EpicSpaceTroll139

To build upon @bewing's statement about turning it upside down - To do this, you'll want to start with the small plane, attach the decoupler to that, and then radially attach the cargo plane to the decoupler. This may seem to be a bit of a backwards way of doing things, but it should get you what you want.

What is your periapsis at? Also: Managing your airbrake deployment during re-entry can help to a certain degree. While deployed, even in the thinnest part of the atmosphere, will help slow your rocket down earlier, and thus reduce peak heating. In the deployed state, the airbrakes have a somewhat lower heat tolerance, however the flat surface sticking out creates a bow shock, reducing this effect slightly. When stowed, the airbrake has a higher heat tolerance, but will not provide the extra drag to slow you down, and thus won't reduce peak heating. I would suggest keeping them open as long as you can, and then when you think they will overheat, use the authority limiter to clean them partially, so that they provide some drag while avoiding overheating. I've used this technique for returning rockets from lower orbits (75-120km), and I think actually my airbrakes would survive if I kept them completely open due to the aforementioned bow shock effect (I mainly just take these things into effect while using them to target the KSC). I'm not certain, but I think you might be able to keep them from overheating by using careful management of their deployment. If you're willing to sacrifice a little payload capacity, using a little fuel to slow down just prior to reentry would likely help your heating problems a lot.

I find that by using combinations of retrying the tweakable slider and moving/reopening the tweakable window, I can eventually get it right.

It doesn't matter how you put it relative to the ground really. You just stick em on your craft with and they deploy outward. The only situation you would need to worry about the ground is if the airbrakes are longer than your gear, in which case you would want to avoid placing them on the bottom of your craft. Since you are making a F9, your airbrakes will be at the top of the rocket, so this is irrelevant. If you want more realistic deployment, you will want the hinged round end to be facing down. As for pitch/yaw function, that is entirely up to you and what you want out of your design. With those on, the airbrakes can be used as control surfaces, deploying differentially to incur assymetric drag, thus steering your craft. This flying wing demonstrates how airbrakes can be used for steering. The principle can be applied to a rocket too.

If I recall, there's a line in the physics or settings .cfg that determines the reset distance. I'll have to check in the morning. You could probably change that to a fairly short distance and not run into problems.

Even if you just do it to look nice, you can still use them. Just zoom your camera in enough and it will clip inside the adapter and you will be able to click on the tanks.

I definitely second this. But as some others have said, along with this, the explosiveness of inert parts like non-fueled wings, trusses, and other structural parts should be effectively eliminated. The only time those parts should get anything looking like an explosion is when colliding with something at >1km/s (possibly even more than that).

I had this problem before, but I was lucky enough to catch it while performing tests at the KSC. It's not enough to have the rover wheels not clipping into the floor.They must be visibly held several centimeters above it,and even then you might get a little bit of bounciness. I'm afraid you'll have to flyback to the KSC and bring a new setup.

Yep, I noticed this. Unfortunately the first contract gave me points of interest around a vessel that had, uhh, landed a bit too hard on the Mun. I imagine these will indeed be good for rovers though. Hoping to get ones for my upcoming Minmus and Duna missions.

Assuming you're talking about when they're on the ground,then I find that actually lowering those settings can help to reduce bouncing. I haven't found a reliable method of eliminating it though. If they're bouncing around while you are actually flying in the air, then I have no idea what to tell you.

While I haven't had any space disasters or significant amounts of fuel wasted by this, I do find that it often switches before I want it to. The game commonly switches me over when I get within 10-20, sometimes even as much as 30km, even though I still have two or three more orbits to go before the rendezvous (I like to save my fuel so I don't use large ∆sep phasing orbits). Before the last one I need to make a prograde or retrograde (depending on whether I'm coming from the inside or outside) burn to set up an approach within 2km (usually more like .5km). I don't need or want the target mode on the nav ball before I get within 2km. Thus I constantly have to turn the nav ball back to orbital and later to target again. While it's not really a problem, it would be nice to be able to either toggle the auto switch, or change the range at which it is activated.

Having finished off my Balls 8 + X-15 combo craft, I decided that the poor F-18 was probably feeling left out, since I had skipped from the F-16 to the F-22. Not being able to decide whether to make the Hornet or the Super Hornet, I decided why not both? Anyway, I decided to start with the Super Hornet. It's coming along nicely. The long narrow bubble canopy is proving hard to make right though.

You missed an O in the last bit. It's supposed to be spelled "DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO." jk

Also Sprach Zarathustra? I made a Messerschmitt Me 262. I got to work on making the Balls 8 and attaching an X-15. I apparently got the dimensions wrong on something because I need to cut out a lot more than a slot in the flap. I got a bit frustrated so I decided to release that stress by playing some airplane bowling. Funny the way the front planes got completely obliterated, and the last one was heavily damaged, but the ones in between were perfectly unscathed.

Umm... don't know what planet you're from that a car will stay in its own lane without assistance... sure in a perfect world a perfect car will go straight as an arrow on the middle of a road... but we're not in a perfect world. Even assuming the road was perfectly flat (which it's not, it's sloped ever so slightly to the sides to allow runoff), there's wind, there's inexact wheel alignment, imperfectly matched friction, wind, etc. And what does an elevated turn and going at the right speed have to do with this? And what is this about not being able to direct it back? Even the most squirrely planes I've had I was able to get it pointing back down the runway, assuming my gear was aligned properly. With canted or otherwise misaligned gear there's no guarantees that a plane will be controllable. As for wild planes, actually, yes. I have seen a plane or two do crazy swerving. Don't know about seeing one manage to take off doing that though. (ooh I didn't know it inserted them like that ) Tail draggers are vulnerable to this due to their main wheels (and with them brakes) being ahead of the center of mass. If the main wheels have some problem (ex: are out of alignment), or the brakes get put on, inertia means the COM is going to want to get in front of them, making it unstable. Nose wheel planes can do weird stuff like that if the nose gear has enough braking force too. On takeoff you can get problems if the main gear start to get lifted from the runway (not even visibly, necessarily), as this turns the plane into a "wheelbarrow" of sorts, balancing it on its nose wheel. Obviously not a very stable condition, because as soon as the plane gets misaligned by the player or even a ghust of wind, it's going to try to roll a bit in the other direction, or at the least the low friction of the main gear, which now are partially off the ground, will make it hard to control. Of course, the small retractable wheels are perhaps a bit more slippery than they should be when low weight is on them (they acted like they were made of Teflon on a couple of my <3t planes until I learned how to work with them), but (assuming gear placement is reasonable) it's generally easy to fix by fiddling with the friction slider. Anyways, sorry to drag this thread off topic. I the runway segment ridges do need to be fixed. I've recently discovered that they indeed can jolt light aircraft. Haven't had any damage caused by it, but it's a bit silly the way it can sort of bounce a small plane 1/2 a meter into the air.

I can definitely second number 1. When I have my engines shutdown as my spaceplane is reentering, it seems weird that the engine bells are swivelling around, as if they'll do something if they move enough. On the second one though... it seems a bit arbitrary. I mean, will my V6 car be as loud as an I4 at the same acceleration? No, physics dictates that the I4 will need to rev up to a higher RPM to get the same torque, and therefore it will make more noise. It's the same kind of thing with the rockets, you're just encountering physics. You limit an engine to a fraction of its rated power, and you get a fraction of its rated effects. You do something silly, you get something silly in return. And think about it, if it shows 100% effects at 50% limiter, what's it going to do when you set it to 100%? 200%? Another thing: Going with your idea, I could take, say, a mainsail or something, put the thrust limiter at 1% (or even 0.01% with the proper tools), and have this giant torch thing that uses very little fuel. Which would make no sense

Ah, with these other people mentioning the ascent, this makes more sense now. I wasn't getting anything about stuff outside the editor from your OP, so I was befuddled. What's funny is that building in the VAB used to be aligned East-West, and the rockets got rotated 90 degrees when being put on the launchpad. So they always ended up aligned North-South. People didn't like that the orientatchanged between scenes, so now they start aligned North-South stay that way on the launchpad. I guess wanting to have an option to make both of them East-West, is reasonable. Might be a little harder than simply rotating the parts though, because they'd also have to get the symmetry code to recognize the new orientation too.

I let my ADHD take hold for my birthday, and took a break from tweaking the B-52's engine looks to start a couple of other things, including a replica I never had plans to make. [I don't have the screenshot currently for another small plane that had 2 junos. Basically, I've been working on small, high performance aircraft that use a COL very close to the COM to allow high g turns with only a couple degrees of control surface deflection. This allows lower drag from the control surfaces, and thus allows me to keep high speed with a small engine.] I'm guessing most knowledgeable people here can tell what this is going to be.

...what? When you grab them from the parts menu, they will be in the default orientation. Their orientation doesn't change until you hit the qewasd keys. I don't see how they could be "already rotated." There isn't any orientation for them to be rotated from than the one they start off as. ...I feel like there's something that's not being conveyed here... You say they're rotated 90 degrees... but from what?

I took my B-52 out into the world of physics, and after a quick fix for some loose wing panels, it flew perfectly! The engines don't seem right... according to my measurements/calculations they should be the right size, but I must have missed something because they look wrong. Ah well.

The problem with the Mk3 cockpit is its size. I've been trying to make all my replica planes at a consistent scale, otherwise I would use it. In fact, I used it on my first try at making a B-52, and it was only after I made the fuselage that I realized "wait... this thing seems a bit too fat" and I checked it and sure enough it was.

Been working on a B-52 replica. I still need to give it engines and landing gear, but other than that the construction's nearly finished. I might end up redoing the nose though. Also, while this technically didn't happen in KSP, seeing this Boeing E-4 Nightwatch (at least I'm pretty sure that's what it is) fly over has inspired me to redo my Boeing 747/VC-25 and also make the VC-25 variant as well.

Alt+F12 menu--> physics -- aero --> display aero data GUI At the top of the window will be rotation in deg/sec for pitch, yaw, and roll

The space suit? Uh... I don't think the Kerbal's and the suit's masses are separable, at least in stock. I was looking at the kerbalEVA.cfg and kerbalEVAfemale.cfg (which actually have the same values for these). And yes you're right I meant to put a 9 at the begining of my number not a 6. Derp! Anyways, apparently doing that last experiment there broke Kerbin.

63.75kg 93.75kg according to their cfg files. Yes I know that rounds to 94kg.