Lithocirkus

The max absorb garment is a new development in kerbosafety technology. This enables kernels to live without life support, using special functions to utilize the body's own natural resources to create a closed ecosystem within the suit! It is also the reason why kernels can safely de-orbit and land without the aid of a craft, parachute or heat shield.

The trick with making shuttle style launchers is watching your centre of thrust. Start from the shuttle and build on one stage at a time. While you are coupled to the liquid booster with its solids your CoT should sit below your Center of mass. Check this on the buttons at the bottom of your VAB screen. you change the CoT by changing the thrust limitation on your engines. the shuttle engine should also fire and draw fuel from the liquid stage. Basically the solid fuel boosters lift your liquid stage while it is heavier than your shuttle, then when the mass of your shuttle and liquid stage are similar you eject the solids and burn until the liquid fuel is gone. The center of thrust will change dynamically during the ascent so the trick is to check each stage and balance them individually.

With the way exp works if you just change them to available after a registered death on flight then it will give you the xp hit. However if you also edit the flight record as well as changing from "Dead" to "Available" then you can keep the xp level. You need to add 2 lines to your last flight. Delete the line that says "died" then look at a previous flight. The last two lines should say something like "landed Kerbin" and "recovered Kerbin". Put both of these on the end of your last flight and they should both appear with previous xp values

It depends what you mean by spaceplanes, sstos I'm not sure can be done with basic jets. At least without basically building a rocket with wings. The way I went suborbital is described earlier in the thread, 2 thuds and a basic jet. There's nowhere near enough dV in that to circularise though. Basically I took the funds-> science strategy at 25% ASAP and then did contracts and Kerbin biomes with the occasional suborbital hop to get the science I needed for turbos. Now building turbojet lifters to push probes further for more science!

Hey! you really inspired me with this idea . I've been doing a plane only mode for the last week now and its awesome, really nice challenge and a good bit of ropeplay story for my kerbals. I became a little stuck at the same point, trying to unlock the nodes for turbojet. i ended up only taking the science and aero routes so my kerbals had a great idea... To help design a plane that works in space we needed to study planes in zero-gravity! So Jeb and Bill ran around KSC collecting all the things they would need to build tiny planes and asteroids and then we designed and built a zero-G plane, complete with a play roo...i mean a zero-g serious tiny plane testing bay. After diving from 14000m to get zero-g while 'analysing' how the timy planes behaved they were able to get a lot of data. 3 zero-g test flights later and after about a year and a half of analysis I just managed to get to my first SSTO plane and now trying to build to launch a satellite payload to get science from the mun and minimus SOI. (sure i know strapping the MPL to a plane and diving about isn't neccessarily useful, but it made sense for my game and meant i had a viable reason to spend a year an a half warp for the science wall) let me know how its going for you! really interested to see how you're tackling it!

Hey there! I've been playing since 0.18.4 and used the information here so much! I guess it's time to come share what I learned too. Happy explosions