Jovus

eddiew, I was running into the exact same problem once upon a time before Wanderfound helped me out. (You've definitely come to the right place; this man is a gift to KSP's spaceplane designers.) What manifests itself as a lack of lift problem is almost certainly actually a lack of thrust problem. Put more engine on that bad boy. (And possibly less wing, though don't screw up your low-atmo low-velocity performance.)

I'm willing to bet good money that your failure mode when switching to rockets/in space is having the plane nose uncontrollably up, and that the reason for that is those huge, heavy vertical stabilizers putting your CoM above your CoT.

In real life, time is cheaper than dV. In KSP, dV is cheaper than time. I expect this explains the discontinuity.

I have one like that! It has a trio of decouplers to separate a stage (the stage above has three engines). One of them decouples the craft; the other two are immediately counted as clipping and go boom. Not as prettily, though.

Another, more efficient way: in your parking orbit, put out a maneuver node and use it to boost your orbit to roughly where you think you ought to be to be in the neighborhood of Minimus when it gets there. (You'll want your apoapsis to be above 46,000,000m, but not too far above.) Then, on that predicted orbit, drop a second maneuver node - doesn't matter where, but for efficiency's sake it should probably be somewhere beyond the orbit of the Mun and not too close to the orbit of Minimus. Then, on that second maneuver node, play with the radial burn indicators. Fairly quickly you should get a close approach marker. If it's not where you like, you can drag that first node around your parking orbit. (This may require some readjustment of the second node as well.

Nope, not gone forever. It's a transmission cap, but the rest of the science is still sitting there on the planet waiting for you to come pick it up. (Albeit in 70% increments like normal.)

Try buzzing the tower. If you're successful, try it closer. Then closer...then asymptotically closer. Bonus points if you destroy the SPH. Bonus JEBEDIAH points if your pilot(s) survive(s) without parachutes.

When you get to escape velocity during the solid booster portion of your launch.

I would very much disagree. I've ridden through about a minute and a half in some reentries with bits of my plane starting to burn but ultimately staying intact(ish).

I feel I should expand on my comment above. I don't want random failures to be part of the stock game. There are two reasons for this: a reason for me, and a reason for others. First, the reason for others: newbies would leave the game. I know I would have decided the game wasn't for me if after launching my first or so mission it suddenly didn't work because the game decided my fuel tank should explode, or whatever. I'd have said, ".... this," and never looked back. Squad (and the KSP community) wants KSP newbies to stick. Second, the reason for self: having a feature as part of the stock game makes it an 'opt-out' (at best) rather than an 'opt-in'. This holds an entirely different psychological space and weight. To explicate, when you 'opt-out' you are choosing not to play the whole game. When you 'opt-in' you are choosing to play the game PLUS something else. Yes, this is 'silly' in some sense, but it's a real psychological phenomenon (for me, at least). That's why, at some point in the future, I'll probably enjoy playing with the Dang-It mod, but I don't want it to be part of stock functionality, ever - I don't want to have the back-brain feeling that I'm not playing 'the full experience' of KSP.

I'm going to chip in here and support the 'no random failures in stock' paradigm. It's already far too easy to screw up a mission due to deterministic factors; if you want random failures, play with a mod.

I keep Jeb and Bill (mostly) at home. Sometimes they go on routine missions, like an EVA to fix my defunct Lunar Lander (stuck in LKO because I didn't extend the solar panels). Why? Because Jebediah is in charge of the aviation program. He takes up the planes and the spaceplanes. Bill is his co-pilot/EVA gofer. Why Jebediah? Because when my planes go into a flat spin at Mach 4, I know Jeb can handle it. He's pulled out of more hairy situations than I'd like to think. (And you in the audience blaming my design skills: hush! I know Cargo Lifter Mk1 is very squirrelly all over its aerodynamic range!)

Two pods reentering from Minimus within 2 minutes of each other.

Jebediah is in charge of all my spaceplane testing programs. Usually Bill rides shotgun, which is taking years off his life.

OK, glad to know you've got it covered! Sorry I didn't see it in the thread; my search-fu is weak.

Think I found a bug. It appears you can build craft with parts you have not yet unlocked in the tech tree. (I don't know if this applies also to things you simply haven't purchased in the tech tree.) Steps to reproduce: 1) Take a craft from a different save or the stock folder that has parts you have not yet unlocked. Move the craft file into your personal save's craft repository. (I recommend using a spaceplane, because that's how I found the issue.) 2) Load up that craft in the appropriate building. 3) Hit the 'Launch' button. 4) In the KCT popup, select build. It should get added to the build queue. 5) Wait until the craft is built. 6) Launch the craft using the KCT dialog. Interestingly, it appears you can't simulate the craft, so some logic somewhere is checking whether parts are restricted. ETA: I'm on version 1.0.3, using the KSP 0.25 for Win32. I do have a bunch of other mods installed, but this is purely with stock parts.

Gfurst, that's not a design problem, that's the way air works. If you want to slow down faster, you're going to need to do something to increase drag. Turning or pitching up are perennial favorites.

Your standard kerbosynchronous satellite ring is 2.868Mm above ASL for Kerbin, right? And it has cone antennae that talk to mission control, coned at Kerbin, and on active vessel, of course. Your kerbosynchronous ring has no communication trouble. That's not my question. Put a probe with a Commmunotron 16 in 100x100km orbit of Kerbin. Wait until it's out of range of mission control. Now the Communotron 16 has a range of 2.5Mm. The only way for it to get a connection is via your kerbosynchronous ring. 2.868 - 2.5 = .318Mm = 318km at shortest distance. Yet your satellite is in a 100x100km orbit, which makes a 218km lack, so you should have no connection. However, we all know from experience that this is not the case. Your kerbosynchronous ring has no trouble keeping constant contact with anything in LKO with a Communotron 16. So where am I going wrong? If a picture is truly necessary, I can boot up KSP and take a screenshot.

February 29th, both because we want Kraken Day to be rare (so as to avoid luring it out) and because leap days are a common cause of mistakes in crappy time-handling code.

I'm having some kind of stupid math trouble. The range on the Communotron 16 is 2.5Mm. The distance to geosynchronous orbit (With its DTSM-1s) is 2.868 MM. 2.868 - 2.5 = 0.313Mm, or 313km. Yet despite this, as we all know, a probe with a Communotron 16 in LKO (say at 100km) has no communication trouble. Where am I misplacing my decimal? I'd dearly love to know before trying to set up my Munar trojans.

Turbojets and docking ports.

Large explosions, in all cases. Except not in KSP; they'd pass through one another harmlessly.

"So, we go about our daily lives, collating data from extragalactic observations whose distance from the telescope is measured in megaparsecs..." Protip: size does not correlate with importance.

That is indeed a .... lookin' plane. And good job - those orbits can be a pain! May I ask what your precision is there? (I'm currently just finishing setting up a RT2 geosat ring myself - my sats are a whole 0.2 seconds off perfect.)

For those of you wanting rectified tank costs, copy this into a cfg file somewhere in your Gamedata folder: @PART[AntimatterTank125]:Final { cost = 48113200 } @PART[AntimatterTank250]:Final { cost = 385577600 } @PART[AntimatterTank375]:Final { cost = 1301249400 } You need ModuleManager for this to work. Also note I haven't tested this in the least; it's just an extrapolation of the solution already given in this thread.