Fearless Son

If it was a plane? Yeah, those would probably be backwards. But as a lander? Nah, they are probably just fine. Fully extended, airbrakes are equally effective whether they are forward or backward, or at least my experience suggests as much. Where you might get fouled up is if these airbrakes are being used as control surfaces instead of pure breaks. I am uncertain how exactly the game models the aerodynamic forces over them when they are not fully deployed, but I would intuit that the backwards ones produce force more suddenly than the forward ones, which might cause the craft to be over-compensating during atmospheric flight. But realistically, the only time you would have to worry about that is when launching very heavy rockets with airbrakes as control surfaces. The rest of the time, it might as well be irrelevant whether they are backward or forward.

That was my thought too. Seems like it might be a fuel-efficient way of getting very heavy cargo spaceplanes off the runway and into their climb. It might mean we need fewer turbojets to get up to where we need the plane to be to start going hypersonic. - - - Updated - - - While the Panther is obviously useful for making nimble "fighter" style planes, one application I think it would excel at is as a lifter engine for VTOL craft. I find that the Wheesley these days is a little too underpowered for lifting most VTOLs unless you go overboard on the number of engines, and the Whiplash is pretty poor at the speed and altitude one generally does vertical takeoff and landing maneuvers at. But the Panther with its higher thrust output than the Wheesley and wide range of thrust vectoring should make it ideal for an aircraft with responsive hovering maneuverability.

Again, just like in Kerbal Space Program. Who here has not recovered Jeb from something that should have killed him, only to stick him in the next craft to go up?

"Fearless Son" is a handle I have had for over a decade and a half now. It is based on my surname, "Ferguson", which in ye olde English means "Son of Fearless", or more literally "Fearless Son". I picked it in part because it was not based on any transient interest of mine, something I would not feel bad associating with my online identity years later, and in part because it sounded kind of badass without sounding too much like a braggart. I could use it in online games without shame or setting myself up for anything.

Ha! Awesome story. Not sure if the procedural SRBs you are using have this option, but the stock SRBs include a thrust limiter tweakable you can set in the VAB but not after deployment. You can use a SRB with the same total amount of fuel but a slower, longer burn to give you a slower acceleration and more gentle ascent. If you wanted to do a two-stage option, you could use a more limited thrust SRB to get out of the thickest of the atmosphere, then use a much more aggressive second stage to break the speed threshold you were going for once you reached thinner atmosphere. Just do not tweak the thrust too low or a SRB will have trouble even lifting itself.

But it would be quite Kerbal:

So I was browsing some of the xkcd "What If?" achieves recently and came across a link embedded in a footnote, this link in fact, detailing a first hand account by Bill Weaver, one of the test pilots on the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. The story was one in which the atmospheric forces on one particular engine got out of control during a hypersonic banking turn, resulting in Rapid Unplanned Disassembly at high altitude which Bill managed to walk away from after going "ragdoll", against all odds. Reading it made me think, "That sounds like exactly the kind of thing that happens all the time when I play KSP." The pushing the performance envelope, the loss of a craft due to some factor unforeseen by the engineers, the improbable survival of a crew in spite of himself, etc. Give it a read.

Yeah, I am sure. It is not just a matter of the strength of the wheels themselves, though that can certainly be a big factor in some circumstances. But even the toughest wheels will not stop a rover from breaking chunks off itself if takes a bad spill at speed. The wheels might be fine, the scientific apparatus, antenna, batteries, and docking ports might get wrecked though. Yes, there are ways of building more stable rovers where that is less likely to happen, but other design constraints can limit one's ability to take advantage of that. If it needs to fit in a cargo bay, for example, that will limit how wide the base can be. Hence why I really want tweakables for fine-tuning the rover performance. Some mission profiles might allow for greater acceleration, some might demand lower.

Given that rovers can accelerate beyond a speed at which they can safely collide with surfaces, the additional acceleration and top speed of those wheels is not always desirable, particularly on rougher or lower body surfaces where the rover is prone to catch air if it crests a ridge too quickly or tries to make too sharp a turn or too aggressive a breaking maneuver. It would be nice to have a few more tweakable options for rover wheels to fine-tune their performance envelope for what you need the rover to do.

This is totally true for the "block" style quad thrusters, but for the streamlined thrusters (which you might want for aerodynamic or aesthetic reasons) I find it best to shift them as far from the center of mass as possible, but place them in matching sets balanced across the center of mass. That way you maximize the leverage their thrust can use when turning the craft around, while also allowing them to thrust laterally. As long as you have a few surfaces so you can place them facing backward and forward as well, and you have all your directions covered.

You can do that:

Heck yeah, that Mk1 crew cab will be extremely handy for early game tourist contracts, or when you have a small(ish) lander that needs a few extra crew on board without bulking it out too much.

I have to say that I love the new cargo ramp, and not just for use on planes. Think of all the possible spacecraft uses for it! Imagine a booster that, instead of fairings, uses cargo bays and can just drop its content out the back while decelerating back into aerobreaking. Or imagine a "White Base" style carrier that can deploy landers and probes. Come to think of it, even on an airless planetary environment that might be one of the better ways of getting a rover down in one piece, or for recovering modules stuck on the surface for contracts.

Avoid xenon-fueled engines. You cannot extract xenon in the field, and the thrust you get out of xenon engines is really poor. Combine that with the high electricity drain demanded by a cluster of xenon engines (especially far out in system where solar panels are less effective) and you will have trouble getting anywhere. You will need something with a decently high total thrust if you expect any of your burns to be timely. A Rhino engine is ideal for this, clusters of other engines might be enough if you do not have one. Even so, be careful not to accelerate too suddenly. Ships joined by Clamp-o-Trons can be a little "wobbly" when a sudden force is put on them, so ease them into a burn.

I can see a ton of uses for stock hinges that would benefit the game, especially with the new aerodynamic model. Landers that have offset gear that fold up during launch to fit into a fairing. Pylons with unfolding solar panels that can extend out to maximize their exposure. Wings on tiny spaceplanes that fold so they can fit inside a large cargo bay for transport to other planets, etc.

Off to find the Sirens of Laythe, are you?

What Streetwind said. Standard radiators only radiate heat from the parts they are directly attached to. They might disperse some heat that convects over into them from adjacent parts, but that is quite inefficient. The thermal control systems, in addition to being deployable radiator panels, come with a set of internal heat convection pipes run throughout the craft, drawing heat from the hottest parts first and radiating them out. In other words, build your containment chamber with the thermal control systems instead of the radiators. Granted, this might wreck the aesthetic you are going for since the thermal control systems deploy out like solar panels, but if you find a way to make them part of your sartorial vision, they would be ideal.

Have you adjusted your break torque? The torque on your rear tires should be set high, while your front tire should be set low. You want to touchdown with the rear tires first and immediately start breaking. The extra breaking force rear to the center of mass will snap the front of the plane down to the ground and hold it there, preventing the nose from rising and minimizing the plane's bouncing. Also, practice runway landing before you try landing on the rougher terrain elsewhere. Even grasslands and deserts have gentle slopes across their surface, and while that might not be enough to stop a landing attempt if the plane has a lot of lift and cannot shed its speed fast enough then passing the ridge of even a small incline can send it gliding back into the air.

Heh. KSP is a "discoverable" game, meaning they throw you into the deep end of the sandbox and you have to figure it out from there. Or at least that is how I like to keep optimistic. But seriously, it is a game where the learning process is long and difficult, and failure at some point is inevitable. But every time you launch, with every new thing you try, you learn a little more and become a bit more of an expert. *Puts on old man hat* Back in my day, we did not even have any fancy-smancy reaction wheels, and our command pods provided no torque! All the parts that are now reaction wheels did was provide generic stability assistance, and there was no function difference between them! You kids these days are lucky you have these options!

Send out all the probes in a short sequence. Then take them over as each one nears its destination in turn. Since they are probes, you do not have to worry about recovery, you can just park them at their destinations.

Ah, but crewed command pods (even empty ones) have built-in reaction wheels, which lets them impart a lot of torque. With those, you only need extra reaction wheels if the vessel is more massive than a small lander or it needs to turn around exceptionally quickly. But take that away, and it only has the probe core's itty-bitty internal wheel to go on, which leaves it very little torque. Regarding RCS, while you can use it for spinning the craft in place, to get the most out of it you need the RCS ports intended to rotate it around to be as far from the center of mass as you can reasonably make them. Two sets of them, mirrored front and back across the center of mass, will get more reaction control out of it than will RCS ports mounted near the center of mass. But if you have enough reaction wheels or built-in torque, you do not even need RCS for spinning the ship around in place. RCS is still very useful, but mostly for fine course adjustment and lateral maneuverability (which is essential while docking.)

Ah, okay, I misunderstood your issue. Though looking at your probe again, I do not see any reaction wheels there. Unless you have reaction wheels somewhere not obvious in the pictures, I think that would be your primary problem. Probe cores have notoriously poor torque and will struggle to rotate all but the lightest probes. Giving it even a small diameter reaction wheel will be a big help. You certainly have enough batteries and solar power that the electricity drain from running that wheel should be practically a non-concern.

Looking at the picture of your launch vehicle, I think you might be fat-fairing it a bit too much. You might want to move your communications antenna in closer to the hull to allow a narrow and more gently tapered fairing to be built around it. Fairings create drag, the point of them being that they create less of that drag than whatever they might enclose, and the wider they are and the more sharply they open and close, the greater that drag is. Too much drag near the top of a rocket is a big part of what leads to them spinning out of control during the ascent phase of a launch. If you narrow the fairing you will reduce that front-side drag. You already have some tail fins near the bottom, those will create drag at the bottom of the rocket and should provide ample control once the top is generating less drag.

Possible, but you also run the risk of knocking one end of the wing up when you need it to be level. Can send the plane spinning across the ground when you are trying to keep it on a linear surface deceleration. Not a bad idea, but a trade off to consider.

If all you are doing is going in for a glided landing, I would recommend you try to use just a large set of fixed wings and minimize your other weight. Keep your fuel and engines minimal, and try to use fixed wings with built-in control surfaces. Just make it as minimal as you can reasonably get away with otherwise. Bit of advice though, I recommend you set the wings high on the body of the glider. No airstrips on Duna means a landing in potentially rough and unpredictable terrain. Low wings are likely to clip on something in such a circumstance.