TheXRuler

Wait so you mean there are other ways to make a turn? I use this technique for everything, including my 350 odd ton spacplane xD

Well I haven't yet tried an early tech spaceplane, but one thing I think might really help is sticking some rato style sepratrons on, basically a radial decoupler with a bunch of, well, sepratrons. That should help you get a nice kick to boost your AP, if that is required, and they are really cheap ^^ Apart from that, go light, as light as possible. You might want to try something using only a singe jet and a few .625m rocket engines (if oyu have any of those unlocked) since they are really light and some of them get quite good specific impulse for amazing (engine-) TWR. Rocket engines are bloody heavy.

Also, if you are going for a tailless designg try using slightly dihedral wings

Love the design on these, they look like something straight out of a movie sadly I can't find the +rep button on the mobile website :c

Sorry to hear that, sounds like a really annoying bug :c If nothing comes up here I'd suggest going over to stock/modded support

Get Procedural fairings, interstage fairings should fix your problems, more or less.

Dude for real, just make your currently third stage a two stage vehicle, instantly more dV. One of the most important things I have learned in KSP is this: If you wan't more dV, edit one of the top stages, then make the booster stages big enough to handle that. You could add sixteen SRB's for probably about the same dV gain as you would get from adding a single flt-400 + LV909 to the topmost stage, it's just the way rockets work.

I cuurently use TAC-LS basically I dob't think the LS mods actually differ that much. Basically they just add a little to the planning of each mission although they can add to the general hilarity of the game. E. My first mission to Duna didn't have enough supplies, forcing me to send a ~20.000 m/s resupply mission, what I dad to do was fly up vertically away from the sun to reach duna within no mor than 80 days. Using an LVN it took me about two and a half hours of burn xD

Well for transfer windows I reccmend using the [thread=93115]Transfer Window Planner[/thread]. It's a small plugin that doesen't change the gameplay but instead let's you calculate transfer windows from and to any body.

Street Is right though, it would be a lot easier to build a dedicated lander craft and a seperate craft to rendevousz in orbit. Assuming you have the tech I think the best way to do things would be to stick a small, automated lander on the top to recover the single kerbal from the surface, then land only that. Also go to the mun first for two reasons, if you postpone the landing that means you are essentially lugging a whole load of dead weight around the whole time. Also, you will not get stranded in munar orbit since you will be taking all the fuel you wanted for the kerbin rendevousz. Then, if you start running low in munar orbit already you can go straight back to kerbin and not have to worry so much about leaving people stuck in orbit around another body, requiring a seperate (and expensive) rescue missin. Remember you can very carefully aerobrake yourself back into a circular orbit without spending another ~850m/s to slow down. Just aim for around 30km (at least that worked well in .90) although to be more precise I reccomend getting the Trajectories Mod or whatever it's called now which will display your orbit after aerobraking. Also very usefull for pecise landings on atmospheric bodies. Edit: However I think I "slightly" overbuilt the lander/transfer stage so it should still be easily doable with my craft. Say you use up 400 m/s for rendevous in orbit around Kerbin + 850m/s to get to the mun and 1000 m/s for each landing and takeoff that would still leav you with ~1300 m/s for rendevous in mun orbit and return to kerbin which should be waaay more than you need.

just a little sidenot you can upload your picture to an imgur album and wrap the album tag (something like az6H7) in [img0ur]az6H7[/img0ur] without the red 0 of course to get an awesome little imgur album

Soo I didn't feel much like describing everything seperately so instead I whipped up something in the VAB quickly which is almost the same, costs 2000 funds more, wheigs a little less and has the same exact amount of parts. First off, that trick for geting radial decoupling weas new to me as well and at ~1000h ingame time there aren't many things I haven't seen so thanks for that I just played around, minmaxing the stages a little. You see, on the first two or three stages the additional couple hundred kg from the cockpit won't make a huge difference, however, on the final stage it's really well worth using the lander can, since that has a lower mass and it will actually be carried the entire way. Basically make you stinginess with added weight directly proportinall to how long you will be carrying that stage with you, the further the stingier. Also I made the lander design two stage which has two main advantages, more dV due to dropping unnecessary weight and more stability because the center of mass is lower down and you have a wider base. The rest of the rocket is mainly unchanged apart from the fact that I use two skipper engines instead of just one as that allows you to carry quite a bit more fuel to orbit at little additional cost. I also slightly increased the length of the first liquid fueled stage since otherwise you would be wasting precious lifting capacity. One thing I did, then reverted because I don't know what you have unlocked was stick some winglets (preferrably with control) at the base of the first LFO stage, this will give you control early on, since the SRB's are ungimballed and the radial lander design shifts the CoL far forwards. As you can see from the screenshots, this setup will give you around 4000m/s of dV once in orbit, which should be way more than you need for going to and from the mun. Here is the craft file in case you wish to muck around with my design/take a closer look. (Edit: Turns out dropbox is a little messed up atm and I can't upload the file there, if you still want it PM me and I'll send it to you via hamachi/teamspeak/skype/facebook/email/whatever)

Finally got my Laythe lander working

Oh .90 is fine, I am still not using 1.0.x either xD Thanks you guys, it has been done, yesterday night the as of yet unnamed Lathye SSTO-Spaceplane had it's maiden flight, it turns out it is even easily capable of getting into orbit around Kerbin. Many many thanks to all of you for contributing and being so patient with me. This is my final version, any thoughts on a name?

if you use EPL right (I think it works together with USI) you can mine ore, on e.g. minmus, refine it there and build entire spacecraft in orbit. - - - Updated - - - You could also build expensive parts in orbit and sell them at KSC for a profit

If you are looking for a stock option you could search google for dV charts, although I don't know whether there are any up to date ones

Well there are a number of mods that will help you with this. if you get KER you get a dV readout both in flight and in editor. Transfer w planner let's you figure out the dV requirements for any given transfer.

Oh well there seem to be ever more problems xD the fins are indeed tilted outward by about 10° also, the I guess I should've clrified that I was sticking all moving surfaces on the nose, although I never tested it in flight. I just ran the FAR simulation and the numbers hadn't changed much so I trashed that concept, maybe I will go back to it though, so many things to try out. It also seems I had slightly misunderstood anhedral/dihedral effects, I was only considering the CoL shift, not the effect that yaw would have on a deflected wing. I guess theres quite a few things which I need to read up on >.< sadly aircraft aircraft design is a master module where i'm studying so it's gonna be a while until I really know what I'm doing

You just made my day Blowfish

Anyone know of a .90 version of this?

Well, if you do not mind experimenting a little, get KER or rather [thread=18230]Kerbal Engineering Redux[/thread] And just drop a vessel through the SOI of the relevant body and watch the thing called situation, it will transition between in orbit high and in orbit low. Or get Science Alert which will tell you when there is new science available. Also, have you tried searching google for sth like science altitudes mun, or Biome list 1.0.4. Just a few ideas, you can of course do it in stock by just spamming e.g. crew reports and checking wehere it changes

Uhhh the high lord of SSTO's *.* all bow to Wanderfound. I was wondering if that might not have a rather large impact, as it is now my fins are VERY close to the CoM. Incidentally, I had already tried vertical stabilizers on the nose, albeit very small ones. I feel confident I'll manage to get this thing working with all the input, thanks everyone, you guys are amazing I'll be sure to post the final design.

1200 Seats Oo man people really are abusing that part of the score calculator. Still an incredibly impressive mission, that final thing is huge T_T how much of that did you build with EPL?

Thanks everyone, that's a lot to consider, I'll try some redesigns and different flight profiles and let you know how things turned out.

First off, a real Skycrane look something like this. This is a slighly more insane version that I built some time ago Now to the OP, remember that KAS/KIS has winches and connector plugs, so you don't need to neccessarily touch it, you could land a few meters away and then connect it via a cable. For landing near a surface target, try keeping the target retrograde marker glued to the retro target marker.