swjr-swis

A 1.25m service bay, while adding one more part, would net you the same result without needing to 'shed' anything.

To be honest, it was a lil bothered. You'll notice if you look closely that the fore deck isn't entirely flat anymore once it's racing towards the KSC. On examination later, apparently it hit its toe front rudder on the way up the beach, and the part poofing triggered a restrutting of all the parts, with a slight misalignment as a result. Considering its a 2.5 kt 520-part full-sized carrier, and it was really not meant to be racing around like an amphibious dune-buggy, I still think consider its structural integrity pretty decent. I have a slightly improved version in the works that prevents the toe rudder-bashing, which I still need to upload.

Nice, but we both know you can do better than that. No holding back now! Based off an older entry of mine for a different efficiency challenge, and using no drag-reduction trickery at all, I can get a 1.885 t plane around the planet. If this can be done with fairly 'standard' build methods, surely with some additional drag-negating techniques we can get even lighter.

Someone called? (does it count as a rover?)

Just to be clear: you are fully out of time warp when trying to control the probe? I am asking because in this screenshot, you are still in time warp. The second thing that immediately comes to mind is: did you check whether the probe is set to hybernate automatically through time warp (this is default)? And if so, whether it successfully came out of hybernation again after the time warp? Lastly: how long has your play session been so far? Especially relevant if you're playing on 1.10 or later. I find that beyond at most an hour or two, especially if doing many scene changes or reloads, the game just starts to randomly malfunction in unpredictable ways. Just the other night, while iterating on a plane I was working on, it randomly decided that my plane had no functional brakes anymore, after about a bit over an hour's play. On a pure stock game. I had to close the game and restart to get my brakes back.

I once encountered a single yellow sock in my laundry. I still don't know what to do.

That training was created in an older version of KSP. The drag/aero physics have since then changed, but the training was never adapted to it. If you follow that particular training to the letter, your chute will either shred on the way down, or never open at all. The only way to survive the training as it is now, is to limit how high you will get (rightclick the chute and slide the 'Min Pressure' all the way to the left so it will deploy in thinner air, and stage the chute when you're still going up, as soon as the icon goes white again), *and* try to be as draggy as possible on the way down (hold pitch up or down and keep doing flips until the chute has fully deployed). It also helps to hold pitch up or down on the way up to force an arc instead of going straight up... that will also limit how high you go.

That texture isn't from any of the stock suits.

In the SPH/VAB, if there is no existing thumbnail yet for the part (and variant!) you select to place, a thumbnail is generated. So, to generate any missing part thumbnails, just go to the part and select it as if to place it on your craft.

Thus the legend was born of Her who ascended into the Heavens on a cloud of snack dust...

'If at first you don't succeed, you might want to reconsider being an astronaut' - not applicable to KSP.

There should be separate categories for spaceplanes and rockets. There's much too big a gap between those to just lump them all together. No need for additional categories, but I'd be very interested in seeing the leaderboard mention how recoverable each launcher is (the % of recovery cost shown by the game; screenshot of launcher sans payload in SPH/VAB and screenshots of recovery of each stage should be provided if doing this). I'll be watching this one, and will likely participate - with a bit of delay, this week is going to be a busy one.

Today, after seeing a proud @T116 post a creation of his daughter, I felt inspired to boldly Go(tm)... and so I did. Craft file: https://kerbalx.com/swjr-swis/Wonderful-Plane-Nr2

Some people spent today building big things; me, I kept it small. Some comments reached us that the FakeJeb2 was found lacking a brain. Not entirely surprising, since I never gave it one (would have been very surprising to find out it spontaneously grew one; but I digress). So I sat down with the team and had them reassess what could be done to add a probe core, and still maintain the overall kerbal weight and outline. The team came through with the FakeJeb3:

Mushrooms, huh. Well, that goes a long way to explaining kerbals' willingness to get into our contraptions...

The different tools for extracting a ship from a safe file have varying degrees of success, depending on the craft. I don't know anything that will work guaranteed. But you do get plenty of opportunity to see the ships 'live' - you could just remake them. Or...

Only because ship building had already moved towards metal hulls before projected air power was even a concept. If'n those slackers would've hurried up and figured out (so arrogant to call it 'invented') the mechanics and potential of flight earlier, we might've seen the first aircraft carriers made of wood.

Once more, Valentina ignored her ToDo list, after spotting an interesting aircraft (@HyperDraco's Draconic Sea-Fox F). She asked the team in the lab if they could make some modifications, and they delivered the DSF R4, a SWiS reinterpretation of the concept. They did try to warn her that it wasn't tuned and ready yet, but off she went to do a River Run... She'll have plenty of time to evaluate the performance before she tries again.

Really like this one a lot. The way you did the cockpit, the overall lines, the handling at low speeds. I had a blast with this one. Thank you. This has all the looks and handling of a high-performance supersonic jet, it deserves being able to do so! Also, the Z-fighting in the wings makes me jittery after a bit . So I tried to see what could be done about those things. This is what I ended up with: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zh9wkjy08bvloxn/Draconic Sea Fox R4.craft?dl=0 It's all yours to do with as you please, or I can upload it to KerbalX with link and full credit to your original, whatever suits you. I think it still keeps the looks and maneuverability of your original, but it's capable of mach 4.8 now, and is supersonic within 40 secs after take off. Also, it can make orbit! Using some of the Ox tank space and emptying LF to 60%, it can steam right up to a 80x80 km orbit, with enough left to return and some LF to spare in case you come up short of the runway. Not sure why anyone would want to take a carrier jet to orbit, but there it is. Few screenshots:

That's pretty fancy in my book. The low detail of the screenshots makes it a bit difficult to appreciate fully, but it looks like you put a good bit of work on the command island. I notice you chose to use wing sections. That likely makes it a lot lighter than something out of Mk3 sections, like most of us do. Does it have a tendency to lift off when you get a bit of speed? How do you power it? What are the blue-ish domes fore and aft of the island? We crave details! C'mon, sell this baby to us.

We still want to see! There's a large range of considerations when it comes to carriers. We're all just trying out designs here, and sharing results. Don't be afraid to ask questions. I have no trade secrets - I'll gladly share any of the techniques I used, if you think they'd help you. I think you'll find the same for others.

Do you have enough funds to pay for the ship? I think it shows a message saying when that is the issue, but I don't recall right now. Look at the numbers in the lower left corner of the screen - it shows two numbers, the top one is how much your current vessel costs, the bottom one how much funds you have. If the bottom nr is bigger, you can't pay for the ship and it won't launch (assuming a career game). Also possible in career: if you built a ship that has exceeds the dimensions, nr of parts, or weight limit of the VAB/launchpad. Yet another is if you loaded a ship that includes parts that you have not unlocked yet. A 4th reason can be that you left a ship on the launchpad (or even a single part... a launch clamp?). It could also be caused by a memory leak. If you've had the game open for a while and launched and reverted a number of times, especially in the newer versions, it eventually gets into an error state. Just save your game, exit, and restart the game.

Probably too late, but just in case: before you do anything else, try to make a quicksave, or a named save: F5 or Alt-F5 on PC. If that won't work either, it is okay to close just KSP, no need to shutdown the whole computer. On PC, Alt-F4 will do this. The game will close immediately without saving, but if you cannot save anyway that's not a worse result than you already have. The craft file themselves are always saved to disk when you launch, even if only as an 'auto-save' craft file. When you restart KSP, try to look for that in your ship list before launching anything else, otherwise it will be overwritten (it's always the same name). The getting stuck without being able to revert, return to VAB or menu, or even closing KSP, is a recent bug that has been reported several times already, but so far I've not seen anyone mention an easily reproducible case, which makes finding the cause difficult. I do notice however one clue in what you describe: They made a change recently in the debug menu to allow overriding the safe minimum altitude for cheating to orbit in, but they had it enabled by default. Obviously that was not what they meant to do, as it results in what you just described. It was corrected in 1.12.2 - you could upgrade to that, or just disable it in the cheat orbit window (remove the checkmark).

Strictly speaking this was done two weeks ago, when I updated the Praying Mantis... but I forgot I had done some recording that still needed editing and publishing. Nothing spectacular. Just one full size aircraft carrier, launching from the KSC runway... and returning to it.

Having missed this the first time, I had to go through the whole thread to see what had been said before. I think I still find myself in agreement with your very first summary, with your current amendment of having drag calculated and applied not to individual parts, but to the whole ship outline, as long as such parts are still connected to the ship. Apart from a slight computational delay at the moment of calculating what that outline would be, that has to be a marked improvement in physics calculation while in flight, and should render a more accurate representation of aerodynamics as we intuitively 'know' from every day. Also, please kill 'cannot deploy while stowed' entirely, with prejudice. Please.