Chaos_Klaus

Well there is one thing about the warp to function of KAC that really annoyes me. KAC doesn't increase your warp speed when the warp limit gets higher. The stock warp to does this better. It correctly increases timewarp when you gain altitude and the limit is higher.

Wait, what ... you can do that? I've got work to do! =]

Solar panels will also radiate heat.

You'd have to calculate your drag and lift forces depending on angle of attack. That's not so easy as these forces depend on the shape of your craft. You will propably have better results when testing it, instead of doing the math. I'm all for doing the math, but here it's not worth the effort, i think.

Yes, comparing the Nerva to other engines is tricky, because you need to use extra liquid fuel instead of the oxidizer to compare correctly.

The thing about the Aerospike engine is that it doesn't loose so much thrust and efficiency when in high pressure atmospheres. This is especially true for flying on Eve, as the atmospheric pressure on the surface is so hight that most of the engines do not produce enough thrust. The Nukes are the better choice in my opinion, as they are useful in more situations. They have double the efficiency of other vacuum rated engines (like the LV-909). They are heavy though and thus only make sense for larger craft with larger payloads. Also note that the LV-N only uses liquid fuel, so don't bring oxidizer!

Well ... that would be a description for like ... any rocket. I mean, come on. Putting a payload into orbit takes a little payload and loads of engines and fuel. Don't whine about rapiers being too small for your mk3 spaceplanes. Maybe think about it the other way. Maybe mk3 planes are just too heavy and draggy to use only a few rapiers. How can you possible go about this with: "Hey it's really inconvenient that I have to use so many engines for my insanely big and heavy craft." ??? Maybe we should ask Squad to reduce gravity some more, because it's really annoying having to bring all these big engines and all that fuel just to get a tiny sattelite into orbit. Didn't KSP teach you anything? It's about finding solutions to problems *within* the boundaries of the game. In this thread people have proven that you can bring reasonably large space planes into orbit with only a few rapiers. You need to pilot it right to break the soundbarrier. So what. Piloting is half the fun of KSP.

Completely disagree. Small probes can be launched with a single SRB as lowest stage, no problem. With the reduced specific impulse of all the SRBs it got a little harder, as they don't yield that much delta v any more. Here are my suggestions: - Why do you bring RCS tanks if you don't have (and need) RCS thrusters? Get rid of those. - Payload is not very aerodynamic. Infact the way KSP calculates drag it's propably very draggy and makes your craft want to turn around during atmospheric flight. Try putting everything inside a service bay. - There are no batteries or solar panels on your probe. It will run out of power when you don't fire your engines. - You need some way to control your craft in space. Add a reaction wheel or you will have absolutely no control when engines are not firing. - The LV-T45 engine is desingned for use atmospheric use. If you have unlocked the LV-909, use that one for everything above 30km. - SRBs are great as a cheap lower stage. However, they have no thrust vectoring (gimbal) in KSP. Use fins with actual control surfaces to compensate for that, as those can steer you in atmospheres. Also, set the thrust limiter on the SRB to maybe 20% for your very small payload. The whole thing should not be going faster than 300m/s at 10km. Don't worry if it doesn't take off from the pad very fast. Seeing that your current design has abolutely no control while the SRB is burning, I'd like to add a link to Scott Manley's tutorial on ascent in KSP 1.0. You need to do a gradual gravity turn in the new aero and he shows how it's done. https://youtu.be/_q_8TO4Ag0E That beeing said, one could propably point your rocket slightly east at launch and then don't touch the controls untill the SRB is burned out, but it's not optimal.

Yes. If your payload is a little larger, I'd suggest adding more boosters (maybe use 4 or 6) and reduce the thrust limit on them a little to make them burn longer. The next stage should have a TWR of just above 1. When the boosters are decoupled, it is ok for the craft to not accellerate. At least it should not slow down. I chose this configuration because it is wasting fuel to try to overcome the soundbarriere below maybe 10km, because of the high transsonic drag.

Again ... look at my design above. Engines are the expensive part. You use four skippers, I use one and a poodle. That's way cheaper. SRBs are cheap, too. Don't bring too much engine!

Well, to be honest ... I think you are all completely overbuilding your rocktets. 11,8t is not extremely heavy for a payload. Here is a fairly simple design that will put it into orbit and still have fuel to spare: http://i.imgur.com/Nb4BjI5.jpg I made a dummy payload. The tank is for adjusting the weight. It uses a Poodle engine for the high altitude and orbital stage and a quarter size 2.5m tank. One single skipper engine and an orange tank form the atmospheric stage. Three Thumper SRBs help with TWR on the pad, igniting together with the Skipper. The Thumpers help reach 270m/s pretty fast. After decoupling them, the rocket has a TWR of little above 1. That way the rocket reaches a velocity just below the transsonic regime fast and then stays at that velocity until it passes 10km. TWR of the main staige is rising as ISP rises and the rocket gets lighter. at around 30km the poodle takes over, slowly pushing the rocket further into orbit. At this altitude can use all the efficient engines designed for vacuum. I got this into orbit with 600m/s of delta v left in FAR. Remember that you do not need extremely high Thrust to weight ratios. 1.4-1.6 is enough! I've gone with more here, becaus I timed the booster burnout with reaching a desired speed at a lower TWR for the rest of the rocket.

The large orbital scanner needs to be in a polar orbit to function.

Center of lift needs to be behind center of gravity. Is that the case? Also when the tanks are empty? You can see both if you activate the markers in the space plane hangar.

If you put data into your science lab, it will not be deleted from your capsule AFAIK. It will place a copy into the laband you can still return the experiment to kerbin.

I got "Poles" science from the mun's equator this way ...

Check this link for some aircraft design tips: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/52080-Basic-Aircraft-Design-Explained-Simply-With-Pictures?p=685737&viewfull=1#post685737

There is a few things that changed with 1.0: Air breathing engines lose thrust at a certain altitude, even if you have enough intake air. So spamming intakes is no longer useful. That also means that you need to use your rocket engines earlier and need to bring more oxidizer. Too many wings will induce a lot of drag. From what I read in the Squadcast Summary, there is a bug with part occlusion that generates more drag then intended. Don't know if that applies to wings. From what I see in the screenshots, you don't have too many wings though. (I think) If you have trouble breaking the soundbarrier, do the following. Climb to a high altitude, gain as much speed as you can, then go into a light dive to gain more speed. That way you can breach th sound barrier without additional engine power. When you reach mach 1.2, drag will decrease again.

There is a mod called UbioZur Welding Ltd. that does exactly this. It's not updated yet. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/107273-0-90-UbioZur-Welding-Ltd-Continued-2-1-1-%282015-01-14%29?p=1669152&viewfull=1#post1669152

I wouldn't go as far as to put RCS on a lander. The extra weight will reduce delta v.

Also, an easier way of getting dry and wet mass is looking at the total mass of a stage, then removing the fuel and looking at the total mass again. Just as a precaution: Fuel tanks have a dry mass of their own. So make hure to count them in aswell.

Only when you are at either the ascending or descending node. But oh, you have no way of knowing where that might be, exept when you target the mun.

You have to align your orbital plane to match the plane the other orbit is in. This is easy if both craft are in the equatorial plane already. The angle between the two orbital planes is called "relative inclination". You can see this value if you target the other craft and then mouse over either the ascending node (AN) or descending node (DN). This value needs to be 0°. If it is not, you will most likely pass "above" or "below" your target. I put up and down in quotes, because there is no real up and down in space. To match inclination, you need to burn radial ("up") at the descending node, or anti-radial ("down") at the ascending node

Some times mirror symmetry is bugged. It sometimes places three wings, with two of them clipped into each other. You can see this when one Wing is brighter than the other. Maybe it's that. I think it gets confused if the parent part was also placed in symmetry. The fix is to press Shift+X to decrease symmetry until it places only one part and then press X again to have two-times-symmetry.

Well, I too think that tha fairings in stock are too heavy. Most of the time bringing a fairing doesn't give you an advantage over launching a naked payload due to the added mass. Someone on reddit tested the best altitudes to jettison the stock fairings. It was around 20km already. If you bring them all the way to suborbital, they have don't save you any delta v.

Drag will also depend on the shape of your craft now.