Edax

You might as well say that Laythe is a reference to the Battle of Leyte-Gulf, the largest naval battle in history. Cause Laythe is the most epic moon in the game, and covered in oceans and islands, just like the Pacific!

Sounds like you simply need more lift. More lift means you can say aloft at slower speeds. I recently built a SSTO biplane that can still fly/glide at 40m/s before stalling (extra wings means extra lift, duh), and it makes landing VERY gentle. I can't see you picture but in general, you need more wings and winglets.

It's not just safe reentry I'm talking about, aerobraking is what I'm referring too. More drag means fewer aerobraking laps and better chance at an aerocapture. Plus, better braking power means more options on where to land on other worlds, when the terrain isn't more or less known.

Paradoxically drag is a good thing when it comes to spaceplanes, as this radically increases your ability to aerobrake and slow down during reentry. The key is to minimize drag when moving forward, and maximize wing surface area when pointing radially to maximize utility.

The navball is a handy guide. Since the runway runs perfectly EAST/West, the 90/270 degree marker is your target that you want the prograde marker to line up with. Cross check that by eyeballing the runway, if your coming in too left, compensate by making sure the prograde marker has moved to the right of the 90/270 degree marker. It can be an easy mistake to think you've adjusted your heading by using the rudder, cause of where the plane is pointed, but make sure the prograde marker has moved to where you want it. When your very close to the runway and aligned, you want to make sure your prograde marker is dead on the 90/270 degree marker so that you'll run off the runway. You also want to make sure your airspeed is less then 75/ms when you touch down and parachutes do a wonderful job of slowing you down when your on the runway.

This will probably be one of the tamest ships on this thread, but I still can't get over how funky this Spaceplane has gotten as I keep tweaking it week after week. All of this to just tow a non-SSTO spaceplane into orbit.

Yes, Minmus is harder to get to when your new to the game. You have to learn about inclination and proper transfer windows to get to Minmus, unless you want to spend forever with the maneuver nodes. I don't even bother to try and intercept Minmus at an inclination anymore. The Mun on the other hand, is very easy to get to cause it has no inclination so there's no need to wait for transfer window, and you even get a handy, easy to use free-return trajectory. And I don't know about you, but I learned how to attain more delta-v out of my ships faster then I did trying to figure out the orbital map maneuver nodes. The Mun was the first place I landed probes on, (though my first manned landing was on Minmus since the Mun was good practice). In a way, both moons have their pros and cons, and both teach you about different aspects of the game. Minmus about navigation and the Mun about engineering.

I'd like the engineers to have a module, or at least a chair in front of a console with walls of buttons and gagues with the Kerbal interacting with them and pretending to look busy. Then at least my engineering staff when overseeing mining actually look busy, and worthy of screenshots/film. Maybe even have some of the gauges work, like ore amount, rate, power consumption/power generation, overheat warning light and a light indicating what mode the ISRU is toggled at. It'd just be nice to see the engineers look busy on a spaceship.

"Vive la science!" Lol, Haven't ever heard THAT before.

I attempted to create a biplane last night and learned that the wings did not produce any lift at level flight or when going down the runway. Only the control surfaces would produce lift when activated. Oddly enough, when the biplane ever went below level flight, all the wings produced downforce. I have no idea why the wings are acting this way.

When in doubt: Simplify.

At least 11.

Is your road trip somehow invalidated when you get gas at the local gas station? No.

Find a theme and roll with it. Wikipedia will have all the potential names you'll ever need.

Telling Jeb that the last launch disaster cost KSC dearly and they their in financial trouble, and that he'll have to get a part-time job at Valentina's Spaceplane & Automobile Carwash, where he'll have to spend his days. He can only hope his plan to mine Minmus and build a blue rock-candy empire will bring him the riches needed to save KSC!

I think Scott Manley mentioned something about New Horizon's (Solar System's fastest rocket) last detachable stage was a solid fuel booster, and it was burned while the rocket was already in space. So apparently solid rocket boosters have utility post-lift-off. But I think solid fuel was used for the mundane reason that they were very reliable.

The Apollo 13 LM did have plutonium batteries, though they weren't plugged into the LM battery system, and we're stored on the outside so they could not be jury rigged into the power supply in anyway. A small solar panel for the CM would have helped, it would have recharged the reentry batteries and might have provided extra power to the LM via the umbilical connection.

Good thing the real Apollo 13 did not use solar power.

If the destination is Bop, is it still worth it to aerobrake at Laythe? Or is it better to just fly towards Bop before reaching Jool's sphere of influence?

It's already been foreshadowed by Wernher from the first page. "Temporal anomaly; beta particles"

It's a handy engine to test for a contract cause you can slap it on anywhere on any rocket you've already designed.

Cut to Khan Kerman marooned on Eve 0.90 plotting his epic revenge on Valentina.

I also realize that there's now a subtle implication from Val's line that the Kerbal religion involves snacks! I'm not surprised.

So wait, Valentina is Admiral Kirk? That's awesome!

Thinking it was a good idea that this thing could be propelled by a Mainsail at full power. At the time, I was unfamiliar how floppy docking ports could be since the wiki said a tri-dock connection was sturdy, and I was sick of low thrust burns at the time and the idea was that high thrust meant more accurate burns. Even though it was a F5 test, it was somewhat embarrassing to crash a straight station into itself.