Goomblah

RAPIERs tend to struggle near the sound barrier; it's fairly common for builds using only RAPIERs to have some difficulty going supersonic. I would suggest staying subsonic and climbing to a little under 10km before going for your speed run; you'll encounter much less drag at that altitude than your 4200m screenshot. If necessary (though with 1.5TWR I don't think it should be) you can actually pitch down slightly as you begin your speed run to break the sound barrier, at which point the RAPIERs will start producing much more thrust and you can pitch up again. You may also save a little mass and drag by removing your surface-mounted intakes and replacing the fuselage tail pieces in the wing with shock cone intakes, as well as removing the 4-way RCS ports on the top and bottom and instead using single RCS ports on the sides. You'll end up with more IntakeAir than you need, but AFAIK shock cones are still probably the best nosecone option out there.

When you Klaw to an asteroid, it becomes classified as a docked ship. You can't get landed science, sadly.

[quote name='r4pt0r']Thats well said. It's like "Congrats! You turned gameplay into essentially a cutscene, way to go!"[/QUOTE] The problem is that you're defining "gameplay" as "piloting spacecraft". KSP is about much more than just the piloting challenges - there's the engineering of the spacecraft themselves, setup and management of any infrastructure you may want/need (i.e. life support, EPL, RemoteTech, or any of the colonization mods), the actual exploration when you finally get to your destination, and for Career and Science modes, some management decisions over contracts and R&D. I would compare playing with MechJeb to playing a RTS game - You're controlling your units and telling them where to go (and how to get there), but the decisions of what to do and how you do it are entirely up to you. I wouldn't ever brag about, say, completing a suicide burn safely that, in reality, was done by MechJeb, or abuse MechJeb to complete piloting contests. I design and test the craft I build, oversee production of individual units, and monitor them as they move to their objectives. Once there, I complete whatever task I set out to do, then recall that mission back to its home base. This isn't to say I don't enjoy piloting - in particular, I love flying atmospheric craft and I find orbital rendezvous and docking (which I do without MJ's assistance) to be really fun. If you enjoy the challenge of piloting ascents and executing maneuvers manually, by all means go ahead. But I'm not interested in manually following the exact same ascent profile for every single launch like some mechanical pilot, so I have an actual mechanical pilot do it for me.

SSTOs are handy for Laythe exploration and cargo missions - you really don't want to have to send a new lifter all the way to Jool every time you want to move something around.

I accidentally EVA'd Jeb during re-entry once - he fell from 10km and survived the landing. Later that day, Bill stood up underneath an aircraft, hit his head, and was turned into a fine mist. I actually now attempt to land Kerbals on EVA if I forget parachutes for some reason XD It's actually saved several kerbals, with no fatalities thus far.

Honestly, the most "cheaty" part about MJ is the MechJeb core itself. It's a ridiculously lightweight surface-mount probe core that uses power incredibly slowly, and provides full SAS before you unlock the more advanced cores. IMO, the autopilot isn't the problem. There isn't anything MJ can do that I can't match or even do better, given time and proper tools - launch window calculators and KER readouts mostly, which could all even be done on paper if you [I]really[/I] want to. The only thing "cheaty" about it is that I don't have to babysit every single one of my burns or constantly make manual course corrections with stock SAS. To me, MJ represents several utility mods wrapped up in one (KER, Precise Node, Trajectories) plus better stability control. It doesn't magically enable me to do things that I couldn't do on a stock install, so I don't see how it's cheating at all.

Screenshots would help immensely. Three Junos should be plenty for small aircraft. What kinds of speeds are you getting up to without liftoff? Adding more wings or adjusting the angle of the wings to gain more lift will reduce your takeoff speed to manageable levels (50m/s is a good benchmark to shoot for, but anything <100m/s is generally survivable on landing). It's also possible that you don't have enough control authority. More/larger control surfaces further from the CoM/CoL will help.

;_;7 What a great ending to a great story "You must spread some reputation around before you can give it to Kuzzter again." Dangit!

I've been having the same issue. I've been topping out at about 800-900m/s @ 15km using Panthers. I've fiddled with multiple designs and just can't get anywhere hear the speeds and altitudes the Whiplash is capable of.

Radiator spam could probably fix or at least mitigate this. It also makes thruster melters actually viable against BDA and kinetic weapons. Adding a big cooling system in addition to your usual armor plates is probably a good idea anyways.

I don't think it's the cockpit so much as nose cones in general. I've found my spaceplane noses (regardless of if it's an intake, cockpit, or structural part) get much closer to the explodey zone than they did in 1.0.4.

Just finished re-certifying my Peregrine XL for SSTO duty. It behaves more or less the same as it did in 1.0.4, actually; ascent was toastier than normal and required a slightly less aggressive ascent profile, but otherwise it's just effective as it always has been. However, with the intake reworks, I think a new design is in order. The Peregrine XL's already generous intake capacity is ridiculously overkill in 1.0.5; I can easily make a much less draggy spaceplane with similar (or preferably better) capabilities than the old model. Also, this was my first time flying without a MechJeb core aboard in several months. Fortunately, my piloting skills have not atrophied, despite our robot overlord's interference

I smacked into one of the VAB fuel tanks during a landing a few days ago, destroying it and much of my right-side wing. It was a disappointing end to an otherwise perfect mission.

I launched the Eeloo probes and rover: Sadly, the Eeloo window would require me to burn way out to Eeloo's apoapsis, so I've decided that the mission will be delayed a few years to wait for a less costly window. I also did a crew transfer mission over to Exogenesis, which I used as a trial run to properly write out a tutorial for using the Peregrine XL. Poking around Exogenesis on the night side of a planet is pretty creepy: (being in an unlit cargo bay also helps) Looking inside the Klaw tug holding bay: Sadly, there was a problem during landing which damaged the SSTO, through no fault of its own - I got the pesky "collided into launchpad/VAB" bug while I was slowing down on the runway. It knocked off one of the wing strakes and part of the right-side engine column, but the rest of the plane was just fine.

Dres is actually the head of its own chapter of the awareness group Space Potatoes United (aka SPU-D) Why else would all the asteroids hang out with Dres?