Raideur Ng

Points out the difficulties and limits associated with this. You could release your craft, burn to desired AP and once it is above 25km, it will follow the physics rails. Before it is 25km away from the launching craft, you'd need to switch back and land / recover before the spacecraft reaches AP. A bit brutal but do-able. Never tried it, but it sounds pretty nice. I have no idea if it would refund your aircraft once out of range automatically.

Except leaving enough fuel for a propulsive landing and ALSO flying it back to the start location is a bit... uh... nuts.

You can do the 2nd type of profile and recover 100% with a little thinking. I've recovered 1st stages on the landmass east of the KSC successfully using that method. It's a parachute landing but it's recovered. Burn 1st stage and leave a few percent fuel in it. Separate and burn the 1st stage retrograde, switch to 2nd stage, burn to AP. Now you have your 1st stage landing prior to 2nd reaching AP (usually).

Val has built vehicles like this before and much of the design it based on their very heavy designs. I'd check them out here. However, I've not seen anyone use the fairing for a nosecone, nor the HECS2 probe core (looking at the stats of both, why wouldn't you?). It also can hide a docking port under that fairing so you can offload fuel in a tanker configuration.

Control surfaces! You need control surfaces! Well.. you need to move your center of lift closer to the center of mass, but mostly, you need a pair of control surfaces ahead of the center of mass to act as a fulcrum to allow you to maneuver. A pair of fins around the cockpit will help immensely. Always think of an aircraft as a balancing act. The farther the push, the more effect it has. fulcrum style. Closer to CoM, less effect it has.

Same problem, same scenario. Disabling and trying to reproduce.

Okay, I made it bigger: Craft File The cargo bay also doesn't clip anymore. 30 tons max or whatever you feel ballsy enough to try with.

There appears to be an issue with the latest release, specifically very frequent crashing to desktop (every flight). This is on a fresh KSP 64bit 1.2.1 with a fresh install of the mod. The only mods present are bundled with GPP, including Scatterer, SVE, and EVE. I believe it's Scatterer, but I cannot for the life of me pin it down. Logs below, any help would be appreciated. EDIT: Stock issue associated with part highlight. TLDR: Turn it off. Specific to 1.2.1

I must say the Skylon design is an incredible SSTO. Using sharp fairings for a highly heat resistant nose, this can achieve 1500+ m/s before close cycle. In a test with no payload, it flew into orbit, deorbited, perform a touch and go on land, back into orbit, and back down with less than it's default fuel. Streamlining seems to be the king of the land now. Thoughts? Craft file here. Skylon Tester Wet Mass: 54.9 T Dry Mass: 20.9 T Liquid Fuel: 20.3 T Oxidizer: 13.8 T HECS2 Core 1000 Ec 4x Rapier Engines + Precoolers Takeoff TWR: 0.58 Max Payload to LKO: 15 T

I am glad I never saw Stealth. That dogfight was the most retarded dogfight I have ever seen. Literally everything was wrong. I can't even find something correct.

Orbital refinery is the ticket. Not only does it avoid the hassle of docking on the surface, but also actually hitting a specific spot on the surface can spend needless fuel. A dedicated Ore Hauler scaled up significantly maximizes the payload to orbit because it minimizes the dead weight of drills and other systems. As long as you do the math and ensure a full hauler can reach orbit, you will have no hassles. Bases are sadly not very useful in the grand scheme of things, at least not from an ease-of-use perspective. If you're going to make fuel and launch it into orbit, why not launch it from Kerbin as has been pointed out. Lastly, hauling the ore allows you to complete those contracts that required you to deliver ore to Kerbin. They are quite a pain, but the rewards are big. They would be far more hassle if your refinery and ore storage is a base. Also, who mines for ore on the Mun when Minmus is so much easier?

Extremely well done mod. Jeb is in awe.

Good grief, that was one of the ugliest SSTO profiles I've ever seen. but yes, when your payload is only 6 tons, you can get away with shenanigans. I guess we've reached the point of asking if detached shockwave is more useful than drag reduction at lower altitudes. Most SSTO's dont have the luxury of 0.8+ TWRs so brute-forcing it into orbit is not an option. Thoughts? Edit: Watching that video, one thing I haven't quite pinned down is the shearing left and right during a pitch up. I would assume it's due to lack of control surfaces forward of the wing and the fact the tail is a V and not a T or conventional. Another mystery of KSP flight...

With 1.2, drag is (even more) king and nosecones dictate that to a large degree. Since the Mk.3 Cockpit is the best command pod for reaction wheels, crew capacity, etc, I try to use it as often as possible. Thus: What nosecone is the least draggy while still being somewhat sane, functional, possibly even nice-looking? This is the best I could come up with: 1.25m Fairing clipped slightly into the Mk.3 pod. 2600 Max Temp (seems to be the highest of anything besides the pod itself)

on Target, literally. That, in a nutshell, will get you docked, Snark's guide is spot on and a great tool if you don't want to learn it painstakingly by yourself. Two sets of 4 RCS blocks provide very translation (Movement) and attitude (Rotation) control. Be sure to hit Caps Lock and have blue indicators bottom left or you're likely wasting fuel. Docking ports only dock to the same size. Normal > Normal Jrs > Jr, Sr > Sr, but NOT SR > Normal.

Soak up that free science. There is a lot of it.

One very good alternative to the shielded docking port is a fairing! If you require a docking port, you can simply place that on the fairing base. Make the fairing as pointy as possible and you now have a nosecone FAR more heat resistant than any aero part, very minimal drag, and will function as a docking port. The only time you generally need extremely optimized drag is during initial ascent anyways. Though, if you jettison it, its TECHNICALLY not an SSTO anymore.

Puff is incredibly useless. An RCS gives 240 to the Puff's 250. Just use the RCS you'd have on your vehicle anyways until it's empty. Additionally, they buffed the Spark, it has a whopping 320 ISP now, better than even the Ant and WAY better than the Puff.

Wait what? While I don't know the drag numbers of the Mk2 pods, they don't appear to be very draggy. Anyone got numbers on if the Mk2 pods are indeed worth using or if you're only shooting yourself in the foot with drag?

It's ModularFlightIntegrator. Whatever it does, it's not good.

Mint-mus doesn't look like radioactive dessert anymore. I'm ok with this. Well done.

It will be interesting to see how the modified drag parameters handle vehicles with such sharp, supersonic-optimized profiles. As much as I love Nertea's Mk.4 pack, vehicles end up being whales with very large forward profiles. These pods scream go fast a bit harder though. I would also caution against making anything overtly strong compared to stock, engines, pods, etc. One of the beauties of finely crafted mod packs is they seamlessly integrate into the stock game and do not have obvious advantages. I'm sure people would be happy to help balance parts so we end up with good numbers. I certainly would. Regardless, the hard work is appreciated and it's set to be the space-plane pack for 1.2, from the looks.

Honestly, I would suggest the creator return to the original number of parts. It was perfectly fine and plenty for every use. The later versions just added needless duplication.

I have to admit, it is embarrassing how inept I am at designing spaceplanes without this mod. Defueling and refueling after each tweak is horrible. Thanks.

Between the SAS changes and drag changes, this makes spaceplane SSTOs much easier to do, borderline child's play.Vehicles that struggled terribly in 1.1.3 glide into orbit with ease. It's really quite astonishing how older SSTOs will over perform now.