SpacePixel

At last, I made the thing I wanted so much. So this flying boat is what you'd call a forward operating base -- it's built to self-sufficiently explore all of Laythe. Naturally, Laythe being an ocean world, it's a seaplane - anything else would be much too whimsical (as if making essentially a flying aircraft carrier is not). Notice that the floats end at the center of the fuselage - much like landing gear must not be placed much too far away from the center of mass so that the plane can rotate on takeoff, so the floats too must end early to allow rotation (actually, buoyancy is much more messed up that this, but at least it works). Now above the fuselage there's a bit of a flight deck. It's for launching the air wing complement. You can fit up to 4 aircraft in the cargo hold, but the usual complement is two - "Ogre" tiltjet VTOL for aerial recon and "Snub 3" rapid ascent spaceplane (pictured) as low orbit shuttle. The craft are moved to and from the flight deck via the elevator in the rear section of the fuselage (see spoiler for details). Despite humble size, launching fixed-wing aircraft is rather easy as the flying boat can easily reach 50 m/s by itself. Landing is more difficult, but possible - I usually land on first try. Finally, the forward section includes the ramp for deploying rovers on ice sheets. The usual complement is a mining rover, a tractor and a science buggy. A mining rover can technically indefinitely refuel the operating base which is of course orbit-capable.

Not really a VTOL, as the single RAPIER, although on a hinge, can't supply enough static thrust to lift the aircraft off the ground, but closed cycle or a short takeoff run does the trick. The Barbaris is a compact exploration craft, featuring a triple fuselage. The lower fuselage holds an intake, engine on a swivel, landing gear and the main wing. Above the lower fuselage, there's two more - the left and the right. The left has a cockpit and the right can be swapped out to supply additional fuel, crew of two in a passenger module, or a set of science experiments. This unorthodox arrangement ensures the center of mass is aligned with the center of thrust in VTOL mode and in vacuum, and the fuel drain has no impact on its position. More than that, the wings fold to barely fit the aircraft in Mk3 cargo bay (see spoiler). It's not terribly easy to fly and land, especially on Laythe, although a skilled pilot will manage, but I still think this architecture is massively superior to uninspired double rotating nacelles (as a matter of fact, seen above on my previous craft)

The Big T is your smallest large spaceplane. What is that even supposed to mean? Well, unlike some of its more gargantuan brethren, The Big T does not seem horribly out of scale for anything useful, as it's about the smallest you can go after you ditch Mk3 for 5m fuselage and has an actual purpose. It's meant so solve a problem I had 4 years ago when I still had time to fly the crafts I built. I saw that SSTOs are more often limited by cargo bay dimensions rather than upmass potential. At 60 meters long, the T features a gigantic 5m cargo bay spanning the length of the craft. The nose swivels up for loading and unloading; since the nose stores a lot of fuel and is thus pretty damn heavy, an elaborate system of pistons and hinges helps raise it up under gravity. The wing is designed so as not to clip in the cargo bay and angled at 3 degrees. 8 RAPIERS in the engine assembly as offset 5 degrees to reduce torque.

I snapped this screenshot after a test flight, and I think it beautifully conveys the scale of some of our spacecraft that we don't often get to really appreciate. So, in the foreground we have the affectionately named "Space Yacht 2". It differs from 1 in that it has half as many rotating RAPIERs, consequently losing the ability to VTOL on Kerbin, though it can still do that on Duna. It retained the two-storied cargo bay, where on the lower level you store your rovers and refineries, and on the upper deck your rotorcraft. Finally, it gained 2 NERVs tucked away in the ramp segment; they can be fired when the ramp is lowered. Though certainly not dragless or overpowered, it easily breaks the sound barrier thanks to swiveling nacelles -- you can tilt them in flight to achieve 0 AoA and a massive reduction in drag.

@TwoCalories, @Kimera Industries thank you for the kind words and I managed to snap a picture which looks a little better to my taste: The TUFX profile is Lighthouse 2 I think from this pack, and clouds are Blackrack's volumetrics. I tweaked no settings, but I do photoshop the colors in my screenshots. I guess one could tweak TUFX and PlanetShine to achieve the same end result, but more often than not I go for a particular feel and Lighthouse 2 offers a great baseline from which you can go pretty much anywhere.

This rather bland screenshot features the Superstorm, my sleekest spaceplane yet. At around 50 tons of liftoff mass, it packs an SSTA package on just 2 RAPIER engines. There's a 10-degree offset NERV between the RAPIERs to avoid thrust torque in vacuum and a tiny rover in the Mk2 cargo bay. The spaceplane flies about as well as you'd imagine with all these wings (stall speed could not be measured), and somehow does not have a travelling CoM. It's a surprisingly useful, beautiful and stable spaceplane for me, who can usually only manage any two of the three.

This craft features a complete exploration package -- 6 RAPIERs, 2 NERVs, 8 VTOL Terriers, a crew complement of 6, a dorsal docking node and a 2-segment Mk3 cargo bay with a ramp to be occupied by a mining rover, a lab, a runabout shuttle or anything else to suit your fancy. Although quite draggy and probably overweight for its powerplant, it feels as a proper sci-fi spacecraft with a bridge and all. Captaining the thing from IVA is some of the most fun I had in KSP -- cycling cameras, aligning docking collar to the station arm, dreading "RETARD RETARD" GWPS callout upon a late flare (landings are insanely fun!), looking out on the ship around you like some age-old captain, really a beautiful thing. I also want to try putting a shuttle in the cargo bay which was explicitly designed for rovers and cosplaying some Star Trek in Joolian system sometime

Your drag model has no power over me! Archimedes is a single-seater VTOL SSTO, capable of reaching orbit on Kerbin and Laythe with some dV to spare for docking. It's actually my remake of my friend's stock replica of my 2017 modded craft that itself was lifted off Star Citizen promotional material (talk about a crisis in creative industries...). The defining ring with contra-rotating propellers incurs unpleasant drag and breaking sound barrier is a slog, but the flight thereafter is a rapid and very enjoyable ascent. Same goes for liftoff and landing -- it's got a very low stall speed and you can easily land on a dime in VTOL mode. Powered by 2 RTGs (perfectly balanced). It's a rather useless runabout, except of course if you need to land on aircraft carriers. It's not that large and can hover indefinitely, which makes for nice landings on rough seas of Laythe. I wish I could add folding wings, but it doesn't seem that easy to figure out geometry in stock.

Things can only get bitter The Turtleback a different kind of landing craft -- it isn't meant to come up to shore to offload its cargo; instead, it's an orbit-capable aircraft carrier. 2-unit cargo bay at the bow opens to reveal an elevator that moves aircraft up to the flight deck and down to the hangar bay. You can cram up to half a dozen aircraft in the hangar, but this is rather much, unless you plan on conducting adversarial engagements, in which case it's rather too little. Usually, you'd put there a couple folding helicopters or tiltrotors, and use the rest of the space to place a submarine and/or a mining rover for a more balanced and sensible mission profile. This vehicle is yet another study on Laythe operating base -- a project that's about to turn half a year and is yet to produce any meaningful result, -- which was primarily motivated by the fact that sea-spaceplanes with ramps looked rather ridiculous trying to deploy the contents of their cargo bays on the ice sheets surrounding Laythe islands. The Turtleback treads a very fine line between looking cool af and utterly insane, but at least I'm happy with how it looks -- a relatively rare occurrence.

These are some magnificent planets you've made, but I could help jumping at the chance to ask you what's with the craft? This retro rocket looks magnificent, does it work? If yes, how?

It becomes a little more obvious that all my screenshots look very much alike when I post too often... Here's another orbit-capable seaplane, this time a small crew shuttle. This one, I'd say, is probably more realistic than not, and has awesome steering. Small crafts like this usually have big trouble getting airborne due the waves and whatnot, but this one can manage to take of from 0.4 Scatterer waves, which is not a lot, but in the ballpark what real seaplanes can do. The center of mass here is again offset from the center of thrust -- something which seems inevitable in case of seaplanes which are not willing to get their engines wet -- so there's a Vernor engine right near the tail to combat this; sure, this may not be terribly efficient, but I am yet to see a seaplane that has CoT aligned with CoM

If Kraken loved us, would He allow such a thing to take flight? This magnificently ugly flying boat is one of my more successful attempts at producing a cargo seaplane SSTO with a loading ramp. A seaplane might be easy to build, as long you're willing to get your engines wet and turn off water physics in Scatterer; I was willing to do neither and suffered the consequences. I'd like to direct your attention to the floats and away from the ugly nose; the floats are placed at such an angle so that they make something of a flat floor in the cargo bay, which renders floor plating somewhat redundant, plus this helps integrate them smoothly with the Mk3 fuselage. Note that the floats also house plenty of propellant, which helps with the moving CoM -- the craft is unbalanced, yes, and I hope someday I'll come up with something less unhinged, but note that it's not meant to carry heavy cargo at all, just some rovers and submarines and whatnot -- it's for Laythe really, after all. Also, note that the engine assembly is integrated into the fuselage, slightly mitigating torque while avoiding getting water into the engines.

We don't call it plain-looking, we call it realistic! There are crafts that are exceedingly laborious to build and fine-tune, and then there are crafts you sketch in a notepad, build in the game and they end up working perfectly fine right off the bat. Lancesse is a prime example of the latter; I just built it by the sketch and found perfectly balanced CoM for both empty and fully fueled craft, as well as well-aligned CoL. Functionally, it's a replacement for the Aquamarine Marlin of the early SX series of 2020, while visually it's somewhat reminiscent of the silly-named Empire series of 2014 (9 years ago now, goodness! I should've found another game to play by now). It can ferry kerbonauts to locations around Mun and Minmus, or take them to Duna and beyond, provided you've got the gas stations going. The visually bulkier nacelles make for a kind of muscle car look, while the shape in general looks very natural, without taking the suspension of disbelief a little too far. How easy and enjoyable this craft was to build may or may not introduce bias into my description of it

Good afternoon, gentlemen. Please observe my tiny aircraft carrier: Now, my problem is that the CoM is slightly offset off the centreline due to the weight of the superstructure: I would think nothing of it, however this small offset results in the following: That's unfortunate, but I could just balance the superstructure with an ore tank or something, right? I could and I did -- see picture 1. This, however, does not remedy the issue of the carrier developing a list the moment the CoM moves even a little off the centreline -- aircraft movements on the deck cause near-capsizing, to say nothing of a hard landing -- on a runway that short one rarely has the luxury of choosing where to touch down. The floats solve the problem of the list... ...but look utterly ridiculous, don't fit in the fairing (yes, the flight deck folds to fit the carrier into a 5 m fairing) and therefore will never be used. A massive keel is also not an option. So my question is, how do I make the bloody thing stable? I've filling up the tanks under the waterline, emptying them, filling them with only liquid fuel -- no change in the list. I've been giving some consideration to creating an active system to steady the carrier with SAS or moving a weight port and starboard, but I've not yet been able to figure out the details. As such, any help will be appreciated.

Explain your smolness Pictured is the Logre reconnaissance tiltjet coming in for a landing at landing ship SSX Egerie. While the VTOL is pretty self-explanatory, the carrier is actually a design study on a Laythe operating base. It's built around a single Mk3 fuselage, and features a landing ramp for deploying rovers, an elevator and a flight deck for aircraft, as well as submarine launching dock. My original idea -- to which I may yet revert -- was to even make the flight deck unfold so that I could pack the entire aircraft carrier into a 5 m fairing -- yeah, talk about a tight fit. This craft could serve as Laythe exploration hub, featuring a complement of transport & exploration aircraft (2 helis and 1 tiltjet), a mining rover, and a science-laden sub (yes, it all fits!). Moreover, the carrier can even host lighter VTOL spaceplanes -- the limiting factor is not even flight deck size, but the weight of the spaceplane that, if misplaced, may, well, heel the ship most severely, resulting in aircraft sliding off the flight deck or even a capsizing