Jovus

I think it's more of a "I have no mouth and I must scream!" face. So, uh, :{} maybe?

Spoken like someone who doesn't work on DoD contracts for a living. It's kinda the main focus of the company.

Was the gull configuration just for runway clearance, or something else?

Nice! I'll definitely be giving that a spin later. I'm curious, though: does it tend to torque up when out of atmo? I've discovered that large tailplanes can cause my designs to do that due to the extra weight above the thrust vector. Also I'm curious why you decided to go with gull wings, since I don't think you've done that before. How'd you fiddle them into aerodynamic stability? Was it easy?

You might want to think this over a bit more, since it's disgustingly easy to make absolutely huge amounts of money by just stringing together orange tanks and extracting/refining Karbonite on the launchpad without going anywhere.

Space is pretty safe from the spirits of the drowned. As long as you don't pack a bathtub.

Then, go to Eeloo! Who says you have to do everything in order?

Really, ferram? 'cause I've seen behaviour that's at least very similar to that. Namely, I put on a piece that got ripped off (it was a basic battery), then I got curious and put said battery on a structural girder behind and inline with a pod, and it didn't get ripped off even though I was intentionally pulling more extreme maneuvers.

There are two ways to do spaceplane reentries with DRE installed: the sensible way, and the 'fun' way. The sensible way is to bump around in the upper atmosphere (~30km) until you bleed off enough speed to go down further - which is probably when you're going 1000m/s or so. Using this method you don't really need to worry too much about stuff burning off, because your reentry heating should be minimal; if it isn't, you aren't spending enough time bleeding off speed in the upper atmosphere. However, one drawback is that this method of reentry is highly inaccurate regarding landing spots, so expect to either make a lot of landings on suboptimal terrain or to spend time motoring back to KSC. The 'fun' way is to throw your periapsis to around 20km and position it above the desert on the continent west of KSC. Then, you use the aerodynamic qualities of the middle atmosphere to ride over to KSC at 20-25km altitude the whole way. Using this method, you need to make sure that all your valuable heat-sensitive equipment is either in a cargo bay or otherwise aerodynamically shielded behind some other bulky part. The advantages are it's shorter, and personally I find it more fun to ride the ragged edge and see how far you can push it. ...also, I don't bother to use drag chutes. Edit: aaaaand I totally missed that stuff was melting off your craft during your way up, not your way down. Yeah, fly higher. Do your speed dash between 17km and 25km, not beforehand.

Yes. I've done it. It works. If you keep things pointed properly.

Scratch my 2.5km/s number for rocket dV. I'm finding 1.5km/s sufficient; packing the latter I get to an 80x80 orbit with enough fuel to do a Mun transfer!

Simple question, really. When building spaceplanes to fly in FAR/NEAR, how much dV and launch TWR do you shoot for for your LFO stage? Of course the ultimate answer for dV is 'as much as costs allow', but I mean generally how much do you expect to use to get to LKO, assuming you've already flown up on jets as high as you like to? I figure it's partially a matter of taste, but I'm curious to see what different baselines people use, and in what range those rules of thumb fall. To start off, I generally like a TWR of ~0.8 or higher, or else I find the plane fighting to fall back down. (This obviously depends on lift, as well.) As for dV, I'm not yet clear, but so far it seems packing ~2500m/s works pretty decently, though sometimes I'm useless once I get up there - only enough fuel to come back down.

Take it from another guy who had a whole world of trouble with landing until just recently: right now you don't want airbrakes. Airbrakes steepen your glide slope, and your glide slope is one of your big issues right now. You want flaps, and put them close to your pitch axis so they don't force the nose up. As to the question of slowing down - you can do it. There are lots of ways to slow down with FAR. The #1 thing to remember is to cut your throttle completely, and then tap Shift just enough that you have the tiniest sliver active for thrust vectoring. Then, remember, nosing down will (generally) speed you up, while nosing up will (generally) slow you down. At that point it's a tradeoff between altitude and speed, which can be difficult because you want to be going low and slow to land. Come in too low too early, and you're going too fast. Come in too high too late, and you'll hit stall speed, dive, and crash. As a very rough rule of thumb, I've found you need to be going less than 125 m/s when you break below 1000m on your final approach, but it very much depends on the airframe. What doesn't depend on the airframe is paying attention to your glide slope: Generally, when you're going to touch down, if your prograde marker is more than 5 degrees below the horizon, you're going to die. Check your Vertical Speed Indicator (the circular dial next to your altimeter at the top of the screen) and if it's about 10m/s you're going to die. (And if it's close, you're going to have a very rough time.) You've already been given some advice on how to slow down. S turns (or full circles) work, as do flaps and spoilers. Or you can dive and rise, dive and rise, if you're more comfortable with that. In any case, start your approach far out - about halfway to the mountains, or almost in line with the island runway. It takes a longtime to slow down in FAR. And if, in the final analysis, your plane truly can't slow down in the sense that its stall speed is higher than 125m/s, then go back to the SPH and change things, because you haven't built a plane, you've built a flying execution device.

I'm findinng that 0.4 is about the sweet spot for my general purpose planes, with the bare possibility of 0.15 for craft I really want to baby to go fast, and up to about 0.7 for "I don't want to have to care about aerodynamic disassembly." 1 is what I use for slamming things into full pitches at Mach 3 to make myself giggle. That being the case, I would love it if in the next release the wing strength tweakable could be rescaled from 1 to 0.1 - either so that finer gradations are possible, or just so it's easier to pick a specific value. (Right now it looks like about half the bar is wasted.)

What probably happened with Treeloader is that whatever API it was calling into to make the changes got modified/removed in 0.25 with the changes to the tech tree. Unfortunately, since KSP's API documentation is so scarce as to be nonexistent, fixing Treeloader or coding up something with similar functionality is probably less a matter of code modification and more a matter of forensics.

I must have missed this. Music to my ears.

Doing the Wrong Brothers in FAR-enabled 0.25 with -1000 rep, 10000 funds, 60% funds and rep gain, and no science from contracts is hard. But I think I'm going to pull it off; I'm almost to turbojets, which means I can definitely get to orbit...if the science holds out.

So, to ask the stupid/obvious question: when you get this stall around 24k, have you already cut out the turbojets? 'cause if they're running out of air, they're flaming out, and they're almost certainly doing it asymmetrically - which will put you in a flat spin or other stall situation.

Silly question. How does one download the dev version, since there's no GitHub release?

My understanding is that some drastic change or other usually comes along for the ride with any FAR update, so you takes your luck and runs your chances.

If it's any comfort, you're not the only one waiting for FAR to allow tweaking wing weight. Low atmosphere loops at Mach 3 are fun and all, but ultimately I want my planes to go to space - else I'd be playing a flight simulator. As a stopgap, I'm cheating and going into the FARAeroData.cfg file and changing massPerWingAreaSupported from 0.065 to 0.03. It's not realistic, but it should work as a stopgap for personal use.

Firkins are used to measure volume, not mass. Stop confusing your units. You're looking for slugs, or perhaps stones or gauge if you can forgive the confusion of mass and weight (which should be fine for these purposes.)

Try a reinstall. I had the same problem with FAR in 0.24.2 and it turned out I had a bugged install due to an extraction glitch on my end.

This is caused by a mistake in Deadly Reentry v6.0. Update to 6.1 and it goes away.

OK, thanks guys! Glad to see it's already covered.