Merandix

@Bloody_looser Yes, quite. Also, any similarities with the same name mod is non-intentional, I was aware of the mod, but not looking at it's implementation (though I certainly won't resist it ). Mainly looking at the massive lack of flexibility the gears have. The main thing really is the adjustable height. Even for relatively simple designs I sometimes have to fight the gears to get the craft in the right orientation. Going as far as having to put the gears on hard-points.

I fail to see how pointing me to a mod helps me in my quest for getting this into vanilla KSP. But thanks anyway I only use two mods. I have tried some part-mods, but I was careless and forgot to back up my saves. Now they're all corrupt. No, I am not a big fan of mods.

Yes, I love the new landing gears, introduced in 1.0... and yes, I realise they're not quite done yet. They still need animation and lights done, and the medium landing gear will also require a steering option to be enabled/disabled. I am however missing one major feature... and that's adjustable height. The landing gear actually mixes and matches in a great way! Except for that it usually doesn't fit. For example, small nose gear + medium main gear would look great... where it not that in most MK2 designs, the main (medium) gear would be WAY too tall, and the nose would be aimed very much to the ground. Same with large landing gear and medium gear. This is less of an issue, but one needs a lot of fiddling to get it to look right... What happens, especially on my Mk2 planes, I usually end up just sticking to the old landing gear... which is a shame. In some cases, I want to use the large bogey-style landing gear underneath the belly of the plane (especially in Mk3 designs). A part of the gear is below the wings, and I'd like some part of the gears below the belly of the plane as well... where it not that I would require incredibly low landing gears, where the bogey-style main gears are VERY tall. Especially with the new wheel-system, it would be great to have more options for landing gears. I still wish we could have a landing gear that sits flush to the hull/wing when retracted and closed, but is a visible wheel-well (not occluded by the hull below it) when deployed.

AMD HD7870 here. One of the worse cards in this poll... while it's one of the best cards in a pc of the people I know. May show that this poll is indeed skewed towards people with relatively new high-end systems, which obviously, could very well be a correct representation of the game's playerbase.

You missed the 'quite reliably'. As in, with 13 tonnes per RAPIER dependency on piloting is MUCH less than at, for example, 16 tonnes per RAPIER. But you're completely right to point out that when you get the hang of stuff, it RAPIERS can do far better. Just that my personal recommendation is to stick with 13 tonnes per RAPIER for learning the basics.

Generally crashing at the lip of the runway is a good indication you have too little You don't need a lot. A full deltawing is probably already pushing it. How did it work out?

What's your intended payload? One, drop the hugemongous wings. You have huge lift, but even at a slight angle of attack, that also means hugemongous drag. Go for sleek and aerodynamic. Mk2 provides lift anyway. If it can get off the runway and fly with an Angle of Attack of 5 degrees or less, it's fine. Two, drop a RAPIER, 3 should be enough. Each RAPIER can get 13 tonnes of total vehicle weight (including itself) into orbit quite reliably. By engine output, you should easily be able to push a nearly 50 tonne craft into space. A bit less if you want to get there quickly. Three, I think you should be able to actually drop a fueltank. Four, add two (for example) pre-coolers. They give you a little fuel, but more importantly, they also give you more air for your third engine. Two engine pre-coolers should be enough for a single engine. They can go on the side tankage. Build your engines / intakes like this: pre-cooler, pre-cooler, engine, ram intake, engine, ram intake, engine. Not really necessary anymore, but it might help a bit. Those big wings and wing-strakes are for far bigger planes. Climb to about 10 km... ideally, you shouldn't stay below 350 till 10 km... because then you need to build up too much speed above, which will slow your ascent and thus increase the fuel bill (and thereby decrease your chance of getting into orbit). A little overheating isn't a problem. I often break the sound barrier by like 5 km. Your rapiers should no longer be accelerating you on airbreathing at about 24-25 km. By then you should do at least 1300 m/s and if you really do it well, over 1450 is possible (though you will run a bit hot by then). Shallow out at about 10 km, but no sharp turns. My personal gut feeling is that letting the engines run at low key and keeping apo at 45-50 seconds till you actually hit your target apo at near orbital speed saves some fuel compared to shutting the engines down after hitting the projected apo and then coasting up to there, then firing the heck out of them to circularise. My gut tells me you'd be reaching the same speed twice... and since I lose up to 200 m/s while coasting up, that sounds quite non-efficient to me. (note, the earlier method does take a bit more time). I don't know if this is correct, but it feels that way.

If you push the stick forward, the nose is intended to pitch down. This is usually accomplished by placing control surfaces controlling pitch at the extremities of the plane... so at the tail (tailplane) or at the nose (canards) (forgive the (possibly) inaccurate terminology, I'm just a guy who learnt this stuff through KSP, not an expert). You don't have canards, so typically for a tailplane this happens: If you push the stick forward, and you have a tailplane with control surfaces, these will change the shape of your tailplane so your tail basically gets more lift, and gets pushed up. If your tail goes up, your nose goes down. Because your main wing isn't doing any deflecting, you will pitch down. However, if you have ONLY control surfaces on your main wing, and those control surfaces are BEHIND the CoM, your SAS will figure, hey... these control surfaces MUST be a tailplane! So, you press forward (push stick forward, intending to push the nose down), your control surfaces will move down to increase lift, since this must be a tailplane according to the SAS. So now, your main wing is generating more lift, but your tailplane is neutral here... so you will pitch up instead. of the expected pitch down. This also means that your SAS thinks you should be pitching up when you are actually pitching down. But because the nose goes down, your SAS goes into panic mode, and pulls up harder... which fails because the pitch controls are inverted and only makes it worse. Again, for effectiveness, the pitch controls are on the extremities of the plane, but work opposite. Because your plane is a see-saw one end moves up, the other end moves down. This is what the SAS assumes. And I believe it uses the CoL as a pivot point. Why the roll reverses when you put the CoL in front of the CoM, I don't know. On this design it stands out that there's no yaw authority in it's entirety. Both your tailplane and vertical stabilisers seem to be AV-T1 winglets, which have no control surfaces. So to fix this, remove pitch from the control surfaces on your main wing, and add control surfaces on your tailplane (disable roll and yaw here). I'd also recommend putting a control surface on your vertical stabiliser for yaw control (disable pitch and roll here).

Rather not because I'd really like to have both visible simultaneously (helps in judging the bumpiness of the terrain below). Also, I really love my altimeter to function reliably, putting too many auto-toggling functions in there will likely only be annoying in my humble opinion. Our airspeed indicator switching automatically can be annoying in it's own right (flying up to your runway flag and it spontaneously changes to target mode is something to be aware of, or you'd stall).

This, and something more handy than klaws or docking ports to strap down rovers in cargo bays with. An extend-able ramp from a (larger) cargo-hold than the large service-bay would also be greatly appreciated

Modular GUI! Just let me select what is on my screen, perhaps with keyboard short-cuts to toggle them. I'd REALLY like to be able to bring up the radar altimeter in default outside view on demand. Because I do not really need it apart from landing.

It would explain where all those exploded spaceplanes I have to rescue Kerbals from ended up in space.

22 m/s is 79,2 km/h or, if you insist, 49,2 mph (use 2,2 for quick and imprecise conversion). How did you end up with 40? I'd like it much better if we could give probe cores (and thus rovers) instructions, so they'd drive wherever the heck we want them autonomously.

Switch to cockpit view, and find the 'Radar Altimeter', it's usually near the altimeter. It measures distance to the ground up to 1500 meters. I do agree that there should be an option to conjure up this meter in the outside view though It is also annoyingly absent from probes. I'd just like this to be available in the normal view.

Press F10 and you get heating gauges that warn you of hot things. Alternatively, press F11 for an overlay. Don't be spooked, Red is good, the yellower it gets the hotter it gets.

I can fully understand that you miss building spaceplanes with more creative freedom. However, you can't blame the game for making wings work more like wings. In pre-1.0 those wings generated a stupidly tiny amount of lift. Therefore FAVOURING craft like yours, because you actually needed a ....ton of wings to generate some useful lift. Hell, I can't build craft like you do because I'm me, and I had to build a 30 meter long plane with a 53 meter wingspan to get it 'sort of' into space. Now we get more sensible and predictable wings. And spaceplanes get to be fun for beginners too. Functionally, we just have to get used to this again. Payload values are already shooting up again... and I've already spotted the first spaceplanes making excursions to the Mun and beyond. I'm a slow learner, and I get spaceplanes up there reliably again, with a payload. Functionally, we'll get there with learning Aesthetically, I'm totally with you that for the people who loved building like that, we need new low-drag structural lego-like parts. But I very much dislike how you, the topic starter, and some other people complain about this issue. It is very counter-productive to what you want. The main problem is that you do not have any parts to use as structural components anymore. Previously, you could use wings for that, because they generated too little lift, and so a ....ton of wings on a plane could actually be very beneficial, thus supporting designs like yours. Your problem now however is that wings work like intended, generating a lot more lift and drag. Thus the only components you could use as body panels for a more freeform approach to plane designing, now generate too much drag to be useful in this way. So, instead of saying everything is broken, why not get to the core of your problem? With the new aerodynamics, you have lost the only parts that allowed you more creative freedom in plane construction. Instead complain about that loss, and make the completely reasonable request to fill in that void. Squad wanted a slightly more realistic atmosphere, not a realistic one. So proving that it is still unrealistic doesn't do anything to prove your point.

Correct, medium and heavy landing gears don't have steering. Heavy can be excused for being a bogie, and those generally don't steer. But Medium absolutely NEEDS to have the option since it's the wheel to go to to use as a nose-wheel when using heavies for main gear. For now, you just have to force your nose about on the ground, or use a hardpoint to mount your small nosegear on (though it looks silly). I suspect the landing gear aren't fully done yet.

I think it's because of that gap. Aerodynamics are actually important. The side of your rocket must be as smooth as possible. The problem is that you have a small part (the stack separator) that is in the airflow, and a small heat sensitive component next to it. Though, admittedly, I've also had some components mysteriously overheat while going quite 'slow'. The thing is, it's always stuff sticking out into the airflow, or around a gap in an otherwise smooth surface.

You are obviously completely right. Apparently, I'm just that much more stupid than you. (Guess where my advise to check direction came from )

Are you going the right way? That mistake is ridiculously easy to make. You are moving counterclockwise in this image, do the dots move clockwise? Being within a few km is still fine, the orbits don't even need to overlap as neatly as yours, hence I'm suspecting you're going the wrong way.

Yup, this does it, I'm an official spaceplane idiot now Thanks for showing this to me... *cracks knuckles* I have work to do I'm using 8 engines on an 80 tonne + 10 tonne payload space plane. This tells me that I have work to do, time to rip those wings off and attempt a more minimalist approach perhaps. *goes off building space planes*

I do believe there's a major difference in flight characteristics between RAPIERS and turboramjets. So that may make a difference, but that's speculation, as I haven't experimented enough to say anything about that yet. Judging by how you react, I do need to step up my game, if you haul 13 tonnes per engine up there, and I only 11, and we get similar results... then I definitely need improvement

Looking at your mass, you might need an extra engine. Your ship weighs in at 52-53 tonnes. That's pretty hefty. For example, my 31 tonne space plane does a reasonable orbit with 3 RAPIERS... you're over 20 tonnes heavier, yet only have a single extra RAPIER. As a rule of thumb, I go by 1 engine per 10 tonnes of plane. Though your fuel consumption will go up too obviously. Ideally, you want to be going 1000+ m/s when switching to closed cycle. It's more involved piloting that it was before, and thus a bit harder. My best was 1120 m/s at switch. The faster and higher you end up going while on air, the less dV needs to come from your LF+O supply. It's a delicate balance, quite fun in fact! Reminds me when I figured out spaceplanes the first time

Not really a large issue: Lights seem to be absent from the medium and large landing gears, despite the lights being present on the models. Also, a minor design consideration: While I think it's fine that the large landing gear doesn't have steering, the medium one sort of needs to steer. Since it's the only fitting landing gear to go to when in need of nose-wheel when using heavy's as a main gear. However, the medium landing gear doesn't have steering as an option.

Yeah, this was the bit where have to get used to the new aero... However, the old aero kind of brutally said 'no' if you went too heavy on the load, taking off too heavy = fireball at the end of runway. So it sort of surprises me that it still takes off with 36 tonnes in there no problem Last variant like this in 0.90 put 27 tonnes into orbit with less fuel, but would hardly get off the ground with 36 tonnes in it. This one is, as you say, is more fit to carry 12 tonnes max into orbit... but gets 36 tonnes of payload off the ground (and in a suborbital flight path) no problem (just not in an orbit).That's where the confusion was coming from. Because if it NEARLY makes it to the intended altitude, circularising shouldn't be that big of an issue, right? Well, that was where my assumption went haywire. Anyway, to answer your questions: Takeoff speed is in the 90-120 m/s range, about halfway down the runway. But I'm generally quite gentle on pulling up, she'll likely fly earlier if I push her. RAPIERS switch over to closed cycle at about 950-1120 m/s and between 23-25 km in altitude. My piloting is a major factor in how well it performs. To be brutally honest, I usually just sort of eyeball it and then start tweaking it till it works