Captain H@dock

Your center of lift is incredibly behind the center of gravity. This will make pitching up very difficult when in the air, and almost impossible when on the ground. In addition, the rearest set of landing gear is so far behind the CoG that you would need an even bigger pitch authority to rotate while on the ground. I'm assuming you put it there to prevent tail strike, but this will prevent you from rotating all together. Try on the grass area if 20km of runway is enough for you to take off. If so, you can focus on fixing the balance first (bring CoG and CoL closer), then the gear location second (a bit behind the CoG). Note that you can have an anti-tail-strike gear on the tail if you want, but it should not touch the ground when sitting on the runway: see concorde for instance:

I'm wondering, could this be screen resolution dependent too? I have no idea how KSP transforms mouse input to angle steps....

I don't think you can land that last one... From the screenshot, it seems you barely made it off the ground at 180 m/s (and used the slope at the end of the runway to rotate a bit). Looking at your Angle of Attack at 200 m/s (it seems to be something like 4 or 5 degrees), you won't be able to flare at anything under 100 m/s... Also you are applying full elevator and don't seem to pitch much... If you have so little pitch authority at 200 m/s, you are going to have a bad time at approach speeds.... I can land mk3 planes with a single set of airliner wing in the 50-70 tons range with no flaps, and occasionally 100 tons ones, but this is REALLY tricky. You have to touch down with almost zero vertical speed. When in IVA, look at the VSI indicator, the needle needs to barely be under the 0 line. Anything higher than 2 m/s vertical speed and the mk3 joins will break (exact value depends on the number of joints and on the total weight of the plane). Mk3 contraption are just really weak. But even in the real word, landing maximum weights are lower than take-off maximum weight. At any rate, you better practice on the grass near the runway first. Chances are you will spend a lot of time in the flare, so you are better off with a 20 km runway (or whatever is the length of th KSC grass area). I can post a "training" 50ish tons mk3 plane later today if you want to practice with something doable, because some of your crafts seem like they won't ever land safely... (if takeoff is tricky, don't even think about landing before emptying the tanks)

When using Shift+WASD, you get 5 degrees steps. (9 of them is 45) And since you need reliability when designing such things, I don't see how one can do any better except direct editing of the craft file (i've got a tool for that, but it's only for part swapping, I don't dare try moving/rotating parts)

Are you sure this isn't just for the backside of the power curve? And I've obviously never flown supersonic, but I would consider this applies even less to faster than sound regimes... Therefore, i would buy GoSlash27 answer. Especially since he seems to get supersonic so low. What happens if you get to 15.000 m subsonically, then level off and accelerate to 1500 m/s? (obviously this will hurt your payload fraction, but i'm interested in what pitch/AoA you would need to hold across the speed range) Also, I haven't found KSP to model very well the backside of the power curve, but that could just be because of the wesley slow throttle response. I agree. Anybody starting on SSTO spaceplane should start small. One rapier, one set of small wings, some mk2 fuselage, and play with ascent profiles.

Yes, but it needs the whole mechJeb. Which i'm not really keen on getting. I keep it as un-modded as I can (KAC, AFBW), and mechJeb is pretty much the opposite of that. IIRC Concorde autopilot held M2.02 this way.@GoSlash27 Thanks. There's no rush, i'm not able to run KSP until tonight anyway. Still, since lift varies with speed, accelerating at zero fuselage incidence should lead to more and more lift, meaning you'd have to pitch up to keep fuselage zero incidence....

Amazing design capability. I've been playing a bit with tilting the wings, but I wasn't able to clearly show the benefits you describe, though I didn't go for such an angle. i must try harder. Also, from your screenshot, it looks like you are flying level when switching to close cycle. I guess such a low Thrust to Drag means it's the only solution, but I've always had a hard time figuring out what the air drag trade-off was regarding the velocity vector at switching point. I usually try to be in the 10-15 degrees range, which my design can achieve without getting bellow the 1450 m/s mark. Which leads to my question: What speed/Ap do you shoot for when accelerating on such a flat trajectory in close-cycle (assuming you keep flying level, and rely on exceeding orbital velocity to 'climb' your way out of the atmosphere). edit: looking at the album, you're pitching up after the switch-over? Also, what's the behavior when re-entering and gliding back to base? Do you have a dedicated thread, I'd be keen on trying to fly it, I'm quite curious of the low speed maneuverability. Also, I think my 6 rapiers equivalent craft doesn't have a higher part count (+5% i'd say?). But I would need to check the number tonight. edit2: this is why we need a very simple black-box mod.... Being able to trace pitch, Aoa, Altitude and Speed during the ascent would make it so much easier to talk spaceplane....

I made a lua tool for parsing standalone .craft file, but i'm assuming the craft part of the save file structure would be the same. While my tool isn't made for error checking (it's for swapping equivalent parts: mk2 short fuselage -> mk2 crew compartement. it allows me to do build transport, cargo and tanker variants of my spaceplanes very easily), It would probably be able to raise any simple error (ie. file syntax error) Contact me if you haven't found anything better in a couple of days, and if command line invocation of such a tool isn't scaring you.

I even change mine during flight. Ie: I enable pitch on the outboard Elevons at the trailing edge of a delta wing for greater low speed pitch authority during final and the flare.

Obviously... However, this has been been extensively reported at least since I joined KSP (.90) and yet no action was taken on that matter. So maybe it isn't that easy, or maybe it isn't a priority... I agree that it's crazy to leave something like that. especially when you have a linear docking part for spaceplane, which means almost everybody going mk2 spaceplane will run into the bug...

The only problem you can run into (and I can't remember if this is still in 1.0.x) is when the transfer has finished and you've got more than two tanks involved. Assuming you're got 4 tanks (A to D). Your engine is burning the content of D, and you're selecting A+B+C+D, and you select IN on D. Now, A+B+C will equally transfer their content* to D, which is probably good to keep your craft balanced. However, once D is full, the transfer will stop for all tanks but one. You'll then have only one tank (say filling-in for the content of D that is being burned (to keep D full). This will probably unbalance your craft. That's something to keep in mind. *This is tank flow dependent, but assuming same tank model.

So here is my most extreme plane example regarding flaps. 131 Tonnes takeoff weight (center fuselage is half full). 3 Flap+Slat combo per wing, each with their own action group. Each couple is center around the CoG as to produce no pitch up torque, and the slat is sunk in the wing leading edge. Action group 1,2,3 for them, which gives 3 flap deployments options: Aero display at similar speed shows the huge difference full flap makes Take off distance and speed are vastly improved (95 against 135), but full flap max speed is 140. Also, too fast when deploying the flaps will tear the wings off... But as I said, I don't think this could work on OP's craft as it doesn't have a wing section at the CoG...

Regarding flaps: You need to position your flaps in-line to the CoG (along the longitudinal axis), or event better, match it with a slat (slat on the leading edge of the wing, moving up, flap at the trailing edge, moving down). I'll post pictures later.: Regarding maintaining the AoA on airflow only: You need to do your flare just at the right time, because the speed will decay quick enough that you don't get a second chance... A very accurate Radar altimeter and VSI does help for that, but we only have the later in the IVA view.

While you're correct, have you looked up X15 landing video? I just did, and it is pretty scary! I wouldn't want to be regularly operating a space plane with such a tight landing envelope... I've tried landing several low lift craft in 1.0.4 with a joystick, and they aren't nice to perform. You usually need in excess of 150 m/s on final, and a perfectly timed flare! My regular small and medium SSTO are touching down between 40 and 60 m/s (on a glide from orbit). That means I have a lot of margin for error during approach and final, which means 100% landing success. So I think with some training you can land this, but it will always be a challenge. Which obviously should not prevent you from operating it. This is KSP. EDIT: Like you said. Powered landing, on the back of the drag curve. It find it quite tricky to do in KSP, compared to 'real planes', and obviously the spool-up time of the jet is not your friend for that. Also, cockpit IVA for an accurate VSI reading. Yes, flaps. This can help with landing/take-off speeds, but I don't think it would work on your design (you don't want your flaps to induce pitch, so you would need them in pair centered around the CoG). Also, my feeling is that it hurts drag, so I don't include it in my SSTO. But I could post a proof of concept if you want.

As close to overheating as possible. Since reasonable spaceplace have too low a TWR for reaching 1400-1500 m/s in a climb, you'll have to balance heating up with accelerating (in level flight) low enough to have time to pitch-up. In the end the trade-off is between speed and angle of climb when leaving air-breathing territory. Shallow climb means drag for longer but higher speed means less rocket dV required to reach orbit.

Regarding the question of what happens past N Year, I think this guy has the answer.... https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/3endsw/in_february_i_began_a_project_to_fly_a_crew_of/

While I agree, there's no way I'm going to attempt that for the same fare as a Kerbin sub-orbital or a minmus orbit.... I actually decline most complex tourist contracts because the money they offer isn't enough. Interplanetary tourism should cost one a lot more than flying around the Kerbin system.

What about the laws of physics? Doing 0.0 m/s in surface mode while hovering about the ground is very un-plane like.

Worst case, move/zoom the camera to be inside the parent part. This allows you to select sunk landing gear. Struts are trickier though...

Locked orientation does that better than Chase, in my opinion. 1.0.x Locked has replaced 0.9 chase. And this is indeed the first item on my docking procedure. I would side with cantab on this one... As long as your vessel is streamlined in the direction of the docking, you're fine, but sometime you just can't visualize the alignment. I wish fixing this bug was higher on the todo list...

I reckon (but I am not sure) that this is related to being in map view at the moment the part is crossing the "show glow" temperature threshold. This should be easy to prove with an hypersonic plane, but I've never found the time to do it [1]. I don't have advanced shadder activated, so it's displayed as a red colored overlay. I don't know if this is the case for you, but this might be a reason why nobody did catch it in testing. [1] Possible test case: Level at 15,000m and accelerate to 1450 m/s in normal view, slow down to 300 m/s, check if the temperature overlay came and went. Then switch to map view, repeat (300 -> 1450 -> 300), check if the overlay has stuck. Switch to normal view, repeat (300 -> 1450 -> 300), check if that fixed the overlay.

What they really improved in 1.0.4 is how steep re-rentry now lead you to burn-up. That was the biggest problem with 1.0.2, you could re-enter radially into kerbin and be fine. In 1.0.4, no more. But shallow Kerbin re-entry are quite forgiving as long as you've slowed down enough by the time you get to 10,000m. Which is to be expected if you want bigger/denser atmospheres to be playable.

I have 50 peoples in my roster, and I've never hired any Kerbal. So it's all relative! And since rescuing four of them cost me around 2,000 credit and 30 mn (20 for the takeoff/landing + 3mn per RDV), it is definitely free money. Plus it allows me to do some space plane flying from now and then. But I rarely have more than two of these spawn at the same time, sometime three. You can always bring some orbit tourists in the remaining seats, though. If I had a complain, that would more be regarding the un-randomness of the kerbal class. Everybody seems to be getting different, yet fairly imbalanced distributions. I'm quite low on engineer (5 out of 50), which isn't good for the end game.

That's the thing: from your first post it seems as you're playing 'real time' (ie. you aren't going to jump to day 320 just to be launching a Duna mission). Since I do the same, I would suggest you map out the up-coming transfer windows (to Eve, Duna, Jool and Dres). This way you will be able to plan in advance when to get things in orbit for these. Due to trip durations being wildly different for these bodies, you will hardly be able to run them concurrently, except if you make them self-sustaining. Leaving Kerbin SOI, makes any sort of 'real-time' playing quite difficult... In the mean time, here are some things you can do: 1. launch some 15,000 dV probes right now 2. start building your station 3. validate your inter-planetary ships by flying test-runs at the mun 4. return your test-runs ships to your kerbin fuel station 5. practice your hohmann transfer skills by doing mun <-> minmus trips 6. train for multiple burns in Kerbin system (Pe kicking) That should keep you busy until the first optimal windows. At the risk of getting your bored until you actually get to the other planets.

Same here. Thanks a lot Stargate525.