Thor Wotansen

That's not how bullets are generally designed to work. The general idea is that you want the bullet to release as much energy into it's target as possible, which it won't do if it makes a neat little hole. Kevlar and other soft types of bullet resistant vests use this to their advantage, since most bullets designed to be used on soft targets are hollow point or similar, that expand on impact in order to maximize the amount of kinetic energy they release. The kevlar vest's job is to stop the bullet from penetrating and the vest has thick padding to distribute the impact over more of the body of the wearer.

Are there any regulations in this challenge prohibiting the use of a SSTO spaceplane as my launch vehicle?

I need help with naming this passenger SSTO. I'm terrible at names and I want something that captures the feel of the craft.

Mind -> blown Amazing work, truly a beautiful build.

I have finally completed the development of my Borr² refueling SSTO, the continuation of the original Borr spaceplane, but now making use of the 5m tanks in the Making History expansion. With two of the longest 5m tanks as payload tanks, it has a maximum payload mass of 512t and a takeoff weight of 1269.14t. Since the runway is a little short, the Borr² comes with two supplementary vectors for slightly less sketchyness off the end of the runway. It is entirely possible to take off without them, but the landing gear tend to get a workout that way. I managed to make orbit on the first successful flight with 0m/s ▲V and an altitude variation of 700m.

https://kerbalx.com/Thor_Wotansen/Pup-P You could try my Pup P, a small Mk 2 passenger SSTO that comes with rcs and docking capabilities. I also have a version with cargo instead of crew.

Here's a fighter you might use, the Bryntröll. And I don't know if this counts as a bomber, but it carries a lot of Hellfire missiles and it has a GAU 8 Gatling gun on it. Bear Ground Attack

Yes I have, that's the first thing I checked actually. Nothing is clipping except whatever happens at the end where the fairing snaps to close on the 5m-3.75m adapter. I intend to try a decoupler there and make the cargo bay a one time open and close deal.

Jeb forgot his guitar.

I've become distracted from my 5m double fuselage fuel tanker SSTO by the thought that I might make it into a cargo SSTO as well. Sadly Squad has not yet seen fit to give us a 5m cargo bay, so I set about making one with fairings, but there's a hitch; when I undock the pieces of SSTO to pull the cargo rack out of the fairing, the pieces act like they're one craft, even though they're not. I have yet to play around with decouplers or stack seperators, but so far the system has required staging the fairing, which defeats the purpose. Any tips or advise with this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Make sure you only autostrut the tips, unless you want your wings falling off randomly.

That 542s of ISP sounds glorious on paper, but they were using Florine (a cryogenic liquid) Hydrogen (it may have been gaseous, I don't remember) and molten Lithium or some such, which required a fair bit of heating to keep it that way. The practicality of the system is pretty obvious at this point and I really can't see such a thing ever being used unless we have an urgent need for some really high performance chemical fuels somewhere like the surface of Titan, and we can make them there. 542s tho.......

Many moons ago, long before the Making History expansion I built a refueling SSTO on request from another forum user, and it was glorious and huge. Then Making History came out, and I went off to play other games, and time passed. But now I have returned and discovered that my previously huge SSTO is no longer so impressive, so I have set out to build a replacement that is bigger and impressiver than ever before, even though impressiver isn't a word. That's right, 5m tanks baby! 512t of payload and more engines than a Russian rocket designers wet dream. I just have to figure out how to get it to orbit without the wings overheating. The radiators don't seem to be doing the trick.

Hm, seems I need to go to Making History parts SSTO school.

Big planes are fun. This is a refueling SSTO with 5m tanks as payload tanks that I built for this challenge (I have issues).

Indeed it was, I just downloaded it again and have been playing around.

Yo dawg, I heard you like bushplanes.

Yeah, that Wilga is a beast, and the build videos Mike did on his channel are awesome. I've played around with STOL stuff in stock KSP for a while now and having angle of attack built into the wing does a lot for lift. I made a stock plane I called the Kub that is obviously inspired by the Piper Cub, and I made a STOL airliner for the airliner challenge designed after the Twin Otter that I called the Nomad. Sadly stock KSP doesn't have props, but I played around with one of those mods with props that has a .625m turboprop in it and a Mk 1 cockpit that has the looks of the stock one but a .625m node on the front, and the Kub was a little rocket with that. I tend not to upload craft files with mods though, so you'd have to do it yourself, besides, I don't remember which mod it was.

This is the lander I'm using in my current career game. Pictured is the historic first Mun landing.

You need to place the landing gear with the location of the center of mass in mind, not only where it is when you build the craft, but where it will be when the fuel drains. The mod RCS Build Aid has helped me greatly in the past, but it doesn't seem to be working currently. I usually place the landing gear just a bit behind the farthest aft the COM gets, and since I try to design so the COM doesn't move much, that means the force necessary to rotate on takeoff is fairly small. I've also found that canards help, as well as situating the landing gear so that the craft rests in a slightly nose up attitude. This means that you won't be fighting negative lift on your takeoff roll in order to rotate. Also, I tend to disable steering on all but the front wheels if I'm using small or medium landing gear. This just makes ground handling more intuitive, and allows fine adjustment at high ground speed. In general, build your plane so that it flies first, then put on the landing gear so that it handles reasonably on the ground. If you want something to to great on the ground build a rover. It's possible to have a plane that can land in crazy places, but not without understanding the balance of all the things and some good piloting.

I was testing a new airplane today when I accidentally encountered the ocean east of the KSC at high speed. As would be expected, the airplane proceeded to redistribute itself across about 500 meters of the ocean's surface, and some bits, seemingly unsatisfied with being up at the top, wandered off to the bottom. Surprisingly, Jebediah was still contentedly ensconced in his Mk 1 cockpit, entirely cool with the whole thing. My challenge is this: build a craft of some sort that can motivate itself at high speed above the ocean and crash land safely on the surface at speed. The craft must have a command pod of any type on it and it may not have parachutes. The craft is not required to remain intact, however the command pod must survive. The winner is the craft that splashes down at the highest speed without sending it's unfortunate pilot to Davey Kerman's kubby. Screenshots of the craft in takeoff configuration, after crashing landing, and of the Flight Results screen are required. The Honor System will be employed regarding actual impact speed, since it can be pretty hard to get that perfect screenshot of a high speed rendezvous with the briny deep. Note: I may update the rules to factor in things like elapsed time since takeoff, highest G forces and perhaps even highest altitude, since that could conceivably be abused to pad the Flight Results numbers. We shall see how things go before I go about thinking about all that though. My submission. Have fun all, and enjoy the challenge.

I have spent most of my KSP career building stuff without modded parts. I've spent I don't even know how much time designing and testing cargo SSTO spaceplanes and tweaking the designs to be the most efficient they can be. I've also spent a good deal of time making BDArmory dogfighters, although that does require the BDA mod. I tried to keep the craft 100% stock aside from the weapons systems, and I have stock versions of all of them. Doing challenges can be fun too, especially in the stock category. If you like flying better than building, just download stock stuff from KerbalX and have a go. There's plenty of frankly amazing things posted all the time in the Spacecraft Exchange, stuff I just wouldn't even think of making. Check out SkunkTwerk's all stock Star Wars stuff if you want to be truly amazed. But yeah, mods aren't bad, I've been toying with the idea of getting a MKS focused career game going, perhaps using FAR and some of the more OP but expensive engine stuff, just so I can make something like a tramp space freighter that is both effective and reasonably functional (the Millennium Falcon isn't an effective freighter, as awesome as it is and the aerodynamics are just...... ), but I digress. Yeah, there's plenty to do stock, the sky actually isn't the limit.

First off, 'pollution' is a pretty vague term in this regard, that could mean anything from leaving a slurm can on Mars to strip mining Olympus Mons. Frankly, as long as the ecosystem here on earth isn't destroyed, I see no reason not to strip mine here, except in the case of destroying places of ecological or cultural significance. Any other rock with no life out there is fair game in my mind.

I've enjoyed playing around with STOL stuff too, here's a few of my craft that resulted. the Kub the Super Kub the Nomad