Fearless Son

Aye, that will do. However, in the case that the craft really is so delicate and heavy that even that seems like a risk, then that is what A.I.R.B.R.A.K.E.S. are for. Put them at the rear of the craft, turn them on during descent, and they can both keep the nose pointed prograde and help shed velocity at the same time. They are not required for every design, but they can certainly help some of them.

To be fair, an experienced pilot does have advantages over a probe core. Their ability to enhance existing SAS systems, for example, can come in handy for craft that have less mass or energy invested in reaction wheels. They simply make the way the craft turns more efficient.

I felt in the mood to make a plane, so I built this fighter-like craft that flies very high and very fast and is relatively agile.

No joke, in a professional context I once saw a bug in a database that had spanned several major releases over the course of a decade. As one dev commented in the notes, "Holy hell, I have kids in school younger than this bug!" It was a minor celebration among the QA and devs when it finally got closed.

Back in one of my previous career saves, I sent Jeb to gather some science from the northern polar region of the Mun. Unfortunately, I did not account for the rough terrain there and bad lighting conditions that caused me to underestimate my altitude and I could not arrest my downward velocity in time to avoid a catastrophic lithobreaking event. Jeb survived, after getting the command capsule thrown clear in the resulting impact that scattered lander debris across the irregular surface. I sent a rescue craft, and forewarned about the conditions in that area, it was able to successfully land about a kilometer from Jeb's location. He had a long hike across the rolling regolith but was able to get to the rescue rocket and board, followed by a successful return to Kerbin. The debris of the previous botched landing attempt remained scattered where they lay as a silent monument to Kerbalkind's endurance.

A land-bound tank with an amphibious assault boat to transport it would be even more Kerbal.

I have to say, I really like the design of your mothership. We rarely see your larger designs, and I am pleased that they are as simple, aesthetic, and practical as your smaller ones. That Mk. 1 crew cabin positioned laterally makes a great bridge window, the external engine pods are sleek, and the staged fuel containers on the rear make it clear it is both easily refuelable and able to shed dead mass as it moves.

I would like to add a little advice on top of what has already been said. If your lander does not have its axis of thrust parallel to the airless surface you are landing on, you are likely going to encounter some difficulty. An unstable design might flip over, and even a stable design might "pirouette" on a landing leg a bit if it lands on it funky. At the same time, the craft needs to have its lateral velocity close to nothing for many of the same reasons: lateral movement can cause it to flip on touchdown, and given how low gravity those bodies are, that can be easier to do than on Kerbin. Hence, I would advise you to have a bit of a reaction-control system on the lander. Not a lot, just enough. Thrusting the engine parallel to the surface is important to arrest lateral velocity, but it forces you to change the entire craft's orientation, which means you cannot see exactly where your prograde marker ends up on the navball until you rotate back again. This will get you close, but not perfectly, into a direct descent. The problem is that as you get closer to the surface, your need to keep the direction of thrust downward grows more urgent, which means correcting your descent direction by rotating the craft gets risky. This is where the RCS comes in. While falling downward with the craft pointed perpendicular to the surface, you can use the RCS translation controls to fine-tune your prograde vector until it is lined up with the axis of the craft. This in turn will allow you a much safer, less stressful landing (just so long as you avoid steep crater and canyon slopes.)

Kerbal Space Program is the kind of game that requires a lot of up-front investment of learning effort to get joy out of (see also: Dark Souls, Dwarf Fortress). So questions are to be expected, and if we want to grow new players into gainful community participants, it benefits us to be good mentors. We all remember that initial struggle to get a handle on it. Plus teaching others the ropes is itself part of the fun.

When I read that, I thought, "Hormons"? Are those creatures you collect by throwing special balls at them?

According to the last Devnote Tuesday, they are. Particularly, the lateral friction of the tires was spectacularly too high, causing vehicles to flip when doing all but the slightest turns at anything above a modest speed. They are adjusting this to make a well-balanced rover more likely to "spin out" then it will to flip over. They are also having the wheels scale their torque downward proportionately to their local gravity, so they will be a bit easier to control the speed of when off-Kerbin (instead of spinning their wheels too fast for no motive gain.)

I recommend disabling any onboard rotational torque for your rovers (reaction wheels, command units, etc.) while driving. I would also recommend installing an RCS system aboard with some monopropellant nozzles that direct force downward. You can enable them when you need to accelerate (like up a steep hill where you cannot get traction of when you are trying to use brakes to arrest a slide down a slope) to help it keep a good "grip" on the ground.

I used to work at a major game studio. Seriously overbuilt PCs are pretty standard for professional artists. The requirements for the final version of a game are all after compression, pre-calculation, and performance tuning. When you are building the assets to begin with you have none of that and have a lot more things for the computer to keep track of besides. If @Francois424 was a digital art student or professional I could totally see that coming in handy. Admittedly, a company gets to write off that kind of thing as a business expense. That is not quite accurate. Yes, there is a degree of wanting a wide install base, nothing wrong with that, but it also reflects the reality that the pace of technological advancement in personal computers has actually slowed down in the last decade or so. We are still making progress toward ever more powerful devices, but not at a rate that holds true to Moore's Law anymore. We are hitting a threshold of diminishing returns, where a company can no longer expect to sell a graphically-intensive application in small numbers initially to first adopters then in larger numbers as people upgrade their hardware to play it. Few want to push the envelope anymore because what would be the point? Doing that no longer carries the industry forward the way it used to, due to the unfortunate realities of physics.

Most "open world" style games tend to use height maps for their terrain deformation. Even those with really steep cliffs and crags, or even overhangs, achieve this by cramming distinct geometry models onto existent sharp differences in the height map. This typically requires a lot of manual placement on the part of the developers, baking into the wider geometry to pre-calculate most of it, and a higher rendering and LOD cost on the part of the user. Which means we are not likely to see much of it in KSP.

Not just for KSP, but yeah, I did upgrade my PC back in December: Intel i7-5930K Haswell-E 6-Core 3.5 Ghz EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 06G-P4-4995-KR 6GB AsRock Gaming Fatal1ty X99X Killer Intel Motherboard Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 SDRAM 2 x 8GB

Yesterday's Devnote Tuesday update looks like they are addressing some concerns relevant to this thread. Apparently part of the reason rover's currently flip during high speed maneuvers is because the lateral friction from their tires is absurdly high, so the moment you start a high speed turn it is like hitting a sudden speed bump and they go flying. Squad is addressing this in 1.1 by reducing the lateral friction so rovers are more likely to "spin out" during a high speed turn than they are to flip over (assuming a low center of mass.) Also apparently they simulate the effect of low-gravity driving very well (less weight means less friction means acceleration is more difficult) but part of the reason it was more challenging than it had to be was because the wheels do not scale their torque relative to the local gravity. Effectively, they spin real fast in place while only having minimal purchase. 1.1 will have rover wheels automatically reduce their torque relative to the gravity of the planet they are on to avoid spending excess power trying to move without gain, and this should make controlling them a bit easier (though they note that they would like to have a way to manually disable this feature if the player so desires.)

Storage? Fit a larger wingspan in a smaller hanger. Great concept for things like carrier-based aircraft.

I generally disable all rotational torque on my rovers whenever I take them out. If they ever do get flipped though, having some extra rotational torque that you can manually activate can be handy for getting it upright.

Being pedantic, SSTOs are not necessarily spaceplanes. A liquid fuel booster that can de-orbit and land near KSC ah-la a Space X Falcon also counts as an SSTO, and can still be fairly cost effective. Not always as cost effective as a spaceplane in all circumstances, but the simplicity can be a benefit (easier to consistently pull off, quicker times to orbit, etc.)

My understanding is that the folks at NASA who play KSP enjoy it because they have so many crazy rocket designs in their heads that "should work" but would be too impractical to build, and this lets them go joyfully nuts with it.

What @LordKael said. Spaceplanes are theoretically very cost effective, but there is a large gap between theory and practice that is narrowed by the player's engineering and piloting skill. If the fuel was costing you so much, my guess is that your SSTO was probably a) very heavy and b) had comparatively limited thrust. I would speculate that it took you a while to get enough altitude that the RAPIERs became effective. If that was the case, I would recommend adding more thrust on your way up. I find an aggressive ascent might consume fuel faster, but it consumes less of it in the long run (just do not try to push the throttle too hard too soon lest you find the atmospheric compression becomes fatal.)

All of the joking about the Mk. 1 Eyeball aside, there are a few things to look for when deciding on a landing site. First, if the body is airless then the surface is going to be rough it a lot of places, probably pockmarked with craters or valleys. Either way means lots of slopes, and slopes make landing more difficult. Think about landing on a high elevation or a low elevation, but avoid places where that elevation might change. Fortunately because of the lack of atmosphere, you can get into a very low stable orbit, which will give you a good vantage point for evaluating landing sites. Look for things like plateaus with flat tops, or look for large craters you can aim for the center of. Those are the places where the slope is likely to be gentle enough for a landing. Remember to make a lander with a low center of mass and wide landing stance to minimize tipping on touchdown. If the planet has an atmosphere, then you cannot get close enough to evaluate landing sites quite as critically, but on the other hand the atmosphere will mean that the surface is more worn down and less irregular, and the safe landing sites will be a lot more common. Again, from orbit look for broad, flat areas. Places that have an icy pole are usually relatively even there, other places have gentle rolling hills that tend to accommodate easy landing. You can also use parachutes in these environments, which can make the landing even easier so long as you are careful to avoid excessively rough areas like mountains. So long as the lander is not too top heavy, the parachutes should get it down in one piece (or at least minimize the amount of thrust you need to spend on the way down.) Good luck!

I would think that one way to make effective belly landers is to build more of a drop-ship style craft, long but with its entire axis of thrust down through the center of the belly. Assuming it is well balanced back-to-front (and being a belly lander it would have to be anyway) those engines should also be able to function as its primaries. No dead weight that way.

That would make for an interesting design consideration and player-driven missions. I imagine people would start deploying LV-Ns in detachable "blocks" that they can remove and replace with a follow up mission, returning the worn engines to Kerbin and giving the reusable vessel fresh ones.

I have heard people swear by Nervas for reusable lifters to ferry cargo like raw ore between Minmus and an orbital fuel depot.