kcs123

Hard to tell without pictures or craft file. More probably that your plane have yaw problems then landing gear problems. Also excesive weight could misalign wheels, so that is another possible reason. Landing gears works just fine, I have made nice planes with both, 0.25 and 0.90 KSP. Check links in my signature.

Yes, you are right. FS feature. Adjustable landing gears and B9 gears both use FS and both have that alignment guide. For wings it is not so needed. You don't need to perfectly align canrads and elevators on tail for example. Those works just fine if are not on same level. As the metter affact, it is quite usefull to use offset tool to move canrads or elevators up or down slightly and fine adjust main thrust torque. RCS build aid is realy usefull for that.

Apologize if this is not valid entry. It is moded SSTO space plane. Requires mods: FAR, B9 , B9 Procedural Wings, Adjustable landing gears I have used MJ only for info and to create nodes once I'm in space. MJ autopilot don't like FAR too much. Only SAS pilot assistance used to keep pitching stable. SpacePlane Mk2 B9PW V0.90 - craft file.Parts count: 98; Cost: 103,104.00 Tested with 32.25t payload to orbit. More then enough fuel left for higher orbit and reentry. Plane was designed in such way that you can glide to runway from orbit without engines. If you assume that all fuel is consumed, fuel cost+monopropelant is 4,888.00 Payload is kibbal from station science mod (not required for craft file) dock port and some struts making 32.25 t. Efficiency should be: 4,888.00 / 32.25 t. = 151.56 cost/t In very rare occasions like in my test flight you will be able to put 32.25t, so I consider this as light cargo entry, but you can put it in any category if this entry is accepted. I'm still recreating my planes from V0.25 for medium/heavy category. You will find soon my additional craft files in craft exchange forum. SpacePlane Mk2 B9PW - trip to orbit with payload

I can't make videos, but I made small tutorial trough pictures Still working on thread and craft examples. Check links in my signature to find essentials about FAR graphs.

I just uploaded small design tutorial. You can find more stuff soon in my craft exchange thread. Link is in signature, here is imgur album that could help with plane designs.

SpacePlane Mk2 B9PW - trip to orbit with heavy payload - You can see optimal ascending path/speeds in galery.

I need a plane that is easy to control, have to be cheap as possible to build, have to be simple to build, have to lift a lot of payload as possible to establish orbit and have to be easy adapted for various orbital tasks: - Deploy / recover space probes - orbital rescue missions - passenger transport to space stations and delivery/recover various cargo to and from space stations in one trip On top of that, have to be most fuel efficient craft, because I'm lousy pilot and need a lot of DeltaV to compensate my mistakes. I have lot of issues in my airplane designs with take off and landing procedures, so aircraft have to be easy to control when you take off without gear woobling on runway. Also it is not so easy to safely land airplane in KSP. For safe landing I need a plane that is easy to control on low speeds, so I have more time to correct mistakes in runway aproach and for more gentle landing without killing poor Kerbals. When I'm returning from orbit, I want to left most of unused fuel at space station so, SSTO need to be easy to control glider without help of engine trust. Most of above plane share the same idea, only difference is size and type of payload. S3 was designed with larger volume payload for space station assembly, while MK2 based planes are mostly for probe deployment and small cargo orbital station resuply missions. Impossible to achieve ? Well, download craft and check for yourself. More info why such unusuall design coming soon in section below. Unhide spoiler below to find more info about design process. Link to original post from Spaceplane Design Contest thread. Unhide spoiler for more info how to improve L/D ratio. Picture with sumed up described design info. Galery with FAR building tutorial. More closely described above picture There was demand for more info how to use flaps. This info is also posted in official craft repository thread, but I will repeat it also here, to have all in one place. I never found flaps useless, regardless of wing shape, is it delta, straight or swept wing. You need to set other control surfaces properly to counterpart negative pitching down effect from flaps. I have used slats only on some heavy weight crafts where flaps were not enough because of overall craft weight, just to lower down pitching momentum, so craft can be easier to control. I found pitching down effect from flaps quite usefull. Designs with slightly tilted down nose worked best for me on take off landing procedures, less likely that craft will bounce during takeoff or steer left and right without control. Common question is how to reduce "sawfish effect" of plane, to wobble as less as possible with SAS turned on. There is several mods that attempts to improve this behaviour. But first step in wobble reduction is in creation of stable craft. When craft start to loose pitching, SAS increase pitching trough control surfaces and engine gimbals. When you set neutral pitching moment in high AoA area (most often mistake), craft will loose lift by large amount. When graph blue line start to drop rapidly, that is AoA when stall starts. Small thin lines tells how craft will behave when fall back to lower AoA until craft is controllable again. Thanks to Tetryds on clarification about stall effect and how it is represented trough FAR graphs. Craft on picture can have 23 degree of AoA before stall starts, however it is not wise to set neutral pitching moment at AoA just little lower than 23 AoA. For several reasons. FAR graph shows only pitching momentum from craft hull wings and control surfaces, you need to consider also momentum from engine gimbals and also momentum of inertia from previous craft movement. Those forces could push craft in AoA that is larger than it is shown in graph and that little extra can push craft in stall AoA area. Also if you choose large AoA where drag is significant, despite high L/D ratio, craft will start to loose speed. With speed loss, craft will also loose lift, this is more important at high speeds and high altitudes where small changes in lift can cause significant height loss where drag is even higher and cause even more drag forces. Or even worse scenario, craft can be disintegrated due to overheating. This is more important in creating of spaceplanes than it is if you try to build fighter. For fighter planes, rapid loss of speed and high AoA is desirable to achieve high maneuverability, but is not SAS friendly and something you want from spaceplane. Picture shows only graph for low speed. This craft have similar L/D line for 2/3/4 mach, so those graphs were not shown, but don't foreget to check those too when you build spaceplane. Those planes will not going to fullfill everyones expectations. Designed to be efficient and stable but for that reason they were not higly maneuverable. For that reason a lot of people that expect fighter plane performance will be disapointed. But if you consider them more like a heavy truck then a sports car, you will like them more. As I build those and test them I also learn more and finding out design flaws and what I could possibly improve. Mk2 V8 is more optimized then other planes because I spend more time building it then other crafts, also my first SSTO for 0.25 KSP. After Mk2 V8, I was wondering will the same aproach work for bigger SSTO, for heavier payload. So, I build other crafts based on the same concept.

Meanwhile, I finished that medium sized SSTO with latest B9 procedural wings. Performed realy well. Link for thread with craft file is in signature. Takoff speed with 31t of payload is between 90 and 100 m/s, flaps set to 2 and without pilot input at all. Link for galery if it not shows properly

Just opened a new thread, still need to update it with better pictures, but at least one craft made with B9 Procedural wings is available to try it. Link for thread is in my signature.

Recreations of my craft from V0.25 SSTO contest thread: SSTO Spaceplane Airplane Design Contest II Akademy Awards and probably some new crafts too I want to use this post to promote some of my favorite mods, like FAR, B9, KW Rocketry, IR parts, Procedural wings and some that I found recently like Adjustable landing gears and Advanced Jet Engines. When I need to ask someone about something in other threads it is easier to pinpoint them to this post, so they can see pictures and even download a craft file to see what I was talking about. Unhide spoiler to reveal links for old KSP version craft files from V0.90 to V1.0.2. KSP V1.0.5. craft files moved to spoiler section. All craft files are available in one archive - Download craft files. KSP 1.1.2 Craft files - All craft files are available in one archive trough download link. Pictures and descriptions moved to spoiler. KSP 1.2.2. Craft files. All crafts are available in one archive trough download link. Some picture will be added later

I think I found small bug. Yetarday I have done flight test with revised version of Space plane. I reached stable orbit and quit game after that. Today I was testing re-entry and I noticed that I have a lot more fuel then I was have when I left plane day before. Link for galery with full res pictures.

Have anyone have problems with action groups and lights not switching on/off properly ? More precisely, with cargo bay open/close ? I have bunch of mods installed, but I think this exists in stock only game too. Version 0.25 worked fine, but in V0.90 does not. Steps to reproduce: Create craft with Mk2 cargo bay. Put some lights in it and turn On lights. In custom action menu on AG3 for example put toggle cargo bay and toggle lights in same group. Keep cargo bay opened and launch a craft. On runway try to close cargo bay and toggle lights with AG3. In my trials cargo bay is closed/opened properly but light toggle event is triggered only when cargo bay is opened, not when it is closing. Doing same thing when you attach lights on craft ouside of cargo bay and attach toggle light event on GEAR action group for example, works just fine. Sorry to bother you with this Claw, I don't expecting that you fix that, just I didn't wanted to start new thread for this. It is not big deal, I'm just curious if someone else noticed this or it is problem on my side.

@Damaske, try to copy Gamedata folder out of ProgamFile/Your_KSP_install folder. Double check that this folder is not readonly and then try to run DDS conerter on that folder outside of KSP main install. If everything worked then just copy converted folder back to main KSP game folder and overwrite files. If DDS still shows 0 files processed, problem could be elsewhere. Could be anything, missing C++ library or faulty directX install. Don't have a clue what else could be a reason for your problem.

My answer - No. Plenty of new features are introduced in next release. I'm sure that Squad did their best to make it work properly, but I think that it will be better to release at least one beta version before going to 1.0. That will provide much wider testing population and it will alow moders to prepare their mods properly. That beta don't need to last long, but after 2-3 weeks, this comunity will provide a lot of feedback, so you will be able to iron out some bugs that was sliped in game and polish some new features before going to full release.

One thing is nowhere explained in tutorials. How to determine engine efficiency ? One thing is to calculate manualy TWR - engine weight/thrust ratio. But how much fuel it consumes. Is that engine better than other one ? Answer is simple - higher ISP, more efficient engine is, found that accidentally searchin for something else on forums/wikipedia. I think that noobs to game will have less trouble to figure out if that is explained somwhere trough tutorials. There was some video on front page recently how to determine optimal speed over altitude for most fuel efficient way to reach orbit. It will be good to be part of some tutorial too, along with ISP explain. Space randevouz and docking is most difficult part to do for beginers. MechJeb mod provides a realy good help for beginers. Although I have learned a lot playing KSP, I don't use much of autopiloting stuf from MJ, but some things are still mandatory for me. I use MJ mostly for dV/TWR info while building craft in SPH/VAB and to help me in maneuvering node creation. MJ don't perform well in atmosphere with FAR, so I don't use it for autopiloting and some of my crafts have misaligned thrust with CoM and MJ don't perform well with those crafts in space either. So, most of piloting stuff I do by keyboard Still, MJ is mandatory for me to create maneuvering node for optimal hohman transfer for example. There should be good tutorial how to determine those nodes manualy. Or even better, in one of future updates, if you have scientist as part of crew, you could ask him to do calculations for you instead of MJ. And last thing that I can think of it on top of my head is how to determine right time and position for transfer to other planets. I don't seek answers for those questions, but that was most troublesome parts of KSP for me when I started to play it.

Found wierd one, also traced down to tweakscale. Don't know if someone already mentioned it or not. Build a craft, go to runway for test flight, everything works fine. Quicksave in flight and reload, or revert flight to runway or to SPH and launch craft again. First thing to notice, pilot pictures in down right corner are all black. If craft is in space and you try to fly it, whole planet missing textures. That is first sign that something is wrong. Next thing to discover is that action groups and RCS does not work properly. Engines are started, but no thrust from them, RCS turned on, but RCS engines also don't provide thrust. Due to graphic glitches I have blamed GPU drivers, ATM mod, tried with DDS loader and without ATM/DDS. I started to uninstall mods one by one until I pinpointed this bug only to tweakscale. I can provide picture if there is need for that, I deleted log files, but I will try to reproduce bug and upload log files if reproducing steps are not enough. Best of all I didn't have any of scaled parts on my craft, using this mod only for IR parts. It seems that I will have to make additional IR parts in same sizes as tweakscale allowed for that mod. Anyway, congrats to Biotronic for new job, thanks for making this mod, until you update it, we have to learn how to build crafts without it. Cheers.

No, those struts were not absolutely needed, but I have excesive load in cargo bay ~30t and with that heavy cargo outher wing have slight woobling. To ensure that wings will not be deformed in flight and stay in desired shape I used additional struts. It is habbit from previous designs with stock wings. Anyway, I have improved that plane design slightly, so it is able to reach orbit with less effort and without additional struts. Some struts are still needed due to KSP behaviour. One wing part crossing two sections of long fuel tanks, so while one part of wing is attached to one fuel tank, for more compact connection I use struts strengthen out part of wing that is not directly conected to fuel tank. Will see how much time I will have, I hope that I will be able to finish that plane and start some thread in craft exchange forum.

I'm not big fan of engine spamm. I rather want to make plane that can reach orbit at lower TWR than "1". First prototype that reached orbit. It still needs tweaking, have to try deentry behaviour, better alignment of engine thrust with COM, but it reached orbit with excesive payload.

New mod in development B9 Aerospace Procedural Parts - icon for this mode (editor KSC) is also wierd. Other textures performes well, so you may also want to add folder to ModsExceptions.txt file. It could happen when you try to convert already small size textures, so, maybe it will be good to add feature to skip small files/resolution when you doing conversion. That icon is already 4kb, so compressing it further don't give much space, but produce issues at same time.

It is pretty good in shaping possibilities. My first prototype for V0.90 reached orbit. Made a mistake with main engine thrust aligment, but it is efficient enough for prototype. Made it to work with FAR. Texture repleacment works nice, now I'm sad that I can't do the same for cargo bay and fuel tanks, but it is only aestetic problem. Design in SPH is much easier then with ordinary PW and don't produce memory leaking like PW. It is not something that is compleatly PW fault, but rather stock editor and PW behaviour. This B9 procedural wings doesn't suffer from such memory leaking SPH editor "feature" like other mods. While building my craft I didn't found any problems with B9 wings in editor or in flight. Don't know how much time I will have, but I plan to make some decent planes with those wings. Just to promote this already great mod as my gratitude to making it.

@tempsgk, check links in my signature, you will find good and bad examples in STTO contest thread. Rakaydos have also asked here about his bi-wing planes, ferram answared as I recall that two wing is only 30% better then one wing and that is only at subsonic speeds. On supersonic speed it is pretty much dead weight. It will be easier to search this forum for his post to find better answer. That contest was for KSP 0.25, but most of things still is valid. Main difference is new skin drag feature. Because of this you need to go for much higher altitude to be able to reach certain speeds. For jets it means that you need more air intake, more air intake also means more drag. So you will have to find sweat spot to make good plane. In my previous designs for 0.25 I was able to reach needed speed near 20-22 km and then switch engine mode or switch to rocket. Now I need to reach 27 km to be able to go above 5 mach. That means that you need stable plane that can reach 27 km on low speed and low AoA. Still, I was able to make again plane that lifts 30t payload. Whole plane is near 108t. It is based on my SpacePlane Mk2 V8, just with two more air intakes and new B9 procedural wings.

Maybe you got too much mods installed afterall ? Try to use ATM with fewer mods at first. Reason is that ATM will make a cache file with converted textures, so when you run game second time whole loading is lot faster. In my case with "only" 37 mods it was close to one hour with first launch. Second time it is near 2-5 min. I didn't measured, just subjective time feeling. Alternative to ATM is DDS loader and converter. However you need to convert files first to DDS format to be able to use them, but you need to do it only once.

Just look at few pages back in this thread and you will find a lot of videos and pictures with kOS and IR parts. Hint: those mech a like crafts made with IR parts

This time I have installed PW and other mods trough CKAN. Between other mods I also installed MemoryUsage. That was alowed me to see strange memory leaking in SPH editor. It is related with procedural wings. Whenever you resize wings small amount of memory is consumed each time. Memory usage is increased each time you resize some wing until game finally CTD. It can be prevented if you watch memory usage and when it is near critical area (3.3 GB in my case) then you can save and load craft in SPH editor. This will reset memory usage to "normal" level. In my customized game it is near 2.8 GB due to larga number of used parts. I hope that this helps to narrow down bug and other users to make workaround of this.

Finally I got soem time to try this. Sorry if there is already asked, but is it possible to add custom URL/dependencies as addition to official CKAN repositories ? For example, I would like to add some mods that is still in development like B9 Aerospace Procedural Parts or Adjustable Landing Gears, not officialy updated, but works fine in V0.90, still CKAN don't allow to install it. I'm aware that I could mess up something with it, but that will be my fault, should not complained about it, but it will be nice if it is possible to make such repository for easier maintenance of my personal set of mods, suported or not trough CKAN officialy. Another feature will be helpfull to other moders and should be easy to make. List of installed mods with version numbers, but not in list with checkbox like it is now, rather in plain memo box, so it could be easy copied in clipboard and pasted to forum when someone asks for help with mod developer. Or even better, do that in memory, not in visible memo and just add "Copy list of installed mods" button and put list of installed mods in clipboard. It will be easier for users to provide info that moders request for debug. Last, but not least important it will be good to put custom "exclude" list from some mod. For example B9 mod is great and I like it, but I didn't make any craft with HX parts and I delete them to make some space in memory for parts from other mods. I can do it manualy, but each time B9 updates it will install all parts again, so I again need to manualy delete them. Custom "exclude" folder from inside mod will be nice too. It is little harder to make such feature properly, but should not be imposible. Otherwise it is realy great addition to KSP, thanks.