Jovus

Just to back up Master Tao, I just did a reentry at Mach 10 with a PE at 21km and no heatshield (using an LV-909) and that worked fine. Well, the engine stuck within 10 degrees of exploding for about three minutes straight, but everything survived. So it sounds like something is weird with your install: either FAR, or DR. If the output.log doesn't help, check the DR debug screen (press ALT+D+R while in a flight scene) and make sure you haven't fiddled with your DR numbers.

ferram4, I just wanted to say thanks. This mod makes all the difference. In fact, I was never interested in planes or flight before this, and now I find real-world aerodynamics (and the engineering solutions) fascinating.

Try clicking while holding down your cmd key?

You should be aware that, because of the way KSP loads and unloads craft in flight, it's very likely you will lose the rocket attached to the plane. As soon as you detach the plane, the game recognizes two separate vessels, and when two vessels are flying in atmosphere and more than 2.5km apart, the game unloads the one you're not focused on. I

Finally started playing again, this time with KSPI, RemoteTech, and KCT. Finally did a close flyby of the Mun, and now it's time for me to put up my keostat network.

That said: I find that, with a standard ascent path (getting to at least 25km going at least 1500m/s) you generally want to shoot for somewhere a bit over 500m/s with a TWR of ~0.6 to make orbit. Those are minimum figures, and as noted by posters wiser than I above, very rough.

Thanks. I suppose I'll just ignore drogues, then. One other question that brings up, though, more to the root of what I was trying to do: How do you keep sounding rockets from dying? Specifically, I mean rockets intended to go on steep suborbital curves for science-gathering or other purposes. If the answer is "you don't; use a shallower trajectory," that's OK.

I have a use question! Not a bug question! I'm using RealChutes with Deadly Reentry. As such, if I deploy my parachutes while going too fast, I tend to die. This is as it should be. My question is, how do I properly use drogue chutes? My impression is that drogue chutes are intended to slow down your craft so that the main chutes can properly deploy. However, as far as I can tell, drogue chutes are just as easy to rip off as main chutes, so I'm struggling to see a use case. Is it the case that drogue chutes in fact can survive higher speeds? Am I doing chute deployment incorrectly? Am I right, and drogue chutes really are extremely niche to useless with this version of DRE? Can anyone give me some tips?

Funnily enough, the Mach effects make re-entry easier, because they greatly increase drag in the higher levels of the atmosphere.

I'm getting the impression that the answer is 'yes', but a thread search hasn't revealed the answer: does SCANSat properly detect ORS resources (as distinct from ORSX)?

Play a different game. I know it's blasphemy, but they do exist.

I'm impressed you got that thing stable with those wings so low. Wow.

It has been 'proven' impossible to make an Eve SSTO. This doesn't directly answer your question, but it's a lot easier to make a multi-stage rocket than a multi-stage plane.

When using just the basic jet engine, I ignore flyover contracts that aren't close to KSC. I have other things to do with my life.

One thing you could do to give yourself a wide landing base and yet have a tall thin launcher is to build such a base attached to the butt of an aerodynamic rocket by decouplers. It'll still be difficult to land properly, but easier than without.

Let me second the suggestion of KER (Kerbal Engineer Redux). Make your lander in the VAB with that mod installed and the KER part slapped on. Set the mod to show atmospheric stats, and include enough dV to get to orbit. (There are dV maps on the wiki; if you need to you can probably skimp about 1000m/s because they are made for a stock air model.) Then build something to get it there, of course, whether that be all one giant craft or something you dock to it in orbit. As to actually flying the thing? I don't know. I've never done an Eve descent or ascent. I should think you need pretty beefy heatshields, and to do your gravity turn a wee bit later in order to get out of the atmo better (because I think the atmo curve at low altitudes overpowers the gravity curve, though I'm not sure). Good luck making something tall and skinny landable, though. You might want to just suck it up and power through the atmo with brute force, at least at first.

Considering there are numerous other ways to activate the engine instead of staging (action groups, right click menu), no, restaging so you can use the engine itself isn't cheating. Unless your personal restrictions make it so. It might seem a bit 'unrealistic' to use a part like it's not experimental when it is, just because the game won't let it blow up in your face.

This challenge is unfortunately impossible without modifying the maximum loading distance. Craft in atmosphere more than 2.5km from the one you control will cease to exist, and you can only control one craft at a time.

There are thermoclines and pressure equipotentials in Earth's atmo because it's not an ideal fluid. So no, KSP's atmo is not just like Earth's. (Not that I'm complaining. Simplifying assumptions that don't do violence to the underlying truth make the game run faster and are easier to play.)

With a spaceplane, your big advantage is that you can control altitude very well. Your big disadvantage is that you aren't as well shielded from heat as with an ablative shield. Therefore, the proper thing to do is to spend more time slowing in the upper atmosphere (around and above 30k).

Your options aren't low enough for me. Where's the 'yellow timer with a mk1 pod on the launchpad' option? (KSP isn't meant for laptops.)

Even if there is some 'total reference frame' that incorporates the entire system of the universe, that reference frame has no claim to truth. Motion is completely relative; I can define any imaginary frame of reference I want, whenever I want, wherever I want, and I can define it so as to be in motion relative to anything I want. So in that sense, no, it's not possible to stop everything in the universe. However, what you could do to sidestep that problem is to define the desired state as every local mass being at rest relative to every other local mass in the universe, effectively unifying their reference frames. According to Newtonian mechanics this is at least theoretically possible, though of course the engineering solution is not. According to quantum mechanics? Not really, no. Any state of absolute rest would violate Heisenberg's uncertainty theorem. There are people who will tell you that the uncertainty principle is an epistemic rather than ontic problem, but so far complementarity seems to win out pretty strongly against hidden determinism.

Almost certainly the problem is that the bicoupler on the back is the last to drain its fuel, which does make it back-heavy on landing. You'll either need to redesign the plane so it drains sooner or manually pump it forward when you hit orbit.

I'm having trouble getting back into the game at the moment. I just got to orbit for the first time in my new save centred around spaceplanes, but the attraction of planes that go to space is starting to wear off, replaced by the tedium of building and flying them.

You'll have more luck convincing Squad to release a stable 64-bit build than convincing ferram to support the current one.