FyunchClick

Totally agree on Kerbal Engineer or the like, but I think there's more to say about not igniting your core engine. Your handle brings back some childhood memories btw. Hmm, I think that's a bit of pre-1.0.0.0 reflex, and doesn't apply anymore. I've done a test after it came out, by shooting up a small (as in typical of 2nd or 3rd launch in career mode) but reasonably powerful rocket straight up (one that could pull about 3 g or so even below the 10 mk mark, but with relatively little total dV (definitely less than orbital)), shooting it straight up and seeing where the apoapsis would end up, and doing the same but throttling it back to 2 g until clear of the thick atmosphere. I don't remember the exact numbers, but throttled down, your apoapsis ends up significantly lower than full blast. Unless you're pulling so much g you're going hypersonic at ground level, or finding you're running into stability issues hitting the sound barrier due to the shape of your payload, I'd suggest pedal to the metal until you clear 30 km (or your apoapsis is at the desired mark, whichever comes first). If you want to save dV, do a correct gravity turn.

Put the torque on your rear landing gear to max, and your front landing gear to half, that way when you touch down the rear wheels have the greatest drag; the CoM will tend to want to be in front of your rear wheels, and your plane quickly stabelizes in your traveling direction even if you had a pretty messy touch down.

Keyboard too. Once you have a module or pilot capable holding prograde/retrograde things are pretty easy. I'm assuming you're doing a powered descent, not landing a glider? If it's a bottom lander, just enable SAS, set reference to "surface" and have SAS track retrograde (this will point your nose in the exact oposite direction of the speed you need to bleed off to come to a full stop relative to the surface), then just throttle your way to a soft landing (set SAS to stability just before touching down to prevent it trying to flip your craft to follow retrograde if there's a bit of a bounce). If it's a belly lander with some thrusters pointing down, try sticking a docking port on the belly, right click and select "control from here" on it when you're about to land, and then it's the same trick (only track prograde as your docking port is at your belly, not top). And if you don't want to tack on thrusters, put on vernors, and use RCS instead of throttle. They're pretty powerfull, easier to control than with the throttle, and enough of them can lift even a big craft. I've not sweated a single powered descent since discovering the use of setting your speed reference on the NAV ball (bar those where I ran out of fuel half way through).

I think you also tilted the jet a bit to get the thrust vector closer to CoM again? And the wings as well to be parallel to the thrust vector and prevent it being pressed down? - - - Updated - - - Apparently, not very... In theory they sound good; they come with fuel, intake air and cooling, but it didn't prevent the LV-Ns going all cherry. I'll give it a try without next time and see. LV-Ns do tend to run pretty hot but I've only rarely seen them blow up so it's probably not much of a need, although I do worry about my kerbals ability to procreate and create more victims, er test pilots; I put one on the end of a 1.25 liquid fuel fuselage and stuck some command seats on there as a little runabout for a science station I put in Minmas orbit, but the pilots get heat gauges almost as soon as I turn it on... pretty soon they'll be glowing in the dark. - - - Updated - - - Interesting use of the MK2 adapters as nacelles, I may just borrow that idea. - - - Updated - - - Thanks, it's interesting to know that purely as a jet it may be a better choice than a whiplash for SSTOs.

Tnx, checking it out.

Interesting. That would mean you'd just need to have little ox on board. Do you use a rule of thumb for the ratio of liquid fuel tanks vs rocket fuel tanks? Hehe, I was thinking that ratio was more likely 6:4:2 or it'd be hell to balance so it'd have to be big. Is that enough with an ISRU on board (tucked in a MK3 bay?), or do you end up even doubling that again? I can see how this setup would help smoothen those drops in efficiency at several stages, and you and Vegetal both offer a nice solutions for that awkward drop in power after flameout that was concerning me most. Thanks both. - - - Updated - - - Good grief I haven't even made it there multi stage... I gotta see that.

Been lurking these SSTO threads a while now. Thanks to the tips in this and other threads I've finally got my 1.004 SSTO planes working again and with a decent payload. My mistake was pulling up 45 degrees directly upon flameout on the jets, which really dropped my horizontal speed too much; I should've stuck at half that pitch a while longer and slowly worked my way up to 45 (low fuel guages are because I stuck at 20 degree untill I noticed an Apoapsis coming on in 5 secs ). Thanks to all involved for the great tips (and questions). Lovely rosy hue on my precoolers thanks to the pair of LV-Ns (so I don't have to worry about the mix of lf and ox). I'll try my hand at rapiers next. Question: if you're looking for carrying the most dV to orbit, is there anything to be said for going with rapiers for the higher kick in the airbreathing phase and not carying a set of unused engines in either phase, or mix whiplashes with efficent rockets of some sort for a beter ISP in the none-breathing phase?

Also, balancing features like tail fins will help keep it straight. Even more importantly if you've got a rocket that's less than aerodynamic, hug the sonic wall until you're out of the thickest parts of the atmosphere (keep your speed around 300/350 m/s). I've had plenty of designs that kept going unstable and flipping above those speeds and it turned out there was nothing wrong with the balance, it was just too much speed. Usually around 12-15 km up or so you can safely go full thrust again. Speaking of aerodynamics, some of your imbalance may come from lopsided aerodynamics rather than mass, put up fairings to get rid of that. Another reason I found for my rockets rolling out of control is putting up fins in triple symmetry with one fin pointing straight north or south, and then doing a gravity turn (east). The imbalance in lift on the wings meant my rocket kept rolling out of the direction I wanted it to go (and often out of control). Put fins up so they're symmetrical over your east-west axis (or with triple radial symmetry rotate about 30 degrees either way before your gravity turn). One trick I use is that, as long as the bulk of my fuel is in consumed in a balanced way, its pretty easy to balance payload that's a bit lopsided by putting one or two small radially attachable liquid fuel engines (like a twitch or spider) on the heavy side on the bottom of your rocket, and play with the trust limiter slider till the torque readout on Kerbal Engineer reads just a few tenths of a kNm. It'll free up reaction wheels capacity that may have been fighting at full strength just to keep pointing straight during ascent and restore some reactiveness to your controls (and steadying to your SAS). Mostly for when you're already up in space to prevent being pushed just slightly off course during burns, as those tiny engines don't do much for really big rocket. Even beter sometimes, some Vernors well away from your CoM, and turning RCS + SAS on during accent helps too, and is more dynamic than the above as it'll push back at the actual torque, not just output a fixed amount on the opposite side as the trick with the radially attached engines, and it doesn't require kerbal engineer, but I think it's wasting a tiny bit more fuel as it's pushing at a right angle instead of straight down, and unless you disable the RCS fuel tanks during ascent, the regular RCS thrusters are consuming that as well on your way up and you find you're dry when you want to dock in orbit. Edit: d'oh ninja'd

I've had the same when moving folders around; my user account is of the type "Limited user" for safety reasons, and while steam will install it with all permissions required to have it access and create save files, when I start copying it into folders that are somehow restricted, Windows forgets those permissions and I have to manually set them. I found that when Kerbal doesn't have permissions to write in the save directory in your Kerbal install directory, it switches to some folder buried under my \Users\[my users] folder somewhere. Perhaps KPS launcher is launching with admin rights and your direct launch isn't, or the other way around, and that may be causing a difference. Try creating a new game in either, using distinctive and different name, and do a search on your harddisks for directories with those name to find where it actually thinking it needs to get your saves from.

The back of the mk3 cockpit is actually also a crew hatch. If you put a cargo bay right behind it you can EVA straight into the bay by clicking on the crew hatch. Useful if you're on a high g planet where you can't jetpack around and want to be able to access your science equipment without spamming Pegasus mobility enhancers.

Thanks for the welcome and likewise. Thanks for taking the time for the write up; now that I've finally started to see why Kerbal Engineer is such a big deal, those numbers will help out definitely. Last time I went to Duna was 0.25; I'd put together an ugly dinky gas breathing SSTO using Kethane which tended to cut out if you got too fast (and with not enough lift surfaces to go slow). I'm dying to get back all (well mostly) stock and see how the new aerodynamics model affects things this time. How could I forget. it led me to discover another great mod (RCS build aid). The vernors've also been quite helpfull in keeping pointing straight up when launching my version of the ole gal straight up, I'm going to be putting them on the underside of all my non-radially symetrical designs from now just for that. Yay! on getting this story rolling again! I'm getting out of the way now.

Heh, mind you flying it from KCS to the abandoned island runway, it did expose some of the challenges you could be facing landing back at KCS if that's what you had in mind, let's just say I'm looking forward to seeing the next few pages.

Loving the story, and the design of the Hummlebee especially; I never realized you could use a design like that for Duna exploration (I'm an idiot for not using Kerbal Engineer until now even though I've been playing for a year now). I even tried to replicate it to give it a spin, and I think I've got the essence right (70t, 360 thrust, dV of 2100), and it behaves pretty well flying around KSC if you keep the speed above 75 m/s. I just cannot get the Orange Knight working, I'll lose control and crash on the runway around 50 m/s, well before I reach takeoff speed, no matter what I try. In the end I just strapped a couple of big rockets to the wings and launched straight up, throttling to hug the sonic wall on my way up. Did you have to do anything special to overcome control issues on the runway?

Wrt interstellar V2 under Kerbal 1.002 icw TextureReplacer; I did run into similar crashes untill I dropped in active texture management. It'll get me into the startup menu with the clouds loaded now, however gettign some weird behaviour from the other mods (totally overcast sky and crazy global lightningstorms) . I'm running with it for now and try again when there's an official release of Edge of Oblivion. Totally hooked on CKAN btw, I just started using it with Kerbal 1.002 and it's been a great help dropping mods in and pulling them out again trying to isolate the issue.