Vegetal

Just a note: Sometimes it's good to have a smaller LFO engine when you have SRBs, because when you ditch them, you only need enough TWR to keep your apoapsis in front of you. I also use a little plugin by Crzyrdm that allows you to set the thrust limiter of SRBs both for start up and burn out, so you have decreasing thrust as the fuel burns up. It helps a lot in making your rocket more controllable.

Everyone with complicated solutions.... Just use these already.

After roughly a thousand hours playing ksp, executing nodes and landing on moons got old, so I installed mechjeb, which does a fine job on that. Before this, I used a pretty standard landing method, trying to follow what I think it's the theoretical ideal. I might be wrong, but the ideal is to make a single, full power retro burn that zeroes your velocity right at the ground level. That would be extremely hard to nail in practice. What I do, is a retro burn in orbit to bring my trajectory impacting somewhat after my target LZ. After that I keep locked retrograde, and adjust my landing trajectory just using the throttle. That way I don't have any cosine losses, and can get pretty close to the theoretical ideal. If you have a strict target, like a surface base, you might have to burn sideways to retrograde to adjust your trajectory. Remember, the shallower your approach is, the more efficient it gets, but also more dangerous.

The sentinel has to be specifically in a lower orbit of the planet you want to scan. So, if you want it to scan kerbin's orbit for asteroids, the telescope has to be in an orbit close to eve, just a bit above it.

Like what Ohiobob said, with the RCS thrusters placed where they are, you *will* suffer to dock. You need to place them correctly (close to the CoM), especially if you aren't proficient at docking yet.

@Aerogav: You have to time your launch to be exactly at the AN or DN of the body's plane. KER helps in this regard, as you can keep an eye at the relative inclination as you make your orbit insertion, and so adjust your heading accordingly. I think the game's map is one of the most lacking parts of UI, it gives you no useful information. So yeah, you have to eyeball it.

There was a challenge a while ago, in 1.0.4, in which I built an SSTO capable of doing the round trip to minmus, and *probably* could make it indefinitely without ever refueling at Kerbin, just on Minmus using an ISRU. The big one mind you, the lighter one only came to be on 1.0.5. It used 4 rapiers and 2 nukes, Mk3 sized. The real trick is to have JUST enough oxidizer to get close to orbital speed on the rapiers, when you go empty you have to be able to continue just on the nukes. That's the first and most important idea you got to have in mind, the rest is ascent optimization. As Nich said, enough incidence on your wings so you keep your plane mostly aligned with prograde, and the least drag as possible. Found the album! Obs: I just noticed I made the plane change after launch. Ha! What a noob!

Well I just did it. But right now, imgur decided to misbehave. Guess I'm gonna try again tomorrow.... Anyway, my entry doesn't exactly qualify, I modded the Mk1-2 pod to make it a little bit lighter, not for this challenge, it was like this since quite a while. But I'm here for the challenge! It wouldn't make much difference anyway...

Hmmmm. Did a test run and managed to connect to the lander with some MAD SKILLZ, but take off wasn't.....according to plan. Will have to think a little more.

People sometimes see the funky look of KSP and feel it's kind of arcadey in it's aero simulation. It's actually pretty accurate to what one would expect from atmospheric flight. That said: Flying a plane with a keyboard sucks. Get at least a gamepad. But yeah, putting the CoM further ahead helps.

You could also do it like me and install Crzyrndm's SRB thrust plugin, which gives you 2 thrust sliders, one for when it's full, and the other for when it's empty. Thrust gradually decreases (or increases if you want) until SRB shut off. It's beautiful.

Check the numbers man. As Snark said, the planet has a semimajor axis of 700 AU. Voyager 1 is at 134 AU, and that was launched at the seventies. And by pure orbital mechanic logic, it's probably close to it's apoapsis. So yeah. No.

You are flying it wrong. Basic rules of thumb for a beginner: At launch, slowly begin turning east. At 8 to 10 km altitude you should be 45 degrees to the horizon. At 30km you should be close to horizontal. Keep burning until your apoapsis is above the atmosphere. When you get there, burn prograde until you circularize. There. Do that and you will see the difference.

Well in real life, space programs always have a lot to do in terms of planning, but to actually launch an interplanetary mission..... Yeah, you have to wait for the window. The penalty is enormous. Man, think about the supposed planet nine. Unless there's a big propulsion technology breakthrough, we're not sending probes there anytime soon. It's the time of the universe..... Things take long....

I generally use the small nose cone for small engines and the radial attachment point for 1.25m ones. Never tried to radially mount anything bigger than that.

Yeaaaaaah those cargo bays always get people who are not used to making space planes. The trick is to put them as close as possible to your CoL, that way they act at the same point as your wings, thus not messing up your stability. One thing to note though: A lot of people try to copy the space shuttle design, thinking it looks cool or it should be a good design, if you don't know better. Actually, it got to space holding on to a big rocket and cam back gliding. It didn't have to be very good at flying actually. And it wasn't as far as I know....

Pardon my computing ignorance, but where do I get the log? That one at the debug menu? I will try to replicate later, if I get any success I'll post here.

Hey, I may have found a bug with the mod. I have no idea how to replicate. On some occasions I lost effectiveness on one control surface (not only it didn't respond, it also didn't seem to work as a fixed aero surface too). All the rest would work fine, the game would continue fine, but that control surface was lost. I believe it has something to do with the mod because after this happened, I couldn't bring the mod interface back by clicking on the toolbar. The mod simply stopped working. Now that I say that, I recall the 2 occasions it happened to me were on planes equipped with KAS winches. Could be a bad interaction....

When you say it falls like a stone, do you mean they go nose down into the earth? Because with that little pitch authority you have and hugely offset CoL to the rear, that's my guess......

I made a plane with a ramp at the front and back and it worked fine, but it was just an atmospheric, subsonic plane, not an SSTO...

I don't know Edax, i just threw together quickly a crew shuttle with the same tech level, and used half the engines you did. 2 jets and one spike. I think you have too much gear on that plane for a 6 crew shuttle...

Well I was about to post a pic of what I did, but it looks like I don't need to do that anymore, because you basically did what I did, with slight differences. I feel your urge to ditch the canards, but you are going to have less pitch authority if you do that. A lot less.

From what I see, you have too little wing area, and because of that you are probably working with too high Angle of Attack (AoA). Mk2 fuselages do generate lift, but are not very efficient at that. The ideal flight profile is pointing straight at prograde, so as to neutralize most of the fuselage drag. The way to do this is to give your wings some positive angle of incidence (the wings point up) by just a little bit, 5 degrees or less. But your plane could definitely benefit from a larger wing area (and less wing loading). If you try using some angle on your wings and something goes wrong, try at least increasing wing area, you will not regret it. If you succeed in streamlining your plane this way, i bet you could ditch 2 of those jets easily. Because of your high AoA flight, you surely have a lot of unwanted drag that's making it hard to push through the mach barrier. As for the cargo bay issue: From my experience, once you have nothing docked, the next thing you dock *won't* clip through the bay. That means you could go back and land even with a non-strutted payload, I already did this a couple of times with Mk3 spaceplanes. If your payload really needs strutting, then I can only recommend the KAS mod. I usually don't do mods but this one is top quality. EDIT: Just tested your design, with some modifications by me . 4 jets, increased wing area and slight incidence adjustment. Around 1:10 after takeoff, mach barrier is broken and plane is accelerating fast. 80km orbit reached and KER indicates more than 1600 dV. Yeah, the plane has no cargo, but that's enough to orbit the Mun and come back. Give it a try!

If you do an SSTO and just come back with a capsule, then you just threw away a bigger lifter than you needed. Pure waste.

I see you are getting some good cargo to orbit with that. Just some optimization advice: If you are using 4 swivels, I think it's time to consider the skipper. It's way more weight efficient. Try using a mk2 to 2.5m adapter and then the skipper. Also, 6 jets seem a bit too much for that cargo size. I think your plane would benefit a lot from streamlining: Positive incidence angle on the wings, and ditching those bi-adapters for the jets. But the best advice: Define a mission. Experiment until you can accomplish that mission with the smallest and most efficient craft possible. Edit: Ah I almost forgot, you could use the aerospike too instead of swivels. They are quite a bit more fuel efficient.