eddiew

IIRC, thermals get distributed in KSP; the canards may be dumping their heat into the cockpit. Logically they also have a very high surface area to volume ratio and should be able to radiate more efficiently than a cylinder/cone. And I guess they present a relatively small profile to the airstream, especially if you're coming in prograde. The cockpit has a 1.25m radius, no matter how streamlined it is. The canard is a knife edge.

This was not an easy thing to make! JNSQ is hard on SSTOs; it's very hard on stock SSTOs. This is the fanciest one I've managed to build in many hours, and it only lifts a 2 ton cargo, and it only survives the trip because I reduced the re-entry heating setting to a suspiciously magical 42%. That said... the Hotwings 4ST gets to orbit. It even gets to orbit with some spare fuel. I suspect it can probably lift 4-5 tons because that would only be a small fraction of the vessel weight, but I'll have to test that. It definitely does not survive the descent at 100% heating, even with the most conservative "periapsis at 35km above KSC" flight profile. It just can't slow down enough without active braking (although I am now suddenly considering retro-rockets in the nacelles - but it would then need a bigger fuel budget to make use of them). I am basically ready to throw in the towel on that because stock parts were just not designed to hit an atmosphere at 4km/s. You can't hit Kerbin's atmosphere in stock at that speed either; not without a heat shield or modded parts. And that's fine, I will just consider this the tweak necessary to get the gravitational challenge of JNSQ without also having to find more thermally tolerant parts The ascent follows my standard "point at 10 degrees" profile. There's no real need to wring every last m/s out of the rapiers, and it's very questionable whether doing so even saves fuel. It seems better to keep vertical velocity above 100m/s than it is to push for horizontal; and realistically, +/-200m/s at 20km is only 5% of orbital velocity anyway. Altitude is preferable. Aim for ~1400m/s at 15km, then kick in the nervas, followed by the vector around 20km. While the oxidiser holds, TWR will be above 1, and should get a 50km apoapsis or better at ~3200m/s. The nervas are capable of adding the last 600 to break atmosphere, but it does feel very tight, with vertical velocity nearing zero even under thrust. Not particularly visible; the Hotwings 4ST has a lot of vertical as well as lateral symmetry. There are two nervas under the wings, and the small tail fins exist on both dorsal and ventral sides. I found this helped with avoiding roll coupling while trying to yaw. It's basically only the landing gear and aerobrakes that are on just the top or bottom. There is a very slight dihedral slant on the wing tips which just helps a little bit to prevent unwanted roll on the ascent. On the way down, it handles just fine. I brought this one down on a shallow ascent just to see how it went, and it did leave me much closer to KSC than previous harder drops have done, with more control over exactly where I wanted to come down. But I may try a bigger cargo and a steeper descent later, just for curiosity. I would like to know why our space shuttle comes in at 30 degrees AoA, and all kerbal craft seem to be closer to 5-10. Atmospheric handling is pretty good on low fuel. At takeoff, yaw and roll and made a bit precarious because of the heavy fuel in the nacelles, so those are set to drain first. With the wings dry, she basically floats. The CoM moves about half a metre between empty and dry, and is far enough back that it doesn't flip unless hamfisted into it, and you can give the KSC a good buzzing if you desire. The main-wing elevons are just flaps to provide more lift on take off, and are locked flat once in flight so's they stay out of the way of the nerva exhaust. The clearance is tight, but it works.

Went to space in a stock mk3 SSTO with JNSQ. No modded parts. Not even Tweakscale. (Disclaimer: I reduced re-entry heating. I'm not sure this would survive the ascent at 100% thermals. Heat is more your enemy than gravity in JNSQ.) Hotwings 4 ST has 750m/s left in orbit, while the comms satellite has a further 2k - enough to take it to a local moon. Refinement pass and full write up tomorrow. It doesn't have any aerobrakes and I haven't tested stability with no fuel, but it is now 1am. Took so many tries to get this bird to orbit at ~2.4x scale

Oh, well then maybe have a trawl through the "What have you done in KSP today?" megathread. There's literally years worth of ideas for station/base building, mining rigs, Mun-capable SSTOs, and the like Ahh, gotcha. Then that is a fear to be rid of - by practising. Send a probe to Duna, learn to park in orbit, how to land, and maybe have a little science capsule that you fire off and bring back to Kerbin. If it fails, if you fly off into deep space, if you crash on the surface; no matter. It was only a probe. They're there to learn with Also, never be afraid to install some mods! Transfer Window Planner, Kerbal Alarm Clock, and Kerbal Engineer Redux are very, very powerful for getting you to the right place. If you can read a delta-v map, build a vessel that works, and know the launch window, you can build interplanetary manoeuvre nodes by hand. Mostly it's just about knowing whether now is a good time, or you need to fast forward 6 months.

This took a while to work out... Now knowing that Thor Tech adjusts aerospikes to be more efficient, I got rid of that particular patch and instead tried to build a viable spaceplane using JNSQ's supplied/approved Javelin engines. Went through... about 6 versions that didn't go to space, ranging between 4-5 Javelins and 4-8 nervas. Eventually found success with even moar tweakscale. Upping the LV-Ns to 1.875m turned out to be the happy place. The wings are also something like 140%, giving them more lift and fuel capacity. Hotwings 3JS dusts off around 130m/s, and the oversized rapiers again deliver a good heavy kick on the way up, ignoring the mach barrier completely and passing 10km well above mach 3. Adding the nervas around 12km allows the Javelins to kick in past 20, swooshing the whole thing up to about 2800m/s at 40km. It is... a tight ascent. The vertical velocity very nearly falls to zero around 50km, but Hotwings just barely gets through it as the periapsis stops being so very negative and the long, long ascent resumes. It takes blooming ages to get this thing to space; but it does reliably get there. Pointing to around 10 degrees all the way works well, although nosing down once atmospherically-orbital is advised. The biggest issue on descent is overshoot; it is hard to get this low-drag, heavy thing to come down from mach 12, and I think I ended up setting the impact point several hundred kilometres west of KSC - and even then, a hard dive was needed at the end. Fortunately you can get away with all kinds of nonsense at 3km in stock atmo As usual, descent exclusively works with reduced re-entry heating. In fact I suspect it won't survive the ascent either, at full thermals. Respectfully, I don't care I wasn't very pleased with re-entry heating when it was first added to stock way back when, and I still don't feel like it adds anything to (my personal) gameplay. I know it's realism, but I honestly prefer just being able to drop a brick back to Kerbin and have it survive. Side note: I did also try using a 2.5m scaled version of the unbuffed aerospike; it still flies, but the margins are the narrowest of all three builds. Still, it does look quite pretty with a big ol' bee stinger on the back!

Honestly, if you have to ask this question, you might not be very into this game Which isn't gatekeeping; honestly, if you want to go to other planets, go to other planets, I've spent thousands of hours doing so. The joy for me is in building, refining, mission planning and eventual execution with maximum efficiency. But if you found nothing fun about going to Mun (including the design and building phase), be aware that that's basically the rest of the game, just with different colours and some atmospheres. Couple of places you can send a plane, most you can't.

I think I lost the game.

Page or two back are a few using the schramjets and scoop rockets. They were a whole new ascent profile, since the schrams will happily get you to mach 10 - if you can stay between 20 and 35km and not explode But as noted, I have scaled back the heating in my game, because honestly, I like challenges but not hard limits. Gravity is a challenge; exploding on re-entry is unavoidable. Ohh... I'll see if I can find that. I saw the atmosphere curve change, I didn't actually check against what the defaults are. I thought it was pretty efficient already, but maybe I've underestimated the changes made. But I haven't noticed this at all I found the Deep Sky aerospike, but didn't notice a third. I'll go looking later! It's not really beating myself so much as wondering what is actually possible with new universal constants So far I have established that stock parts don't really cut the mustard any more - but modded parts are very adequate. They are late in the tech tree, but they are eventually accessible, and that's good to know. And to be fair, the Hotwings 3 develops about 2.6 TWR for a brief shining moment around 10km and 1000m/s - then starts decaying by 15km and fizzles at 18

Continued with my obsession to make an almost-stock, useful SSTO in JNSQ. Hotwings 3 is a very different bird to the OPT-engined ones I've been favouring so far; where their goal was to stay low and hit 3000m/s on the shcramjets, Hotwings 3 will struggle to pass 1500m/s on turbojets - and this leads to aiming for that speed at around 12-14km altitude. Fortunately, the 2.5m rapiers deliver quite the kick and once off the runway, ascent to 8km is very fast and easy. From there, levels off to around 5 degrees and hammers it. Kick in the (stock) nervas past 10-11km where they'll have over 700isp, nearly full thrust and will burn for several minutes, so no good reasons not to add 200kN right now. (Other than the potentially radioactive exhaust, obviously, but we don't worry about that kind of thing here.) If all goes well, by 15km she'll be passing 1600m/s and it's time for the aerospike; in this case, Tweakscaled up to 2.5m and given a new plume and gimbal by Thor Tech (side note, I do not believe TT makes the aerospike any thrustier or more efficient, but I'm not honestly sure. If it is improved, I think it relates to the altitude it gets to it's best efficiency at - which means very little in JNSQ. Maybe @JadeOfMaarcould confirm this? ). TWR is tight, starting around 0.99 when the rapiers fizzle, but it's just enough if you're careful. Hold the angle of ascent all the way; the oxidiser will burn out with about 2km/s left on the nervas, but the TWR will drop from 1-1.3, down to just 0.28. This is fine if your AP is already above 60km when the aerospike fizzles; failure to do this will result in rapid unplanned deorbiting. Assuming you made the altitude, the nervas are just enough to push you into orbit. Even with Tweakscale, I think the big red tank test is going to be a major challenge in JNSQ without modded parts, so instead I've opted to do proofs of concept with a simple relay satellite; this one carried enough for 2km/s, which would take it to Mun, or possibly even Minus orbit. This isn't useless, but it probably does come quite late in the day if you're launching MK3s with rapiers and aerospikes. Still, it would certainly meet a whole bunch of career satellite contracts and make some roots. A bit tempted to try replacing the engines with clusters of stock ones... I'd be interested to find out how many are needed and if the end result still flies. There would be a lot of surface-attaching, which would require a lot of nodes to be closed off with tails or nosecones, but hopefully it's not beyond the wit of kerman. With regards to stock-a-like fuel lifters for JNSQ, I'm thinking the best option might be a drone ship - possibly one that doesn't have a cargo bay but simply is the orbital fuel tank until it's time to come down. Or it might be viable to launch largely-empty orange tanks which would be assembled in orbit by a tug. Won't be surprised if it's more efficient to mine Minmus and come back to LKO however. This isn't really a planet pack where you're supposed to SSTO anyway, I'm surprised I got this far with only Tweakscale and reduced re-entry heating Edit: deorbiting note - while the Hotwings 3 does not get seriously hot at 42% heating, the airbrakes will blow up if deployed fully. A reduced 40 degree angle is recommended, and still provides some drag. Also, there is a risk of tail strike on the lower nervas; an extra set of landing gear at the back of the wings would prevent this. The engineering team has promised to look into it in about 40 years when the radiation clears enough to return to KSC.

Finally, finally, got a mk2 airframe to SSTO with JNSQ. Yes it did need the mostly-cheating OPT shcramjet engines (Tweakscaled down) and a reactor from Deep Sky. But it made it. That fuselage has so much drag I can't work out why it hasn't been reduced. It is... simply not useful, despite being very pretty. Initially tried OPT's mk2 jet engine - which is good, to be fair, pushing beyond rapiers and up to 1800m/s, but the flight ceiling is low, and JNSQ's atmosphere seems to still be pretty dense by the time you pass it, so rockets end up with a lot of work to do. In the end, OPT's schramjets won out again, although their low-speed thrust is ruddy awful and they always need help getting off the runway and then again to go supersonic. Fortunately when upwards of 520m/s, they are into their power band and can push even this brick up all the way to mach 11 - with an AP upwards of 100km if you let them keep pushing. Flight is very, very low; mostly using canards deployed at 1-3 degrees, with manual nudges to keep the nose down. The problem isn't getting out of the atmosphere, it's doing it with enough speed to not waste all your rocket fuel. Obviously, the mk2 (and stock wings) wouldn't survive this abuse at standard heating; I've turned mine down to 42% which seems somewhere between sane and not enough. Things do get warm, but they don't explode. Except airbrakes, which absolutely do explode. One glance and poof, gone. Also went through several iterations using SRB assist to pass the mach barrier, none of which really did the job because the added boosters also added drag, meaning they needed to last all the way from the runway up to altitude and the magic 520m/s - and nothing was really the right size or shape. In short, I can't find a way to do a small, useful, SSTO under JNSQ without using some overpowered parts. But they're parts that are late in the tech tree, and I feel like by the time you get to them, you've earned them. Came back down with no major issues other than overshooting and having to loop back. Did not spin out in the upper atmosphere, which was nice - although that usually dumps speed, so maybe it would have been useful. Almost had a perfect touchdown, except bounced a bit on the runway and skidded off to the side. Came to a stop on the tarmac though, so all's well that ends well! To be fair, JNSQ is only ~2.4x scale, so if you can do something on 3.5 then it should translate down pretty well

It's so beautiful Love the sneaky SRBs on the bottom. It's hard to make an SSTO for JNSQ, but creating a HOTOL with disposable boosters helps a lot - mostly to get trans-sonic, but sometimes just for lift because you'll be running so heavy. Good point about fuel consumption scaling; I do notice the rapid drop of resources, but on the whole it's about finding a balance of power and part count. There's going to be a different sweet spot for all of them I reckon - and a single large engine does look better than 4 little ones, most often

Wait, wait... Far Future makes mining other planets actually useful and profitable? I was gonna go science mode, but maybe...

Got a bit obsessed noodling around with JNSQ... After many hours, I've decided that I'm going to compromise on the scale; namely I'll keep it at it's default ~2.5x, but I'm dropping re-entry heating to a pleasing 42%. Why? Because gravity (and orbital radius) doesn't actually tend to say no very often. It usually says "try harder". Atmospheric heating on the other hand, just says no, you can't use that component in anything but the most conservative of builds. It'll be nigh impossible to strap a mk1 pod onto anything for the aesthetics, because it doesn't have the thermal tolerance to come home. That would make me sad, and since this is a singleplayer game, I'm tweaking that setting to my liking Experimenting a while, I concluded that the magic number of 42% creates a stock-like experience when descending from low orbit. Mk1 and mk2 pods will get quite close to redline, especially if plunging directly prograde. An AoA anywhere from 20-40 degrees seems healthy. At 45% heating, the mk1 doesn't survive. I'm not real sure about 43-44%, but honestly, the difference won't be huge. Either way I suspect that trying to come back from Mun without braking into circular low orbit first will kill stock cockpits, so that is still a constraint that must be worked with. Anyway, once you mitigate the re-entry fireball issue, turns out you can still make a small spaceplane; if you don't mind a couple of shrimps to help the rapier get supersonic, and that it really won't carry anything to orbit with it. Trying for an mk2 fuselage... no. Just no, as far as I can tell, or at least, not with stock engines. IIRC, the mk2 was always renowned for having more drag than the mk1, and it tends to just cause things to get stuck at a given altitude and speed - usually an altitude and speed that would see you suborbital in stock, but which won't break 40km here. Strapping an mk2 to the front of an mk3 fuselage and using Tweakscale to provide some supersized rapiers and aerospikes delivered some success; hit orbit with ~800m/s left on nervas. Plenty of TWR during the ascent, should be viable to lift small satellites, or just act as a touring craft.

So yes, OPT's J fuselage and engines can pass the big red test even at default scale JNSQ Fun fact, when I added a cargo bay, I forgot to set any fuel type to it... so it was purely structural. The J3 was evidently capable of lifting more than it can physically fit, with no additional fuel required. For reasons unclear, the J4, despite looking just a touch too long, actually handles better than the smaller version. The ARI engines need to burn a little longer during launch, with a target of 600m/s at about 7km before the Nebulas can keep up, but after that it's the same acceleration phase at 10-22km before switching to shcramjet mode and gunning for 40km. Topped out around 3050m/s before needing to engage the ARI engines again. Apparently I had one pair on auto-switch, and the other on manual, so it burned a bit more fuel on the way up than expected; but frankly the OPT engines are good enough that this didn't change anything about the flight. Nearly 40t of payload to 140x140km. Even shorter descent profile at about 60 degrees around from KSC; no thermal issues, and became flight stable a few km higher than expected. A good 5-15 minutes worth of cruising fuel remained and was ample to get back to a comfortable runway landing. On the whole, this is very much the sort of mod you want at the end of your tech tree on a larger scale play through (although it's probably overkill for stock)

Debating a career using JNSQ and whether I want to keep it at default size or shrink it down. My general love is making things that shouldn't fly, fly... so the higher orbital speeds and higher re-entry heating might be counterproductive. Meanwhile the larger planetary surfaces will make my overland expeditions take a lot longer - although Bon Voyage might take care of that for me. That said, JNSQwould almost force the use of mods that are deeper into the tech tree than I usually get before considering a game 'finished'. While it's not impossible to build a large stock-ish SSTO with Tweakscale... ...it was quite painful. This thing didn't carry any cargo and only had 200m/s left in orbit. I spent another couple of hours trying to get a cargo carrier with no success. This was actually the best of all the designs, and it was pretty bad So stock parts aren't going to satisfy. But what about modded spaceplane parts? Turned out that OPT has us covered for larger-than-stock homeworlds. I suspect it may stand for Over Powered Technology, but that's fine. It'll be late in the (community) tech tree and by the time you get there, you'll have earned it. Working out how to fly with OPT's shcramjets took some experimentation. Static thrust on the runway is low, these feel like 2.5m rapiers more than anything. But once you can get them past 500m/s, their turbojet mode develops a lot more power, and that will carry right on up to ~1600m/s (maybe beyond, didn't test it). This is plenty for any stock-scale spaceplane; you'd be about 45-50km up and possibly have an AP outside the atmosphere already. Not in JNSQ; here you'll still be very much atmospheric. That's when you need shcramjet mode. The power band for this starts somewhere around 20km and 1200m/s, but faster is highly recommended for a smooth changeover. When done right, you get a few seconds of low thrust, then jump from the fizzling 1.1 TWR of turbojet mode up to 1.5 on shcramjets, and they just keep pushing harder the faster you go. These eventually hit their ceiling around 2.1 TWR. This is indeed a bit absurd, but it is also the sort of thing you need at ~2.5x scale. Ascent was handled mostly on canard deployment angle; 20-30 degrees in the lower atmosphere, down to around 8 at the higher stages of ascent. Because it's such a long climb, you'll spend a lot of time in that slippery zone where you don't really have enough air for your control surfaces to work with, so the less manual input you have to make the better the whole flight will be. Too much fiddling will drop the nose, and even though this design is aerodynamically stable and won't flip, it can end up being a fight to regain your AoA if you lose it. (Side note; I found my rear elevons were working against the canards when the former were deployed; I disabled pitch control on them during ascent and things got much easier. Not sure where that behaviour comes from.) I'm not entirely sure what the true maximum speed of an OPT shcramjet is; I don't think I hit it, but I was struggling to keep the nose down by this point and the Optimus J3 just bounded on up beyond the engines' flight ceiling. Flameout was asymmetric, with a steady drop in power on the right side - I'm not sure if this is KSP or OPT, thought we'd fixed that sort of thing way back in 1.0.2 but here we are. My advice is that the moment you feel the nose start to turn, cut the shcramjets and turn on the ARIs again. Even at this altitude, the ARIs operated in air-augmented mode, delivering over 900 isp with good thrust. Not sure where they fizzle, seems like they may go right up to the edge of space. Either way, they are powerful enough to push your AP past 100km with plenty of fuel reserves remaining. Be warned; the OPT engines suck electricity. It's basically mandatory to have some form of advanced modded generator on board, else you'll run out of juice long before you run out of fuel. Anyway, point is, nearly 20 tons of cargo delivered to 120x120 orbit with plenty of fuel to spare. Could very easily rendezvous with an orbital structure and deliver components (or life support supplies if you do that). It should also be very possible to add a docking module or perhaps even a bit more cargo bay+payload and still make the ascent. I will investigate whether it's possible to pass the classic 'big red tank' SSTO test with the J series parts; if not, that's fine because this is the smallest fuselage that OPT offers. There is a bigger one that I haven't touched yet. I've seen videos+posts recommending a very shallow descent in JNSQ, setting an atmospheric PE above KSC; this might still be true for stock parts, but I found the Optimus J3 was happier with a steeper route. OPT parts seem to handle burst heating very well, but if you come in too shallow you'll end up with a very long, sustained heating that eventually overwhelms something. A moderately aggressive AoA helps distribute the temperatures around and provide decent braking. By the time you're under ~2800m/s, everything will be fine, OPT parts can take those kind of thermals at high altitude, and this particular craft drops below 2km/s at 30km up. Which is almost a bit of a trap; because it's a relatively long descent vs stock, you feel like you're lower and slower than you actually are. Manoeuvring at 20km still doesn't work very well and it's best not to try, lest you end up fighting the stick all the way down. Passing 10km, and particularly below 7, handling firms up and you can do a very conventional glide back down to the runway. I needed to find about 50km extra after my eyeballed descent, but there was a big reserve of fuel left over. With this particular cargo, it's possible to sacrifice about 2000 units of oxidiser and the same again of liquid fuel and still have a little bit spare on landing. The weight difference has very little effect however, and I left it there to give some scope for pumping fuel around and changing craft balance if needed (top tip; OPT cabins have a small fuel tank - set it to low priority to keep some weight in the nose as long as possible). I'm a little suspicious that this plane could do a double ascent, if it was empty both times... the problem with OPT+JNSQ doesn't seem to be fuel efficiency, it's about getting enough engines onto your craft to keep your TWR above 1 all the way. So there we have it. A few mods and spaceplanes are back on, to some extent at least. Probably can't do the silly things you can in stock, but basic satellite lifters are entirely viable. Late in the tech tree. As to whether I will run at JNSQ's default scale, or apply the mod to shrink it, I'm still not quite sure. On the one hand, I'm not entirely certain how to get started when it takes this much more to get to orbit. On the other hand, I rarely found a need for 10m modded rockets in stock scale systems, even though they look cool. JNSQ is likely to force my hand and insist that I build things with those late-game parts if I want to reach the outer/bigger planets. I can of course lower the atmospheric heating if that turns out to be a barrier; it's entirely about how viable it is to get fun things into orbit. Shall continue to ponder. -- In other news, what do people use for image hosting these days? I used to use imgur, but it's UI is so incredibly painful now... spent 20 mins working out how to create an album, and I still can't find a way to re-order or make things public without "sharing with the community"...

Situation report... spent about 30 mins in the SPH and sort of made an SSTO that works in JNSQ default scale? Stock+Tweakscale, plus some old models for air intakes. Didn't carry any cargo, arrived at 100x100km with 200m/s left. Never used the rapiers in closed cycle, should investigate using a much smaller orbital engine and whether the weight saved can justify the low ISP during ascent. Not quite sure what happened to the control surfaces, they were scaled right when I left the SPH Few more pics in spoiler to not clutter this thread. All in all, a horribly designed bird, but enough to let me know that it's at least possible to do this. Will see if I can create something a bit more refined that comes back down the right way up Also seem to have some stripy artefacts in the ocean, might have done something wrong on install. Will investigate that later.

Quite possibly Duncan from Yogscast... I remember watching him burn straight towards the middle of Mun then wondering why he crashed. I figured it must be possible to do better than that Fortunately other youtubers/resources taught me how to play. Version 0.9 I think.

I honestly can't remember if I did, or just planned to! I definitely landed on Tellumo, and was aware of other people doing ascents from it. Also had Tellumo visible in the sky because I'd edited another modded planet to be it's moon Feels like I need to put some sandbox time in and just play around and see what I can do. Entirely possible that some advanced engines will be needed - that's fine, never been afraid of many mods, just need to work out what's still good these days. I'm a little out of the loop

I feel like I'm going to have to just mess around in sandbox and make my own conclusions, but thank you - at least I know it might work out TLDR, I'm used to stock-a-like MK2 and MK3 SSTO spaceplanes, but I've not tried anything at higher scale. Relatively sure I used to be able to get one to Mun's surface and back however, so maybe that will carry me to LKO in JNSQ? But I'm certainly not too proud to use the 1/10 option if I can't get the effects I like out of default. In the end, singleplayer game, no point pushing it in directions the player doesn't enjoy

Rookie question if I may... how well to spaceplanes fare at regular JNSQ scale vs the 1/10 option?

Tried to collect EVA science during atmospheric entry... But it was fine. (I can't find this at all in my mission logs... may have accidentally missed out an entire career. This was one of the moons of Otho from the Galileo planet pack.)

I have something like 3000 hours logged in KSP... my experience of stopping playing was "start playing a multiplayer game where if you don't join in now, the opportunity will disappear". This will quite quickly get you out of the habit of any singleplayer game you are doing at the same time. FOMO is powerful. That said, I'm considering doing a little career game now that everything has settled out and there's not going to be any changes that cause me to have to reset my entire modpack and start over (Not that I ever objected to KSP updates; just when all my mods would die and I ended up playing an old version 2-3 months past release... it got to feel like I was always behind the times.)

Staging. Always staging. I don't get it the right order until the first stage is burning and the next spacebar will destroy the vessel.

I am 90% sure you won't be able to leave the flight scene due to being in-atmosphere. But truthfully, I have never experimented with that last few metres of atmos. I'm usually just grateful my ridiculous spaceplane made it to orbit at all

I forget the exact number, but it was the last of the 0.9s (edit: there was only 0.9) before 1.0 changed the aero model and made me throw away all my old designs. Mostly it was the version where KSP was still all about (my personal) discovery, where in later times it was me refining the mods I chose to play with and learning to systematise my approach to all things in order to have high success rates and minimal "wasted" time while exploring various solar systems. Everything I did was new, so it all kind of stuck in my head Had a very intricate and involved mod set going, such that even as my first ever proper career, it still made me take life support supplies into account. Not sure how much evidence of it remains, but I definitely remember leaving a food can in Duna orbit to pick up on the way back, and later thinking about coming home from Eve orbit (absolutely no landing!) and stopping by GIlly on the way because I had way bigger fuel margins than I'd expected. I think I also did a lot of probe exploration - which in hindsight, was a mistake. Later on I restricted myself to not landing probes on vacuum bodies, because indeed that is still very very hard even in 2021 with earth tech!