n.b.z.

A pilot, an engineer, and a scientist land on Eve. That's it. I don't have a punchline for you at this point. But then, the return ascent has not yet been attempted...

Same problem here. Zero mods, not the Steam version, Windows (ZIP version).

Figuring out how to make planes with excellent handling qualities, that are a joy to hand-fly without SAS or reaction-wheel torque - and, as a consequence, the video below. Take it as an opinion piece about why anyone interested in winged vehicles, who isn't already using a joystick, should REALLY try using one. Or a joypad, whatever you have that has proper analog inputs for primary flight controls.

It's the other way around. SSTO is the general term for any vehicle that gets to orbit using a single stage, be it a spaceplane or not. The constant confusion around this is caused by conflating the term SSTO with "airplane".

Nice. The plane is a favorite of mine. Think about it: this was a serial produced, manned, fully and rapidly reusable rocket (at least if it didn't explode). With freaking deep throttling. Took quite some time for another attempt at building such a thing, me thinks...

Now that we can "officially" deploy Kerbal's parachutes from Command Chairs, I couldn't resist building the obvious para-trike. As I usually do for anything that uses air for lift, I couldn't stop tuning the thing until it not only flew acceptably, but really well-balanced and self-stabilizing, a pleasure to fly with a joystick and no SAS. I had to add two Basic Fins to solve a roll issue. Since I had to add them anyway, I also made them reduce the tendency to pitch-up as speed increases. At idle thrust, the trim speed is (very close to) 50 m/s at sea level. I could have reduced the ridiculously high engine power, but then decided that the ability to climb vertically to a few thousand meters before deploying the chute, a cruise altitude of 14000 m, and a cruise speed of 210 m/s at that altitude are actually nice features. As a bonus, the vehicle is a surprisingly good unintended submarine.

That's still accurate, for very large values of week. (In the meantime, I'll still play KSP, as my older versions don't stop working just because a new one is announced.)

I submit the "Brutan Traveler". 100% stock 12.21 tons after landing on the island airfield _______ On the one hand, this is not a proper challenge entry, as I didn't even try to go for the actual objective - to fly the highest possible weight I can. On the other hand, I did build a plane as a response to this thread, it's my Biggest Plane With A Juno, both in size and weight, and I flew it to the island airport. I ended up with merely 12.21 tons on the island airfield. But more importantly, I not only had a lot of fun building and flying the thing, I actually have a keeper. I will keep flying this plane just for the joy of flying it. I never thought I would say that about a plane with such a ridiculous TWR! It has become my favourite thing in KSP to make airplanes just for fun flying - yes, of course using a joystick - and I put a lot of effort into tuning their handling. CoM/CoL, fuel tank layout, trim and "known" trim speeds, flaps (also with trim), control surface authority, gear params, ... if it has advanced tweakables, it will be tweaked. So reading this thread - already thinking about a one-Juno plane - I saw GoSlash27's beautifully rutanesque plane, and the following three things occured to me: 1. Awesome! I want a Voyager-like plane, too. Using only one Juno would actually be just right for that. 2. Hmmm, no canards? I want mine with canards! 3. But GoSlash27 isn't exactly new at this, so... since I like fine-tuning a lot... making canards fly and handle really well might be a challenge all by itself? (This is not a dig at GoSlash27 - his plane beats mine by miles in this challenge, and was what inspired me to make one myself!) Ditching the max-weight / top-of-the-leaderboard goal allowed me to build a plane that's by no means a replica of the Voyager, but resembles it a bit closer, if only for the canard layout and the thinner booms. It's called "Brutan Traveler" because this absolutely, totally doesn't sound like a cheap knockoff of the "B. Rutan Voyager" at all. I couldn't even resist adding a few draggy parts for the looks. The plane has two air intakes instead of one, useless winglets, and three lights hidden away in the fuselage. The handling is superb, I had no big troubles with the canard setup. In fact, I only use the inner half of the canard as elevators, and these surfaces are set to only 70% deflection. (The reaction wheel of the Mk1 cockpit is disabled.) The canard has a slight angle of incidence, and I was delighted to find that it actually stalls before the main wing does, resulting in a benign stall behaviour and an easy recovery. There are three flap settings (action groups 1-3): no flaps, flaps HALF, and flaps FULL. The neutral trim speeds, at sea level, for these settings are, respectively: 100, 75, and 50 m/s. That's to say, the plane flies in a perfectly straight line without SAS and very little / occasional control inputs when flown at these numbers. There is also a 5° downward-tilted probe core for semi-automated cruise flight (abusing SAS PROGRADE as AOA HOLD). Challenge proof shots: Cruise performance: 125 m/s at 3300m - no flaps 105 m/s at 4000m - flaps HALF Of course it takes forever to reach those altitudes. Thanks zolotiyeruki for this challenge, I had good fun and now have one more plane in the hangar.

One way to get an idea of the difficulty of landing on Duna, before actually flying there, is to practice landing somewhere high in the mountains on Kerbin. While you still have higher atmospheric density on Kerbin, you add the factor of unvafourable Terrain. If you can't land your plane in Kerbin's mountains, that same plane will be difficult to land on Duna. Drogues in the back are actually a good idea if you really don't want to spend fuel to slow you down. But on Duna, you need the big chutes (such as the blue radial ones) to act as drogues. Having them in the back will keep the plane pointed straight, in case your nose-wheel contacts first and knocks your craft into a pitch-up motion. Ideally, they should be mounted in the back and a bit above the vertical position of the Center-of-Mass. This way, the chutes "want" to orient the plane in a slight nose-up attitude, 5 or 10 degrees, like the flare for a landing.

The second-most annoying thing about Dalin Kerman is her constant bragging and bigmouthing, claiming to be "the best pilot north of the south pole". The most annoying thing about Dalin Kerman is that she's probably the best pilot north of the south pole. ______ Enjoy.

Slightly more annoyed than usual about the various states of wonkyness that the landing gears seem to undergo over time, I admittedly overreacted at some point a few days ago, when still using 1.4.0. After watching a bunch of my favourite fun planes jump off the runway like mad kangaroos - only with less resilience to self-induced impacts - I found myself asking: "Isn't there anything these gears are good for?" This was obviously a very bad line of inquiry, which has lead me away from the path of noble and righteous rocketry, as I answered the above question by building my very first kraken drive. "Powered" by wonky gears, of course, and built into a spaceplane. Animation of drive arming and activation: https://i.imgur.com/1zAOISN.gif (large-ish GIF file, thus not embedded here) While I'm not usually a fan of cheating myself in this fashion, I am more amused by the contraption than I thought I would be - maybe more than I should be? This is a glorious "science fiction" drive: a strange, bulky, complicated looking, dramatically illuminated bullcrap apparatus, which implements a bullcrap propulsion principle. On activation, the ship briefly shudders, flexes, almost ripping itself apart shortly before the drive kicks in. After that, it's smooth sailing with a steady, on-demand 3g tailwind, painting an obscenely straight line into the map view. If you ever saw a need to run away from Oberth or Tsiolkovsky, this is the vessel you'd want to escape with. The moveable part in the drive (which I call the "kraken core" mainly because I cannot resist) can be easily re-docked, but initial testing shows that at some point after being used repeatedly for some time, the drive just stops working. This seems to depend on the environment, but once it happens, the drive remains broken even in areas where it worked before. So this little plane is a Single-Stage-To-Anywhere-But-Probably-Not-Back vehicle. Another test result: just because you show up with a fancy glitch drive, doesn't mean Eve isn't going to smash your vehicle to bits.

I don't have this when switching between games. But the frequency at which I keep re-discovering that view controls (such as coolie hats) do not actually work with screenshots or videos of games is embarassing.

The boringly named "Fivetonner" is an uncrewed cargo SSTO that can lift 5 tons of freight, shielded in a cargo bay, to a 75km low orbit. It is also capable of docking. It can return with an equal 5 ton load, or empty. While it both takes off and lands vertically, the reentry and entire approach to the KSC is flown in a nose-forward position. This way, I can keep being lazy about actually doing precise maneuvers, and just rule-of-thumb improvise may way back to the KSC by "flying" it similar to a spaceplane. Over the KSC, two stages of drogue chutes turn the vehicle bottom-down again, large chutes arrest most of the sink rate, and a tiny landing burn... rather, a landing breeze... takes care of a few surplus m/s that would overstress the legs. This craft was originally meant to look somewhat "realistic". Like something that could exist in the real world. But as you can imagine, flying nose-forward with empty tanks, an empty cargo bay, and seven engines in the back presented a severe stability problem. The solution was to add that rather wild aero structure in the back, which not only has KERBAL written all over it - it looks exactly like someone managed to convert the sentence "I HAVE &$*!§# ENOUGH OF this rocket flipping!!!" into a blueprint for a stabilizer.

The "Relay Flatpack" was not designed for beauty. It is just what happened when I tried to make a compact relay probe using the largest relay dish, with a built-in engine and fuel supply. Since I could not reduce the circumference of the dish, I tried minimizing the use of the one dimension I had control over. When I was done, I did add 8 parts only for the looks: two lights, and those six Communotron 16 antennas. It also doesn't really need all six solar panels to work. I'm not sure at the moment, but I think this probe carries north of 2000 m/s of delta-v. Weighs just under 5 tons fully fueled.

Mounting an additional probe core, or two, deliberately tilted off the vehicle's axis of travel, in order to... implement an AOA HOLD mode for planes (nice feature for cruise flight and/or reentry from orbit) tame wobbly rockets on ascent build an asymmetric shuttle stack, and use SAS PROGRADE on ascent like on any other rocket, going as far as rotating the whole thing 180° into a heads-up, tank-down position (like the real shuttle did) while the main engines are still burning, mainly just because I can I don't know about "revolutionary", but my little write-up about the TiltProbeCore™ seems to be my most-liked post ever.

I spend waaaay too much time on builds. Much more time than I should be spending in front of a PC in general. This means that I have a hangar full of vehicles that were designed to grandiose phantasies of the surely phantastic missions they were meant to be able to accomplish. Missions that then never actually take place, because the time left to fly them is a negative number, and also, because..... I *just* saw someone else's build on this forum and thought "wait a second - you can do THAT?? Let me try this idea for a moment". Turns out, I have a really interesting definition of "moment".

I don't remember any numbers, but I'm sure I have never gone as fast as when trying to get into a Moho orbit for the first time. The velocity at which I screamed past Moho was unbelievable.

Today, I uploaded my very first Youtube-video, which incidentally happens to be a KSP video. It's rather longwinded, almost 14 minutes long. But that sounds bad and boring, so let me rephrase: this video is for the connoisseur of the unabbreviated ascent footage. Sounds better? As an aside: I have seen solid fuel boosters being used as sepatrons before, but as far as I know, this is the first recording of a Flea booster being used as an attitude thruster. I can recommend that. Some info about that stack is in the Youtube description text.

The amount of times that I have needed to change, or improvise, an approach to Duna because of Ike getting in the way, seems to be grossly out of proportion with the actual amount of Ike's in existance. I have begun thinking of the term "Ike" as one of those words that don't really have a singular or a plural. Like "dirt", or "milk", or "radiation". Rolled around in the mud? You'll now need to deal with the dirt on your clothes. Handling uranium, or somesuch element? You'll need to deal with the radiation it emits. Going to Duna? You'll need to deal with the Ike that surrounds all of it.

KSP still feels to me as if Squad made it specifically for me. So I find it even more amazing that so many others like it, too! Also, let me use this space to say that I think that the Maneuver Node in the map view alone is a huge accomplishment in user interface design, that cannot be overrated. Reducing much of the complexity of orbital mechanics to a screen element with 6 colorful twiddlethingies to play with, while the resulting trajectory is plotted in realtime, is just great. That this idea seems so obvious to us now only illustrates how innovative it really is.

It is unclear to me why Squad should hate and despise Tycho Brahe to such enormous degree as to name that place after him. I mean, come on, Tylo is just a *********, horrible Kerbal-killing piece of ****, some rotten .... [not for the first time when the topic is Tylo, discreet security types now drag n.b.z. off his soap-box and away from the mic; this time before the really bad screaming and kicking has started.]

I have occasionally seen struts that were placed using n-fold symmetry getting messed up when transferring a vessel between SPH and VAB. I am speculating that this could, maybe, also happen to auto-struts. So in case you're using auto-struts, you could try resetting / re-doing these in the SPH. Other than that, I have no idea, but will be watching this space. I have my own "Different Aero Model" theory about launching from VAB/SPH, versus launching after using "Revert to launch". I have often observed large performance differences after reverting, but when I made a thread about that, nobody could confirm my findings.

Today, I made the Imgur album linked below, showing the mission flown the previous day. It was the first crewed flight of my ITS, and took place in my first ever career game. It was a test flight to Minmus, then the Mun, and then back to the KSC. It went very well: it uncovered some bad glitches that need to be fixed before venturing further out, but didn't come too close to crashing along the way to be uncomfortable. And I got all the expensive kit back. I have this vague feeling that somehow, in some way, my design style might still be somewhat influenced by ages of playing sandbox. I mean... I've heard of solid boosters being used as sepatrons before... but using a Flea as an attitude thruster... in a career game? I have worked on this stack since September. It is a rip-off, but by no means a replica, of the SpaceX ITS concept. It has a lot of ITS features and properties, but also differs in many ways, as it was shamelessly kerbified to make sense in the stock solar system. Among the similarities are, for example, the number of engines (42 on the lifter, and 6 vacuum plus 3 atmo engines on the ship) or the passenger capacity (100). Among the differences are the use of chutes on the lifter (they are just too effective and reliable in KSP to not use them), and the wholesale replacement of the orbital refueling method via tanker with a mining trip to Minmus instead. The ship reaches orbit with enough juice left to get there, and comes factory-equipped with a fuel refinery and no less than 12 large drills, and the cooling and electrical equipment to run these. The whole stack would be 100% stock, if it weren't for the two kOS units that control, and completely automate, the entire ascent to orbit. Yes, the 42-engined monster lifter returns and lands in one piece at the KSC, which is why I can afford it in a career game. The ascent is unusually steep, to get around the problem of in-atmosphere vessels being deleted when outside of the physics range. Short Imgur album

I don't particularly like these dark winter days. But I will not despair, for soon enough, a new spring will be upon us, when beautiful Vectors will blossom again in the dew of morning, while young drogues perform their mating dance in a mild breeze... In other, entirely unrelated news: Nobody on the ITS team expected the guidance software to perform the BFR landing flawlessly before some finetuning of certain parameters had taken place. But when the lack of said finetuning was demonstrated by an actual demonstration, the outcome was still widely regarded as surprisingly surprising. Also, quite loud. PSA: saucer-shaped fairings do not only look cool, they actually generate lift when forced through the air sideways. I'm not saying that this makes any sense or might be efficient. I actually swear by the Kraken that it is not. All I'm saying is that I once flew a fairing-based flying saucer off the runway and all the way to Duna, so I should know.

Building a plane that just handles reasonably well, after only 15 hours of playtime, is good! You will be doing just fine with KSP! I don't know about the Mac, but KSP has its own screenshot key, which at least on Win is F1. (And F2 gets the interface out of the way for the pretty ones.) Screenshot files should end up inside the "Screenshots" directory within the game's main directory. _____ A short remark on drag: it's not only open nodes that can hurt badly, it's also high angle of attack. Having too much wing area obviously causes excessive drag and adds useless mass, but having too little wing area can also hurt badly, as the vehicle may be flying with a too high angle of attack. Building such an angle into the wings can help with that. _____ A rather long comment on droptanks: true, anything dropping tanks is not an SSTO by definition. So, no argument. But this discussion may miss, or obscure, the point of making good spacecraft, that get a job done efficiently. A point that Freds seemed to want to get across if I'm not mistaken: The capability of a spaceplane that can be flown as an SSTO can be greatly enhanced by adding droptanks! Who cares if the plane loses the SSTO sticker, when you can massively improve the capability of the vehicle by making a small fraction of its dry mass expendable? When you fly wreckage retrieval contracts around the Mun or Minmus, conveniently flying retrieved pieces and rescued Kerbonauts right down to the KSC runway, for the price of a few tanks and nose-cones? There is no need to design something either completely reusable, or completely expendable. Sure, spaceplanes with droptanks are not SSTOs, but can make a lot of sense nevertheless. I'm in my very first career game (but not new to the game at all), and my workhorse for about half of all contracts has been the "VentureWing", a spaceplane I made as soon as I had Rapiers. It's the best one I ever made. The cargo hold is made from two long MK2 cargo bays in a row, the vehicle's CG is exactly on the boundary between them, and the fuel tanks are almost perfectly balanced (the exception are the two "NCS adapter" tanks which move the CG slightly forward when full). It carries most of the science gear (except large scanners) in its own equipment bay without cluttering up the cargo hold. It features a medium dock port, a small one on the bottom, RCS for translations, and lots of reaction wheel torque. There are enough seats to be useful for most occasions. Heck, there is even a contingency fuel cell and two Oscar reserve tanks in case someone manages to break both solar panels. (No, why, I'm not looking at Bill at all.) The plane handles marvellous, having a natural "trim speed" suited for making the approach to the runway a joy to fly without SAS if a joystick is used, and extending the flaps will even change the trim to landing speed. It would be more efficient if it carried only one nuke, but carrying two of them gets me a lot of the nuke's efficiency while still retaining enough fun factor (a term highly correlated to "TWR"; some would even say these are basically synonyms). This spaceplane is an SSTO for all missions that stay in Kerbin orbit. It can even reach the surface of Minmus or the Mun and return to Kerbin, but not with a sensible payload. The value for my career game is that I can say "to heck with the SSTO label", hang a bunch of big LF droptanks under the wings, and actually go places with it, or enjoy a comfortable delta-V margin to be able to just wing it without looking at any numbers. I have retrieved four stranded Kerbals AND one piece of wreckage from four different Mun orbits - one of them was retrograde - in a single mission ... and could have done a half-hour sightseeing flight in the mountains with the fuel I still had when coming back. (I didn't.) Optional droptanks were part of the design from the beginning: the four 1.25m service bays on the outer pods - which happen to be arranged around the vehicle's CG perfectly - and their content are just useless ballast for missions in Kerbin orbit. But when going to the Mun, the two downward-pointing Spark engines in each bay make vertical landings on the gear a breeze. And when Kerbonauts ventured to another planet for the first time - Duna, of course - the Sparks were assisted by large parachutes deployed from these bays. This worked so well, that the crew did a visit to Ike's surface on the way back just because everyone was having so much fun. (Okay, I'll admit it: they refueled on Minmus first AND took mining equipment on this pioneering trip for ease of mind. For five Kerbals going to an atmosphere in which the plane had never been tested, having plenty of fuel margin was reassuring. But they would have made it back easily without it, if they had left out Ike.) How do I get away with so much radially attached stuff? 4 radiators, 4 RCS parts, 1 small dock port, 2 wingtip antennas, 2 ladders, 2 drogue chutes? ....Not to speak of that surplus of intakes that were somehow left over from an earlier, non-Rapier version, and then seemingly just forgotten? First: I don't. There is a performance penalty, but the four Rapiers are strong enough to deal with it. When using large droptanks, I pitch down to almost level flight to get through transonic drag, while lighting the nukes for a little extra push. In other words, ascent profiles are so important, they can make the difference between "land on the Mun" and "get stuck on the boring side of the sound barrier forever". Once Rapiers hit about 420 to 450 m/s, they basically become unstoppable. Second: The outer fuselage columns are NOT attached radially. Instead, the outer Rapier engines were attached back-to-back to the inner Rapiers, rotated 180° and shifted out; eliminating the draggy rear nodes of all Rapiers. The outer fuselage columns then were built from there to the front, and are held in place by magic auto-struts. Third: The main wing has an angle of attack built in that allows lift to be generated while the vehicle is at zero pitch. In other words, when fast enough, the vehicle's attitude marker on the Navball is nicely aligned with the prograde marker. While the wing itself is more draggy this way, everything else is less so!