater than -6m/s, though.

Oh yeah? Prove it.

I usually land around 100m/s as well, but I was jockeying for position, and then decided to see how far I could push it and keep it in the air.

Gull on descent and incidentals: The Kerbodyne Gull variant I flew handled my standard descent protocol very well. (It involves flying around half the planet bopping between 25-30km.) I noticed that when you get very low and very slow, it just keeps flying. Probably has a lot to do with its wing configuration, but I ended up doing multiple circles of the runway at 300m altitude going ~70m/s. (I could have landed on the paddock, but I wanted to hit the runway.) All in all a very flyable plane, though a rank novice might have trouble with overcorrection at low altitude. In the SPH, however, I discovered that there were no flaps set up, and that all the control surfaces hadn't had their masses tweaked down from the default 1. Also, the tailplane was set at what I consider a heavy 0.5 (I use 0.3 for tails, since they don't experience as much force as lifting bits.) Congratulations to Wanderfound on another successful design.

Reporting back on the Kerbodyne Gull Utility: It flies really nicely. (surpise!) I'm using a modified version that replaces the cargo bay with a short cargo bay and a crew cabin. (Aside: Good job, Wanderfound! I was able to simply plug-n-play the new parts with no changes to the airframe other than a 5-degree dihedral on the wingtips.) My one point of less-than-stellar performance is that, despite a nearly optimal flight profile (1500m/s at 30km before switching to rockets) I hit orbit with ~200m/s. That's enough for some careful orbital maneuvering, but I tend to prefer at least 400m/s - honestly, I was hoping to get multiple things done in LKO, not just dropping off a crew at my space station. I'm a bit leery of putting an actual cargo in the original design, given how thin this margin is. I haven't yet brought it back down; I'll report when I do.

This guy knows how to play this game.

Watching you launch/dock/maneuver all that with a green mission counter makes my laptop want to cry.

If you edit your original post so that the title says 'answered' instead of 'unanswered', that's the standard way of 'closing' these threads.

That said, it looks like it connects, and the only ill effects are reduced structural integrity (fixable by struts or by making this a temporary situtation) and the tendency for your unattached decouplers to blow up prettily when you stage and they slam into the lower debris really fast.

It is, in fact, exactly like asking how fast is petrol. Delta V is determined by many, many factors. At the most basic, it's determined by the mass of the craft - including fuel - and the rocket equation. So, with a given thrust, specific impulse, and craft weight, adding fuel may reduce dV in some cases. It is also determined by your engine's specific impulse (or Isp, often known as Isp around here) which is a measure of how efficiently your engine uses reaction mass to change your velocity. Specific impulse is a trade-off with thrust and/or weight: the more thrust your engine has, the less Isp all other things being equal, because of the tyranny of the rocket equation. For practical purposes in KSP, if you want to know how much delta V any given design has, there are two options: you can either work it out by hand, or you can grab a mod that gives you a dV readout, such as VOID, Kerbal Engineer Redux, or MechJeb.

I want to see this movie more than the movie this is based on.

Cool! I might install this and see if I can get comfortable with any science via contracts, then.

Does this mod do something significantly different from the Zero Science Contracts Mod?

To be fair, 'hydrogen dioxide' is a deadly poison. We just don't usually think of it that way because we're rarely exposed to enough to do more than kill a few topical cells (and, more importantly, whatever bacteria may be in the area of application).

If you're looking for ideas still, Wanderfound, a SSTLAB* HTOL light cargo and/or crew plane would be cool. *Single Stage to Laythe and Back

Wanderfound, have you seen Nertea's new Mk4 parts?

Captured my first asteroid. And lemme tell ya, that mission was a barrel of laughs. One failure after another.

When the prospect of launching it makes you decide to play something else.

I'm not sure where this should be posted, since it's a suggestion for the website, not the game. A simple one, really: I was just buying a gift code in the KSP store to share this wonderful game with my friends (and take advantage of the Black Friday discount), but there didn't seem to be any way to buy multiple gift codes in one order. I want to give KSP to more than one person, but I have to go through the whole ordering process multiple times.

Minor potential bug report with a bit of the new UI: it seems impossible to select anything below Custom07 for default keys for spoilers or flaps. When you move that far down, the window loses focus and the menu disappears. I've tested this both in the default space centre scene and in the contract building scene (due to a misclick). It seems pretty easy to reproduce, and I'm using a fresh install (albeit with a lot of other mods). If this were at all a complicated workflow I'd pin down the bug further before reporting, but considering how simple it is to check reproducibility I figured it wasn't too much of a sin to report first. Ferram4, if you have trouble reproducing it, I'll dig further.