bewing

Well, not exactly. The atmospheric pressure at Jool's liquid "surface" (= 0m altitude) is lower than the pressure at Kerbin's surface. But there is nothing there to land on. So you sink through and blow up at -250m. But it is certainly true that if you try to reenter Jool's atmosphere at orbital velocity then you melt, unless you are very careful and have good heatshields.

That particular MK1 cockpit has heating issues sometimes. If you have heating problems with that plane on reentry let us know -- there are very easy fixes to make it work better for heating.

Welcome to the forums. imgur is the free image hosting service that we all seem to use most. Klaws (the AGU) are very tricky to use. You may have just gotten lucky in the past. For a klaw to grab something, the klaw has to touch the surface at close to 90 degrees. A klaw can grab anything except a wheel. So I guarantee that it can grab the pod that contains your rescue kerbal. If the pod has a flat surface on it, try grabbing it right there. If it's spinning, you can turn on a little bit of timewarp and then turn timewarp off again -- that always cancels all spin. It's harder to grab a curved surface, because it's much harder to touch it at 90 degrees -- but it can be done if you have patience and try many times. You do not have to jump between ships. I think you have to rearm the klaw between each successful grab and the next one, but you only have to do it once. Making your approach so that you touch at 90 degrees is just generally difficult. It is necessary to quickly memorize which keys move the klaw in which direction. It is usually necessary to move the camera around a lot so that you can see the approach from several directions. It is often necessary to start your approaching craft rotating slowly, and time it so that at the moment the klaw touches it happens to be as close to 90 degrees as you can judge by eye.

Nah. I guarantee it's the MK2 fuselage itself and that 4 degree AoA he has. That's just instant death for spaceplane performance.

Yes, rapiers (and really all jet engines) have a thrust minimum at mach 1. So if the drag on your plane at mach 1 is just a little above that thrust minimum, then you'll either never break the mach barrier -- or you will need to use some extreme method such as going into a shallow dive, lighting an extra rocket engine, or lighting any afterburner you have. Getting to a 10km altitude and locking your SAS on "prograde" will sometimes get you through if you are on the edge. (Alternately, holding F to temporarily turn off SAS works well on stable planes.) A rapier's thrust ramps up extremely fast after mach 1, so if you make it through and can pull out of your dive, then you're good to go.

The problem is your MK2 fuselage. As soon as your AoA goes a few degrees above prograde, the drag on an MK2 fuselage goes up exponentially. I understand that you said you got it to orbit before you added features. The features you added changed your CoL/CoM a little, so now it needs more AoA to fly. I assume you want to keep the cargo bay, so you want to keep the MK2 fuselage. In that case, you need to adjust the AoA on the wings. Thank you for the pics. According to them, it looks like you need another 3 or 4 degrees of AoA incidence on the wings. As soon as you do that, your nose will drop to approximately 0 degrees AoA, and the drag on your spaceplane will drop tremendously. Then you will be able to get to orbit again. Doing that to your wings will completely change your CoL, of course, and would force you to change your design a bit. If you don't want to change your design, then try slowly flying up to 10km altitude, going to full throttle, and holding down F (to temporarily cancel SAS). If your plane can make it to 400 m/s and level out before you hit the ground, then you can probably make it to orbit.

If you have a lot of reaction wheel, you can turn on SAS and then recover the vessel really fast.

Congrats!

When the OP posts a lot of pics of spaceplanes and says "SSTO", the inference is obvious and adding lots of useless pedantic jargon confuses everyone, wastes time, and derails the topic.

AFAIK, it goes by the biome. And the biome of the Island Runway is the entire piece that's grafted on top of the island.

Just enough to do the job. A single structural wing (or maybe BigS strake) with no control surface. Control surfaces have mass and drag and therefore need to be minimized. But you probably need something back there to provide yaw stability. Finding just the bare minimum of drag at the back end to keep things stable is an art. And be careful of the "occlusion" effect. If an engine is directly in front of another part of your spaceplane (such as a wing), then its thrust gets set to zero. And you turn off grid-snap by holding down Shift.

Welcome to the forums. You do understand that putting an orange tank in orbit with an SSTO is considered to be an expert-level SSTO design problem? To become an expert at SSTO design, you need to concentrate on 1) reducing dry mass, 2) reducing drag, 3) optimizing your flight profiles. Your designs really have too many engines, and getting rid of them would probably help. Using wing parts that hold fuel helps to reduce mass. Getting rid of tailfins reduces drag and mass. Avoiding MK2 parts reduces drag. Using a shallower ascent allows you to swap more inefficient rapiers for very efficient nukes. Moving your engines forward would probably help with stability. Using more shock cones and fewer other intakes would probably help with drag and mass. Adding just the right amount of incidence to your wings helps reduce drag and improves your flight profile. And then there's the trick/cheat of adding inverted cones to the back ends of your rapiers, to reduce drag -- do you know that one? And no, the Advanced Nose Cone is best for drag. But the shock cone is very close behind and produces all the intake air you need. AeroGav figures 30 tonnes per rapier, IIRC. But that's the absolute max. I admit I like my SSTOs to perform a little better than that. There is no optimal wing shape. All wings of all shapes are treated identically. Lifting area per tonne is a religious question. You will get an endless argument about that one. There is the "spaceplanes have wings for a reason" camp -- which promulgates large wing areas, shallow, slow ascents, and nearly horizontal "speed runs". And then you get the "just set your AoA to 30 degrees and blast your way to orbit" crowd. They say that wings are mostly for decoration, so you should have the very very smallest one you can get away with.

You kinda need to understand a couple things. First, the driveable "deck" of the cargo bay is pretty narrow. Second, your rover needs to be suspended above the deck while in flight. If your wheels clip through the cargo bay or the deck while in flight then the whole thing won't work. As soon as you detach the rover, both craft will probably explode. To get a fair sized rover to fit properly in a cargo bay so that you can drive it out -- some part clipping (especially the wheels) is pretty much mandatory. And probably the best way to learn is just to go to the KerbalX website, and download some rovers and trucks and stuff that other people have already designed to fit in cargo bays.

I think 5thHorseman slightly misunderstood the question. If you have a Level 2 (or 3) Tracking Station, and you have full control of your craft, then maneuver nodes are unlocked. To have full control of your craft: you either need to have a pilot onboard, or if you are playing with CommNet turned on, you need to have communications back to Kerbin, or if you are playing with CommNet off, then you need to have a probe core on your craft.

preventing tailstrikes, probably.

ah

AFAIK, rapiers do NOT have gimbal. And yes, it looks like you have things nicely aligned in that pic now.

Well, first, ya gotta post a craft or a savegame or even just a pic. There are 18 million rules of thumb for building and flying spaceplanes, and we have no way of knowing which you understand and which are tripping you up. Since your craft is heavy (MK3), it is absolutely going to need aerospikes on the belly to manage a horizontal landing, unless you want to land your SSTO on its tail. And yes, the atmosphere on Duna is quite thin, so you are going to need a lot of extra time to make turns and stuff. Yes, you will certainly need extra control to fly in Duna's atmosphere. Yes, RCS and reaction wheels, and big control surfaces. The last few seconds before you land usually require a lot of control inputs, unless you want to crash. But if your plane is going unstable, that has to come down to two things: drag and CoM. That is, too much drag at the front, and not enough at the back -- and your CoM has to be as far forward as possible. So pump all your remaining fuel into your forward tanks. Then you'd better have some method (besides a parachute) of adding drag to the back end of your spaceplane. Use it. Extend your rear landing gear. Open a cargo bay. Slats? Something.

KerbNet also displays altitude above ground, but very few people use it for that.

Yeah, you've probably run out of electricity. That will cause the stage lock to lock. Either that, or you are out of communication range and you turned on the "require signal for control" setting in the settings.

And alternately, if you turn on "advanced tweakables" in your settings, then you will have access to things called autostruts at the same time that you get struts in the tech tree. They can also do the job of keeping all the parts of your ship stiff (but they are a tiny bit tricky to use).

If he can manipulate the camera, it's almost certainly not the locks.

Well, the problem you are describing should definitely be impossible. Which usually means that either your game executable has become corrupted, or your operating system needs to be rebooted. Did you get the game from steam? Do you know how to validate your game files? I think that would be the smartest next step.

That should be impossible. You can always open the context menu of any part, at any time, even on a piece of uncontrolled debris. What happens when you right-click one of the cabins? Nothing? Maybe your mouse battery has died? What happens when you right-click the cockpit?

Landing with precision is more important than minimizing your deltaV ... it's necessary to trade some deltaV to be accurate. The more accurate, the more it's going to cost.