Nich

Yes you have way too much Yaw authority. In addition you have pitch and roll going to your elevon 3's. This will do some strange things when you are trying to roll and pitch at the same time. Namely if your pulling up and rolling left the craft will yaw right because the right side has more drag (2 up vs 1 up 1 down on the left) This is further confounded by the fact that your yaw stability has a very small yaw arm but a large roll arm and the yaw directly cancels your roll. Are you using the weasly to reverse thrust? It is a lot of dead weight above mach 1. Sepratrons, veneers, or parachutes might be better. Also setting the landing gear so the wing creates down force will make brakes more effective. Finally circular intakes are subsonic intakes I do not believe they work well about mach 1. Here is an example. The precoolers provided me with more then enough air. Landing distance was very short Tops speed was respectable. It probably had too much pitch authority as I would lose a lot of speed in a 15g 15 degree AOA bank. Roll was better then anything I had flown in a LONG time lol. It was a little unstable at high speed flight so I would probably change the yaw surfaces to pure vertical as it doesn't need any more pitch control. Any yes the third pic I hit the 90 at 45m/s and stopped where you see me. I am guessing less then 50m. Make sure you turn off the brakes on the front wheel and get the backs close to CG.

I am trying to figure out how to do this efficiently. Idealy I would want to leave Kerbin at the AN/DN and then it would be a straight retro/prograde burn. However these windows are quire rare as you have to be in the right spot in the orbit and your target has to be in the right spot relative to Kerbin. So as an alternative you can do a hohmann transfer when the orbits are aligned with a large inclination change or you can do a larger non hohmann burn and intercept at AN/DN with a larger capture burn. Which is more efficient they both kind of seem like a wash to me. I also experimented with burning to the purple triangles out of kerbin to push AN/DN so it was more of a hohmann transfer but this required a large amount of dv and I think this would only be worth it if I launched into this orbit straight away. I find this rather complicated because not only do I have to launch at the right time but at the right angle.

Is yaw introduced by roll? Or roll introduced by yaw? My first guess agrees with Snark

I did a couple tests with the smallest decouplers and it was still smashing the center tank even with low center of mass and sepratrons. I suspect there is some unseen clipping as mentioned before that is forcing the tanks to pop out on the bottom even though the decoupler is on top.

Since there is no wind isnt surface speed = TAS? IAS is basically CAS but not standardized for STP.

Anyone know of a Mod that gives CAS for pilots?

Yes I expect I will get the most distance doing a full burn as high as possible and gliding to my next landing. If I am flying around with fuel I am fine going with a suboptimal aoa

nasa is not limited to 200 parts. I wonder if you could complete a 1 million part Apollo mission inyour lifetime.

I am planning on sending down a science plane to get Science and explore Eve. I want to make it as efficient as possible so I am doing some math. If you could check it over and give comments suggestions it would be much appreciated. Here is my starting point. The craft will have a mass of around 11t when I get done adding wing area. So on Eve it will weigh 11,000 kg*9.81m/s^2*1.7 = 183.447kN From We know that 2 degree AOI will give optimal wing L/D. At 2 degrees AOA the wings will produce 80kN of lift per 10 wing area on kerbin. To adjust this we need to multiply by 5 for Eves denser atmosphere. Thus 400kN per 10 wing area. This means we would need 4.59 wing area. I already have a little over 8 wing area SO I could probably cruze a little slower then 100m/s on Eve and be at L/D max. What is the math to adjust? L = 1/2 * CL * density * V^2

Doesn't airflow for precoolers and ramp intakes drop off at some point? Where as for shock cones it remains constant. Also I am not a big fan of tail cones/precoolers as they add a lot of weight. When you spend 75% of your fuel in vacuum every kg you can shave off is dv for getting to orbit. Finally tail cone has a speed limit of about 1350 below 20km and 1800 below 30km otherwise it will blow up. My most efficient SSTOs tend to get 1590-1620m/s off air breathing and hohmann transfer from 30km (2450ish) to AP. This requires a shielded docking port on the front of the craft.

did some testing and to me the most important thing was staging when going directly prograde.

Not 100% on KSPs aero model but the noses pointed out cause lift into the middle (faster air creates lower pressure) Points on the inside closer to the core should pull the boosters away.

Ya that is definitely lite. Stock would be 9.5t with no solar panels, radiators, landing gear. Is that a .0625m converter?

I thought of a perfect solution. Use the Station/Base identifiers. When a craft is designated as a station or base all parts are welded together it is then given a requirement that bases have zero surface velocity and stations have zero acceleration (not including gravity). This would disable all RCS Reaction wheels and Thrusters. If the station/base is bummed it is then taken out of its part welded state until acceleration becomes zero again. Doesn't really help with enormous craft but I imagine I could finally build a 300+ part base/station. I would be willing to put up with 10 seconds of lag when docking ports collide. Any thoughts?

The problem is that it is really hard to balance the contracts. Hard can be hard BUT if you take the time to build optimized rockets your payouts on each contract are still well over 200-500%. Most of my rockets are 2000-5000 funds per ton to orbit but in the cheap and cheerful payload challenge Nefrums showed it is possible to break 600 funds per ton. In the caveman challenge it has been shown Mun, Minimus and Duna are all accessible without upgrading facilities. At this point in the game contracts are throwing money at you after you have explored Duna so getting level 2 facilities are much more feasible without grinding. Yes I would prefer tighter margins on contracts and less funds to upgrade facilities. That way as long as your doing contracts for profit facility upgrades are not too difficult. One thing that still bugs me is the fact the sub orbital has the best payout / game time. If your like me and want to have the kerbal system explored within a game week or 2 this is the quickest way to get funds. In 7 minutes I can make about 10k funds doing 2 suborbital contracts where as 2 orbitals take 30 minutes and only pays 19k funds. It only get worse the longer the missions get.

hhmmmm..... well improved my record but things were getting buggy as heck. Every ship I had to get it perfectly lined up then go to space center, then restart KSP and when I came back they might be docked. Huge pain in the but. In addition my kerbal landing on top almost knocked it over had to restabilize it with gyros :/ I included a pic of a joint that was not connected until my kerbal landed on top lol. Just enough to finally push it in i guess. 288m

Wow just got caught up after taking a break from KSP for a while. They really need a way to give some one 100 rep :/ simply amazing what your doing

probably tech or skill level.

Nice Mun and Minimus. Here is my Mun and up next Duna

I don't want to install the demo version what is the count part and weight limit?

HA HA whoops wrong docking port lol Very nice base I started with something very similar but part count killed me.

Yes the rappiers will suck fuel though just about anything. I am surprised they don't use fuel from craft they are not connected to while docking

Inclined orbits cost the less from the equator until less then 1 degrees away from polar or backwards where kerbins spin actually hurts you. Launching from the top of mount whoopstoshort would save you about 75? dv and 5% mass? Most people carry way more margin to orbit and would not even notice.

ROFL great video

Exponential costs limits players tech when they leave the SOI. Most players do not leave the SOI until they have 90% or all of the tech unlocked even though you can do a Duna mission with 1.25m parts and a 30 parts limit. So you are forced to grind in your model as well if you want 2.5m parts for a Duna mission. 10% science only makes it grindy if you want to do Duna like your used to. If you limit yourself to 2 kerbin missions, 1 Mun mission and 1 Minimus mission. Then upgrade VAB to level 2 you will have enough tech to send a 1 way probe to every body in the game.