Fearless Son

Automatic fuel-flow balancing across adjacent tanks. This made everything a lot simpler. Prior to that, I would have to set up fuel lines everywhere and selectively lock-down flow from certain tanks just to ensure that the craft retains proper balance during thrust. Now though, the game is much smarter about which tanks to drain first, and multiple tanks all joined together are considered one large "tank" as far as fuel-flow seems to be concerned. Makes VTOL aircraft and powered landers much less finicky.

I would be okay if the Swivel had better gimbling for that cost, weight, and thrust. The Reliant is great as a LF/O booster engine (good TWR and inexpensive) but there are control advantages to having the main lifting engine be capable of vectored thrust to adjust for perturbations or slight aerodynamic imbalances during the lower ascent.

How are they drinking through their helmets? I think I have an idea...

I noticed you have a large monopropellant tank just behind your cockpit. That honestly probably contains much more monopropellant than you actually need. Especially if you are including vector RCS nozzles which fulfill the same purpose just with a different resource requirement (LF/O) and more thrust. I would recommend replacing the monopropellant tank with a similarly sized LF/O tank, and replacing the other RCS blocks with more vectors. Not only will this give you better RCS control, you will save on some of the excess monopropellant weight you are (probably) bringing along with you, give your vectors more fuel, and allow you to shift weight between the fuel tanks.

I would recommend you add another fuel tank near the front. Not necessarily a large fuel tank, and not necessarily even a full one. But having fuel tanks at the front and back of a spaceplane will allow you to adjust the center of mass of the plane forward or backward by shifting the fuel from one tank to the other. I find this can help a lot for maintaining control during descent. Though it helps to have fewer total tanks with more capacity than lots of separate tanks with little capacity since you will need to adjust fuel flow quickly and while under external forces, and balancing the mass across many different tanks can be hard without mods for that purpose. I would recommend two tugs, but not necessarily one at the front and one at the back. The problem with that is then you need to get each tug perfectly aligned with the other tug. To do otherwise means that the wheels of one are not necessarily parallel with the wheels of the other, and that can lead to control problems, which you definitely do not want when lifting something heavy. But do consider adding docking port juniors to the front and back (or possibly the sides) of your rover. That way you can send multiple rovers, link them together, and have them all move a larger mass as one extended rover. Docking each rover to each other will ensure they keep their wheels aligned while spreading the weight of the object being carried across them.

About the simplest version of this I know is the kind with drop-tanks. As long as it has enough air-breathing engine power to lift a little extra weight, you can use small external rocket fuel tanks to burn through while doing its trans-atmospheric burn. Once the tanks are spent and it has a trans-orbital trajectory, you can drop the tanks and save some weight for the orbital circularization burn.

Aye. I find it especially useful for testing how easy it is to land a particular plane. The island airfield is a lot shorter than the airstrip at KSC while also being on a much steeper rise. It requires the pilot have better judgement about their altitude, and the plane needs to be able to get all its gear in contact with the runway very quickly and with minimal impact if it is to have any hope of landing.

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... why do they need a boat at the bottom of the sea?

The KSP forums do not host files of their own, but you can link to files from here. I see you already have a Google Drive for the .craft file. If you take any screenshots, you can upload them to an image sharing site (Imgur seems to be one of the most popular here) and embed the photo in the forum post using the "Insert other media" button below a new post and selecting "Insert image from URL".

Aww, I know how you feel. Out house hold has a kitty named Pumpkin too! And just last November we lost one of our cats, Horatio, who was just a few months past his twentieth birthday. Years ago, I lost my childhood cat who lived to be twenty-two! Cats really do seem to get sweeter and more affectionate in their old age.

Like this, huh? I would probably use some radial couplers to attach lifting engines with fuel tanks, then detach those engines once reaching orbit. The Arkbird does have engines of its own, but they are only intended to let it dip into the upper atmosphere for high-altitude atmospheric rendezvous before powering back to orbital velocity. I suspect the Osean Federation originally launched it with disposable boosters, and it was never intended to land.

I find a good trick for booster separation lower in the atmosphere is to put stabilization surfaces toward the bottom of them. Not only does it help general rocket stability, but once the radially-mirrored boosters detach it makes each booster's individual drag profile asymmetric, and the aerodynamic forces help them peal away to the sides. This is mostly relevant on lower-stage boosters where the air is thicker and the acceleration is great, but it is a little less relevant at higher altitudes where the air is thin and one has more time to throttle-down and adjust in order to clear from the previous stage before beginning a strong burn.

Maybe its Kerbelline!

I had never considered using fairings in an SSTO like that (mostly mine have been limited to heat-resistant aerodynamic nosecone replacements.) Thank you, this represents an innovation I am going to have to steal.

I used to do the drop-tank-on-top-of-solid-booster style quite a lot, but not so much anymore these days. Felt like too much effort trying to balance the fuel consumption to the actually gain in performance. After a certain point, adding more complexity in the name of efficiency becomes counter-productive. Drop tanks that can drop independently of the boosters served me better because I can alter the point that they drop depending on how much I need to open the throttle during ascent. Dropping the SRBs before the tanks are empty wastes that fuel, holding onto the empty tanks because the SRBs are still burning wastes mass, and trying to balance that for every different payload takes too much trial and error.

That is something I try to avoid. I hate bay door clipping. However, I am grateful for the ability to limit the range of motion on some bay doors. Sometimes a fully-opened bay will clip through things mounted on its sides, so limiting the door authority can allow things to enter and exit without the doors smacking through geometry. As for crew mobility, I try to apply clipping rules there too and avoid situations where Kerbals would have to crawl through other objects that have non-crew functional purpose, like fuel tanks. I make an exception if there is no way to make something aerodynamic and aesthetic without that, but I try to minimize that and keep it plausible (an LF/O tank that only carries LF on a splaceplane I can pretend has a crew tube since not all the internal volume is being occupied.) I tend to assume that hollow structural components are Kerbal-permeable (or can be made so by our dedicated VAB construction teams.) I have to say, I love that Dragon-style module.

I am not content with perfect efficiency in my spacecraft, I feel the need for some kind of aesthetic appeal too. They do not need to replicate real missions, or fictional ones for that matter, nor do I want something that is terribly inefficient in the context of the KSP simulation itself, but I do want craft with an interesting and plausible looking profile. For my really long-range missions, I tend to have very minimal integrated fuel tanks, but feed them through much larger fuel tanks attached via docking ports. Makes it easier to assemble and refuel in orbit, and I can drop the extra tanks en-route to save dry mass. This necessitates clearance on certain sides of the ship, often little booms or nacelles to mount them on easily. Multiple points of attachment on each tank are needed to ensure the tanks are aligned properly so we do not worry about unbalanced mass that might throw off the ship during maneuvers.

Built this nice high-altitude plane, sent Jeb out to Kerbin's northern ice shelf to grab a sample and return to KSC. Still had a quarter tank of gas when I got home. That means this can literally fly halfway around Kerbin on a single tank of fuel. Generally cruises at about 800 m/s at an altitude of 20,000 meters.

When I could consistently get to orbit, that is the point I felt like I "got" KSP. It is probably the hardest milestone to achieve for a new player, but also the most critical. Once a player can get past that, everything else begins to fall into place and it gets easier to understand from there.

I can see that, but I generally prefer the engine to be as light and fuel-efficient as possible. I use it primarily as a low-speed landing engine, where long-distance, high-altitude flight is not a priority. If I am going to deorbit a shuttle, I can usually get it into the general area I want to land on, but I need to make some specific flight adjustments after reaching the lower atmosphere. For example, while landing at KSC I find that I often either over-shoot or under-shoot the runway (shuttles and space planes can be especially variable when it comes to atmospheric deorbiting due to their lifting shapes and many possible orientations) so having the small engine to let me turn around or remain airborne longer are important. If I can keep the mass (both from the engine and its associated necessary fuel) as low as possible, that helps and space mission it is trying to accomplish.

Sometimes I would find the Weesley a good engine for shuttles that need to a powered landing. They might take off on big rocket engines that get discarded and make their orbital adjustments on light rocket engines, but once they are back in atmosphere the light rockets will generate insufficient thrust for the pressure they are in and consume what little fuel it has left too rapidly. The Weesley has just the right balance of low weight and decent (but not great) atmospheric thrust to make it good for guiding a shuttle to the runway under its own power. It is either that or do an unpowered glide, which can turn out pretty disastrous if you misjudge any part of your reentry process.

Is the resemblance to a hermit crab intentional?

Technically, if debris is landed on Kerbin (in parts if not in whole) you can actually recover it, rather than just terminate it like you would in any other situation. You even get some credits back for doing so! I think of this as a recycling problem. Melting existing aluminium is cheaper and environmentally cleaner than going through the Bayer process to extract more (it only takes a fraction of the energy requirements.)

No kidding. They would be better suited to a stationary mass driver, like to launch cargo from non-atmospheric surfaces.