Excalibur

Sweet, be my guest. I find the hardest part is getting the rotors directly above the centre of gravity. Takes quite a lot of trial and error to get that right. Another issue is when the wings start producing lift it also screws up the balance; the catch is I\'ve found you do need them for both stability and control. The current basic lift model used by KSP makes it very hard to do any vertical landings because they still generate a daft amount of lift at slow speeds. This makes it difficult for you to hover with no horizontal velocity. When the lift model is updated to introduce stall parameters things should be a lot more fun interesting.

Excalibur Exoatmospheric Proudly Presents: EE Jet Trainer & EE Advanced Jet Trainer Considering that the 0.15 update has made creating aircraft with forgiving handling characteristics that little bit more difficult, EE has decided to launch two training aircraft for new recruits; The first is the basic Jet Trainer. Following a completely stock single-engined conventional design, this one is a good craft for the first-time flyer. Able to be stableâ„¢ without SAS or MechJeb it doesn\'t have too much control authority to avoid augering into the ground accidentally. Simply pull back on the stick at around 60m/s and it will soar from the runway and into the air with little or no trim required. Secondly we have the Advanced Jet Trainer. Designed as a step-up from the basic trainer this craft has a more modern canard-delta wing layout. The result of this is vastly increased maneuverability; it is capable of taking off and performing an Immelmann Turn (Google if you don\'t know) within a ceiling of 400m. Despite these improvements the aircraft has benign handling characteristics at all speeds and also needs little to no trim. The fuel tank is centrally located to avoid major shifting of CoG during long flights. Craft files are attached. We hope you enjoy these aircraft and we have plans for more complex machines to be released in the near future...

You stated that all of your graphics settings are set to the lowest. Have you tried running a lower resolution (1600x1200 is quite high)? Running the game at 1280x1024 or lower may improve frame rates slightly. Also if you enter the nVidia Control Panel you can force certain settings to run for a particular game. Since KSP won\'t be recognised you can add it manually, then force most of the quality options to \'performance\' or \'off\'. I\'m not sure if you\'ll have this option with the GT220, but it\'s worth looking at your PhysX setting as well. If you can, try forcing it to run on the CPU only, then GPU only and compare the results to see which better suits your machine. In the past forcing PhysX to run on my GTX460 GPU provided the best results. However with 0.15 I\'ve noticed that the game has become more GPU intensive I run the PhysX on my Core2Quad Q6600 (running at 3.6GHz) FTW. As socket7 stated there isn\'t a whole lot you can do about the poor frame rate whilst the scene loads, it does that even on the most powerful systems.

I also love the new Mun, but I have a huge disdain for New Moon, or any of it\'s stinking brethren.

Excalibur Exoatmospheric Proudly Presents: EE Ko-AXE Coaxial Helicopter Here we go, thirty minutes in the making; I present the Ko-AXE. Totally stock aside from the Damned Aerospace plugin it can be flown entirely without SAS. To aid in controllability it has a small wing forward, and large canard tail surfaces but no RCS. Although it is very definitely flyable as you can see, it\'s still a bit of a b*****d to fly and will devour great sods of earth should you allow it. On take-off only use very low throttle settings, or you\'ll end up like a stuck turtle. You have been warned! Enjoy! http://youtu.be/tcujF-grU-Q Craft file attached. Let me know what you think, plus if you manage to improve it - particularly it\'s vertical landing characteristics.

Here we go, thirty minutes in the making; I present the Ko-AXE. Totally stock aside from the Damned Aerospace plugin it can be flown entirely without SAS. To aid in controllability it has a small wing forward, and large canard tail surfaces but no RCS. Although it is very definitely flyable as you can see, it\'s still a bit of a b*****d to fly and will devour great sods of earth should you allow it. On take-off only use very low throttle settings, or you\'ll end up like a stuck turtle. You have been warned! Enjoy! http://youtu.be/tcujF-grU-Q Craft file attached. Let me know what you think, plus if you manage to improve it - particularly it\'s vertical landing characteristics.

Before 0.15 hit the the shelves helicopters were actually quite easy to construct. Alas now I\'ve found making a successful one is rather tricky. I did find that small wings, usually placed very close to the centre of thrust (i.e. adjacent to the rotors) do help with control. I\'ll try make a stock/damned/mechjeb one for you...

The above post was made with 0.14 so I thought I\'d make a similar design in 0.15.2 to look for any significant changes. Here\'s the result of the first test run. http://youtu.be/PW01fXTbiGw Using reasonably balanced mods and a bit of care, I think well over 500m/s should be achievable.

Good point. Though I wonder if the extra velocity would cancel out the mass lost of the RCS propellant... I\'m tempted to say no and guess that using RCS propellant as impacting mass would give more of a benefit than as reaction mass. Just a guess though

If I may, here\'s my entry from a previous challenge... Separating second stage liquid boosters... Gliding in before powered landing at the Southern ice cap... Successful polar landing... Conversion to LSR vehicle... Ready to rock and roll... Hard acceleration to top speed... Final velocity before engine cut-off... Jeb accidentally locked out the controls during testing of a new water speed record prototype based on the Hyper Streak. This resulted in the untrained occupants being launched straight up under full thrust. The following image was taken of the errant craft just after MECO... Don\'t think we\'ll be seeing those poor saps again any time soon... As I said this isn\'t necessarily a balanced vehicle, hence the \'unlimited land speed\' category. Further development pending to break the 500m/s barrier. If anyone has beaten this figure without .cfg edits or ridiculous mods and have the pictures to prove it - please let us know! Stay tuned.

I just take a guess as to CoG/CoL at the moment as there\'s not definitive way to tell. I try to mentally average out where the heaviest parts are and go from there. That said jhultgre\'s Engineer plugin is slated to have indicators in the SPH/VAB in the future. My first attempt to fly a large aircraft to KSC 2 ended in disaster because of the shifting CoG due to fuel consumption that you mention. Got within ten kilometres before flat-spinning to the ground. What I usually do to counteract this is to initially disable the more central tanks via the context menu and alternately drain forward/rear tanks in an attempt to keep the CoG shifting as little as possible.

I found placing CoG behing CoL to give best results for stability and control to be honest. I seems that at the moment KSP\'s aircraft differ slightly from their real-life cousins because of this. If you can prove me wrong I\'ll glady edit the guide, I did however have someone \'in the know\' take a look at the guide and okay it in terms of content. After reading your post I had to confirm things again just to be sure. Tested two aircraft, one a delta with canards and another conventional design with a T-tail. I built two variants of each aircraft, one with a forward CoG, one with a rearward one. Both variants are perfectly flyable, however the ones with the rear CoG just seem to turn better. I would attribute this to not having to create as large a control moment as you would with a forward CoG. Attached are all four aircraft, all stock except for MechJeb. They\'ll fly without it but much more enjoyable with KILLROT turned on. Please let me know what you think.

It\'s already in there fella, look at the screenshot in the OP, third column. Shows weight of current stage and cumulative weight of stages.

Perhaps it\'s a combination of both... I\'ve just been playing around with a design in 0.15.1 that had the same yaw issues. Fixed it by adding two more landing gears. Haven\'t noticed any issues with wing placement yet.

Usually I find the cause of lateral skids on take-off being too much weight on your landing gear. This can force them into the ground slightly (often one side more than the other) creating an unequal drag force and causing loss of control. Try adding more landing gear to spread the weight. Otherwise ensure your thrust forces are equal and any landing gear is placed symmetrically and nice and straight. I wrote this guide to give beginners some pointers; Kerbal Space Program: How do you build a Spaceplane?

That thing is a beast! The creativity of people on here never ceases to amaze me! Is it made up of just stock parts?

Cool beans matey - I\'ll get it downloaded and give it a whirl!

I\'ve come quite close (actually crashed into the thing) to doing it, but without your magical \'arch computer\'. You\'re right, it\'s damn hard.

I realise I may have sounded a little arrogant there, not my intention. It did take me quite a while and a fair bit of trial and error to get my abortion of a vehicle to work. But when it did the satisfaction was rather nice... At the end of the day it\'s a land speed challenge - doesn\'t matter where you achieve it or how you get to your destination. I didn\'t want to force anyone to use any particular method - just to discourage hacks or .sfs edits that\'s all.

Screw cheating. Just make your record attempt car in the VAB. Add some wings and tail plane with radial decouplers to make it into an aircraft. Place a rocket beneath it and launch it into a -90 degree suborbit. When you reenter jettison the rocket stage and fly to the pole. Once you land jettison the wings and you\'re done. 15 Minute flight time (ish) and no cheating.

Regarding the ice caps I can definitely say they\'re the best place for land speed records. Here\'s one of my previous attempts in 0.14.4

Launch an umbrella into orbit.

Not stock I\'m afraid. Try the Damned Aerospace plugin.

I disagree. The fact they were all willing volunteers removes any guilt from the humour for me. Stapp\'s Jeb-like grin as he sits in the steel rocket-porta-toilet helps with that a bit too.

Cheers. That\'s pretty much all I did to be honest, can\'t beat trial and error. Just been trying to make some helicopters again - found them pretty simple before (even with 0.15) but after the weekend off I seem to have lost my touch...