Fearless Son

Not stupid at all. A flying "monoprop sled" is a great way to get around the Munar landscape. Easier than a rover, at any rate.

Sounds like a job for SCIENCE!

Orbital rescue contracts. They typically involve a single part that can have crew inside it (a cockpit, passenger section, or science module) floating in orbit with no other pieces. Take one of those contracts, leave it alone long enough, and watch what happens. Granted, few people would leave helpless Kerbals stranded that long after taking a contract specifically to rescue them, but it could happen.

For roleplay purposes, I always thought it would be neat to put a big wide fairing between the nuclear reactors and the habitat sections, pretending it was a giant radiation shield to protect the crew.

That raises an interesting notion about the efficiency of RAPIERS as reusable booster engines... hmm...

Well, this is a fuel counterweight, so not exactly what you asked for, but I find it works. Add a small fuel tank forward in the fuselage, well ahead of the center of lift. It does not need to be a lot of fuel, just needs to be far enough forward that it can leverage the center of mass. Fill the tank, and set it to deny fuel flow. That will keep the mass up front while the rear tanks dry up first. If you need that extra fuel, you can unlock the fuel lines on that tank and let the fuel draw from there, so the extra mass is not just "dead weight". I find it works well for spaceplanes that spend most of their fuel mass getting to orbit, then need to save a little extra anyway to make it back to the ground safely. The forward tank is effectively treated as cargo mass on the way up, and all the rest of the fuel can be spent getting it up there. Then that becomes the landing fuel that the plane needs to navigate back to the runway. By the time you are ready to use it, you do not have much fuel in the rear tanks left to wreck the stable balance.

The implication I got from @NathanKell's response is that he has already implemented a partial fix in their development build which, if not eliminating the fluctuations that lead to decay, at least even those fluctuations out so that on average they stay the same. He is currently looking into more robust methods to correct the issue, but if those do not pan out he might need to do a fix that requires more radical code restructuring, which can take a lot of time and potential introduce other issues which might be even less desirable.

What @Snark said covers it pretty well. If it helps, think of it like this: the Oberth effect works because you are adding energy to the system at the point of highest velocity (the lowest point in an orbit,) right? But when you are circularizing, you are not actually adding much total energy to the system so much as you are taking the energy that is already in the system and evening the velocity out. You are taking all the energy that the craft uses to go fast at that low point, and changing it to go higher-but-slower instead. It is why a higher elliptical orbit is cheaper to circularize than a lower one: you have more potential energy at that point, and changing direction (but not speed) is cheaper when you are slower, so you can channel more of it into lateral motion.

Reminds me of an asteroids clone I made in college. The asteroids were rendered as semi-circular vectors, with each vertex offset by a slight amount of randomness to give them a jagged "rocky" look. They would then rotate around at a random rate and drift at a random velocity. I left the application running (minus player collision) one Friday, and came back to my work station the next Monday, to find that some of the asteroids had gotten huge, while others had shrunk. Turns out that the calculations I was doing to rotate them were introducing tiny rounding errors in the float values of the positions of their vertexes, and those errors added up over the two days it was left running, either pulling it into a wider state or pushing it into a shrunken one.

Which is why I stick with Windows 7, or as I like to call it, "Vista Done Right" (and I am speaking as someone who used to contract at Microsoft during the development of both Vista and Windows 7.)

I call that the "get out and push" maneuver.

Aye, and that is a pretty strong combo. The Whiplashes ought to get the RAPIER up to an altitude and speed where its thrust can be maximized, pushing ever more air into the engines by raw speed. The only caution I would have about that approach is that you can get going too fast at too low an altitude and risk damage to the plane due to atmospheric compression overheating it. Literally an air-friction burn. But so long as you have a good management of the throttle and a good grasp of the flight envelope you should be good. Sounds like you use the old tradition of air-breathing boosters.

From my experience with the Whiplash, it tends to favor a more aggressive ascent than the RAPIER. With a RAPIER you want to build as much horizontal velocity as you can while in its relatively high optimal envelope. A Whiplash can also generate tremendous thrust with a ram effect but at a much lower envelope than the RAPIER, so it tends to require a steeper profile to make orbit. A Whiplash-driven spaceplane pointed up nearly forty-five degrees from a surface tangent will easily launch you out of atmosphere, but with only modest horizontal velocity. It requires more substantial vacuum thrust to circularize than the RAPIER does, which means more engines and mass.

So that explains the last words transmitted by Dave Kerman at the end of that ill-fated odyssey to Jool... "My Kod... it's full of peas!"

Was it a... Sea Duck?

Nice plane! It looks like a twin-engine, twin-tailed version of a Gripen.

What is the range on those Cypher landers like? I mean, what kind of planetary bodies can they get to and from assuming the mothership was in low orbit? Duna? Kerbin? Eve?

Woohoo! Milestone! (Do I get a small science, funding, and reputation boost?)

To be more specific, I had Jeb EVA into the capsule (I had yet to unlock mobility enhancers,) then realized that since that was the only hatch, the capsule only supported one Kerbal, and I wanted Jeb in the pilot's seat, I would need to get him back out and get the others in first so I could transfer them to the passenger compartment. So I got Jeb back out of the capsule, had him let go (a fall from that height on the Mun is harmless) and he brushed the landing leg on the way back down. *Crack!* goes the landing leg.

The first thing I thought of when I first saw that the Panther engines had afterburners was "Hey, these would be great for VTOLs. After all, didn't Cupcake say that a good air breathing VTOL need some switchable extra thrust for sudden maneuvers?"

I find that especially apropos when launching spaceplanes. Time it just right so the big crescendo hits just as you switch from air breathing to closed cycle. "Time to dance with the angels!"

You too? Jeb broke a landing leg when I was trying to get him back into a Munar lander via EVA pack. He ended up colliding with the leg at low speed, then the leg snapping due to being "overstressed". Either these legs take great umbrage at being accidentally kicked by Kerbals, or the new physics for them needs a little tweaking.

Pretty much anything on this channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/SpaceAmbient

So I mentioned I sent three Kerbal's to the Mun in my most recent career game, and here they are! Unfortunately, their lander lacked the delta-v to make it back to Munar orbit. Reminder to self: add drop-tanks next time for extra endurance. Speaking of drop-tanks, that is what the automated rescue craft used on its way to get them home... Do not let the 139.7m distance from the target craft fool you, touching this lander down was a pain. High center of gravity and narrow landing legs made it very tippy, resulting in many aborted landings that, coincidentally, ended up bringing it a lot closer to the target than I had hoped. Anyway, all three Kerbals transferred from one craft to the other, bringing their science data with them. Huzzah! A boon for our Research and Development department!

Last night I tried to rescue three Kerbals I stranded on the Mun by underestimating the delta-v requirements of the trip. Unfortunately, I also underestimated the delta-v requirements of the rescue mission. This seems to be something of a habit of mine. Anyway, I had to scrub the surface rescue mission before it could land. However, a "Rescue Randal Kerman from orbit of the Mun" contract opened up while it was in transit, so I was able to accept that and change the mission objective to get him back. That more than recouped the cost of the mission which would otherwise have been a waste. Next time I am going to have to revise my lander design to increase the efficiency on the ascent and return stages so I can squeeze enough delta-v out of them to get back to Kerbin.